"God, you're a hulk," she said.

"I'm a little husky, that's all."

"It's all right, it's okay. Lean on me. Come on."

In a voice now as thick as English custard, I said, "Are we going to the park?"

"That's right."

"Picnic?"

"That's right. And we're late, let's hurry."

I peered past Lorrie, toward the sound of an approaching engine.

Headlights washed across us. An array of revolving blue and yellow beacons on the roof indicated that it was either a police cruiser or an intergalactic vehicle.

The car slid to a halt, doors flew open, and two men got out about fifteen feet away. One of them said, "What's going on here?"

"This man is shot," Lorrie told them. I wondered who she was talking about. Before I could ask she said, "We need an ambulance."

The cops approached warily. "Where's the shooter?"

"Over there on the sidewalk. He's hurt, doesn't have a gun anymore."

When the officers moved toward Punchinello, Lorrie shouted, "No! Stay back. The building's going to blow."

In my condition, her warning was mystifying; it didn't seem to make sense to the police, either. They hurried toward Punchinello, who lay half revealed in the backwash of the squad-car lights.

With single-minded determination, Lorrie kept me moving toward the park.

"Too cold for a picnic," I said. "So cold."

"We'll build a bonfire. Just move."

My teeth chattered, and words shivered out of me: "Will there be p-p-potato salad?"

"Yes. Plenty of potato salad." "The p-p-pickly kind?" "Yes, that's right, keep moving." "I hate the p-pickly k-k-kind." "We have both kinds."

Another curb almost defeated me. The sidewalk looked soft and inviting.

"It's too c-c-cold for a picnic," I said, "and too d-dark." An instant later it was also too noisy.

The four virtually simultaneous explosions-mansion,, bank, courthouse, library-purged confusion from my mind. For a moment I could think too clearly.

As the ground rocked, as the evergreens in the park swayed and shook off dead needles, as the initial blasts gave way to the mad-gods-bowling clatter of stone structures collapsing, I remembered being shot twice and not enjoying it either time.

The pain didn't return with the memory, and now I was clearheaded enough to understand that being unable to feel my leg at all was worse than the fiery agony that I had first endured. The utter lack of feeling suggested that the leg was damaged beyond repair, already dead, amputated, gone.

Exhausted, I stumbled when the ground rocked. Lorrie helped me lower myself to the grass, where I leaned against the trunk of a sycamore, even as the final blasts quaked through the town square.

With the memory of being shot came a nightmare montage of the three murders that Punchinello had committed in front of me. These bloody images were more vivid in recollection than at the time of the killings, perhaps because then I had been so concerned with my own and Lorrie's survival that I dared not consciously consider the hideous details for fear of being paralyzed by terror.

Sickened, I tried to repress those memories, but they tormented me. All my life, I had been comfortable inside my own head; but now that interior landscape was bloodstained and darkened by an ominous eclipse.

When I wished for the comforting return of the haze to which I had earlier succumbed, it came immediately in a great gray wave-drowning the lights of the police car in the street, then seething through the trees as might rich billows of wind-driven fog, which was curious on a windless night.

Dust.

The turbulent mass proved to be neither fog nor mental haze but thick clouds of fine dust expelled from Cornelius Snow's mansion as it crashed down from imposing edifice to shattered ruin. Pulverized limestone, powdered brick, crushed plaster: In a thousand scents and flavors, dust rolled over us.

Pale as it approached, the cloud brought darkness when it fell upon us, a gloom deeper than the lightless night itself. I eased away from the sycamore and rolled onto my right side, closing my eyes, pulling my shirt up to mask my nose and mouth against the choking dust.

I reached down with one hand to touch my numb left leg, to reassure myself that it was still there. My hand came away slick with warm blood.

In what seemed but an instant, dust caked the blood and formed a grisly plaster around my hand.

At first I thought that Lorrie must have dropped to the grass beside me, covering her face against the suffocating pall. Then I heard her voice above me and knew that she remained on her feet. She called for an ambulance, coughing, wheezing, ceaselessly shouting for help, help, a man's been shot.

I wanted to reach for her, pull her down, but I had no strength to raise my arm. A fearsome weakness had overcome me.

The comforting mental haze that I had wished for now returned. Frantic about Lorrie, I no longer wanted this escape, but resistance was impossible.

My thoughts wove an incoherent narrative of hidden doors, candlelit tunnels, dead faces, gunshots, snake handlers, tornadoes, clowns Soon I must have been unconscious and dreaming, for I had become an aerialist, walking the high wire, using a long pole for balance, progressing tentatively and precariously toward a platform on which Lorrie waited.

When I glanced behind to see what distance I'd already traveled, I found Punchinello Beezo in pursuit of me. He carried a balancing pole, too, but each end of it terminated in a wickedly sharp blade. He was smiling, confident, and faster than I was. He said, "I could have been a star, Jimmy Tock. I could have been a star."

Occasionally I drifted up from big-top dreams and from secret passageways in my soul, and realized that I was being moved. Carried in a litter. Then strapped on a gurney in a rollicking ambulance.

When I tried to open my eyes but could not, I told myself that they were simply glued shut by dust and tears. I knew this to be a lie, but I took comfort from it, anyway.

Eventually someone said, "The leg can't be saved."

I didn't know if he was a person in a dream or a real doctor, but I responded in a voice that sounded like me if I had been a frog prince: "I need both legs. I'm a storm chaser."

Thereafter, I sank uncounted fathoms into an abyss where the dreams were too real to be dreams, where mysterious behemoths stood guard over me but always at the periphery of vision, and where the air smelled of cherry tart flambe.

Six weeks later, Lorrie Lynn Hicks came to dinner. "She looked prettier than pom mes a la Sevillane. Never at any meal previously had I spent so little time admiring the food on my plate.

