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By Root 449 0

but it's what makes him do like he does, it's what makes him look like he's got secrets in his eyes. And you tell him, 'Calm down, calm down, take it easy now.' Or you ask him, 'How come you keep doing the same crazy things over and over again, when you know they're just going to get you in trouble again?' Only you know there's no sense arguing with him, on account of it's the thing inside that's making him go. It says, 'Jump,' he jumps. It says, 'Steal,' he steals. It says, 'Cry,' he cries. Unless he dies young, though, or unless he gets everything all his way and nothing big goes wrong, that thing inside of him is going to run down like a wind-up toy. You're working in the prison laundry next to this man. You've known him twenty years. You're working along, and all of a sudden you hear this click from him. You turn to look at him. He's stopped working. He's all calmed down. He looks real dumb. He looks real sweet. You look in his eyes, and the secrets are gone. He can't even tell you his own name right then. He goes back to work, but he'll never be the same. That thing that bothered him so will never click on again. It's dead, it's dead. And that part of that man's life where he had to be a certain crazy way, that's done!"

Noyes, who had begun with such a massive lack of passion, was now rigid and perspiring. Both of his hands were white, choking the broomhandle in a deathgrip. And while the natural design of his story suggested that he calm down, to illustrate how nicely the man next to him in the laundry had calmed down, it was impossible for him to simulate peace. The wrenching work his hands did on the broomhandle became obscene, and the passion that would not die made him nearly inarticulate. "Done! Done!" he insisted. It was the broomhandle that enraged him most now. He tried to snap it across his thigh, snarled at Charley, the owner of the broom, "The son of a bitch won't break! Won't break!

"You lucky bastard," he said to Eliot, still trying to break the broom, "you've had yours!" He showered Eliot with obscenities.

He flung the broom away. "Motherfucker won't break!" he cried, and he stormed out the door.

Eliot was unruffled by the scene. He asked Charley mildly what the man had against brooms. He said, too, that he guessed he had better catch his bus.

"Are—are you all right, Eliot?"

"I'm wonderful."

"You are?"

"I never felt better in my life. I feel as though— as though—"

"Yeah—?"

"As though some marvelous new phase of my life were about to begin."

"That must be nice."

"It is! It is!"

And that continued to be Eliot's mood as he sauntered to the Saw City Kandy Kitchen. The aspect of the street was unnaturally quiet, as though a gun fight were expected, but Eliot did not notice this. The town was certain he was leaving forever. Those most dependent on Eliot had heard the click as clearly as they would have heard a cannon shot. There had been a lot of frantic, lame-brained planning of an appropriate farewell—a firemen's parade, a demonstration with placards saying the things that most needed saying, a triumphal arch of water from fire hoses. The plans had all collapsed. There was no one to organize such a thing, to lead. Most were so eviscerated by the prospect of Eliot's leaving that they could not find the energy or bravery to stand at the rear of a large crowd, even, and feebly wave bye-bye. They knew the street down which he would walk. From that most fled.

Eliot left the afternoon dazzle of the sidewalk for the humid shade of the Parthenon, strolled along the canal. A retired saw-maker, a man about the Senator's age, was fishing with a bamboo pole. He was seated on a camp stool. A transistor radio was on the pavement between his high shoes. The radio was playing "Ol' Man River." "Darkies all work," it said, "while the white folks play."

The old man wasn't a drunk or a pervert or anything. He was simply old, and a widower, and shot full of cancer, and his son in the Strategic Air Command never wrote, and his personality wasn't much. Booze upset him. The Rosewater Foundation had given him a