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By Root 4465 0

Really, no matter how much we want to help, no matter how much we try to do on the fringes, we’re outside.” In imitation of his father he has clasped his hands behind him and turned his back on his auditor; through the screen he watches the one other who, perhaps, is not outside, Nelson, lead the Fosnacht boy across the lawn in pursuit of a neighbor’s dog. Nelson’s laughter spills from his head as his clumsy tottering steps jar his body. The dog is old, reddish, small, and slow; the Fosnacht boy is puzzled yet pleased by his friend’s cry of “Lion! Lion!” It interests Eccles to see that under conditions of peace Angstrom’s boy leads the other. The green air seen through the muzzy screen seems to vibrate with Nelson’s noise. Eccles feels the situation: this constant translucent outpour of selfish excitement must naturally now and then dam in the duller boy’s narrower passages and produce a sullen backflow, a stubborn bullying act. He pities Nelson, who will be stranded in innocent surprise many times before he locates in himself the source of this strange reverse tide. It seems to Eccles that he himself was this way as a boy, always giving and giving and always being suddenly swamped. The old dog’s tail wags as the boys approach. It stops wagging and droops in an uncertain wary arc when they surround it like hunters, crowing. Nelson reaches out and beats the dog’s back with both hands. Eccles wants to shout; the dog might bite; he can’t bear to watch.

“Yes but he drifts further away,” Mrs. Springer is whining. “He’s well off. He has no reason to come back if we don’t give him one.”

Eccles sits down in the aluminum chair again. “No. He’ll come back for the same reason he left. He’s fastidious. He has to loop the loop. The world he’s in now, the world of this girl in Brewer, won’t continue to satisfy his fantasies. Just in seeing him from week to week, I’ve noticed a change.”

“Well not to hear Peggy Fosnacht tell it. She says she hears he’s leading the life of Riley. I don’t know how many women he has.”

“Just one, I’m sure. The strange thing about Angstrom, he’s by nature a domestic creature. Oh dear.”

There is a flurry in the remote group; the boys run one way and the dog the other. Young Fosnacht halts but Nelson keeps coming, his face stretched large by fright.

Mrs. Springer hears his sobbing and says angrily, “Did they get Elsie to snap again? That dog must be sick in the head the way she keeps coming over here for more.”

Eccles jumps up—his chair collapses behind him—and opens the screen door and runs down to meet Nelson in the sunshine. The boy shies from him. He grabs him. “Did the dog bite?”

The boy’s sobbing is paralyzed by this new fright, the man in black grabbing him.

“Did Elsie bite you?”

The Fosnacht boy hangs back at a safe distance.

Nelson, unexpectedly solid and damp in Eccles’ arms, releases great rippling gasps and begins to find his voice.

Eccles shakes him to choke this threat of wailing and, wild to make himself understood, with a quick lunge clicks his teeth at the child’s cheek. “Like that? Did the dog do that?”

The boy’s face goes rapt at the pantomime. “Like dis,” he says, and his fine little lip lifts from his teeth and his nose wrinkles and he jerks his head an inch to one side.

“No bite?” Eccles insists, relaxing the grip of his arms.

The little lip lifts again with that miniature fierceness, as if this tells the whole delightful story. Eccles feels mocked by a petite facial alertness that recalls, in tilt and cast, Harry’s. Sobbing sweeps over Nelson again and he breaks away and runs up the porch steps to his grandmother. Eccles stands up; in just that little time of squatting the sun has started sweat on his black back.

As he climbs the steps he is troubled by something pathetic, something penetratingly touching, in the memory of those tiny square teeth bared in that play snarl. The harmlessness yet the reality of the instinct. The kitten’s instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.

He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother’s legs, his face buried in