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up and walked toward her across the room. “Now I know where we stand,” I said. “What makes you certain you’re going to be alive very long?”
    With my shoulders coming towards her, it must have sounded like a direct threat. Her face went to pieces finally. She moved back into the corner between the bar and thewall, watching me with a basilisk grin, the breath hissing in her nostrils.
    “Get away from me,” she whispered.
    I leaned on the bar and smiled as cheerfully as I could. “You scare easily, don’t you? You’ve got a lot of fear inside you, but I didn’t put it there. I’m just the peg you’re hanging it on for the moment. Now I wonder where all that fear came from?”
    Her whole face was twisting, trying to cover the nakedness of her emotion. “Go away,” she whispered again. “I can’t stand any more of your talk.”
    “I’m not crazy about it myself, but there isn’t much else I can do. Now, if you’d do a little of the talking and tell me what you’re afraid of—”
    “You came here to torment me, didn’t you?” she said in a low monotone. “You thought you could break me down. You hate me because your father left me his money, and you think you should have it. Get out of here, you overgrown bully!”
    I was young enough to be hit hard by the epithet. But before I walked out of the house I threw her something to chew in bed:
    “What you need is a good psychiatrist. I hear there’s a good one in the state penitentiary.”

chapter
5
    A faded sign in the window of Kaufman’s secondhand store stated: “We Buy, Sell, and Exchange Anything,” and the contents of the window supported the statement. There were old coats, cameras, military medals, an old fox neckpiece, which looked as if it had been gnawing itself to death, a Western saddle, a shotgun, a pair of Indian clubs, a rusty pair of handcuffs, a thirty-day clock in a bell jar, a complete set of the
Waverley
novels, a bird cage, a greasy truss. The strangest object in the window was a lithographed portrait of Friedrich Engels, surveying with a cold eye the chaotic symbols of the civilization he had criticized.
    The store was dark, but a thin line of light shone under a door at the back. I knocked. The door at the back opened, and a bulky shadow appeared in the rectangle of light, walking not quite like a man. He switched on the store lights and hobbled towards me, through a junk heap of rusty stoves, baby carriages whose original occupants had long since graduated from high school, fly-specked dishes, and battered furniture—the detritus of broken homes and the leavings of people bettering themselves on the installment plan.
    He was a heavy old man who swung one leg stiffly from the hip and rolled as he walked. He flattened his broad nose against the window in the front door and peered at me. Then he shouted through the pane: “What do you want? I’m all closed up.”
    I shouted back: “Are you the man that writes the letters to the newspapers?”
    “I’m the man. You been reading them?”
    “Let me in. I want to talk to you.”
    He unsnapped a key ring from his belt, unlocked and opened the door. “So what do you want to talk to me about? Ideas?”
    The smile which swallowed his eyes was wide, bland, and simple, like the smile on a Buddha’s stone face. The naked crown of his head was level with my chin, but he was almost as wide as the door. He swung his stiff leg and moved back out of my way.
    “What’s Engels doing in the window?” I asked.
    “You know his face? Almost nobody in this godforsaken burg knows him. They ask me who’s that, is that your father? So I tell them who Engels was. I tell them what he stood for. I educate them without their knowing what I’m doing.” He sighed heavily. “The exploited masses.”
    “A good many of the exploited masses must come in here. You’re in a good spot to spread your gospel.”
    “You come in the back.” Without touching me, his right arm moved in the circular