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and stared out the picture window with an air of unutterable sadness, as if she knew things beyond mortal bearing. Sometimes she would call Taylor over and wrap her long arms around him, then close her eyes and hoarsely whisper, “Terence! Terence!” Eyes still closed, she would turn her head and resolutely push him away.
    Silver and I immediately saw the potential of this scene and we replayed it often, so often that we could bring tears to Taylor’s eyes just by saying “Terence! Terence!” Taylor was a dreamy thin-skinned boy who cried easily, a weakness from which he tried to distract us by committing acts of ferocious vandalism. He’d once been to juvenile court for breaking windows.
    Mrs. Taylor also had two daughters, both older than Terry and full of scorn for us and all our works. “Oh, God, ” they’d say when they saw us. “Look what the cat dragged in.” Silver and I suffered their insults meekly, but Taylor always had an answer. “Does your face hurt?” he would say. “I just wondered, it’s killing me.” “Is that sweater made of camel’s hair? I just wondered, I thought I saw two humps.”
    But they always had the last word. As girls went they were nothing special, but they were girls, and empowered by that fact to render judgment on us. They could make us cringe just by rolling their eyes. Silver and I were afraid of them, and confused by Mrs. Taylor and the funereal atmosphere of the house. The only reason we went there was to steal Mrs. Taylor’s cigarettes.
    We couldn’t go to my place. Phil, the man who owned the boardinghouse, had no use for kids. He rented the room to my mother only after she promised that I would be quiet and never bring other kids home with me. Phil was always there, reeking of chewing tobacco, drooling strings of it into the chipped enamel mug he carried with him everywhere. Phil had been badly burned in a warehouse fire that left his skin blister-smooth and invested with an angry glow, as if the fire still burned somewhere inside him. The fingers of one hand were welded together.
    He was right not to want me around. When we passed one another in the hallway or on the stairs, I couldn’t keep my eyes from him and he saw in them no sympathy or friendliness, only disgust. He responded by touching me constantly. He knew better but could not help himself. He touched me on the shoulders, on the head, on the neck, using all the gestures of fatherly affection while measuring my horror with a cold bitter gaze, giving new pain to himself as if he had no choice.
    My place was off-limits and Terry Taylor’s was full of trolls, so we usually ended up at Silver’s apartment. Silver was an only child, clever, skinny, malicious, a shameless coward when his big mouth brought trouble down on us. His father was a cantor who lived in Tacoma with his new wife. Silver’s mother worked all day at Boeing. That meant we had the apartment to ourselves for hours at a stretch.
    But first we made our rounds. As we left school we followed girls at a safe distance and offered up smart remarks. We drifted in and out of stores, palming anything that wasn’t under glass. We coasted stolen tricycles down the hills around Alkai Point, standing on the seats and jumping off at the last moment to send them crashing into parked cars. Sometimes, if we had the money, we took a bus downtown and weaved through the winos around Pioneer Square to stare at guns in the windows of pawnshops. For all three of us the Luger was the weapon of choice; our passion for this pistol was profound and about the only passion we admitted to. In the presence of a Luger we stopped our continual jostling of each other and stood wide-eyed.
    Television was very big on the Nazis then. Every week they screened new horrors, always with a somber narrator to remind us that this wasn’t make-believe but actual history, that what we were seeing had really happened and could happen again if we did not maintain ourselves in a state