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smiled a little, thinking how descriptive was the carney slang word for it, madball.
    He stared at it, but not into it, musingly.
    Round like the world, he thought. Like the world, sometimes seeming transparent, easy to see through; like the world, at other times mysterious and a little frightening. Not that he ever really saw anything there except once in a while when he was a little drunk and then it always scared him, but looking into it helped him to concentrate.
    Usually, that is. This time it didn't. Whatever the thought that he'd been on the verge of thinking, it slipped farther and farther away.
     

 

     
     

    CHAPTER SIX
    MID-EVENING AND SAMMY was glad because Jesse was drinking and when Jesse started drinking on the job he nearly always closed the place early, even if business was fairly good like tonight, and if he closed Sammy wouldn't have to set up any more milk bottles and might even have th e rest of the evening to do anything he wanted to do. Sometimes when he was drinking Jesse would go off by himself and he'd tell Sammy to stick on the lot and not get in any trouble but as long as he stayed on the lot Sammy would be free to wander around and see the other games and the shows.
    Tonight Sammy was especially glad that they might close early because Jesse was mad at him. Jesse had bawled the holy hell out of him this morning and had been acting mean to him ever since, all because he'd found a man dead and instead of pretending he hadn't found a man dead he'd called people to tell them about it. And it wasn't fair of Jesse to be mad because how could Sammy have known, since he'd never found a dead man before, that he was supposed to go away quickly and let somebody else find the man?
    That was the bad thing, you never knew what you were supposed to do when something new happened until it had happened once and you'd learned, but the first time you probably did the wrong thing and so many new things kept happening that you were always in trouble because you'd done wrong on them.
    And Jesse was always getting mad and bawling him out for something even though he always tried to do his best for Jesse because Jesse took care of him and Jesse always told him that if h e ever quit taking care of him they'd come and put him in a place behind bars because he couldn't take care of himself. And Sammy knew Jesse was telling the truth because he'd been in a place like that once, a place with bars on the windows and the doors always locked. He'd hated it there. And one day there'd been a door open and he'd walked out and there had been a horrible time, he didn't know how many days, with people ki cking him around and ordering him away and slamming doors on him when he was hungry, starving to death and hardly able to walk. And then he'd heard music and there was the carnival lot and he'd walked the midway dazzled by the bright colors and the happy music and tortured by the smell of frying hamburgers. And then Jesse had yelled "Hey, kid!" at him and from that moment everything had been all right. Jesse had asked him if he wanted to set up milk bottles and earn a little money and it had been hard for him to learn just how to do it right - well, it hadn't been hard to learn how to set them up but it had been awfully hard to learn when to set them up, to wait until the man had thrown three baseballs instead of putting back one milk bottle if he knocked it over on the first or second throw. He had to learn to watch and count the baseballs, one, two, three, and after that he could put back any of the milk bottles that had been knocked down. But Jesse had growled and sworn at him until he'd learned. And then after a while Jesse had taken him over to the place where the carney's ate and had bought him a meal and he'd eaten it so fast that Jesse had stared at him and said, "Damn it, kid, when did you eat last?" and when he said he didn't remember Jesse had bought him a second meal and his stomach was finally filled. That night Jesse