Need
Theodore Sturgeon
Some towns seem to defy not only time, but change; when this happens in the far hinterland, one is hardly amazed. Yet, amazingly, it happens all the time quite near some of our largest cities. Occasionally one of these is found by the "project" entrepreneur, and becomes the setting for winding windrows of coops and hutches, alternately "ranch" and "split"; yet not even these, and the prefabricated, alien, chain-driven supercilious superservice shopping centers in symbiosis with them, ever become a part of such towns. Whatever span of years it takes to make the "projects" obsolescent only serves to make these towns themselves more solid, more—in the chemical sense—set. Modernity does not and cannot alter the character of such a place, any more than one might alter a suit of chain mail by topping it with a Panama hat.

In such towns are businesses—shops and services—which live as the unassailable town lives, that is to say, in their own way and forever. Purveyors of the same shoes, sheets and sundries as the multi-celled merchandizing mammoths sell go by the board, quite deserving of all that their critics say of them, that they can't keep up with the times, that they're dead and now must lie down. Defiance of time, of change, of anything is, after all, only defiance, and does not in itself guarantee a victory. But certain businesses, by their very nature, may be in a town, may be a town and achieve this defiant immortality. Anyone who has reflected with enough detachment on recent history is in a position to realize that, in revolutionary days, there must have been a certain market for genuine antiques made in America of American materials more than a century earlier. No technology advancing or static can eliminate the window-washer, the launderer, the handyman-smith and their establishments. Fashions in invention might change the vestments of their activity, but never their blood and marrow. The boatwright becomes a specialist in wooden station-wagon bodies, and then in mobile-home interiors. The blacksmith trades his leather bellows for a drill-press and a rack of epoxy resins, but he is what he was, and his shop is his permanence and his town's.

The general store has passed into the hands of the chains. It, and they, pursue the grail of everything, and since to be able to sell everything is on the face of it impossible, they are as impermanent as a military dictatorship that must expand or die, and that dies expanding. But there is another kind of store that sells, not everything, but anything. Its hallmark is that it has no grail at all, and therefore no pursuit. It emphatically does not expand. Its stock is that which has been useful or desirable to some people at some time; its only credo, that anything which has been useful or desirable to some people at some time will again be useful to someone—anything. Here you might find dried flowers under a glass dome, a hand-cranked coffee mill, a toy piano, a two-volume, leather-bound copy of Dibdin's Journey, a pair of two-wheel roller skates or a one tube radio set—the tube is a UX-n and is missing—which tunes with a vario-coupler. You might—you probably would—also find in such a place, a proprietor who could fix almost anything and has the tools to do it with, and who understands that conversation is important and the most important part of it is listening.

Such a town was North Nyack, New York, barely twenty miles from Manhattan, yet—but for superficial scratches—untouched and unchangeable. It contained such a business, the Anything Shoppe—a title that constituted one of the scratches, being a concession to the transient trade, but one that did not bleed—and such a proprietor. His name was Noat, George Noat. G-Note, naturally, to his friends, who were all the people who knew him. He was the ugliest man in town, but that, like the silliness of his concern's name, was only skin-deep.

Why such a trade should be his, or why he was its, might make for some interesting discussion of cause and effect. The fact—which would contribute nothing to the discussion—remained that there was an anythingness about G-Note; not only would he buy any-

thing, sell anything or fix anything, he would also listen to anyone, help anyone and, from the depths of a truly extraordinary well of the quality called empathy—the ability to feel with another's fingertips, look out through another pair of eyes—he could understand.

To George Noat, Prop., then, at twenty minutes to three one stormy morning, came Gorwing.

"G-Note!" Gorwing roared, pounding on the front door of the Anything Shoppe with force enough to set adance the two sets of pony harness and the cabbage grater that hung against it. "G-Note, Goddammit!"

A dim light appeared in the back of the shop, and G-Note's grotesque face and one T-shirted shoulder, over which a big square hand was pulling a gallus-strap, appeared at the edge of the baize curtain that separated G-Note's working from G-Note's living—the most partial of barriers, which suited him. He called, "It's open!" semaphored and withdrew.

Gorwing, small, quick, black hair, snapping black voice and eyes, sharp white teeth, slammed into the shop. The vibration set a clothing-dummy, atop which was perched a rubber imp carnival mask, teetering, and it turned as it teetered, bearing round on Gorwing indignantly. He and it stared one another in the eye for an angry moment, and then he cursed and snatched off the head and threw it behind the counter. "G-Note!" he barked.

G-Note shuffled into the shop, shrugging into a shawl-like grey cardigan and, with his heavy lids, wringing sleep out of his eyes. "I got that toilet you wanted yesterday," he mumbled. "Real tall, with pink rosebuds on. I bet there wouldn't be another like it from here to—"

"The hell with it," said Gorwing. "That was yesterday. Come on, willya?"

G-Note blinked at him. "Come?"

"The car, in the car!" Gorwing half cried, in the tones of excessive annoyance applied usually to people who should know by now. It was unfair, because by now G-Note did not know. "Hurry up, willya? What do I hafta do to make you hurry up?"

Gorwing flung open the door, and G-Note peered out into sodden blowing black. "It's raining out."

Gorwing's tight lips emitted a single sibilant explosion, and he raced out, leaving the door open. A moment later there came the sound of a car door slamming. G-Note shrugged and followed, closing the door behind him, and, hunching his shoulders against the driving rain, made his way out to the car. Gorwing had started it and switched on the lights while he was negotiating the puddles, then flung open the door on the driver's side and slid over into the passenger's seat. He shouted something.

"Huh?" G-Note grunted as he came poking and dripping into the car.

"I said Essex Street and Storms Road, right by the traffic light, and get goin', willya?"

G-Note got himself settled and got going. "Gosh, Gorwing," he said, protesting gently.

"Quitcher bitchin'," said Gorwing through clamped teeth and curled lips. "Tromp down on that thing."

"Where we goin'?"

"I told you."

"Yeah, but—"

"You'll see when we get there. There's some money in it. You think I'd come out on a night like this if there wasn't some money in it? Listen, G-Note—" He paused with a mechanical abruptness, as if the machine gun with which he fired his words had jammed.

"What?"

Unjammed as suddenly, Gorwing shot: "You wouldn't let me down."

"No, I won't do that, but I wish I knew what I was 'sposed to do."

They sloshed over the high crown of Storms Hill and down the winding slope on the other side. The slick blacktop showed the loom of lights ahead before they saw the lights themselves—gold tinged with green, suddenly with ruby; the intersection and the traffic signal.

"Cut him out. Quick! Don'tflet'm pick up that guy."

Peering ahead, G-Note saw a car slowing for a waving figure who stood at the far side of the intersection. G-Note seemed not to have heard Gorwing's crackling order, or to have understood; yet it was as if his hands and feet had. The car lurched forward, cut in to the curb at the right of the other, and almost alongside. Startled, the other driver shifted and pulled away up the hill. At Gorwing's grunted order, G-Note stopped at the curb by the sodden and obviously bewildered pedestrian who had been trying to flag the other car. The man bent and tried to peer into the dark interior. Gorwing rolled down his window.

The man said, "Can you give me a lift?"

Gorwing reached back and opened the rear door, and the man plunged in. "Thank God," he panted, slamming the door. "I've got to get home, but I mean quick. You going near Rockland Lake?"

"We're going anywhere you say, mister," said Gorwing. "But it'll cost."

"Oh, that's all right. You're a taxi, hm?"

"We are now." Gorwing's hard hand took G-Note's elbow, squeezed, warned; but, warning or no, G-Note gasped at what came next: "Rockland Lake costs one hundred bucks from here."

G-Note's gasp was quite lost in the newcomer's wordless and indignant sound.

"What's the matter," Gorwing rasped, "can't raise it?"

"What kind of a holdup is this?" squeaked the man.

For the second time Gorwing reached back and swung the rear door open. Then he stretched across G-Note and shut off the motor. In the sudden silence, the sluicing of rain across the roof and the passenger's angry breath seemed too loud. Gorwing said, at a quarter the volume and twice the rasp, "I don't much go for that holdup talk."

The man plunged up and out-half out. He stood, with one foot still in the car, and looked up the road and down the road. Nothing moved but the rain. Clearly, they heard the relay in the traffic light saying clock, chuck! as the dim sodden shine of the intersection turned from green to red. To anyone thinking of traffic and transport, it was a persuasive sight. At three in the morning, chances of anything passing before daylight were remote.

He put his head back in. "Look, whoever you are, I've just got to get to Rockland Lake."

"So by now," said Gorwing, "we would be past Hook Mountain Road more'n halfway there. But you want to talk."

The man made his inarticulate sound and got back in. "Go ahead."

Gorwing, with a touch, checked G-Note's move toward the ignition. "A hundred bucks?"

"Yes, damn you!"

Gorwing turned the dome light on. "Take a good careful look at him," he said. Since he might have said it to either of them, they necessarily looked at one another, G-Note twisting around in his seat to look back, the passenger huddled sullen and glaring in the rear corner. G-Note saw a softhanded petulant man in his early thirties, with very fine, rather receding reddish hair and surprisingly bright blue eyes.

G-Note's great ugly head loomed over him like an approaching rockfall. The domelight, almost directly overhead, accentuated the heavy ridges of bone over his eyes, leaving the eyes themselves all but invisible in their caves. It gleamed from the strong fleshy arches that walled his wide nostrils and conceal the soft sensitivity of his thin upper lip while making the most of the muscular protruding underlip.

"You'll pay," said Gorwing, grinning wolfishly and switching off the light. "Drive," he said, nudging G-Note. He laughed. "I got a witness and you ain't," he said cheerfully.

"Just hurry," said the passenger.

G-Note, wondering more than anything else at the first laugh he had ever heard from Gorwing, drove. He said, unhappily, "This ain't a fun one, this time."

"Shut up," Gorwing said.

"Can't you go any faster?" cried the passenger.

He got no response. Only the anxious would feel that this skilled hurtling was not fast enough. No object, including an automobile, was inanimate with G-Note's big hands upon it; this one moved as if it knew its own way and its own weight.

"In here," said the passenger.

"I always wondered," said Gorwing. His meaning was clear. Many must have wondered just who lived behind these stone posts, these arresting NO ADMITTANCE and PRIVATE ROAD, KEEP OUT and NO TURNING and DEAD END ROAD signs. The drive climbed, turning, and in fifty yards one would have thought the arterial road below had ceased to exist. They came to a T. Neat little signs with arrows said SMITH on the left and POLLARD on the right. "Left," said the passenger.

They climbed again, and abruptly the road was manicured, rolled, tended, neat. "This will do."

There was a turn-around; the drive continued, apparently to a garage somewhere. In the howling wet, there was the shadowed white mass of a house. The man opened the door.

"A hundred bucks," Gorwing said.

The man took out his wallet. Gorwing turned on the dome.

"I have only twenty here. Twenty-one."

"You got it inside." It could have been a question.

"Damn it!" the man flared. "Four lousy miles!"

"You was in a awful hurry," Gorwing drawled. He took the twenty, and the one, out of the man's hand. "I want the rest of it."

The man got out of the car and backed off into the rain. From about forty feet, he shrieked at them. He meant, undoubtedly, to roar like a lion, but his voice broke and he shrieked. "Well, I won't pay it!" and then he ran like a rabbit.

"Yes you will!" Gorwing bellowed. He slammed the back door of the car, which, if heard by the fleeing man, must have doubled his speed.

"Don't go out in that," said G-Note.

"Oh, I ain't about to," said Gorwing. "He'll pay in the morning. He'll pay you."

"Me?"

"You drop me off home and then come back and park here," said Gorwing. "Don't for Pete's sake go back to bed. You want to sleep any more, you do it right here. When he sees you he'll pay. You won't have to say nothing. Just be here."

Z2.

G-Note started the car and backed, turning. " Oh, why not just let it go? You got more than it's worth."

