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She sighed, a two-note sigh. “But let me tell you something, my friend. It’s not a normal life you’re leading out there.”
    “Okay, Ma. I’ll bite. What kind of a life is it?”
    “It’s
nothing,
and that’s my last word on the subject. You’re living in nothingness. It’ll eat you up. As anyone with a brain in his head would tell you. But I won’t interfere. Maybe nothingness suits you.”
    “Oh, I thrive on it. It is my mother’s milk.”
    There was a long pause.
    “All right,
be
sarcastic,” she said. “I can tell we aren’t making progress. Goodbye, honey. I’ll call again in two weeks.” She made artificial and insincere kissing noises on the mouthpiece.
    “Bye, Ma.” Saul hung up the telephone in the kitchen and walked into the living room, where Patsy was watching the Sunday-afternoon movie,
From Here to Eternity.
“Take off your clothes,” he said. “We’re going to mess around.”
    She kept her eyes on the screen. “Not now. I don’t want to right now. At least not until this scene is over.” She glanced up at him. “Did the Marschallin call, sweetheart? You must’ve just talked to her.”
    Saul waited impatiently until the movie was over.
    In the April tournament held at the Aqua Bowl, Saul scored 201, 194, and 132, and at the party afterward at Mad Dog Bettermine’s summer house on the Tittabawassee River, he was exultant. Everyone had been told to bring a favorite CD to the party, and Saul, in an ironic mood that then gave way to earnestness, had brought Etta James singing Billie Holiday.
    Mad Dog taught shop class and coached the wrestling team. No one had ever seen him button a collar around his own neck. For the party, his statuesque girlfriend Karla had prepared two huge casseroles, one with tuna and the other with chicken, and in the back room Mad Dog was busy rolling joints packed with the most powerful Colombian—grown, Mad Dog claimed, in the wet upper altitudes—that money could buy. Around the room on bookshelves were Mad Dog’s Lionel trains, including a complete model of the
Twentieth Century Limited
with baggage car, lounge, Pullman sleepers, diner, coaches, and engines. The track had been laid on top of a little red carpet. Sitting on a blue beanbag chair, Saul asked, his voice thickening with smoke, why Mad Dog didn’t run his trains on a layout but had set them up on a bookshelf display instead.
    “These trains,” Mad Dog announced, “are too
good
to run.” He inhaled and inhaled and inhaled. “They’re classics,” he gasped. He slipped his fingers inside his shirt and started to scratch.
    Saul nodded. He was wearing his bowling shirt with his name patch sewed on in front. In the next room, also thick with smoke, Patsy was dancing with Toby Finch, a fat man, as his name suggested, who taught social studies. On the other side of the room various people were tossing money on the floor as an incentive to someone to run down to the Tittebawasee River and jump into it. The money would be collected whether the daredevil wore clothes or not.
    An hour later, Saul’s Etta James CD was playing, and Saul himself was standing upright in the middle of the living room, a bottle of Chablis in one hand, a cigarette in the other (he was not a smoker, but he was smoking—Saul insisted he could not be identified by the acts he occasionally performed). He was singing loudly, an unpracticed baritone. There was some muted applause and encouragement as Mad Dog appeared at one side of the room with another joint, and Toby appeared at the other, his clothes soaking wet. He was demanding cash.
    “You needed a witness!” Mad Dog said. “For all we know, you went out there and wet yourself down with a garden hose.”
    “It’s not connected,” Toby said. “I tried it.”
    “Well, you got wet once,” Saul said. “Get wet again. What’s the difference? We’ll watch you this time.”
    “Yeah,” Mad Dog said. “That’s right. We’ll watch you jump in.”
    The entire