The road twirled through the park. A ubiquitous, decaying odor pervaded the air, a smell like sun-poached fish on a riverbank. Leaves fell on the windshield, and the sky smeared with barn swallows and sparrows. On the right, more kids were swinging and seesawing. On the left, two men in white pants carried their clubs toward a dirt mound. This golf course needs mowing, I thought.

“Time for some information on Neil,” Eric said. “He used to come here and get picked up by old men. Do you know what I’m talking about?” I shook my head. “Prostitution. Neil was a little whore; had been for quite a few years. He’d come out here whenever he needed money. The oldsters would get their rocks off and hand him a couple of twenties, boosting his ego somewhere into the stratosphere range.”

The park sped past. “Wow,” I said. I’d thought only women could work as prostitutes; thought it only happened in the largest cities. The idea of Neil-as-prostitute seemed like a feature from the sensational TV programs my mother adored. I imagined a newscaster’s voice-over: “This teenage boy generates an ample amount of money for sex, and it all happens right here in the sleepy midwestern city of Hutchinson, Kansas.” Eric was watching me; I wondered what reaction he expected. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Did you send him that letter?” I finally asked.

“Oh, the one about you?” He looked at the dashboard clock again and steered toward Carey Park’s exit. “Indeed I did. Took me a week to finish. I doubt Neil will write back. But he knows who you are, knows you’re going to meet him when he comes home.”

The park’s road intersected Reformatory Drive, and as we passed I could see KSIR and its four turrets. I noticed a shadow in the southwesternmost tower. The figure might have been my mother, standing guard over the grounds; although I couldn’t be certain, I reached over and honked Eric’s horn, then leaned out the window and waved my arms. It was something I did sometimes.

When we got to North Monroe, Mrs. McCormick was sitting on her front steps. “There she is,” Eric said. Her hair fell across her face, the same color as Neil’s in the photograph. She looked a little wild, dark, very pretty. I instantly liked her.

She trotted over to the car and squeezed into the backseat. Her hand reached forward, its fingernails painted pink, and I shook it. “Eric’s told me about you,” she said. “You’re an old acquaintance of my Neil?”

“Sure am.” Then: “Little League.” Whatever Eric had said, I hoped he’d chosen to disregard the UFO story. Since she didn’t look at me as if I were crazy, I assumed she didn’t know about it.

As for what I knew about her, Eric had sketchily detailed her job at a grocery store, her sense of humor, the fact that she drank. Like my mother, she was a single woman with a teenaged son, but Mrs. McCormick seemed unrestrained, more independent and feisty than my austere, workaholic mother. The two of them wouldn’t get along.

Ellen McCormick seemed especially friendly with Eric, almost acting as if they shared critical secrets, or as if he were her son instead of her son’s friend. What did she know about him and Neil? And what about Neil’s doings in Carey Park? Perhaps it didn’t matter now. She leaned forward, her perfume oozing its nectar, her eyes scanning the ditches for identifying road markers. “Up here by this red barn, make a left,” she directed. “Go a couple of miles. You’ll pass some haystacks and a felled tree in the ditch.” She offered us black licorice whips, pushing them into the front seat as if she’d magically retrieved them from the air. “From the same batch as the ones we ate at Cheyenne Bottoms,” she told Eric. “I can’t get rid of this candy now that Neil’s gone.” I took one, and it slid snakelike from her fingers.

Eric honked as he passed a hilly cemetery, its stone crosses and mausoleums outlined against the horizon. He drove farther into the boondocks. Hutchinson’s city limits disappeared behind us. “Here it is,” Mrs. McCormick said from the backseat; Eric steered into the ditch and stopped.

The watermelon field-a flat, sandy plot lacking trees-was separated from the road by a damaged barbed wire fence. A sign, wired to a fence post, spelled out TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. We began trespassing regardless. I could tell the melons had seen better days: their leaves and vines had yellowed, with carcasses of fruit scattered here and there, exhibiting crimson wounds, ravaged to smithereens by raccoons.

We crawled over the fence. “My father taught me-” I said, then stopped myself. No, that was not what I wanted to say. “Um, I know how to tell if a melon’s ripe. There’s a little coil where the fruit meets the vine. It turns brown, and the melon’s ready. I hate to say it, but these are rotten.” I sounded like my professors at the college, and I suddenly wished I’d shut up.

Mrs. McCormick was unfazed. “I don’t need the meat,” she said. “Just the rinds. My neighbor lady taught me to make watermelon rind pickles. Ooh, they’re good. I could get drunk on them. Now, let’s get to picking.”

I searched awhile. A scattering of pumpkins freckled the field’s far end; since Halloween was approaching, I robbed the three with the most intriguing shapes and carried them back to the fence. Good melons were harder to find. Still, I discovered some whose curlicues were brown instead of black; these I ripped from the vines and placed beside the pumpkin trio.

Mrs. McCormick began whooping, her voice lilting in the air like a yodeler’s. She had spied a raccoon. I glanced up and saw her hightailing through the watermelon patch. She chased the coon, gaining on it, her speed almost superhuman. The stripes on the animal’s tail bobbed through the dying vines, and twice she leaned to try and snatch the tail, her feet sliding in the loose sand. Eric laughed, one hand clasped over his mouth, his eyes darting from Mrs. McCormick to me to watch my reaction. Just before she could snag it, the raccoon reached the pasture’s end and scurried under the barbed wire, secure at last. Mrs. McCormick raised her head, gave a final whoop, then turned back to us, exasperated.

Eric calmed down and began wandering around lazily, stirring up clouds of dust. Neil’s mother returned to her previous spot and continued foraging for healthy melons. After a while, she looked up from the space where she was crouching and mock-frowned. She pointed to Eric and aimed her voice at the sky. “What to do with this one? He doesn’t want to work.” Then her finger pointed at me. “But this one,” she said, “is a keeper. This is the one my Neil will have to meet.” I wasn’t certain what she meant by that, but I liked the sound of it. She pushed a sugar baby melon with the flat of her hand, and it slowly rolled toward the fence, leaving a trail in the sand.

After the watermelon afternoon, the weather became explicitly autumn. Eric began wearing a series of bulky black sweaters, his pale skin turning paler. I told him the sweaters looked comfortable. The following evening, when I stopped by the mobile home after class, he presented me with a blue one. “No need to think I’m in love with you,” he said. “I just wanted you to have this. A gift from a friend.”

My mother was working overtime, so I invited Eric back to Little River. He fetched his tapes and a bottle of whiskey. I started to say, Don’t let my mother see that, but that sounded inane. I started to say, I’ve never been drunk before, and that sounded even more inane. I finally said, “Let’s go.”

At home, my room was chilly, so I slipped the blue sweater over my head. “That’s better.” I chose a tape by a band called Breathless and blasted the volume. Eric uncapped the whiskey, took a drink, and delivered it to me. He began to search my closet, finding sheets of paper and a cigar box full of magic markers. Scribbled on the box, in my father’s handwriting, was 6¢ PER POUND. He had written that years ago, when Deborah and I had sold watermelons during the Kansas State Fair.