Gorwing made a laughing noise. This was not the laugh that had amazed G-Note before; it was the one that G-Note had thought was all the laughter Gorwing had. It was also all the answer Gorwing would offer.

G-Note said, sadly, "You like doing this to that fellow."

Gorwing glanced at the road-signs as they pulled out of the driveway. "Private Road," he read aloud, but not very. It was as if to say, "He can afford it."

"Well," said G-Note again, as they neared North Nyack, "This ain't a fun one, this time."

There had been "fun ones." Like the afternoon Gorwing had come roaring and snapping into his place, just as urgently as he had tonight, demanding to know if G-Note had a copy of Trials and Triumphs, My Forty Years in The Show Business, by P. T. Barnum; and G-Note had! And they had tumbled it, with a lot of other old books, into two boxes, and had driven out to the end of Carrio Lane, where Gorwing just knew there was somebody who needed the book—not who, not why, just that there was somebody who needed it—and he and G-Note had stood at opposite sides of the lane, each with a box of books, and had bellowed at each other, "You got the P. T. Barnum book over there?" and "I don't know if I have the P. T. Barnum book here; have you got the P. T. Barnum book there?" and "What is the name of the P. T. Barnum book?" and "Trials and Triumphs, My Forty Years in The Show Business," and so on, until, sure enough, a window popped open and a lady called down, "Do one of you men really have Barnum's biography there?" and, when they said they had, she said it was a miracle; she came down and gave them fifteen dollars for it. And that other time, when at Gor-wing's urgent behest, G-Note had gone on a hot summer's day to stand blinking in the sun at Broad and Main streets, with a heavy ancient hand-cranked music box unwrapped on his shoulder, and the city man had come running up to him to ask what it played: "Skater's Waltz," G-Note had told him, "and My Rosary." "I'll give you a hundred bucks for it," the man had said, and, when G-Note's jaw dropped and fumbled for an astonished word, he'd made it a hundred and a quarter and had paid it, then and there.

Fun ones, these and others, and it hadn't mattered that the customers (or was it victims?) paid exorbitantly. They did it of their own free will, and they seemed really to need whatever it was. How Gor-wing knew what was needed, and where—but never by whom or why—was a recurrent mystery; but after a while you stopped asking—because Gorwing wouldn't stand catechizing on the subject—and then you stopped wondering; you just went along with it, the way you do with automatic shifting, the innards of an IBM machine, or, if you happen not to know, precisely what chemicals are put into the head of a match to make it light. You don't have to know.

But this man, this passenger they'd charged twenty-five dollars per mile now; it wasn't fun. He was a guy in trouble if ever G-Note had seen one, anxious, worried, even frantic—so anxious he'd say yes to a demand like that, even if he did take it back later; so anxious he was stumbling homeward through the rain at three in the morning. You should help a fellow like that, you shouldn't use his trouble against him. Which didn't seem to bother Gorwing, not one bit: coming into the street-lit area of North Nyack, now, G-Note could glance sidewise at Gorwing's face, see the half grin, the cruel white teeth showing. No, it didn't bother Gorwing.

So… you found out new things about people all the time. Such a thing could be surprising, but, if you don't want surprises like that, you just keep away from people. Thus G-Note shrugged away the matter, as he asked, "Where you staying now?" for Gorwing moved around all the time.

"Just drop me off by O'Grady's."

O'Grady's, the poolhall, was across town from G-Note's place, on the same avenue; yet, passing his own shop, G-Note turned right and made the usual wide detour past the hospital. He made a U-turn at the poolhall and stopped. For a good-night, Gorwing had only, "Now you said you wouldn't let me down."

"All right," said G-Note.

"Forty-sixty, you and me," said Gorwing, and turned away.

G-Note drove off.

Eloise Smith hoped Jody wouldn't be mad. His was not the towering rage of this one nor the sullen grumps of that one, but a waspish, petty, verbose kind of anger, which she had neither the wit nor the words to cope with. She loved Jody and tried her very best to have everything the way he wanted it, but it was hard, sometimes, to know what would annoy him. And when anything did, sometimes she had to go through an hour or more of his darting, flicking admonishments before she even knew what it was.

She'd broken the telephone. Kicked the wire right out of the wall—oh, how clumsy! But she'd done worse than that from time to time, and he'd just laughed. Or she'd done much less serious things and he'd carried on just terrible. Well… she'd just have to wait and see. She hoped she could stay awake, waiting—goodness, he was late. Elks nights were always the latest; he was secretary, and was always left to lock the hall after the meeting. But he usually got home by two anyway—it was three already, and still no sign of—oh—there he…

She ran and opened the door. He spun in, dripping, out of breath. He slammed the door and shot the bolt, and pushed past her to peer out the front window. Not that anything could be seen out there. He turned from the window. He looked wild. She stood before him, clutching her negligee against her breast.

"Eloise… you all right?"

"All right? Why, of course I'm all right!"

"'Thank God?" He pushed past her again, darted to the living room door, flicked his gaze across and back. "You all alone?"

"Well, not since you got here," she said, in a hopeless attempt to produce some levity. "Here, you're wet through. Give me your hat. You poor—"

"It might interest you to know… you've driven me half out… of my mind," he panted. She had never seen him like this. He might be a little short of breath from running from the car to the house, but not this much, and it should be, well, tapering off. It wasn't. It seemed to get more marked as he talked. He was very pale. His red-rimmed eyes and the rain running off his bland features gave him the ludicrous expression of a five-year-old who has bumped his head and is trying not to cry. She followed him into the living room and rounded on him, to face him, and for the third time he pushed past her, this time to fling open the dining room door. She said timidly, "Jody, I broke the telephone. I mean, I fell over the wire and it came out."

"Oh, you did, did you."

He was still panting. "Jody!" she cried, "whatever is the matter? What's happened?"

"Oh, what's happened?" he barked. His eyes were too round. "I call you up and somebody cuts the wire, as far as I know. I rush out of the hall to the car and the door slams behind me, that's all. My keys on the table. Can't get back in, can't start the car. Try my best to get here quickly. Hitchhiking. Get waylaid by a couple of the ugliest hoodlums you ever saw, they robbed me."

"Oh dear—did they hurt you, honey?"

"They did not. Matter of fact," he panted, "I told them off, but good. And they better not fool with me again. Not that they will—I guess they learned their lesson." Angrily, proudly, he hitched his shoulders, a gesture that made him aware of his wet coat, which at last he began to remove. She ran to help him. "Oh Jody, Jody darling, but you didn't have to rush back like that…"

"Didn't I," he said solemnly, in a tone dripping with meaning, not one whit of which she understood. He pulled himself, glaring, away from her, and, while she stood clutching her negligee to herself again, he ponderously took off the coat, glaring at her.

"Oh, I'm so sorry. You poor dear." She thought, suddenly, of a woman she had seen in the parking lot at the supermarket, whose child had bolted in front of a car. People had shrieked, brakes had squealed, the woman had run out to scoop up her frightened but unharmed youngster—and, in her relief, had whaled the tar out of him.

That was it—Jody had been so terribly worried about her, he'd gotten into all this trouble rushing to help her, and now that he knew she was safe he was, in effect, spanking her.

She grew very tender, very patient. "Oh Jody ..." she said fondly.

"You won't 'Oh Jody' out of this one," he said.

"Well, I'm sorry/" she cried, and, "Oh, Jody, what is it? Is it the telephone? Will it be hard to get it fixed?"

"The telephone can be fixed," he growled in a voice again inexplicably loaded with meaning. He passed through the dining room into the kitchen, again flicking his glance here, there, up, across. "Got everything put away," he said, looking at the glass cupboard, the dish shelf.

"Well, don't I always?"

"Doubtless," he said bitterly. He opened the refrigerator.

"Let me fix—"

"I'll do it myself," he said.

Her tenderness and patience gave out at that point. She said in a small voice, "I'll go to bed then," and when he did not respond, she went upstairs, lay down and cried.

She managed to be silent, stiff and silent, when he came upstairs, and lay in the dark with her eyes squeezed shut while he undressed and washed and got into his pajamas and into the other bed. She dearly hoped he'd say something, but he didn't. After a long time, she whispered, "Well, good night, Jody." He made a sound which might have been an offensive "Ha!" or just a grunt; she couldn't be sure. She thought he fell asleep after a while, and then she did, too—lightly, troubled.

The glare of her bed lamp awoke her. Up through it, and up through the confusion of puzzlement and sleepiness, she blinked at Jody. Seen so, standing by her bed and glaring down at her, he looked very large. He never had before.

He said, "You'd better tell me all about it right now."

She said, "Wh-what time is it?"

"Now you listen to me, Eloise. I've learned a whole lot of things in the last few hours. About you. About me. About—" Suddenly he raised his voice; at the rim of the glare of light, the vein at the side of his neck swelled. "I'm just too doggoned nice to everybody. When I told off those thugs, I tell you, something happened to me, and from now on I won't stand for it any more!"

"Jody-"

"Two of them, twice my size, and I told them."

"You did?"

In retrospect, Eloise was to look painfully back upon this moment and realize that on it turned everything that subsequently happened between them; she would realize that when she said, "You did?" he heard "You did?"—a difference in inflection that becomes less subtle the more one thinks about it. Later, she thought a great deal about it; now, however, she could only shrink numbly down into the covers as he roared, "Yes, / did! You didn't think I had it in me, did you? Well I did, and from now on nobody puts anything over on me! Including you, you hear?"

"But Jody—I—"

"Who was here when I called you up at two o'clock?"

"Who was—Nobody!"

He sank down to the edge of his bed so their heads were more nearly on a level, and fixed her with a pink-rimmed, weepy, steely gaze. "I… heard… you," he intoned.

"You mean when you called?"

He simply sat there with his unchanging, unnatural glare. Won-deringly, frightened, she shook her head. "I was watching a movie on TV. It was just ending—the very end; it was a good one. And I—I—"

"You told your… your…" He could not say the word. "You told whoever it was not to talk. But I heard you."

Dazedly she sat up in bed, a slim, large-eyed, dark-blonde woman in her late twenties—frightened, deeply puzzled, warding off certain hurt. She thought hard, and said, "I spoke to you—I said that to you! In the picture, you see, there was this girl that… that… Oh, never mind; it's just that in that last moment of the picture everything came together, like. And just as you rang and I picked up the phone, it was the last minute of the picture, don't you see? I was sort of into it—you know. So I said to you, 'Don't say anything for a second, honey,' and I—Is that what you heard?"

"That is what I heard," he said coldly.

She laughed with relief. "I said it to you, to you, not to anyone here, you silly! And—well, I was sort of mixed up, coming out of the TV that way, to the phone, and you began to sort of shout at me, and I couldn't hear the TV, and I kind of ran to it to turn it up, just for a second, and I forgot I was holding the phone and the wire caught my ankle and I fell down and the wire pulled out and—Jody!" she cried, seeing his face.

"You're a liar, you bitch."

"Jody!" she whispered faintly. Slowly she lay down again. She closed her eyes, and tears crept from beneath her lids. She made no sound.

"I can handle hoodlums and I can handle you," he said flatly, and turned out the light. "And from now on," he added, as if it were a complete statement; he must have thought so, for he said nothing more that night.

Eloise Smith lay trembling, her mind assuring her over and over that none of this was really happening, it couldn't happen. After a useless time of that, she began to piece the thing together, what he'd said, what she'd said… she recalled suddenly what he had blurted out about the Elks' Hall, and the car, and all… what was it? Oh: he'd called, apparently to tell her he was on the way; and she'd murmured, "Don't say anything for a second, honey," and he'd thought… he must have thought oh dear, how silly of him! "Jody!" she said, sitting up, and then the sight of his dim rigid form, curled away from her in the other bed, drove her back to silence, and she lay down to think it through some more… And he'd gotten himself all upset and yelled, and then she'd broken the wire, and probably thought her—her—but she could not think the word any more than he had been able to say it—he'd thought that whoever it was had gaily pulled out the wire to, well, stop his interruption. And then apparently Jody had gone all panicky and berserk, had run straight out to the car, got himself locked out of the Elks' Hall with the car keys still inside, had headed north—away from town, and gas stations, and other telephones—and had tried to hitchhike home. And something about hoodlums and being robbed on the way—but then he said he'd driven them off, didn't he?

