"He's like a savage in a National Geographic National Geographic TV show." TV show."

"Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house-his house, maybe, the name was Rockway-sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn't talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I've been able to control him. But I ... I'm tired, you see ... and ..." She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. "I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. The minges and mosquitoes don't seem to bother him." She paused. "I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances. "

Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim's name into parlor conversation.

"I don't know where I'm going," he said. "I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me."

He was expressing himself badly and didn't seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the dark man.

"I've been scared a lot of the time," he said carefully, "because I'm on my own. Pretty paranoid. It's like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me."

"In other words, you've stopped looking for houses and started looking for people."

"Yes, maybe."

"You've found us. That's a start."

"I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife's gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up."

"Yes."

"I don't want to sound brutal ..." He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.

"Would you consider leaving him?" There it was, spat out like a lump of rock, and he still didn't sound like much of a nice guy ... but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath? He had told her he was going to sound brutal, and he supposed he had. But they were in a brutal world now.

Meanwhile, Joe's odd seawater-colored eyes bored into him.

"I couldn't do that," Nadine said calmly. "I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He's jealous. He's afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to ... try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don't mean to ..." She trailed off, leaving that part vague. "But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won't be a party to that. Too many have died to kill more."

"If he cuts my throat in the middle of the night, you'll be a party to that. that. " "

She bowed her head.

Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn't know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, "He probably would have done it last night if you hadn't come after him. Isn't that the truth?"

Softly she replied: "Those are things that might be."

Larry laughed. "The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?"

She looked up. "I want to come with you, Larry, but I can't leave Joe. You will have to decide."

"You don't make it easy."

"These days it's no easy life."

He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.

"All right," he said. "I think you're being dangerously softhearted, but ... all right."

"Thank you," Nadine said. "I will be responsible for his actions."

"That will be a great comfort if he kills me."

"That would be on my heart for the rest of my life," Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I'll not kill. Not that. Never that.

They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. Vaguely, Larry remembered the spell of rain that had occurred the afternoon he had found his mother dying, just before the superflu had hit New York like a highballing freight train. Remembered the thunderstorm and the white curtains blowing wildly into the apartment. He shivered a little, and the wind danced a spiral of fire out of the fire and up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down on the beach, Joe's torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel lonely and all the colder-that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed.

"Do you play?"

He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken into to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was-coming from a house like that, it was probably a good un. He hadn't played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life.

"Yeah, I do," he said, and discovered that he wanted wanted to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone. to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone.

"Let's see what we got here," he said, and unsnapped the catches.

He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn't enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"It sure is."

He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel-string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords-zing! He smiled a little, remembering Barry Grieg's contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them "dollar slicks." Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up.

"What are you smiling about?" Nadine asked.

"Old times," he said, and felt a little sad.

He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up.

Joe was standing by the fire, a burned-out stick held forgotten in one hand. Those strange eyes were staring at him with frank fascination, and his mouth was open.

Very quietly, so quietly that it might have been a thought in his own head, Nadine said: "Music hath charms ..."

Larry began to pick out a rough melody on the guitar, an old blues he had picked up off an Elektra folk album as a teenager. Something originally done by Koerner, Ray, and Glover, he thought. When he thought he had the melody right, he let it walk off down the beach and then sang ... his singing was always going to be better than his playing.

"Well you see me comin baby from a long ways away I will turn the night mamma right into day Cause I'm here A long ways from my home But you can hear me comin baby By the slappin on my black cat bone."

The boy was grinning now, grinning in the amazed way of someone who has discovered a glad secret. Larry thought he looked like someone who had been suffering from an unreachable itch between his shoulder-blades for a long, long time and had finally found someone who knew exactly where to scratch. He scruffed through long-unused archives of memory, hunting a second verse, and found one.

"I can do some things mamma that other men can't do They can't find the numbers baby, can't work the Conqueror root But I can, cause I'm a long way from my home And you know you'll hear me comin By the whackin on my black cat bone."

The boy's open, delighted grin lit those eyes up, made them into something, Larry realized, that would be apt to make the muscles in any young girl's thighs loosen a little. He reached for an instrumental bridge and fumbled through it, not too badly, either. His fingers wrung the right sounds out of the guitar: hard, flashy, a little bit tawdry, like a display of junk jewelry, probably stolen, sold out of a paper bag on a street corner. He made it swagger a little and then retreated quickly to a good old three-finger E before he could fuck it all up. He couldn't remember all of the last verse, something about a railroad track, so he repeated the first verse again and quit.

