"Larry? Are you okay?"
He was so startled that a little noise - "Yike! " squeaked out of his throat and he jumped. It was Leo, sitting on the curb about three blocks down from Harold's. He had a Ping-Pong ball and was bouncing it up and down on the pavement.
"What are you doing here?" Larry asked. His heartbeat was slowly returning to normal.
"I wanted to walk home with you," Leo said diffidently, "but I didn't want to go into that guy's house."
"Why not?" Larry asked. He sat down on the curb beside Leo.
Leo shrugged and turned his eyes back to the Ping-Pong ball. It made a small whock! whock! sound as it struck the pavement and bounced back up to his hand.
"I don't know."
"What."
"This is very important to me. Because I like Harold... and don't like him. I feel two ways about him. Have you ever felt two ways about a person?"
"I only feel one way about him." Whock! Whock!
"How?"
"Scared," Leo said simply. "Can we go home and see my Nadine-mom and my Lucy-mom?"
"Sure."
They continued down Arapahoe for a while without speaking, Leo still bouncing the Ping-Pong ball and catching it deftly.
"Sorry you had to wait so long," Larry said.
"Aw, that's okay."
"No, really, if I'd known I would have hurried up."
"I had something to do. I found this on a guy's lawn. It's a Pong-Ping ball."
"Ping-Pong," Larry corrected absently. "Why do you think Harold would keep his shades down?"
"So nobody can see in, I guess," Leo said. "So he can do secret things. It's like the dead people, isn't it?" Whock! Whock!
They walked on, reached the corner of Broadway, and turned south. They saw other people on the streets now; women looking in windows at dresses, a man with a pickaxe returning from somewhere, another man casually sorting through fishing tackle in the broken display window of a sporting goods store. Larry saw Dick Vollman from his party biking in the other direction. He waved at Larry and Leo. They waved back.
"Secret things," Larry mused aloud, not really trying to draw the boy out anymore.
"Maybe he's praying to the dark man," Leo said casually, and Larry jerked as if brushed by a live wire. Leo didn't notice. He was double-bouncing his Ping-Pong ball, first off the sidewalk and then catching it on the rebound from the brick wall they were passing... whock-whap!
"Do you really think so?" Larry asked, making an effort to sound casual.
"I don't know. But he's not like us. He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him, making him smile. Big white worms eating up his brain. Like maggots."
"Joe... Leo, I mean..."
Leo's eyes - dark, remote, and Chinese - suddenly cleared. He smiled. "Look, there's Dayna. I like her. Hey, Dayna!" he yelled, waving. "Got any gum?"
Dayna, who had been oiling the sprocket of a spidery-thin ten-speed bike, turned and smiled. She reached into her shirt pocket and spread out five sticks of Juicy Fruit like a poker hand. With a happy laugh, Leo ran toward her, his long hair flying, Ping-Pong ball clutched in one hand, leaving Larry to stare after him. That idea of white worms behind Harold's smile... where had Joe (no, Leo, he's Leo, at least I think he is) gotten an idea as sophisticated - and as horrible - as that? The boy had been in a semi-trance. And he wasn't the only one; how many times in the few days he had been here had Larry seen someone just stop dead on the street, looking blankly at nothing for a moment, and then go on? Things had changed. The whole range of human perception seemed to have stepped up a notch.
It was scary as hell.
Larry got his feet moving and walked over to where Leo and Dayna were sharing out the chewing gum.
That afternoon Stu found Frannie washing clothes in the small yard behind their building. She had filled a low washtub with water, had shaken in nearly half a box of Tide, and had stirred everything with a mop-handle until a sickly suds had resulted. She doubted if she was going about this in the right way, but she was damned if she was going to go to Mother Abagail and expose her ignorance. She dumped their clothes in the water, which was stone-cold, then grimly jumped in and began to stomp and slosh around, like a Sicilian mashing grapes. Your new model Maytag 5000, she thought. The Double-Foot Agitation Method, perfect for all your bright colors, fragile underthings, and -
She turned around and beheld her man, standing just inside the backyard gate and watching with an expression of amusement. Frannie stopped, a little out of breath.
"Ha-ha, very funny. How long have you been there, smartypants?"
"Couple of minutes. What do you call that, anyway? The mating dance of the wild wood duck?"
"Again, ha-ha." She looked coolly at him. "One more crack like that and you can spend the night on the couch, or up on Flagstaff with your friend Glen Bateman."
"Say, I didn't mean - "