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handbills, the piano tuner, and the woman whose blood pressure was higher than it should have been at her age—perhaps all these people had some destination or were expected somewhere. Spud was sailing before his own anger.
    He walked on past a paint and varnish factory where, at the gate, an electric bulb shone down on the night watchman’s empty chair. Across the street stood a row of ramshackle two-story frame houses, each with the same peaked roof, the same high sagging front porch. The houses extended for two blocks. Then the future asserted itself over the past and there were more apartment buildings with vacant lots between them, more signs, more weeds growing up through unfinished foundations.
    A big Irishwoman in a black coat came toward Spud on the wrong side of the walk. She was feeling the effects of liquor and self-pity, and the least people could do, it seemed to her, was to get out of her way. Spud came straight on. At the very last moment her truculence turned to panic and she stepped off the sidewalk. But he was not, as she had thought, a blind man, so she shouted after him: “Damn kids! Think they own the earth …”
    Spud turned and looked back, seeing the drunken woman for the first time. He shook his head and walked on. The members of his own family—his father, his mother, and his sister—all were against him; it was not surprising that, without knowing how or why, he should bring on himself the ill will of strangers.
    At Christiana Avenue the sidewalk gave out abruptly and rather than continue through mud and have to clean his shoes when he got home, Spud turned south. After one long block, Christiana Avenue also gave out, and he turned back east again, zigzagging until he found another bridge and a street that brought him to the western edge of the park. In the park at the drinking fountain Spud found what all day long he had been searching for.
    The other boy was astride a bicycle and apparently deep inconversation with two girls. He looked up as Spud walked past. Neither gave any sign of recognition. The other boy balanced himself on his bicycle with the front wheel turning this way and that, and his right foot resting against the cement base of the drinking fountain. His straight blond hair was parted in the middle and trained back like an Arrow collar ad, but it kept falling forward, and he had a nervous habit of tossing his head back.
    Spud sat down on a bench near a young maple tree and crossed his legs so that his right ankle rested on his left knee. The girls giggled, which was to be expected, and when they bent over the drinking fountain, the blond boy made the water spurt up in their faces. After having this ancient trick played on them, they decided to turn the water on for each other, but the blond boy promised, and crossed his heart to die, and said honestly, until at last they gave him one more chance. Spud could have told them what would happen. He knew also that the argument by the drinking fountain was for his benefit. If the blond boy had been sure of himself, he wouldn’t have wasted valuable time spurting water on girls and pretending to run over their feet with the front wheel of his bicycle.
    Tilting his head back until he could look up at a street lamp that was directly behind him, Spud ignored the whole performance. His throat was dry and he could feel his heart pounding inside his shirt. He watched the moth millers beating against the glass globe, which was large and round and made the yellow leaves of the maple glow with light.
    After a while the two girls (whether in real or mock anger there was no telling) walked away. Left to himself, the blond boy circled once around the drinking fountain and then rode past Spud so slowly that the bicycle wavered and nearly fell.Spud waited until he tossed his hair back, and then said quietly, “Why don’t you get a violin?”
    The blond boy didn’t answer. He rode on about fifteen feet, made a sudden swift turn, came back, and