“You should talk to Coach Dearborn,” I told Zimmer. “The coach has a theory about selective worrying.” This was meant, of course, for the snowshoer to hear, though I saw no reason not to share the selective-worrying theory with our starting 110-pounder.

“I’ve been thinking about something—it’s just a crazy idea, but I thought I should say something about it,” Zim told us. “That little woman who’s been beating up those guys—what if it’s your mom, Adam? What if it’s your wife, Mr. Barlow? She could do it, you know,” Zimmer told us. “And I swear I saw her—I told you!” Zim said to me.

“Adam told me. You didn’t see her, Zim,” Mr. Barlow said. “Ray hasn’t been in town—it wasn’t her you saw,” the snowshoer said.

“The woman I saw was small enough to be her—she looked even smaller!” Zimmer exclaimed. “And there’s no one as pretty as she is,” he assured us.

It sounds like you were pretty convincing, I almost said again to the little English teacher, but I didn’t.

“Stop worrying, Zim,” Mr. Barlow said.

“And what do you guys make of the cat killer? The creepy feline hangman!” Zimmer cried. The pitiless violence in the town of Exeter had seriously upset him.

“I’ll bet a cat isn’t doing it,” I told our 110-pounder.

“I’ll bet the small, pretty woman in the parking lot isn’t the cat killer, Zim,” the little English teacher said.

After Zimmermann left, the snowshoer and I had a hard time finding a Bible in our faculty apartment. “I know I have one, but I never read it—I just use it to look up things,” Elliot kept saying. I kept looking at the almost ornate handwriting on the note—it was hard to believe an Exeter student had handwriting like that.

Mr. Barlow finally found a Bible. It was partially hidden behind an L.L.Bean catalog in the bathroom he shared with my mom; Little Ray got some of her long underwear, for skiing, from L.L.Bean. “The good old King James Version—just what I like to read when I’m taking a dump,” the snowshoer said. We were both laughing when he put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat on it. He quickly found the passage in Deuteronomy. I could see his lips move as he read it to himself—our laughter dying. I could see in his expression what he’d meant when he said Moses wasn’t as nice as Jesus.

“Read it,” I said to him. Mr. Barlow was a good reader. I didn’t doubt that he would find the voice to imitate how harsh Moses could be—in an uptight, Old Testament way.