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things.
    He closed the door while he was still looking me over.
    If that Greaser Charles was Mrs. Worthington’s cousin then I was a monkey’s uncle. When grown-ups lie to kids they don’t even try very hard. They think we’re too dumb to know the difference. I didn’t care who he was or what he was doing there. Then I thought about it more and decided that maybe I did care.
    The only thing good that came out of me ringing that doorbell was learning that Mrs. Worthington’s first name was Faye. That was a good name for me. That would be a Half-and-Half Word meaning I could probably say Faye about half the time without stuttering. Of course I could never call her Faye to her face but it was a good name in my book just the same.

    I finished the route early and didn’t know what I was going to do the rest of the afternoon when I saw Ara T pushing his cart across Melrose into the alley between Harbert and Peabody.
    Mam liked to say that Ara T only had two speeds. Slow and slower. The cart jangled and rattled as he made his way to a bunch of garbage cans. The more the cart rattled the more the neighborhood dogs barked.
    A second good idea for the day came to me.
    Ara T would have to knock off from his junk collecting sometime and I could follow him at least until it got dark and maybe get to seewhere he kept his cart. He had to keep it somewhere at night. If he wasn’t going to give me back my knife then I might be able to come up with a way to take it when he wasn’t around.
    The first thing I had to do was stash the yellow raincoat that made me stand out like one of those crossing guards at school. It wasn’t raining and the raincoat was too hot anyway. I stuffed the yellow coat and one newspaper bag into my second bag.
    I remembered the thick privet hedges around Mrs. Worthington’s porch. That would be a good place to hide my bag. I could never get Rat to call them anything but Private Hedges even though I spelled out Privet for him. He told me not to be always worrying so much about words. But I did.
    I went back to Mrs. Worthington’s and pushed the bag under the hedges snug up to the porch. I sat behind the privet next to the porch which gave Ara T time to get up the alley a little ways. Being close to Mrs. Worthington’s porch made me feel special like somehow I belonged there.
    Following Ara T wasn’t going to be easy because he was always looking up and back and to both sides when he was collecting junk. Ara T had a steady routine. He would push his cart up to a bunch of cans behind a house and take off all the lids first thing. He would then start picking through one can and put junk from that can in another one that didn’t have as much in it. He would go through all the cans one at a time like that. I’ll say this. He was neat. He put whatever he wanted in his cart then put the lids back on all the cans like he had found them. He didn’t throw stuff around like youwould think a junkman would do. Anytime he found a whiskey bottle he would hold it up and shake it. If it had even a little whiskey left in it he would put the bottle in a wooden crate in the back of his cart.
    I let Ara T get about a dozen houses ahead of me and then I started creeping down the alley behind him.
    Rat sometimes made me watch a detective show on television where this guy with a moustache named Boston Blackie would follow people around but they never saw him even though he was creeping only a few steps behind them in leather street shoes. Not even tennis shoes. Even a kid has enough brains to know that you can’t follow somebody like that without them seeing or hearing you. I knew I was going to have to be careful following Ara T.
    Every time Ara T would push his cart up to a bunch of cans I ducked behind a fence or into a garage that opened out to the alley. He looked back down my way a few times but I made sure he didn’t see me. This went on for a long while. The muscles in my legs started hurting from scrunching behind