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objectionable.
    â€œEasily. Very easily,” he said with a laugh. He threw down the rest of his coffee, stood up, kissed Ginny on the forehead, and raced for his plane, like the candidate for cardiac arrest that he was. Though how a heart of stone could be subject to malfunctions escaped Ginny at the time.
    Two and a half months later he was dead, of a heart attack.
    After watching Mrs. Yancy’s plane take off, Ginny wandered home via the perplexing network of new superhighways and shopping malls. She felt as though another bout of separation anxiety was imminent. It was all too much: her mother sick in the hospital, the Major dead, her childhood home on the auction block, Hullsport being strangled by a kind of cancer. Everything familiar to her in this place seemed to be slipping away. And since Ira had kicked her out, she had no other home, no other family.
    She drove by Hullsport Regional High School, a massive red brick construction with white trim. Next to the building was a vast practice field. She was intimately acquainted with every tussock and pothole in that field because she had marched up and down it endlessly, trying to bend her legs at the knees in perfect right angles, almost every afternoon for two years as flag swinger for the Hullsport Pirates. This honor entitled her to strut in front of the marching band at football games, wearing gray twill short shorts and a braided maroon uniform jacket with silver epaulets and white tasseled go-go boots and a high white-plastic visored helmet with a maroon ostrich feather anchored in its band. She carried a maroon and gray flag with the school crest in the middle — a torch of knowledge. And above the crest was the school motto, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The flagstaff had a bulb handle that enabled her to twirl and snap the flag around her as she marched, in a variety of dazzling patterns to accompany the fight songs being struggled through by the band. The prestige!
    Ginny was driving very slowly past the practice field, savoring crumbs of glory from her past and pondering the fact that it was possible to condition a person to take pride in doing almost anything if his environment labeled that activity desirable.
    She knew that cinder track and practice field in another way than just marching over it, though. After she had dropped out of flag swinging, Clem Cloyd and she, if there were no coaches around, would roar out onto the track and race round it on Clem’s Harley. The flying wheels would throw cinders up into the red straining faces of the dripping track team, Joe Bob Sparks among them, who would be yelling, “Get that goddam cycle off our track!”
    Then Ginny noticed that some boys were in fact running the cinder track now, their bare chests, with their newly sprouting fleeces of hair, slick with sweat under the hot midsummer sun.
    Suddenly she jammed on the Jeep brakes and stared at one of the figures. Swerving into the curb, she sat there short of breath. She’d have known that sweaty back anywhere! The muscular ridges that rose up on either side of the backbone were rippling rhythmically as their owner ran. How many times had she danced holding onto those ridges with her hands and wishing fervently that that hard-muscled body were moving up and down on top of hers? Dear God, it was Joe Bob Sparks himself!

3
Walking the Knife’s Edge, or Blue Balls in Bibleland
    The first time I ever saw “the Sparkplug of the Hullsport Pirates” as the sportscaster of WHPT referred to Joe Bob Sparks, he came flying through a paper portrait of a snarling pirate who had a black patch over one eye and a knife between his teeth and a bandanna around his head. Joe Bob led with one cleated foot, his elbows extended and his shoulder pads hunched up around his maroon helmet. Number thirty-eight he was, halfback and captain. I had of course heard of him. He was an area legend by this time. But I had never seen