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“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. Little dots of sweat stood out on his brow, but fear hadn’t put them there this time. “Go first.”
So she went up first, and she could feel him looking up the short skirt of the little-girl sailor dress she was wearing. She was bare beneath it.
The door closed, and the thing that Harold had made sat in the open shoebox in the gloom. There was a battery-powered Realistic walkie-talkie handset from Radio Shack. Its back was off. Wired to it were eight sticks of dynamite. The book was still open. It was from the Boulder Public Library, and the title was 65 Natio...
Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs. He put it on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard. Ralph Brentner had told him that afternoon that the Free Zone Committee was inviting Chad Norris to speak at their next meeting. When was that go...
September 2.
Chapter 57
Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm’s Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. You could have anything to drink in Boulder that you wanted these days, as long as it came in a can and you didn’t mind drinking it warn. From out back came the steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy....
It was the last day of August.
The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn’t appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn’t know how Leo had been when Larry had first encou...
The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn’t come back all the way and he wouldn’t talk about what had happened.
“That woman has something to do with it,” Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower’s tank.
“Nadine? What makes you think that?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to mention it. But she came by the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone.”
“Lucy—”
She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. “I judged you wrong before,” she said. “I guess I’ll always be sorry for that. But I’m never going to like Nadine Cross. There’s something wrong with her.”
Larry didn’t answer, but he thought Lucy’s judgment was probably a true one. That night up by King Sooper’s she had been like a crazy woman.
“There’s one other thing—when she was here, she didn’t call him Leo. She called him the other name. Joe.”
He looked at her blankly as she turned the automatic starter and got the Lawnboy going.
Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm’s and watched Leo bounce the Ping-Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold’s, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged, but not dented. Thok-thok-thok against the pavement. Bouncy-bouncy-bally, look-at-the-way-we-pl...
Leo (he was Leo now, wasn’t he?) hadn’t wanted to go inside Harold’s house that day.
Into the house where Nadine-mom was now living.
“You want to go fishing, kiddo?” Larry offered suddenly.
“No fish,” Leo said. He looked at Larry with his strange, seawater-green eyes. “Do you know Mr. Ellis?”
“Sure.”
“He says we can drink the water when the fish come back. Drink it without—” He made a hooting noise and waved his fingers in front of his eyes. “You know.”
“Without boiling it?”
“Yes.”
Thok-thok-thok.
“I like Dick. Him and Laurie. Always give me something to eat. He’s afraid they won’t be able to, but I think they will.”
“Will what?”
“Be able to make a baby. Dick thinks he may be too old. But I guess he’s not.”
Larry started to ask how Leo and Dick had gotten on that subject, and then didn’t. The answer, of course, was that they hadn’t. Dick wouldn’t talk to a small boy about something so personal as making a baby. Leo had just… had just known.
Thok-thok-thok.
Yes, Leo knew things… or intuited them. He hadn’t wanted to go in Harold’s house and had said something about Nadine… he couldn’t remember exactly what… but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if—
(—thok-thok-thok —)
Larry watched the Ping-Pong ball bounce up and down, and suddenly he looked into Leo’s face. The boy’s eyes were dark and faraway. The sound of the lawnmower was a far-off, soporific drone. The daylight was smooth and warm. And Leo was in a trance again, as if he had read Larry’s thought and simply responded to it.
Leo had gone to see the elephant.
Very casually Larry said: “Yes, I think they can make a baby. Dick can’t be any more than fifty-five at the outside. Cary Grant made one when he was almost seventy, I believe.”
“Who’s Cary Grant?” Leo asked. The ball went up and down, up and down.
(Notorious. North by Northwest.)
“Don’t you know?” he asked Leo.
“He was that actor,” Leo said. “He was in Notorious. And Northwest.”
(North by Northwest.)
“North by Northwest, I mean,” Leo said in a tone of agreement. His eyes never left the Ping-Pong ball’s bouncing course.
“That’s right,” he said. “How’s Nadine-mom, Leo?”
“She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”
“Oh.” A cold chill was weaving its slow way up Larry’s back.
“It’s bad now.”
“Bad?”