Chapter Three

The Greyhound bus was slow and hot and nearly empty. It smelled mostly of smoke and sweat, a tired smell like the ends of journeys, but underlying that was a faintly exotic sweetness that twined into the nostrils like opium smoke. Probably the industrial strength disinfectant they used to slop out the rest room at the back of the bus, but to Trevor it was the smell of travel, of adventure. At any rate, it was an odor he knew as well as that of his own skin. He had spent a good part of the past seven years on Greyhound buses, or waiting for them in the quiet despair of a thousand cavernous terminals.

The Carolina countryside rolled past his window, summer-green, then dusk-blue, then a deepening, smoky violet. When he could no longer see by the dying sunlight that came through the window, he switched on the small bulb above his seat and kept drawing, his hand moving to the rhythm of the Charlie Parker tape on his Walkman. Now and then he raised his head and stared briefly out the window. All the cars had their headlights on, rushing toward him in an endless dazzling stream. Soon it was so dark that he could see only his own hollow-eyed reflection in the glass.

The fat redneck occupying the two seats in front of him heaved a great sigh when Trevor turned on the light. Trevor was dimly aware of the man shifting in his seat, making a show of tugging his John Deere cap down over his eyes, his body giving off a strong stale odor of cheap beer and human dirt. At last he turned completely around and stared at Trevor over the back of the seat. Neckless, his head looked like a jug resting on a wall; the skin of his face was seamed and damp and blotchy, nearly leprous. He might have been nineteen or forty. “Hey, you, ” he said. “Hey, hippie. ”

Trevor looked up but did not remove his earphones. He always listened to music at a very low volume, and he could hear fine with them on. “Me? ”

“Yeah, you, who the fuck you think I mean, him? ” The redneck gestured at an ancient black man asleep across the aisle, toothless cavern of his mouth gaping, gnarled hands twisting around the nearly empty bottle of Night Train in his lap.

Ever so slowly Trevor shook his head, never looking away from the redneck's bleary, glittering eyes.

“Well anyway, you mind turnin' that goddamn light off? I got a real bad headache, you know? ”

Hangover, more like. Trevor shook his head again, even more slowly, even more firmly. “I can't. I have to work on this drawing. ”

“The fuck you do! ” More of the redneck's head rose over the seat, though there was still no neck in evidence. A large scarred hand appeared as well. Trevor saw black half-moons of dirt under each thick nail. “What's a freak like you drawin' that's so goddamn important? ”

Silently Trevor turned his sketchbook around so that the redneck could see it. The light showed every detail of the drawing: a slender woman half-seated, half-sprawled in a doorway, head thrown back, yawning mouth full of blood and broken teeth. Her left temple and forehead were smashed in, her hair and face and the front of her blouse black with blood. The draftsmanship was stark and flawless, the frozen agony eloquent in every line of her body, in every stroke of her ruined face.

“My mother, ” Trevor said.

The redneck's fat face quivered. His lips twitched; his eyes went shocked, momentarily defenseless, then flat. “Fuckin' freak, ” he muttered loudly. But he didn't say anything else about the light, not for the rest of the trip.

The bus turned off the interstate at Pittsboro and got on the narrow two-lane state highway. It stopped for minutes at a tiny dark station in Corinth; then there were no more stops, and it was irrevocable, it was true, he was really going back to Missing Mile.

Trevor looked back down at his drawing. A line appeared between his eyebrows as he frowned at it. How weird. In the lower right-hand corner, without being aware of it, he had labeled the drawing. And he had labeled it wrong. In big, dark block letters he had printed the name ROSENA BLACK.

But his mother's name had been Rosena McGee. She had been born Rosena Parks, but she had died a McGee. Black was the name Trevor had chosen for himself years ago, the name he drew under.

