He was unconscious. They carried him into the kitchen and held him under the cold water. He came to quickly and began to curse. When they saw he was all right, they went back to the living room.

Miguel was helping Earle over to the couch. All the tan had drained from his face and it was covered with sweat. Miguel loosened his trousers while Claude took off his necktie and opened his collar. Faye and Tod watched from the side.

“Look,” she said, “my new pajamas are ruined.”

One of the sleeves had been pulled almost off and her shoulder stuck through it. The trousers were also torn. While he stared at her, she undid the top of the trousers and stepped out of them. She was wearing tight black lace drawers. Tod took a step toward her and hesitated. She threw the pajama bottoms over her arm, turned slowly and walked toward the door.

“Faye,” Tod gasped.

She stopped and smiled at him.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “Get that little guy out of here.”

Claude came over and took Tod by the arm.

“Let’s blow,” he said.

Tod nodded.

“We’d better take the homunculus with us or he’s liable to murder the whole household.”

Tod nodded again and followed him into the kitchen. They found the dwarf holding a big piece of ice to the side of his head. “There’s some lump where that greaser slammed me.” He made them finger and admire it.

“Let’s go home,” Claude said.

“No,” said the dwarf, “let’s go see some girls. I’m just getting started.”

“To hell with that,” snapped Tod. “Come on.”

He pushed the dwarf toward the door.

“Take your hands off, punk!” roared the little man. Claude stepped between them.

“Easy there, citizen,” he said.

“All right, but no shoving.”

He strutted out and they followed.

Earle still lay stretched on the couch. He had his eyes closed and was holding himself below the stomach with both hands. Miguel wasn’t there. Abe chuckled, wagging his big head gleefully.

“I fixed that buckeroo.”

Out on the sidewalk he tried again to get them to go with him.

“Come on, you guys-we’ll have some fun.”

“I’m going home,” Claude said.

They went with the dwarf to his car and watched him climb in behind the wheel. He had special extensions on the clutch and brake so that he could reach them with his tiny feet.

“Come to town?”

“No, thanks,” Claude said politely.

“Then to hell with you!”

That was his farewell. He let out the brake and the car rolled away.

24

Tod woke up the next morning with a splitting headache. He called the studio to say he wouldn’t be in and remained in bed until noon, then went downtown for breakfast. After several cups of hot tea, he felt a little better and decided to visit Homer. He still wanted to apologize. Climbing the hill to Pinyon Canyon made his head throb and he was relieved when no one answered his repeated knocks. As he started away, he saw one of the curtains move and went back to knock once more. There was still no answer.

He went around to the garage. Faye’s car was gone and so were the game chickens. He went to the back of the house and knocked on the kitchen door. Somehow the silence seemed too complete. He tried the handle and found that the door wasn’t locked. He shouted hello a few times, as a warning, then went through the kitchen into the living room. The red velvet curtains were all drawn tight, but he could see Homer sitting on the couch and staring at the backs of his hands which were cupped over his knees. He wore an old-fashioned cotton nightgown and his feet were bare.

“Just get up?”

Homer neither moved nor replied.

Tod tried again.

“Some party!”

He knew it was stupid to be hearty, but he didn’t know what else to be. “Boy, have I got a hang-over,” he went on, even going so far as to attempt a chuckle.

Homer paid absolutely no attention to him.

The room was just as they had left it the night before. Tables and chairs were overturned and the smashed picture lay where it had fallen. To give himself a reason for staying, he began to tidy up. He righted the chairs, straightened the carpet and picked up the cigarette butts that littered the floor. He also threw aside the curtains and opened a window. “There, that’s better, isn’t it?” he asked cheerfully. Homer looked up for a second, then down at his hands again. Tod saw that he was coming out of his stupor. “Want some coffee?” he asked. He lifted his hands from his knees and hid them in his armpits, clamping them tight, but didn’t answer.

“Some hot coffee-what do you say?”

He took his hands from under his arms and sat on them. After waiting a little while he shook his head no, slowly, heavily, like a dog with a foxtail in its ear.

“I’ll make some.”

Tod went to the kitchen and put the pot on the stove. While it was boiling, he took a peek into Faye’s room. It had been stripped. All the dresser drawers were pulled out and there were empty boxes all over the floor. A broken flask of perfume lay in the middle of the carpet and the place reeked of gardenia.

When the coffee was ready, he poured two cups and carried them into the living room on a tray. He found Homer just as he had left him, sitting on his hands. He moved a small table close to him and put the tray on it. “I brought a cup for myself, too,” he said. “Come on-drink it while it’s hot.”

Tod lifted a cup and held it out, but when he saw that he was going to speak, he put it down and waited.

“I’m going back to Wayneville,” Homer said.

“A swell idea-great!”

He pushed the coffee at him again. Homer ignored it. He gulped several times, trying to swallow something that was stuck in his throat, then began to sob. He cried without covering his face or bending his head. The sound was like an ax chopping pine, a heavy, hollow, chunking noise. It was repeated rhythmically but without accent. There was no progress in it. Each chunk was exactly like the one that preceded. It would never reach a climax.

Tod realized that there was no use trying to stop him. Only a very stupid man would have the courage to try to do it. He went to the farthest corner of the room and waited.

Just as he was about to light a second cigarette, Homer called him.

“Tod!”

“I’m here, Homer.”

He hurried over to the couch again.

Homer was still crying, but he suddenly stopped more abruptly than he had started.

“Yes, Homer?” Tod asked encouragingly.

“She’s left”

“Yes, I know. Drink some coffee.”

“She’s left.”

Tod knew that he put a great deal of faith in sayings, so he tried one.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“She left before I got up,” he said.

“What the hell do you care? You’re going back to Wayneville.”

“You shouldn’t curse,” Homer said with the same lunatic calm.

“I’m sorry,” Tod mumbled.

The word “sorry” was like dynamite set off under a dam. Language leaped out of Homer in a muddy, twisting torrent. At first, Tod thought it would do him a lot of good to pour out in this way. But he was wrong. The lake behind the dam replenished itself too fast. The more he talked the greater the pressure grew because the flood was circular and ran back behind the dam again.

After going on continuously for about twenty minutes, he stopped in the middle of a sentence. He leaned back, closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep. Tod put a cushion under his head. After watching him for a while, he went back to the kitchen.

He sat down and tried to make sense out of what Homer had told him. A great deal of it was gibberish. Some of it, however, wasn’t. He hit on a key that helped when he realized that a lot of it wasn’t jumbled so much as timeless. The words went behind each other instead of after. What he had taken for long strings were really one thick word and not a sentence. In the same way several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph. Using key, he was able to arrange a part of what he had so that it made the usual kind of sense.