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Willie"—I felt just like Pa must when he's trying to explain the Bible to thick-headed parishioners—"it stands to reason, don't it? If a person don't believe in God, then he don't have to worry about all that stuff in the Bible anymore. Why, just now I was sitting here thinking I wanted to cuss those durned Westons for taking our best hole. So I just went right ahead and helped myself. I can cuss anytime I feel like it now. The commandments don't apply."
    "The
Ten
Commandments?"
    What other commandments were there? "Sure," I said. "If I need to lie or steal or cuss or"—and here I felt a little shiver go through me as I said it—"or do somebody in..."
    Willie was up on his feet staring down at me like I'd suddenly turned into a porcupine.
    "Or be wicked on Sunday or commit 'dultry—"
    "Hush your mouth, Robbie Hewitt. Suppose your father heard you talking this way."
    "I would never tell him," I said grandly. "It would break the poor man's heart."
    Willie sat down again, still considering what his best friend had become. Finally he lay back against the bank. "You better think this through careful, Robbie," he said quietly.
    "You think I ain't give it proper thought?" I said.
"Why, it's practically all I think about anymore." Which was not true. I thought an awful lot about motorcars and bicycles. (Was there any chance of my ever owning a pair of wheels?) And would the members want to throw Pa out after the next annual meeting of the congregation because he wasn't thrilled enough about eternal damnation? I—though I could hardly confess it even to myself, much less to Willie—I even thought about Rachel Martin, who sat right in front of me at school—how it might feel to give one of those corkscrew curls of hers a proper yank, just to see if it boinged back in place like a pond frog. But faced as I was with the end of the world, it didn't seem fitting to have thoughts about girls with dark brown curls hanging down their backs. Anyhow, thoughts of Rachel Martin made me a little itchy under the collar, even when I never breathed them out loud.
    We were quiet a long time, lying against the bank, chewing our wood-sorrel sticks, our lines only moving with the gentle current, the smell of the new-mown fields in our noses, the hum of insects in our ears. At the time it seemed the Fourth of July would last forever. But there was a sadness already in the lazy call of a crow, as if it knew that everything was all downhill from here, like it was the beginning of the end of our last summer on earth.
    "So," said Willie, and when he did, I realized that he had said it more than once and I hadn't been paying attention. "So, what do you want to do?"
    At that moment I didn't want to do anything but lie against the bank of the North Branch and get mildly drunk on the smells of midsummer and listen to the
stream laughing past and the insects busy humming in my ears. I didn't answer. Willie didn't ask again. I think he was content, too. It had been a great parade, even with having to pull that bum wagon with Letty aboard.
    I allowed myself the luxury of a daydream of next summer's parade. Me on a pair of wheels from W. R. Nichols in Tyler. The ad in the Tyler paper was framed in a double-thick black-lined box. I had the words memorized: "Bicycles, the most complete of any in the city and I will sell them at any price you want!"
    That was a lie, of course, because the ad went right on to say the price Mr. Nichols wanted.
    "Prices from $20 to $125," which was sure not any price
I
wanted, my total savings at the moment being a whopping $1.35. But there was this tantalizing phrase at the bottom of the lying ad: "A large number of secondhand wheels almost given away in the basement of the Nichols Block. Come and see me!"
    All right, it sounded a little bit like the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" inviting the young folks into her gingerbread house, but I could hardly resist walking the ten miles to Tyler to find out. What