He didn't erase the mislabel; it was too heavily penciled, would fuck up the paper. He wasn't much for erasing anyway. Sometimes your mistakes showed you the really interesting connections between your brain, your hand, and your heart, the ones you might otherwise never know were there. They were important even if you had no idea what they meant.

Like now, for instance. Coming back here might be the biggest mistake he'd ever made. But it might also be the most important thing he had ever done.

He couldn't remember his last sight of Missing Mile. His mother's friends had carried him out of the house that morning, and that was all he had known for a while. Only one of them, a man with large, gentle hands, had been brave enough to edge past Bobby's dangling body and pry Trevor from his niche between the toilet and the sink. The next thing he remembered was waking up in a blank white room, smelling medicine and vomit, then screaming at the sight of a tube that snaked out of a bag hanging by the bed and ran straight into the crook of his arm. The flesh where it went in was puffy, red, sore.

Trevor had thought the thing was alive, burrowing into him as he slept. He would never really trust sleep again. You closed your eyes and went somewhere else for a few hours, and while you were gone, anything could happen — anything at all. The whole world could be ripped out from under you.

The nurse said Trevor had not been able to hear people trying to talk to him, and could not eat or drink. The tube had pumped ground-up food into his arm to keep him from starving to death, or so he understood it. He was embarrassed to find himself wearing a diaper. Even Didi was too old for diapers. Then he remembered that Didi wasn't anything anymore but a memory of a smashed shape on a stained mattress. His family had been dead five days, had been buried while Trevor floated in that hazy twilight world.

The doctors at the hospital in Raleigh called it catatonia. Trevor knew it was Birdland. Not just the place where no one else could touch you, but the place you went when the real world scared you away.

After it became apparent that no relative or friend of the family was going to claim him, and a series of cognitive tests proved he was functional (if withdrawn), the court declared Trevor McGee a ward of the state. He was placed in the North Carolina Boys' Home on the outskirts of Charlotte, an orphanage and school whose operating budget had been shaved to the bone the previous year. There was no foster family program, no special training for the gifted, no therapy for the disturbed. There was only an enormous drafty pillared school building and four outlying dorms all built of smooth gray stone that held a chill even in the heart of summer. There were only three hundred boys aged five to eighteen, all kept crew-cut and conservatively dressed, each with his own personal hell and none of them much inclined to help ease the weight of anyone else's.

The place seemed to have no color, no texture. Trevor's thirteen years there were a collage of blurred edges, featureless gray expanses, empty city streets sectioned into little diamonds by the chain-link fence that surrounded the Home and its grounds. His room was a cold square box, but safe because he could draw there without anyone looking over his shoulder.

Most of the other boys used sports as their escape, built their dreams around athletic scholarships to State or UNC. Trevor was painfully clumsy; except for his right hand, his body felt wrong to him, like something he wasn't entitled to and shouldn't have. He dreaded the afternoons he was forced out to the playing fields with his gym class, hot dusty tedium broken only by occasional panic when someone screamed at him to run or swing or catch a hurtling ball that looked like a bomb falling at a thousand miles per hour out of a dizzying clear blue sky.

His life at the Boys' Home had been neither good nor terrible. He never tried to make friends, and mostly he was ignored. On the rare occasions that a group of predators chose him as their next target, Trevor returned their taunts until he goaded them into attacking him. They always attacked him eventually. Then he would hurt as many of them as badly as he could. He learned to land a hard punch with his left fist, to kick and claw and bite, anything that did not risk his drawing hand. He usually got the worst of it, but that particular group would leave him alone afterward, and Trevor would mind his own business until the next group came along. From things he read, he suspected it was a lot like prison.

The state had cut him loose at eighteen with an option to attend vocational school. Instead, Trevor headed for the Greyhound station and bought a ticket for as far as the hundred dollars in his pocket would take him.

He had traveled haphazardly in those years, zigzagging between cities and coasts, picking up work here and there, occasionally selling a sketch or a comic strip for the price of a bus ticket, often more. Sometimes he met people that under other circumstances he thought he might have called friends. At any rate, people in the real world were more interesting than any he had met in the Home. But as soon as he left a place, these acquaintances were gone as if erased from the world.

