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pleasant attitude, which became grim as he listened to the detective. The first one, I noticed, did not remove his fedora until he had come inside and stood in the foyer with his partner. My mother’s face was stricken. She glanced at me, as if she wished she could tell the two men they had made a mistake, there was no boy by that name living here. Neither of the men looked in my direction, as if not wanting to scare me into flight, but I noticed that the lead guy switched to talking to my father. I saw a thin fold of skin, or a scar, beneath his left ear, running down almost to his chin. I lit a filter cigarette with a silver table lighter and tried to listen. Both men were inside now, hats off, held in one or both hands, and now the second one, on the right, with motionless eyes and small ears set too far back on his head, spoke, and in his quiet words I could make out the name of my best friend, David. My heart lightened; David and I had done a lot of shit together, stealing watches from departmentstores, cartons of cigarettes from grocery stores, even his parents’ car in the middle of the night, which we joy-rode around Booneville smoking and bullshitting about stuff we’d done with girls. But that wouldn’t account for the look of disgust on my mother’s face, or the pain on my father’s, or the dull undertone of the detective’s voice. I crushed the lousy-tasting weed in a blue glass ashtray on the coffee table. I pulled a Lucky from the flattened pack in my jeans pocket, straightened and plumped it, and lit it. I exhaled and out of habit blew several smoke rings, which charged one after the other to the center of the room, where they hung in a row, until the last one blew through the first and settled down on the couch. The second cop caught it, and he seemed to calculate what sort of attitude they had here. Suddenly, all four of them were looking at me, and the lead detective stepped into the living room. Followed by my mother.
    My tough-guy attitude was something I had acquired hanging around the corner drugstore. There was no steel inside, although the girl on the train didn’t see that; she thought I knew what I was doing. I wanted to talk to her. Words were how I knew things. Like now, tapping on the keys of this ancient machine, gathering the letters and the silent sounds they represent into some sort of story of the night on the train so I can finally let go. I can’t adequately describe the feel of the air as my parents and the two detectives entered the living room, or the sounds as they walked across the carpet, or the sight of their limbs dangling at their sides as they came to a stop, in a semicircle. Maybe there is a little steel, after all, for I remember I was quite determined that I was not going to stand up for the detectives. Neither was I going to stop smoking,although I saw the smaller one with still eyes glance at the Lucky in my hand as if it were some sort of a weapon. So I stayed seated and waited for one of them to say something.
    O UR PARENTS ’ FEAR at the lake house had always been that one of us would hang onto the rope too long and crash on the far bank of the river. It never seemed to occur to them that one of us could be lost when a canoe turned over in the middle of the lake. We could handle canoes; we tipped them over all the time for fun. We were all good swimmers. We jumped and dove off the dock, where the water was well over our head. So, the shock when Joseph drowned out there. I can feel the tightness in my chest. Maybe I did see him in the woody tangle on the water’s edge. The purple-veined skin, the staring eyes are suddenly quite vivid.
    T HE TWO MEN with fedoras? Clear as ice water. My mother said the men were detectives and wanted to talk to me. I stayed in my seat and said nothing, so the two men pulled up chairs across the coffee table from me and sat down. The big one set his gray fedora on the table next to the glass ashtray