A Side Order of Truth

By Robert L. Payne

My purpose in writing this book was to leave a mark on the hard face of passing time, a mark softened at the edges of a smile. An early glance shows a young family secure in its humor. Yet the grip of something stronger squeezes the three children apart and toward irony that laughter couldn't touch. It will touch readers, I am confident. My hope is that these pages will loosen the force that wrenched the siblings apart, even as they thought less and less of how to help each other. Still and all, they must turn their own thoughts around.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469167398

Robert L. Payne

“It just happened… but in a slow-motion kind of way.” When asked to comment about his book of photographs - all of them depicting water in some way - Robert Payne doubled back and tied a square knot of conceptions on becoming an artist. “Seeing” like an artist” mixes in with keeping “feelings” at an arm’s length. But always remember to keep one or more fi ngers near the shutter. Th en the matter asserts itself of anticipating an upcoming “photographic moment,” or in layman’s terms, “Don’t leave your camera at home.” Besides the shutter, there are other buttons which Mr. Payne fi nds appropriate to set every year and make do. A gentleman he met on a golf course in Scotland, gave him this advice on explaining the fi ne points of golf: “Don’t even bawther.” Run-ins like this led to blending together many sophisticated approaches to taking pictures, playing golf and living life. Even on rare occasions Robert Payne has taken risks like photographing water hazards on golf courses. It is refreshing to know that people like Robert might be thought of as an artist. He prefers that others make such claims. When it comes to explaining how anybody would call him an artist, a golfer, a photographer or a person who fi nds satisfaction in snapping shots of the surface colors of a northern lake, he would venture this: “Enjoy the photos. But take an end-round approach to explaining how to become an artist. “Don’t even bawther.” Robert L. Payne

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Copyright © 2012 by Robert L. Payne.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

