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excursions, but this was really different.
    The bedsprings squeaked and the old man’s feet pattered across the bedroom floor; the usual thump and groan of excruciating pain as he stubbed the foot of the dresser. A rustling silence as he peered through the curtains into the blackness of the night.
    â€œShhhhh!”
    Another pause. I waited, scared and anxious in my bed, my kid brother mewing softly across the room.
    â€œI’ll be damned!” the old man said aloud in wonder. “You’ll never believe it.”
    â€œBelieve what?” whispered my mother, who had gotten up and joined him.
    â€œJust take a look out there,” he said with disbelief. “They moved out! They’re gone!”
    I realized why I had awakened. For the first time in many months, the sound of Gene Autry records had ceased; the continuous whine and yelp of the Bumpus hounds had been silenced. Everything was—quiet.
    My father sniffed noisily.
    â€œThe smell is gone. Even the smell is gone!”
    It was true. The air in my bedroom was clear of cabbage, dog urine and corn whiskey for the first time in six months.
    The next morning, the truth was there for all to see. The Bumpuses had packed up and moved on, leaving behind a sagging shambles of a house, the back yard rutted and ground to gray dust by the endless clawings and scratchings of the Bumpus dogs and the Bumpus chickens, with great, tangled rat’s nests of rusting junk and weather-beaten barrels, and smelly gallon jugs and empty bean cans that told everything there was to know about the way the Bumpuses lived out their days. They just ran up a big enough rent bill and then moved out in the middle of the night. We never heard another word about them.
    At first, my father seemed to be glad. Then, about a month later, a nice old couple moved in next door and soon had the house and yard looking like an illustration for an insurance company that sold retirement plans to nice old couples. They went to bed every night at 8:30 and had a canary as a pet.
    One night at supper, after a couple of beers, the old man finally said it:
    â€œYou know, they cleaned out just when I was going to hand ’em my crusher. I’ll bet they did it on purpose.” He got kind of moody for a while after that. We never found out what he had planned.



I struggled frantically to my feet, spilling Diet Pepsi over the front of my brocade smoking jacket as I flailed about. There wasn’t a second to lose. Lurching forward, grasping for the knob, I fell heavily over the coffee table. On hands and knees, I scrambled forward, hoping to kill the TV set before it was too late. With a groan, I realized that once again, I had lost. The late-late-movie curse had struck again. I sat back to accept my fate.
    I was trapped by one of the worst ever, a bucolic horror that I had taken care to avoid, when it was first released, by walking on the opposite side of the street from any moviehouse that played it. In a sky-blue suit and straw skimmer, Dick Haymes stood framed against the movie version of the Indiana countryside, dotted with quaint corn shocks and tinted with lurid oranges and greens, at the entrance to an archetypal Hollywood state fair. A few minutes later, there was the mandatory Old Gramps perched atop a sulky in the big trotting race, and TheGirl, rosy-cheeked and beribboned, who watched walleyed while Dick soulfully serenaded the Indiana moon.
    Vainly I watched for a single glimpse of the Indiana fairs I had known—the Indiana fairs nobody makes movies about—but it never came. As Haymes warbled on, his eyes twinkling with boyish sincerity, my own grainy movie of a real Indiana fair began to unwind in memory.
    As the scene opens, Schwartz, Flick, Junior Kissel and I are standing around back of the Sherwin-Williams paint sign in a misty drizzle. We are discussing current events, as was our wont. Schwartz had found half a can of Copenhagen snuff in the weeds, which we