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of mongrels.’
    Tod’s eyes shot over to Ben. ‘That’s right,’ he said emphatically. ‘That’s what they want.’
    Teddy paid no attention to him. He kept his eyes on Ben. ‘They don’t really give a shit about eating with us, or going to school with us, or anything else like that. They just want to ruin us, ruin our race, so they can take over everything.’ He shook his head wearily, painfully. ‘And they’re doing it, too. They’re already making us do what they want. And before long, we’ll just be like a bunch of mongrel dogs.’ He picked up the picture, held it a few inches from Ben’s face and slowly ripped it in two. ‘I am loyal to my race, Ben,’ he said darkly, ‘before everything.’ He released the photograph, and its torn parts fluttered back down onto the table.
    Ben stared at him silently for a moment, then gathered up the two halves of the photograph and returned them to his coat pocket. ‘I’m just doing my job, Teddy,’ he said quietly.
    ‘Well, you’ll have to do it without me,’ Teddy said.
    From somewhere deep within him, Ben felt a sudden, inexplicable surge. ‘I intend to,’ he said.
    He drove home slowly, turning north, so that he could move along the central boulevards of the city. The streets were almost entirely deserted. The restaurants and cafeterias were tightly closed, and some had already taken the added precaution of boarding up their windows. Even the brilliant chandeliers of the Tutweiler Hotel appeared somehow dim and exhausted in the fully fallen darkness. The streetlamps swung ponderously in the heavy summer air, and the light that swept down from them seemed to fall to earth in thick blue drops. Uniformed policemen patrolled the empty sidewalks two abreast, their holsters already unsnapped, their fingers playing at the handles of their revolvers. In front of Pizitz, black sanitation men were gathering together stacks of broken placards and tossing them into the grinding steel jaws of the compactors, and a little further down, only a few blocks from the park, another crew was hosing waves of accumulated litter into the cement gutters.
    The park itself was green and lush, and Ben knew that within only a few hours it would be shimmering brightly in the early morning dew. Far in the distance, he could see the outline of its empty playground. The swings were moving languidly in the air, and under the tall gray lantern, the slide took on a ghostly silver.
    To the left, and barely visible through a wall of trees, he could make out the high wire fence of the softball field, and it instantly reminded him of the goalpost off Twenty-third Street. He made a hard left at the end of the park and headed out toward the distant perimeters of Bearmatch.
    There were no streetlamps in the ballfield, and so, when he reached it, he could see only a spot of dry ground beneath the covering darkness. No line of benches, no mound of freshly turned earth, no goalpost. Only a wall of impenetrable black which seemed to rise at the very edge of the broken, weedy sidewalk and then extend outward forever. For a while he sat in his car and smoked a cigarette while he stared out into the dark field. From time to time, people would casually approach the car, moving steadily down the sidewalk until they were close enough to notice that the man behind the wheel was white. Then they’d suddenly freeze, as if they’d just stumbled upon a rattlesnake in the brush, eye him cautiously for an instant, then hurry away toward the other side of the street. It happened first one time, then another and another, until Ben grew tired of seeing it, hit the ignition and drove away.

SIX
    On his way to work the next morning, Ben parked at almost the same spot on Twenty-third Street where he’d stopped the night before. But by seven o’clock, when he finally pulled over to the curb, the streets were already busy. Small knots of people strolled briskly up and down the sidewalks and across the ballfield.