When the silence hit again, Nadine laughed and clapped her hands. Joe threw his stick away and jumped up and down on the sand, making fierce hooting sounds of joy. Larry couldn't believe the change in the kid, and had to caution himself not to make too much of it. To do so would be to risk disappointment.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.

He found himself wondering with unwilling distrust if it could be something as simple as that. Joe was gesturing at him and Nadine said: "He wants you to play something else. Would you? That was wonderful. It makes me feel better. So much better."

So he played Geoff Muldaur's "Goin Downtown" and his own "Sally's Fresno Blues"; he played "The Springhill Mine Disaster" and Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right, Mamma." He switched to primitive rock and roll-"Milk Cow Blues," "Jim Dandy," "Twenty Flight Rock" (doing the boogie-woogie rhythm of the chorus as well as he could, although his fingers were getting slow and numb and painful by now), and finally a song he had always liked, "Endless Sleep," originally done by Jody Reynolds.

"I can't play anymore," he said to Joe, who had stood without moving through this entire recital. "My fingers." He held them out, showing the deep grooves the strings had made in his fingers, and the chips in his nails.

The boy held out his own hands.

Larry paused for a moment, then shrugged inside. He handed the guitar to the boy neck first. "It takes a lot of practice," he said.

But what followed was the most amazing thing he had ever heard in his life. The boy struck up "Jim Dandy" almost flawlessly, hooting at the words rather than singing them, as if his tongue was plastered to the roof of his mouth. At the same time it was perfectly obvious that he had never played a guitar in his life before; he couldn't bear down hard enough on the strings to make them ring out properly and his chord changes were slurred and sloppy. The sound that came out was muted and ghostly-as if Joe was playing a guitar stuffed full of cotton-but otherwise it was a perfect carbon copy of the way Larry had played the tune.

When he had finished, Joe looked curiously down at his own fingers, as if trying to understand why they could make the substance of the music Larry had played but not the sharp sounds themselves.

Numbly, as if from a distance, Larry heard himself say: "You're not bearing down hard enough, that's all. You have to build up calluses- hard spots-on the ends of your fingers. And the muscles in your left hand, too."

Joe looked at him closely as he spoke, but Larry didn't know if the boy really understood or not. He turned to Nadine. "Did you know he could do that?"

"No. I'm as surprised as you are. It's as if he is a prodigy or something, isn't it?"

Larry nodded. The boy ran through "That's All Right, Mamma," again getting almost every nuance of the way Larry had played it. But the strings sometimes thudded like wood as Joe's fingers blocked the vibration of the strings rather than making it come true.

"Let me show you," Larry said, and held out his hands for the guitar. Joe's eyes immediately slanted down with distrust. Larry thought he was remembering the knife going down into the sea. He backed away, holding the guitar tightly. "All right," Larry said. "All yours. When you want a lesson, come see me."

The boy made a hooting sound and ran off along the beach, holding the guitar high over his head like a sacrificial offering.

"He's going to smash it to hell," Larry said.

"No," Nadine answered, "I don't think he is."

Larry woke up sometime in the night and propped himself up on one elbow. Nadine was only a vaguely female shape wrapped up in three blankets a quarter of the way around the dead fire. Directly across from Larry was Joe. He was also under several blankets, but his head stuck out. His thumb was corked securely in his mouth. His legs were drawn up and between them was the body of the Gibson twelve-string. His free hand was wrapped loosely around the guitar's neck. Larry stared at him, fascinated. He had taken the boy's knife and thrown it away; the boy had adopted the guitar. Fine. Let him have it. You couldn't stab anybody to death with a guitar, although, Larry supposed, it would make a pretty fair blunt instrument. He dropped off to sleep again.

When he woke up the next morning, Joe was sitting on a rock with the guitar on his lap and his bare feet in the run of the surf, playing "Sally's Fresno Blues." He had gotten better. Nadine woke up twenty minutes later, and smiled at him radiantly. It occurred to Larry that she was a lovely woman, and a snatch of song occurred to him, something by Chuck Berry: Nadine, honey is that you?

