"Joe Jordan! It wasn't supposed to be you!"

Mrs. Fletcher had come up from behind us and was standing there with a pink dish towel in her hand.

"I know, goddammit! How many things are going to fuck up before we get this straightened out? Did you hear about last night? How many things've there been already, four? Five? No one knows nothin' anymore, nothin'!"

"Calm down, Joe. Let's wait and see. You going to call that ambulance, Mr. Abbey? The number's one-two-three-four-five. Just dial the first five numbers. That's the emergency line."

The boy began gurgling and his legs jumped and twitched involuntarily, like a frog touched by an electric prod in a biology experiment. I looked at Jordan, but he was looking at the boy and shaking his head.

"I'm telling you, Goosey, it wasn't supposed to be me with this!"

As I turned to run to the phone, I heard Mrs. Fletcher say, "Just quiet down and wait."

The pavement was hot under my bare feet, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the melting ice-cream cone again. I ran by Saxony standing on the top step of the porch, holding Nails by his thick leather collar.

"Is he dead?"

"Not yet, but he's in bad shape. I've got to call the ambulance."

When it came, a few people were standing around and watching from a distance. A white police car was in the middle of the street with its row of busy blue lights on the roof flashing back and forth.

The short bursts of people's voices from its radio filled the air with a staccato crackle that was both adamant and annoying at the same time.

We watched from the porch while they gently lifted the flaccid body onto a stretcher and slid it into the back of the van. When it was gone, Joe Jordan and the policeman stood in front of our house and talked. Jordan kept running his hand across the lower part of his face, and the cop rested both hands on the front of his wide black belt.

Mrs. Fletcher moved away from a bunch of onlookers and joined the two men. They talked for several minutes, and then Jordan and the policeman drove off together in the patrol ear. Mrs. Fletcher stood there and watched them go. After a while she turned around and waved me over to join her. I walked down the steps and across the warm flagstones.

"You saw it all, eh, Tom?"

"Yes, unfortunately. The whole horrible thing."

The sun was high and directly over her shoulder. I had to squint to look at her.

"Was the boy laughing before he got hit?"

"Laughing? I don't know what you mean."

"Laughing. You know, laughing? He was eating that pistachio cone, but was he laughing too?"

She was totally serious. What the hell kind of question was that?

"No, not that I remember."

"You're sure about that? You're sure that he wasnt laughing?"

"Yes, I guess so. I saw him right up until he got hit, but I wasn't really paying that much attention. No, I'm positive about that, though. Why is it so important?"

"But he was touching the fence with his hand, right?"

"Yes, he was touching the fence. He was touching the top of it with his free hand."

She looked at me. I felt very confused and uncomfortable. To get out from under those X-ray eyes, I looked around, and everyone was staring at me with that same impassive gaze that had made me feel so squirmy the day before at the barbecue.

An old farmer in a rust-red Corvair, a teenager with a bag of groceries under his arm, a doughy-looking woman with her hair up in hot pink curlers and a cigarette dangling unattractively from her lip. All giving me the gaze….

About an hour later, Mrs. Fletcher and Saxony went off to shop for groceries. They said they wouldn't be back until the early afternoon. I secretly wanted to go along with them, but they didn't ask me, and I've always felt strange inviting myself to things. Anyway, I thought that it would be good for us to be separated for a while. I wanted to work on some notes that I'd had floating around in my head since we'd arrived. First impressions of Galen and all that. I also wanted to start reading some of the literary biographies we had brought along to see how it was supposed to be done.

I changed into a pair of corduroy shorts, T-shirt, and sandals and got another cup of coffee from the kitchen. Nails followed me everywhere, but I was already getting used to that. I had all but decided that no matter what happened with this book, as soon as I got back to Connecticut I was going to buy one of these loony dogs. Maybe I'd even buy one here and have a relative of one of Marshall France's dogs. If I couldn't have a biography, at least I could have a bull terrier.

I sat down on one of the rocking chairs and put the coffee cup on the floor within easy reach. Nails tried a tentative sniff or two at my java, but I gave him a bop on the head and he lay down. I opened the book and began reading. I had gotten through about half a page when the image of the boy lying in the street floated up into my mind and stayed there. I tried to think of Saxony, of Saxony in bed, of what my book had just said about Raymond Chandler, of how nice a day it was, of what it would be like to go to bed with Anna France… but the boy in the street refused to leave. I got up and walked over to the porch railing to see if I could make out the spot where he had been hit. To see if there was still blood or any other sign that an hour ago we'd all been out there watching him die.

I remembered that I'd also been sitting on a porch when I heard that my father had been killed. The night before, I'd been on the living-room floor of Amy Fischer's house with Amy Fischer watching him in Mr. & Mrs. Time. I was much more interested in undressing Amy than in his performance, which I'd seen countless times. Since Amy's parents weren't there, she let me do whatever I wanted. The whole time we were at it, I kept hearing his voice behind me, and I even laughed once or twice because it felt strange screwing in front of my father. The gray-white from the television washed in different, changing patterns over our bodies, and when we were done we lay side by side and watched the end of the film. The next morning Amy decided that we should have breakfast out on the porch. We set the table together, and she even brought out her portable radio so that we could listen while we ate. "Massachusetts" by the Bee Gees was playing, and I was slumped down into the hammock when the news bulletin cut through the song and announced that Stephen Abbey's plane had crashed in Nevada and that there were no survivors. I didn't move when the last part of the song came back on. Amy walked out of the house with a frying pan full of scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon. She called me over to eat. She hadn't heard the bulletin yet, and as I said, you end up doing strange things when something horrible has just happened to you. What did I do? I sat down at the table and ate everything on my plate – I even had seconds on the eggs. When I was done I put my fork down beside my empty orange-juice glass and said, "My father was just killed in an airplane crash." Those were the days in prep school when every other word out of your mouth was cynical, so sweet Amy Fischer shook her head at my bad taste at the breakfast table and went on eating.

Whenever I turn on the television and Mr. & Mrs. Time is playing, the first thing that comes to mind is that disgusted look on Amy's face and the way she kept eating her yellow scrambled eggs.

It was several seconds before I realized that a car had stopped in front of the house. I couldn't see the driver, but I could see a big white blob of something pressing its nose against the half-open glass of one of the back windows. The car was an old gold-and-white Dodge station wagon like the one Leave It to Beaver's mother used to cart the family around in. I tried to focus on the driver, but the white bull terrier was now hopping back and forth from the front seat to the back, and I assumed that it was Anna and Petals. The driver's door opened and that perky head of black monk's hair emerged. She shaded her eyes and looked toward the house.