DEAD FOR THE LAST TIME

by John D. Nesbitt

I

I didn't know anyone was dead, much less killed, until after I had gone to the police station. When I was lingering in there I saw Jesse Bonner and Darnell Preston, which did not surprise me, as they were subject to being hauled in on any day of the week. On this day, they were sitting in two hard old oak chairs with straight backs and no arm rests, just slouched with their hands in front of them as they stared at the floor. I gave them a toss of the head and a half-smile, but all they gave me back was a hangdog look that I took to mean they had their ass in a sling. Later on I found out why they'd been hauled in and left to sit in those hard chairs where they couldn't even have a cigarette.

Meanwhile, I had business of my own to tend to with these cops. In a small town, you get your fun where you can find it, and I found mine, or the first part of it, in the laundromat. I had been sitting there, reading an article about Castro and Cuba in Look magazine and waiting for my clothes to run the last few minutes in the dryer, when a little girl had an incident with the soda pop machine. As she pulled out a bottle of orange soda, something in the machine went wrong and started coughing out a stream of nickels, one by one. Click, click, click, click, and so on. I went over and scraped the coins out of the dish and counted them. Forty-one, for a total of $2.05, which wasn't very much but more than an hour's wages, even if I had a job. The little girl claimed ten cents, the change she had coming from the quarter she had dropped into the slot to begin with, so now I had $1.95 of new money.

I bagged up my laundry in the pillow case I used for that purpose, and I set out on foot. It was the latter part of June, so the days were getting hot. I trudged for about a mile north on the highway until I came to Shady Grove, a little cabin and trailer court set down off the highway in an old stand of oak trees. I went to my trailer, which had been described to me as a fifteen-footer, and flopped down in front of the swamp cooler. Shortly after I moved in, I came to understand that the fifteen feet included the tongue length, so my living space was about twelve by eight. The cooler took up a fair amount of that space, but I was glad to have it.

As I lay there, I got to thinking about the money I had picked up at the laundromat. The girl's mother and some other old bird had seen me take it, and either of them might tell the owner. As a general rule, money in coin returns is finders-keepers, but I figured thirty-nine nickels probably went past the rule. Furthermore, if either of those other two people didn't like the looks of my long hair, or if they were a little jealous that someone else got the windfall, or a little of both, the local police would be all too willing to look me up. I didn't see any fun in that.

I did see the opportunity for a joke, though, and at the same time I could make the point that not all young folks with long hair were scurrilous hippies. So I decided to walk back into town and turn in the $1.95 to the local police.

At the city hall building, I went up the stairs and through an oak door with opaque glass, into the police department itself. That was when I first saw Jesse and Darnell. I tossed them a glance and turned to talk to two cops behind the counter. I must say I caught them unprepared. After a little uncertainty on their part, one of them ushered me into an inner office and gave me to a cloudy-faced fellow named Arnold, who took my statement and had me sign it. Then he typed me a receipt, in the old hunt-and-peck method on a crash-and-bang typewriter.

Recieved from Larry Sterne $1.95 in Change. Money came from the Pop Machine at the self Service laundry 5 th and Tehama.

R.L. Arnold #52 W.F.P.D.

He signed it and gave it to me. As I admired his spelling and capitalization, I decided his receipt was a gem worth keeping.

When I walked out of the office into the waiting area, I saw Bonner and Preston still sitting there looking glum. I could feel the contrast. Here I was with a bounce in my step after watching Officer Arnold go through all of his labor, and here were these two would-be hoodlums, half-assed pals of mine, looking as if they'd been caught with a gas can and a coil of hose in their trunk. Or worse.

Back out on the street, I thought there would be no harm in walking past the laundromat, so I went that way. As I glanced in the window, I saw a lean guy about forty with slicked-back hair sweeping the floor. I went in and asked him if he was the owner. He said he was the manager. I told him about the nickels and how I had looked out for their safe-keeping. He thanked me. Then he offered to buy me a soda, which I declined. I was just about to leave when he asked if I'd heard what happened at the old milk factory.

“No, I didn't.”

“Well, they found a dead man there.”

“Really. Who was it?”

The manager lowered his voice and glanced toward the window and open door. “It was that old man Earle.”

It registered real fast. He meant Clarence Earle, the old pervert who, as I heard it, used to lure boys into the abandoned factory and give them four bits to watch him expose himself and more. I had heard it from a couple of different sources, including Jesse Bonner and Darnell Preston. In one version of the story, Darnell said he had touched the old man's peter, and then he said he didn't. I never asked for clarification.

The manager spoke again, kind of confidential-like. “They just found him earlier in the day, and they've already brought in a couple of kids for questioning. Boys he took in there when they were a little younger, I guess.”

I nodded. The whole idea was getting disagreeable. “Well,” I said, “it sounds as if someone's going to be in trouble.”

The man stood with the broomstick against his shoulder as he lit a cigarette. “Oh, yeah. Big trouble. Even if he was an old queer.”

I walked back to my trailer, still in the heat of the afternoon, and was glad to see the shade of the oak trees covering my little hut. I went in and turned on the cooler, and as I loafed on the fold-down bed, I couldn't get the creepy news out of my mind.

The old milk factory had been shut down for about four years. It was a row of connected buildings, concrete and corrugated metal, all a dull grey and easy to ignore. It lay along the west side of the railroad tracks, set back from the highway that ran past it on that side. Other businesses were strung along the tracks as well—–a lumber yard, a feed store, and an almond processing plant as the tracks went south; then going north, an orange-packing co-op next to an olive plant with a yard full of huge wooden vats, where rats came out after dark. The milk factory was the biggest enterprise, and when it shut down, the town lost its noon whistle as well as quite a few decent-paying jobs. But when it was gone it was gone, and the buildings didn't look much different from any old set of warehouses all along US 99W where the highway ran parallel to the railroads. That's how they looked to me, anyway, but to someone older, or to someone who had more of an awareness of how human nature can take its dark and twisted turns, even in a small town, the abandoned factory might have looked just like what it was—–a place where boys with an unhealthy curiosity could meet with dirty old men.

It wasn't as if the town kids didn't know any better. In the past few years, when we would go to the creek in the springtime when the weather warmed up, we would see sullen, grimy men living under the bridge. We knew to stay away from them. I never hopped any trains, but it was common knowledge that if a kid crawled into a boxcar and saw some hobo like that, he'd better get back out. The phrase at the time was that the tramp would make you be the girl.

So even if teen-age kids knew better, some of them went into the old milk factory anyway. Maybe it was for the thrill of doing something wrong and secret, or for the pocket money, or both. I didn't know of anyone in my grade who did it, but these two kids a couple of years behind me, Bonner and Preston, had talked about it, and so had a couple of others about their age and about their level—–that is, the kind that got into trouble and ended up dropping out of school.

