The morning after our Emerson blew its tube, I was standing outside the A & P with my sister's battered old cart and a cardboard sign with red crayon letters that informed shoppers of my willingness to bring their groceries home for a nickel. That first day and the next, half a dozen old ladies used my services. I walked home beside them, pulling their bags of groceries in Anne-Marie's cart, chatting in the polite, cheerful way I thought might inspire them to tip me a couple of cents in addition to my nickel, but none of them did. And every one of those women lived blocks and blocks away from the A & P, and I had to lug their bags up to apartments on the upper floors, leaving the cart in the first-floor hallway so nobody would steal it. I pondered the rotten luck of every single oneof my customers being an old woman who lived far away and on the top floor. And each of them too cheap to give a friendly, smiling guy a tip. What were the odds? It took me awhile to work out that this wasn't a matter of singularly bad luck. Only women who were so poor they couldn't afford to give a tip would go blocks from their homes to save a few pennies at one of the new supermarkets; and only those who lived on the upper floors would be willing to part with a nickel to have their stuff carted home and carried up to their door. Still, after two days I had earned thirty cents towards the tube, even if my sister did complain bitterly that I'd worn her red crayon down to a nub making my sign, so she couldn't make any red clothes for her paper dolls, just when red was all the rage, and her movie star customers were complaining that...

Oh, shut up, why don't you?

You shut up!

Youshut up?

Copy cat, eat my hat!

Oh, shut up!

No, you shut up!

(From the bedroom) Both of you shut up!

The next morning I arrived at the A & P to find another boy standing there with a wagon and sign-a bigger boy with a bigger wagon and a bigger sign. And he wasn't even from our block! Well... we had words. He said he had as much right as I did to be there because I didn't own the sidewalk, so who the hell did I think I was to...

I hit him while he was still blabbing and got two more shots in while he was wondering if this was a fight or not, and then we really went to Fistcity, rolling around on the pavement, him mostly on top because he was bigger, but me getting some pretty good face shots in from below, but the manager of the A & P came out and snatched us around by our collars for a while, then he told us that if we didn't behave ourselves he'd send for the cops. When I tried to explain that I had been there first, he told me that he'd seen me start the fight. Of course I started the fight! A smaller kid has to get his shots in first or he doesn't stand a chance. Jeez! But I promised not to fight anymore, so this copy-cat interloper and I ended up standing on opposite sides of the store's door, glowering at one another until some old lady came out carrying groceries, then we'd try to out-smile and out-nice one another. I was at a disadvantage because my smile was sort of one-sided because I had a split lip. It was a scorcher of a day, and time passed slowly standing there in the sun, especially since I got only one customer that day, and that only because this other kid was away on a delivery. I could see what was going on in the women's heads. They didn't like having to pick one kid and leave the other behind, so most of them carried their own bags home, and the others chose this bigger kid because they didn't want to make a skinny little kid lug those bags all that way. Yeah, sure! Give money to the big healthy kid, and let the skinny little one go without! That makes lots of sense, you stupid old...

That night as I walked home, hot and sticky, dragging the wagon behind me, I was too tired and disheartened to remember to avoid the shortcut through the back alley. I knew I should go straight home, but I wanted desperately to play some kind of story game for a little while because without my nightly dose of radio, there was nothing to carry me away me from my life and refresh my soul. Then too, I wasn't all that eager to arrive at home with a split lip and only a nickel to show for a day's work. I was always a lot better at playing the modest hero than the brave failure.

There was only one old-fashioned streetlight in the back alley that hadn't been slingshot out. Its dim, dirty light fell at a sharp angle over the facades of the abandoned stables, texturing them and leaving pockets of deep shadow in the entranceways... a perfect setting for scary games. I slipped into a space between a shed and a stable, one side of my face lit and the other in shadow, knowing how scary I must look as I whispered to my followers that there just hadto be a rational explanation for the Murders in the Back Alley. "I shouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that Professor Moriarty had a hand in this, Watson." (A blend of clipped speech and Peter Lorre nasality did for my English accent.) I told them that the only way to discover the insane killer was to expose ourselves to the same dangers that those poor, bloody, axe-chopped, heads-ripped-off, faces-bashed-in women...

...I just about pissed myself when that sharp tap-tap-tap on the window made my voice squeak and sent my followers vanishing into the darkness, leaving me to face the danger alone. I looked up to see Mrs McGivney beckoning to me, and her husband silhouetted in the other window by the soft gaslight of their parlor. I knewI should have gone straight home! Drawing a peeved sigh, I inserted a mental bookmark into my game so I could remember where I was next time, and I trudged to the end of the alley, around past my own stoop, where I stashed Anne-Marie's wagon in the basement, then down to 232, and up the stairs, the air getting thicker and hotter with every floor I climbed. It was really hot in the McGivney top-floor apartment directly under the lead roof, and their gaslighting made it hotter yet. That was the only time in my life I experienced the effect of gaslight, which was softer and more golden than electric light and didn't seem to descend from the ornate gas fixtures on the wall, but rather to come from within the things and people lit, making them sort of glow with an inward radiance... like I imagined life must be for people in the movies, or rich people.

With an edge of grievance in her voice, Mrs McGivney asked me where I'd been the last few days, and I explained that our radio had blown a tube and I had been trying to earn money to replace it. She made a tight little nasal sound, like that was no excuse, so I curtly asked what she wanted. It was late and Mr Kane's was closed. But it turned out that she just wanted to give me a glass of milk and some of those cookies that 'little boys love so much'. I didn't tell her that this particular boy would rather be allowed to pursue his game than be dragged up there to spend time with a boring old lady and a scarecrow. Instead, I sat across from her and nibbled grumpily. But she just smiled at me, then looked over at her husband and sighed with satisfaction, as though everything was all right, now that we were all back together again.

I noticed that when she drank her milk she looked into the glass, like little kids do. And that's when it struck me that, like her husband, she was strangely young. She had white hair, sure, but her skin was smooth and her eyes bright. It was as if, living as they did, without hopes or fears or work or play, time had flowed lightly over them, without eroding their features, and they had remained eternally young and oddly-ghostlike.

As I left, she pressed a nickel into my hand. I protested that I hadn't done anything to earn it, but she just squeezed my hand around it, so I left thinking how nice people can be worse than mean ones, because you can't fight back against nice people.