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breath and heart were quick.
    Larry Guidry was a short wiry boy with biceps like baseballs, thin curly hair, a small head, and a face the color of housedust. Paul thought his head looked like a cottonmouth’s. Larry had no friends but sometimes at recess he joined a group that was joking about girls or parts of girls and when he laughed his eyes were bright. They were bright too when he hurt Paul. In the fifth grade the Brothers had stopped failing him. That was the first year Paul was his classmate. It was, he thought, as if Larry had been waiting for him to catch up. For two years Larry punched his arms, twisted his ears, yanked his hair, and stomped his cold instep as the class waited in line outside of school on winter mornings. Once at supper his mother saw the bruise on his arm and asked him what had happened. He told her a boy hit him. She said he must tell the boy not to do it again, a bruise like that could cause cancer. Did you hit him back? his father said. We were playing, Paul said. Walking home from school in the afternoons and in bed at night Paul fought with Larry, blackened and closed his eyes, broke his nose and jaw, covered his small crinkled face with cuts and blood, and hearing Larry’s helpless and defeated pleas, his breast filled as with the brass and bass drum of a passing parade.
    Larry came from a poor family. Paul knew this because he came on the school bus from the north end of town and because everything he wore was old: the clean starched and ironed khakis in the fall and spring, the corduroys and sweat shirts and mackinaw in winter, and the black tennis shoes with their soles worn nearly smooth. Paul also believed he had many brothers and sisters. He looked like he came from one of those families. In the summer Larry sold snowballs. He had a roofed, glass-windowed cart attached to the front of his bicycle and he rode about town. Usually he worked the north end where the swimming pool and golf course were and where poor white families lived on the borders of the Negro section. But sometimes on summer afternoons when Paul and Eddie walked to a movie they saw him on the main street and bought a snowball from him. The three of them spoke nervously and politely, like old schoolmates who hadn’t been close. Paul knew Larry wouldn’t do anything to them, though he didn’t know how he knew it or why it was true: whether because working and bullying didn’t go together or because it was summer and bullying was left back there with books and desks and blackboards and ringing bells. I saw Brother Daniel driving somewhere. I saw Louis at the pool. Larry bent over the block of ice, his head and arms inside the cart as he scraped with the hand-scraper; then he packed ice into paper cups and poured over it the flavored syrup. I’ll take grape this time. The small hand gave him the cup. He placed a nickel in the palm, his thumb and finger touching the hand.
    When Paul went back to school for the seventh grade Larry was sixteen years old, his voice was deeper, but he had not grown; the khakis he wore could have been the same he had worn the autumn before. On the first day of school, about twenty minutes late, Roland Comeaux joined the class. He missed the first bell which summoned the boys to line up in two files facing their teacher, and the second bell which rang usually as the principal, a large, jovial and irascible Frenchman, emerged from the building and stood on the back steps and, with his hands resting on his round belly, looked down at the entire school: the third graders to his left, the high school seniors to his right, and the black-robed Christian Brothers standing with roll books at the head of each column. Brother Gauthier, the seventh-grade teacher, was also from France and he used snuff. In other years Paul had smelled oiled wooden floors, washed blackboards, chalk dust, and the glossy pages of new books. The seventh grade would be the year that smelled of