1 BEGINNING WITH AN ENDING

2 HIS ARRIVAL, HIS DISAPPEARANCE

3 LOSING A HORSESHOE

4 ANOTHER BIRTH AND ANOTHER

5 NATURAL-BORN PRANKSTERS

6 FOOD TO FORGET

7 GRADES

8 NEW YORK FRAME OF MIND

9 THE CABIN

10 BAXTER MOVES

11 TO THE MATS AND OTHER MATTERS

12 TEACHERS

13 TURNING TWENTY-ONE

14 THE HAIRY PINEAPPLE

15 MORE LEGEND

16 FLOWER IN TAFFETA

17 BAXTER GOES TO COLLEGE

18 THE BARRIER ISLAND

19 PARKER AND SHACK, ROOMMATES

20 LOVE TAKES AN INTEREST

21 TRAVELING SHOES

22 KNEELING

23 TEXAS NEIGHBORS

24 THE BIG DOG, A FRISBEE, AND HELICOPTERS

25 THE PEOPLE

26 THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

27 BORDER CROSSING

28 MRS. LOONEY

29 SCAB PICKING

30 BEING PICKED UP

31 EUROPE AND BACK

32 AMONG THE STARS

33 REACHING BELIEF

34 SCOFFLAWS

35 ROAD TRIPS

36 THE FIRST RETIREMENT

37 DEEPER LESSONS

38 NEW FRIENDS

39 LOW KEY DAYS

40 NOT SUCH A TWERP ANYMORE

41 TWO SICK GIRLS

42 MAGIC

43 WEDDING BELLES

44 THE MAN WITH NO FLAWS

45 DAIL GOES NEW AGE

46 DEEPER MAGIC

47 MOUSE WORLD

48 READINESS

49 A DANGLING CONVERSATION

50 A SHIPLOAD OF SLAVES

51 A FRESH START

52 WHEN YOU WERE TWELVE…

53 GETTING THINGS STRAIGHT

54 HONOUR, IS THAT HOW YOU SPELL IT?

55 QUOTES, ANECDOTES AND ANTIDOTES

56 THE OLD SKIPPER AND HIS WIFE

57 CHRISTMAS ON CABBAGE KEY

58 BAXTER’S NEW GIRL

59 THE SANIBEL LOST AND FOUND

60 CLASS

61 THE ASHRAM TIP

62 BAXTER GETS HIS WAY

63 THE CABIN IN THE SPOTLIGHT

64 RALPH’S BUSINESS SIDE

65 HAGAN ADOPTS

66 WHERE PEOPLE GO WHO LIKE TO WRITE

67 A SHORT GOODBYE AND A LONG HELLO

68 THE GRAND OPENING OF THE MAGNOLIA INN

69 A REDWOOD PICNIC

70 NO SMOKING IN SCHOOL

71 HOW EIGHTH GRADERS RUN AMOK

72 YES, WE ARE NOT OUT OF QUOTES

73 RECRUITING A TEACHER

74 TEACHER TROUBLES

75 SO?

76 PRANKS

77 BASEBALL

78 THE GYNECOLOGIST-SONGWRITER

79 BACK TO THE MAGNOLIA INN

80 THE AGONY-AND-THE-ECSTASY CLASSES

81 ARE YOU WEARING THAT TO SCHOOL?

82 MOVING DAY

83 THE DAY-LONG RAIN

84 MAIL

85 THE COMPUTER-GENERATED TONE

86 DOUBLE-ROTATING BELL SCHEDULE

87 STUDY HALLS

88 ANNA

89 YARD ART

90 PARENTAL WARNING

91 VISITING KATHRYN

92 TRUTH IS ONE. PATHS ARE MANY

93 GREECE

94 THE ZAMBIANS

95 TACO BELL AND BILL GATES’ PALS

96 A LAWYER’S MEETING

97 HALEY MERGES…

98 A MURMUR OF PURPLE

99 THE RIVER HOUSE

100 SQUIRRELS AND DUCKS

101 THE AUDITION

102 RELIGION BECOMES AN ELECTIVE

103 THE LONG-ANTICIPATED GOODBYE

104 TOO WEIRD TO HEAR

105 FIGURING OUT HALEY. A SUDDEN ENDING

106 MORE FIGURING OUT…

107 FAMILY LIFE

108 TENTH YEAR REUNION, STILL MOST TALKATIVE

109 THE DEATH OF A GENTLEMAN

110 MATTIE STILL

111 MULLIGAN THE FATE

112 CAREGIVING WITH NO BRAKES OR LIGHTS

113 BROWBEATING A DENTIST’S OFFICE

114 CULT BEHAVIOR

115 BAXTER GETS MORE GUMPTION

116 A CATNAP AND A KIDNAPPING. LAWYERS AND BEANS

117 LOGJAM

118 THOUGHTS

119 SHOOTING ONE’S MOUTH OFF LIKE A CHEAP POP GUN; THE ENEMIES LIST

120 LIVING WITH SEIZURES

121 BART’S FIRST MEDIATION

122 HAGAN’S DESSERT

123 HANDLING STRESS

124 HAGAN ASKS FOR HELP

125 THANKSGIVING

126 THREATS

127 PICKING AND CHOOSING

128 BAXTER TAKES SICK

129 AUDREY, THE HOSTAGE

130 THE BAXTER AFTERMATH

131 I-ME-WANT-GIVE-NOW.

132 THE LOST RING

133 THE CLOSING OF THE RACCOON HOTEL

134 THE REAL ESTATE AGENT

135 THE THREAT

136 A WAY OUT

137 THE BUYER

138 PROGNOSES

139 HOW MANY OUTS IS THAT?

140 READING THOUGHTS

141 THE PICKLE

1

BEGINNING WITH AN ENDING

LATE-SPRING SUNLIGHT PRIED its vivid beams through the muscular branches of giant oaks, to play across clusters of graduates, their friends and families. A sense of giddy picnic lent itself to the Commencement of 1968. Through the trees that history had landscaped, the fabled colonnade of Washington and Lee University glimmered in the background of what would become carefully arranged photographs, framed and hung, the ones in which the diplomas were in clear focus.

Through the disorganized hour after the throwing of the mortarboard caps, clumps of people still milled and muddled. Most of the still-lingering had turned to congratulating each other, seeking the gush of good feeling that heady chatter with strangers could not bestow. One large group of faculty, parents and the recently degree’d, spilled from under massive shade trees toward a lane that led toward the outside world. A handsome, popular Spanish professor was giving students his last benedictions, shaking their hands, slapping their backs, foretelling futures of promise and prosperity.

Patrick, your record here makes us all proud; you deserve all the best. Marvin, almost all B’s and A’s for four years. You make teaching a pleasure. Hagan Padgett lingered, awaiting a crumb of, Well done. Most of his friends had already departed. He liked this guy, although that may have been due to having taken just a one-semester class that he had taught.

Hagan, his voice commanding attention as he made eye contact, Congratulations for hanging in there, but really…you know… you should be congratulating us! Involuntary laughter pickled of the afternoon air. The attendees with taste or any sense of occasion began to shuffle away. Hagan felt the relief for absent friends who didn’t hear, and realized that nothing remained but to go.

Squeezing his paper tube until it crumpled, Hagan found his parents, younger brother and even younger sister, and other more distant relatives who had driven across Virginia from Norfolk, waiting at the big family station wagon. They let out a roar as he neared, which lasted as long as the laughter from minutes earlier. Soon after that the cousins and aunts and uncles dispursed. The doors of Steady Eddie were flung open and swallowed the family of five, leaving only bystanders to remark on the yellow mustard color of the tank of a car.

With their oldest offspring an official college graduate now for over an hour, the parents had no need to know how close he had come to the abyss, but his margin of success for the required cumulative four-year grade-point average was twenty-three thousandths of a point. Class rank: dead last. As the big yellow Chevrolet rumbled across the Maury River Bridge and out of Lexington, Hagan realized that he could not recall a single thing about his graduation ceremony. A small place that felt like an old burn on the back of his neck stung him. Lexington receded in the distance of the June day. He didn’t want to talk about it. Family conversation huffed and sighed, and lapsed into individuals’ private thoughts.

Dr. Padgett, the surgeon, nearly smiled as he drove through the sunny countryside, feeling prouder than he had expected to. Hagan watched at the familiar surroundings, hillsides divided by whitewashed fences, farm houses with unpaved driveways and streams that seemed to look back at him with annoyed expressions, as if to ask, What are you still doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere? After four hours of respecting the speed limit, the father nudged the big wagon into the Lochhaven neighborhood of Norfolk, Hagan heard his own voice asking a recurring question he hadn’t been able to shake. If I don’t know where I’m going, am I lost if I can’t get there?

In the first week of summer, he and some of his college pals partied, drove around a lot, stayed up late and allowed themselves to feel liberated and exuberant. Many times Hagan caught the fleeting lyrics of a new song that taunted him with the words, leading lives of quiet desperation… but never could he hear more than those. In dreams he pictured trains of dangling conversations disappearing into tunnels. Following into the darkness, he never caught more than the fumes of an occasional caboose.

Summer’s first week ended. His friends went forth with grinning confidence and outlooks they tried to shape into whatever they thought the future looked like. One was getting married in the coming week. Another had graduate school; several others anticipated officer candidate school, or actual jobs that should keep them out of shooting distance from Vietnam.

The Monday morning of summer’s second week, at his parents’ kitchen breakfast table, some place between the beginning of grapefruit and the end of eggs and toast, Hagan heard himself realizing something… in his own voice again, but not in words.

What he felt: a hole in his life. What he knew: he had no idea what to do next. No plans. The only breadcrumbs for him rested in swirls of egg yolk on his plate. After trying so hard to finish college, he had not begun anything else. Nothing on the back burner. All he could count on was getting hungry sometime later in the day. That would mean lunch. Okay, it was something.

Want ads appeared every weekday in the newspaper. He turned to them for the first time in his life and circled some. By early afternoon he was the new assistant bartender of the Bay Club, on the top floor of Norfolk’s tallest office building, working the lunch shift. Mostly he chopped fruit and ran to members’ lockers to fetch their bottles of whiskey and vodka and rum. The first-string bartender had taken a shine to Hagan, hired him on the spot, and launched into his stories, mostly about himself and about the customers. Hagan’s shift lasted from eleven to three, and included a free lunch. Then he drove his newly acquired used 1967 Ford Mustang convertible to a country club his parents had just joined and played golf until twilight. It would be fair to say that he did some thinking during this time. He found that he wasn’t good at predicting anything, and that gazing backward didn’t help.

Being alone on an empty golf course gave him comfort. The placid fairways gave his mind room, but keeping his eye on the ball didn’t solve much. He found he could rely on knowing how to get from one green to the next tee. That way he finished each round where he had started, knew where his car was parked, and that golf balls were still round.

