“I-”

“It don’t matter!” She said fiercely at the window. It looked out on a backyard filled with rusting pieces of junk and tire rims and some little boy’s sandbox that now, many years later, was filled with scruffy October woods.

“It don’t matter!” she repeated. “It’s the darkies.” She turned to Richards and her eyes were hooded and furious and bewildered. “I’m sixty-five, but I was only a fresh young girl of nineteen when it began to happen. It was nineteen seventy-nine and the darkies were everywhere! Everywhere! Yes they were!” she nearly screamed, as if Richards had taken issue with her. “Everywhere! They sent those darkies to school with the whites. They set em high in the government. Radicals, rabble-rousing, and rebellion. I ain’t so-”

She broke off as if the words had been splintered from her mouth. She stared at Richards, seeing him for the first time.

“OhGodhavemercy,” she whispered.

“Mrs. Parrakis-”

“Nope!” she said in a fear-hoarsened voice. “Nope! Nope! Oh, nope!” She began advancing on him, pausing at the counter to pick up a long, gleaming butcher knife out of the general clutter. “Out! Out! Out!” He got up and began to back away slowly, first through the short hall between the kitchen and shadowy living room, then through the living room itself.

He noticed that an ancient pay telephone hung on the wall from the days when this had been a bona fide inn. The Blue Door, Guests. When was that? Richards wondered Twenty years ago? Forty? Before the darkies had gotten out of hand, or after?

He was just beginning to back down the hall between the living room and the front door when a key rattled in the lock. They both froze as if some celestial hand had stopped the film while deciding what to do next.

The door opened, and Elton Parrakis walked in. He was immensely fat, and his lackluster blond hair was combed back in preposterous waves from his forehead to show a round baby face that held an element of perpetual puzzlement. He was wearing the blue and gold uniform of the Vendo-Spendo Company. He looked thoughtfully at Virginia Parrakis.

“Put that knife down, Mom.”

“Nope!” she cried, but already the crumbling of defeat had begun to putty her face.

Parrakis closed the door and began walking toward her. He jiggled.

She shrank away. “You have to make him go, son. He’s that badman. That Richards. It’ll mean prison or worse. I don’t want you to go!” She began to wail, dropped the knife, and collapsed into his arms.

He enfolded her and began to rock her gently as she wept. “I’m not going to jail,” he said. “Come on, Mom, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” He smiled at Richards over one of her hunched and shaking shoulders, an embarrassed awfully-sorry-about-this smile. Richards waited.

“Now,” Parrakis said, when the sobs had died to sniffles. “Mr. Richards is Bradley Throckmorton’s good friend, and he is going to be with us for a couple of days, Mom.”

She began to shriek, and he clapped a hand over her mouth, wincing as he did so.

“Yes, Mom. Yes he is. I’m going to drive his car into the park and wire it. And you’ll go out tomorrow morning with a package to mail to Cleveland.”

“Boston,” Richards said automatically. “The tapes go to Boston.”

“They go to Cleveland now,” Elton Parrakis said, with a patient smile. “Bradley’s on the run.”

“Oh. Jesus.”

“You’ll be on the run, too!” Mrs. Parrakis howled at her son. “And they’ll catch you, too! You’re too fat!”

“I’m going to take Mr. Richards upstairs and show him his room, Mom.”

“Mr. Richards? Mr. Richards? Why don’t you call him by his right name? Poison!”

He disengaged her with great gentleness, and Richards followed him obediently up the shadowy staircase. “There are a great many rooms up here,” he said, panting slightly as his huge buttocks flexed and clenched. “This used to be a rooming house many years ago-when I was a baby. You’ll be able to watch the street.”

“Maybe I better go,” Richards said. “If Bradley’s blown, your mother may be right.”

“This is your room,” he said, and threw open a door on a dusty damp room that held the weight of years. He did not seem to have heard Richards’s comment. “It’s not much of an accommodation. I’m afraid, but-” He turned to face Richards with his patient I-want-to-please smile. “You may stay as long as you want. Bradley Throckmorton is the best friend I’ve ever had.” The smile faltered a bit. “The only friend I’ve ever had. I’ll watch after my Mom. Don’t worry.”

Richards only repeated: “I better go.”

“You can’t, you know. That head bandage didn’t even fool Mom for long. I’m going to drive your car to a safe place, Mr. Richards. We’ll talk later.”

He left quickly, lumberingly. Richards noted that the seat of his uniform pants was shiny. He seemed to leave a faint odor of apologia in the room.

Pulling the ancient green shade aside a little, Richards saw him emerge on the cracked front walk below and get into the car. Then he got out again. He hurried back toward the house, and Richards felt a stab of fear.

Ponderously climbing tread on the stairs. The door opened, and Elton smiled at Richards. “Mom’s right,” he said. “I don’t make a very good secret agent. I forgot the keys.”

Richards gave them to him and then essayed a joke: “Half a secret agent is better than none.”

It struck a sour chord or no chord at all; Elton Parrakis carried his torments with him too clearly, and Richards could almost hear the phantom, jeering voices of the children that would follow him forever, like small tugs behind a big liner.

“Thank you,” Richards said softly.

Parrakis left, and the little car that Richards had come from New Hampshire in was driven away toward the park.

Richards pulled the dust cover from the bed and lay down slowly, breathing shallowly and looking at nothing but the ceiling. The bed seemed to clutch him in a perversly damp embrace, even through the coverlet and his clothes. An odor of mildew drifted through the channels of his nose like a senseless rhyme.

Downstairs, Elton’s mother was weeping.

MINUS 050 AND COUNTING

He dozed a little but could not sleep. Darkness was almost full when he heard Elton’s heavy tread on the stairs again, and Richards swung his feet onto the floor with relief.

When he knocked and stepped in, Richards saw that Parrakis had changed into a tentlike sports shirt and a pair of jeans.

“I did it,” he said. “It’s in the park.”

“Will it be stripped?”

“No,” Elton said. “I have a gadget. A battery and two alligator clips. If anyone puts his hand or a crowbar on it, they’ll get a shock and a short blast on a siren. Works good. I built it myself.” He seated himself with a heavy sigh.

“What’s this about Cleveland?” Richards demanded (it was easy, he found, to demand of Elton).

Parrakis shrugged. “Oh, he’s a fellow like me. I met him once in Boston, at the library with Bradley. Our little pollution club. I suppose Mom said something about that.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled unhappily.

“She said something,” Richards agreed.

“She’s… a little dim,” Parrakis said. “She doesn’t understand much of what’s been happening for the last twenty years or so. She’s frightened all the time. I’m all she has.”

“Will they catch Bradley?”

“I don’t know. He’s got quite a.. uh, intelligence network.” But his eyes slipped away from Richards’s.

“You-”

The door opened and Mrs. Parrakis stood there. Her arms were crossed and she was smiling, but her eyes were haunted. “I’ve called the police,” she said. “Now you’ll have to go.”

Elton’s face drained to a pearly yellowish-white. “You’re lying.”

Richards lurched to his feet and then paused, his head cocked in a listening gesture.