Candles in ruby-red, cut-crystal chimneys cast soft trembling geometries on the silk moire walls and shimmering amber circles on the coffered mahogany ceiling.

She outshone the candlelight.

Over the appetizer-sesame-baked crab-my father said, "I've never known anyone whose mother is a snake handler."

"A lot of women take it up because it sounds fun," Lorrie said, "but it's a lot harder than they think. Eventually they give it up."

"But surely it's still fun," my mother said.

"Oh, yes! Snakes are great. They don't bark, claw the furniture, and you'll never have a rodent problem."

"And you don't have to walk them," Mom added.

"Well, you can if you want, but it freaks out the neighbors. Maddy, this crab is fabulous."

"How does a snake handler make money from it?" Dad wondered.

"Mom has developed three primary revenue streams. She provides a variety of snakes to movie and TV productions. There for a while, it seemed every music video used snakes."

My mother was delighted: "So she rents out the snakes."

Dad asked, "By the hour, the day, the week?"

"Usually by the day. Even a snake-heavy movie only needs them for maybe four, five days."

"There isn't a movie these days that wouldn't be improved by a lively bunch of snakes," Grandma Rowena declared. "Especially that last Dustin Hoffman thing."

"People who rent snakes by the hour," Lorrie said somberly, "are for the most part not reputable."

This intrigued me. "I've never heard of a disreputable snake-rental company."

"Oh, they're around, all right." Lorrie grimaced. "Very tacky outfits. They rent to individuals by the hour, no questions asked."

Dad, Mom, and I exchanged baffled looks, but Weena knew the score: "For erotic purposes."

Dad said, "Yuch," and Mom said, "Creepy," and I said, "Grandma, sometimes you scare me."

Lorrie wanted to make one thing clear: "My mother never rents snakes to individuals."

"When I was a child," Weena said, "Little Ned Yarnel, the boy next door, was bit by a rattlesnake."

"A free snake or a rented one?" Dad asked.

"Free. Little Ned didn't die but he got gangrene. They had to amputate-first a thumb and finger, then everything to the wrist."

"Jimmy, dear," Mom said, "I'm so glad we didn't have to cut your leg off."

"Me too."

Dad raised his wineglass. "Let's drink to our Jimmy not being an amputee."

After the toast, Weena said, "Little Ned grew up to be the only one-handed bow-and-arrow champion ever to compete in the Olympics."

Amazed, Lorrie said, "That isn't possible."

"Dear girl," Weena said, "if you think there were lots of one-handed Olympic bow-and-arrow champions, you can't know much about the sport."

"Of course, he didn't win gold," Dad clarified.

"A silver medal," Grandma admitted. "But he'd have won the gold if he'd had two eyes."

Putting down her fork to punctuate her astonishment, Lorrie said, "He was a cyclops?"

"No," my mother said, "he had two eyes. He just couldn't see out of one of them."

"But don't you need depth perception to be good-at something like the bow and arrow?" Lorrie wondered.

Proud of her childhood friend, Weena said, "Little Ned had something better than depth perception. He had spunk. Nothing could keep Little Ned down."

Picking up her fork again, taking the last morsel of crab from her plate, Lorrie said, "I'm fascinated to know if Little Ned might also have been a dwarf."

"What a peculiar but somehow charming idea," my mother said.

"Just peculiar in my book," Grandma disagreed. "Little Ned was six feet tall by his eleventh birthday, wound up six feet four-a big lug like our Jimmy."

No matter what my grandmother thinks, I am inches shorter than Little Ned. I probably weigh a lot less than he did, too-except if the comparison is limited to hand weight, in which case I would have a considerable advantage over him.

Comparing my own two legs, my left weighs more than the right by virtue of the two steel plates and the numerous screws that now hold the femur together, plus the single steel plate in the tibia. The leg required considerable vascular surgery, as well, but that didn't add an ounce.

At dinner there in early November 1994, the wound drains were no longer in place, which improved the way I smelled, but I still wore a fiberglass cast. I sat at the end of the table, stiff leg thrust out to one side, as if I hoped to trip Grandma.

Weena finished her crab, smacked her lips in the flamboyant manner that she believes is a right of anyone her age, and said, "You mentioned your mama makes snake money three ways."

Lorrie patted her wonderfully full lips on her napkin. "She also milks rattlesnakes."

Appalled, my dad said, "What kind of supermarket from hell would sell such stuff?"

"We had a cute little milk snake lived with us for a while," Mom told Lorrie. "His name was Earl, but I always thought Bernard would suit him better."

"He looked like a Ralph to me," Grandma Rowena disagreed.

"Earl was a male," Mom said, "or at least we always assumed so. If he'd been a female, should we have milked him? After all, if you don't milk a cow, it can end up in terrible distress."

The evening was off to a splendid start. I hardly had to say anything.

I looked at Dad. He smiled at me. I could tell he was having a wonderful time.

"There's not actually milk in a milk snake," Lorrie said. "None in a rattler, either. What my mother milks out of them is venom. She gets a grip behind the head and massages the poison glands. The venom squirts out of the fangs, which are hypodermic in rattlers, and into a collection beaker."

Because he considers the dining room to be a temple, Dad rarely puts an elbow on the table. He put one on it now, and rested his chin in his hand, as though settling in for a long listen. "So your mother has a rattlesnake ranch."

"Ranch is too grand a word, Rudy. So is farm, for that matter. It's more of a garden with just the one crop."

My grandmother let out a satisfying belch and said, "Who does she sell this venom to-assassins, or maybe those pygmies with blowguns?"

"Drug companies need it to make antivenin. And it has a few other medical uses."

"You mentioned a third revenue stream," my father reminded her.