His parents were deeply concerned, thoughtful people, and downright gifted as worriers. They were not much help to him. Theirs was the worry of self-preservation; they had been through a decade of depression and two wars. Hagan accepted their offer for some vocational testing, after which the counselor spoke to him with an even voice and a straight face and said the tests indicated him pursuing work as a philosophical playground director. A what? His few good friends agreed among themselves that he had chosen well by ignoring those test results. With him, they enjoyed a long, deep laugh when he told them how he had informed the counselor that some neighborhoods in town had been painted shades of colors that he found unappealing and which were accompanied by a plague of loud, discordant sounds. Both were deliberate, he stated, but was unable to say why he thought so. None of his friends knew enough to advise him what to do with a French degree and low grades. None of his friends’ opinions were winning any prizes either.

Two or three years later, he discovered that he could thrive as a member of the landed gentry, although there wasn’t much land, and well, it wasn’t his. A month before graduation, he had failed something gratifying, his Army physical. The calluses on his hands from playing golf tended to fester and required goo. The Army only wanted perfect, goo-free specimens.

Hagan was not Army material, so we see. He was, however, a sensitive, slender, nearly six-foot-tall possessor of a college degree. He tended toward the preppy in his clothes. Short hair length and original color, light brown, suited him, so he kept them. The concept of balance was not a highly prized entity to him, but his curiosity and his caution kept one another in check, and there was that philosophical thing, looking for a place to hang its hat, but avoiding playgrounds.

By a month after graduation, his bartender boss had unintentionally taught him a lot about gossip about the customers. Hagan had seen enough life patterns to be able to package some into tentative conclusions for himself. What he could remember and fall back on, he could sum up.

Simplify in all walks of life.

Come to grips with all forms of reality.

Remain openminded and honest with oneself.

Try to understand love.

Spend money with care.

Respect insight.

Develop an appreciation for wisdom.

Realize that lessons can be learned by observing other people’s blunders.

He also had concluded that wisdom comes from making one’s own mistakes. One had to have money to learn how to use it. Being openminded was the only way to learn about love, because everybody was different. Simplifying life didn’t work at all unless accompanied by flexibility, because, you see, coming to grips with reality complicated everything.

But what his little life has had to say:

The attraction of love is its mystery.

Contradictions sometimes pose as wisdom.

What is wisdom for one isn’t wisdom for another.

The blunders people make are mostly theirs to learn from.

Listening can save a person a lot of falls.

Reality isn’t something you come to grips with – it will come to grips with you.

Life responds with as much as you put into it.

Being openminded works for everything, if you believe in something.

No one can tell you how to believe.

Ignore anyone who tells you to believe what they do.

The idea of the walks of life is a mistaken concept.

Consider instead, Life on the dead run.

2

HIS ARRIVAL, HIS DISAPPEARANCE

LOOKING BACK TO his beginnings, before he could walk, we find him at peace in the neighborhoods where his parents took him to live. Everyone in the family and their neighbors and friends, were attentive and affectionate to him, as he was the oldest grandchild of what would be an enormous corral of grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, most of them girls. His mother and father had formed their values in the Depression and knew how to economize with rubber bands, plastic newspaper bags, paper clips, gasoline and expressing their thoughts about the most serious things. Theirs was the grit that lasted through years of a world war. So they had some life skills, all right. They had foresight.

Long before his oldest son’s birth, Dr. Padgett had made the prenatal decision to get Hagan to a modern Maryland hospital, rather than risk his birth in any less modern West Virginia hospital. When his young wife’s labor pains came, Dr. Padgett drove her through the sleety mountains, in time for a healthy baby Hagan to be delivered at dawn on a mid-March day in 1946.

When the tyke’s grandmother heard of the delivery, she took the back roads all the way to Charles Town to see her first grandson. Interstate highways didn’t exist at this time, a good thing, for when they appeared, Hagan’s grandmother avoided them. To get on them to drive, she said, you have to merge… What followed was a stern grandmother’s look. I don’t merge.

After moving several times to get the best possible medical training, Dr. Padgett and his little family found themselves in Norfolk, Virginia in the leafy quietude of Algonquin, the neighborhood that Dr. Padgett himself had grown up in, less than a block from that same house. One arrived at the choicest residential lots fronting the Lafayette River by winding through lanes that curved and cut back as if dipped in the English countryside.

The neighborhood surged with the quiet strength, good judgment, solid maturity and old money. Hagan’s grandparents’ massive, comfortable, white stucco hacienda was the only house surrounded by water on three sides.

The large lots afforded the occupants of three-story, four-bedroom homes room to spill out into the unhurried gardens and spacious driveways, showing the early prosperity that would become unparalleled in the second half of the century. With a determination learned in war, and in turn built on patience forged through the Depression, the Padgetts readied for practical changes and thoughtful improvements. Rooms were added to houses, and picture windows were added to rooms. Garages expanded. Water skis were assigned space beside ping-pong tables.

Badminton equipment kept company with gun racks. Tether balls had their own space in the back yards, as did horseshoe pits. Terraces with awnings met swimming pools with diving boards; small pleasure boats on trailers coexisted with goldfish ponds and barbecue pits. The east coast of North America was flexing its muscles.

As Hagan passed his third birthday, he peered out with curious eyes under a short, blond cowlick from his stroller. In this he was moved back and forth from his family’s house to that of his grandparents, through twisting lanes that called to mind London’s well-hemmed outskirts. No one could find the right word for his eye color, for they were neither blue nor brown. Muddled green, maybe. Hazel had to do. Nearby lay a respectable colored settlement from which domestic help was readily available, which opened expanses of free time for Hagan’s mother Tinsil.

A young woman of introspective, aloof beauty, the chosen homecoming queen for three years in college, she was a natural fit in many social settings. Although her movie star brunette looks preceded her when she arrived at these places, it was her sharp humor and penetrating sense of irony that lingered, after she had departed. One nearby country club featured fine dining, yacht slips and an assortment of swimming pools. In Virginia Beach, a half an hour away, a second club devoted to golf, lay in wait.

Friends with ocean-front cottages extended open invitations. With Dr. Padgett at his surgical practice all day, and a trusted baby sitter and house cleaner showing up for full-time work promptly every day, Tinsil eased her attention to these and other recreations.

Alice arrived on foot punctually just after breakfast each weekday and on Saturdays. Tinsil had more shopping days and golf days than she had ever imagined. The confidence she placed in Alice occupied a secure place in her mind.

