Richter had gone to a great deal of trouble only to let it be wasted. He had been driving south on the Kansas Turnpike when his police scanner had told him that Vale was being pursued by a sheriff's deputy on a county road near El Dorado, so he had left the turnpike and had used the Jaguar's computerized map display to guide him there. He had then driven at dangerous speeds until he had overtaken the patrol car and forced it into the ditch. Having eliminated the compet.i.tion, Richter had continued driving at a high rate of speed, confident that he would overtake the motorcycle in twenty or thirty seconds.

He had not, which meant that Vale had left the road to hide from the pursuing deputy. Richter had pulled off at a picnic area to wait, and sure enough, Vale had come by several minutes later. Richter had begun following him then and had come close to apprehending him at the Kaw Reservoir, but Vale had hidden again, almost evading Richter entirely. Richter had been more cautious after that, hiding the Jaguar behind an abandoned farmhouse until Vale had pa.s.sed him a second time. Richter had resumed following the motorcycle then, but had kept well back, waiting for Vale to stop and dismount before attempting a capture.

It had almost worked. Richter had caught up with Vale at the convenience store and had parked across the highway while the other was inside, planning to nail him when he came out. Then the woman had b.u.t.ted in.

The b.i.t.c.h. Not only young, but strong too. And here he was, his arm throbbing, his eight-hundred-dollar coat covered with sand and gla.s.s, his breath coming in hard puffs. Without his car. He replaced his pistol in its shoulder holster and looked toward the gla.s.s door of the convenience store.

The counter was visible, but there was no one at the register. That meant that the clerk was hiding somewhere and telephoning the local uniforms because of the violence outside.

Richter grimaced. As if he didn't have enough problems.

Brushing himself off, he walked to the woman's pickup truck and climbed inside. The keys were in the ignition, so he started the engine, pulled up to the pump that his bullet had hit, and got out to fill the tank.

The pump hummed to life when he flipped its lever, so at least he wouldn't have to go inside and possibly kill the clerk just to turn it on from the counter.

The tank took eighteen gallons. When it was full, Richter let the nozzle fall to the pavement. He climbed inside the truck and started it again, then drove onto the highway and headed south.

The truck rattled and shimmied, and as Richter pushed it up to highway speed, it rocked as if an anvil had been dropped into the bed. Its headlights were dim, and the speedometer and fuel gauge were broken. The m.u.f.fler, if there was one, was so full of holes that the cab reverberated with a perpetual metallic cough. The engine was firing on only five or six of its eight cylinders.

The GMC was worn out, and Richter was furious that he had to use it. He didn't know how he would find Vale now that he didn't have the Jaguar and its equipment, but he swore that he would. His body might be older and softer than it had once been, but he still had his instincts.

Things had become personal now. He owed Vale. Even more, he owed that interfering female citizen.

He hoped that she would stay close to Vale for a while. She had humiliated him, and that could not be allowed. He had never enjoyed discretionary killing, but sometimes it was necessary.

His considered opinion-d.a.m.nthem for making him feel so old-was that this was one of those times.

RINGO.

Ringo was bored. Occasionally, after making sure that the Ariel's scent was so strong that he couldn't lose it, he had cut cross-country for variety... but that had made things worse. It was awful to come across a rabbit hole without being able to stay and bark awhile.

So he was glad when the motorcycle stopped at a convenience store. Maybe it would stay long enough for him to have a little fun. He would have to remember, though, not to interact with humans any more than necessary. He would have to remember the lesson that the fat woman with the Windex had taught him.

He circled the convenience store's parking lot outside of its circles of yellow light so that the motorcycle's rider (Cathy and Jeremy called him Vale) would not notice him, and then he loped behind the building to see whether he could find anything interesting in the trash.

Ringo rose up on his hind legs and put his front paws on the rim of the store's dumpster. He looked inside, sniffing, but found only boxes and papers. What he really wanted, he decided, was food. Hisinsides had been modified so that he didn't have to eat, but he liked to do it anyway. Boog's beef jerky had reminded him.

The Doberman dropped back to the ground, and as he did so, he heard an automobile drive into the parking lot and slam on its brakes. He c.o.c.ked his head to listen and also heard the motorcycle's engine start, then human voices and other noises. But the motorcycle wasn't going anywhere yet, so he could putter here a bit longer.

He trotted past the dumpster and found the store's back door. When he sniffed at its edges, he smelled hundreds of wonderful things: potato chips, peanuts, chocolate, cheese, salami, fish sticks, corn dogs, pretzels, donuts, frozen pizzas, gumb.a.l.l.s, sesame crackers, and-yes!-beef jerky.

