On the memo pad he wrote and underlined two words: “Let’s try.”

Baker sighed and nodded. “Okay. Vince Hogan works down to the sawmill… well, that ain’t just true. What he does mostly is fucks off down to the sawmill. We’ll take a ride down there about nine, if that’s fine with you. Maybe we can get him scared enough to spill the beans.”

Nick nodded.

“How’s your mouth? Doc Soames left some pills. He said it would probably be a misery to you.”

Nick nodded ruefully.

“I’ll get em. It…” He broke off, and in Nick’s silent movie world, he watched the sheriff explode several sneezes into his handkerchief. “That’s another thing,” he went on, but he had turned away now and Nick caught only the first word. “I’m comin down with a real good cold. Jesus Christ, ain’t life grand? Welcome to Arkansas, boy.”

He got the pills and came back to where Nick sat. After he passed them and a glass of water to Nick, Baker rubbed gently under the angle of his jaw. There was a definite painful swelling there. Swollen glands, coughing, sneezing, a low fever, felt like. Yeah, it was shaping up to be a wonderful day.

Larry woke up with a hangover that was not too bad, a mouth that tasted as if a baby dragon had used it for a potty chair, and a feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be.

The bed was a single, but there were two pillows on it. He could smell frying bacon. He sat up, looked out the windows at another gray New York day, and his first thought was that they had done something horrible to Berkeley overnight: turned it dirty and sooty, had aged it. Then last night began coming back and he realized he was looking at Fordham, not Berkeley. He was in a second-floor flat on Tremont Avenue, not far from the Concourse, and his mother was going to wonder where he had been last night. Had he called her, given her any kind of excuse, no matter how thin?

He swung his legs out of bed and found a crumpled pack of Winstons with one crazy cigarette left in it. He lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter. It tasted like dead horseshit. Out in the kitchen the sound of frying bacon went on and on, like radio static.

The girl’s name was Maria and she had said she was a… what? Oral hygienist, was that it? Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral. He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Perdue drumstick. Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the crappy little stereo in the living room, singing about how much water had gone underneath the bridge, time we had wasted on the way. If his memory was correct, Maria sure hadn’t wasted much time. She had been a little overwhelmed to discover he was that Larry Underwood. At one point in the evening’s festivities, hadn’t they gone out reeling around looking for an open record store so they could buy a copy of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”?

He groaned very softly and tried to retrace yesterday from its innocuous beginnings to its frantic, gobbling finale.

The Yankees weren’t in town, he remembered that. His mother had been gone to work when he woke up, but she had left a Yankees schedule on the kitchen table along with a note: “Larry. As you can see, the Yankees won’t be back until Jul 1. They are playing a doubleheader the 4th of July. If you’re not doing anything that day, why not take your mom to the ball park. I’ll buy the beer and hotdogs. There are eggs and sausage in the fridge or sweetrolls in the breadbox if you like them better. Take care of yourself kiddo.” There was a typical Alice Underwood PS: “Most of the kids you hung around with are gone now and good riddance to that bunch of hoods butt think Buddy Marx is working at that print shop on Stricker Avenue.”

Just thinking of that note was enough to make him wince. No “Dear” before his name. No “Love” before her signature. She didn’t believe in phony stuff. The real stuff was in the refrigerator. Sometime while he had been sleeping off his drive across America, she had gone out and stocked up on every goddam thing in the world that he liked. Her memory was so perfect it was frightening. A Daisy canned ham. Two pounds of real butter—how the hell could she afford that on her salary? Two six-packs of Coke. Deli sausages. A roast of beef already marinating in Alice’s secret sauce, the contents of which she refused to divulge even to her son, and a gallon of Baskin-Robbins Peach Delight ice cream in the freezer. Along with a Sara Lee cheesecake. The kind with strawberries on top.

On impulse, he had gone into the bathroom, not just to take care of his bladder but to check the medicine cabinet. A brand-new Pepsodent toothbrush was hanging in the old holder, where all of his childhood toothbrushes had hung, one after another. There was a package of disposable razors in the cabinet, a can of Barbaso shave cream, even a bottle of Old Spice cologne. Not fancy, she would have said—Larry could actually hear her—but smelly enough, for the money.

He had stood looking at these things, then had taken the new tube of toothpaste out and held it in his hand. No “Dear,” no “Love, Mom.” Just a new toothbrush, new tube of toothpaste, new bottle of cologne. Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind. He began brushing his teeth, wondering if there might not be a song in that someplace.

The oral hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon half-slip and nothing else. “Hi, Larry,” she said. She was short, pretty in a vague Sandra Dee sort of way, and her breasts pointed at him perkily without a sign of a sag. What was the old joke? That’s right, Loot—she had a pair of 38s and a real gun. Ha-ha, very funny. He had come three thousand miles to spend the night being eaten alive by Sandra Dee.

“Hi,” he said, and got up. He was naked but his clothes were at the foot of the bed. He began to put them on.

“I’ve got a robe you can wear if you want to. We’re having kippers and bacon.”

Kippers and bacon? His stomach began to shrivel and fold in on itself.

“No, honey, I’ve got to run. Someone I’ve got to see.”

“Oh hey, you can’t just run out on me like that—”

“Really, it’s important.”

“Well, I’m impawtant, too!” She was becoming strident. It hurt Larry’s head. For no particular reason, he thought of Fred Flintstone bellowing “WIIILMAAA! ” at the top of his cartoon lungs.

“Your Bronx is showing, luv,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She planted her hands on her hips, the greasy spatula sticking out of one closed fist like a steel flower. Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn’t fetched. He stepped into his pants and buttoned them. “So I’m from the Bronx, does that make me black? What have you got against the Bronx? What are you, some kind of racist?”

“Nothing and I don’t think so,” he said, and walked over to her in his bare feet. “Listen, the somebody I have to meet is my mother. I just got into town two days ago and I didn’t call her last night or anything… did I?” he added hopefully.

“You didn’t call anybody,” she said sullenly. “I just bet it’s your mother.”

He walked back to the bed and stuck his feet in his loafers. “It is. Really. She works in the Chemical Bank Building. She’s a housekeeper. Well, these days I guess she’s a floor supervisor.”

“I bet you aren’t the Larry Underwood that has that record, either.”

“You believe what you want. I have to run.”

“You cheap prick!” she flashed at him. “What am I supposed to do with all the stuff I cooked?”

“Throw it out the window?” he suggested.

She uttered a high squawk of anger and hurled the spatula at him. On any other day of his life it would have missed. One of the first laws of physics was, to wit, a spatula will not fly a straight trajectory if hurled by an angry oral hygienist. Only this was the exception that proved the rule, flip-flop, up and over, smash, right into Larry’s forehead. It didn’t hurt much. Then he saw two drops of blood fall on the throw-rug as he bent over to pick the spatula up.