One afternoon after returning from a poolside luncheon, she answered the telephone on the screen porch and hastily wrote down a golf game. Her notes read Thursday, coming up. The game was to be on Friday. So… on that next Thursday, no golf partners met her on the first tee at nine fifteen. She shopped on the way home, and when she turned the knob of her front door at eleven thirty, sounds of a grandfather clock greeted her…

She breezed through the downstairs, calling for Alice and Hagan, but there were no people sounds. With shopping bags flung to the hall floor, she slammed through the screen door into the back yard, no longer calling out. The emptiness of the yard seeped into the house. The walls closed in around her. The smell of mothballs reached her. Had she checked the closets? Where could…? Why would…?

Her rising panic jutted one question to the forefront… Did she know enough about Alice to even find her? Her fingers fumbled for the woman’s address in the telephone book. Another hope boiled away. Only a jaggedly torn square of lined paper offered any hope, jabbed onto a cork board amidst recipes and plumbers’ work numbers… Alice’s home phone…

She misdialed it twice. Then, even before Alice spoke her hello, Tinsil heard Hagan’s voice blended with those of other small children. A torrent followed of, This the only time, and Should I bring him in his stroller right away?

Tinsil scribbled directions and left the receiver dangling. She was in Alice’s kitchen in minutes. There she found a sizeable pile of clothes being ironed, a small radio playing soft music, and Alice’s three little girls and their dolls, and Hagan, all wide-eyed to see this banshee flare into the house. She never gave the stroller a thought. A much bigger vehicle would be required to haul the guilt back home that Mrs. Padgett felt the weight of that day. Alice would not darken their door again; this much she knew.

Yet… enterprise was a value Tinsil believed in, and Alice had just taken a little while out of an everyday stroller walk to do some of her own housework, while on the Padgett payroll…Nothing took precedence over the knowledge of the deceit, however.

In the week that followed, Tinsil asked herself countless times, how much worse it could have been. She spent over two days making up a list of interview questions for new help to be asked, and consulted a domestic worker agency about their hiring criteria. Exactly how did they do their checking up?

As if to ease her tension, she began to count the pieces of family silverware until she knew by heart the number of knives, forks, spoons and serving dishes. She cut back on golf. Then, as weeks churned into months, the episode loosened its grip, slipped into the folds of those things that had been reconciled and accepted, and… largely forgotten.

3

LOSING A HORSESHOE

IT WAS IN the mid-summer of Hagan’s third year that the Darwins accepted an invitation to the Padgetts’ back yard for a cookout. Walter Darwin and Bob Padgett had gone to school together long enough to have erased any doubts one might have had about the other. Walter sold insurance, and Bob bought all of his from Walter.

Marjorie Darwin had a way of flipping her long, black hair and smirking when relating a story, so there always seemed to be a hidden joke in it. While Bob Padgett slathered barbeque sauce across the chicken breasts, and the Darwins threw horseshoes from pit to pit, Marjorie let slip the fact of Alice being now in their employ. Tinsil and Bob already knew this, and Tinsil considered her marriage all the stronger because of her Alice incident.

She eased into a canvas chair in the shade as the conversation sought its own level. The horseshoes clanged, and the subject moved along to the new chef at the country club, the best brand of tennis balls, and the most competent real estate company from which to rent cottages on the Outer Banks of North Carolina… and finally back to Hagan’s stroller adventure to Alice’s kitchen.

Many family members and friends knew that Hagan had an imaginary friend, and most knew his name, Mink Monk. They were disposed to view such as a sign of a well-developed imagination and intelligence. No one told him to make up a fantasy being.

If the family was about to drive away with Mink Monk still in the house, Hagan didn’t hesitate to ask to let Mink Monk out, to save him from being left. The child would often bring a small blue blanket along to keep Mink Monk warm. So, when Walter Darwin followed a ringer with a leaner, his wife tried to distract him.

You do know that Mink Monk has a friend of his own, don’t you?…a little girl. Kind of like a sister to Mink Monk, ya’ see.

His next horseshoe missed the pit completely. Walter’s career in insurance had grounded him in statistics, and this sort of talk made his attention jump the tracks.

Walter, Honey, don’t you agree that is the cutest thing?

I suppose it is… said Walter. He seemed to have lost track of where his other horseshoe was. Tinsil saw the conversation was losing its entertainment value. That in turn deepened her attention to the smell of barbequing chicken.

She put her gin and tonic down and swept into the conversation with the smile that had made many, many people forget where their other horseshoe was. How long ‘til we get to eat some chicken?

It’s almost ready… Give it another minute and a half. Medical training had made Bob Padgett, if nothing else, precise.

Her husband tilted his head toward the horseshoe conversation, but never took his eyes off the chicken. Majorie played the pauses between the airborne clanging of horseshoes, knowing the friendship between the men, forged by insurance, couldn’t be jeopardized by made-up children.

Bob Padgett gestured them all toward the picnic table for juicy, hot chicken, and tacitly allowed the stage to change but the conversation to continue.

Marjorie peppered and salted her chicken breast, ate slowly and monopolized the conversation for twenty minutes.

Dr. Padgett finally heard an opening. Who’d like more barbecued chicken? Another drink?

Tinsil looked at the remains of her lunch…three ravaged chicken breasts. She found that the watermelon was exerting as much pressure as the chicken. I think we should cut into that watermelon, is what I think…

As Bob Padgett started across the yard taking long, angular strides toward the back porch to get their first whole watermelon of the summer, Marjorie called after him, This wife of yours is eating like a lumberjack today. Gossip circles of Norfolk feed on that, you know…

He stopped out in the middle of the side lawn, suddenly a man adrift.

Well… and as he tried to phrase an appropriate answer, the Darwins both saw that he was blushing… face, neck and ears.

Well, yourself! And congratulations to you both!! How long have you known?

In November, he replied, only half realizing that he had answered the wrong end of the question. We’re hoping for a girl this time, he said, as he picked up a souvenir machete from his war years in the Fiji Islands, handling it like a scalpel, approached the watermelon like he would a patient in surgery. After a moment of undivided attention, he divided it into perfect equal halves.

When the insides came into view, Tinsil laughed out loud and cried, I’ll take the slice on your left! She would have, too, had he not carved out a large wedge for her and one for each of the rest. It doesn’t matter about telling whoever you want, Marjorie. We’ve been lucky to keep it a secret this long.

Given any thought to names? Walter asked, envisioning blank spaces on insurance forms, which he viewed as things of beauty.

