Mohawk

these because she had counted on him to rescue her from her own.
    She wondered if her mother was thinking about him in the bedroom below. That she hadn’t turned out the light was odd.
    Anne got up again and pulled on her robe. The flat downstairs was dark, except for the light in the bedroom. “Mother?” Anne said. The living room door was not completely closed, and a cool breeze riffled the curtains. It was still raining, but a sliver of moon had appeared between the clouds, enough to illuminate the street. Mrs. Grouse, dressed in her thin housecoat and slippers, was at the foot of the porch steps, slashing the ground with a long-handled ice-chopper. Clumps of earth had been cut from the lawn and now lay askew on the sidewalk. The old woman’s slashing seemed only to have stirred the worms into a frenzy, and though she halved and quartered some, the only visible effect was to increase the number of glistening, writhing coils underfoot. “I don’t
want
them here,” Mrs. Grouse cried as her daughter gently guided her back up the porch steps. “I don’t
want
—”
    “I know, Mother,” Anne said. “I know.”

53
    The rain had the curious and unanticipated effect of altering Randall Younger’s purpose. He had devised the plan the very night that Rory Gaffney had offered him two hundred dollars to take the van down the line. The symmetry was appealing, and Randall felt this was exactly the sort of thing his grandfather might’ve done had there been only him and no wife or daughter to worry about. But now, as Mather Grouse’s grandson sat high up in Myrtle Park, Mohawk invisible below, it suddenly seemed to Randall that his attempt to pay Rory Gaffney back for tormenting his grandfather was childish. He even doubted it would’ve received his grandfather’s blessing, this dishonest act perpetrated against a dishonest man. It amounted to doing what Price had recommended, using his spikes with deadly efficiency in order to keep the game honest—except that the game was over, lost long ago, one of the contestants dead.
    When the rain let up and the streetlamps of town began to sparkle, Randall backed the van onto the macadam and headed out of the park. Though it was late, he felt certain his mother was awake. He hadn’t even been over to see her since moving in with the girl. Now he knew that he was going to leave Mohawk,probably for good, almost certainly in the morning, after telling Rory Gaffney that he was right about Mather Grouse’s grandson. And if Randall stayed much longer, the draft board would tire of writing letters, and if they came looking, as eventually they surely would, they’d find him.
    To tell his mother what he was doing with his life seemed imperative, but he couldn’t and he knew she didn’t expect it of him. Going to jail was hardly productive; he wasn’t, it now seemed, quite that idealistic. Of course, he could go down to the draft board and make a deal. Given his race, intelligence and skills, there was a good chance he’d end up holding a typewriter-ribbon instead of an M-16. It was the Boyer Burnhoffers whose destiny it was to wake up dead one morning five thousand miles away from the friendly base of Nathan Littler’s statue. The Randall Youngers were molested with haircuts, but did all right otherwise.
    But he wasn’t all that pragmatic, either. Which left Canada or the open road, and the latter was more appealing. Randall liked the fact that his was a sizable country, large enough to stay lost in without exactly running away. There was enough Mather Grouse in him not to like the idea of flight. On the other hand, no law obliged you had to have a permanent address, or even a forwarding one. In Mohawk he no longer had any obligations that he could think of.
    There was the girl, but he had never misled her. B.G. was no worse off for having known him. Nor any better off, he had to admit. She knew, now that he thought about it, what he was going to do before he did. Leaving town, he would disappoint people—Harry and The Bulldog, even the ladies he made salads for—but they wouldn’t be hurt. He had already hurt hismother by dropping out of the university, but he doubted that dropping out of Mohawk would strike her as tragic or even regrettable. It would be months before his father noticed. Who else was there to consider?
    He pulled up at the intersection of Mountain and Fifth just as his mother’s bedroom window went dark. The storm was spent, though the gutters