He looked up as Steve came toward him, and said accusingly, “Why’d you throw me in the water?”

Steve stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

Billy looked down at his dripping clothes. “You didn’t have to push me in.”

Steve stared at him and shook his head. He didn’t trust himself to argue.

After they went back to their motorcycles and Billy rode as clumsily as a beginner, Steve told himself he had to watch this guy, because he was surely crazy.

“You know what I’d like to do someday?” Billy said when they reached the roadway between the pond and the hillside. “I’d like to stretch a canvas across the road between those two elm trees, high up so cars could pass under it. I’d paint it so it looked like the mountain with shrubs and trees and a tunnel right in the middle.”

“Billy, you got some strange ideas.”

“I know,” Billy said, “but I’d like to do it.”

Bev found her money dwindling away on food and repairs for the cycles and cars. (Billy had bought an old Ford Galaxy.) She began to hint that Steve and Billy should start looking for jobs. They applied at several factories around Lancaster, and by the third week in May, Billy was able to fast-talk the people at Reichold Chemical into jobs for both of them.

It was heavy work. As the strings of fiberglass came out of the vat and were rolled into wide mats, their job was to cut the mats when the roll reached a certain size. Then they would lift the hundred-pound roll, place it on the cart and begin the new roll.

On their way home one night, Billy stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker who carried an instamatic camera hanging around his neck.

Driving toward town, Billy offered to trade the young man three hits of speed for the camera. Steve saw Billy dig into his pocket and come up with three white tablets wrapped in a plastic bag.

“I don’t do speed,” the hitch-hiker said.

“You can sell these for eight bucks apiece, a quick profit.” The hitch-hiker did some quick figuring and handed over the camera in exchange for the plastic bag. When Billy let the man off in Lancaster, Steve turned to him: “I didn’t know you did chemicals.”

“I don’t.”

“Where’d you get the speed?”

Billy laughed. “Those were aspirins.”

“God,” Steve said, slapping his thigh. “I’ve never seen anything like you.”

“I once sold a whole suitcase full of phony pills,” Billy said. “I think its time to do it again. Lets make some blotter acid.” He pulled into a drugstore to buy gelatine and a few other ingredients. Back at the trailer he melted down the gelatine in one of Bev’s pans to a patty one sixteenth of an inch thick. When it was hard and dry, he cut it into quarter-inch squares and put it on tape.

“Blotter acid should sell for a few bucks apiece.”