"Take me around the block again."

"Here we go."

The leaf-light flickered on the paper-thin skin of the old men's wrists, the shadows alternating with fading sunlight. They moved in a soft whisper.

"All of a sudden. In that boy's face . . . He gave me a piece of cake, Bleak."

"I saw him."

"Why, why did he do it? He kept looking at me as if I were someone new. Was that it? Or what? Why did he do it? And there I was, me, staring out of his face. And I knew I'd lost."

"Let's say you didn't win, maybe. But you didn't lose."

"What broke me down all of a sudden? I hated that monster, and then, suddenly, I hated myself. Why?"

"Because he wasn't your son."

"Ridiculous!"

"Nevertheless. You never got married that I knew . . ."

"Never!"

"Never had children?"

"Never!"

"And the children never had children."

"Of course not. Impossible!"

"You cut yourself off from life. The boy has recon nected you. He is the grandson you should have had, to keep the juices flowing, life staying alert."

"Hard to believe."

"You're coming around. You can't cut all the phone lines and still be on speaking terms with the world. Instead of living inside your son and your son's son, you were really heading for the junkyard. The boy reminded you of your utter and complete fi nish."

"No more, no more!" Quartermain grabbed the hard rubber wheels of his chair, causing them to stop short.

"Face up to it," Bleak said. "We're both dumb old fools. A little late for wisdom, but better an ironic recognition than none at all."

Uncurling his friend's fingers from the spider web wheels, Bleak pushed the chair around a corner so the light of the dying sun stained their faces a healthy red, and added, "Look, life gives us everything. Then it takes it away. Youth, love, happiness, friends. Darkness gets it all in the end. We didn't have enough sense to know you can will it-life-to others. Your looks, your youth. Pa.s.s it on. Give it away. It's lent to us for only a while. Use it, let go without crying. It's a very fancy relay race, heading G.o.d knows where. Except now, in your last lap of the race, you find no one waiting for you on the track ahead. n.o.body for you to hand the stick to. You've run the race for no reason. You've failed the team."

"Is that what I've done?"

"Yes. You weren't hurting the boy. Actually, what you were trying to do was make him grow up. You were both wrong for a while. Now you're both winning. Not because you want to, but because you have to."

"No, it's only he who's ahead. The idea was to grow them as fruit for the grave. But all I did was give them-"

"Love," said Bleak.

Quartermain could not say the word. That dreadful sweet, candy-sickening word. So trite, so true, so irritating, so wonderful, so frightening, and, in the end, so lost to himself.

"They won. I did them a favor, my G.o.d, a favor! I was blind! I wanted them to race about, like we run about, and wither, and be shocked by their withering, and die, like I'm dying. But they don't realize, they don't know, they're even happier, if that's possible."

"Yes." Bleak pushed the chair. "Happier. Because growing old isn't all that bad. None of it is bad if you have one thing. If you have the one thing that makes it all all right."

That dreadful word again!

"Don't say it!"

"But I'm thinking it," said Bleak, trying mightily to keep an unaccustomed smile from creasing his lips.

"So you're right, so I'm miserable, and here I sit, crying like a G.o.dd.a.m.n idiot fool!"

The freckled leaf-shadows pa.s.sed over his liver-spotted hands. They fitted, for a moment, like a jigsaw and made his hands look muscled, tanned, and young. He stared at them, as if delivered free of age and corruption. Then the freckling, twinkling motion of pa.s.sing trees went on.

"What do I do now, what do I do? Help me, Bleak."

"We can help ourselves. You were heading for the cliff. I tried to warn you. You can't hold them back now. If you'd had any sense, you might have encouraged the children to continue their d.a.m.ned revolu tion, never grow up, to be egocentrics. Then they really would have been unhappy!"

"A fine time to tell me."

