Over ice cream, Uncle Ray spoke up. Judy hadn’t been the only woman to visit him up in the woods. “There’s been somebody else,” he said, with difficulty. “Woman name of Harry, Carole Hatty, knows there’s a few of us scattered about them woods, and from the goodness of her heart she come up to visit with us ‘n bring clothes ‘n pie ‘n stuff, even though there’s mad bastards up there’d take an ax to anythin’ came within ten feet, man, woman, child, or rabid dog.” As he talked about the woman, Uncle Ray began to color and shift in his seat. Judy said, “She important to you, Raymond? You want us to ask her over?” Whereupon the snake skunk weasel across the kitchen table began to slap his thigh and laugh, a loud drunk snake skunk weasel traitor’s laugh, he laughed till he cried, then jumped up, knocking over his chair, and said, “Oo, Carole Hatty. Carole Easy-Over from the Big Dipper Diner on Hopper Street? That Carole Hatty? Woo. Man, I never knowed she need so much sugar she come up your way lookin’ for more. Hell, Ray, you been outa touch. Us boys, we bin bangin’ li’1 Carole regular, since she was fifteen years old and beggin’.” Now Ray looked over at little Eddie, a horrible empty look, and even at ten Eddie could understand its meaning, could feel how deeply his Uncle Ray had been stabbed in the back, because Raymond Ford in his own way had been saying that he had come down from his hilltop redoubt not only for the love of family—the love of Eddie, the look said—but also for what he thought of as a good woman’s love; after the long angry years he had come in the hope of having his heart healed by these things, and what Tobe Ford had done was to puncture both those balloons, to stab him twice in the heart with a single blow.

Well, the big man stood up himself after Tobe finished talking and Judy started shrieking at both of them and trying to get Eddie behind her at the same time because the snake skunk weasel her husband had a small pistol in his hand and it was pointed at his brother’s heart. “Now, then, Raymond,” said old Tobe, grinning, “let’s be rememberin’ what the good book say on the subject of brotherly love.” Ray Ford walked out of the house and Judy was so scared she started singing “Late last night I heard the screen door slam,” and at that Tobe left too, saying he didn’t have to take the crap being handed down around here, she could take her attitude and stick it where the sun dorit shine, you hear me, Jude? Don’t judge me, bitch, you’re only my fuckin’ wife, and if you don’t care for your husband’s remarks, why don’t you just go suck old loony Raymond’s dick. Tobe went out to play cards over at the Corrigan body shop, where he worked, and before morning came, Carole Harry had been found in an alley with a broken neck, dead, and Raymond Ford was in the junkyard full of rusting autos at the back of the Corrigan lot, with a single gunshot wound in his heart and no sign of a weapon anywhere. That was when the snake skunk weasel took off, just never came home from the card game, and even though the word on Tobias Ford, armed and dangerous, was put out in five states, nobody ever found a trace of him. Eddie’s mother was of the opinion that the bastard had really been a snake in disguise all along, and after what he’d done he simply slipped out of his human skin, just shucked it off and it crumbled to dust the moment he let it go, and one more snake wouldn’t get any attention around Nowheresville, where the houses of the Lord were full of rattlers and diamondbacks and those were just the ministers. Let him go, she said, if I’d a knowed I was marryin’ a serpent I’d a drunk poison before sayin’ my Christian vows.

Judy took comfort in her growing collection of quarts of Jack and Jim, but after what happened had happened, Eddie Ford just clammed up, hardly spoke twenty words a day. Like his uncle, but without leaving town, he had sequestered himself from the world, had locked himself away inside his own body, and as he grew he concentrated all the immense energies of that newly puissant frame on throwing the football, throwing it harder and faster than a football had ever been thrown in Nowheresville, as if by hurling it clean into outer space he could save himself from the curse of his blood, as if a touchdown pass were the same thing as freedom. And finally he threw himself as far as Mila, who rescued him from his demons, coaxing him out of his internal exile, taking for her own pleasure the beautiful body that he had made his prison cell and in return giving him back companionship, community, the world.

Everywhere you looked, thought Professor Malik Solanka, the fury was in the air. Everywhere you listened you heard the beating of the dark goddesses’ wings. Tisiphone, Alecto, Megaera: the ancient Greeks were so afraid of these, their most ferocious deities, that they didn’t even dare to speak their real name. To use that name, Erinnyes, Furies, might very well be to call down upon yourself those ladies’ lethal wrath. Therefore, and with deep irony, they called the enraged trinity “the good-tempered ones”: Eumenides. The euphemistic name did not, alas, result in much of an improvement in the goddesses’ permanent bad mood.

At first he tried to resist thinking of Mila as Little Brain come alive: and not Little Brain the hollow media re-creation at that, not Little Brain the traitress, the lobotomized baby doll of Brain Street and beyond, but her forgotten original, the lost L.B. of his first imagining, the star of Adventures with Little Brain. At first he told himself it would be wrong to do this to Mila, to dollify her thus, but then—he argued back against himself—had she not done it to herself, had she not by her own admission made early-period Little Brain her model and inspiration? Was she not quite plainly presenting herself to him in the role of the True One he had lost? She was, he now knew, a very bright young woman indeed; she must have foreseen how her performance would be received. Yes! Deliberately, to save him, she was offering him that mystery which she had somehow divined-would answer his deepest, though never articulated, need. Shyly, then, Solanka began to allow himself to see her as his creation, given life by some unlooked—for miracle and caring for him, now, as might the daughter he’d never had. Then a slip of the tongue let out his secret, but Mila seemed not at all put out. Instead she smiled a private little smile—a smile that, Solanka was obliged to concede, was full of a strange erotic pleasure, in which there was something of the patient angler’s satisfaction at the bait being finally taken, and something, too, of the prompter’s hidden joy when a much repeated cue is picked up at the last—and, instead of correcting him, she replied as if he had used her right name and not the doll’s. Malik Solanka flushed hotly, overcome by an almost incestuous shame, and stammeringly tried to apologize; whereupon she came up close, until her breasts moved against his shirt and he could feel the breath from her lips brushing against his, and murmured, “Professor, call me whatever you like. If it makes you feel good, please know that it’s good with me.” So they sank daily deeper into fantasy. Alone in his apartment in the rainy afternoons of that ruined summer, they played out their little father-and-daughter game. Mila Milo began quite deliberately to be the doll for him, to dress more and more precisely in the doll’s original sartorial image and to act out for a much-aroused Solanka a series of scenarios derived from the early shows. He might play the part of Machiavelli, Marx, or, most often, Galileo, while she would be, oh, exactly what he wanted her to be; would sit by his chair and press his feet while he delivered himself of the wisdom of the great sages of the world; and after a little time at his feet, she might move up to his aching lap, though they would make sure, without a word being said, that a plump cushion was always placed between her body and his, so that if he, who had sworn to lie with no woman, responded to her presence there as might another, less forsworn man, then she need never know it, they need never mention it, and he need never be obliged to admit the occasional spilling weakness of his body. Like Gandhi performing his brabmacbarya “experiments with truth,” when the wives of his friends lay with him at night to enable him to test the mastery of mind over limb, he preserved the outward form of high propriety; and so did she, so did she.