As for me, I knew just the name, Old Man Earle. The only time I saw him in person was when the woman in the grocery store called him Mr. Earle as she gave him his change. It ran a feeling of dread through me, and I kept my eyes away from him as he walked out the door. Still, I got a look at him. He had large brown eyes and a clean-shaven face with a sagging mouth. He reminded me of an actor I had seen in several westerns. He wasn't one of the better-known ones, as he usually played a secondary character, and I didn't remember his name. But I never liked his looks, not any more than I liked this man in the grocery story.

Old Man Earle, the old pervert, the old queer—–whatever people wanted to call him. And he wasn't all that old—–maybe in his fifties. Now he was dead. As near as I could figure it, they might have been hauling his body out of those musty old buildings two or three blocks away at about the same time I was having a lark with the forty-one nickels.

***

In the cool of the evening, after a dinner of canned macaroni and canned plums, I walked back into town. My current funds were at two dollars and one cent, but the bowling alley was a place where a person could hang out and not spend money. Lots of guys came and went in the course of an evening, and it was a good place to find out what anyone else was up to. For my own purposes, I was interested in finding out if there was any work around, and I had to admit to myself that I was also interested in knowing if Bonner and Preston were still in the can. I didn't think they would have killed the old man, but there are lots of things you don't know about your friends, especially if they're just casual pals to begin with.

II

Two middle-aged couples, all in glasses and matching orange T-shirts, were bowling in one of the middle lanes. They were the only bowlers, but the corner where the younger people hung out had a small crowd. A guy named Morgan was playing one of the pinball machines, and two farm kids with flat-tops were watching him. Sitting at a table a few feet away, smoking a cigarette and drinking a bottle of Coke, was a guy I didn't recognize right away. He wore a thin, dark beard that didn't look like it was going to fill in very well. Perched on his nose was a pair of wire-rim glasses, the kind that had just become popular a few months earlier, during my second semester of college. When school got out and I went to Berkeley and be-bopped along Telegraph, I saw the style everywhere—–round, rectangular, clear, yellow, or purple. So at first I took this guy to be from out of town, until I got a second look.

“Oh, it's you,” I said. “Hello, Eugene .”

“Hi.” He gave me a matter-of-fact look, then seemed to recognize me. “Sit down, Larry. What've you been doin'?”

“Not much. School got out about three weeks ago, so I hitch-hiked down to Big Sur with another guy. He had a job at one of the lodges, but I didn't like it, so I came back. Meanwhile I met a girl from Walnut Creek , went over to Berkeley and saw all that with her.”

“Did you go to the Haight?”

“No, I didn't.”

“That's where it's happenin'.”

“I guess so.” After a pause I said, “What about you? What have you been up to?”

“I've been livin' in Sac.”

“Workin'?”

He gave me a close look through the wire-rimmed ovals, as if he had decided I was on his intellectual level. “I've been writin' songs.”

“Really? What kind?”

His eyes narrowed. “About life. You know. How plastic everyone is.”

“Oh, yeah.” I bobbed my head, like you were supposed to do when people said things like that.

“So you came back home?”

He flared his nostrils as he took a drag on his cigarette. “For a while.”

“Are you gonna write some songs about this place?”

“I could.” His eyes tightened and his brows went up. “Unmask the hypocrisy of the upper crust.”

It sounded like a phrase he had picked up somewhere, like the hat and glasses. “Hell, yeah,” I said. “Might as well.”

He pressed his lips together, then took a drink of Coke. “So how was college? Was this your first year?”

“Yeah. It was all right.”

“Lotta girls?”

“Oh, for sure. But not like some guys would let on. It's easy to talk to them, but it's hard to get very far beyond that. You get to know one for a little while, and then you find out she's got a boyfriend back home.”

“They just say that.”

“I don't know. I checked on a couple of ‘em, asked their friends, and they said it was true.”

“You hear a lot. Don't believe half of it.”

“Sure. And not just girls. This one guy in the boarding house, to hear him tell it, all he did was win fights and lay girls. But I never saw any of it.”

“I know guys like that. Couldn't get a piece of ass if they paid for it.”

“I guess there's some of that in Sac.”

“Whores? Oh, yeah. Right on the street.”

I shook my head. “I don't know much about that. I've seen ‘em, just drivin' by.”

Eugene lifted his head with a kind of man-of-the-world air about him. “It takes all kinds.”

At this point I saw that he had a shiny, narrow cane leaning against the inside of his right leg. I remembered he had a catch in one leg that kept him out of the draft, but I didn't remember him having to use a cane, so I wondered if it was part of his songwriter get-up.

After a moment he spoke again. “I guess someone killed Old Man Earle.”

“That's what I heard.”

He scratched his sparse beard. “Can't say it bothers me.”

I shrugged. “I didn't know him.” In the half-minute of silence that followed, I had a hazy memory that Eugene might have been one of the boys I had heard of in that connection. He was a year ahead of me in school, so if he had had anything to do with the old man, it would have been a few years before the ones I had heard talk about it.

Eugene spoke again. “I guess they hauled in those two punks Bonner and Preston to ask them about it.”

“Yeah, but I can't imagine them doin' it.”

“Me neither. They'd need more huevos than they've got between ‘em.”

I thought he sounded kind of bitter, but I figured he was just putting them down because he was a few years older, a man of the world in his own eyes, and they were just small-town punks who hadn't gone anywhere or done anything yet.

Morgan was racking up games on the pinball machine, and the farm boys were cheering him on. Bowling pins crashed in the background. Eugene and I didn't say anything for a couple of minutes as he crushed his cigarette and drank the last of his Coke. I thought he was getting ready to go, and then Jesse Bonner and Darnell Preston came in past the counter and stools.

In light of the conversation I had just had with Eugene , these two kids did look a little silly, like rat-fink hoodlums in a beach-party movie. They had their shirts untucked and their collars up, and they walked leaning forward with their arms straight down, each of them with a cigarette in his right hand. Jesse was the shorter of the two, a sandy-haired kid with a soft face and a build to go along with it. Darnell was taller, darker, and thinner, so he looked a little more solid, except that he had a fuzzy black mustache trying to make an impression on his upper lip. Both of them looked like what they were, just kids, and I think they got some of that quality from having older brothers. Jesse's brother was about five years older, cool and slick, with a red Malibu and a floor shift, and a blonde girl who sat almost in his lap. Darnell's brother was about three years older, not so cool, but already married to a girl who was a year older than he was. I always thought he was a slow, humorless sort, but in Darnell's stories he was a legendary stud who banged this older girl all night every night they went on a date. And knocked her up, of course.

So here were these two sixteen-year-old kids strolling into the bowling alley, no doubt aware that everyone in town knew they had been taken in for questioning. I wondered if they thought it made them seem notorious or dangerous, or at least important, because they walked up to the table where Eugene and I sat, and they looked us over as if we were a couple of loafers sitting on a bench and shelling peanuts.