Drooling, Ringo nosed the steel door. It didn't move, so he nosed it harder and whined, hoping that someone would let him in. No one did, so he nosed harder still. The door buckled in the middle and fell inside.

Ringo blinked. He hadn't meant to do that, but as long as it had happened, he might as well go on in.

He padded through a storage room as a youthful human male looked in from the doorway that led to the shop. The youth's mouth opened and his eyebrows jumped, and he turned and ran. Ringo hurried after him, making sounds in his throat that he hoped would be rea.s.suring. "Don't be afraid!" he wanted to say.

"I just want some beef jerky! Please don't spray me with Windex!"

The young man ran past a counter to a gla.s.s door, but then he stopped and made a squeaking noise. He turned to face Ringo, made a squeaking noise again, and then sprinted to a big metal case that sat against the wall. The young man slid open a transparent lid on top of the case, climbed inside, and pulled the lid shut over him.

Ringo looked out through the gla.s.s door and saw two humans, one of them Vale, locked in a weird dance. Another human, a female, was standing beside a white pickup truck and yelling. The situation didn't look like anything that was any of the dog's business, so he ambled over to the big metal case to see what the deal was there.

The young man lay on his back among colorful cardboard cartons and cylinders, peering up at Ringo through the lid. A circle of fog had formed on the gla.s.s over his mouth.

Ringo sniffed, and his processors told him that the cartons and cylinders inside the case were filled with ice cream. No wonder the young man had jumped in there. The stuff smelled terrific. But Ringo didn't want to be greedy. He would let the human have the ice cream. There were plenty of other things to eat.

He trotted down an aisle and gulped a jumbo bag of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, then found a refrigerator chest containing packages of bologna and cheese. He wolfed down several of each, wrappers and all. Next he nosed open an upright case and pulled out a cl.u.s.ter of red-and-white cans labeled "Budweiser." He popped the first can between his teeth, and the foam tickled his nose. He swallowed the other five for safekeeping, then munched a frozen pepperoni pizza.

When the pizza was gone, Ringo went to the counter for dessert. The beef jerky was inside a plastic jar beside the cash register. He tore open the jar and ate every salty, delicious strip.

Now that his hunger was sated, he thought to look outside again. Vale and his motorcycle were gone.

Caught up in his revelry, the Doberman hadn't even heard the Ariel leave. The man with whom Vale hadbeen dancing was at one of the gasoline pumps, holding a hose to the side of the pickup truck.

Ringo started toward the door, but paused beside the icecream case. He had told himself to have as little to do with people as possible, but the young man had allowed him to eat, and Ringo couldn't leave without acknowledging that favor. He nosed back the case's lid and licked the whimpering human on the face. The nose was cold; a good sign.

That done, Ringo went to the front door, shouldered it open, and trotted out, belching because of the Budweiser. He sniffed the air and discovered that the motorcycle was still heading south.

The pickup truck was leaving now, and it too was going south. Ringo hesitated, c.o.c.king his head and considering, then bounded after the truck. It would have been no physical strain for him to continue after Vale on foot, but he had always found it pleasant to lie down and snooze after a meal.

He leaped into the truck bed as the noisy vehicle accelerated, and its body bounced and swayed as he landed. Hunkering down so that the driver wouldn't see him, the Doberman curled up below the cab's rear window.

His olfactory processors would alert him if the Ariel got too far ahead or if the truck deviated from the motorcycle's path. For now, though, he could nap.

He coughed up one of the Budweisers and popped it with his teeth, first savoring the foam and then chewing on the can. He was content.

5.

OLIVER.

1967 began as though the world were coming to an end. A fire during an Apollo test killed Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee on January 27, and I lost one of my most treasured dreams.

Edward White had been the man I had first seen floating above the Earth, an atmosphere away from all of the trouble below. With his death, I realized that even s.p.a.ce was not a refuge. To get there, you had to find a way to leave the planet, but the planet did not want to let you leave. If it could, it would kill you first.

Mother saw the tragedy as another omen, like the tornado of seven months before. She was certain that still worse things were yet to come.

They took their time, but they came.

That summer was the Summer of Love. At least, it was in San Francisco. In Topeka, it was the Summer of Sweat. The city was sticky and miserable, and so was I.

My baby-sitter from the summer before had now found better things to do than spend eight hours a day with a kid, but Mother could neither quit her job nor leave me home alone. Thus it was that I spent June with first one babysitter and then another, and finally with something that made even first and secondgrades seem pleasant in retrospect: Vacation Bible School.