Aloud, he said: "Let's see what we've got for breakfast."

He built up the fire and the three of them sat close to it, working the nightchill out of their bones. Nadine made oatmeal with powdered milk and they drank strong tea brewed in a can, hobo fashion. Joe ate with the Gibson across his lap. And twice Larry found himself smiling at the boy and thinking you couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.

They cycled south on US 1. Joe rode his bike straight down the white line, sometimes ranging as far as a mile ahead. Once they caught up to him placidly walking his bike along the verge of the road and eating blackberries in an amusing way-he would toss each berry into the air, unerringly catching them in his mouth as they came down. An hour after that, they found him seated on a historic Revolutionary War marker and playing "Jim Dandy" on the guitar.

Just before eleven o'clock they came to a bizarre roadblock at the town line of a place called Ogunquit. Three bright orange town dump trucks were driven across the road, blocking it from shoulder to shoulder. Sprawled in the back of one of the dump-bins was the crow-picked body of what had once been a man. The last ten days of solid heat had done their work. Where the body was not clothed, a fever of maggots boiled.

Nadine turned away. "Where's Joe?" she asked.

"I don't know. Somewhere up ahead."

"I wish he hadn't seen that. Do you think he did?"

"Probably," Larry said. He had been thinking that, for a main artery, Route 1 had been awfully deserted ever since they left Wells, with no more than two dozen stalled cars along the way. Now he understood why. They had blocked the road. There would probably be hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars stacked up on the far side of this town. He knew how she felt about Joe. It would have been good to spare the boy this.

"Why did they block the road?" she asked him. "Why would they do that?"

"They must have tried to quarantine their town. I imagine we'll find another roadblock on the other end."

"Are there other bodies?"

Larry put his bike on its stand and looked. "Three," he said.

"All right. I'm not going to look at them."

He nodded. They wheeled their bikes past the trucks and then rode on. The highway had turned close to the sea again and it was cooler. Summer cottages were jammed together in long and sordid rows. People took their vacations in those tenements? Larry wondered. Why not just go to Harlem and let your kids play under the hydrant spray?

"Not very pretty, are they?" Nadine asked. On either side of them the essence of honky-tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini-golf.

Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and -black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups-never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine. And now all those Americans were gone. A thunderstorm had ripped a branch from a tree and it had knocked the gigantic plastic Dairy Treet sign into the ice cream stand's parking lot, where it lay on its side like a pallid duncecap. The grass was starting to get long on the mini-golf course. This stretch of highway between Portland and Portsmouth had once been a seventy-mile amusement park and now it was only a haunted funhouse where all the clockwork had run down.

"Not very pretty, no," he said, "but once it was ours, Nadine. Once it was ours, even though we were never here before. Now it's gone."

"But not forever," she said calmly, and he looked at her, her clean and shining face. Her forehead, from which her amazing white-streaked hair was drawn back, glowed like a lamp. "I am not a religious person, but if I was I would call what has happened a judgment of God. In a hundred years, maybe two hundred, it will be ours again."

"Those trucks won't be gone in two hundred years."

"No, but the road will be. The trucks will be standing in the middle of a field or a forest, and there will be lousewort and ladies' slipper growing where their tires used to be. They won't really be trucks anymore. They will be artifacts."

"I think you're wrong."

"How can I be wrong?"

"Because we're looking for other people," Larry said. "Now why do you think we're doing that?"

She gazed at him, troubled. "Well ... because it's the right thing to do," she said. "People need need other people. Didn't you feel that? When you were alone?" other people. Didn't you feel that? When you were alone?"

"Yes," Larry said. "If we don't have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness. When we get together we build miles of summer cottages and kill each other in the bars on Saturday night." He laughed. It was a cold and unhappy sound with no humor in it at all. It hung on the deserted air for a long time. "There's no answer. It's like being stuck inside an egg. Come on-Joe'll be way ahead of us."

She stood astride her bike a moment longer, her troubled gaze on Larry's back as it pulled away. Then she rode after him. He couldn't be right. Couldn't Couldn't be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive? be. If such a monstrous thing as this had happened for no good reason at all, what sense did anything make? Why were they even still alive?