Darnell looked at Eugene and said, “I thought that was you. I didn't know you were back in town. I heard you were dead.”

Eugene took out a pack of Lucky Strikes, the short unfiltered kind, and tipped it so that a cigarette slipped into his palm. Still with the same hand he took the cig between two fingers and stuck it in his thin mouth. After he lit it he shook the match and said, “I'm not dead till you read my obituary.”

Darnell turned to his partner. “But it's true we heard it, didn't we, Boner?” He always called his pal “Boner” with that juvenile sense of humor that never seemed to die.

“Yeah, we did,” said Jesse, “but I don't remember where.”

Eugene wrinkled his nose. “It doesn't matter. But you can see it's a bunch of shit, whoever says it.” He took a long, authoritative puff on his cigarette.

Jesse turned to me. “Hi, Larry. How long have you been back in town?”

“A few days.”

He smiled. “Saw you earlier, but didn't get a chance to ask.”

“No hurry.” I glanced at Darnell and then back at Jesse. “At least they let you guys out on the street again.”

Darnell spoke up. “Shit, we didn't do anything. They just pick on us ‘cause it's the thing to do.” He raised his cigarette and puffed on it. “They just wanta make a big deal out of it, but they got their head in their ass.”

“I'll tell you,” said Eugene . “If this was down in Sac, it wouldn't be a big deal. Things like that happen every day. But still, if you were down there, you wouldn't get out of the can so easy.”

“Well,” Darnell answered, “this isn't Sacramento , and we're not in the can. So whoop-dee-shit.” He raised his cigarette and tipped his head back to take a big puff.

Eugene scowled. “You punks think you're smart, and it's all a big joke, but don't be surprised if they haul your ass back in.”

Darnell stiffened. “Don't call us punks.”

“I just did. If the shoe fits—–”

“Ah, calm down, both of you,” I said. “You don't need to start anything in here.”

Eugene crushed his half-smoked cigarette. “I was about to leave anyway.” With a little flourish of the cane he pushed himself up out of his chair. Then he hefted the cane in a light toss, grabbed it as if he was choking it by the neck, and sauntered out of the bowling alley with the cane raised at his side like a baton.

Jesse turned from watching him walk away. “That must be what happens when you go away to the city.”

Darnell made a “Puh” sound and said, “The city. That's San Francisco or L.A. All he did was go to Sacramento , and come back lookin' like a pimp.”

“How do you know what a pimp looks like?” I asked. “Are there any of them in King Creole ?”

“What's that?”

“It's a hoodlum movie. I thought you guys watched it, and that was where you learned your moves.”

“Aw, go on. You're as bad as what's-his-name, Ass-Eyes.”

I looked in the direction where Eugene had gone. “He's all right,” I said. “He just doesn't like very many people.”

“I'm sure it's mutual,” Darnell said. “I think he's a shitface.”

I thought someone should teach these kids to swear, but I wasn't the guy for the job. “So what else are you guys up to,” I asked, “besides gettin' hauled in by the cops?”

Jesse answered. “Not much.”

“I need to find some work,” I said. “You know of any?”

“Nah. About the only thing goin' on right now is apricots.” He looked down at the floor. “That's a slow way of makin' anything.”

“It's all right,” I said. “And you don't get your ass in the clink for it.”

Jesse shook his head. “I don't like it.”

His partner chipped in. “Ah, you break out in a cold sweat just thinkin' about work.”

“I don't see you runnin' down to the labor office.”

“Look,” I said. “You guys need to make some money, right? Well, I do, too. We can go out and pick apricots together. If I can ride with you, I'll help pay for the gas.”

“I thought you had a car,” said Jesse. “Like a Buick or an Oldsmobile.”

“I did. It was a Pontiac . But the transmission went out of it, and I was broke, so I had to sell it cheap. I've gotten okay at hitch-hiking, but that's not much good around here.”

“It's a long walk out to any of the orchards.”

“You're tellin' me,” I said. “It's far enough just out to Shady Grove.”

Darnell frowned. “You walk all the way from there? Are you stayin' in one of the cabins?”

“In a trailer.”

“That's where all the hay haulers stay.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Jesse. “They sit in the store there, or whatever it is, like a bar, and drink beer and roll dice.”

I'd seen them, guys with big muscular arms and their shirt sleeves cut away, slamming leather dice cups on the counter.

“Ship, captain, and crew,” Darnell said, getting back into the conversation. “My brother said that's what they play there.”

“Liar's dice,” Jesse countered.

“Anyway,” I said, “what do you guys think? Do you want to go to work tomorrow?”

They looked at each other and shrugged.

“You guys are goin' to be a long time makin' your first million.”

Jesse looked at me with his pale blue eyes. “And you're gonna show us how, pickin' cots?”

“I'll be your moral support. We might not get rich, but if I go out there, it's to work. I'll make somethin', and if you guys don't sit on your ass all day, you will, too.”

“Well, shit fire and save matches,” Darnell said. “Why aren't we out there right now?”

“Morning's soon enough,” I answered. “If you guys can get up before noon.”

“We're on restriction,” said Jesse. “We've got to be in by ten.”

“That's fine. Why don't you pick me up at seven, then? I'm in the smallest trailer, a grey one with no car in front of it.”

They went over to rail at Morgan a little bit, and then they left. They didn't offer me a ride, so I just sat there, thinking I'd leave in a couple of minutes and walk home.

As I was sitting there daydreaming, someone walked up on my left side. I looked around and saw Dennis Wilkinson, which didn't surprise me. He had been sitting at the far end of the counter, near the lanes, when I first came in, but I didn't pay much attention. Now I got a good look at him.

He was scrubbed as always, tall and clean-cut in a pair of slacks and a white shirt. I figured he'd gotten off work at the One-Stop Market, where he'd worked all the way through high school. He was a year ahead of me in school—–the same year as Eugene , as far as that went—–so he had just finished his second year of college. His girlfriend was a year behind me, so she would have just graduated from high school. She was part of the in-crowd, a blonde bouffant cheerleader and an insurance agent's daughter. Dennis wasn't as much in the in-crowd as far as I remembered, but he had a little money and a nice shiny ‘64 Chevy hardtop, and he was working his way up.

“Hi, Larry,” he said. “Mind if I sit down?”

“No, go ahead.” I wondered what use he had for me, but I was in no hurry, and I wasn't too good to talk to someone just because he wore too much Brut.

“How was your first year of college?”

“It was okay.”

“Get through all your classes?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That's good. A lot of guys, you know, they go off to school and then they don't stick with it. They goof off, go down the tubes.”

I shook my head. “I got through all my classes just fine. One C and the rest A 's and B 's.”

“That's good. And what is it you're majorin' in?”

“I'm sort of in between. I started out in psychology, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be, so I'm thinking of something else. Maybe history.”

