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gull sailed out over the empty road, wheeled around in a wide curve, and dipped back toward the beach. Jack watched it go, shrinking in the air to a smudge of white above the erratic line of the roller-coaster track.
    Lester Speedy Parker, a black man with crinkly gray hair and heavy lines cutting down through his cheeks, was down there somewhere inside Funworld and it was Speedy he had to see. That was as clear to Jack as his sudden insight about his friend Richard’s father.
    A gull screeched, a wave bounced hard gold light toward him, and Jack saw Uncle Morgan and his new friend Speedy as figures almost allegorically opposed, as if they were statues of NIGHT and DAY , stuck up on plinths, MOON and SUN – the dark and the light. What Jack had understood as soon as he had known that his father would have liked Speedy Parker was that the ex-bluesman had no harm in him. Uncle Morgan, now . . . he was another kind of being altogether. Uncle Morgan lived for business, for deal-making and hustling; and he was so ambitious that he challenged every even faintly dubious call in a tennis match, so ambitious in fact that he cheated in the penny-ante card games his son had now and then coaxed him into joining. At least, Jack thought that Uncle Morgan had been cheating in a couple of their games . . . not a man who thought that defeat demanded graciousness.
    NIGHT and DAY, MOON and SUN; DARK and LIGHT , and the black man was the light in these polarities. And when Jack’s mind had pushed him this far, all that panic he had fought off in the hotel’s tidy gardens swarmed toward him again. He lifted his feet and ran.
    2
    When the boy saw Speedy kneeling down outside the gray and peeling arcade building – wrapping electrician’s tape around a thick cord, his steel-wool head bent almost to the pier and his skinny buttocks poking out the worn green seat of his workpants, the dusty soles of his boots toed down like a pair of upended surfboards – he realized that he had no idea of what he had been planning to say to the custodian, or even if he intended to say anything at all. Speedy gave the roll of black tape another twist around the cord, nodded, took a battered Palmer knife from the flat pocket of his workshirt and sliced the tape off the roll with a flat surgical neatness. Jack would have escaped from here too, if he could – he was intruding on the man’s work, and anyhow, it was crazy to think that Speedy could really help him in any way. What kind of help could he give, an old janitor in an empty amusement park?
    Then Speedy turned his head and registered the boy’s presence with an expression of total and warming welcome – not so much a smile as a deepening of all those heavy lines in his face – and Jack knew that he was at least no intrusion.
    ‘Travellin Jack,’ Speedy said. ‘I was beginnin to get afraid you decided to stay away from me. Just when we got to be friends, too. Good to see you again, son.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Jack said. ‘Good to see you, too.’
    Speedy popped the metal knife back into his shirt pocket and lifted his long bony body upright so easily, so athletically, that he seemed weightless. ‘This whole place comin down around my ears,’ he said. ‘I just fix it a little bit at a time, enough so everything works more or less the way it should.’ He stopped in mid-sentence, having had a good look at Jack’s face. ‘Old world’s not so fine right now, seems like. Travellin Jack got bucked up to a load of worries. That the way it is?’
    ‘Yeah, sort of,’ Jack began – he still had no idea of how to begin expressing the things that troubled him. They could not be put into ordinary sentences, for ordinary sentences made everything seem rational. One . . . two . . . three: Jack’s world no longer marched in those straight lines. All he could not say weighed in his chest.
    He looked miserably at the tall thin man before him. Speedy’s hands were thrust deep into his pockets; his thick gray