You know we have… Carie Lyn has always been a favorite of Bob’s, and I’d be fine with that, if we have a girl. He also says he’d find it interesting to name a girl Pouty or Praline, but that’s just him making fun of my sweet tooth, and, well… just me, at times… They looked at each other and smiled.

Right. Walter rolled his eyes and made a mental note never ever to allow the name Praline on any of his company’s forms. And if you have a boy?

Funny, Tinsil answered, but we can’t get anywhere with a boy’s name. Hagan was sort of an accident… I mean the name just jumped in front of us at the right time.

She yawned and stretched like a young cat. Walter forgot to tell them that one of their horseshoes was lost; after that, the Darwins went home. Tinsil fell asleep in the back yard hammock and dreamed of giving birth to a large, ripe watermelon, without a name.

4

ANOTHER BIRTH AND ANOTHER

BAXTER WOULD BE his name. With a fourth family member in the small rooms of the old Algonquin place, the Padgetts looked for a bigger house. Looking gave way to planning to build. Soon enough, a large corner lot was found which they filled with a spacious, restrained, comfortable house, equally close to the same river, just one neighborhood away, a tasteful, elegant new home. It was built with enough bedrooms to house an expanding family for many years to come. Tinsil’s flower garden inside the hedge was soon the talk of the garden club members, for blocks in every direction.

The doctor undertook to train the family’s cocker spaniel, Dusty, hoping to impart advanced obedience, through top-notch training. Yet, with his busy practice, his standing golf foursome on Thursdays, and the sixteen-foot-long fishing boat being kept immaculate in the garage, the dog dodged most of the knowledge intended for him. His best trick entailed balancing a dog biscuit on his quivering nose until given the signal. With a snap, he caught it before it fell past his nose, crunched twice, and swallowed before it would have hit the ground.

Hagan had always thought of Dusty as his dog, and Baxter’s presence, implying sharing him, held little appeal for the older boy. Old family photographs showed Hagan as a baby riding on Dusty’s back, holding him by the ears. The dog appeared to be smiling. Pictures of the whole family showed no friction once Baxter’s dreamy, dark eyes began to appear in them. But Hagan knew Dusty had always been his dog, since time began.

The Wrenn family lived four houses away, nearer the river, and on a dredged canal, generally refered to as a gut. Their older son Kendall was close to Hagan in age. But on the November day when Tinsil gave birth, Bartlett Wrenn was just two days old. Once the two younger brothers were discharged by the hospital, the young mothers compared every hiccup and freckle that either boy exhibited, every pound gained or knee scraped.

Their older boys folded their arms across their chests and set about rolling the welcome mats back up. Kendall Wrenn had no more stomach for an adorable little attention-grabbing diaper wearer than did Hagan. Hagan, in turn, made sure that Baxter expected nothing in the form of hospitality.Their self-promotion grew without watering.

Always having a two-year head start gave the older brothers every advantage in these parallel rivalries. So Baxter and Bartlett each knew what the other had felt, even before knowing how to tell each other. When they could talk about their separate-but-equal indoctrination into inferiority, a brotherhood began to evolve that neither older brother could fathom. They were too busy maintaining the illusion of superiority.

Then one late June afternoon when Baxter was three and Hagan five, their father put their mother into the family car and drove her to the hospital. Four days later he drove back into the driveway with her and their baby sister, Carie Lyn.

Once the baby was settled in her own room, Tinsil asked Hagan if he noticed anything different about her appearance, meaning her newly sleek body. He didn’t, and he said no.

Although he didn’t attach any significance to it, she lit a cigarette. It was June 1951. Women were encouraged to mind their waists, and tobacco wouldn’t be considered a health hazard for another decade.

In that time, Hagan and Kendall would have started school and reached the ninth grade. Bartlett would have reached the eighth grade; Baxter would not have. But their notoriety got itself a boost in an event that occurred about halfway through the 1950’s.

5

NATURAL-BORN PRANKSTERS

THE HOT BREATH of the summer when they were eight found the two boys at times free from the oppression of their older brothers. Hagan had discovered a summer camp in New Hampshire, fallen in love with water skiing and would be gone for eight weeks for this and the next three summers. Kendall had asked for horseback riding lessons, given on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the middle of the day. Free riding was offered on other days.

By midmorning of the Tuesday in July in question, both Bartlett and Baxter had been ushered to the front doors of their houses and told to go out and play.

They saw big problems in this... Their allowances would not be available for almost a week. It was going to be ninety-five degrees by noon. What they wanted was to get out of their neighborhood, cross the boulevard that formed the main boundary between Lochhaven and the outside world, and sit down in the air-conditioned comfort of the local drugstore. Once there, with large cherry limeades and a bottomless supply of potato chips, candy bars, or any other thing that crunched or oozed chocolate, they would plot terrible things for their brothers.

Only their lack of money stood in their way. On the positive side: the maid who the Wrenns considered a family member had already provided Bart with enough aged chicken parts for bait, so when they met down on a friend’s pier, they had brought fishing rods, a bucket, a net and little hope of staving off the midsummer heat.

I sincerely believe I was sweating at the breakfast table, Bartlett said, wiping his forehead with his arm and casting out into an area of the Lafayette River that he hoped would be home for a large school of rainbow trout. If it continued, one hungry croaker or spot, he’d be happy to reel it in.

If we catch a dozen fish, and sell them for a dollar each, we’ll be set. Baxter’s idealism hit Bart’s funny bone, and he laughed out loud.

We’ll be in college before spot sell for a dollar!

They both wore striped tee shirts which had big damp spots in the middle of their backs. Baxter’s rod bent suddenly, and he practically yanked something out of the river, croaking. Superior fishing skill rears its head first… again!

Well, that’s all of one, so let’s keep the awards ceremony ‘til later.

How about an award for Hagan and Kendall both being gone? I suggest a bucket of this special low-tide mud, right down the back of their pants!

Bartlett caught the next three rainbow trout, but they were all blow toads. Too bad we don’t have any cherry bombs… These make such a mess when they go off in midair!

We could put that down their pants, too!

Nearly an hour went by, and the blow toads outnumbered the fish. Let’s collect bottles and get the deposits, huh? Baxter knew the futility of this, at two cent per bottle.

Bartlett gurgled with laughter. Well, let’s get going so we’ll have enough by September. How many are in the bucket, Bax?

Eight, I think. Let’s just go and sell what we’ve got, before my tongue dries up. Before long, they were ambling into the heat-hushed Lochhaven streets, trading the weight of the bucket at every driveway.

