She looks at them sadly for a moment, and Beaver realizes she knows a lot of what they aren’t telling, probably enough to keep her awake that night. Then she smiles. Right at Beaver she smiles, and it makes him tingle all the way down to his toes. “What a lot of zippers you have on your jacket!” she says.

Beaver smiles. “Yes, ma’am. It’s my Fonzie jacket. It was my brother’s first. These guys make fun of it, but I like it just the same.”

“Happy Days,” she says. “We like it, too. Duddits likes it. Perhaps you’d like to come over some night and watch it with us. With him.” Her smile grows wistful, as if she knows nothing like that will ever happen.

“Yeah, that’d be okay,” Beav says.

“Actually it would,” Pete agrees.

They sit for a little without talking, just watching him play in the back yard. There’s a swing-set with two swings. Duddits runs behind them, pushing them, making the swings go by themselves. Sometimes he stops, crosses his arms over his chest, turns the clockless dial of his face up to the sky, and laughs.

“Seems all right now,” Jonesy says, and drinks the last of his tea. “Guess he’s forgotten all about it.”

Mrs Cavell has started to get up. Now she sits back down, giving him an almost startled look. “Oh no, not at all,” she says. “He remembers. Not like you and I, perhaps, but he remembers things. He’ll probably have nightmares tonight, and when we go into his room-his father and me-he won’t be able to explain. That’s the worst for him; he can’t tell what it is he sees and thinks and feels. He doesn’t have the vocabulary.”

She sighs. “In any case, those boys won’t forget about him. What if they’re laying for him now? What if they’re laying for you?” “We can take care of ourselves,” Jonesy says, but although his voice is stout enough, his eyes are uneasy,

“Maybe,” she says. “But what about Duddits? I can walk him to school-I used to, and I suppose I’ll have to again, for awhile at least, anyway-but he loves to walk home on his own so much.”

“It makes him feel like a big boy,” Pete says. She reaches across the table and touches Pete’s hand, making him blush. “That’s right, it makes him feel like a big boy. “'You know,” Henry says, “we could walk him. We all go together to the junior high, and it would be easy enough to come down here from Kansas Street. “-Roberta Cavell only sits there without saying anything, a little birdie-woman in a print dress, looking at Henry attentively, like someone waiting for the punchline of a joke. “Would that be okay, Missus Cavell?” Beaver asks her. “Because we could do it, easy. Or maybe you don’t want us to.”

Something complicated happens to Mrs CaveE’s face-there are all those little twitches, mostly under the skin. One eye almost winks, and then the other one does wink. She takes a handkerchief from her pocket and blows her nose. Beaver thinks, She’s trying not to laugh at us. When he tells Henry that as they are walking home, Jonesy and Pete already dropped off, Henry will look at him with utter astonishment. Cry is what she was tryin not to do, he will say… and then, affectionately, after a pause: Dope.

“You would do that?” she asks, and when Henry nods for all of them, she changes the question slightly. “Why would you do that?” Henry looks around as if to say Someone else take this one, willya?

Pete says, “We like him, ma’am.”

Jonesy is nodding. “I like the way he carries his lunchbox over his head-”

“Yeah, that’s bitchin,” Pete says. Henry kicks him under the table. Pete replays what he just said-you can see him doing it and begins blushing furiously.

Mrs Cavell appears not to notice. She’s looking at Henry with fixed intensity. “He has to go by quarter of eight,” she says. “We’re always near here by then,” Henry replies. “Aren’t we, you guys?” And although seven forty-five is in fact a little early for them, they all nod and say yeah right sure yeah. “You would do that?” she asks again, and this time Beaver has no trouble reading her tone; she is incredyouwhatsis, the word that means you can’t fuckin believe it.

“Sure,” Henry says. “Unless you think Duddits wouldn’t… you know…”

“Wouldn’t want us to,” Jonesy finishes.

“Are you crazy?” she asks. Beaver thinks she is speaking to herself, trying to convince herself that these boys are really in her kitchen, that all of this is in fact happening. “Walking to school with the big boys? Boys who go to what Duddits calls “real school"? He’d think he was in heaven.”

“Okay,” Henry says. “We’ll come by quarter of eight, walk him to school. And we’ll walk home with him, too. “'He gets out at-”

“Aw, we know what time The Retard Academy gets out,” Beaver says cheerfully, and realizes a second before he sees the others” stricken faces that he’s said something a lot worse than bitchin. He claps his hands over his mouth. Above them, his eyes are huge. Jonesy kicks his shin so hard under the table that Beav almost tumbles over backward.

“Don’t mind him, ma’am,” Henry says. He is talking rapidly, which he only does when he’s embarrassed. “He just-”

“I don’t mind,” she says. “I know what people call it. Sometimes Alfie and I call it that ourselves.” This topic, incredibly, hardly seems to interest her. “Why?” she says again.

And although it’s Henry she’s looking at, it’s Beaver who answers, in spite of his blazing cheeks. “Because he’s cool,” he says. The others nod.

They will walk Duddits to school and back for the next five years or so, unless he is sick or they are at Hole in the Wall; by the end of it Duddits is no longer going to Mary M. Snowe, aka The Retard Academy, but to Derry Vocational, where he learns to bake cookies (baitin tooties, in Duddits-ese), replace car batteries, make change, and fie his own tie (the knot is always perfect, although it sometimes appears about halfway down his shirt). By then the Josie Rinkenhauer thing has come and gone, a little nine days” wonder forgotten by everyone except Josie’s parents, who will never forget. In those years when they walk with him to and from his school, Duddits will sprout up until he’s the tallest of all of them, a gangly teenager with a strangely beautiful child’s face. By then they will have taught him how to play Parcheesi and a simplified version of Monopoly; by then they will have invented the Duddits Game and played it incessantly, sometimes laughing so hard that Alfie Cavell (he was the tall one of the pair, but he also had a birdie look about him) would come to the head of the stairs in the kitchen, the ones that led to the rec room, and yell down at them, wanting to know what was going on, what was so funny, and maybe they would try to explain that Duddits had pegged Henry fourteen on a two hand or that Duddits had pegged Pete fifteen backward, but Alfie never seemed to get it; he’d stand there at the head of the stairs with a section of the newspaper in his hand, smiling perplexedly, and at last he’d always say the same thing, Keep it down to a dull roar, boys, and close the door, leaving them to their own devices… and of all those devices the Duddits Game was the best, totally bitchin, as Pete would have said. There were times when Beaver thought he might actually laugh until he exploded, and Duddits sitting there all the time on the rug beside the big old Parkmunn cribbage board, feet folded under him and grinning like Buddha. What a fuckaree! All of that ahead of them but now just this kitchen, and the surprising sun, and Duddits outside, pushing the swings. Duddits who had done them such a favor by coming into their lives. Duddits who is-they know it from the first-not like anyone else they know.

“I don’t see how they could have done it,” Pete says suddenly. “The way he was crying. I don’t see how they could have gone on teasing him.”

Roberta Cavell looks at him sadly. “Older boys don’t hear him the same way,” she says. “I hope you never understand.”