"I'm glad I didn't think of it. The worst thing is never to grow up. I see it all around. I see children in every house. Look there, that's Leonora's house, poor woman. And here's where those two old maids live, and their Green Machine. Children, children without love. And over there, take a look. There's the ravine. The Lonely One. There's a life for you, there's a child in a man's body. That's the ticket. You could make Lonely Ones of them all, given time and patience. You used the wrong strategy. Don't force people to grow. Baby them. Teach them to nurse their grievances and grow their private poison gardens. Little patches of hate and prejudice. If you wanted them unhappy, how much better to say, 'Revolt, I'm with you, charge! Ignorance, I'm for you! Down with the slob and the swine forever!'"

"Don't rub it in. I don't hate them anymore, anyway. What a strange afternoon, how odd. There I was, in his face. There I was, in love with the girl. It was as if time had never pa.s.sed. I saw Liza again."

"It's still possible, of course, you can reverse the process. The child is in us all. It's not hard to keep the child locked there forever. Give it another try."

"No, I'm done with it. I'm done with wars. Let them go. If they can earn a better life than I did, let them earn it. I wouldn't be so cruel as to wish them my life now. I was in his face, remember, and I saw her. G.o.d, what a beautiful face! Suddenly I felt so young. Now, turn me around and roll me home. I want to think about the next year or so. I'll have to start fi guring."

"Yes, Ebenezer."

"No, not Ebenezer, not Scrooge. I'm not anything. I haven't decided to be anything. You can't be anything that quickly. All I know is I'm not quite the same. I've got to figure what I want to be."

"You could give to charity."

"You know me better than that."

"You've got a brother."

"Lives in California."

"How long's it been since you've seen him?"

"Oh, G.o.d, thirty years."

"He has children, right?"

"Yes, I think so. Two girls and a boy. Grown now. Got children of their own."

"You could write a letter."

"What kind?"

"Invite them for a visit. You've got a big house. And one of those children, G.o.d help them, might seem like you. It struck me, if you can't have any private sense of destiny, immortality, you name it-you could get it secondhand from your brother's house. Seems to me you'd want to connect up with a thing like that."

"Foolish."

"No, common sense. You're too old for marriage and children, too old for everything except experiments. You know how things work. Some children look like their fathers, or mothers, or grandfathers, and some take after a distant brother. Don't you think you'd get a kick out of something like that?"

"Too easy."

"Think on it, anyway. Don't wait, or you'll sink back into being nothing but a mean old son-of-ab.i.t.c.h again."

"So that's what I've been! Well, well. I didn't start out intending to be mean, but I got there somehow. Are you mean, Bleak?"

"No, because I know what I did to myself. I'm only mean in private. I don't blame others for my own mis takes. I'm bad in a different way than you, of course, with a sense of humor developed out of necessity." For a moment, Bleak's eyes seemed to twinkle, but maybe it was only the pa.s.sing sun.

"I'll need a sense of humor from here on out. Bleak, visit me more often." Quartermain's gnarled fingers grasped Bleak's hand.

"Why would I visit you, you sorry old b.a.s.t.a.r.d, ever again?"

"Because we're the Grand Army, aren't we? You must help me think."

"The blind leading the sick," said Bleak. "Here we are."

He paused at the walk leading up to the gray, fl akepainted house.

"Is that my place?" said Quartermain. "My G.o.d, it's ugly, ugly as sin. Needs paint."

"You can think about that, too."

"My G.o.d, what a Christ-awful ugly house! Wheel me in, Bleak."

And Bleak wheeled his friend up the walk toward his house.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

Douglas stood with Tom and Charlie in the moist-smelling warm late-summer-green ravine. Mosquitoes danced their delicate dances upon the silence. A dancing idiot hum-tune.

"Everyone's gone," said Tom . Douglas sat on a rock and took off his shoes . "Bang, you're dead," said Tom, quietly . "I wish I was, oh, I wish I was dead," said Doug . Tom said, "Is the war over? Shall I take down the flag?" "What flag?"