She gave it up at length. Whatever had happened to him, he obviously felt like a giant, or a giant-killer maybe, for the first time in his life, and he was taking it out on her.

Well, maybe in the morning—

In the morning he was even worse. He hardly spoke to her at all. Just watched her every minute, and once in a while snorted disgustedly. Eloise moved quickly with poached egg, muffin, coffee, marmalade; sleepless, shaken, she would know what to do, take a stand, have a sensible thought, even—later; not now.

Watching her, Jody wiped his lips, threw down his napkin and stood up. "I'm going for the car. If you're thinking of letting anybody in, well, look out, that's all. You don't know when I'll be back."

"Jody, Jody!" she wailed, "I never! I never, Jody!"

He walked past her, smiling tightly, and got his other hat. "Oh boy," he said to the cosmos, "I just hope I run across one of those thugs again, that's what I hope." He banged the hat with the edge of his hand, and set it uncharacteristically at a rakish slant on his head. Numbly, she followed him to the door and stood in it, watching him go. He sprang up the steep driveway like a spring lamb. At the top he turned without breaking stride and came straight back—but not springing—scuttling would be the word for it. His face was chalky. He saw her and tried, with some apparent difficulty, to regain his swagger. "Forgot to call the phone company. Get a taxi, too."

"You can't," she said. "I broke the wire."

"I know, I know!" he snapped waspishly, though she felt he had forgotten it. "I'll call from Pollard's." He glanced quickly over his shoulder, up the driveway, and then plunged across the lawn and through the wet shrubbery toward their only neighbor's home.

She looked after him in amazement, and then up the drive. Over its crest, she could see the roof of a car, obviously parked in their turn-around. She was curious, but too much was happening; she would not dare climb the drive to see who it was. Instead she went in and closed the door and climbed upstairs, where she could see from the bedroom windows. From this elevation, the car was plainly visible. It wasn't theirs. Also visible was the ugly giant lounging tiredly against the car, watching the house.

She shrank behind the curtain and put all her left fingers in her mouth.

After a time she saw Jody plunging across the long grass of the vacant acre that lay between their place and Pollard's. He pushed through the shrubs at the edge of the lawn, stopped to paddle uselessly at his damp trouser-legs and then sidled over to the driveway. He peeped around the hollyhocks until he could look up the drive. The ugly man had apparently detected some movement, for he stood up straight and peered. Jody shrank back behind the hollyhocks.

She thought then that he might come in, but instead he crouched there. There was a long—to Eloise, an interminable—wait. Then a taxi pulled in from the road and turned to stop next to the other car. Jody straightened up and began trotting up the drive. The ugly man leaned his elbows on the lower edge of the taxi driver's window—he had to bend nearly double to do it—and began speaking to him. Of course she could not hear a word, but the ugly man and the driver seemed to be laughing. Then the ugly man reached in, slapped the driver cheerfully on the shoulder and stood back. The taxi started up, backed around and pulled out of the drive. Jody, seeing this, for the second time made a U-turn and scuttled back to his hiding place behind the hollyhocks. He looked very little like a man who was overanxious to meet some thugs.

Eloise moved closer to the window in order to see him better, for he was almost straight down beneath her. Perhaps he caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, or perhaps some sixth sense… anyway, he glanced up, and for a moment looked more miserable than a human being ought, caught like that—chagrined, embarrassed. Then, visibly, he began to grow angry again; it began with her, she could see that. Then he wheeled and marched up the drive like a condemned man ascending the scaffold. The ugly man opened the right front door of his old sedan, and Jody got in.

For a long time Eloise Smith stood in the window, kneading her elbows and frowning. Then, slowly, she went downstairs and began to write a letter.

Smith's posture of pugnacious defiance lasted from the turn-around to the private road he shared with Pollard. Once out of sight of the house, he slumped unhappily into the corner of his seat and stole a quick glance at his captor.

The man was even bigger, and considerably uglier, in daylight than he had been in the dark. He said, "I sent away your taxi. He didn't mind. He's an old buddy of mine."

"Oh,"saidjody.

He watched the scenery go by, and thought of how gentle the man's voice was. Very soft and gentle. Into this Jody Smith built vast menace. After a while he said sulkily, "This going to cost me another hundred?"

"Oh gosh no," said the ugly man. "You bought a round trip. Where do you want to go?"

Cat-and-mouse, thought Jody. Trying to get my goat. "Got to get my car at the Elks' Hall."

"Okay," the man said, nodding pleasantly. Deftly, he spun the wheel, turning into what Smith prided himself as being his short cut to the Hall. Obviously this creature knew the roads hereabouts.

They came to the built-up area, slid into an alley, crossed two streets and turned sharp right into the crunchy parking yard at the Elks. There were two other cars there; one Smith's, the other obviously the caretaker's, for the doors stood open and the old man was sweeping the step.

Timidly, Smith touched the door handle. The ugly man sat still, big gnarled hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead. Smith opened the door and said, "… well—" Then, incredulous, he got out. The ugly man made no attempt to stop him.

Smith actually got two paces away from the car before sheer compulsive curiosity got the better of him. He went back and said, "Look, what about this money? You don't really expect me to pay a hundred dollars for that ride."

"I don't," said the big man, "Gorwing, I guess he does."

"Gorwing. Is that the little ape that—"

"He's a friend of mine," said the giant, not loudly, but just quickly. Smith dropped that tactic, and asked, "You work for him?"

"With, not for. Sometimes."

"But you're doing the collecting."

"Look," said the ugly one, suddenly, "Gorwing, he wants sixty per cent of that money. Well, I wouldn't let him down. For me, I don't want it. Now, how much did he get off you last night?"

"Twenty-one."

"From sixty is thirty-nine. You got thirty-nine bucks?"

"Not on me." Astonished, he looked at the grotesque face. "Tell me something. What would you do if I wouldn't give you another penny?"

The man looked at his gnarled hands, which twisted on the wheel. "I guess I'd just have to put it up myself."

Smith got back in. "Run me over to the bank."

The man made no comment, but started his engine.

"What's your name?" asked Smith as they stopped for a light a block away.

"George Noat."

"Aren't you afraid I'll go to the police?"

"Nope."

Smith recalled then, forcefully, what Gorwing had said: "I got a witness and you haven't." He imagined himself trying to explain what had happened to a desk sergeant, who would be trying to write it all down in a book. Outrageous, certainly—but he had gotten into the car of his own free will, he had agreed to pay.

"How did you happen to come along when you did last night?"

"Just driving by."

Smith found the answer unsatisfying, and he could not say why. He said, sulkily, "Friend or not, I've got to say that your Gorwing is a bandit."

"No he ain't," said George Noat mildly. "Not when all he does is get things people really need. You really need something, you pay for it, right?"

"Yes, I suppose you—"

"And if you need something, and a fellow delivers it, nobody's getting robbed."

At that moment they came to the bank, and the subject was lost.

Need Jody Smith lived with the letter for a long time.

Dear Jody,

After the way you acted last night I don't know what to do except I have to go away from you. 'You have to trust a person. I always believed you but why did you make up all that about Mr. Noat I know him a long time and he is about the kindest man who ever lived he wouldn't hurt a fly.

I want you to think about one thing you said a lot about me and some man and all that, well I want you to know that there isn't any man at all and now that means your wife left you and there wasn't even any other man. I bet now you wish there was. I wish there was. No I don't Jody, oh my goodness I wish I could write a letter I never could you know, but I can't stay here any more. Maybe you could find somebody better I guess you better I won't stand in your way because I still want you to be happy.

Eloise

Tell the market not to send the order I sent yesterday. We were supposed to have dinner at the Stewarts Tuesday. I can't think of anything else.

Now Jodham Swaine Smith was a man of independent means—this was the phrase with which on occasion he described himself to himself. His parents had both come from well-to-do families, but Smith was two generations—three, on his mother's side—removed from the kind of fortune-getting that had gotten these fortunes; latterly, it had become the Smith tradition to treat the principal as if it did not exist, and live modestly on the interest.

Independent means. Such independence means all Four Freedoms plus a good many more. Small prep schools—in small towns and with, comparatively, small fees—gray as Groton, followed by tiny, honored colleges on which the ivy, if not the patina, is quite as real as Harvard's, make it possible to grow up in one of the most awesome independencies of all, the freedom from Life. In most cases it takes but six or so post-graduate weeks for trauma and tragedy to set in, and for the discoveries to be made that business is not necessarily conducted on the honor system, that the reward for dutifully reporting the errors of the erring gets you, not a mark toward your Good Citizen Button, but something more like a kick in the teeth, and finally, that the world is full of people who never heard of your family and wouldn't give a damn if they had.

Yet for those few who are enabled by, on the one hand, the effortless accumulation of dividends, and on the other, an absence of personal talent or ambition that might be challenged, it is possible to slip into a surrogate of man's estate in its subjective aspects hardly different from the weatherproof confines of the exclusive neighborhood, the private school and the honored and unheard-of college. Jody Smith was one of these few.

Not that he didn't face the world, just as squarely and as valiantly as he had been taught to do. But it happened that, all unknowing, he gave the world nothing worth abrading, and the world was therefore, as far as he could know, a smooth place to live with. In no sense did he withdraw from life. On the contrary, he sought out the centers of motion, and involved himself as completely as possible with the Elks, the Rotary, the Lions, and the Civic Improvement League. Strangely enough, these gatherings, filled as they were with real people, gave him no evidence of the existence of a real world. Jody Smith was always available for the Thanksgiving Dance Committee and Operation Santa Glaus, but did not submit himself, and was somehow never proposed, for any chairmanship. In a word, he wasn't competition for anyone.

And he had gravitated to that same strange other- or no-world in what might laughingly be called his business. He was a philatelist. He ran small classified advertisements in the do-it-yourself and other magazines on a contract basis, and handled the trickle of mail from his little den at home. He made money at it. He also lost money at it. In the aggregate, he probably lost more than he made, but not enough to jeopardize his small but adequate and utterly predictable income.

He had, from time to time, wanted this or that. He had never for a moment needed, anything. Eloise, for example—he had wanted her, or perhaps it was to be married to her, but he hadn't needed to. She helped him with his business, typing out some of the correspondence from form letters he had composed, and moistening stamp hinges. But he did not need her help. He did not need her.

Not even when she left. For a while. Weeks, in fact. And even then at first it was want, not need, and even then the want was to create some circumstance that would make her realize how wrong she had been. Then the wants widened, somehow. The television and the stamp hinges seemed after a time to be inadequate to fill the long evenings or to occupy the silence of the house. When no hand but his own moved anything about him, his hat would not go of itself into the closet but remained on hall tables where he himself had put it. And, where at first he had rather admired himself for his cookery, for he was a methodical, meticulous, and, as far as cookbooks were concerned, obedient person, he began slowly to resent the kitchen and even the animal beneath his belt which with such implacability drove him into it. It seemed to him a double burden—that he should have to put in all that time before a meal, and then have nothing ready until he prepared it himself. To do things in order to make lunchtime come seemed ultimately enough, more than enough, for a man to be burdened with. Then to have to do things to make the lunch itself seemed an intolerable injustice.

These matters of convenience—and lack of it—grew into nuisances and then, like the pebble in the shoe, like the inability to turn over even in the most comfortable of beds, into sheer torture.

