He wanted to write a story about one of the people at the library for the blind. That was the only way to imagine their world.

Marguerite had blue eyes and dark lashes. She was a sales clerk and cashier, working near the hosiery shop she'd managed, about a dozen years earlier, on Canal Street, before they fired her. She could not add or subtract was the stated reason. Marguerite knew better, felt the vibrations, heard the whispers of nasty attitude, of grudge against the world, which wasn't as bad as the time she was fired from Lerner's in New York because they said she did not use deodorant. This was not true because she used a roll-on every day and if it didn't work the way it said on TV, why should she be singled out as a social misfit? New York was not behind the times in strange smells.

He did his homework at the kitchen table, questions only morons would want to answer. She woke him up for school by clapping her hands in the doorway, insistently, the fingers of one hand tapping the palm of the other. Something in him turned to murder at the sight of her, sometimes, in the street, coming toward him unexpectedly. He heard her footsteps, heard her key in the lock. The voice called out from the kitchen, the toilet flushed. He knew the inflections and the pauses, knew what she would say, word for word, before she spoke. She tapped her hands in the doorway. Rise and shine.

"It is evident," he read, "that the definition of capital-value invested in labor-power as circulating capital is a secondary one, obliterating its specific difference in the process of production."

He tried to talk politics with Robert Sproul's sister, mainly to say something. They played chess on a closed porch at the Sproul house. Robert sat nearby doing a term paper on the history of air power.

She was a year older than Lee, soft-skinned, blond, with a serious mouth. He had a feeling she tried not to look too pretty. There were girls like that, hiding behind a surface of neatness and reserve.

"Eisenhower gets off too easy," Lee was saying, "and I can give you a good example."

"I don't think you can but go ahead."

"It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs. Guaranteed. They're the ones responsible."

"Well that's just you're daydreaming."

"Well no I'm not."

"There was a trial unless I'm sadly mistaken," she said.

"Ike is a well-known boob. He could have stopped the execution."

"Like a movie, I suppose?"

"Do you know who the Rosenbergs are, even?"

"I just said there was a trial."

"But the hidden factors, the things that don't get out."

She gave him a tight look. She was just the right height. Not too tall. He liked her air of restraint, the way she moved the pieces on the board, almost bashfully, giving no hint of the winning or losing involved. It made him feel animated and rash, a chess genius with dirty fingernails. There was a mother or father moving around inside the house.

"I read all about the Rosenbergs when I was in New York," he said. "They were railroaded to the chair. The idea was to make all communists look like traitors. Ike could have done something."

"He did do something. He played golf," Robert said.

"Now Senator Eastland's coming to New Orleans. You know why, don't you?"

"He's looking for you," Robert said. "He can't figure out how a boy in the Civil Air Patrol."

"He's looking for reds under the beds," Lee said.

"He's wondering how a clean-cut boy."

"The main thing is in communism that workers don't produce profits for the system."

"He's looking at your cute smile and he's just real upset. A teenage communist in the CAP."

Lee half enjoyed the ribbing. He looked at Robert's sister to get her reaction but her eyes were on the board. Well brought up. He saw her at the library. She was on the pep squad at school, the girl at the far end who went more or less unnoticed.

"What if they did spy? It's only because they believed communism is the best system. It's the system that doesn't exploit, so then you're strapped in the chair."

Lee was aware that the parent, whichever one it was, had moved to the edge of the open doorway. The parent was standing there, on the other side of the wall, listening.

"If you look at the name Trotsky in Russian, it looks totally different," he said to Robert Sproul's sister. "Plus here's something nobody knows. Stalin's name was Dzhugashvili. Stalin means man of iron."

"Man of steel," Robert said.

"Same thing."

"Dumb bunny."

"The whole thing is they lie to us about Russia. Russia is not what they say. In New York the communists don't hide. They're out on the street."

"Quick, Henry, the Flit," Robert said.

"First you produce profits for the system that exploits you."

"Kill it before it spreads."

"Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system."

"Well that's neither here nor there," the sister said.

"Where is it?" he asked her.

It was the father who appeared in the doorway, a tall man with a plaid blanket folded over one arm. He seemed to be looking for a horse. He spoke of homework and errands, he mumbled obscurely about family matters. The sister's relief was easy to see. It could be felt and measured. She slipped past her father and melted serenely into the dim interior.

The father walked with Lee to the front door and opened it as wide as it would go. They did not speak to each other. Lee walked home through the Quarter past hundreds of tourists and conventioneers who thronged in the light rain like people in a newsreel.

He kept the Marxist books in his room, took them to the library for renewal, carried them back home. He let classmates read the titles if they were curious, just to see their silly faces crinkle up, but he didn't show the books to his mother. The books were private, like something you find and hide, some lucky piece that contains the secret of who you are. The books themselves were secret. Forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas. Trotsky's name was Bronstein. He would need a secret name. He would join a cell located in the old buildings near the docks. They would talk theory into the night. But they would act as well. Organize and agitate. He would move through the city in the rain, wearing dark clothes. It was just a question of finding a cell. There was no question they were here. Senator Eastland made it clear on TV. Underground reds in N'yorlenz.

In the meantime he read his brother's Marine Corps manual, to prepare for the day when he'd enlist.

There were two kids at school, in particular, before he quit, who called him Yankee all the time. Trailing him down the halls, calling across the lunchroom. He smiled and was ready to fight but they never made a realistic move.

The names on the order blanks excited him. Lisbon, Manila, Hong Kong. But soon the routine took hold and he realized the ships and cargoes and destinations had nothing to do with him. He was a runner. He carried paper to other forwarding companies and steamship lines or across the street to the U.S. Custom House, which looked like a temple of money, massive and gray, with tall granite columns. He was supposed to look eager and bright. People seemed to depend on his cheerfulness. The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile. He disappeared for hours at the movies. Or he sat in an unused office in a far corner of the third floor, where he spent serious time reading the Marine Corps manual.