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hear? He won't
like it if you do." Then he turned back to the TV.
    I walked down the hall to the outside door and stepped
into the evening air. The street was already lit for night—gas lamps
puddling brightly on the wet concrete, house lights glowing up and down
the street. The rain had stopped and a chilly wind had come up from the
west, pushing the big dark storm clouds across the sky and whistling through
the hedges and the pines. It whipped at my hair and my jacket as soon as
I stepped off the porch. I pulled the jacket close to my chest and I followed
a hedge row to the driveway beside the apartment house. There was enough
light coming out of side and rear windows for me to make my way back to
the garage—a long slat outbuilding with eight pairs of double doors,
each with numbers. painted on it in phosphorescent paint.
    I found l-C and 1-D, unlatched the doors, and pulled them
open. The l-D stall was dark and empty. A Buick had recently been parked
in l-C. I could hear the engine ticking and could smell the exhaust fumes.
I groped around the empty stall, looking for a light switch, and eventually
walked into a string dangling from an overhead fixture. I jerked it down
and the right side of the double garage was lit faintly by a forty-watt
bulb.
    There was an oil spot on the concrete floor, but aside
from that the cubicle was clean and orderly. A padlocked metal cabinet
stood against the rear wall, with a couple dozen pictures taped to the
doors. As I got closer, I could see that most of them were pictures of
rock musicians, cut out of magazines. But a few of them were snapshots
of a boy whom I took to be Bobby. He was a tall, skinny kid, with shoulder-length
brown hair and a little boy's face that made him look childishly sweet,
guileless, and a little simple-minded. The kind of kid who could be made
to do anything. In two of the photos he was sitting on the porch steps
of a frame house, his guitar cradled lovingly in his lap. Two other boys
were sitting beside him—both of them in their early twenties, both of
them holding musical instruments (guitar, sax) and smiling at the camera.
Like Bobby they were long-haired, bright-eyed kids in jeans and workshirts.
    The most interesting photograph was taped to a fluorescent
light hung above a narrow workbench on the east wall. I didn't notice it
until I'd turned to leave. It had been taken on the same porch as the other
two photos, but Bobby wasn't in it. Robbie Segal was. She was sitting on
a stair, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands. A man and a woman
were sitting on either side of her like a family portrait. The man had
a long black beard with touches of gray in it, long black hair braided
in a ponytail, a black beret slanting across his forehead, wire-rim glasses,
and a haughty, fleshless, unsettlingly cold-looking face. He was staring
so intently into the camera that it was as if he were taking the picture,
and not the photographer. On Robbie's left, a middle-aged woman with very
short gray hair, cut almost like a crew cut, and a mannish, sappy face
was grinning mindlessly at Robbie and the black-haired man. She looked
as if she were overjoyed to have been included in the picture—like a
punk house mother.
    I spent a moment trying to decipher the look on Robbie's
face. It wasn't a conventional look of happiness, although she seemed happy.
It was more like the look she might have had as she sank into a hot tub
at the end of a long day. Her eyes were vague and sleepy; her crooked mouth
hung open, as if she were taking a deep, satisfied breath. I thought of
the hash pipe I'd found in her room, but she looked more than high. She
looked spaced-out, thick-tongued, tripping-stoned, as if she'd just done
up junk in both arms. It was a drunken look of contentment, and it worried
me.
    I peeled the photo off the lamp and stuck it in my pocket.
Then I took a closer look at the workbench. I found some Beatles sheet
music—"Blue Jay Way," "Rocky Racoon," and "I Am the