Every Protestant church in the Midwest runs one of these. Some last only a few weeks, and some last the whole d.a.m.n summer, but all have several things in common: A lack of air-conditioning. "Bible Heroes" coloring books. "This Little Light of Mine," an inspirational song written for three-year-olds but forced on persons up to the age of ten. The Children of Israel's Escape from Egypt. Blue-haired teachers with fat arms and cheek rouge the color of red M&Ms. The walls of Jericho. King David. Construction paper. The baby Jesus. Elmer's glue. The adolescent Jesus. Crayola crayons. The adult Jesus.

Rounded-tip scissors. The crucified Jesus. Severe discipline for the unruly. The dead Jesus. Warm Kool-Aid and stale cookies. The resurrected Jesus. Bible-quiz contests ("What is Jael best known for?").

The ascended Jesus. Why the Devil (aka Satan) is bad and how to avoid him. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

I was furious with Mother for sending me to a place like that, but she had little choice in the matter and did the best she could in picking the church. She enrolled me in the Vacation Bible School that was operated by the Central Shawnee County United Methodist Church of G.o.d in Christ of the United States of America, which she probably figured was the Vacation Bible School that was the least like an ideological concentration camp in all of Topeka. We were given two bathroom breaks and one snack period per six-hour day, and twice a week we were allowed to go outside to play sinners and saints in the church parking lot. (Sinners and saints was a religious version of the playground staple called dodgeball or bombardment. My cla.s.s of Vacation Bible Schoolers would count off, one, two, one, two, and the teacher would designate the ones as saints and the twos as sinners. The sinners would line up against the brick wall of the church and try to dodge the melon-size red inflate-o-b.a.l.l.s that the saints threw at us. I always tried to be a sinner, because if a sinner managed to catch a ball that was thrown at him, the saint who had thrown it was either out of the game or had to become a sinner-and I was good at catching.) It really wasn't too bad, as long as I turned off my ears during the lectures and focused on artistic perfection during the crafts periods. I wasn't allowed to draw, paint, or cut-out-and-glue just anything that I wanted to, of course, but had to follow Mrs. Stummert's a.s.signments. Thus I had to find what joy I could in the work itself. Once I drew a picture of David and Goliath that I thought was almost good enough to be inMad magazine, and another time I did a finger painting of Jesus Walking on the Water that might have been done by Salvador Dali when he was my age (seven). Mrs. Stummert generally frowned whenever she took a look at my finished work, but she could hardly complain because I had done what she had asked to the best of my abilities. She couldn't punish me just because my interpretations happened to be a little bizarre.

My masterpiece was going to be a huge construction-paper collage of the Destruction of Sodom. Mrs.

Stummert had told us to reconstruct a biblical scene that ill.u.s.trated the Power of G.o.d in Action, and for me the choice was easy. In my opinion, turning Lot's wife into a slab of rock salt while simultaneously wasting a city was the best trick G.o.d had ever pulled.

The beginning of the end of my Vacation Bible School career came as I was putting the finishing touches on the collage one Friday in late July. I had worked on the project during crafts period for five days in a row, lavishing care on details and striving for perfection as I had never done before. I had cut the buildings of Sodom out of purple and red paper, the smoke from gray and tan, the flames from orange and yellow, the tiny screaming Sodomites from brown, and Lot's wife from white. I was finishing by carefully pasting each piece on a big sheet of black, and I thought it looked terrific. I actually felt happy.

I should not have let myself feel that way. Not in Vacation Bible School. When I felt happy, I hummedor sang without being aware of it, and the songs I hummed and sang (although they were my prayers) were extremely secular in nature.

Several weeks earlier, Mother had brought home a new Beatles alb.u.m:Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Ever since she had first played it, the lyrics had been jostling about in my head like soccer players. One of them scored a goal that day while I was working on the Destruction of Sodom, and I sang.

To me, it was nothing more than a happy song about being in good ol' Sergeant Pepper's band. But to Mrs. Stummert, it was something else. It was a sign that the long-haired freakish enemies of all that was good and decent had invaded Topeka.

"What are you singing?" she asked. She was standing behind me, her voice quavering over my head with outrage and doom.

I had learned enough in grade school to know when a teacher had already made up her mind that you were in trouble. The only defense in that situation was to act humble while displaying as much ignorance about your supposed crime as possible.

In this case, I reallywas ignorant of my crime. I knew that I was in trouble, but I didn't know why.

"Just a song," I said in a tiny voice.

"Whatkind of song?" Mrs. Stummert demanded.

"A Beatles song," I squeaked.

Mrs. Stummert clamped my right arm in one fat red hand, pulled me out of my chair, and marched me around the table where my entire Vacation Bible School cla.s.s was working. The kids were all staring, although they kept their heads down and tried to pretend that they weren't.

