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muddy front yards, their engine blocks wrenched in the air with rusty chains, swinging from the limbs of oaks. Grocery carts wheeled home from the Piggly Wiggly and abandoned to rust in the ditches. Yard art of the store-bought and homemade variety, ceramic deer and plastic trellises, tires spray-painted white and half-buried in the sand to frame an unkempt circle of ragweed and dying daylily
    Tysinger lived down there with his mother and father and grandmother, and even though Raleigh Road was in another income bracket from Wilmington Avenue, it was close enough for outsiders to consider it the same neighborhood. Only Tysinger and a few other boys from those blocks occasionally hung out at the black pipe—the rest were either in reform school or were motorheads who spent all their time at some uncle’s garage, waxing and buffing their machines.
    Tysinger was Cozart’s friend, mostly. Pete was intimidated by him, not only because of his size—six-two, 240 pounds, a star linebacker for the Trent High Stallions, so powerful and dependable that the coach, a notorious hater of longhairs and fuckups, kept him on the team despite his shoulder-length curls and his blatant disregard of the training regimen—but because he rarely spoke. To Pete, Tysinger seemed so unaware of and uninterested in the possibilities of words and their music that he might as well cut his tongue out. Pete found his silence sinister. Yet he hung around with him because Tysinger was Danny’s age and at eighteen could always be counted upon to buy beer.
    Often Pete and Cozart ended up with Tysinger toward the end of the night. He always had pot and he didn’t mind sharing his stash.
    Tonight was the first time Pete had seen Tysinger since Saturday night when Tysinger had picked up Pete and Cozart at the Glam around eleven and drove them to a party at Brandon Pierce’s house.
    That Brandon Pierce was the most effeminate boy at Trent High had not stopped them from crashing his party. In Trent you did not have to like or even be acquainted with a kid throwing an unchaperoned party to show up.
    Brandon was slight and limber and had a gossipy alto, often featured in the musical productions of the Trent High Drama Club. His friends were girls, except for a few of these girls’ boyfriends who tolerated him because they had to, and Pete’s brother, Danny, who used to hang around with him some in tenth grade when they were both officers in the French Club. That friendship was brief and carried on mostly in private—Pete remembered Brandon showing up at the house a few times with the group of girls Danny knew, the smartest and straightest girls at school—but when, last year, Danny decided to go out for football in order to improve his chances for the Carmichael, Danny dropped Brandon Pierce.
    Pete was relieved, for his friends used to say, when they saw Danny with Brandon at school, “How come your brother hangs out with that fag?” Pete admired his brother for befriending Brandon, for he knew that Danny did so more because he knew Brandon needed a male friend than because he enjoyed his company—once Pete had overheard Danny say to some girl on the phone that Brandon was such a whiny snob it was no wonder he had no friends. But it also embarrassed Pete to have to endure his friends’ comments. With the exception of Cozart, who he had known long enough to ignore all but his most benign qualities, Pete had to be stoned to stand their company, and he did not welcome any other reasons to feel uneasy.
    That night of Brandon’s party had started out like any of a hundred nights in his life. He and Cozart had been hanging around the Glam when Tysinger had shown up in the parking lot. A crowd of kids gathered around his car, and it was clear to Pete even from inside the Glam that something was up. Cozart went to find out and came back breathless and giddy.
    “Man, Tysinger kicked Brandon Pierce’s ass,” he said.
    “What a match,” Pete said. “Let me