He never let anyone touch him. Mostly he preferred to be alone. If he was ever unable to draw, Trevor thought he would probably die. It was a possibility he always kept tucked away in a corner of his mind, the comfort of the razor or the rope, the security of poison on the shelf waiting to be swallowed. But he wouldn't take anyone with him when he went.

He had not cut his hair for seven years. He had never had a permanent address. He seldom visited a town or a city more than once. There were only a few places he avoided. Austin. New Orleans. And North Carolina, until now.

His twenty-fifth birthday had recently come and gone, celebrated only by the crossing of state lines, a thing that always exhilarated him a little no matter how often he did it. Trevor often came close to forgetting his own birthday. All it had meant in the Boys' Home was an ugly new shirt and a cupcake with a single candle on it, reminders of everything he didn't have.

And besides, his birthday was overshadowed by the more important anniversary just after it. The anniversary that fell tomorrow.

Twenty years since it happened, and every year strung heavy as a millstone round his heart. Four-fifths of his life spent wondering why he wasn't dead. It was too long.

Recently he had started having a dream of the house on Violin Road. All through his childhood Trevor had dreamed of that last morning, that bloody morning that seemed to drip through his memory like molasses, dark and slow. That was a familiar nightmare, infrequent now. But this new dream was different, and had been coming several times a week.

He would find himself sitting in the little back bedroom Bobby had used as a studio, staring at a blank sheet of paper on the drawing board. Trevor usually drew comics in his sketchbook, but Bobby had used looseleaf paper for Birdland. Only there was no Birdland on this sheet of paper. There was nothing on it, and he could think of nothing to put on it. It stared him in the eye and laughed at him, and Trevor could almost hear its dry sardonic whisper: The abyss stares back into you? Ha! Nothing to see but a liver pickled in whiskey and the ashes of a million burnt-out dreams.

Awake, Trevor couldn't imagine not being able to draw. He could always make his hand move. An empty page had always been a challenge, a space for him to fill. Awake, it still was. But in this dream, the blank sheet of paper was a mockery.

And he didn't drink whiskey, or any other kind of alcohol. He had never taken a drink in his life.

Trevor found that this dream bothered him more than the ones in which he saw his family dead. Drawing had been the only thing he cared about for such a long time. Now he was beginning to understand how the loss of it could drive someone insane.

He started to worry: what if the hollow, paralyzed feeling of the dream infiltrated his waking life? What if someday he opened his sketchbook and his hand went stiff, his mind numb?

The night he woke up with a broken pencil in his hands, the edges of the wood as raw as a fractured bone, the sound of the snap still echoing like a leftover shred of nightmare through his lonely boardinghouse room, Trevor knew he had to go back to the house. He was sick of wearing his past like a millstone. He would not let his art become one too.

The bus passed a wreck just outside Missing Mile, a small car crumpled in a ditch, sparkling shards of glass picking up the whirling red and blue lights, making the scene seem to revolve psychedelically. Trevor cupped his hands to the window, pressed his forehead to the glass. Paramedics were loading someone into the ambulance, strapped to a stretcher, already punctured with needles and tubes. Trevor looked straight down into the person's face and saw that it was a girl, maybe close to his age, face drenched with blood, chest crushed in, eyelids still fluttering.

Then-he saw it-the life left her. Her lids stopped moving and he saw her eyes freeze on a point beyond him, beyond anything he would ever see in this world. The medics kept moving, shoved her into the ambulance and slammed the doors, and she was gone. Yes, she was gone.

Great, he thought. An omen. Just what I needed.

A few minutes later the bus pulled into the parking lot of the Farmers Hardware Store, the flatiron-shaped building that stood lone and proud among lesser downtown structures like the prow of some landlocked ship. A small ticket office at the back and a bench in the parking lot served as Missing Mile's bus station. The Greyhound groaned to a stop alongside the deserted bench.