"Please continue working, children," Mrs. Stummert said. "This is none of your business." She propelled me into the hall, and the church echoed with the sound of the heavy wooden door banging shut behind her.

Still holding my arm, Mrs. Stummert put her free hand under my chin and tilted my head so that I had to look directly at her rouged face.

"Where did you hear that song?" she asked fiercely. "Were some older kids playing their radio where you could hear it?"

"No," I said, my voice distorted because Mrs. Stummert's fingers were clamped on my jaw.

"Where, then?" she said, shaking me. "Where did you hear filth like that?"

I twisted my head out of her grasp and tried to pull away altogether, but she held my arm tight. "It's not filth," I said, my voice shaking with the tears that were climbing up my throat to my eyes. "It's just a song about being in a band. Sergeant Pepper's band."

Mrs. Stummert's eyes bulged, and her flaccid lips trembled. "Oliver! Do you know who Sergeant Pepper is?" She said "Sergeant Pepper" as though she were spitting out something rancid. "Just a sergeant, I guess," I said, hating her. "One who runs a band."

Mrs. Stummert shook her head, and her cat's-eye gla.s.ses went crooked. "No, Oliver! It's another name for someone who sells bad drugs, and that song and all of those other Beatles songs are about people who aren't married but who all live in the same house together and, and-" She gulped for air.

Meanwhile, I was p.i.s.sed. "Says who?" I yelled. When Mrs. Stummert insulted the Beatles, she might as well have been insulting me and my mother. After all, the Beatles were Buddy Holly's disciples, and so were we.

At that point, Mrs. Stummert took off down the hall like a speeding blimp, dragging me to the pastor's office. Naturally, he was in.

He was a broad, big-bellied man with a pockmarked nose and hair as black and gleaming as shoe polish laced with Vaseline. He wore a dark blue suit with a tightly knotted necktie that was partially covered by the pouch of skin under his chin. "Well, well, what have we here?" he said as Mrs. Stummert yanked me forward to stand in front of his desk. I swear, that's what he said.

"We have a young man who has been singing hippie drug songs in Bible School," Mrs. Stummert said.

The pastor's eyebrows pulled together, his eyes narrowed, and his face darkened to a deep red. He stood and came around the desk to stand towering over me. "Is this true, young man?" he thundered. I swear: Hethundered.

When you're a kid, this is what they do to you. One adult accuses you of a crime, and another demands, "Is this true?" If you say no, then you've just called adult number one a liar, and you're in for it. If you say yes, then you've confessed your guilt to adult number two, and you're in for it.

Come to think of it, that process stays pretty much the same after you've grown up. d.a.m.ned if you do and d.a.m.ned if you don't, between a rock and a hard place, good cop/bad cop, Scylla and Charybdis.

I said nothing.

"I asked you a question, son," the pastor said.

"I'm not your son, fat b.u.t.t," I blurted.

"Fat b.u.t.t" was an insult I had learned in second grade. I was horrified at myself for having used it on the pastor, who for all I knew would kill me; but regardless of that, it was appropriate.

Mrs. Stummert shrieked and shook me, telling me that I would wind up in either h.e.l.l or reform school and nearly dislocating my arm. The pastor raised his hand as if he were going to swat my head from my shoulders, but then he walked around the desk and sat down again. From there he glared at me with the most intense expression of hatred that I have ever seen. I became scared.

"Mrs. Stummert," he said.

Mrs. Stummert stopped shaking me. "Yes, Pastor?" she asked. Even she sounded a little frightened now. "Please bring me your record book," he said. "I need the boy's home number to call his mother."

"Yes, Pastor," Mrs. Stummert said, pulling me toward the door.

"Leave him here," the pastor said.

Mrs. Stummert released my arm and left the office, closing the door. I stood before the pastor's desk and rubbed the red spots her fingers had left.

"Stand still," the pastor said.

I stopped rubbing and stood still.

The pastor stood again and came around the desk. He put one meaty hand on my head.

"You little piece of dogs.h.i.t," he said. His voice was a low growl. "You're going to grow up like those others, aren't you? The un-Christian, un-American ones in California and New York with their dirty hair and filthy clothes and their diseased wh.o.r.es who commit perversions with their mouths."

My stomach tightened with a sick terror. Even what I had felt at the sight of the tornado the year before was better than what I felt now. I wanted to run, to get out of there and never go back, but I couldn't move.

"If your teacher would just wait a few minutes before coming back," the pastor continued, "I'd show you what it'll be like for you. That'd teach you."