The breaking point came, oddly enough, not in the long night hours with the empty bed beside his, nor in some dream-wracked and disoriented morning, but in the middle of an otherwise pleasant afternoon. He had just received the new Scott's catalog, and wanted to compare something in it with the 1954 edition. He couldn't find the 1954 edition, and he called out:

"Eloise—"

The sound of his own voice, and of her name, made something happen like the tearing of a membrane. It tore so completely, and with such suddenness and agony, that he grunted aloud and fell back on the couch. He sat there for a moment weaving, and his mouth grew crooked and his eyes pink, and there came a warning sting at the very back of the roof of his mouth that astonishingly informed him, as it hardly had since he was nine years old, that he was about to cry.

He didn't cry, beyond once whimpering, "Eloise?" in a soprano half-whisper; then for a long time he sat silent and stunned, wondering numbly how such a force could have remained coiled so tightly within him, undetected.

When he could, he began to take stock. It was a matter of weeks—six of them, seven—since she had left, and not once had he examined his acts and attitude. He had done nothing about locating her, though in that department there was little to be done—he simply did not know where she was. Her only relative was an aging mother in a rest home out West, and she certainly had not gone there. He had not destroyed her letter, but he hadn't reread it either, nor thought about its contents. He hadn't wanted to think about these things, he now knew. He had thought… he hadn't needed to.

He needed to now, and he did. The letter gave him nothing at first but a feeling—not quite anger—more like a sullen distaste for himself. And one more thing, slightest of handholds—she apparently, somehow or other, knew George Noat.

And, on that slender evidence, he tore out of the house and got into his car.

Nothing was the way it should be. The trail was not obscure. The taxi-driver—Noat had said he was "an old buddy"—told him immediately where Noat and his business were, and there were no obstacles to his finding the place—it was within three blocks of the Elks' Hall. The fact that never once in Elks or Lions or Rotary had he heard Noat's name was only surprising, not mysterious: such establishments as the Anything Shoppe look back, not forward, and are not found on the lists of forward-looking organizations.

It was only in the subdued light of the shop(pe), with the old-fashioned spring-swung doorbell still jangling behind him, thatJod-ham Swaine Smith realized that, though intuition and evidence had brought him here, they had not supplied him with the right thing to say. "Mr. Noat!" he bleated urgently, and then dried up altogether.

The proprietor glanced up at him from his work, and said easily, "Oh, hi. Give a hand here, will you?"

Annoyed, which was uncharacteristic of him, and simultaneously much more timid than he ever remembered being, Jody Smith edged around the counter. Noat was squatting before an inverted kitchen chair, painted flat red, with a broken spoke and a split seat-board. "Just grab holt here," he invited. Smith took the legs as indicated and squeezed them together, while Noat drove in corrugated fasteners. "Nothing wrong with the chair," said Noat philosophically between hammer blows. "It's people. People busted this chair. As for fixing it, if people had sense enough to have four arms like this thing has four legs, why, I wouldn't have to call on my neighbors. You like people?"

The direct question startled Smith; he had been about to interrupt, and was only half following what the big man said. He made a weak uncertain laugh, very like that of Sir Laurence in the Graveyard Scene, and said, "Sure. Sure I do."

He stood back while Noat turned the chair upright, set it on the counter and measured the missing spoke with an ancient and frayed dressmaker's tape. "You got to make allowances," Noat said to the tape. "This old thing's stretched, but you see I know just how much it's stretched. 14 inches here is 14 and 17/3 2.nds actual. That's one way to make allowances. Then," he went on, laying the tape against a piece of square stock that was chucked in a highly individual wood lathe, "if the tape says 14 on the chair, and I mark it the same 14 on the lumber, it comes out right and it makes no never mind what it is actual. People," he said, rounding at last on Smith, who prepared himself for some profound truth, "fret too much."

Smith lived for a moment with that feeling one has when mounting ten steps in the dark, then discovers there are only nine stairs. He grasped wildly at what he thought the man had been talking about. "People are all right. I mean, I like people."

Noat considered this, or a turning chisel he had obviously made from an old screwdriver, carefully. Smith could not stand the contemplative silence, and ran on. "Why, I do everything for people. I join every club or lodge in town that does any good for people, and I work hard at it. I guess I wouldn't do that if I didn't like people."

"You don't do that for yourself." It was, if a statement, agreement and a compliment; if a question, a searching, even embarrassing one, calling for more insight than Smith had or dared to have. It was voiced as a statement, but so nearly as a question that Smith could not be sure. He was, however, too honest a person to grasp at the compliment… and if he rejected it, he must be embarrassed, even insulted, and walk out… but he couldn't walk out until he—"You know my wife, don't you?"

"Sure do. A very nice little lady."

He started the lathe. It made a very strange sound. The power looked like that from an ancient upright vacuum cleaner. Reduction was accomplished through gears that could only have come from one of those hand-operated coffee mills that used, with their great urn-shaped hoppers and scroll-spoked, cast-iron scarlet flywheels, to grace chain markets before they became supered. The frame was that of a treadle-operated sewing machine, complete with treadle, which, never having been disconnected, now disappeared in a blur of oscillation that transferred itself gently to everything in the place. One could not see it, but it was there in the soles of the feet, in the microscopic erection of the fibers in a dusty feather boa, in the way sun-captured dust motes marched instead of wandered. The lathe's spur-center seemed to have been the business end of a planing attachment from some forgotten drill press; it was chucked into a collet that seemed to have been handmade out of rock maple. The cup center, at the other end, turned freely and true in what could be nothing else but a roller-skate wheel. Noat set his ground-down screwdriver on the long tool rest, which was of a size and massive-ness that bespoke a history of angle-bracketship aboard a hay wagon. On the white wood a whiter line appeared, and a blizzard of fragrant dust appeared over Noat's heavy wrists. He carried the tool along the rest, and the whiter-upon-white became a band, a sheet. When he had taken it from end to end, he stopped the machine. The wood was still square, but with all its corners rounded. Smith tore his fascinated eyes away from it and asked, wondering if Noat would still know what he was talking about, "How did you happen to know her?"

"Customer."

"Really?"

Noat squinted at the display window over the edge of his chisel. "Garlic press," he said, and pursed his lips. "Swedish cookie mold, by golly, she was here seven times over that. Little lady really gets two bits out of each two dozen pennies." He laughed quietly; he had a good laugh. Smith's solar plexus contained a sudden vacuum at the mention of these homey, Eloise-y things. "And the egg separators—two hundred egg separators."

" Whatl I never saw—"

"Yes, you did. You went away to some kind of convention, and when you came back she'd done over the breakfast nook."

"The textured wall!"

"Yeah, those mash-paper cushions they put between layers in an egg crate. She cut and fit and put 'em up and painted 'em—what she say?" He closed his eyes. "Flat purple with dull gold in the middle of each cup."

"She never told me," Smith informed himself aloud. "She said she'd… Well, I guess she didn't actually say. But I got the idea she saved up from the house money and had it done. She really did it herself?"

Noat nodded gravely.

"I wonder why she didn't tell me," Smith breathed.

"Maybe," said George Noat, "she thought you might live with a textured wall where you wouldn't with egg separators."

There was a meaning here that he could not—would not—see, but that he knew would come to him most distastefully later. He compressed his lips. He had acquired too many things to think about in the last few minutes, and at least two of them might be insults. He glanced doorward, and said in farewell tones, "Well, I—" and then the handle of the chisel pressed into his palm stopped him. "You go on with that. I got to cook some glue."

Smith stared with horror at the chisel. "Me run that machine? I never in my life—"

The giant cupped a hand under his left armpit and propelled him to the machine. "The one wonderful thing about a lathe, you couldn't tell a beginner's first job from Chippendale's last one. Don't ever get all big-eyed over beautiful work—chances are it was real easy to do. What I always say is, a Duncan Phyfe is only a piccoloful of whiskey."

"But—but—"

"Pull this chain, starts it. Rest your chisel here, cut light and slow at first. Anytime you want to see what you've done or feel it, pull the chain again, it stops. That's all there is." He started the machine, took the chisel, and, under its traveling point, the wood drew on a new garment of texture from end to end.

Timidly, Smith took back the chisel and nervously approached the spinning wood. It touched, and he sprang back, but there was a new neat ring around it. Fascinated, he tried it again, and again, and then looked up to ask if that was right: but Noat had confidently retired to the other end of the shop, where a disgraceful-looking glue pot sat upon a gas ring.

Nothing could have given him more assurance than to be trusted with the job like this. For a while, then, he entered the magical, never-quite-to-be-duplicated region of The First Time. You may challenge the world to find anyone who runs a lathe and who also forgets the first cut he ever made.

Disappointingly soon, the square wood was round; but then he realized joyfully that this would be a new spoke for the chair, and must come down quite a bit more. He worked steadily and carefully, until at last his mind was able to watch it while it thought of other things as well—and it thought of Eloise, thought of Eloise in a way unknown to it for oh… oh, a long time; and for such a brief while, too—there was something deeply sad about that. The day—no, two days—before he had stumblingly asked her to marry him, he had been in a drugstore, just like any other drugstore except for the climactic fact that it was in her neighborhood, the one she always went to, her drugstore. He had walked in to get some cough drops and had suddenly realized this incredible thing about the place—that she had many times stood here, had bent over that showcase, had had that prim warm little body cupped there by the padded swivel seats at the soda fountain. She had smiled in this place. Her voice had vibrated the sliding glass over the vitamins, and her little feet must have lightly dotted the floor, from time to time, just after it had been waxed.

And so it was with the Anything Shoppe; her hand had danced the spring-dangling doorbell, and she had bargained here and made plans, and counted money and held it for a moment, while the three fine "thinking" furrows—two long and one short—came between her eyebrows, and went quickly, leaving no mark. She had smiled in this place, and perhaps laughed; and here she had thought of him.

Textured wall.

The turning wood had grown silky, and now seemed to be growing a sheath of mist… he withdrew the tool and stood watching it through the blur until a bulky rectangular object on the tool rest distracted him. He blinked, and saw it was a box of tissues. Gratefully he reached for one and blew his nose and wiped his eyes. He gazed guiltily at Noat, but the big man's back was turned and he appeared to be totally absorbed in stirring his stinking glue. Let's not think about how he put the tissues there, or why… turn off the machine now.

George Noat found it not necessary to turn to him until he spoke: "Getting a cold, I guess… snff… time of year. Mr. Noat, have a look at this now."

Noat lumbered back to the lathe and ran his hand along the piece. His hands were those a prep-school boy might see from the windows of the school bus, that a collegian with a school letter on the front of his sweater might see manipulating the mysteries under a car. One seldom noticed the skill of such hands, but ingrained black was dirt and dirt was, vaguely, "them," not "us." The idea does cling, oh yes it does, ingrained, too. Yet for all his distress in this moment, Smith was able to notice how the great grainy leather-brown hand closed all around the stainless new wood, was intimate with it from end to end, left not a mark. To Smith it was an illumination, to see such a hand live so with purity. All this subliminal; still before his stinging eyes was the mist of hurting, and he said aloud, "She left me."

"That's just fine," said George Noat. He must have meant one thing or the other—probably he meant… for he was taking up the red chair. He lifted it high and hung it casually on the handle of a scythe, which, in turn, hung to the beam overhead. An unbroken rung of the chair thereby lay at his eye level. He started the lathe, and with four sure sweeps and five confident pauses, he duplicated the unbroken rung complete to its dowelled ends. He stopped the machine, slapped away collet and tailstock and tried the new rung for size. Freehand, with a keyhole saw, he cut away excess at the tips. It fitted. He took it to the glue pot, dipped the ends, returned and set it in place; then, with simultaneous blows right and left, he drove it home. A war surplus quartermaster's canvas belt plus a suitcase clasp of the over-center type formed a clamp for it. He left it where it hung, and in his strange way—he seemed never to move quickly, but all the same, could loom up over a man in a rush—he rounded on Smith. "You want her back?"

"Oh God," said Jody Smith softly, "I do."

"Hmp." Noat moved to the other end of the counter and gingerly capped the hot glue pot. "You need her," Smith thought he said.