Trevor hoisted his backpack and made his way down the aisle, then down the steps. His feet touched North Carolina ground for the first time in two decades, and a shiver ran through him like a tiny electric chill. No one else got off.

The bus had seemed hot, but the humid swelter of the night outside made him realize it had been air-conditioned. The air pressed like a soft damp palm against his face, delicious with the scents of honeysuckle, wet grass, hot charcoal and the rich oils of roasting pork. Someone nearby was cooking out tonight.

The smell of barbecue made his stomach roll over, then growl: he was either sick or starved. Years of institutional food had blurred the two sensations. The Boys' Home was not quite Dickensian, but second helpings were neither kindly looked upon by the cafeteria ladies nor much desired by the boys.

Maybe by now Missing Mile had somewhere to eat besides that greasy diner. But if not, the diner would do. Trevor decided to take a walk through downtown. He couldn't go out to the house yet. Not at night. He was ready for anything, but he was still scared.

He would be there tomorrow, for the twenty-year reunion.

Trevor only hoped he was invited this time.

Kinsey knew tonight was going to suck. Rima was scheduled to work, and Rima was gone, finding someone else to rip off, having raw meat scraped out of her womb, coking up her little brain until it spun like a whirligig, or maybe all of the above.

So Kinsey would be working by himself. Terry Buckett's new band Gumbo was playing. Owner and manager of the Whirling Disc record store, Terry also played drums and sang whenever he could get a gig. Gumbo was one of the Yew's biggest draws now that Lost Souls? were on the road, and it would be a busy night.

To distract himself, Kinsey decided to have a dinner special. It would make him even busier, but he loved feeding his kids. He ran through his limited repertoire. Curry? . . . no, it would take too long. . . lentil soup? no, he'd had that one twice last week. . . gumbo, for the band. . . but his skills weren't up to it, and there was nowhere to get fresh seafood, and he never had been convinced you could make good gumbo anywhere but New Orleans. The Mississippi River water gave it that special flavor, maybe. At last Kinsey decided tonight would be Japanese Night.

He hiked home and put together a quick broth from some elderly vegetables and a few pork bones in his freezer, loaded it into his car, and drove slowly back into town so as not to slosh it. The railroad tracks were tricky, but he managed them with aplomb. In town, he stopped at the little grocery next to Farmers Hardware and bought twenty packages of Oodles of Noodles and several bunches of green onions. The rain had stopped, which meant it would be even busier.

Back at the Yew, Kinsey took down the chalkboard over the bar, selected a piece of purple chalk, and with a flourish Wrote JAPANESE NOODLE SOUP! $1. 00!

If anyone ordered the special, Kinsey would ladle up a bowl of his homemade broth, pop in the noodles, throw away the sodium-laden “flavor packet, ” and zap the whole thing in the microwave he kept behind the bar. The green onions were for a garnish, and he set to chopping them into small, fragrant rounds. It was getting near eight. The band wouldn't start until ten, but the kids often started drifting in this early to drink and eat and talk. Sometimes he opened the club at five for happy hour, but he hadn't been happy enough today.

An hour later the Sacred Yew was nearly full. Admission was free until ten. After that he would have to find someone to work the door. That was never hard: all the door people had to do was collect money, shoot the shit, and watch the band for free. If they were of age they got a free beer too. The club served no alcohol but beer-bottled, canned, and draft. Still, the vagaries of North Carolina law made the Yew a bar and forbade the presence of those under twenty-one.

For the place to be an all-ages club-as Kinsey had intended all along-it must qualify as a restaurant as well. Hence the noodle soup, the sandwiches, the odds and ends of snacks he served. At first making the food had been a bother. Then he grew to like it; now his cookbook collection was rapidly expanding. Regular customers gave them to him all the time, and Kinsey chose to take these as a compliment.