“That's good. I mean, that's a good area.”

I shrugged. “I don't know. I guess I'll find out. How about you?”

“Oh, I'm majoring in business. Lots of opportunities there.”

“I bet. You go to Sac State , right?”

“Oh, yeah. Good school.”

No one said anything for about a minute, and then he spoke again. “Hey, I saw you talking to those two kids. I heard they were the ones that might have done in that homo.”

“Nah, I don't think they're up to that sort of thing—–not yet, anyway.”

He fixed his brown eyes on me. “You can't tell. You hear of pachucos their age doing all sorts of things.”

I waved my hand. “Oh, that's in the city. I know those two guys, and if they had done it, I think I could tell by the way they acted.”

“Don't be surprised,” he said. “You've studied a little psychology, at least, and you know people get shocked all the time by someone close to them, someone they think would never do a thing like that.”

“I wish. I spent about five years thinkin' how cool it would be if the cops came and took my stepfather away for something hideous, but they never so much as wrote him up for expired registration. He even waved to ‘em.”

“Well, just mark my words. And by the way, was that Eugene Fillmore sitting here?”

“It sure was.”

“I didn't know he was back in town, and in fact I thought I heard he was dead.”

“Well, he's not, of course.”

“I can see that now. What did he think of these hoods?”

“Oh, I don't think he believes they'd do it, either. He just made fun of ‘em and called ‘em punks.”

“Like he has room to talk.”

“Huh,” I said. “I don't think he's ever been in trouble.”

“Maybe they've never picked him up, but I'd bet he's got it in him. He's almost as low-class as they are.”

I didn't like the tone he was taking, so I said, “Some people get a better start to begin with. You learn that, too. You hear it in one place or another, that if everyone started with the same amount, after a period of time there'd be some people pretty well off and other people broke. So not everyone's equal as far as hangin' on to things or acquirin' ‘em. Along with that, you learn that some people just have more from the beginning, which means that others have less. That's one way of being low-class, but there are others.”

“Oh, I know all that, and I didn't want to start an argument.”

I could tell he realized he'd stepped on my feelings as well, and now he was being a nice guy again. “It's all right,” I said. “None of it matters much. I know who I am, and you know who you are.”

“That's right,” he said, giving me an assuring nod he might have learned from his girlfriend's father if it didn't come to him naturally already. “The good thing about you, Larry, is that you're smart, and you think about things.”

I thought he was going to try to sell me something right there, but he didn't. He stayed around for a couple of more minutes, then looked at his watch and said he had to work in the morning.

So did I, I hoped, but I didn't say anything. I waited until he was gone, and then I walked home in the warm summer night, past the last streetlight where three-inch June beetles smashed into the glass lens and fell to the pavement. There they lay on their backs, waving their legs at the stars and waiting to die.

III

The apricot orchard was starting to warm up by the time we got our referral, found the orchard, and got set out on our rows. The picking buckets were the regular old kidney-shaped type that were called belly buckets, from the way they hung across a guy's stomach. The ladders were old ten-footers, painted white with a red stripe across each side rail at the five-foot mark. According to labor laws, no one under sixteen was supposed to go above five feet on the ladder. Bonner and Preston were both sixteen, so they each got a ladder as well as a bucket. I could tell they didn't like pulling the harness over their head and getting the straps straightened out. It meant work, and every time a guy stopped to lolly-gag, he had the bucket there to remind him.

I took one row, and they took the next one together. We agreed that if they got very far ahead, they could skip over to my row and pick a tree to help me catch up, but after we'd been at it about an hour I wondered if it might work the other way around.

We were picking by the box, forty cents for a fifty-pound lug box full of apricots. It took two buckets to fill a box, so if a guy was picking bottoms, he might fill his bucket all the way a few times. But if he was going up and down the ladder, he'd empty it rather than carry half a bucket or more up the rungs. That was how I did it, anyway, and I tried not to lose time whenever I did empty my bucket.

These other two, though, didn't have much of a knack for this kind of work, where you got paid strictly on the basis of how much you did. They would pick for a while, maybe a quarter of a bucket, and go empty it. Then they'd go back to the ladder, re-set it, and stand with one hand on each rail, looking up at the fruit. They'd pick what they got on that set of the ladder, then go empty the bucket again. They had barely picked a box each when they took a break, turning a couple of the field crates upside-down and plunking their asses down to smoke a cigarette and drink water.

I just raised my eyebrows and kept working. I'd seen worse. I remembered one kid in the prune orchards who had come from Arkansas to stay with his sister. Her husband was driving forklift, so he got the kid a job pickin' up prunes in the same orchard. I have to admit it would be pretty demoralizing to have to try to fill a three-by-three bin of prunes by yourself, but this kid was hopeless. He was sixteen, three years older than I was at the time, but he had pale, skinny arms like he'd always stayed inside watching t.v., and he wore cowboys boots and a straw hat. Partway through the first day he pooped out and sat against the trunk of a tree for the rest of the day. When his brother-in-law finished his shift on the forklift he helped the kid fill his bin, and that was it for prune-picking. For the next two days the kid rode around on the forklift, slouched on a wide running board, and after that I didn't see him again. I heard his brother-in-law got him a job driving a water truck, to keep down dust on the dirt roads around the orchard, but he wasn't any good at that, either. He filled the water tank at a slow trickle and went to sleep in the cab of the truck.

By comparison, then, my two pals weren't so bad, but they weren't going to make much more than cigarette money.

I decided I was going to take a break after my first ten boxes, so I worked non-stop as these other two would work a little, loaf a little, and so on. When I took a break, they joined me.

Jesse's mother had made egg sandwiches for the two of them to eat at mid-morning, but Darnell didn't want his, so Jesse gave it to me. It was good. It had salt and pepper and pieces of bacon in it. I shared coffee from my thermos, and we took turns using the plastic red cup. It was all kind of brotherly, as these other two had gotten dirty and sweaty in spite of their resistance to the work, and we were off doing honest labor in a hot, drowsy orchard where no one in the world was going to give us shit except the row boss.

As we sat there amidst the dirt clods and the faint sounds of other people working and talking farther into the orchard, these two kids started telling stories. Like most of the tales I had heard from them before, these were about things that had happened to other people. One story was about a kid their age, who hadn't been in town long and so I didn't know him. According to Jesse, the kid had run off with a woman who kept him in bed almost the whole time he was with her, which was about two weeks. When the kid was telling the story to a handful of his pals, one of the other kids asked if the woman was a hemophiliac. Jesse cracked up at this point and handed me the plastic thermos cup.

“He meant nymphomaniac.”

“I get it,” I said.

“And the kid it happened to, he said, ‘I don't know, but she sure liked to fuck a lot.'”

Now Jesse and Darnell both busted up laughing. I imagined they had been through the routine a dozen times, and I wondered if either of them knew what a hemophiliac was.

