He bunted her with one meaty hip and almost knocked her sprawling in the dark. She heard the radio fall to the floor. 'The girl can't help it if the menfolks stop and stare,' Little Richard informed them with his customary hoarse enthusiasm. 'Can't help it!' the back-up group testified, 'the girl can't help it!' Ben was panting now, too. They sounded like a couple of steam-engines. Suddenly the re was a crunch . . . and silence.

'Oh shit,' Ben said. 'I just squashed it. Richie's gonna have a bird.' He reached for her in the dark. She felt his hand touch one of her breasts, then jerk away, as if burned. She groped for him, got hold of his shirt, and drew him close.

'Beverly, what — '

'Shhh!'

He quieted. They sat together, arms around each other, looking up. The darkness was not quite perfect; there was a narrow line of light down one side of the trapdoor, and three others outlined th e slit window. One of these three was wide enought to let a slanted ray of sunlight fall into the clubhouse. She could only pray they wouldn't see it.

She could hear them approaching. At first she couldn't make out the words . . . and then she could. Her grip on Ben tightened.

'If she went into the bamboo, we can pick up her trail easy,' Victor was saying.

'They play around here,' Henry replied. His voice was strained, his words emerging in little puffs, as if with great effort. 'Boogers Taliendo said so. And the day we had that rockfight, they were coming from here.'

'Yeah, they play guns and stuff,' Belch said.

Suddenly there were thudding footfalls right above them; the sod-covered cap vibrated up and down. Dirt sifted onto Beverly's upturned face. One, two, maybe even all three of them were standing on top of the clubhouse. A cramp laced her belly; she had to bite down against a cry. Ben put one big hand on the side of her face and pressed it against his arm as he looked up, waiting to see if they would guess . . . or if they knew already and were just playing games.

'They got a place,' Henry was saying. 'That's what Boogers told me. Some kind of a treehouse or something. They call it their club.'

'I'll club em, if they want a club,' Victor said. Belch uttered a thunderous heehawing of laughter at this.

Thump, thump, thump, overhead. The cap moved up and down a little more this time. Surely they would notice it; ordinary ground just didn't have that kind of give.

'Let's look down by the river,' Henry said. 'I bet she's down there.'

'Okay,' Victor said.

Thump, thump. They were moving off. Bev let a little sigh of relief trickle through her clamped teeth . . . and then Henry said: 'You stay here and guard the path, Belch.'

'Okay,' Belch said, and he began to march back and forth, sometimes leaving the cap, sometimes coming back across it. More dirt sifted down. Ben and Beverly looked at each other with strained, dirty faces. Bev became aware that there was more than the smell of smoke in the clubhouse — a sweaty, garbag stink was rising as well. That's me, she thought dismally. In spite of the smell she hugged Ben even tighter. His bulk seemed suddenly very welcome, very comforting, and she was glad there was a lot of him to hug. He might have been nothing but a frightened fat-boy when school let out for the summer, but he was more than that now; like all of them, he had changed. If Belch discovered them down here, Ben just might give him a surprise.

'I'll club em if they want a club,' Belch said, and chuckled. A Belch Huggins chuckle was a low, troll-like sound. 'Club em if they want a club. That's good. That's pretty much okey-dokey.'

She became aware that Ben's upper body was heaving up and down in short, sharp movements; he was pulling air into his lungs and letting it out in sharp little bursts. For one alarmed moment she thought he was starting to cry, and then she got a closer look at his face and realized he was struggling against laughter. His eyes, leaking tears, caught hers, rolled madly, and looked away. In the faint light which leaked in through the cracks around the closed trapdoor and the window, she could see his face was nearly purple with the strain of holding it in.

'Club em if they want an ole clubby-dubby,' Belch said, and sat down heavily right in the center of the cap. This time the roof trembled more alarmingly, and Bev heard a low but ominous crrrack from one of the supports. The cap had been meant to support the chunks of camouflaging sod laid on top of it . . . but not the added one hundred and sixty pounds of Belch Huggins's weight.

If he doesn't get up he's going to land in our laps, Bev thought, and she began to catch Ben's hysteria. It was trying to boil out of her in rancid whoops and brays. In her mind's eye she suddenly saw herself pushing the window up enough on its hinges for her hand to creep

out and administer a really good goose to Belch Huggins's backside as he sat there in the hazy afternoon sunshine, muttering and giggling. She buried her face against Ben's chest in a last –ditch effort to keep it inside.

'Shhh,' Ben whispered. 'For Christ's sake, Bev — '

Ctrrrackk. Louder this time.

'Will it hold?' she whispered back.

'It might, if he doesn't fart,' Ben said, and a moment later Belch did cut one — a loud and fruity trumpet-blast that seemed to go on for at least three seconds. They held each other even tighter, muffling each other's frantic giggles. Beverly's head hurt so badly that she thought she might soon have a stroke.

Then, faintly, she heard Henry yelling Belch's name.

'What'?' Belch bellowed, getting up with a thump and a thud that sifted more dirt down on Ben and Beverly. 'What, Henry?'

Henry yelled something back; Beverly could only make out the words bank and bushes.

'Okay!' Belch bawled, and his feet crossed the cap for the last time. There was a final cracking noise, this one much louder, and a splinter of wood landed in Bev's lap. She picked it up wonderingly.

'Five mo re minutes,' Ben said in a low whisper. 'That's all it would have taken.'

'Did you hear him when he let go?' Beverly asked, beginning to giggle again.

'Sounded like World War III,' Ben said, also beginning to laugh.

It was a relief to be able to let it out, and they laughed wildly, trying to do it in whispers.

Finally, unaware she was going to say it at all (and certainly not because it had any discernible bearing on this situation), Beverly said: Thank you for the poem, Ben.'

Ben stopped laughing all at once and regarded her gravely, cautiously. He took a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face with it slowly. 'Poem?'

The haiku. The haiku on the postcard. You sent it, didn't you?'

'No,' Ben said. 'I didn't send you any haiku. Cause if a kid like me — a fat kid like me — did something like that, the girl would probably laugh at him.'

'I didn't laugh. I thought it was beautiful.'

'I could never write anything beautiful. Bill, maybe. Not me.'

'Bill will write,' she agreed. 'But he'll never write anything as nice as that. May I use your handkerchief?'

He gave it to her and she began to clean her face as best she could.

'How did you know it was me?' he asked finally.

'I don't know,' she said. 'I just did.'

Ben's throat worked convulsively. He looked down at his hands. 'I didn't mean anything by it.'

She looked at him gravely. 'You better not mean that,' she said. 'If you do, it's really going to spoil my day, and I'll tell you, it's goin g downhill already.'

He continued to look down at his hands and spoke at last in a voice she could barely hear. 'Well, I mean I love you, Beverly, but I don't want that to spoil anything.'

'It won't,' she said, and hugged him. 'I need all the love I can get right now.'