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spoke, and now he tucked the watch into Kootie’s shirt pocket. “If you follow me. Oh, and the same with your belt, hey? That I’ll let you fix. Lord, boy,” he said, shaking his head as he lithely straightened up again, “both legs and your left hand! You must have been weak as a kitten all day.”
    Kootie seemed embarrassed, as though he’d blundered into a girls’ rest room by mistake. The boy quickly unbuckled his belt, straightened out the twist, and re-buckled it; then he pointed at the truck and asked gruffly, “Why is your truck the color of blood?”
    The pregnant woman by the truck closed her eyes, and Mavranos crossed his arms and nodded several times. “The hard way, of course. You take the low road and I’ll crawl in the goddamned dirt, right? That’s the spirit. Oh, that was the wrong question, boy!”
    He turned and walked back to the still-open driver’s-side door, and for a moment Angelica hoped these two people, and whatever they might have brought with them in the truck, would now just go away; but Mavranos only leaned in to hook out a can of Coors beer, which, from the way it swung in his hand as he trudged back to where he had been standing, was already half-emptied.
    He took a sip from it before speaking. “But since you ask. This lady and a friend painted it red on Ash Wednesday of 1990, in Las Vegas, to elude detection by the police—like the blood of the lamb over the doorposts in Egypt, right?—and ever since then the truck spon- tane -eously turns red every year during Holy Week. Ordinarily it’s blue.”
    “This isn’t Holy Week,” ventured Pete. “This is New Year’s Day.”
    “Oh, the error of it hadn’t eluded me, honest,” Mavranos said. He looked again at Kootie, and frowned. “You were a street beggar in L.A. a couple of years ago, weren’t you? With an old black guy and a dog? Didn’t I give you five bucks?”
    Kootie’s eyes widened, and then narrowed in a slow, shy smile. “Yeah, you did. And it was a blue truck.”
    “Sure,” Mavranos said. “I remember now I saw room for the crown on your head even then. I should have figured it would be you we’d find today.” After crouching to put his beer can down on the pavement, he straightened and spat in the palm of one hand and then struck it with his other fist; the spit flew toward the kitchen, and he looked up at the crazy old building for the first time.
    He was staring at the sign over the door. “I met Leon,” he said softly; “though he had lost his testículos years before.”
    On top of her anxious tension, Angelica was now embarrassed too. “It means ‘Testicles of the Lion ,’ ” she said. “All consultorios have animal valor names—Courage of the Bull, Heart of the Leopard, things like that. It’s … a custom.”
    Mavranos looked down at her, and his eyes were bright until he blinked and resumed his protective squint. “We’re in the choppy rapids of custom every which way you look, ma’am. Now, the random … trajectory of my spit has indicated your building. Will you give permission for my party to come inside?”
    Party? Angelica was suddenly certain that there was a third person in the old red truck—a person, the person, central to all this—sick or injured or even dead; and suddenly she very strongly didn’t want any of these strangers inside the buildings of Solville. Apparently permission would have to be given for that to happen—and she opened her mouth to deny it—
    But Kootie spoke first. “I am the master of this house,” the boy said. “And you have my permission to bring your party inside.”
    Angelica wheeled on Kootie, and she could feel her face reddening. “Kootie, what are you—” Then she stopped, and just exhaled the rest of her breath in helpless frustration.
    Under the tangled curls of his black hair, Kootie’s face looked leaner, older now; but the apologetic smile he gave her was warm with filial affection, and sad with a boy’s