“Where have you been? Where have you been, you bad boy, you bad old Duddits!”

They come together and Duddits is so much bigger-two or three inches taller, too-that Beaver winces, expecting the birdie-woman to be flattened the way Coyote is always getting flattened in the Roadrunner cartoons. Instead, she picks him up and swings him around, his sneakered feet flying out behind him, his mouth stretched halfway up to his ears in an expression of joyful ecstasy.

“I was just about to go in and call the police, you bad old late thing, you bad old late D-”

She sees Beaver and his friends and sets her son down on his feet. Her smile of relief is gone; she is solemn as she steps toward them over some little girl’s hopscotch grid-crude as it is, Beav thinks, even that will always be beyond Duddits. The tears on her checks gleam in the glow of the sun that has finally broken through.

“Uh-oh,” Pete says. “We’re gonna catch it.”

“Be cool,” Henry says, speaking low and fast. “Let her rant and then I’ll explain.”

But they have misjudged Roberta Cavell-have judged her by the standard of so many adults who seem to view boys their age as guilty until proven innocent. Roberta Cavell isn’t that way, and neither is her husband, Alfie. The Cavells are different. Duddits has made them different.

“Boys,” she says again. “Was he wandering? Was he lost? I’ve been so afraid to let him walk, but he wants so much to be a real boy…” She gives Beaver’s fingers a strong squeeze with one hand and Pete’s with the other. Then she drops them, takes Jonesy’s and Henry’s hands, and gives them the same treatment. “Ma’am…” Henry begins.

Mrs Cavell looks at Henry with fixed concentration, as if she is trying to read his mind. “Not just lost,” she says. “Not just wandering.” “Ma’am Henry tries again, and then gives up any thought of dissembling. It is Duddits’s green gaze looking up at him from her face, only intelligent and aware, keen and questioning. “No, ma’am.” Henry sighs. “Not just wandering.”

“Because usually he comes right home. He says he can’t get lost because he sees the line. How many were there?”

“Oh, a few,” Jonesy says, then shoots a swift look at Henry. Beside them, Duddits has found a last few gone-to-seed dandelions on the neighbors” lawn and is down on his belly, blowing the fluff off them and watching it float away on the breeze. “A few boys were teasing him, ma’am.”

“Big boys,” Pete says.

Again her eyes search them, from Jonesy to Pete, from Pete to Beaver, and then back to Henry again. “Come up to the house with us,” she says. “I want to hear all about it. Duddits has a big glass of ZaRex every afternoon-it’s his special drink-but I’ll bet you guys would rather have iced tea. Wouldn’t you?”

The three of them look at Henry, who considers and then nods. “Yes, ma’am, iced tea would be great.”

So she leads them back to the house where they’ll spend so much of their time in the following years-the house at 19 Maple Lane-only it is really Duddits who leads the way, prancing, skipping, sometimes lifting his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox over his head, but always, Beaver notices, keeping at almost exactly the same place on the sidewalk, about a foot from the grass margin between the walk and the street. Years later, after the thing with the Rinkenhauer girl, he will consider what Mrs Cavell said. They all will. He sees the line.

“Jonesy?” Beaver called.

No answer. Christ, it seemed like Jonesy had been gone a long

time. Probably hadn’t been, but there was no way Beaver could tell; he’d forgotten to put on his watch that morning. Stupid, but then, he’d always been stupid, he ought to be used to it by now. Next to Jonesy and Henry, both he and Pete had been stupid. Not that Jonesy or Henry had ever treated them that way-that was one of the great things about them.

“Jonesy?”

Still nothing. Probably he was having trouble finding the tape, that was all.

There was a vile little voice far back in Beaver’s head telling him that the tape had nothing to do with it, that Jonesy had just gone Powder River, leaving him here to sit on the toilet like Danny Glover in that movie, but he wouldn’t listen to that voice because Jonesy would never do anything like that. They were friends to the end, always had been.

That’s right, the vile voice agreed. You were friends. And this is the end.

“Jonesy? You there, man?”

Still nothing. Maybe the tape had fallen off the nail it had been hung on.

Nothing from beneath him, either. And hey, it really wasn’t possible that McCarthy had shit some kind of monster into the john, was it? That he’d given birth to-Gasp!-The Beast in the Bowl? It sounded like a horror-movie spoof on Saturday Night Live. And even if that had happened, The Beast in the Bowl had probably drowned by now, drowned or gone deep. A line from a story suddenly occurred to him, one they’d read to Duddits-taking turns, and it was good there were four of them because when Duddits liked something he never got tired of it.

“Eee doool!” Duddits would shout, running to one of them with the book held high over his head, the way he’d carried his lunchbox home that first day. “Eee doool, eee doool!” Which in this case meant Read Pool! Read Pool! The book was McElligot’s Pool, by Dr. Seuss, the first memorable couplet of which went, “Young man,” (argued the farmer) “You’re sort of a fool!

You’ll never catch fish in McElligot’s Pool!” But there had been fish, at least in the imagination of the little boy in the story. Plenty of fish. Big fish.

No splashes from beneath him, though. No bumps on the underside of the lid, either. Not for awhile now. He could maybe risk one quick look, just raise the lid a little and slam it back down if anything-

But sit tight, buddy was the last thing Jonesy had said to him, and that was what he’d better do.

Jonesy’s most likely a mile down the road by now, the vile voice estimated. A mile down the road and still picking up speed.

“No, he ain’t,” Beaver said. “Not Jonesy.”

He shifted a little bit on the closed seat, waiting for the thing to jump, but it didn’t. It might be sixty yards away by now and swimming with the turds in the septic tank. Jonesy had said it was too big to go down, but since neither of them had actually seen it, there was no way to tell for sure, was there? But in either case, Monsieur Beaver Clarendon was going to sit right here. Because he’d said he would. Because time always seemed slower when you were worried or scared. And because he trusted Jonesy. Jonesy and Henry had never hurt him or made fun, not of him and not of Pete. And none of them had ever hurt Duddits or made fun of him, either.

Beav snorted laughter. Duddits with his Scooby-Doo lunchbox. Duddits on his belly, blowing the fluff off dandelions. Duddits running around in his back yard, happy as a bird in a tree, yeah, and people who called kids like him special didn’t know the half of it. He had been special, all right, their present from a fucked-up world that usually didn’t give you jack-shit. Duddits had been their own special thing, and they had loved him.

They sit in the sunny kitchen nook-the clouds have gone away as if by magic-drinking iced tea and watching Duddits, who drank his ZaRex (awful-looking orange stuff) in three or four huge splattering gulps and then ran out back to play.

Henry does most of the talking, telling Mrs Cavell that the boys were just “kinda pushing him around.” He says that they got a little bit rough and ripped his shirt, which scared Duddits and made him cry. There is no mention of how Richie Grenadeau and his friends took off his pants, no mention of the nasty after-school snack they wanted Duddits to eat, and when Mrs Cavell asks them if they know who these big boys were, Henry hesitates briefly and then says no, just some big boys from the high school, he didn’t know any of them, hot by name. She looks at Beaver, Jonesy, and Pete; they all shake their heads. It may be wrong-dangerous to Duddits in the long run, as well-but they can’t step that far outside the rules which govern their lives. Already Beaver cannot understand where they found the sack to intervene in the first place, and later the others will say the same. They marvel at their courage; they also marvel that they aren’t in the fuckin hospital.