to Mrs. Czeskì—a butternut squash with the likeness of her own face—was unnatural. The boy was bright, people agreed, but maybe it was the light of the Devil.
Such sentiments did not fuss Lloyd much (although his parents, who were already sensitive about their mixed blood, were plenty troubled). He had never known otherwise, and most of it was just talk. Still, he was not so foolish now not to run—or, at least, to appear to run—and he led the Marietta Street tribe through a stand of poplars into an area that Hephaestus had used as a scrap yard until he found a black cat dead of snakebite. Lloyd had since turned the wasteland into a maze of chicanes and surprises.
Booth Tanner and Buddy Pitch took the first hits, tripping a crawdad wire that hurled a corn-popping basket full of fishing shot at them. A smaller but more tightly wound hairspring catapult almost plinked out Mason Griddle’s left eye, while Andy Cudrup took a palm-size flywheel straight to the forehead. Then Willie Best and Oscar Trogdon stepped on partially buried potato rakes and knocked themselves silly, while Ezra Fudge planted both feet in a concealed wagon wheel and just about broke off at the ankles. The gang halted or retreated in disarray at this point—all except the hellion general, Grady Smeg, who lumbered after Lloyd with the sticking plaster from his father’s strappings hanging off him.
Even with his comrades downed or deserted, Grady could not grasp that he had been led into a trap. Lloyd had covered the hole with a big swath of burlap floured with dirt and sneezeweed. Grady never suspected a thing until he landed with a thud. Everything hurt, and blood filled his mouth with a taste of iron and chagrin.
As predicted, Lloyd came home as the lengthening shadows of dusk were spreading out over the goat pen, where Hephaestus was milking the two long-eared Anglo-Nubians for the second time that day. The boy stopped by the well and washed his face, but his father could tell that something was up by the way he flustered the Indian Runner they called Cotton Mather (because the duck would often alight on the roof of the forge and “preach”). The bottle-shaped drake squawked with indignation and wobbled off to what green ooze was left of the pond. The boy marched on toward the house without pause. Such behavior worried Hephaestus more than the fits and the invisible friends. There was a scary side to the child. Normally, Lloyd was kind to all creatures, a lover of animals—but things could change, as Hephaestus had discovered to his disgust and anguish one afternoon when he interrupted the young student in the midst of a vivisection of his once favorite Flemish giant rabbit, Phineas. The sounds the creature made, its long soft ears drooping—it was something he would never forget. The boy’s punishment had been to dig a regal tomb for the creature and to tend the grave every day. But Hephaestus could never get the pitiful rabbit’s eyes out of his mind.
That evening they ate a pale celery soup served cool and a spatterdock-and-spikenard salad tossed with crushed coriander. Not much was said. Then, just as they were washing up and Hephaestus was thinking about getting out of working in the garden and enjoying some parsnip wine, Lionel Smeg, Grady’s ham-fisted father, rattled into their yard in his logging cart, old Tip crooning balefully.
“Sitturd! Yoo get that boy-a-yoors out here!” Lionel commanded.
The elder Smeg had been top bulldog in the local sport of brawling until his love of the “Democratic comforter” had made him too stout for such exertions, so he had taken to imbibing vinegar to reduce his flesh, and this was now ruining his stomach.
Lloyd was already out in the settling dust, patting Tip and staring defiantly at the blood pressure—red visitor, whose cheek bulged with chewing tobacco.
“Somep’n’s heppend to ma boy!” the man blubbered. “This one done somep’n to ’im!”
“What?” asked Hephaestus, limping out of the house. “Lloyd? He’s only a runt compared to Grady. What do you mean?
Lionel’s face blotched even redder at this reminder of the physical inequity of the boys, but he stammered on, lolling the tobacco wad around in his mouth like a second tongue.
“Thair ’as some shenanigans. Lloyd heer done somep’n dirty to Grady. Now we kaint fine ’im.”
“What’s this about, Lloyd?” Hephaestus asked.
The boy looked back with his green eyes and said, without blinking, “Grady plays with some rough boys and in