to shout; the dog might bite; he can’t bear to watch.
“Yes but he drifts further away,” Mrs. Springer is whining. “He’s well off. He has no reason to come back if we don’t give him one.”
Eccles sits down in the aluminum chair again. “No. He’ll come back for the same reason he left. He’s fastidious. He has to loop the loop. The world he’s in now, the world of this girl in Brewer, won’t continue to satisfy his fantasies. Just in seeing him from week to week, I’ve noticed a change.”
“Well not to hear Peggy Fosnacht tell it. She says she hears he’s leading the life of Riley. I don’t know how many women he has.”
“Just one, I’m sure. The strange thing about Angstrom, he’s by nature a domestic creature. Oh dear.”
There is a flurry in the remote group; the boys run one way and the dog the other. Young Fosnacht halts but Nelson keeps coming, his face stretched large by fright.
Mrs. Springer hears his sobbing and says angrily, “Did they get Elsie to snap again? That dog must be sick in the head the way she keeps coming over here for more.”
Eccles jumps up—his chair collapses behind him—and opens the screen door and runs down to meet Nelson in the sunshine. The boy shies from him. He grabs him. “Did the dog bite?”
The boy’s sobbing is paralyzed by this new fright, the man in black grabbing him.
“Did Elsie bite you?”
The Fosnacht boy hangs back at a safe distance.
Nelson, unexpectedly solid and damp in Eccles’ arms, releases great rippling gasps and begins to find his voice.
Eccles shakes him to choke this threat of wailing and, wild to make himself understood, with a quick lunge clicks his teeth at the child’s cheek. “Like that? Did the dog do that?”
The boy’s face goes rapt at the pantomime. “Like dis,” he says, and his fine little lip lifts from his teeth and his nose wrinkles and he jerks his head an inch to one side.
“No bite?” Eccles insists, relaxing the grip of his arms.
The little lip lifts again with that miniature fierceness, as if this tells the whole delightful story. Eccles feels mocked by a petite facial alertness that recalls, in tilt and cast, Harry’s. Sobbing sweeps over Nelson again and he breaks away and runs up the porch steps to his grandmother. Eccles stands up; in just that little time of squatting the sun has started sweat on his black back.
As he climbs the steps he is troubled by something pathetic, something penetratingly touching, in the memory of those tiny square teeth bared in that play snarl. The harmlessness yet the reality of the instinct. The kitten’s instinct to kill the spool with its cotton paws.
He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother’s legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees, and their exposed breadth and pallor, undesired, laid bare defenselessly, superimposed upon the tiny, gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood. Strong—as if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could purge the dust and rubble from every corner of the world—he steps forward and promises to the two bowed heads, “If he doesn’t come back when she has the baby, then we’ll get the law after him. There are laws, of course; quite a few.”
“Elsie snaps,” Mrs. Springer says, “because you and Billy tease her.”
“Naughty Elsie,” Nelson says.
“Naughty Nelson,” Mrs. Springer corrects. She lifts her face to Eccles and continues in the same correcting voice, “Yes well she’s a week due now and I don’t see him running in.”
His moment of fondness for her has passed; he leaves her on the porch. Love never ends, he tells himself, using the Revised Standard Version. The King James has it that it never fails. Mrs. Springer’s voice carries after him into the house, “Now the next time I catch you teasing Elsie you’re going to get a whipping from your grandmom.”
“No, Mom-mom,” the child begs coyly, fright gone.
Eccles thought he would find the kitchen and take a drink of water from the tap but the kitchen slips by him in the jumbled rooms. He makes a mouth that works up saliva and swallows it as he leaves the stucco house. He gets into his Buick and