From there they went to another story about some kids who took a girl out to an old airstrip in the country, where they took turns with her in the back seat. One kid, named Fred Tarin, whose family had a couple of dinosaur tow trucks and a wrecking yard, was taking too long on his turn. The back door at his feet was open, and the other kids would look in and tell him to hurry up. He would look over his shoulder and say, “Go away, I'm not done yet.”

Darnell, who was telling the story, said, “Poor Fred. He was so dumb, I don't know if he even knew how to do it, and it was probably the only time he ever got to.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Oh, he got killed in a car wreck a couple of months later.”

“That's too bad.”

Darnell shrugged. “Drivin' that ‘56 Mercury about a hundred miles an hour, I guess.”

Jesse turned to me and said, “Don't you have any stories, Larry?”

“Well,” I said, “I think most of the stories about gettin' pussy happen to other people. But I did hear a story that might be true. When I was out hitch-hikin', down there by Hollister and Gilroy , I met a couple of kids about my age. They said they'd gotten a ride with an old guy who had a wife who was a little younger and had big tits. She was drivin', and the two kids got in the back seat. They asked the old man if he had a road map, and he reached over and started rubbin' the woman's tits and said, ‘What do you think about these road maps? Would you like to see ‘em?' So the woman pulled onto a back road, and out come her big tits. The old man got out of the car to keep a lookout, and the woman got in the back seat and took on each of these kids. The old man watched, and he seemed to enjoy the whole thing. When it was done, they took the kids back out to the highway and left ‘em off.”

“Sumbitch,” said Darnell. “I guess we should hitch-hike.”

“I've thumbed a couple of thousand miles,” I said, “and nothing like that has ever come close to happening to me. Like I said, these things happen to other people, or at least they say they do. I met a couple of other kids, down by Carmel , one of ‘em had a Levi jacket just like mine. They told me how they'd gotten picked up by a priest or something—–maybe a friar, because he took them to a place where a couple of these religious guys were living. Kind of like a convent. They told the kids they could spend the night there, and then they gave ‘em some wine and got ‘em kind of woozy. They showed the kids where they could lay down, and when they did, these friars or whatever started rubbin' their legs and so on. It scared the hell out of ‘em, and they grabbed their stuff and hit the road.” I looked at Jesse. “So maybe you guys are better off not hitch-hikin'.”

He smiled. “I'd take my chances with the big tits.”

I laughed. “That reminds me of something I heard last year when I was pickin' peaches over on the other side of the river. You know, we got paid by the bucket there. We dumped the fruit into bins, with four bins to a wagon. Each wagon had a sorter, to pull out the undersized and bad peaches, and a checker, to keep tally of how many buckets you picked. Anyway, the checker was an older Mexican woman who talked in a shrill voice. She'd holler at the Mexican guys in Spanish, then rattle on in English at the sorter girl, who was the tractor driver's girlfriend. And this old lady didn't care about her language. She'd say, ‘An' I tole that sunnavabitch, you git outta my way you sunnavabitch or you be sorry goddammit.' One time I was steppin' up onto the trailer to empty my bucket, and she was talkin' about some woman in town that the Mexicans all knew. She says to the sorter girl, ‘They all call her Big Tits.'”

I did the voice up nice and shrill, and I got Jesse and Darnell to laughing pretty good. I said it again the same way, and they laughed again.

When everything settled down and no one started a new story, I said, “So who do you think killed Old Man Earle?”

Jesse leaned forward on his crate and spit out a drool onto the clods. “No tellin'. No one liked him, but I don't know of anyone who hated him enough to do that.”

Darnell said, “I wouldn't be surprised if it was your friend with the goofy glasses.”

“Eugene ? I can't picture it.”

“It happened just about the time he came back to town.”

“Well, so did I, but that doesn't mean I did it.”

“No one said you did.”

“Why do people say he might have done it, then?”

“Who else said it?”

“Oh, well, Dennis Wilkinson sort of hinted at it. But I have to say, he mentioned you guys first.”

“Good old Pennis,” said Darnell. “My brother said that when they were in the eighth grade, Pennis said he wanted to be an undertaker because they made so much money. He wouldn't play football because he didn't want to get hurt, but get this. He didn't like the way they got dirty, either. So he played tennis, where they wear everything white.”

“He's a prick,” said Jesse. “Dennis the pennis, who plays tennis.”

“Well,” I said, “it still doesn't answer the question of who killed the old queer. I don't see what the motive would be.”

Darnell piped up. “For Eugene ? The same one they tried to hang on us.”

Jesse added, in an apparent imitation of an investigator, “For liberties he took.”

“What's it to you?” Darnell asked as he looked at me.

“Nothin', really. Just somethin' to wonder about.”

We worked through the rest of the morning, and along about noon I started to hear the other pickers calling to one another and then talking as they walked out to their cars at the edge of the orchard. Some of the kids from town were working out there, as we could tell from the cars as well as from their voices, and I got the feeling that Jesse and Darnell were in no hurry to go out and eat lunch in their company. As I emptied my bucket into the box and leveled off the fruit, I looked around and saw my two companions watching me.

“How many's that?” asked Jesse.

“Eighteen.”

“What are you goin' to do with all your money?”

“Oh, I don't know. I'm thinkin' of goin' into business for myself, set up my own office, get me a girl Friday—–”

Darnell cut in. “You ought to get one that'll do it every day.”

“You act like a moron,” I said. “Haven't you ever read a book, or the Help Wanted ads? A girl Friday's an office girl, one that answers the phone, types letters, runs errands—–a little of everything.”

“What kind of an office?” asked Jesse. “Detective?”

“You've been watchin' too much Dragnet . She works in any kind of office. The main thing is, she's reliable.”

“But what kind of office are you gonna set up?”

“I don't know. Depends on how much of a fortune I make here. Shall we go to the car and eat?”

Darnell spoke. “It'll be too hot in the car. Why don't we eat here in the shade?”

“There's shade there.”

“I'd rather eat here.”

“Fine with me,” I said. “Who wants to go get the lunch?”

They looked at each other, and then Jesse said, “Why don't you go get it?”

“What the hell?” I asked. “Are you afraid I'm goin' to steal some of your apricots and put ‘em in my box? You guys are like the little turtle in the joke.”

“What joke is that?”

“Oh, it's from the fifth-grade joke books. These three turtles are in the drug store, eatin' ice cream sundaes, and it starts to rain. Two of the turtles tell the third one, who's the littlest, to go home and get their umbrellas. He says, no, he doesn't want to go, because the other two will eat his ice cream. They say, ‘No, we won't. Just go get the umbrellas.' So he walks away, and they go back to eating their ice cream. After quite a while, one of ‘em says to the other, ‘I wonder what's takin' that little guy so long. Let's go ahead and eat his ice cream after all, before it melts.' About that time the little turtle pops out from the end of the counter, where he's been hidin' all this time, and he says, ‘I knew you were plannin' all along to eat my ice cream. Just for that, I'm not goin' to get the umbrellas after all.”