Smith frowned. "Isn't that what I just said?"

"Nope."

Jody Smith's quick petulance evaporated as quickly as it had formed; again he found himself fumbling for whatever it was this creature seemed to mean, or almost meant. "I said I want her back."

"I know. You didn't say you need her."

"It's the same thing."

"No, it ain't."

Half angry, half amused, Smith said, "Oh come on, now. Who'd split hairs about a thing like that?"

"Some people might." He paused, looking at a piece of junk he pulled from a box. "Gorwing, he would."

"Gorwing, he won't," said Smith with some asperity. "Look, I don't want this talked all over with the likes of that Gorwing."

Noat gave a peculiar chuckle. "Gorwing wouldn't talk about it. He'd just know."

"I don't get you. He'd just—know? Know what?"

"If you should want something. Or need it."

Smith wagged his head helplessly. "I never know when you're kidding."

"This thing," said Noat soberly, staring at the object in his hand—it seemed to be the ring-shaped, calibrated "card" from a marine compass—"got three hundred and sixty degrees on it. More than any college graduate in the country." Without moving anything but his eyes, he regarded Smith. "Am I kidding?"

In spite of himself, Smith felt moved to laughter. "I don't know." Sobering then, and anxious, "Have you any idea where she might have—"

"I really couldn't say," interjected the proprietor. "Here's Gor-wing."

"Oh, for God's sake," Smith muttered.

Gorwing banged in, stopped, stared at Smith. He passed his hand over his eyes and muttered, "Oh, for God's sake."

Then both men turned to Noat, redly regarding his sudden burst of merriment.

"You settin' on a feather?" rasped Gorwing.

"Just listening to the echoes," answered Noat, grinning. Then a quick concern enveloped his features. He leaned forward and watched Gorwing bend his head, gingerly touch the back of his neck. "What is it—him?"

"Him?" Gorwing glanced insultingly at Smith. "Him, too, you might say. You doing anything?"

"What do you want?" asked Noat.

"Let's take a ride."

Noat, too, glanced at Smith, but not with insult. "Sure," he said. "Go on out to the car. Be with you soon's I… got something to finish."

Gorwing glanced inimically at Smith again. "Don't waste no time, now," he said, and slung out.

Smith made a relieved and disgusted sighing sound like zhe-e-e-e! and shrugged like shuddering. Noat came around the counter and stood close, as if his proximity could add a special urgency to what he had to say. "Mister Smith, you want to see your wife again? You want her to come back?"

"I told you—"

"I believe you, especially now. Some other time we'll talk about it all you want. Now if you want to get her back, you go with Gor-wing, hear? You drive him where he wants to go."

"Me? Not on your life! I want no part of it, and I bet neither does he."

"You just tell him, it's with you or not at all; you tell him I said so."

"Look, I think—"

"Please, Mister Smith, don't think; not now—there isn't time. Just get out there."

"This is the craziest thing I ever heard of."

"You're absolutely right." Noat physically turned Smith around and faced him to the door. Outside, a horn blared. The sound seemed to loop and lock lassolike round the confused and upset Smith. He allowed it to pull him outside. He might then have been frightened if he had been given a chance to think, but Gorwing roared at him: "Where's G-Note?"

"You come in my car or not at all," Smith parrotted, his voice far more harsh than he had intended. He then marched to his car, got in and started the motor.

Livid, Gorwing sprang out of the other car. "G-Note!" he bawled at the unresponsive store front, then cursed and ran to Smith's car and slammed inside.

"Whose stupid idea was this?" he snarled.

White and shaken, but, feeling that in some way he had already tipped over the lip of some long slide, Smith said, "Not mine. You going some place?"

Gorwing hunched back against the door, as far from Smith as he could get. "You know the Thruway exit southbound?"

"All right."

He turned out into the street and right at the main avenue. Once or twice he glanced at his passenger, the slick black hair, the fevered dark eyes, the lips ever curled back from the too-sharp, too-white teeth. It was a tormented, dangerous kind of face, and the posture—this had been true as he had seen Gorwing stand, walk, turn, sit—was always one of imminent attack, like some small furious cornered animal.

He knew a short cut just here, and was on it before he quite realized he had come so far. He swung the wheel abruptly and turned into Midland Avenue, and from the corner of his eye, seemed to see the feral silhouette of his passenger sink and disappear. Astonished, i he glanced at Gorwing, to find him bent almost double, his hands clasping the back of his neck, his eyes screwed shut.

"You feel sick?" He applied the brakes.

Gorwing unlaced the fingers behind his neck and, without opening his eyes, freed a hand for some violent semaphore. "Just drive," came his strained, hissing whisper. Puzzled beyond bearing, Smith drove. Was Gorwing in pain? Or—could this be it—was he hiding? Who from? There was a football field and a high school on the left, a row of houses—mostly nurses' residences for the nearby hospital—on the right. No one seemed to be paying special attention to the car.

Two blocks further on Gorwing slowly sat up.

"You all right now?"

In a very, very quiet voice, a deathly, a deadly voice, Gorwing spoke. He tipped the side of his mouth toward Smith as he spoke, £ but stared straight ahead. He said, "Don't you ever drive me near the hospital. Not ever." i Crazy as a coot, thought Smith. "Nobody told me." f "I'm telling you." s,, They came to the underpass and crossed beneath the Thruway, and Gorwing came out of himself enough to lean forward and scan the road and the sides of the road, ahead. Suddenly he pointed.

"There he is. Pull over there."

Smith saw a young man in a grimy flannel suit and a white sport shirt, standing on the grassy shoulder just by the Thruway exit. There was a suitcase with a broken clasp on the grass by his feet. Smith pulled off the pavement and stopped.

The man picked up his suitcase and came toward them, trying to smile. "Give us a lift into town?"

Gorwing's tongue darted out to wet his lips, and his eyes seemed to grow even brighter. He waited until the man was abreast of the car, was even elevating his suitcase to let it precede him into the back seat, then sprang out and, chest arched, eyes flaming, blocked the man. "Lift hell," he snarled, "this town wouldn't give a cup o' water to the likes of you. Don't you set foot in it. We don't wancha."

The stranger slitted his eyes. "Now wait, Mac, you wait a minute here. Who the hell you think you are? You own this—"

"Git," said Gorwing, and his voice descended to something like the hissing, strained note that Smith had heard in the car. He mouthed his words—spittle ran suddenly from the corner of his mouth. As he spoke he walked, and as he walked the other man backed away. "You gawd… damn… junky… you think you can come here and pick up a fix, well this place is cold turkey for you and you'd better be on your way out of it, never mind who I am, I killed a man once."

The man tried to shout him down, but Gorwing kept talking, kept crouching forward. "We're stayin' right here to see you walk up the pike or down the pike or hitch a ride, I don't care which way, an' don't think you c'n slide into town without my knowin', I got guys spotted all over town and your life ain't worth a bar o' soap if you so much as show your face let alone tryin' to find a pusher. There ain't no pusher an' if you meet another gawd damn hophead you c'n pass the word—" but it was pointless to go on; suitcase and all, the man had turned by then and fled. Gorwing put his thumbs in his belt and watched the hitchhiker, white-faced, scampering to the northbound lane. Then Gorwing sighed, and turned tiredly back to the car.

"What a blistering," breathed the thunderstruck Smith as Gorwing got in and fell back on the seat. "Who was that?"

"Never saw him before in my life," said Gorwing absently. With great tenderness he touched the back of his neck. He looked at Smith by rolling his fevered eyes, as if the neck were too tender to disturb. "I never killed a man," he said. "I just say that to scare 'em."

A thousand questions pressed on Smith's tongue, but he swallowed all but, "You want to go back now?"

"How's our li'l buddy doing?"

Smith peered down the ramp. Through the underpass, he could see the grimy-white of the hitchhiker's clothes. "He's still—no wait, I think he's got a lift."

Gorwing joined him in peering. They saw a green Dodge slow and stop, and the man climb in. "And good riddance," murmured Gorwing.

"I don't think he'll be back," said Smith, for something to say.

"He'll wish he didn't if he does," said Gorwing, so offhandedly that Smith knew the man, the episode, the whole subject was leaving Gorwing's mind; and in a way this was the most extraordinary part of this inexplicable episode, for Smith knew that he himself would never forget it. Gorwing said, "Drive."

Smith made a slightly illegal turn and got the car headed back toward town. When he saw the yellow and black HOSPITAL ENTRANCE—500 FEET sign, he turned left and went into a long detour. Gorwing sat abstractedly, and Smith was certain he had not noticed the special effort he was making, until they turned back again on to Midland Avenue, well past, and Gorwing said, "Hospitals, they give me the creeps."

"Me, too," said Smith, remembering a tonsillectomy when he was fourteen—his only contact with the healing arts in all his life. Gorwing laughed at him—a singularly unpleasant and mirthless laugh. Anything in Smith that was about to formulate conversation—maybe even a question out of his vast perplexity—dried up. Smith's petulant pink underlip protruded, and he drove without speaking until they pulled up in front of the Anything Shoppe. Smith had never been so glad to see anything in his life. He had had, as of now, exactly all he could take of this man.

He swung his door open but "Oh, hell," Gorwing said. He said it in the tones of a man who has conducted a theater party in from the suburbs and finds, under the marquee, that he has forgotten the tickets. In spite of himself, "What's the matter?" asked Smith.

"Shut up," said Gorwing. Suddenly he closed his eyes and said again, "Oh hell." Then he opened his eyes and snapped, "Get goin'. Quick."

Reflexively Smith shut the door, then demanded of himself wby?

Argumentatively he asked, "Where do you want to go?"

"Move, will ya?" He waved vaguely toward Hook Mountain. "Up that way. I'll tell you."

"I don't see—"

Gorwing's words tumbled out so fast they were almost indistinguishable. "Dammit you want somebody should be dead it's your fault you didn't jump when I said jump now drive!"

The car was started and heading north before Smith was aware of it, so stunned was he by this hot spurt of language. When a man speaks like that, you want to throw your hands up over your face as if you had seen raging heat through sudden cracks in something you knew, too late, might explode.

A mile later Smith asked timidly, "What do you mean, dead?"

"Your place," Gorwing growled, directing, not responding.

They wheeled into the private road and up the hill. Dead? My place? Smith was terrified. "Listen—"

"You got any rope?" Gorwing snapped.

"Rope?" Smith repeated stupidly. He went into his own driveway in a power-slide; he hadn't known he could drive like that. "No, I haven't got any rope. What—"

"Oh, you wouldn't," spat Gorwing. "Chains. You got tire chains?"

"I don't—yes. In the trunk." He braked to a slithering stop in the turnaround. Gorwing was out of the car while it was still sliding, and tugging at the trunk lid. He roared to find it locked. Smith tumbled out with the keys and opened it. Gorwing flung him aside in his dive as he clawed through the trunk, throwing tire iron, jack pedestal, a can of hydraulic fluid behind him like a digging dog. The chains were in a cloth sack; he up-dumped the sack, shook out the chains, hooked the end of one into the end of the other, draped them over his shoulder and sprinted down toward the house.

"Wait, you—" gasped Smith, and trotted after him.

Gorwing passed the house and plunged across the lower lawn into the woods, Smith after him, already panting. "Hey, watch yourself, that's full of poison ivy back there!"

Gorwing was already out of sight in the rank woods below the house.

Stumbling, gasping, Smith floundered after him, until he came to the edge of the cliff that overlooked the broad Hudson. At this point it was sheer about a hundred feet, then slanted down and away in a mass of weed-grown rubble almost to the railroad tracks. For a moment he thought Gorwing must have plunged straight over the edge, but then he saw him working his way along the ragged brink to the right.

