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snuff.
    Roland Comeaux missed more than the morning line: he missed the morning prayers recited in the classroom, Brother Gauthier leading, each boy standing at his desk, fingering the black rosaries they all carried. Roland came in after they had recited the first decade of the joyful mysteries. They were seated and Larry, sitting behind Paul, had just given his tricep a long hard pinch, and Paul had turned to him a smiling face. When he looked to the front of the class again Roland was coming through the door. He wore khakis and a T-shirt whose sleeves were taut around his veined biceps; in tennis shoes he strode poised and graceful to the desk where he smiled at Brother Gauthier and then, turning, smiled at the class. The smile did not ask for anything. Then he turned back to Brother Gauthier.
    At recess that morning the class crowded around the Coke machine, five or six hands at once waiting with a coin at the slot. Paul was toward the rear, holding his nickel in his fist and pocket too, so he didn’t see Roland and Wayne until the crowd moved back from the machine with that sudden and quiet shifting that always meant a fight. He could feel the anticipation in their bodies as he squeezed between them and got toward the front. Roland was perhaps an inch taller than Wayne but much lighter; Wayne Landry was short, chubby, and strong, one of the boys the high school football coach waited for.
    â€˜Pick it up,’ Wayne said.
    Then he pushed Roland’s chest. In the fights Paul had seen, this pushing was a ritual: boys pushed each other until fear left their eyes, then they fought. Roland did not return Wayne’s push. He hit him in the jaw with a left hook (Paul noticed that: not a round-house right but a left, and a hook at that); the second blow was a right to the stomach that would have folded Wayne if it weren’t for the left and right which struck almost the same point on his chin. He went to the pavement as though he had slipped on ice. Leaning forward, Paul saw that one outstretched hand lay next to the nickel. Wayne was looking up at Roland, whose fists were unclenched, one hand going into his pocket as he turned to the machine and said: ‘I didn’t hit your nickel. You dropped it.’
    He bought a Coke, opened it, then he bought another. He opened that one and held it down toward Wayne. Wayne sat up and looking at some point past Roland’s knees, took it. Roland walked slowly through the crowd of boys. Paul wanted to touch him as he passed. Instead he murmured: ‘You looked like Bob Steele.’
    The smile Roland turned on him was friendly; Roland’s brown eyes looked into his, as though asking his name.
    â€˜Who’s Bob Steele?’ Roland said.
    Then he walked on.
    Sometimes on winter afternoons when yesterday’s mud was hard footprinted earth, Paul lingered after school and watched the boxers in the gym. He sat with his books in the bleachers and watched Roland in a grey suit skipping rope and then handing the rope to an older boy and crossing the gym where, waiting at the large bag, he talked with a high school boy who fought at a hundred and forty-five pounds. Then Paul watched him working on the bag. The older boy watched too and sometimes spoke to Roland. When the boxers finished in the gym the coach took them for a six-mile run in the cold twilight. Mounting his bicycle Paul watched them leaving. They ran in a formation of two files and Roland, ninety-five pounds and shorter than everyone, ran in front. As Paul pumped past them on the opposite side of the road he could see Roland turning his head, talking to the boy beside him; he was laughing. Paul turned on his light and rode home.
    â€˜I don’t want to go,’ Eddie said. ‘I’ve never been to one.’
    â€˜Neither have I,’ Paul said.
    It was recess, and they stood with hands in their jacket pockets. Paul was looking up at Eddie’s face. He liked Eddie’s face but sometimes