“That's hilarious,” said Darnell. “But since you rode with us, it seems fair that you go get the lunches.” He held out the keys. “Come on, be a good sport. There's some of those guys we'd rather not have to talk to.”

I wondered if it was because the other guys would razz them about Old Man Earle or because Bonner and Preston owed one or more of them some money. I figured it didn't matter. “All right,” I said, taking the keys. I set off toward the end of the row, following the tracks that had been worn into the disked-up clods when the tractor and trailer had come through to scatter the empty boxes. And they want to be tough guys , I thought.

IV

Rather than march right in the front door of the bowling alley, I decided to go around the block and come in by the parking lot, to see if there were any cars I recognized. The sun had gone down, but night had not closed in yet, so I walked in the dusk of one of the longest days in summer. I passed the olive plant, where I smelled the sour odor and saw the huge wooden vats with iron rings holding the staves together. I didn't see any rats, but I knew they were in there, under the platforms.

As I came around the corner of one of the five small grocery stores in town, I saw the east wall of the bowling alley rising against the grey sky. I had noticed in the daylight, a couple of days earlier, that the building had been painted in the last few months. It was the color of the inside of a cantaloupe—–a dull, pinkish orange. This evening, as I walked across the empty parking lot, I saw that the wall was spotted with a thousand long-horned June beetles, which I imagined settled onto the stucco surface in the shadows of late afternoon. When night thickened, they would go smashing into street lamps, moving cars, and the plate-glass windows of any businesses with lights on. I had heard there were millions of them on top of some of the buildings on Main Street , and people told stories of the bugs being so thick on paved roads that they caused cars to slide off and crash. By comparison, I was seeing just a few, but it was a creepy-looking horde anyway.

Inside, a grey-haired woman in an apron was sitting at the counter on my right, adding up sales tickets by hand. Straight ahead, all the lanes were quiet, with the pins set up and waiting. On my left sat the business office, dark now except for the window, where a powder-blue bowling ball with swirls of silvery white sat on a little stand and rotated in the glow of a tiny spotlight. Past the office and back to the left, the pinball machine area was empty except for one person sitting at a table and smoking a cigarette. I recognized his black felt hat and wire-rimmed glasses.

He lifted his head as a way of saying hi, and when I got closer he said, “Go ahead and sit down.”

As I took a chair, I noticed his cane in the same place as before. “Write any songs today?”

“Not much.”

“Make it with any girls?”

“None to tell you about. How about you?”

I hit him with a line I had heard not long before. “I eat more chick-en any man ever seen.”

He pressed his lips together as if he had to be patient.

“Don't you like the Doors?” I asked. “Or have you heard them?”

“I've heard ‘em.”

“Well, that's from their album.”

“It's got a lot on it. I don't remember that one.” He took a drag on his Lucky Strike. “Anyway, besides eatin' chicken, what did you do today?”

“I went and picked apricots. With your friends Bonner and Preston .”

“I didn't know they worked.”

“It's not always evident, even when they're on the next row, but we got through the day.”

“Why do you even hang around with them?”

“For one thing, they've got a car and I don't. I need to get back and forth.”

He gave a little shrug. “Take what you can get.”

“Well, it's work, and I'm broke.”

“Who isn't?”

It was my turn to shrug. “You could try it.” I knew that all the way through high school he had lived with his grandfather, who got by on a pension, and I assumed he was staying with the old man now.

Eugene shook his head. “I'm not gonna do work like that. I don't want to ruin my hands. I'm gonna learn to play the guitar.”

I looked at his hands, pale and slender. “Well,” I said, there's other jobs. This last year I washed dishes in a restaurant and brushed tables in a pool hall. Worst thing that happens is your fingers get a little green.”

“Maybe you should brush tables in the afternoon and wash dishes at night.”

I thought he was being kind of dry about people who worked, but I said, “That's one good thing about washing dishes. You get your hands clean. That, and you don't go hungry.” I could see he didn't care about that topic, so I changed. “It got pretty hot in the orchard today. How was it here in town?”

“Too hot.”

I imagined him going out on foot for a pack of cigarettes. His grandfather had an old ‘52 Plymouth , but Eugene just about never drove it. “Over a hundred?” I asked.

“Easy.” He shifted his cane about an inch.

I thought I'd cheer things up. “Say, you know what you need? I saw one on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . A walkin' stick with a round knob of a head, suitable for bashin' in the heads of aristocrats.”

“You've got a lot of good ideas. Too bad you can't sell some of ‘em.”

“Oh, I just thought I'd humor you. You're the one with the ideas, about hypocrisy in a small town and all of that.”

“I'm sick of this town. I've been back four days, and I'm sick of it already.” His eyes had a glint to them, and his mouth turned down, bitter-like.

“Geez, if it's that bad—–”

“Fuck these people,” he said, with his voice seething.

I sat straight up in my chair. “Did someone—–”

“Them and their small-time, jerk-water, toady-ass cops.”

“What did they do?”

“Oh, nothing. They just come to my house, put me in their stinkin' cop car, and take me down to the station. They harass me for two hours and then let me walk home when it's as hot as an oven out there.”

“They took you in for questioning, then? About old what's-his-name?”

Eugene gave me a hard stare. “I'll tell you because I know you don't have any part in the chickenshit stuff. But I think your little friends tried to put the finger on me, and maybe someone else did, too.”

“Really?” It sounded as if he had worked up the idea of a conspiracy against him.

He took a huff and a puff on his cigarette. “I'll tell you this. I never let that old queer do anything to me. But I know who did, more than once, and they hate their self for it. And they know I know, and it makes ‘em squirm.”

“Did you tell that to the cops?”

“Shit. They think what they want to. I told them I didn't have the motive or the inclination. Truth of it is, I don't think I even have the nerve to kill someone like that.”

“But you didn't tell ‘em who might have a motive?”

“I can tell ‘em any time. If they piss me off again, I just might.”

As he crushed his cigarette, I thought of a couple of things he didn't say. One was that he had never done anything at all with the dirty old man. The other was that maybe he enjoyed having something over on someone else, and it wasn't just peevishness at the cops that let him sit on what he knew.

I didn't think I'd get anywhere by prying, so I took another approach. “You said last night you didn't think it was the punks, as you called them.”

“I still don't.”

“Then why do you think they tried to put the blame on you?”

“Oh, you can tell by the way the cops ask the questions. They gave me the impression that two different parties mentioned me.”

“No, I mean, why do you think the punks would say it?”

He waved his hand. “Oh, to get the heat off of them, I guess. And they don't know all that much about it.” He looked past me. “I'll tell you the rest later. It looks like they just came in.”