Some of the kids he knew, the ones from Missing Mile and surrounding areas, most of whom attended a nearby Quaker school called Windy Hill. There was a public high school too, but the kids there were mostly metalheads and shitkickers; Kinsey knew some of them, had even helped them work on their cars, but they didn't like the music at the Yew.

The kids who came here were of a more artistic bent, clothed in bright ragtag colors or ripped T-shirts and combat boots or chic, sleek black, according to their various philosophies and passions. Some dyed their hair and cropped it, some let their hair grow long and tied it with colored ribbons, some simply shoved it behind their ears and didn't give a shit, or pretended not to. There were poets and painters, firebrands and fuckups, innocents and wantons. There were Missing Mile townies and college kids from Raleigh and Chapel Hill, the ones with legal IDs and money for beer, the ones who paid his bills. There were younger kids furtively fumbling with flasks, adding liquor gotten from God knows where to their Cokes from the bar. Unless this was done in a particularly obvious or obnoxious manner, Kinsey usually turned a blind eye.

He had just hooked up a new keg of Budweiser when Terry Buckett sat down at the bar. The band had done their sound check earlier, and it was obvious they'd been practicing: they were tighter than ever, Terry's voice clear and strong, R. J. 's bass line thunderous. “What do you call that style of music? ” Kinsey had asked after listening to a couple of numbers.

“Swamp rock, ” Terry had said with a grin.

Now he grinned up at Kinsey again, stoned and amiable, muscular drummer's forearms propped on the bar, tie-dyed bandanna wrapped around his dark curly hair. “Noodle soup, huh? Where'd you come up with that? ”

“A cookbook called The Asian Menu, ” said Kinsey. “With certain variations. ”

“I'll bet. Well, let's give it a try. Gimme a Natty Boho too. ” National Bohemian was the Yew's bar brand. At a dollar-fifty a bottle it was a hot seller. Kinsey opened a frosty bottle and set it on the bar in front of Terry, then started preparing the soup.

“Talked to Steve and Ghost today, ” Terry said.

“Yeah? They call the store? ” Steve and Ghost were the two members of the band Lost Souls?; the spray-painted lyric WE ARE NOT AFRAID was from “World, ” the song they always used to close their set. Steve played a dark, fierce guitar; Ghost had a voice like golden gravel running along the bottom of a clear mountain stream. A couple of weeks ago they had returned from a gig in New York and promptly left town again for a cross-country road trip in Steve's old T-bird. San Francisco was their ultimate destination, but they would plan their route as they traveled, and they might be gone for as much as a year.

“Yeah. The new guy answered, and Steve goes This is John Thomas from the IRS calling for Mr. Buckett. ' I about pissed myself when he handed me the phone. That little bastard. . . ” Terry laughed and shook his head.

“Are they doing okay? ”

“Sure. They're in Texas now. Steve said they played at a coffeehouse in Austin and the folkies loved 'em. Sold some tapes too. Maybe I ought to check out Austin. You ever been? ”

“No. One of my favorite underground cartoonists came from there, though. Bobby McGee. ”

Terry frowned. “McGee? Wasn't he the guy who. . . ”

“Yup. ”

“That house is still standing out on Violin Road, ” Terry mused. “I was only eight when the murders happened, but I remember. They say it's haunted. ”

“Of course they do. It might even be true. But his comic Birdland was brilliant, right up there with Crumb and—”

“Didn't he leave one of his kids alive? ”

Kinsey served Terry a steaming bowl of noodle soup. “Yes, he left a kid. A five-year-old son, I believe. And no, I don't know what ever happened to him. ”

“I bet he was fucked up real good, ” said Terry, slurping thoughtfully.

“Excuse me. Could I get a bowl of that soup? ” said a quiet voice from the end of the bar.

