Mike recognized the tone of voice as the one he used for his most serious sins during Confession. "Where is it?"

"I hid it behind the old depot."

Mike nodded. To retrieve the bike, Dale would have to go back through Congden's neighborhood. "I'll get it," he said.

Dale looked at him with what looked like a mixture of relief, embarrassment, and anger. The anger, Mike figured, was at feeling so relieved. "Why? Why should you get it? It's my bike."

Mike shrugged, discovered that he was still carrying some of the grass from the field, and chewed on the bottom part of it. "It doesn't make any difference to me. But I'm going up that way to church later, and it makes sense that I get it. Think . . . Congden isn't looking for me. Besides, if I'd had a rifle aimed at my face once today, I wouldn't go looking for another chance. Uh-uh, I'll get it after lunch when I'm up there running an errand for Father C." Mike thought, Another lie. Do I confess this one? He didn't think so.

This time, Dale's expression showed so much pure relief that he had to look down as if he were counting his pile of stones to hide it. "OK," he said faintly. And even more faintly, "Thanks."

Lawrence was standing twenty feet away, "armored" plane poised. "Are you jerks ready or are you gonna keep talking all day?"

"Ready," said Dale.

"Launch!" cried Kevin.

"Duck!" yelled Mike.

The missiles flew.

The Old Man wasn't home when Duane got there just before sunset, so he walked back out through the fields to Wittgenstein's grave.

Witt had always carried his after-dinner and gift bones out to this flat, grassy area in the east pasture, burying them in the soft soil at the top of the hill above the creek. So that's where Duane had buried Witt.

Beyond the pasture and cornfields to the west, the sun hung on the horizon in the thick-aired, full-bellied Illinois sunset that Duane could not imagine living without. The air around him was blue-gray with the end of day and sound traveled with the slow ease of thought. Duane could hear the soft shuffle and wheeze of the cows coming in from the far reaches of pasture even though they were still out of sight over the hill to the north. Smoke hung thick in the air from where old Mr. Johnson had been burning weeds along his fence more than a mile to the south, and the evening tasted of dust and tiredness and the sweet incense of that smoke.

Duane sat next to Witt's small grave while the sun set and the evening allowed itself to go gently into night. Venus appeared first, blazing above the eastern horizon like one of the UFOs that Duane used to sit in this field at night and watch for with Witt lying patiently at his side. Then the other stars moved into the sky, each quite visible this far from any scattered light. The air began to cool off slowly, reluctantly, the humidity still causing Duane's shirt to cling to his ample torso, but eventually the day's heat dissipated and the heaped soil under Duane's hand cooled to the touch. He patted the grave a final time and ambled slowly back to the house, aware again of how different it was to walk alone through the high grass rather than keeping one's pace slow to accommodate an aging and half-blind collie.

The Borgia Bell. He'd wanted to talk to the Old Man about it, but his father wouldn't be in any mood to talk if he'd been at Carl's or the Black Tree all afternoon.

Duane made dinner for himself, frying pork chops in the large skillet, cutting up potatoes and onions with a practiced hand while turning his radio, and listened for a while to WHO from Des Moines. The news on the hour was the usual stuff-Nationalist China was still complaining in the U.N. about Red China's shelling of Quemoy the previous week, but no one in the U.N. seemed to want another Korea; Broadway shows were still shut down by an Actors Equity strike; Senator John Kennedy's people were saying that the once and future candidate was going to give a major foreign-policy speech in Washington the next week, but Ike seemed to be stealing the limelight from all potential candidates by planning a major trip to the Far East; the U.S. was demanding that Gary Powers be returned by the Russians while Argentina was demanding that Israel return the kidnapped Adolf Eichmann. The sports included an announcement of a ban on homemade scaffolds at the Indianapolis 500 of the kind that had collapsed during this year's Memorial Day race, killing a couple of people and injuring almost a hundred more. There was talk of the upcoming rematch between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson.

Duane turned the volume up and listened as he ate alone at the long table. He liked boxing. He'd like to write a story about it someday. Something about Negroes maybe . . . Negroes finding equality through fighting in the ring. Duane had listened to the Old Man and Uncle Art talk about Jackie Johnson years ago, and the memory had stuck in his mind like the plot of a favorite novel. It could be a good novel, Duane thought, if I knew how to write it. And knew enough about boxing and Negroes and Jackie Johnson and life and everything to write it.

The Borgia Bell. Duane finished his dinner, washed the dishes and coffee cup along with the Old Man's breakfast dishes, put them back in the cupboard and walked through the house.

It was dark except for the kitchen light and the old place seemed creakier and eerier than usual. The upstairs, with the Old Man's bedroom deserted, Duane's old room unused, seemed a heavy presence above him. The Borgia Bell, hanging up there in Old Central above us all these years? Duane shook his head and turned on a light in the dining room.

The learning machines sat there in all their dusty glory. Other inventions littered the worktables and floor. The only one that was plugged in or working was the phone-answering device the Old Man had built a couple of winters ago out of pique at missing calls: a simple combination of telephone parts and a small reel-to-reel tape recorder, the device plugged into the phone socket, gave a recorded message, and invited the caller to leave a message.

Almost everybody who called-except Uncle Art-hung up in anger or confusion at having a machine answer the phone, but sometimes the Old Man could tell who was calling by recorded curses or mutters. Besides, Duane's father liked the irritation it caused. Even to the phone company. Ma Bell people had been out to the farm twice, threatening to shut off the McBrides' service if Mr. McBride didn't quit breaking the law by tampering with the phone company's equipment and hookups, not to mention violating federal regulations by tape-recording people's conversations without their permission.

The Old Man had pointed out that these were his conversations, that the people were calling him, that FCC regulations demanded that the person know they were being taped- which he said right on his tape-and, when it came right down to it, Ma Bell was a motherfucking capitalist monopoly and it could go stick its threats and equipment up its corporate ass.

But the threats had kept the Old Man from ever trying to market his answering devices-what he called his "telephonic Jeeves." Duane was just happy they still had a phone.

Duane had refined the Old Man's device in recent months so that a light blinked when there were recorded messages. He'd actually wanted to fix it up so that different-colored lights would glow at the recognition of different voices on the tape-green for Uncle Art, blue for Dale or one of the other kids, flashing red for the phone company guy, and so forth-but while the problem of voice recognition hadn't been too hard to solve . . . Duane had hooked up a rebuilt tone generator to an ID-circuit based on old tape recordings of callers, then made a simple schematic for a feedback loop to the battery of who's-calling lights ... the parts had been too expensive, so he'd quit at having a light blink once for each call on the tape.