I looked around, and sure enough it was Jesse and Darnell, dressed like the night before. They had washed away the dirt and the sweat from the apricot orchard, and they had slicked their hair with fresh pomade. They came cruising up to the table where I sat with the songwriter and potential snitch.

I turned my chair around to the side, away from the table, and waved at them.

“Hi, guys,” said Jesse. “You the only ones here?”

Eugene gave a slow turn of the head. “What's it look like?”

“I didn't think you had anyone hidin' under the table.”

Darnell chipped in. “There's extra benefits in that.”

Eugene glared at him. “Maybe you know a lot about that.”

Darnell seemed to catch some of his drift. “No more than you. Probably less, you havin' been to Sac and all.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothin'. You just seem to know more.”

Eugene did his trick with shaking out a cigarette. “If I know anything, it's to keep my mouth shut about things I don't know enough about.”

“What's that mean?”

“I think you know.”

“Well, blow me down if I do.”

Eugene put his cigarette back in the pack and stood up. “You're a smart-ass little punk, that's what. One of these days someone's gonna knock your teeth out.”

“Not you.”

“Don't count on it.” Eugene had his cane by the neck and held it at waist level.

“Ah, you're just a little weinie.”

Eugene lunged forward, swinging his thin cane in a way that wasn't going to do anyone any harm, but he bumped into the table and sent the ashtray rattling. I jumped up and stood aside.

All of a sudden the place seemed full of people. Two high-school kids had come in and stopped in their tracks, and the manager came pushing past them.

“Look here,” he said. “If you've got trouble, take it outside.”

“It's all right,” said Eugene , calm now. “I was just leaving.” He touched the brim of his hat and said, “I'll see you all later.” Then with his head lifted and his cane upright by his hip, he marched out of the bowling alley.

The manager walked back to the counter, where I saw Dennis Wilkinson sitting in the same place as the night before. The manager stopped to talk to him.

Jesse's voice brought me back to the present company. “What was all that about?”

“Oh, he's just touchy,” I said. “I think he had to talk to the cops, and he's pissed about it.”

“Well, he doesn't need to take it out on us,” said Darnell. “We didn't do anything to him. And it's not like he's the only one who's been questioned.”

I shrugged. “It's none of my business anyway.”

Darnell turned to his partner. “Gimme a cigarette, Boner.”

Jesse fished into his pocket and brought out a pack of Marlboros, then a book of matches. After he handed them to Darnell, he turned to me. “I've got a question for you. Bein' a guy that knows how to read and write.”

“I passed my driver's license test.”

“This one might not be so hard.” He took the cigarettes and matches back from his pal. “What does it mean if someone puts on a postage stamp upside-down?”

“Not much, I don't think.”

“Well, Prestone here says it means sealed with a kiss.”

“I doubt it. If someone wants to seal with a kiss, he writes S.W.A.K. on the back where he seals it. They've been doin' that for years, probably since the war. I imagine they even kissed the envelope there. Real romantic.”

Jesse looked at Darnell. “See?”

“Well,” said the other, “I heard an upside-down stamp could mean the same thing.”

“I don't know,” I admitted, “but if it does, not everyone knows about it. I've licked stamps and put ‘em on that way, just to be contrary, I guess, or non-conformist. One girl I wrote to, her parents took it as carelessness and disrespect. Went on about it. But I think they were already inclined to see me that way.”

Jesse shook out a cigarette. “So there's no deeper meaning?”

“Not that I know of. Is it some clue you ran across, to solve the big crime?”

“No, it was just something Prestone came up with.”

I looked at Darnell, who seemed used to being called by the name of a can of anti-freeze. “I could ask my girl Friday about it,” I said.

Darnell frowned. “I thought you said she didn't work in a detective's office.”

“I said she could work in any kind. And actually, she does show up in the murder mysteries, like in the cast of characters at the beginning of those Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries.”

“I don't read ‘em,” he said, still kind of surly.

“Neither do I. Not any more. At one time I read a bunch of ‘em, though, and later I gave the collection to my girlfriend's mother.”

“Do you any good?”

“Not enough.” Then, wishing I hadn't gone along with his innuendo, I said, “It hasn't helped me solve the question of who killed the old pervert.

Darnell leaned forward and tipped his ashes in the ashtray. “I don't really care who did. All's I know is, it wasn't me. Or us.”

Jesse shrugged. “I still don't know why they call her Friday.”

“It's from Robinson Crusoe ,” I answered. “The guy who lived by himself on an island. He ended up getting a native to be his servant. Met him on a Friday, so that's where he got the name for him.”

“That would be handy. We could get one to pick cots for us.”

“They're hard to come by,” I said. “He was a cannibal, and Crusoe had to kill another cannibal to save his life.”

“That sounds like a lot of work.”

“Not if you have a servant. You get him to bury the dead guy.”

V

We worked a couple of more days in the apricot orchard, without servants. When the original Friday came around, we got paid through noon of that day. I cashed my check at the One-Stop, where I bought some groceries. I gave Jesse and Darnell a dollar a day for riding with them, so we were all in good spirits by about 4:30 when they left me off at my trailer.

That evening I went to the bowling alley, where I dropped a couple of dollars playing the pinball machine. Bonner and Preston didn't show up, so I figured they had gotten someone to buy them some beer or Apple Jack and were off at one of the regular spots drinking in their car. I hadn't seen Eugene since the night of the little tiff, but that didn't surprise me. All in all, the bowling alley was pretty dead for a Friday night, so I walked home at about ten and went to sleep.

The next morning, I waited more than an hour for my ride, and the guys never showed. I started thinking of them as the punks. I imagined them sick as a couple of pups, reeking of sloe gin or some such poison. When I got fed up with waiting, I put my lunch away and walked into town.

I thought that if I could get Eugene to drive me out to the orchard, for a small price, I could pick up my lunch, get in a half day, and arrange with some of the other guys to ride with them. To hell with the punks. I couldn't depend on them, and if anything, I made less with them around.

I went to Eugene 's grandfather's house, which was a low, single-story hovel with chipped asbestos shingles on the sides. The old man answered my knock on the door. He had yellowish, watery eyes and about four days' worth of white stubble on his chin. When I asked for Eugene , the old man squinted a couple of times and spoke in a creaky voice.

“I haven't seen him since day before yesterday. He went out in the early part of the evening. I don't think he went back to stay with his sister, because his things are still here.”

“You don't have any idea where I could find him, then?”

The old man shook his head. “What is it you want to see him about?”

“I know of a little work he could pick up.”

“Oh, he could use that.”

“Well, I wish I knew where I could find him.”

With his hand still on the doorknob, the grandfather said, “He did say something about a girl named Paula. Whoever she is, she might know something.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll see what I can find out.”

