several tries, got the engine to turn over. There was no damage. A quiet caught and held. Something had ended, at least for the night. There was no damage. Larry got into the front seat, Billy and Dina into the back. Bix steered the Ford back onto the road.
“Some night,” Billy said.
“Far out,” Larry said. Bix and Dina didn't speak. Billy wasn't ready for the nowhere yet.
“I think I need a little more war paint,” he said. He reached over and touched the blood on Bix's cheek. Bix cuffed him with the back of his hand. He caught Billy on the chin, snapped his head back. The car veered to the far side of the road
“You all right, Billy?” she asked. Her knee pressed against his. He shoved her knee away.
“I'm fine,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
The quiet sealed itself, but as long as the pain throbbed in him he was somewhere. The radio played on. Billy held his jaw in his hand and put his boots out the window. His heart was pounding with a love so awful it made him giddy and a little faint. The car sped along and Billy watched the tree limbs flash by. He felt Dina's perfume working itself into his skin. Bix drove in silence and Billy ran his fingertips tenderly along his jawbone, fondling the injury as if it belonged to someone else, someone he adored. The car hurled itself into the growing somewhere. He believed he could drive all night.
When he got home a pale, tentative light was seeping down the stairwell. He walked as lightly as he could in his boots but they were made for noise. That was the point of them.
“Billy?” His mother's voice drifted down with the light. He paused on the landing, sucking air between his teeth.
“Yeah, Ma.” Let me get to my room. All I want, all I need, is quiet and darkness. He got to the top of the stairs and halfway down the hall but his mother came out of her room and caught him with her anxious smile. She was puffy and radiant in a rose-colored bathrobe.
“It's late,” she said.
“I know. I know it's late.”
He stood in his boots and his leather jacket, not looking at her. He knew he smelled of vodka and cow manure. He knew he had blood on his face.
“Look at you,” she said. “What have you been doing?”
“Nothing,” he said. He wanted a mother like Bix's, who carried a cocktail from room to room. Who didn't need anything but Rents and Scotch and her own bitter, wised-up personality.
“What happened to your forehead?” she asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No. I'm totally fine. I'm going to bed.”
She tried to touch his forehead but he took a heavy-heeled step away from her. She managed to catch his sleeve. His lungs tightened and he pulled in air through his clenched teeth, striving for a full breath. Lately he'd been suffering these attacks of breathlessness, though he hadn't told anyone about them. He suspected he had lung cancer.
“This is no way for a Harvard man to act,” his mother said with whispered cheerfulness.
“I'm not a Harvard man, Ma.”
“You will be in September, Billy. Do you know how special you are? Do you know how much is going to happen to you?”
“Maybe I don't want to go to Harvard after all,” he said.
“Don't be ridiculous. After all that work.”
“I haven't even told anybody about it. I mean, Bix and Larry and everybody. They don't even know.”
She put her face closer to his. She smelled of powder and sleep and something else, a vague but insinuating sweetness that frightened him. “Bix and Larry,” she said. “I want you to watch yourself with them. Do you hear me? Bix and Larry are basically nothing but juvenile delinquents.”
“Yeah. Well, that's what I like about 'em.”
“Honey,” his mother said, and her voice took on deeper, more harshly whispered urgency. “What's wrong with you? What's going on?”
“Nothing's wrong,” he said evenly. “I'm tired. I need to go to sleep.”
“You're not the same,” she said. “You're not the same boy. I don't know who you are these days.”
He wanted to put his hands in her hair, to grab hold and tell her—what? A new world was coming, and she would have to stay home. He stood briefly in a transport of love and fury, surrounded by dim unbreathable air, wanting to touch