Kinsey turned. Neither he nor Terry had noticed the boy before; the bar was crowded and the kid fit right in, tall and slender, plain black T-shirt tucked into black jeans, wavy ginger-blond hair grown long and pulled back in a ponytail from a bony, almost delicate face. A battered gray backpack was slung over his shoulder. He looked about twenty and carried himself like someone maybe even younger, unsure of his welcome and not particularly wanting to be noticed.

But his eyes were arresting: a transparent, icy blue, large and round, irises rimmed with a thin line of black. They seemed enormous in the thin face. Waif-eyes, thought Kinsey; hunger-eyes.

“You new in town? ” Terry asked through a mouthful of noodles.

The boy nodded. “I came in on the bus about an hour ago. ”

“That's new, all right. ” Terry offered his hand. The boy looked confused for a moment, then reached out and shook. “I'm Terry Buckett. I run the record store here, in case you need any sounds. Everything from Nine Inch Nails to Hank Williams. ”

“Hank Williams, Senior, ” Kinsey interjected.

“Senior, absolutely. For Bocephus you have to drive to Corinth-he's a little too all-American for us. Who're you? ”

“Trevor Black. I usually listen to jazz. ”

“Got some of that too. ” Terry grinned at the boy. After a moment's hesitation, the boy smiled tentatively back. Terry's friendliness was hard to resist; he would keep talking until a person starting answering, even if it was just to shut him up.

Kinsey set a bowl of soup in front of Trevor Black-the name seemed vaguely familiar, but he couldn't think why — and collected the boy's dollar. “I usually buy new customers a beer. If you're under twenty-one, I'll buy you a Coke. ”

Trevor tucked a neat bundle of noodles into his mouth. “I'm twenty-five. But I don't drink. I'll take a Coke. ” He chewed the noodles, then frowned. “This tastes just like Oodles of Noodles. ”

Terry snorted. “Kinsey practices what you call 'found cuisine. '”

“The broth is homemade, ” Kinsey said coolly. “Would you like your dollar back? Either of you? ”

Terry just waved an impatient hand. Trevor seemed to consider it for a moment, then shook his head. “No. This is fine. ”

“So glad it meets with your approval, ” Kinsey muttered, turning away to get the kid's Coke. Behind him he heard Terry snort again. Kinsey closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. It was going to be a long night.

An hour later Gumbo was churning away onstage, Trevor Black was still perched on his stool nursing his third Coke, and the bar was a scene of utter chaos.

Kinsey had gotten a local kid called Robo to collect money at the door. Robo, at eighteen, was well on his way to becoming Missing Mile's resident stewbum-he got his nickname from the bottles of Robitussin he shoplifted from the drugstore-but Kinsey figured he was just capable of counting dollars, stamping hands, and managing not to pocket any of the band's proceeds as long as Kinsey slipped him a couple of beers during the show.

The club was packed. Terry and R. J. Miller, Gumbo's bass player, had sat in with Lost Souls? a number of times and were already known as solid players. The guitarist was a glam-rock dynamo, a kid named Calvin who in fact bore a strong resemblance to the Calvin of comic strip fame, but punked out and tarted up considerably. Gumbo served up a foot-stomping set, hot as Tabasco, intoxicating as Dixie beer.

Since the band started, Kinsey had been drawing constant cups of draft, popping endless bottletops. Just before eleven the keg of Bud ran dry. Kinsey ducked into the back room and walked a new one onto the dolly. The kegs were heavy and awkward, and when he was in a hurry he usually managed to roll them off the dolly and right onto his toes.

“Shit! ” he said loudly as this very thing happened. As he jerked his foot away, the keg teetered and threatened to tip. Kinsey grabbed at it. If it went over, the beer inside would foam unmercifully. Customers were lined up three deep at the bar, waiting to be served, and last call was just an hour away. Silently he cursed the treacherous Rima, wishing he had busted her after all, if only for the cheap satisfaction it would give him right now.