I knew of a girl named Paula Reynolds, and she might be someone Eugene knew. She was in her early twenties, had been through some sort of a half-hearted marriage, and was back living with her mother. They lived in a white stucco house across the highway near the stockyards. As the sun climbed higher in the sky, I walked over there.

The front door was open, and I could hear the t.v. going as I knocked. Paula came to the doorway and looked at me through the screen. She was a drab-looking girl, or woman, with sleepy eyes and big knockers. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse and a pair of cut-off jeans, and I couldn't guess if she had combed her hair yet today. I knew she knew me, but she gave a half-frown as if to ask what I was doing there.

“Hi,” I said. “I'm looking for Eugene Fillmore. I was wondering if you know where he is, or if you've seen him in the last couple of days.”

She shook her head. “I don't know where he is. He stays with his grandfather, I think.”

“I knew that, but he hasn't been around for a day or two. I wondered if he'd been by this way.”

“I think I saw him earlier in the week, but not since then.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I just wanted to let him know about some work I know about.”

“I'll tell him if I see him.”

“Thanks.” I wondered if she thought I was using Eugene as an excuse to knock on her door, but nothing more came of the conversation, and I walked away in the hot sun.

Back at my trailer, I ate lunch and tried to imagine how I could get out to the apricot orchard. Anyone who wasn't a deadbeat would be busy working, so I was probably going to have to wait until late afternoon or evening to try to run across someone.

The trailer was starting to heat up, so I turned on the swamp cooler and tried to relax. I told myself that maybe Jesse and Darnell would come by, but I didn't much believe it. I sat there and fidgeted, thinking about what I was going to have to do just to get by. In two days I was going to have to pay rent again, and that was going to leave me with about fifteen dollars. I couldn't coast on that for very long. One thing I knew was how to get a job and make wages, but I didn't like having to depend on someone else. I sure didn't like waiting for these other two guys.

At about four I walked back into town, and in spite of the heat it did me some good to walk off my nervous energy. I didn't have a particular place to go, so I walked where I could find shade, first along a row of businesses on Main Street and then through a neighborhood lined with shade trees. I found myself going past Eugene 's grandfather's house, and I saw the old man sitting in the shade of a sycamore tree.

I stopped and asked him if Eugene had come back, and he said no. I went on my way.

Next I wandered along and turned on the street where the laundromat sat casting its shadow on the sidewalk in front. There I paused and looked north, where the orange co-op and the olive plant sat back from the street. It looked like a hot, sunny trek, so I turned around, went another block south, and hung a right at the corner. Two blocks ahead, on the other side of the tracks, stood the abandoned milk factory with at least a hundred yards of shade.

I crossed the tracks in the hot sun and went on without hurrying until I reached the shelter of the building. I turned left, walked to the south end, and lingered a moment. Then I turned and walked in the same shade northward along the row of connected buildings. I took my time. I came to a set of cement steps that led to a solid metal door. I passed it and a hundred feet later came to another entrance, this one with a railing of grey pipe going up the middle of the steps.

Along the walls of these buildings, sometimes at eye level and sometimes higher up, metal-framed windows gave a blank stare. I could see through most of them, and the buildings looked empty inside, with overhead iron beams, free-standing iron framework, and iron braces attached to walls. I also saw stairs and catwalks with iron railings. Several of the windows had iron grates on them as well, so the whole place had a resemblance to a prison or a bleak castle.

For a moment it reminded me of a movie I had seen a couple of years earlier, called Castle of Blood . It was a black-and-white British movie, with a couple of young Englishmen characters. One of them makes a bet with the other that he can't spend the whole night in the castle, which is supposed to be haunted. So the other one takes the bet and goes into the castle at dusk. He spends the night wandering from one room to the other, where doors creak, curtains wave, and shutters bang. He even climbs into one of the beds for a while. Then, when the first light of morning starts to show, he gets a hell of a scare and runs through the castle, out the front door, and through the iron gate in front. There he stops still, heaving a sigh of relief, and the gate bangs shut in back of him. Not long after that, a couple of bobbies come along, and they see the guy still standing straight up in front of the gate, with an iron spike, part of the railing work, sticking out the front of his forehead. I have to admit that even though it was a dorky movie, it had some genuine scary parts and a good surprise at the end.

I put that out of my mind and moved on. Past the buildings with the windows, a cement loading dock ran for about a hundred feet along a structure that looked like a warehouse. A pair of sliding doors came together with a heavy chain and padlock. The building and the doors were covered with corrugated galvanized metal, all a dull grey.

Past the loading dock, the building dropped to ground level, and the ridge of the roof was six feet lower as well. The area on my left was no longer paved with concrete but was covered with gravel, with dry Bermuda grass growing through in patches. The building had no windows or doors, at least on the side where I stood.

This factory had been a place that processed canned milk, so at one time it would have had tanks for boiling the milk, machines for canning and sealing, rollways for labeling, a casing machine for packing cans in boxes, a conveyor belt for the full boxes, and a station where men stacked the boxes on pallets. One of the few times I had talked with my father when I was able to have an actual conversation, he told me about working in a peach cannery on the other side of the valley. He loaded pallets, and he said the guy who ran the caser sometimes put in just three or four cans, enough to give weight for the box to run down the conveyor. Then the guy stacking the full boxes, who was used to hefting forty or fifty pounds each time, would give his usual heave and nearly fall over backwards. It was a big surprise, and it could cause a guy to pull his back muscles or fall off balance. The guy filling the boxes, who was a smug son of a bitch according to my father, thought it was real funny.

Anyway, from the little I had heard here and there, I had an idea of what the iron beams and frames and catwalks were all about, and I imagined the building I had come to had been a kind of shed for forklifts and jitneys and maybe stacks of old pallets. I also figured it was the easiest to break into.

As this side of the building did not have any doors, I walked along about a foot away from the structure and ran my hand across each sheet of corrugated metal. Where the sheets met, they were nailed onto the studs with large-headed, rubber-shanked, galvanized nails. Some of the sheets rattled, but none of them lifted away from the frame.

Around the north end, where the strong winds of winter hit the hardest, the panels were looser. Then, about six feet from the far corner, I found a sheet that lifted away. I had to turn around and crouch, but I was able to crawl through.

It took me a minute or two, paused with my hands and knees on the gravel floor, until my eyes adjusted to the dark inside of the building. The only light came through the crack of a sliding door on the west side. Beyond that faint stream of light, a low heap lay on the floor.

I stood up and walked in that direction. I crossed the place where the light fell in an uneven streak on the gravel. Now my eyes were well adjusted, and I could identify the object on the floor. He was lying face down with his head turned away from me, but he was still wearing his wire-rimmed glasses. His hat and cane lay on the gravel beyond his sprawled left arm and pale, slender hand. I could imagine him saying, “This is a rotten deal,” but he was beyond ever saying anything again.

THE CONCLUSION WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT ISSUE