He saw the times that were lost, which he loved and missed because they were lost. Himself at six, squeezing his thin body between the sink and the wall and watching, with awe and with a deep warm pleasure, the ritual of his father shaving, asking “Will I ever be able to do that?” And his father, in one of those foolish, unfunctional, armless undershirts, looking so odd and different that way but still carrying the dignity of his light gray suit-and-vest, somehow, even with the gigantic moles and warts, like mushrooms, dangling from his pale skin, saying, “Of course, of course, now go away!”

Himself at seven, in the evenings just before bedtime, when he would lie down on the floor, the upper half of him beneath the brown radio which sat high on carved stilts, and listen in this single world wholly his own. Never real, he thought, dreaming. I’ve made them up. I didn’t have a childhood. There was no brick house, no serpentine river, no Danny and Marty and me shooting at the used prophylactics that we called balloons because we thought they were balloons, what else could they be? And no dark sewer that went beneath the ground for a thousand miles, so far that you could lose sight of the opening; certainly no baseball in the streets before the fall of night, or rides on scarlet horses, or beds for sleeping . . .

No, his life had begun at the age of twelve, when the sickness came like a thief and stole away the man who might have been and put a wrinkled mummy in his place.

16

16

The cars moved slowly, quietly, down the street and into the uphill gravel path. Seventy models, many bright and new and shining, many old and streaked with filth. A multicolored centipede, an endless creature inching forward, its hundred and forty eyes unblinking in the summer night.

Within the cars were ghosts. All silent, sheeted white and capped with peaks of white, riding stiffly, sitting straight.

The car in front, a Buick, slowed. A hooded figure turned the wheel, and next to him, a young man nodded, smiling slightly.

“We won’t have to stop,” he said, “just keep it steady.”

Up the grade, past all the lighted houses, across the dark fields, then to Simon’s Hill; the cars rolled on, their engines humming softly.

Past the rotted wooden shack where Negroes sat on stools, drinking coffee, cola; eating pie;

Past the first apartment;

Past the tailor shop, the barbershop;

—“Just keep it steady.”—

Past the open windows, slowly, winding, tire treads snapping pebbles, deep internal springs in dry squeaks making rhythm.

And the ghosts sat straight.

“Hey, lookit,” said Stuart Porterfield. He’d finished his work and watched TV, and then he’d gotten kind of restless, kind of hungry: at The Huddle there were always friends. He poked Andrew McGivern’s shoulder.

“What’s that?”

“Out the window, there.”