Then suddenly someone was beside him, wrestling with the icy keg, pushing Kinsey toward the taps, the cooler, the impatient mass of drinkers. “Go wait on them-I'll hook it up. I know how. ” Skinny arms wrapped around the keg, heaving it into place; deft long-fingered hands were already tapping the valve. Trevor Black. Kinsey wondered if the kid really was twenty-five. He still looked more like nineteen, and the Yew could get busted if an underage person was caught serving beer. Kinsey shrugged and put it out of his mind. Taking the risk was better than losing business.

Fifteen minutes or so into the rush, Kinsey could tell Trevor had done this kind of work before. He was quick to figure out where everything was; he was able to duck and dodge around Kinsey without getting in his way. Since he didn't know the prices, he just served drinks as fast as he could and left the register to Kinsey. Dollar bills flew into Kinsey's hands. The tip jar jangled with change. At last the flood of customers flowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether: everyone was drunk and dancing, getting into Gumbo.

Kinsey went up front with a round of Natty Bohos for the band. Terry flashed him a big smile and did a little flourish on the drums. The club was hot and steamy, smelling of sweat and beer and clove smoke; the faces of the dancing kids were slick with light, lost in musical rapture.

When Kinsey made his way back through the crowd, Trevor was leaning against the cooler drinking another Coke. His smile was tentative, barely a flicker. “Was that okay? To just jump in like that? ”

“Absolutely not. You're fired. ” They stared at each other for a moment; then Kinsey's mouth twitched, and all at once both were laughing. “Seriously, do you want a job? You can keep all tonight's tips, and I'll start you at four-fifty an hour. ”

Trevor shrugged. “I have stuff to do in Missing Mile-I don't need a job right away. And I'm not really a bartender. I've just filled in for one a couple of times. ”

Kinsey raised an eyebrow. “You could've fooled me. Well, you can fill in some here if you want. Pick up a shift every week or so. ”

Trevor stared at the floor. “Maybe. It depends. ”

Kinsey decided not to ask what it depended on. He seemed to have wrecked the moment of camaraderie already. Trevor was an odd bird, his conversation seeded with chill winds and ice pockets. Kinsey searched for a neutral topic to dissipate the tension. “So, if you're not a bartender by profession, “what is it you do? ”

Trevor kept looking at the floor, scuffed the toe of a ratty black sneaker over the worn boards. “I draw comics. ”

Kinsey had thought the name was familiar. “Trevor Black. . . Didn't you have a page in Drawn and Quarterly? ” This was an underground comics magazine featuring some of the newest, most bizarre talent around.

Trevor looked surprised, then a little disconcerted, but he nodded. “Yes. That was me. ”

“It was a good strip. You know, it made me think of—”

A second wave of beer drinkers descended upon the bar clamoring for Natty Bohos. Trevor turned away to serve them so quickly that Kinsey wondered whether he was glad to get off the subject. As Kinsey rang up their purchases, his mind lingered on the comic. It had been an odd, brief tale, an epiphany of sorts, something about a flock of birds rising from a man's charred corpse like a feathered, jewel-eyed soul. Kinsey had been about to say how much the comic's style had reminded him of the late Robert McGee, the sharp inking and clean, graceful lines. He was sure Trevor had read Birdland. Possibly he knew McGee had died here. Kinsey might even tell him about the time he'd fixed the McGees' car, just before the tragedy.

But the band was winding down. The rush went on until last call, and then it was closing time, money to count, spills to wipe up, hundreds of cups, cans, bottles to find and empty and sort for tomorrow's recycling pickup. By the time they finished it was after three.

Kinsey popped a beer, then picked out a tape and stuck it in the little cassette player behind the bar. Miles Davis, something from the fifties. The sound of the trumpet filled the room, easy and slow, smooth as eggnog spiked with whiskey. Trevor put his head down on the bar. Kinsey leaned against the register and closed his eyes.

