I rubbed the top of his soft, brushlike hair as the two cars turned down a dirt alley and their dust rolled across the wash hanging behind a row of clapboard shacks.

The typical isolation unit in a prison is a surreal place of silence, bare stone, solid iron doors, and loss of all distinction between night and day. Its intention is to lock up the prisoner with the worst company possible, namely, his own thoughts.

But fear and guilt have corrosive effects in the free people's world as well.

Bunny Vogel passed my house twice, driving a customized maroon '55 Chevy, before he mustered the courage to turn in the driveway and walk out to the chicken run in back, where I was picking up eggs in an apple basket.

He wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and jeans and Roman sandals without socks, and his tangled bronze-colored hair seemed to glow on the tips against the late sun. With his classical profile and his abdominal muscles that were like oiled leather, he could have been a male model for the covers of romance novels, except for the sunken scar that curled like an inset pink worm along his jawbone.

'Pretty nice automobile,' I said.

'What you said the night you busted Darl in the nose? About me being loyal to a guy who cost me a pro career?'

'I didn't mean to offend you, Bunny.'

He let out a breath. 'I think you're gonna pin the tail on any donkey you can. I ain't gonna be it, Mr Holland,' he said.

'You want to come inside?'

'No… The old black guy out at Shorty's told you Roseanne Hazlitt slapped somebody in the parking lot the night she was killed.'

'How do you know that?'

'Darl heard the old guy'd been talking to you. So he kind of got in his face about it.'

'He's quite a kid. I don't think I've ever known one exactly like him.'

'It was me she slapped. I ain't gonna hide it no more.'

I picked up a brown egg from behind a tractor tire and dropped it in the basket. I didn't look at him. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

'But that's when I left. I didn't see Roseanne or Darl or none of the others after that. I ain't part of nothing that happened later that night,' he said.

'Who was?'

'God's truth, Mr Holland, I don't know.'

'You told me you weren't mixed up with Roseanne, Bunny.'

He kneaded his fists at his sides and the veins in his forearms swelled with blood. Then his face colored and his eyes glazed with shame.

'Damn, I knew this was gonna be a sonofabitch,' he said.

This is the story he told me.

He was a high school senior, on the varsity, with the kind of bone-breaking running power that left tacklers dazed and sometimes bloody in his wake, when he first noticed her watching him at practice from the empty stands.

He remembered the balmy gold afternoon that he walked over to her, his cleats crunching on the cinder-and-pea-gravel track, and tossed the football into her hands. He thought it was a clever thing to do, the kind of gesture that disarmed most girls, that made them feel vulnerable and a little foolish and gave them a chance to be coy and defenseless in his presence.

She flipped it back at him with both hands, so fast he had to duck to avoid being hit in the face. Then she opened her compact and put on lipstick as though he were not there.

'How old are you, anyway?' he asked.

'Fifteen. You got something against being fifteen?' She squeezed her knees together and wagged them back and forth.

He looked back over his shoulder at the practice field, at the second-string, whose attention was absorbed with thudding their pads against one another and running plays they would never be allowed to run in a game that counted.

'You want to go to a movie tonight?' he asked.

'The drive-in?'

'It don't have to be the drive-in.'

'I'll think about it.'

'You'll think about it?'

'I work at the Dairy Queen. I get off at six. I'll let you know then.'

He watched her walk down the empty concrete aisle, then across the worn grass to the bus stop in front of the school, her hips swaying under her plaid skirt. He kept glancing back at the practice field, as though someone were watching him, and his own thoughts confused and angered him.

He was at the Dairy Queen at five-thirty.

They did it a week later, amid a drone of cicadas, in the back of his uncle's old Plymouth, on cushions that smelled of dust and nicotine, and he realized immediately she had lied and that she was a virgin and he was hurting her even more deeply than the gasp, the clutch of pain in her throat, indicated. But he couldn't stop, nor did he know how to be gentle, nor could he admit that most of his sexual experience had been with Mexican prostitutes in San Antonio and the mill women his father brought home when he was drunk.

He was frightened when he saw how much she bled and he offered to drive her to a hospital in another county.

'You afraid to take me to one here?' she said.

'I don't want you in trouble with your folks, that's all,' he lied.

'I don't need a doctor, anyhow. Did you like me?' she said.

'Yeah, sure.'

'No, you didn't. But you will next time,' she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Her hand found his. The trees that had gone dark outside the car made him think of stone pillars wrapped with the tracings of fireflies, but he did not know why.

He saw her two days later in front of the shoe store downtown and bought her a lemon Coke at the small soda fountain in back of the Mexican grocery. He told her he would call her that evening but he didn't.

Two weeks passed before he realized it was not he who had avoided her; she had made no phone call to him, had not come out to the practice field as he had expected, had not told anything of their first date to anyone he knew.

He found himself watching her at her job at the Dairy Queen from his parked car across the street. Then one night at closing time he saw her go in back, in her uniform, and emerge moments later from a side door in suede boots and tight jeans and hoop earrings and vinyl black jacket, her mouth bright with fresh lipstick, and mount the back of a motorcycle a Mexican kid who looked carved out of an oak stump sat splayed upon, his genitalia sculpted against his jeans.

A half hour later he found them both at the drive-in restaurant north of town.

'Get in my car, Roseanne,' he said. Then to the Mexican boy, 'Here the drift, greaseball. You can ride your hog home and fuck your fist tonight. Or walk out of here on broken sticks.'

'Oh yeah, she told me about you… Vogel, the running bo-hunk, right?' the Mexican replied. 'I got news for you, sperm-brain. She's jailbait. I hope you end up in the Walls and somebody jams a chainsaw up your cheeks.'

An hour later Bunny and Roseanne made love on a bare mattress in the darkened back of the filling station where he worked on weekends.

Through the rest of his senior year she was available whenever he wanted her. She rarely made demands or threw temper tantrums, and the fact that he didn't take her to the parties or places where his friends went seemed of no concern to her. But he would realize, again, belatedly, as had always been the case, he did not really understand the nature of the game. Just as he had worried that her age would diminish him in the eyes of his classmates (until he discovered that, as a West Ender, he was not expected to date anyone of significance, anyway), he also learned that Roseanne didn't care about his world or friends because she had brought him into hers.

Sophomore girls giggled when he walked by, and one time three of them hung a condom filled with milk on a string inside his hall locker. When they had slumber parties his father would be wakened by phone calls that made him wonder if his son had become a child molester.