“Hiiillyyyyyyyy!”

Hilly's head snapped around at the sound of his mother's scream, which sounded to him as loud as a jet plane. As a result, he fell off his sled just before it reached the foot of the driveway. The driveway was asphalted, the glaze of sleet was really quite thin, and Hilly Brown never had that knack with which a kind God blesses most squirmy, active children-the knack of failing lucky. He broke his left arm just above the elbow and fetched his forehead such a dreadful crack that he knocked himself out.

His Flexible Flyer shot into the road. The driver of the Webber Fuel truck reacted before he had a chance to see there was no one on the sled. He spun the wheel and the tanker-truck waltzed into a low embankment of snow with the huge grace of the elephant ballet dancers in Fantasia. It crashed through and landed in the ditch, canted alarmingly to one side. Less than five minutes after the driver wriggled out of the passenger door and ran to Marie Brown, the truck tipped over on its side and lay in the frozen grass like a dead mastodon, expensive No. 2 fuel oil gurgling out of its three overflow vents.

Marie was running down the road with her unconscious child in her arms, screaming. In her terror and confusion she felt sure that Hilly must have been run over, even though she had quite clearly seen him fall off his sled at the bottom of the driveway.

“Is he dead?” the tanker driver screamed. His eyes were wide, his face pale as paper, his hair standing on end. There was a dark spot spreading on the crotch of his pants. “Oh sufferin” Jesus, lady, is he dead?”

I think so,” Marie wept. “I think he is, oh I think he's dead.”

Who's dead?” Hilly asked, opening his eyes.

“Oh, Hilly, thank God!” Marie screamed, and hugged him. Hilly screamed back with great enthusiasm. She was grinding together the splintered ends of the broken bone in his left arm.

Hilly spent the next three days in Derry Home Hospital.

“It'll slow him down, at least,” Bryant Brown said the next evening over a dinner of baked beans and hot dogs.

Ev Hillman happened to be taking dinner with them that evening; since his wife had died, Ev Hillman did that every now and again; about five evenings out of every seven on the average. “Want to bet?” Ev said now, cackling through a mouthful of cornbread.

Bryant cocked a sour eye at his father-in-law and said nothing.

As usual, Ev was right-that was one of the reasons Bryant so often felt sour about him. On his second night in the hospital, long after the other children in Pediatrics were asleep, Hilly decided to go exploring. How he got past the duty nurse was a mystery, but get past he did. He was discovered missing at three in the morning. An initial search of the pediatrics ward did not turn him up. Neither did a floor-wide search. Security was called in. A search of the whole hospital was then mounted-administrators who had at first only been mildly annoyed were now becoming worried-and discovered nothing. Hilly's father and mother were called and came in at once, looking shell-shocked. Marie was weeping, but because of her swollen larynx, she could only do so in a breathy croak.

“We think he may have wandered out of the building somehow,” the Head of Administrative Services told them.

“How the hell could a five-year-old just wander out of the buildings?” Bryant shouted. “What kind of a place you guys running here?”

“Well… well… you understand it's hardly a prison, Mr Brown”

Marie cut them both off. “You've got to find him,” she whispered. “It's only twenty-two degrees out there. Hilly was in his pj's. He could be… be…”

“Oh, Mrs Brown, I really think such worries are premature,” the Head of Administrative Services broke in, smiling sincerely. He did not, in fact, think they were premature at all. The first thing he had done after ascertaining that the boy might have been gone ever since the eleven-o'clock bedcheck was to find out how cold the night had been. The answer had occasioned a call to Dr Elfman, who specialized in cases of hypothermia-there were a lot of those in Maine winters. Dr Elfman's prognosis was grave. “If he got out, he's probably dead,” Elfman said.

Another hospital-wide search, this one augmented by Derry police and firemen, turned up nothing. Marie Brown was given a sedative and put to bed. The only good news was of a negative sort; so far no one had found Hilly's frozen, pajama-clad body. Of course, the Head of Administrative Services thought, the Penobscot River was close to the hospital. Its surface had frozen. It was just possible that the boy had tried to cross the ice and had plunged through. Oh, how he wished the Browns of Haven had taken their little brat to Eastern Maine Medical.

At two that afternoon, Bryant Brown sat numbly in a chair beside his sleeping wife, wondering how he could tell her their only child was dead, if it became necessary to do so. At about that same time, a janitor who was in the basement to check on the laundry boilers saw an amazing sight: a small boy wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a plaster cast on one arm strolling nonchalantly between two of the hospital's giant furnaces in his bare feet.

“Hey!” the jan;” tor yelled. “Hey, kid!”

“Hi,” Hilly said, coming over. His feet were black with dirt; his pajama bottoms were swatched with grease. “Boy, this is a big place! I think I'm lost.”

The janitor carried Hilly upstairs to the administration office. The Head sat Hilly down in a large wing chair (after prudently putting down a double spread of the Bangor Daily News) and sent his secretary out to fetch back a Pepsi-Cola and a bag of Reese's Pieces for the brat. Under other circumstances the Head would have gone himself, thereby impressing the boy with his grandfatherly kindness. Under other circumstances-by which I mean, the Head thought grimly to himself, with a different boy. He was afraid to leave Hilly alone.

When the secretary came back with the candy and the soft drink, the Head sent her away again… after Bryant Brown this time. Bryant was a strong man, but when he saw Hilly sitting in the Head's wing chair, his dirty feet swinging four inches off the rug and the papers crackling under his butt as he ate candy and drank Pepsi, he was unable to hold back his tears of relief and thanksgiving. This of course made Hilly-who never in his life had ever done anything consciously bad-also burst into tears.

“Christ, Hilly, where you been?”

Hilly told the story as best he could, leaving Bryant and the Head to parse objective truth out of it as best they could. He had gotten lost, wandered into the basement ('I was followin” a pixie,” Hilly told them), and had crawled under one of the furnaces to sleep. It had been very warm there, he told them, so warm he had taken off his pajama shirt, working it carefully over the new cast.

“I like the pups, too,” he said. “Can we have a puppy, Daddy?”

The janitor who had spotted Hilly also found Hilly's shirt. It was under the No. 2 furnace. Getting the shirt out, he saw the “puppies,” too, although they skittered away from his light. He did not mention them to Mr and Mrs Brown, who looked like folks who would just fall apart if faced with one more shock. The janitor, a kindly man, thought they would do just as well not knowing that their son had spent the night with a pack of basement rats, some of which had indeed looked as large as puppies as they fled from his flashlight beam.

Asked for his perceptions of these things-and the similar (if less spectacular) incidents that occurred over the next five years of his life-Hilly would have shrugged and said, “I'm always getting in trouble, I guess.” Hilly meant he was accident-prone, but no one had taught him this valuable phrase yet.