"Just the flag, that's all."

"Yeah. Take it down. But I'm not sure if the war is really over yet . . . but it sure has changed. I've just got to figure out how."

Charlie said, "Yeah, well, you did give cake to the enemy. If that wasn't the strangest thing . . ."

"Ta-ta-tahhhh," hummed Tom. He made furling motions in the warm empty silent air. He stood solemnly by the quiet creek in the summer evening with the sun fading. "Ta-ta-tahhhh. Ta-ta-tahhhh." He hummed "Taps." A tear fell off his cheek.

"Oh, for gosh sakes!" cried Douglas. "Stop!"

Douglas and Tom and Charlie climbed out of the ravine, and walked through the boxed and packaged town, through the avenues and streets and alleys, among the thousand-celled houses, the bright prisons, down the definite sidewalks and the positive lanes, and the country seemed far away and it was as if a sea had moved away from the sh.o.r.e of their life in one day. Suddenly there was the town and their lives to be lived in that town in the next forty years, opening and shutting doors and raising and lowering shades, and the green meadow was distant and alien.

Douglas looked over at Tom getting taller every minute, it seemed. He felt the hunger in his stomach and he thought of the miraculous foods at home and he thought of Lisabell blowing out the candles and sitting there with fourteen years burnt behind her and not caring, very pretty and solemn and beautiful. He thought of the Lonely One, very lonely indeed, wanting love, and now gone.

Douglas stopped at Charlie's house, feeling the season change about them.

"Here's where I leave you guys," said Charlie. "See you later, at the haunted house with those dumb girls."

"Yeah, see you later, Charlie."

"So long, Charlie," said Tom.

"You know something," said Charlie, turning back toward his friends, as if he'd suddenly remembered something important. "I been thinkin'. I got an uncle, twenty-five years old. Came by earlier today in a big Buick, with his wife. A really nice, pretty lady. I was thinkin' all morning: Maybe I'll let them make me twenty-fi ve. Twenty-five strikes me as a nice medium age. If they'll let me ride in a Buick with a pretty lady like that, I'll go along with them. But that's it, mind! No kids. It stops at squalling kids. Just a nice car and a pretty lady with me, ridin' along out toward the lake.

Boy! I'll take about thirty years of that. I'm puttin' in my order for thirty years of being twenty-five. Fill 'er up and I'm on my way."

"It's something to think about," said Douglas. "I'm goin' in the house to think about it right now," said Charlie. "So, when do we start the war again?" said Tom. Charlie and Douglas looked at each other. "Heck, I dunno," said Doug, a little uncomfortably. "Tomorrow, next week, next month?" "I guess." "We can't give up the war!" said Tom. "Heck, we're not giving it up," said Charlie. "Ev ery once in a while we'll do it again, huh, Doug?" "Oh, sure, sure!" "Shift the strategy, identify new objectives, you know," said Charlie. "Oh, we'll have wars okay, Tom, don't you worry." "Promise?" cried Tom, tears in his eyes. "Cross our hearts, mother's honor." "Okay," said Tom, lower lip trembling. The wind whistled, was cool: it was an early au tumn evening, no longer a late summer one. "Well," said Charlie, standing there, smiling shyly, looking up from under his eyebrows at Doug. "It sure was a farewell summer, huh?"

"Sure was."

"Sure kept us busy."

"Sure did."

"Only thing is," said Tom, "it didn't come out in the papers: Who won?"

Charlie and Douglas stared at the younger boy.

"Who won? Don't be silly!" Douglas lapsed into silence, staring up into the sky. Then he fi xed them with a stare. "I don't know. Us, them."

Charlie scratched inside his left ear. "Everybody. The first war in history where everybody won. I can't figure it. So long." He went on up the sidewalk, crossed the front yard, opened the door of his house, waved, and was gone.

"There goes Charlie," said Douglas.

"Boy, am I sad!" said Tom.

"About what?"