The music ended and an announcer's voice came on, part of the tape, which had been recorded live on Fifty-second Street in the golden bebop days. The voice was deep, white, and juicy, and somehow seemed a distilled essence of its time; you could easily picture the guy in his sharp suit with its deep-cut lapels, hair slicked back, cool ofay cat. “Well! Yeah! Miiiiles Davis. Remember, you still have plenty of time to get to Birdland—”

Kinsey heard a strangled sob. He opened his eyes and stared at Trevor, who was rolling his head back and forth on the bar, his hands clawing at the scarred wood. His lips were pulled back over his teeth, and tears poured from his eyes. Kinsey could actually see them forming salty little pools on the bar's varnished surface. He moved toward the boy. “Hey, Trevor? What—”

“I don't have plenty of time to get to Birdland! ” Trevor cried. His voice sounded as if it were being pulled out of him, dragged over hot coals and rusty nails, tortured out of his throat. “I don't have any time at all-and I'm scared—”

“Birdland? ” Kinsey said softly.

Trevor caught the puzzled inflection. He looked up at Kinsey, the pale flesh of his eyelids swollen, his clear eyes naked and wet and terrified. And suddenly Kinsey knew that face: a five-year-old boy, in bad need of a haircut by some standards, too thin and hollow-eyed by any, standing on the side of a country road staring first at his mother, then at his father.

“Trevor McGee, ” said Kinsey.

“Oh, goddamn. . . ” Miserably, Trevor nodded. Then he was sobbing again. Kinsey went around the bar, put a cautious hand on the boy's trembling shoulder, felt the muscles bunch up and flinch away from his palm.

“Don't touch me! ”

“Sorry. I didn't mean—”

“No, I just can't—”

They stared helplessly at each other. Trevor's face was flushed, slick with tears. Everything in the way he held himself-arms crossed over his chest, shoulders hunched — screamed Don't touch me as loudly as Trevor's mouth had done. But his eyes were five years old again, and begged Hold me. Hold me. Help me.

Trevor might hate him, might even think Kinsey was hitting on him, but that was just too bad. Kinsey could not ignore such pain. “I remember you, ” he said. “I was the mechanic who fixed your parents' car. I wanted to help you then, and I want to help you now. ” Before Trevor could flinch again, Kinsey wrapped his long arms around the boy and held on tight.

He felt Trevor's body go absolutely rigid, felt him try to pull away. If he had kept trying, Kinsey would have let him go. But after a few seconds of struggle Trevor sagged against Kinsey's chest.

“I remember you too, ” he said. “You recognized my dad. . . but he was ashamed of himself. . . ashamed of us... ”

“You poor child, ” Kinsey whispered, “you poor, poor child. ” The thin body was all sharp angles, all elbows and shoulder blades; it felt as fragile against him as that of a wounded bird. Kinsey imagined Trevor's fear unfolding like treacherous wings to carry him back to that house, back to the strange and painful year 1972, to the death he no doubt thought he had deserved.

At last the crying faded to an occasional long tremor that jerked through the boy like an electric current. He had been leaning hard against Kinsey, his sharp chin digging into Kinsey's shoulder. Now he pulled away and slumped on the bar stool, swiping at his face. Kinsey decided not to give him time to be embarrassed. “Let's go. ”

Trevor gave him a half-wary, half-questioning look.

“You shouldn't be by yourself tonight, ” Kinsey told him. “You're coming home with me. ”

He expected argument, maybe refusal, and he was prepared to push the issue. But if anything, Trevor looked relieved. Kinsey wondered whether the boy had been planning to hike out to Violin Road, to sleep in that bad memory of a house. The house of Trevor McGee's thwarted doom and, perhaps, of Trevor Black's impending destiny.

Trevor slung his backpack over his shoulder, turned off the bar lights, and followed Kinsey out of the club, down the bad end of Firehouse Street, into the silent silver-lit night.