Maybe my grandmother will pay double, Bartlett offered. I’m not sure she knows what things cost anymore. By the time they had gotten across the first street, both boys had stepped in melted tar. Gnats swarmed their faces, and within a block, mosquitoes had them both scratching arms and necks. God must have been having a bad day when He made mosquitoes.

At the first three houses where they knocked, the black cleaning ladies told them to go on their way. Bartlett’s grandmother’s car was not in it usual shady spot beneath a willow tree. "Today would be her day to go run errands, or wherever she goes."

Mrs. Witherspoon’s car is in the side yard. I’d know those Cadillac tail lights anywhere! They knocked. They rang the doorbell. Mrs. Witherspoon, the mom of one of the neighborhood boys, was sort of pretty, as mothers went, and could be very nice.

She answered the door in curlers. I don’t have time for fish in a bucket today, boys! The luncheon at the club has probably already started, and my makeup is still on the countertop of my vanity! Now….shoo! She clicked to the back of the house in her pink, fuzzy, high-heeled slippers.

The door remained cracked, and the air conditioning seeped out through the screen door. Baxter spoke first… I think those curlers killed the rest of the fish.

Bartlett squirreled his face around, and performed his best imitation, in the voice of a sour parakeet. My makeup is still on my vanity…

"Don’t you think she deserves something for taking the trouble to come to the door?" Bartlett’s chin quivered. He reached into the bucket and selected a dead croaker. Baxter grasped the handle of the screen door and eased it open. Bart leaned into the chilled living room air, looked down at the croaker, and nudged it under the corner of the thick, cream-colored rug. Baxter took the end of his fishing rod and gave it a poke to make sure it was out of sight.

With that done, they soundlessly pulled back onto the porch and allowed the screen door to engage the latch. With faces red from holding their breath, the two scuttled to the sidewalk and pushed and tripped each other back to Bartlett’s house. There they knew a bolgna sandwich and cold milk could be made to appear just by acting weak with hunger and appearing pitiful in ways that would have impressed Shakespeare.

By the time Mrs. Witherspoon had caught up on the country club’s lunch offering, it was late afternoon. Ronnie, her eight-year-old, was home from his Cub Scout troop meeting, and greeted her with the news of the odd smell in the house.

His mother went into her mom checklist for bad smells, and gave cursory inspections to his shoes, for dog excrement, then checked their dog, a beige, full-sized St. Bernard named Custer. The dog had not been out of the house since before she had gone to the club.

When Mr. Witherspoon arrived home from work, he, too, fixated his suspicion on Custer. With a stern adult voice, he speculated that he might have killed an animal and left it under the house. This was unlikely because Custer had long since become overdomesticated to the point that he wouldn’t be able to outthink a retarded possum. Ronnie came to Custer’s defense by suggesting that he might have found a diseased or wounded animal and left it under the house.

Bartlett and Baxter were conveniently absent when the neighborhood children were offered banana popsicles to squeeze themselves under the house. Nothing was found that smelled, but the word of the stink got into the neighborhood gossip circles and went everywhere.

By the end of the second day, the Witherspoon family had opened and inspected every drawer, every jar or box in every pantry, all cabinets, bags, cans, tins, lockets, urns, pieces of luggage, and anything with a zipper, clasp, snap, tie, button or clip. The air conditioning/ heating company sent their wiliest duct snooper, and the chimney inspection organization dispatched their man with a black belt in sweeping chimneys. Furniture was moved, pillows sniffed, and pockets of all clothes given patient visual appraisal. The Witherspoons effectively sidestepped the problem by going out for dinner and not so effectively by sleeping with all the windows in the house open.

The end of the third day found the Witherspoons no closer to a solution, but their neighbors insisted on one. Close the windows. The Witherspoons went to a hotel for the night. They were sure that they had looked everywhere.

The fourth day was the one in which Mrs. Witherspoon threatened to put asunder what God had joined together. After explaining on their street corner to a small crowd of neighbors the extent of their dilemma, she lost a modicum of her self-control and threatened to dismember anyone who caused this olfactory plague. Bax and Bart heard several versions of her outpouring of venom. It gave them the beginnings of how adults could become when their right, little worlds went wrong.

Time seemed to have slowed to a crawl, as Baxter and Bart were beginning to experience feelings of loss of the joi de prank. The neighborhood had been flooded with the subject.

The focus had turned to what consequences would befall the guilty. Among adults, guesses included police involvement. In the children’s subculture the contenders had more to do with public humiliation and some creative uses of dog poop.

The morning of the fifth day, after each boy’s father had, beyond a shadow of a doubt, gone to work, the Wrenn-Padgett pair admitted that their time had run out. They told their mothers.

Mrs. Wrenn had her husband home from work in ten minutes, and a hairbrush was taken to Bart’s bare backside. The Padgett solution had to wait until surgery was over for the day. Baxter was confined to his room. Before dinner that evening the four parents decided on a path of action. The boys were sent straightaway to confess and apologize. When they came out, they had tears in their eyes, from the smell. They were only in the Witherspoons’ house for a minute or two, but as they trudged away across their front lawn, Bartlett wiped his sweaty forearm across his nose.

"I honestly didn’t know a smell could be that bad!"

Baxter grimaced and said, It’s for the best that we told ‘em, ‘cause that smell would have probably suffocated Custer before long!

It would have killed both of us, if we’d stayed in there much longer.

We’d be happier dead if we had…

"Let’s hope our punishment isn’t having to go back in there and do something grotesque like clean the smell out of there."

What’ll we do if they say that? Baxter’s face turned horror stricken.

Pull the biggest play they’ve ever seen… Go to Mexico.

Baxter thought for a moment. I’m not sure that Mexico doesn’t smell worse.

They had pointed out the one place no one had looked, under the front corner of the heavy cream-colored carpet. So sure were the Witherspoons that they had looked everywhere, that when the croaker had begun to dry up and curl, and the carpet developed a slight hump, no one bothered to look there. They would have many long laughs over it in the years to come, but this one was short.

What the Witherspoons experienced the most was relief. Their politeness returned; the rug in question was eventually burned. No amount of dry or wet cleaning could make it right again. They actually didn’t want it in their living room anymore. For a week, they didn’t want their living room anymore. Too much croaker under the bridge.

So the Witherspoons got a new rug, but the path to take with the boys was not nearly so well defined. Dr. Spock’s book had no solution for such a prank. Much deliberation turned into too much… The parental committee eventually pronounced punishment to be… no allowances for a month. They were not allowed to play with each other for two weeks.

