The tank overflowed a little and Thomas hung up the hose and put on the cap and wiped away the splash of gasoline on the rear fender. He washed the windshield down and collected four dollars and thirty cents from Mr. Herbert, who gave him a dime tip.

“Thanks,” Thomas said, with a good facsimile of gratitude, and watched the Oldsmobile drive off into town. The Jordache garage was on the outskirts of town, so they got a lot of transient traffic, too. Thomas went into the office and charged up the sale on the register and put the money into the till. He had finished the grease job on the Ford and for the moment he had nothing to do, although if his uncle were there, he would have no trouble finding work for him. Probably cleaning out the toilets or polishing the chrome of the shining hulks in the Used Car Lot. Thomas thought idly of cleaning out the cash register instead, and taking off somewhere. He rang the No Sale key and looked in. With Mr. Herbert’s four dollars and thirty cents, there was exactly ten dollars and thirty cents in the drawer. Uncle Harold had lifted the morning’s receipts when he went home for lunch, just leaving five one-dollar bills and a dollar in silver in case somebody had to have change. Uncle Harold hadn’t become the owner of a garage and a Used Car Lot and a filling station and an automobile agency in town by being careless with his money.

Thomas hadn’t eaten yet, so he picked up his lunch bag and went out of the office and sat tilted on the cracked wooden chair against the wall of the garage, in the shade, watching the traffic go by. The view was not unpleasant. There was something nautical about the cars in diagonal lines in the lot, with gaily colored banners overhead announcing bargains. Beyond the lumberyard diagonally across the road, there were the ochre and green of patches of the farmland all around. If you sat still, the heat wasn’t too bad and just the absence of Uncle Harold gave Thomas a sense of well-being.

Actually, he wasn’t unhappy in the town. Elysium, Ohio, was smaller than Port Philip, but much more prosperous, with no slums and none of the sense of decay that Thomas had taken as a natural part of his environment back home. There was a small lake nearby, with two hotels that were open for the summer, and holiday cottages owned by people who came there from Cleveland, so the town itself had some of the spruced-up air of a resort, with good shops, restaurants, and entertainments like horse shows and regattas for small sailboats on the lake. Everybody seemed to have money in Elysium and that was a real change from Port Philip.

Thomas dug into the bag and pulled out a sandwich. It was wrapped neatly in waxed paper. It was a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, with a lot of mayonnaise, on fresh, thinly cut rye bread. Recently, Clothilde, the Jordaches’ maid, had begun to give him fancy sandwiches, different ones every day, instead of the unrelieved diet of bologna on thick hunks of bread that he had had to make do with the first few weeks. Tom was a little ashamed, seeing his grease-stained hands with the black nails on the elaborate tea-shoppe sandwich. It was just as well that Clothilde couldn’t see him as he ate her offerings. She was nice, Clothilde, a quiet French-Canadian woman of about twenty-five who worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, with every other Sunday afternoon off. She had sad, dark eyes and black hair. Her uniform somberness of coloring set her off as being ineluctably lower in the social scale than the aggressively blonde Jordaches, as though she had been born and marked specifically to be their servant.

She had taken to leaving a piece of pie out on the kitchen table for him, too, at night, when he left the house after dinner, to wander around the town. Uncle Harold and Tante Elsa couldn’t keep him in the house at night any more than his own parents could. He had to wander. Nighttime made him restless. He didn’t do much—sometimes he’d play in a pickup softball game under the lights in the town park or he’d go to a movie and have a soda afterward, and he’d found some girls. He had made no friends who might ask embarrassing questions about Port Philip and he’d been careful to be civil to everyone and he hadn’t had a fight since he’d come to town. He’d had enough trouble for the time being. He wasn’t unhappy. Being out from under his mother and father was a blessing and not living in the same house and sharing the same bed with his brother, Rudolph, was soothing to the nerves. And not having to go to school was a big improvement. He didn’t mind the work at the garage, although Uncle Harold was a nuisance, always fussing and worrying. Tante Elsa clucked over him and kept giving him glasses of orange juice under the impression that his lean fitness was a sign of malnutrition. They meant well enough, even if they were slobs. The two little girls stayed out of his way.

Neither of the senior Jordaches knew why he had been sent away from home. Uncle Harold had pried, but Thomas had been vague and had merely said that he was doing badly at school, which was true enough, and that his father had thought it would be good for his character to get away from home and earn some money on his own. Uncle Harold was not one to underestimate the moral beauties of sending a boy out to earn money on his own. He was surprised, though, that Thomas never got any mail from his family and that after the first Sunday afternoon telephone call from Axel telling him that Thomas was on his way, there had been no further communication from Port Philip. Harold Jordache was a family man, himself, extravagantly affectionate with his two daughters and lavish with gifts for his wife, whose money it had been in the first place that had enabled him to take his comfortable place in Elysium. In talking about Axel Jordache to Tom, Uncle Harold had sighed over the differences in temperament between the brothers. “I think, Tom,” Uncle Harold had said, “it was because of the wound. He took it very hard, your father. It brought out the dark side in him. As though nobody ever was wounded before.”

He shared one conception with Axel Jordache. The German people, he believed, had a streak of childishness in them, which drove them into waging war. “Play a band and they march. What’s so attractive about it?” he said. “Clumping around in the rain with a sergeant yelling at you, sleeping in the mud instead of a nice, warm bed with your wife, being shot at by people you don’t know, and then, if you’re lucky, winding up in an old uniform without a pot to piss in. It’s all right for a big industrialist, the Krupps, making cannons and battleships, but for the small man—” He shrugged. “Stalingrad. Who needs it?” With all his Germanness, he had kept clear of all German-American movements. He liked where he was and what he was and he was not to be lured into any associations that might compromise him. “I got nothing against anybody,” was one of the foundations of his policy. “Not against the Poles, or the French, or the English, or the Jews or anybody. Not even the Russians. Anybody who wants can come in and buy a car or ten gallons of gas from me and if he pays in good American money, he’s my friend.”

Thomas lived placidly enough in Uncle Harold’s house, observing the rules, going his own way, occasionally annoyed at his uncle’s reluctance to see him sitting down for a few minutes during the working day, but by and large more grateful than not for the sanctuary that was being offered him. It was only temporary. Sooner or later, he knew he was going to break away. But there was no hurry.

He was just about to dig into the bag for the second sandwich, when he saw the twins’ 1938 Chevy approaching. It curved in toward the filling station and Tom saw that there was only one of the twins in it. He didn’t know which one it was, Ethel or Edna. He had laid them both, as had most of the boys in town, but he couldn’t tell them apart.