'It's Silver, all right,' Mike said at last. 'I thought you might have been wrong. But it's him. What are you going to do with him?'

'Fucked if I know. Have you got a bicycle pump?'

'Yeah. I think I've got a tire-patching kit, too. Are those tubeless tires?'

'They always were.' Bill bent down to look at the flat tire. 'Yeah. Tubeless.'

'Getting ready to ride it again?'

'Of c-course not,' Bill said sharply. 'I just don't like to see it si-hi-hitting there on a flat.'

'Whatever you say, Big Bill. You're the boss.'

Bill looked around sharply at that, but Mike had gone to the garage's back wall and was taking down a tire-pump. He got a tin tir e-patching kit from one of the cabinets and handed it to Bill, who looked at it curiously. It was as he remembered such things from his childhood: a small tin box of about the same size and shape as those kept by men who roll their own cigarettes, except the top was bright and pebbled — you used it for roughing the rubber around the hole before you put on the patch. The box looked brand-new, and there was a Woolco price sticker on it that said $7.23. It seemed to him that when he was a kid such a kit had gone for about a buck-twenty-five.

'You didn't just have this hanging around,' Bill said. It wasn't a question.

'No,' Mike agreed. 'I bought it last week. Out at the mall, as a matter of fact.'

'You've got a bike of your own?'

'No,' Mike said, meeting his eyes.

'You just happened to buy this kit.'

'Just got the urge,' Mike agreed, his eyes still on Bill's. 'Woke up thinking it might come in handy. The thought kept coming back all day. So . . . I got the kit. And here you are to use it.'

'Here I am to use it,' Bill agreed. 'But like they say on the soaps, what does it all mean, dear?'

'Ask the others,' Mike said. 'Tonight.'

'Will they all be there, do you think?'

'I don't know, Big Bill.' He paused and added: 'I think there's a chance that all of them won't be. One or two of them may decide to just creep out of town. Or . . . 'He shrugged.

'What do we do if that happens?'

'I don't know.' Mike pointed to the tire-patching kit. 'I paid seven bucks for that thing. Are you going to do something with it or just look at it?'

Bill took his sportcoat out of the basket and hung it carefully on an unoccupied wallpeg. Then he turned Silver upside down so that he rested on his seat and began to carefully rotate the rear tire. He didn't like the rusty way the axle squeaked, and remembered the almost silent click of the ball-bearings in the kid's skateboard. A little 3-in-1 oil would fix that right up, he thought.

Wouldn't hurt to oil the chain, either. It's rusty as hell . . . And playing cards. It needs playing cards on the spokes. Mike would have cards, I bet. The good ones. Bikes, with the celluloid coating that made them so stiff and so slippery that the first time you tried to shuffle them they always sprayed all over the floor. Playing cards, sure, and clothespins to hold them —

He stopped, suddenly cold.

What in the name of Jesus are you thinking of?

'Something wrong, Bill?' Mike asked softly.

'Nothing.' His fingers touched something small and round and hard. He got his nails under it and pulled. A small tack came out of the tire. 'Here's the cuh-cuh-culprit,' he said, and it rose in his mind again, strange, unbidden, and powerful: He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts. But this time the voice, his voice, was followed by his mother's voice, saying: Try again, Billy. You almost had it that time. And Andy Devine as Guy Madison's sidekick Jingles yelling, Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!

He shivered.

(the posts)

He shook his head. I couldn't say that without stuttering even now, he thought, and for just a moment he felt that he was on the edge of understanding it all.

Then it was gone.

He opened the tire-patching kit and went to work. It took a long time to get it just right. Mike leaned against the wall in a bar of late-afternoon sun, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and his tie yanked down, whistling a tune which Bill finally identified as 'She Blinded Me with Science.'

While he waited for the tire cement to set, Bill had — just for something to do, he told himself — oiled Silver's chain, sprocket, and axles. It didn't make the bike look any better, but when he spun the tires he found that the squeak was gone, and that was satisfying. Silver never would have won any beauty-contests anyway. His one virtue was that he could go like a blue streak.

By that tune, five –thirty in the afternoon, he had nearly forgotten Mike was there; he had become completely absorbed in small yet utterly satisfying acts of maintenance. He screwed the nozzle of the pump onto the rear tire's valve and watched the tire fatten, shooting for the right pressure by guess and by gosh. He was pleased to see that the patch was holding nicely.

When he thought he had it right, he unscrewed the pump-nozzle and was about to turn Silver over when he heard the rapid snap-flutter of playing cards behind him. He whirled, almost knocking Silver over.

Mike was standing there with a deck of blue-backed Bicycle playing cards in one hand . 'Want these?'

Bill let out a long, shaky sigh. 'You've got clothespins, too, I suppose?'

Mike took four from the flap pocket of his shirt and held them out.

'Just happened to have them around, I suh-huppose?'

'Yeah, something like that,' Mike said.

Bill took the cards and tried to shuffle them. His hands shook and the cards sprayed out of his hands. They went everywhere . , . but only two landed face-up. Bill looked at them, then up at Mike. Mike's gaze was frozen on the littered playing cards. His lips had pulled back from his teeth.

The two up cards were both the ace of spades.

'That's impossible,' Mike said. 'I just opened that deck. Look.' He pointed at the swill-can just inside the garage door and Bill saw the cellophane wrapper, 'How can one deck of cards have two aces of spades?'

Bill bent down and picked them up. 'How can you spray a deck of cards all over the floor and have only two of them land face up?' he asked. 'That's an even better que — '

He turned the aces over, looked, and then showed them to Mike. One of them was a blueback, the other a redback.

'Holy Christ, Mikey, what have you got us into?'

'What are you going to do with those?' Mike asked in a numb voice.

'Why, put them on,' Bill said, and suddenly he began to laugh. 'That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't it? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?'

Mike didn't reply. He watched as Bill went to Silver's rear wheel and attached the playing cards. His hands were still shaking and it took awhile, but he finally got it done, drew in one tight breath, held it, and spun the rear wheel. The playing cards machine-gunned loudly against the spokes in the garage's silence.

'Come on,' Mike said softly. 'Come on in, Big Bill. I'll make us some chow.'

They had scoffed the burgers and now sat smoking, watching dark begin to unfold from dusk in Mike's back yard. Bill took out his wallet, found someone's business card, and wrote upon it the sentence that had plagued him ever since he had seen Silver in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. He showed it to Mike, who read it carefully, lips pursed.

'Does it mean anything to you?' Bill asked.

'"He thr usts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts."' He nodded. 'Yes, I know what that is.'

'Well then, tell me. Or are you going to give me some more cuh-cuh-crap about figuring it out for myself?'

'No,' Mike said, 'in this case I think it's okay to tell you. The phrase goes back to English times. It's a tongue-twister that became a speech exercise for lispers and stutterers. Your mother kept trying to get you to say it that summer. The summer of 1958. You used to go around mumb ling it to yourself.'