"Hang on! Hang on!" Gorwing yelled. Totally perplexed, Smith looked around him for whatever it was he was supposed to hang on to and failed to find it. He shrugged and stumbled after the man. Gorwing kept bellowing to hang on. Suddenly Smith saw him fall to his knees and crawl to the crumbling lip of the precipice. He yelled again, then moved on a couple of feet and hooked a free end of the tire chains to itself around the trunk of a foolhardy pine tree with a ten-inch bole, which grew bravely at the lip of disaster.

At last, Smith reached Gorwing, who had hunkered down with his back to the tree. He had described the man to himself before as "fevered"—he now looked sick as well; there was a difference. "What are you—"

Gorwing motioned toward the drop. "You'll have to do it. I can't stand high places."

"Do what?"

Gorwing pointed again. Smith heard a weak bleating sound that seemed to come from everywhere. But it was specifically outward that Gorwing had pointed. So he fell to his knees and crawled to the edge and looked over.

Eight or ten feet below him he saw the chalk-white, tear-streaked face of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy. The child was hanging by his hands to a protruding root, which angled so sharply downward that it was clear no grip could last too long on it. The boy's toes were dug into loose earth, a fresh damp scar of which surrounded his feet and, widening, showed where to his left a ledge had fallen away. To his right was rock, almost sheer, and without a handhold.

"Hang on!" yelled Smith, at least half again as loud and urgently as Gorwing had. He caught up the end of the chain and lowered it carefully down. At its fullest extent it reached about to the boy's belt-line. Smith looked at Gorwing, who looked back out of sick black eyes. "You got to," he said in strained tones, "I tell you I can't. I just can't."

Smith, whose usual activities involved nothing more strenuous than stamp tongs, found himself on his stomach, hanging his legs over, hunting wildly with his toes for the rungs formed by the crosslinks of the tire chain. Then he was stepping down, while the earth and grass of the edge rose up and obscured Gorwing like some crazy inverted theater curtain. "Hang on," he said, and was startled when the boy answered, "Okay…" because that remark had been for himself.

Tire chains may be roughly the size and shape of a small ladder, but they take unkindly to it. The rungs roll and their parts pinch, and the whole thing swings and bends alarmingly; you know they won't break, but do they? Too soon the next rung under his seeking foot just—wasn't, and he withdrew the foot from nothing-at-all and stood on the last crosslink, gulping air. He was then of a mind to freeze to his shaky perch and stay there until somebody else figured a way out, but there came a whimper nearby and he saw clods and stones spin sickeningly down and away from the boy's toes. He glanced at the boy's face, saw and would forever see the muddy pallor, the fear-bulged eye, the lips gone whiter than the tanned cheeks. The youngster's foothold was gone, and only his grip on the slanted root held him. Afterward, Smith was to reflect that, if the kid had been standing on anything solid, he would never in life have been able to figure out a way to bring him in; but now he had to, so he did.

"Lift your foot!" he screamed. "Give me your foot!"

The foot was already dangling, but for an endless, mindless moment the boy stretched downward with it, trying to make a toehold if he could not find one; then Smith screamed again, and the boy brought the foot up slowly, shakily… and he said, "My hands, I can't…" but then Smith had the foot, leaning far sidewise to get it; he lifted it, thrust it through the last "rung" down to the knee. One more reach, and he had the skinny upper arm in a grip that astonished both of them. "Let go," he panted, and the boy let go; it may well be that he could not have held on any longer to the root if he had wanted to. With the release, the chains swung nauseatingly sidewise; with one hand Smith ground steel into his own flesh, with the other drove flesh into the arm-bone; but he had the boy, now, thrust the arm through the next rung. "Hold with your arms, not your hands," he said through his teeth.

When they stopped swinging, Smith freed his hand from the boy's biceps. It took a concentrated effort, so clamped, so cramped, was his hysterical hand. "Now rest," he said to both, for both of them. The boy kept whimpering, a past-tears meaningless, habitual kind of sound, dry and probably unfelt. Some measureless time later he helped the boy get his other leg into the little twisted square of chain, so that he sat and whimpered, while Smith stood and panted, for however long it took to be able to think again. Then Smith had the boy stand up inside the circle of his arms, and climb until his buttocks were at the level of Smith's chest. Then they climbed together, Smith urging the boy to sit back on him when he had to, half-lifting him when they got the strength and the courage, each interminable time, to try another rung. And when at last the boy tumbled up and over and was, by Gorwing, snatched back from the edge, Smith had to stop achingly and wearily ponder out what had happened to the weight and presence of him, before he could go on.

Gorwing snatched him, too, away from the edge, where he lay laughing weakly.

"You," said Gorwing darkly, "you real gutsy."

"Me?"

"I coudn'. Not ever, I could never do that." He made a sudden vague gesture, startling in its aimlessness, a jolting contrast to his vulpine appearance and harsh voice. "I never had much guts."

Smith held his peace, as does one in the presence of evidence too great for immediate speculation. He thought of Gorwing standing up to him about the hundred-dollar fare, and of Gorwing ravening, tearing, lashing out at the hitchhiking dope addict. Yet there was no mistaking his sincerity in what he said—nor in this frank compliment to him, Smith—a man who had, up until now, stimulated only open disgust. He promised himself he would think about it later. He said to the boy, "How do you feel, kid?"

"Gee, all right." The boy shuddered. "Ain't going to do that again."

"What were you doing?"

"Aw. Bunch of Nyack kids, they bet nobody could climb the cliff. I didn't say nothing, but I thought I could, so I tried it."

Smith stood up, held gingerly to the tree trunk and peered over. "Where are they?"

"Oh gosh, I wouldn't try it when anyone's around. I just wanted to see if I could before I opened my trap about it."

"So no one knew you were there!"

The boy grinned shakily. "You did."

Gorwing and Smith shared a glance; to Smith it meant nothing, but Gorwing rose abruptly and barked, "Let's get out of here." Smith sensed his sudden desire to change the subject, just as he sensed the impact of the boy's refusal to change the subject: "Hey, how did you know I was there?"

Gorwing half turned; Smith thought he sensed that glance again, but when he tried to meet it it was gone. "Heard you yellin'," Gorwing said gruffly.

"I live right here," said Smith. It satisfied the boy completely, but for the very first time Smith saw Gorwing look astonished. Yes, and in a way pleased.

They stopped at his house for something cool to drink, and then got in the car to return to Nyack; the boy said he lived on Castle Heights Avenue. There was surprisingly little talk. Neither Gorwing nor Smith seemed to know how to talk to a thirteen-year-old—a rare talent, at best, rare even among thirteen-year-olds—yet what occupied Smith's mind could hardly be discussed in his presence.

Gorwing. This rough, mad, strange, unpredictable Gorwing… you couldn't like him; and Smith knew he did not. Yet through him, with him, Smith had shared something new—new, yes, and rich. He had… it was as if he had had a friend for a moment there, working so dangerously together… and the work was for someone else; that had something to do with it…

Friend… Smith knew many people, and he had no enemies, and so he had thought he had had friends; but for a moment now he got a glimpse of the uncomfortable fact that he had no friends. Never had. Even… even Eloise. Husband and wife they were, lovers they had been—hadn't they?—but could he honestly say that he and Eloise had ever been friends?

He sank for a moment into a viscous caldron of scalding loneliness. Eloise…

"Hey." Gorwing's harsh note crashed into his reverie. "How we get this young feller to keep his mouth shut?"

"Me?" said the boy.

"You better keep your mouth shut, that's all," said Gorwing ominously.

Smith had no experience in talking to boys, but he could see this was the wrong tack. The kid was edging away from Gorwing, and his eyes were too wide. Smith said quickly, "He's right. I don't know your mother, sonny, but I'd say she'd be worried sick if you told her the story. Or maybe just mad."

"Yeah, maybe." He looked warmly at Smith, then timidly at Gorwing. "Yeah, I guess you're right——Can't I tell nobody?"

"I'd as soon you didn't."

"Well, anything you say," said the boy. He swallowed and said again, "Anything…" and then, "That's my house. The white one."

Smith stopped well away from the house. "Hop out, so no one sees you in the car. So long."

"So long." The boy walked away a slow pace, then turned back. "I don't even know your names."

"Delehanty," said Smith. And Gorwing said solemnly, "Me, too."

"Well," said the boy uneasily, "well, thanks, then," and moved toward the white house.

Smith backed into a nearby driveway and headed back toward the shop.

Gorwing said truculently, "How come you covered for me like that?"

"I had the idea you wanted it that way. Up on the cliff I got that idea."

"Yeah——You know all the time what people want?"

"I don't think," said Smith slowly, with a frankness that stung his eyes, "I ever tried before."

They rolled along for what seemed a long, companionable moment. Then Smith added, "You don't always help people out for money, do you?"

Gorwing shrugged, rolled down his window, and spat. "Only when I can get it. Oh man, could I use some about now."

"This," said Smith bitterly, "is my taxicab this time."

"Oh, I wasn't asking you for nothing. You watch yourself, Smith. I'm no panhandler."

Smith drove self-consciously, carefully. He knew his face was pink, and he hated himself for it. He wondered if he could say anything to this madman without making him angry. Angrier. He asked, without malice, "What would you do with money?"

"Get drunk," said Gorwing, and immediately glanced at Smith's face. "Oh my God," he said disgustedly, "he believes me. I never drink anything… What would I do with money?" he mused. "Tends how much. Now there's a couple, the old man is dying. I mean, he can't last, not much more. The woman, she stays by him ever minute, don't go out even to buy food. Somebody don't go to the store for 'em, throw 'em a couple skins now and then, they… oh, you wouldn't know."

No, Smith wouldn't know. He had never been in need… or in danger, before today. Turning into Midland Avenue, he glanced down a side street toward the river, where the wide-lawned pleasant houses gave way to the shabby-decent, the tenement, the shack. He had never done that before, not to see them. And then, the need you could see, starting with the shacks, was, when you came to think about it, surely not all the need there was; need comes in so many colors and kinds. He brought the thought back up to the crisp-tended, tree-shaded homes on the Avenue and wondered what it was like to live in this world instead of—of whatever it was he had been doing.

He stopped in front of the Anything Shoppe, and they got out. "Here," Smith said. He took out his wallet and found a twenty-dollar bill. He looked at Gorwing and suddenly took out the ten, too—all he had with him.

Gorwing did not thank him. He took the money and said, "Well, all right!" and marched off.

Smith was still wagging his head as he entered the shop.

"I know how you feel," said G-Note, grinning.

"What is he?"

G-Note grunted. "I never did really know, myself."

"I never thought I'd say this, but I sort of like him." Smith was feeling very warm inside about all this.

Oddly enough, the remark brought no smile this time. "I don't know if you can really like Gorwing," said Noat thoughtfully. "He sometimes… but anyway, tell me what happened."

Smith related his afternoon. Noat nodded sagely. "Junkies," he nodded at one point. "He can't stand 'em. Runs 'em out of town every time."

At the end of his story, Smith told him about the money. "Is that on the level, Mr. Noat? Or will he just go on a toot?"

"No, it's on the level. If he keeps out any for himself, it'll be what he barely needs."

"Doesn't he have a job or something?"

Noat shook his big head. "No job. No home, not what you might call a place of his own. Moves around all the time, furnished rooms, back of the poolhall, here in the shop sometimes. I don't think he ever leaves town, though."

"Mr. Noat, how does he do it?"

Noat cocked his head on one side. "Didn't you ask him?"

Smith laughed weakly. "No." Then, with a sudden surge of candor, "Tell you the truth, I was afraid to."

"Tell you the truth, I'm afraid to, too," said Noat. "He… well, between you and me, I think he thinks he's some sort of freak. Or, anyway, he's afraid people will think that. He never lets anybody get close to him. He always does what he can to hide how he does what he does. Usually by blowing up in your face."

"He must… he seems to do a lot of good."

"Yes…" There was a reservation in the ugly man's voice.

"Well, doggone it, what is it he does?"

