Mohawk

in school, and they all grinned knowingly, as if to suggest that in their book he was all right. They had shared something andwere from that day forward blood brothers. They would do to anyone who bothered him precisely what they had done to him.
    No doubt a significant portion of their newfound respect was due to the fact that Randall had stubbornly refused to implicate anyone. When the principal called him in, he denied having been in a fight at all, explaining he was playing basketball and had inadvertently run into the bleachers. Though the principal didn’t believe this explanation, he was greatly relieved by it. He hated trouble, and it seemed that every time he took disciplinary action against a student, someone took disciplinary action against him. His tires were flattened, or an obscene suggestion was written on the hood of his car with shaving cream. Besides, at the moment the principal had real problems. Apparently a genuine maniac was on the loose. He had assaulted one of the boys on school property, injuring him badly, and the boy’s parents, two huge, pear-shaped people who smelled of perspiration and, unaccountably, lemon juice, were threatening a suit. So he accepted Randall’s improbable account.
    Randall saw no reason not to be cheerful. Miraculously, he still had all his teeth, and his injuries had begun healing already. And it was difficult to hold much of a grudge against Boyer Burnhoffer, his tormentor, because he’d warned Randall for months that he was going to do it, and Randall himself had been prideful to assume that he could escape forever. Besides, the beating squared things all around, because he was no longer considered in arrears, the beating representing a kind of receipt for payment in full. Indeed Burnhoffer personally approved of this arrangement. Of late he’d been in more trouble than usual and knew thatone more episode would land him back in reform school. He was resigned to returning one day but wasn’t looking forward to it or to the necessity of killing the person responsible for sending him there when he got out.
    Randall wasn’t worried about being murdered by Boyer Burnhoffer, but the current misunderstanding about his rescuer did prey on the boy’s mind. Fortunately, the now notorious Wild Bill Gaffney had somehow vanished. No one in Mohawk had seen him for days and wild rumors had begun circulating. Among the adolescents of Nathan Littler Junior High, he had long been legendary, largely due to his mutant appearance and vocal peculiarities. But special notice was now taken by their parents, who had self-consciously looked the other way whenever they encountered Wild Bill on the street. Since the assault their daughters had told them about Wild Bill’s huge member, alternately compared to a rope and a garden hose, which someone had seen him use to water the side of the dumpster in the alley outside the Mohawk Grill. How many times the good people of Mohawk had passed him without suspecting how dangerous he was, never considering that he might be more than a simple retard. It was frightening. Several junior-high boys to whom Bill had made gifts of condoms now remembered and confessed, pulling them and their disintegrating plastic wrappers out of the secret compartments in their wallets where they had long awaited the right circumstances. The citizens of Mohawk could not have hunted more enthusiastically if they’d been on the trail of Jack the Ripper.
    Very few people knew what really happened the day Wild Bill Gaffney came to Randall Younger’s rescue.Anyway, it was far more pleasantly chilling to think of Wild Bill Gaffney as a maniac and consequently the stories that began to circulate about him were increasingly colorful and imaginative. Soon the switchboard at city hall began to light up, everyone wanting to know what was being done to make the streets of Mohawk safe again. Some callers were Wild Bill’s classmates many years ago, and they remembered him, now that they stopped to think, as never having been exactly right. For years he had been drinking the contaminated water of the Cayuga Creek, which had given him brain cancer. The whole town was on the lookout, conventional wisdom being that a man with a brain half-eaten away with contamination couldn’t outsmart the constabulary and citizenry of Mohawk County for more than a few days. He’d turn up, all right.
    When he didn’t, the topic of conversation turned to what would happen to him when he did.