The subculture of children laughed out loud, out of earshot of adults. The boys were not banished to separate hemispheres of the earth. No parts of them were drawn, and none quartered. There was no record of Baxter even being spanked.

The parents endured more trauma than the boys, over the long term. They perceived the incident as a precursor of things to come. In both houses there were sore afflictions voiced, in conversations that seemed to start themselves. Anxieties attacked without warning. So it was then that they formed an alliance, in hopes of presenting a unified front, but how many times could they answer the call to strength and sternness, when Bart and Baxter seemed to behave. It came down to this: they bided their time and waited as hard as they could for something bad to happen somewhere else.

6

FOOD TO FORGET

OLD FATHER TIME dropped his scythe and bent over to arrange his sandals. When he stood up, school had dragged all fishermen, waterskiers, and horseback riders back indoors, into classrooms, and away from the season of painful pleasure, or so autumn has been described. The slow shortening of days begun with brisk Canada-blue morning skies, ended with the chill of ever-earlier sunsets. Sandlot football games lasted so deep into the evening twilight, that Mrs. Padgett and Mrs. Wrenn couldn’t see how to call it anything else but…night. The neighborhood boys simply agreed that it was the same for both teams and therefore fair, and played on, as if seeking to enchant the gods of early winter.

Baxter would sometimes trudge home in answer to his mother’s first call. As the saying went, back then, he may not have been big, but he was slow. Add to that: soft, round, and clumsy… and hungry before his teammates, and cold in a way that he couldn’t explain. Hagan, on the night before Baxter’s birthday, dragged into the living room only just in time to see his father nod into a light sleep before even saying hi. He had, as usual, taken a sip or two from a short glass of bourbon and water, as he waited for the call to the formal family sit-down dinner in the dining room. When he heard, Dinner is served, he shook off the exhaustion that had begun early in the day, even before his standard seven o’clock morning surgery.

Refreshed by his three-minute nap, he nudged the children with how-was-your-day questions. They pushed back by keeping straight faces while tallying up the dinner to come.This night corn on the cob accompanied onion-soup-covered pork chops and spinach.

Hagan listened to his little sister try to remember her blessing, while he calculated how many hours had passed since the school had thoughtfully provided lunch at eleven eleven AM. Baxter noted that Dusty lay in the corner. It was at that moment about four minutes short of eight in the evening. Hagan coated his first ear of corn with butter and salt.

A parental glance gave the okay to consume. Sitting just to the left of his father’s elbow, he ratcheted his teeth like an electric typewriter down an entire row of corn and slowed down to chew it. That was when, over his right shoulder, he heard the blast of his father’s voice: "Well, why don’t you get yourself a damned trough !!??"

Hagan’s mouth was too full to speak. The force of the question had knocked any possible answer far from his mind.Carie Lyn’s eyes bobbed wide. Baxter stopped buttering a dinner roll and cut his eyes down the table to see what was going to happen next. He’d been expecting, How was your day? or maybe a repeat of the story about how seriously farm folks took their fresh corn, back when. If any given farm kid was sent to the field to pick the dinner corn had accidentally dropped an ear, he was sent right back out to get a fresh one. But this night, no one said much for the rest of dinner. Hagan would need a long time to realize that there was no need to look over his shoulder before starting to eat an ear of corn.

Spinach was Baxter’s cross to bear. Things were so stirred up about Hagan needing a trough that Baxter managed to slip the minuscule serving into his napkin without being seen. Other nights he would not be so lucky.

Dusty would sniff anything poked under the table, but he wouldn’t eat spinach. He got the knack, after a while, of detecting spinach poked down, cloaked in a dinner roll. Years later there would be stand-offs, lasting until past nine o’clock, for Baxter to take two bites of the stuff; then it became one. Once or twice he would feel… or fake… nausea, at least gagging, first at the dinner table, then in the downstairs bathroom. When the spinach-gagging hour began to infiltrate the getting-ready-for-bed hour, it became gradually clear that Baxter wasn’t going to do what he did not want to do.

Although this would sink in years later, at the time it was thought that a person ought to make an effort to like a variety of foods, especially the ones that were good for you. These were the fifties. The letter of the parental law read that kids had to try a little bit of everything. By the sixties, parents were scared to death that their kids were trying a little bit of everything.

7

GRADES

THE LOCHHAVEN CORNER house saw them through their childhood years, even counting the five-year span of age difference between Hagan’s birth and Carie Lyn’s.

She couldn’t remember ever living anywhere else, until she left for college. Baxter and Hagan realized their differences were widening as their experiences became more diverse. Life seemed to be giving them lessons spelled out in alphabets of different languages. By the end of his fourteenth summer, Hagan had been to New Hampshire six times, four of them being two-month-long camp stays at the lake that would eventually be used to film On Golden Pond.

He became the camp waterskiing champion. He took eight overnight canoe trips, most lasting a week or more.These were on wilderness lakes where no other human beings were seen. He climbed Mount Washington and consumed so many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that he never outgrew the camp glut of strawberry jam. After four summers of lakeside living, Hagan developed a sense of accomplishment from camp life that it edged close to being one of superiority.

Baxter and Bartlett persuaded their parents to buy and equip fifteen-foot open boats with motors that started at five and a half horsepower and ended with eighteens and steering wheels. The Wrenns installed a mooring behind their house where a narrow gut had been dredged and gouged open to form a passable waterway to the Lafayette River. Baxter’s boat was housed in a slip at the country club, with an arrangement to charge gas. The rules? Mostly a set of distance restrictions that were as strict, precise and limiting as they were impossible to enforce.

A phone call between the two fisherboys in summer would sound like this:

Good evening, Mrs. Padgett. Is Baxter there? Oh, hey…we going fishing tomorrow? We can take our boat. What’s your mother doing? She sounds like she’s practicing for a play.

Helping my sister with her summer reading. I think I can get away long enough to go to the club and wash our boat…

Don’t you have summer reading, too?

I do, but when I was bringing the books home from the library across the river, they fell in the river.

… wash your boat?

"Think about it. We can fish a little from the pier…"

"Oh, I gotcha… Just not that pier, am I right?"

When the size of the fish in Ocean View attracted the pair, they had to cover distances farther than twice the size of their entire allotted territory, and pass ocean-going freighters and cruise ships. The Navy kept its boat slips mostly filled with combat vessels and sometimes aircraft carriers.

