Frankenstein

between the hour and the half. The middle ten is confusing.”
    Shaking one fist at Nummy and then the other, Mr. Lyss said, “I’ll tell you what time it is, you bonehead mooncalf. It’s a quarter till
too late
. They’re going to be coming here to look for you, for us.” His tight hands flew open, grabbed Nummy’s sweatshirt, became fists again, and shook Nummy every which way while he shouted. “I need
pants
! I need a shirt, a sweater, some kind of jacket that doesn’t have a police patch on it! You know anywhere a skinny-assed reject like me can get himself clothes to fit?”
    “Yes, sir,” Nummy said when Mr. Lyss stopped shaking him and threw him back against the kitchen table. “After his brain stroke, Poor Fred he lost a lot of his weight. He’s like a scarecrow.”
    “Who? Fred who?” Mr. Lyss demanded, as though they’d never talked about Poor Fred before.
    “Poor Fred LaPierre,” Nummy explained. “Mrs. Trudy LaPierre’s husband next door.”
    “The Trudy who hired you to murder him.”
    “No, sir. She didn’t hire me. What she done was try to hire Mr. Bob Pine.”
    Mr. Lyss pounded one fist into the open palm of his other hand,pounded and pounded while he talked. “Doesn’t sound like the generous kind of woman who’d give away some of her husband’s clothes to help a poor traveler down on his luck. Sounds like a
bitch
to me!”
    “Like I told you, Mrs. Trudy LaPierre she’s gone, nobody knows where. They say she’s on the run, but what she done was take the car, so I think they’re wrong, and she’s driving. And Poor Fred he’s up in bear care gumming mush and half plastered.”
    His face all red and his lips skinned back from his charcoal teeth, Mr. Lyss slammed both fists down on the table, slammed them again, slammed them again. Right then Mr. Lyss reminded Nummy of an angry baby, except he was old, and except he looked like he might kill somebody, which a baby never would.
    When he stopped slamming his fists, Mr. Lyss said, “Do you
ever
make sense, you featherbrain oaf? I need
pants
! Look at the clock. Look at the
clock!”
    Mr. Lyss pulled back one bony fist like he was going to punch Nummy. Nummy closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands, but the punch didn’t come.
    After a while, Mr. Lyss said in a little quieter voice, “What the hell are you trying to tell me?”
    Nummy opened his eyes and peeked at the old man through spread fingers. Hesitantly, he lowered his hands.
    He took a moment to get his thoughts in a row, and then he said, “Before she run off in the car, Mrs. Trudy LaPierre she breaked Poor Fred’s right arm and right leg with a fireplace poker. Then what she did is she got his false teeth and smashed them. Now Poor Fred he’s up in the Bear Street Care Home, his right side in a cast and eating only all softer kinds of food.”
    “Poor Fred ought to be called Stupid Fred for marrying such a psychopath,”Mr. Lyss said. “And why do half the streets in this town have
bear
in their name?”
    “There’s a bunch of bears in the general area,” Nummy explained.
    “So what you’re telling me is that nobody’s home next door, at the LaPierre house. We could just go there and take some clothes.”
    “Borrow some clothes,” Nummy said. “You don’t want to steal.”
    “Of course, yes, and when I’m done with them, I’ll have them dry-cleaned and pressed, and I’ll return them in a pretty box with a thank-you note.”
    “That’ll be nice,” Nummy said.
    “Yes, it’ll be lovely. Now let’s get out of here before they show up on your doorstep and do to us what they did to the people at the jail.”
    Nummy had tried to put out of his mind what had been done to the people in the next cell, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could forget the way you could sometimes forget Christmas was coming until people started putting up their decorations. When Mr. Lyss mentioned it, Nummy saw it all again in his mind so clear he almost needed to throw up.
    They left by the back door. Nummy locked the house and put the key in its secret place under the mat, and they walked to the house next door, which was about fifty or sixty steps because both houses had some land. Grandmama always said no matter how pleasant your neighbors were, it was good to have some land, and in the case of Mrs. Trudy LaPierre it was, Grandmama said, double good.
    The LaPierre house was one story. The back porch had a ramp instead of steps, so Poor Fred could get