"He, well, hears when somebody needs something, or maybe you might say smells it. I don't know. I don't know as I care much, except it works. Heck, you don't have to know how everything works—by the time you did, you'd be too old to work it." He turned away, and Smith thought for a moment he had closed the subject, but he said, without turning around, "Only thing I'm sure of, he knows the difference between wanting something and needing it."

"Want… you asked me that!"

"I did. I asked Gorwing, too, although maybe you don't remember."

"Eloise… you mean he'd know whether I—need her, or just want her? Him?"

Noat chuckled. "Feels like a sort of invasion of privacy, doesn't it? It is and it isn't… what he knows, however he knows it, it isn't like anyone else knowing it. That Gorwing… but he does a lot of good, you know."

"I don't doubt it."

"Calla Pincus, she thinks he's some sort of saint."

"Who's she?"

"Girl he—well, she was going to kill herself one time, and he stopped her. She'd do anything for him. So would the Blinker—he's kind of a poolhall rat—and there's old Sarge, that's a track walker for the West Side Line… I mean, he has sort of a raggle-taggle army, all through the town, that've learned to ask no questions and jump to do what he says. Sometimes for pay. And Doc Tramble, and one of the teachers at the high school and… and me, I guess—"

"And me."

Noat laughed. "So welcome to the fold."

"All these years in this town," Smith marveled, "and I never guessed this was going on. Mr. Noat… does he know where my wife is?"

"Did you ask him?"

Smith shook his head. "Somehow I… I was afraid to ask him that, too."

"You better. You need her—you know that and I do and he does. I think you should ask him… Now can I ask you something?"

"Oh, sure."

"You never went to the police or anything. How come?"

Smith looked down at his hands and closed them, then his eyes.

He said in a low voice, "I guess because… You know, she said to me, whatever had happened, she still wanted me to be happy. I imagine I wanted the same thing for her. It was something she had to do; I didn't think I should stop her."

"But you're looking now."

"Not with police."

"Hey, he's coming. Ask him. Go ahead—ask him."

Smith turned eagerly to the door as Gorwing banged in. "Hi!" He felt warm, friendly—pleasurably scared—anticipatory. Gorwing utterly ignored him.

Noat frowned briefly and said, "Hey boy. Smitty there, he's got something to ask you."

"He has?" Gorwing did not even look around.

Smith hesitated, then caught Noat's encouraging nod.

Timidly, he asked, "Mr. Gorwing… do you know where my wife is?"

Gorwing flicked him with a black glance and showed his white teeth. "Sure." Then he turned his full cruel smile on Smith and said, "She don't need you."

Smith blinked as if something had flashed before his eyes. His mouth was dry inside, and outside shivery. He wanted to say something but could not.

Noat growled, "That ain't what he asked you, Gorwing. He says do you know where she is."

"Oh sure," said Gorwing easily, and grinned again. "She got a cold-water walk-up over on High Avenue, 'long with the guy she's livin' with."

Smith had never in his life physically attacked anyone, but now he grunted, just as if he had been kicked in the stomach, and rushed Gorwing. He struck out, a wild, round, unpracticed blow, but loaded with hysteria and hate. It never reached Gorwing, but planted itself instead in the region of Noat's left shoulder blade, for Noat, moving with unbelievable speed for so large a man, had vaulted the counter and come between them. He came, obviously, not to protect anyone, but to launch his own attack. "You lousy little rat, you didn't have to do that. Now you get out of here," he rumbled, as with one hand he opened the door and with the other literally threw Gorwing outside. Gorwing tried to keep his balance but could not; he fell heavily, rolled, got up. His face was so white his black hair looked almost blue; still he grinned. Then he was gone.

Noat closed the door and came to Smith. "So now you know."

"El-Eloise is…" and he began to cough.

"Oh, not that! I mean, now you know about Gorwing. How can you figure it? All he does is take care of what people need… and there's no kindness in him."

"Eloise is—"

"Your wife is taking care of an old sick man who'll be dead any time now."

"Who?" Smith cried, agonized. " What old man?"

"That you just gave the money for."

"I've got to find her," whispered Smith, and then heard what Noat had said. "You mean—that old man? Wh-why, he told me it was an old couple!"

"I bet he didn't."

"You! You know where she is! You knew all the time."

Noat spread his hands unhappily. "You never asked me."

Smith's scorn made him appear a sudden four inches taller. "Quit playing games!"

"Okay… okay." The big man looked completely miserable. "I just didn't want to hurt you, that's all." At Smith's sharp look, he said "Honest. Honest… Gorwing, he's right, you know. She doesn't need you. I wish you didn't make me tell you that. I'm sorry." He went back behind the counter, as if he could comfort himself with the tools, the clutter back there.

"You better tell me the whole thing," whispered Smith.

"Well… she, Mrs. Smith I mean, she came to me that day. She was all… mixed up. I don't think she meant to spill anything, but she sort of… couldn't hold it." He put up a swift hand when Smith would have interrupted. "Wait, I'm telling this all wrong. What I'm trying to say, she came here because she just didn't know where else to go to. She said something about 'Anything Shoppe'; she wanted to know if 'anything' meant… anything. She said she had to have a job, something to do. She said never mind the money, just enough to scrape along, but something to do; that's what she needed."

"What she needed."

"I know what you're thinking. Yeah, Gorwing knew she needed something, and just what it was, too… y'see," he said earnestly, "he's always right. Even the lousy things he does sometimes, they're always right. Or at least… there's always a reason." He stopped, as if to ponder it out for himself.

"Look," said Smith, suddenly, painfully kneading his cheeks, "whatever it is you have to tell me, tell me. I'm all mixed up… and… and where is she?" Then he opened his blue eyes very wide—oddly like those of the boy he had saved on the cliff, when Gorwing had frightened him—and said piteously, "You mean she really doesn't need me? Gorwing was right?"

G-Note crouched over, elbows on the counter, his big hands holding each other in front of him.

He said, "What she needed, what she needed more than anything in the world, she needed something to take care of. You—well, she tried to take care of you, but—Don't you see what I mean?"

There was silence for a long time. Smith felt that somehow, if he could pull together the churned-up pieces of his mind, he might be able to turn it to this, make some sense out of it. He tried very hard, and at last was able to say, "You mean, when you come right down to it, there… was never very much for her to do for me."

"Oh, you got it. You got it. You… well, she told me some things. She cried, I guess she didn't mean to say anything, but I guess—she just had to. She said you could cook better'n she could."

"What?"

"Well, things you liked to eat, you could. And those were all the things you ever wanted. She took care of the house, but you'd 'a done just the same things if she wasn't there. She never felt she really had to…"

"But this old man—who's he?"

"One of Gorwing's… you know. Gorwing found him down by the tracks. Sick, wore out. Needing somebody to take care of him—needing it, you see? Not for long… Doc Tramble, he says he don't know how the old fellow hung on this long."

"God," said Smith, stinging with chagrin, "is that what she needed? Maybe I should be dying—she'd be happy with me then."

"Ah, knock that off. She's only like most people, she has to make a difference to somebody. She makes a difference to that old man, and she knows it."

"She made a difference to me," whispered Smith, and then something lit up inside him. He stared at Noat. "But she never knew it." Suddenly he leaped to his feet, walked up, walked back, sat again bolt upright, holding himself as if he were full of coiled springs. "What's the matter with me? You know what I did, I said she had somebody with her while I was at the Elks' that night, you know, the night you picked me up in the car. That's why she left." He hit himself on the forehead with sharp knuckles. "I know she didn't have anyone, she wouldn't! So what made me think of it? why all of a sudden did I have to think of it, and even when I knew I was wrong, why did I have to go for her, curse at her, call her names the way I did, till she had to leave… why?" he shouted.

"You really want me to tell you?" Then Noat looked away from Smith's frantic, twisted face and shook his head. "I don't know," he said carefully, "I only know what I think. I don't know everything… I don't know you very much. All right?"

"Yes, I understand that. Go ahead."

"Well, then." Noat watched his big brown hands press and slide on the counter until they squeaked, as if they had ideas under them and could express the words by squeezing. He raised them and looked under them and folded them and looked at Smith. "You hear a lot of glop," he said carefully, "about infantile this and adult that, and acting like a grownup. I've thought a lot about that. Like how you've got to be adult about this or that arrangement with people or the world or your work or something. Like they'd say you never had an adult relationship with the missus. Don't get mad! I don't mean—well, hell, how adult is two rabbits? I don't mean the sex thing." He opened his hands to look for more words, and folded them again. "Most people got the wrong idea about this 'adult' business, this 'grownup' thing they talk about but don't think about. What I'm trying to say, if a thing is alive, it changes all the time. Every single second it changes; it grows or rots or gets bigger or grows hair in its armpits or puts out buds or sheds its skin or something, but when a thing is living, it changes." He looked at Smith, and Smith nodded. He went on:

"What I think about you, I think somewhere along the line you forgot about that, that you had to go on changing. Like when you're little, you keep getting bigger all the time, you get promoted in school; you change; good. But then you get out, you find your spot, you got your house, your wife, your kind of work, then there's nothing around you any more says you have to change. No class to get promoted to. No pants grown too small. You think you can stop now, not change any more." Noat shook his craggy head. "Nothing alive will stand for that, Smitty."

"Well, but why did I think she… why did I say that about—some man with her, all that?"

Noat shrugged. "I don't know all about you," he said again. "Just sort of guessing, but suppose you'd stopped, you know, living. Something's going to kick up about that. It don't have to make a lot of sense; just kick up. Get mad about something. Your wife with some man—now, that's not nice, that's not even true, but it's a living kind of thing, you see what I mean? I mean, things change around the house then—but good; altogether; right now."

"My God," Smith breathed.

" 'Course," said Noat, "sooner or later you have to get over it, face things as they really are. Or as they really ain't." He thought again for a time, then said, "Take a tree, starts from a seed, gets to be a stalk, a sapling, on up till it's a hundred feet tall and nine feet through the trunk; it's still growing and changing until one fine day it gets its growth; it's grown up: it's—dead. So the whole thing I'm saying is, this adult relationship stuff they talk about, it's not that at all. It's growing up that matters, not grownup——Man can get along alone for quite a long time 'grownup'—taking care of himself. But if he takes in anyone else, he's… well, he's got to have a piece missing that the other person supplies all the time. He's got to need that, and he's got to have something that's missing in the other person that they need. So then the two of them, they're one thing now… and still it's got to be like a living thing, it's got to change and grow and be alive. Nothing alive will stand for being stopped. So… excuse me for butting in, but you thought you could stop it and it blew up on you."

Smith stared silently at the big man, then nodded. "I see. But now what?"

"You want to know where she is?"

"Sure. By the Lord, now I can…"

"What's the matter?"

Smith looked at him, stricken. "Gorwing said… she didn't need me."

"Gorwing!" snarled Noat. Then he scratched his head. "I see what he meant. She never could take care of you much, and she awful much needs to take care of somebody. Now she's got the old feller. He needs her, God knows. For a little while yet… Gorwing… hey! Why d'ye suppose he tried to make you think—you know—about your wife?"

"You know him better than I do."

"It comes to me," said Noat, inwardly amazed. "I see it. I see it. He makes it his business to take care of what people really need, need real bad. Right? Good. How do you do that?"

"Get 'em what they need, I guess."

"That's one way. Two—" he held up fingers—"you get 'em out of range. Like he does with dope addicts. Right? Then—three. You fix it so they just don't feel they need it any more. I mean, if he was to fix it that you got so mad at your wife you wouldn't want ever to see her again—see?"

"That poor little man! He couldn't do that."

"He just tried. He has a gift, Smitty, but that don't mean he's bright."

"It doesn't?" said Smith in tones of revelation. "It's bright enough. I need her—that's one big need, correct? Now, suppose I go find her, take her away from that poor old man. He starts needing her—and she starts needing to take care of somebody again. So—two big needs. That Gorwing, he knows what he's doing. I—I can't do that, Mr. Noat."