It was tugboats that made the biggest wakes, waves that looked mountainous from the water. They met these head-on by jumping them—take-offs just a matter of feet from the tugs’ sterns–leaving the water for short-but-crazed flights—oars and cushions and gas cans clattering— and splashing back into the river. After several of these, the pair headed on their way across part of the largest natural harbor in the world, to encounter nothing less than the gaping mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

Their arrival at their early teens found them so used to living outside the strictures of family rules that they could keep track of numerous cover stories, fabricated excuses, and outright lies that always depended on a parental assumption of innocence. This, in turn, was based on rarely being apprehended, even as the size of the fish they brought back increased.

Hagan maintained his spot in the same private school as the Wrenns, although his grades slipped from honor roll to middle-of-the-class grades, until his sixth grade year revealed a youngster with no more capacity to solve math problems than a dog of average intelligence.

His transition from camp to school never was easy, but at age twelve, he attended two days of sixth grade before turning up with a fever and after several days in bed, complaints of a stiff neck and back. The family pediatrician made a series of house calls, still an expectation in the later fifties. When Carie Lyn and Baxter overheard him use the word polio, they began to realize what could happen to their brother. Hagan caught a glimpse of his mother with tears in her eyes after one of the doctor’s visits.

The next day there were shots for each of them and instructions in somber tones not to discuss the possible diagnosis with the patient. Hagan had always been an active, coordinated and agile kid, but after two weeks he had lost a tenth of his body weight. To walk across the hall to take a bath exhausted him.

By the third week his siblings had begun to take his illness for granted and had gotten used to not going into his room. They had to rely on their parents for news. By mid-September his temperature dropped, and within a few days he was allowed to get dressed and sit on the porch. After four weeks Hagan returned to school for a half day.

On that first morning when he stepped out of the car into the grassy schoolyard of the Norfolk Preparatory Academy, ten kids were waiting to carry his books. A hundred more came running at full speed toward the parking lot, all waving their hands and cheering. It was a sight he would long remember. That, and being told of being elected captain of a middle school football team, which was leading the four-team league, in spite of his absence.

His seventh year at the same school brought an unrelenting sense of sameness, his first girlfriend and an uncle who showed an interest in introducing Hagan to golf. With the availability of country clubs, the boy soon enough found himself able to immerse himself far from stuffy classrooms, only by getting a ride to one of the family’s clubs and teeing up a slightly used Titlelist, usually with his cousin Rickie. His father happened to have been state champion, more than once, yet never mentioned it to Hagan.

Hagan and Baxter’s grades were headed down. Hagan’s leveled off at the C to D level. Baxter’s kept right on going. He became more adept than his older brother at omitting any mention of when report cards were issued.

Most kids’ grades, when they fall, are accompanied by long, queasy silences, or irritating noises like the squeak of a porch door when a teenager is trying to sneak in, hours after curfew. A careless word about a test or a grade that slipped from the mouth of a visiting friend spelled doom and ruination to the black-out on school information inside the house.

If parents talked to each other, things got even worse. Baxter learned more quickly than his brother the art of omitting words like report cards, grading periods, tests, papers, homework,and well, anything that might remind his parents that education might still exist. When the parents had a conference with a teacher, they came home with Baxter’s situation appearing as a stark reality to them.

Dr. Padgett knew that grades weren’t everything, and he tried not to use words like dismal or atrocious or irresponsible or abysmal when talking to Baxter about his grades, but the reality became more and more clear. Something had to be done. As Baxter’s elementary school years slithered by, life came to mean summer for him. His father was developing the unconscious habit of worrying whenever he had some free time.

8

NEW YORK FRAME OF MIND

BAXTER HAD REPEATED his second grade year; after all, with a November birthday, he had started school younger than all his classmates. So he was behind from the beginning. Then he repeated the fifth grade, this time due to an unfortunate lack of doing any homework. Add to that: not getting along with any teacher, except one or two who practically did his studying for him and might as well have taken the tests themselves. After searching their souls as much as any parents could have been expected to, the Padgetts decided. Baxter would be sent to boarding school.

His seventh grade year began with the big, yellow station wagon crammed with his luggage, headed toward a school on the north side of New York City. Rain pelted the New Jersey Turnpike. In the early evening of what had been a mind-numbing drive, through the glare of headlights from the southbound cars, Dr. Padgett forced his concentration to stay on the turnpike.

The only warning was the twisting headlights…a car coming from the other direction, out of control. It jump-roped the median and rammed three cars head-on, the middle one being the Padgetts’. Baxter had been asleep with the luggage in the back and was unhurt, except for bruises from flying suitcases. Tinsil suffered a punctured lung. She was taken in the first ambulance and admitted to a Philadelphia hospital.

What went into Dr. Padgett’s decision that night never received much explanation in the family. He made what he believed to be the best decision. Arrangements were in place. The school was expecting the boy. The doctor got a car rental agency on the telephone, and soon he and his younger son got into a rented car, left Tinsil in her hospital room, and plowed on through a night of dark rain.

When Baxter’s face reappeared in the family home at Christmas, it had whiskers on it. He had grown to over six feet tall and was combing his dark hair as best he could to imitate Elvis Presley. Most disturbing to the family were his black leather shoes. Zippers went up the sides.

By the end of that school year, Baxter’s report card indicated that he had broken a school record for most demerits in a single year. What it omitted was an episode involving him and another boy caught smoking. The two were put in a small bathroom and told not to come out until they had each smoked five packs of cigarettes. No word ever surfaced about the other boy. Baxter emerged with a life-long addiction to nicotine.

Dr. Padgett barely knew who Elvis Presley was. Seeing his second born resembling him added to the impact of the night in the rain on the New Jersey Turnpike. When they had tried to talk during Christmas, Baxter told of his explorations of the city. Baxter, how much time do you devote to your homework every night?

Dad, homework takes its place behind everything else. I do what I have to, you know, to get by. It’s a rough place… mean. Think, ‘big-city mean.’ he said. Dr. Padgett pictured everybody in New York looking like Elvis whatshisname. After that, his mind drifted, until he nearly asked Baxter if he knew if Elvis did all of his homework, but he caught himself.

Later in the week he fell prey to exhaustion and brought up the subject of Baxter. What is going to become of him? he asked Tinsil, as they got ready for bed. I can’t for the life of me figure out where he will end up, or what he’ll do to make a living. Have you considered that he might turn out to be a criminal? And he’s just halfway through the seventh grade.

After a vacation