The porky little girl burst into whiny tears.

The porky little boy sat astride his Big Wheel with his lower jaw hanging almost to his chest.

Arnie, who had always scuttered past the smoking area at school like a hunted thing, never even flinched. He actually seemed to want it to happen.

Ralph whirled on me, his eyes bulging with fury.

“All right, you little shit,” he said. “You first.”

I held onto his hand, straining. “Come on, man,” I said in a low voice. “The tyre’s in my boot. Give us five minutes to change it and get out of your face. Please.”

Little by little the pressure of holding his hand back slacked off. He glanced at his kids, the little girl snivelling, the little boy wide-eyed, and that seemed to decide him.

“Five minutes,” he agreed. He looked at Arnie. “You’re just goddam lucky I ain’t calling the police on you. That thing’s uninspected and it ain’t got no tags, either.”

I waited for Arnie to say something else inflammatory and send the game into extra innings, but maybe he hadn’t forgotten everything he knew about discretion.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry if I got hot under the collar.”

Ralph grunted and tucked his shirt back into his pants with savage little jabs. He looked over at his kids again. “Get in the house!” he roared. “What you doing out here? You want me to put a bang-shang-a-lang on you?”

Oh God, what an onomatopoeic family, I thought. For Christ’s sake don’t put a bang-shang-a-lang on them, Pops—they might make poopy-kaka in their pants.

The kids fled to their mother, leaving their Big Wheels behind.

“Five minutes,” he repeated, looking at us balefully. And later tonight, when he was hoisting a few with the boys, he would be able to tell them how he had done his part to hold the line against the drugs-and-sex generation. Yessir, boys, I told em to get that fucking junk away from my house before I put a bang-shang-a-lang on them. And you want to believe they moved like their feet was on fire and their asses were catching. And then he would light up a Lucky. Or a Camel.

We put Amie’s jack under the bumper. Arnie hadn’t pumped the lever more than three times when the jack snapped in two. It made a dusty sound when it went, and rust puffed up. Arnie looked at me, his eyes at once humble and stricken.

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll use mine.”

It was twilight now, starting to get dark. My heart was still beating too fast and my mouth was sour from the confrontation with the Big Cheese of 119 Basin Drive.

“I’m sorry, Dennis,” he said in a low voice. “I won’t get you involved with any of this again”

“Forget it. Let’s just get the tyre on.”

We used my jack to get the Plymouth up (for several horrible seconds I thought the rear bumper was just going to rip off in a screech of decaying metal) and pulled the dead tyre. We got the new one on, tightened the lug-nuts some, and then let it down. It was a great relief to have the car standing on the street again; the way that rotted bumper bent up under the jack had scared me.

“There,” Arnie said, clapping the ancient, dented hubcap back on over the lug-nuts.

I stood looking at the Plymouth, and the feeling I’d had in LeBay’s garage suddenly recurred. It was looking at the fresh new Firestone on the rear right that did it, The blackmail still had one of the manufacturer’s stickers on it and the bright yellow chalk-marks from the gas-jockey’s hurried wheel-balancing.

I shivered a little—but to convey the sudden weirdness I felt would be impossible. It was as if I had seen a snake that was almost ready to shed its old skin, that some of that old skin had already flaked away, revealing the glistening newness underneath.

Ralph was standing on his porch, glowering down at us. In one hand he was holding a drippy hamburger sandwich on Wonder Bread. His other hand was fisted around a can of Iron City.

“Handsome, ain’t he?” I muttered to Arnie as I slung his busted jack into the Plymouth’s boot.

“A regular Robert Deadford,” Arnie muttered back, and that was it—we both got the giggles, the way you sometimes will at the end of a long and tense situation.

Arnie threw the flat into the boot on top of the jack and then got snorting and holding his hands over his mouth. He looked like a kid who just got caught raiding the jam-jar. Thinking that made me break up all the way.

“What are you two punks laughing at?” Ralph roared. He came to the steps of his porch. “Huh? You want to try laughing on the other sides of your faces for a while? I can show you how, believe me!”

“Get out of here quick,” I said to Arnie, and bolted back to my Duster. Nothing could stop the laughter now; it just came rolling out. I fell into the front seat and keyed the engine, whinnying with laughter. In front of me, Arnie’s Plymouth started up with a bellowing roar and a huge stinking cloud of blue exhaust. Even over it, I could hear his high, helpless laughter, a sound that was close to hysteria.

Ralph came charging across his lawn, still holding his drippy burger and his beer.

“What are you laughing at, you punks? Huh?”

“You, you nerd!” Arnie shouted triumphantly, and pulled out with a rattling fusillade of backfires. I tromped the gas pedal of my own car and had to swerve sharply to avoid Ralph, who was now apparently intent on murder. I was still laughing, but it wasn’t good laughter anymore, if it ever had been—it was a shrill, breathless sound, almost like screaming.

“I’ll kill you, punk!” Ralph roared.

I goosed the accelerator again, and this time I almost tailgated Arnie.

I flipped Ralph the old El Birdo. “Jam it!” I yelled.

Then he was behind us. He tried to catch up; for a few seconds he came pounding along the sidewalk, and then he stopped, breathing hard and snarling.

“What a crazy day,” I said aloud, a little frightened by the shaky, teary quality of my own voice. That sour taste was back in my mouth. “What a crazy fucking day.”

Darnell’s Garage on Hampton Street was a long building with rusty corrugated-tin sides and a rusty corrugated-tin roof. Out front was a grease-caked sign which read: SAVE MONEY! YOUR KNOW-HOW, OUR TOOLS! Below that was another sign in smaller type, reading Garage Space Rented by the Week, Month, or Year.

The automobile junkyard was behind Darnell’s. It was a block-long space enclosed in five-foot-high strips of the same corrugated tin, Will Darnell’s apathetic nod toward the Town Zoning Board. Not that there was any way the Board was going to bring Wilt Darnell to heel, and not just because two of the three Zoning Board members were his friends. In Libertyville, Will Darnell knew just about everyone who counted. He was one of those fellows you find in almost any large town or small city, moving quietly behind any number of scenes.

I had heard that he was mixed up in the lively drug traffic at Libertyville High and Darby Junior High, and I had also heard that he was on a nodding acquaintance with the big-time crooks in Pittsburgh and Philly. I didn’t believe that stuff—at least, I didn’t think I did—but I knew that if you wanted firecrackers or cherry-bombs or bottle-rockets for the Fourth of July, Will Darnell would sell them to you. I had also heard, from my father, that Will had been indicted twelve years before, when I was but a lad of five, as one of the kingpins in a stolen-car ring that stretched from our part of the world east to New York City and all the way up to Bangor, Maine. Eventually the charges were dropped. But my dad also said he was pretty sure that Will Darnell might be up to his ears in other shenanigans; anything from truck hijackings to fake antiques.

A good place to stay away from, Dennis, my father had said. This had been a year ago, not long after I got my first clunker and had invested twenty dollars in renting one of Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage bays to try and replace the carburettor, an experiment that had ended in dismal failure.