"You mean, to the old man?"

"Well, yes, that. But her… my wife. I need her. You know that, and I do."

"And Gorwing does."

"Yeah, but she doesn't. God, what do I have to do? Do I really have to be dying?"

"Living," said George Noat.

You're a freak.

Sometimes for days at a time he could content himself with the thought that all the rest of them were freaks. Or that, after all, what does anyone do? When it gets cold, they try to get warm. When they get hungry, they go find something to eat. What people feel, what-ever's crowding them, they get out from under the best way they can, right? They duck it or move it or blast it out of the way, or use it on something else that might be bothering them, right? And what bothers people is different, one from the other. Hunger can get to them all and cold and things like that; but look, one wants some music, some special kind of music, more than anything else in life, more than a woman or a drink, while another needs heroin and another to have a roomful of people clapping their hands at him. Or needing, needing like life-and-death, some stupid little thing that would mean nothing to anyone else—something as little as a couple of words, like that Calla girl, about to jump off the Tappan Zee Bridge for wanting somebody to come up to her and say, "Hey, I need you to do something nobody else can do." Or needing to feel safe from some something that lurks inside them, like the Blinker: you'd never guess it to watch him cuss and laugh and make the pass, and chalk the cue, just like anybody, but he was epileptic and he never knew when it was going to hit him. Or needing defense against things lurking outside of them, like Miss Guelph at the high school, crazy afraid of feathers, terrified one might touch her. So the things people need and the things they need to be safe from, they're all kinds of things: it doesn't make one of them a freak if his special need is a little different.

What if you never heard of anyone with a need just like yours?

Does that automatically make you a freak?… There are lots of people who have to make it alone, who can't share what they have with anyone. Who can't drive a car for fear that faint-making, aching cloud will suck them down into it when they don't expect it.

Sometimes, too, you can get to believe that the very thing that's wrong with you makes you special. Well, it does, too. You have power over people. Now just how many people in this—or any—town could tell you a little kid two blocks away was lost, and a woman three blocks the other way was looking for him? Or look at the way you found that boy on the cliff—now that boy would be dead right now.

So if you're so special how come old Noat throws you out on your ear?

You're a freak.

Now cut it out. You got it made. You got a nice spot. The town's just big enough so nobody much notices you, just small enough so when that faintness comes, and that ache, and then the picture in your head—of a traffic light or a building front or a green fence or a cliff side—you know just where to go to find the person who has that big noisy need for something. Remember that trip down to Fort Lee? So big, so noisy; God, you almost went out of your head. Plank you down in the middle of New York, say, you'd be dead in a second, all that racket. And the things they need, you'd never know where to get them in a big place, but here, heck, you know where to find anything if it's in town. Or old Noat will get it for you.

What he want to throw you out like that for? Just trying to shut off the shrieking lonesomeness of that squirt Smith; him and his Eloise, it gave him a headache.

Ow. Here comes one now. Shut your eyes. Ow, my neck. Shut your eyes tight, now. See… see a… see a street, store-front, green eaves over the window. Felt carpet slippers, a man's belt. That would be Harry Schein's Haberdashery on Washington Street. Somebody standing there, needs—what? Sleep, wants to sleep, for God's sake, gets wide awake soon as hits the sack… a man. Screaming for sleep, frantic for sleep. Get some sleeping pills, everything closed now. Hey, this could be worth a buck. Go call Doc Tramble. Here, phone in the gas station. NY 7… o…o… 5…

"Doc? Gorwing here. Got some sleeping pills in your bag? Oh, nothing serious… yes, I know what's dangerous and what ain't. No, not for me. Oh, five, I guess. I'll send the Blinker or somebody around for 'em, okay?"

Ow. Guy walking toward Broad Street now. Oh boy does he want some sleep. Where's dime… here. Call poolroom… 4… 7… "Hi—Danny? Gorwing. Hey, the Blinker there? Hell… Who else is around? No… Nuh, not her. Smith? What Smith—you mean that guy's been hanging around G-Note's? Yeah, put him on."

"Hello—Smitty? Thought you'd be mad. You wouldn't want to do a little job… you would? Well you'll have to scramble. Get over to Doc Tramble's and say you want the pills for me. Yeah. Then take 'em over to Fordson Alley and North Broad—you know, right by the movie—there's a guy there frantic for 'em. See if you can get a dollar apiece. Sleeping tablets. Yeah. Hurry now… He's moving, he's ambling up past the movie. I don't know what he looks like. Just look for a guy looks like he needs some sleep. Hurry now. See ya."

Now that's a surprise. I thought I'd botched it up with that Smith but for good. A good boy. Calmed down, too. Wonder if he's going to pull that wife of his away from the old man. Hope not. Set up a hell of a rattle, the two of 'em at once.

So Gorwing ambled through the evening, through the town. He walked in a cloud of, or in a murmur of, or under the pressure of, or through the resistance of the not-mist, not-sound, not-weight, not-fluid presence of human need. Want was there, too, but want of that kind—two teen-agers yearning for a front-drive imported car in a show window, a drowsy child remembering a huge bride-doll in Woolworth's, the susurrus of desire that whispered up in the wake of a white-clad blonde who, with her boy-friend, walked through the lights of the theater marquee—this kind of want was simply there to be noticed if he cared to notice it. But the need… he watched for it fearfully, yet eagerly—for sometimes it paid off. He hoped that for a while nobody would get hit by a car without getting killed out-

right, or that some hophead wouldn't suddenly appear with that rasping, edgy scream of demand. Ow. Wish Smitty would get to that guy with the sleeping pills.

Need was a noise to Gorwing. No, not really a noise. Need was an acid cloud, a swirling blindness. Need might mount up out of the nighttime village and make him faint. Need might pay off. Need, other people's need, hurt Gorwing… but then each person had one or another difference, one or another talent; this one bad perfect pitch and that one had diabetes, and he wasn't, after all, so different from other people.

You're a freak.

Strangely, it was not too easy to be funereal at this funeral. The flowers were sad, of course, such a scrappy little bunch, and the man was saying all the right things… and it was sad how easily the men handled the coffin; poor little old man, so wasted away. But you couldn't feel badly about him now; he'd been glad to go, and it was good that he'd had, for those last weeks, just what he'd yearned for for so many sick lonesome years—someone who sat near and brought him things and listened to him ramble on about all the old places and the friends and family who were passed on, dead and gone and yet waiting eagerly for him, some place. No, it wasn't any tragedy. Sweetly sad, that was it… and oh, such a bright beautiful day!

Eloise Smith hadn't been out in the fresh air, the sunshine, since…"Eeek!"

It was a small scream, or rather squeak, and really no one noticed. But Jody, oh Jody was standing right next to her in a dark suit, with his hat—the one they called his Other hat—held over his heart, his head bowed. He looked… peaceful.

She bowed her head, too, and they stood quite close together until the man finished saying the old simple words, and the handful of earth went tsk!—a polite expression of sympathy—on the coffin lid. Then it was over. "Bye, you old dear," she said silently but with her heart full.

Then there was Jody. "Oh, Jody. I don't think I—"

"Shh. Eloise, come home. I need you."

"Jody, you're going to make me sound mean, and I don't want to be mean. But you don't need me or anybody, Jody."

Smith moistened his lips, but loosened no special, just-right winning words; he said, could say, only: "I need you. Come home."

"Wait—there's Mr. Gorwing… Wait, Jody; I have to speak to him. Will you wait over there, Jody? Please?"

"Let me stay with you."

"Honey," she said, the wifely word slipping out before she realized it, "he's sometimes sort of… funny. Unpredictable. I wish you'd wait over there and let me talk to—"

"He won't mind. We're old friends."

"You know Mr. Gorwing?"

"Sure."

"Oh dear. I didn't know. He… he's a kind of saint, you know." When Smith, coolly regarding Gorwing, who was talking to the funeral director, did not answer, she went on nervously—she had to talk, had to, oh why had he turned up like this, all unexpectedly? "If anyone's in need at all, he has a way of finding it out; he—"

"I'm in need," said Smith. "I need you."

"Jody, don't!"

"I do," he said softly, earnestly. "You've got to come back. I can't manage without you."

"Oh, that's silly! You have your—"

"I have my nothing, Ellie. I—I gave the money away, almost all of it. I got a job, but I'm only beginning, and the pay isn't much. I'm running a wood lathe in the cabinetmaker's."

"You—what?"

"You've got to help; maybe you'll even have to go to work. Would you, if there's no other way? I can't make it without you, Ellie."

What she was going to say through those soft trembling lips he would not know, for Gorwing interrupted. "Miz Smith—you know who he is?"

She flashed a look at her husband and really blushed. Gorwing laughed that wolf's laugh, that barking expression of mirth and hurt, and said, "I'll tell you who he is. He's the only person in the whole world who ever came up to me and asked me what I needed." He clapped Smith on the shoulder, waved a casual hand at Eloise and walked away toward the cemetery gate. She called him once; he waved his hand but did not turn his face toward them.

"We'll see him again," said Smith. "Ellie… will you just let me tell you what this is all about?"

"What is it all about?"

"Can I tell you all of it?"

"Oh, very well…"

"It'll take about twenty-three years. Oh Eloise—come home."

"Oh,Jody…"

The shy man crouched in the hospital stairwell and peered through the crack of the barely-opened door. There were no white-coated figures in the corridor that he could see. He had long ago abandoned the front way, the elevator and all. Slipping in through the fire doors during visiting hours was much better. He pushed the door open far enough to let him into the corridor, and let it swing silently closed.

He gasped.

"Hello, Johnny."

Right behind the door as he opened it, oh God, the doctor. Johnny bit his tongue and stared up into Doc Tramble's face. It blurred.

"Hey now, hold on," said the doctor. "You better come in here and sit down." He took Johnny's forearm—and for a split second they were both acutely aware of Johnny's tearing temptation to snatch it away and run; and of its crushed quelling—and led him across the corridor into an empty private room, where he lowered the sweating visitor into an easy chair. Dr. Tramble pulled up a straight chair and sat close enough to force Johnny's gaze up and into his own.

"I don't know if you can take this, Johnny, all at once, but you're going to have to try."

"I got a second job, nights," said Johnny hollowly. "With that I can catch up some on the bills. Don't put my wife on the charity list, doctor. She couldn't stand it. She—"

"Now you just listen to me, young fella." He reached into the wall, got a paper cup from a dispenser and filled it from the ice-water jet. With his other hand he reached into his side pocket and took out a folded paper, which he planked down on Johnny's knee. "The bill. I want you to look at it."

Painfully, Johnny unfolded it and looked. His jaw dropped. "So much…" Then his eyes picked up an additional detail on the paper. "P-p-paid?" he whispered.

"In full," said Dr. Tremble. "That's point one. Point two, Madge gets her operation. MacKinney from the Medical Center got interested in the case. He's going to do it next week. Point three—"

"Her operation…"

"Point three," laughed the doctor, "she gets that room to herself now, all paid up, and you have the privilege of telling that to her snide roommate. Point four, here is a check made out to you for five hundred. Drink this," and he pushed the water at him.

Johnny sipped, and over the cup said, "B-but wh-where…"

"Let's keep it simple and say it's a special fund for interesting cases from the Medical Center, and you know these endowed institutes—all this money is interest and there's nobody to thank so shut up and get out of here. No—not to see Madge! Not yet. You go down to the office and they'll cash that check for you. Then you grab a taxi and voom down the street and buy flowers and a radio and a big box of dusting powder and a fancy bed jacket. Git!"

Numbly, Johnny walked to the door. Once there, he turned to the doctor, opened his mouth, shook his head, closed his mouth and without a word went for the elevators.

Laughing, the doctor went down the corridor to the telephone booth, dropped a coin, dialed the poolroom.

"Gorwing there?"

"Speaking."

"Tramble. All set."

"Yeah, doc, I know. I know. Oh God, Doc, it's so quiet in this town…"