Mohawk

other end of the bar. Mather Grouse knew him, of course. When he was younger, the bookie had made the rounds of all the shops. Now the mountain came to Mohammed, as Untemeyer was fond of saying.
    The majority of his business concluded, Untemeyer was making neat stacks of his dollar bills and paper slips, after which he would thumb quarters into the paper coin rolls. Everyone knew that he didn’t appreciate taking further action after six, after he began tubing paper with rubber bands. “Yeah!” he barked whenever he sensed a laggard customer at his elbow. He never bothered to look up.
    “I wish to play a number,” Mather Grouse said.
    The voice, together with the formal phrasing, jolted him, and he peered up over the rims of his owl-eyed glasses. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
    “Perhaps not,” said Mather Grouse.
    “Mather Grouse.”
    “What is a good number?”
    “602,” Untemeyer told him honestly. He himself had never played a number, but had he been a betting man he’d often thought he’d play 602. Actually, this was the first time in forty years that anyone had asked his advice. The men and women of Mohawk were fiercelyloyal to the numbers they selected. They played the last three digits of their license plates, the birthdates of their children and lovers, the death dates of local suicides. They didn’t need Untemeyer to tell them what to play, and Untemeyer would not have presumed. “How much?”
    Mather Grouse put a crisp ten-dollar bill on the bar. Untemeyer blinked. “Are you all right?”
    “Perfectly,” Mather Grouse said. In fact, doing something this abjectly foolish made him feel wonderful. It wouldn’t do to make a habit of it, but the novelty was delightful. “Thanks so much for asking.”
    Greenie’s was now beginning to thin out, and on the way back to his stool Mather Grouse spied Rory Gaffney at the bowling machine, surrounded by a small group of men. The sight of him caused Mather Grouse a fleeting moment of panic, although his coming to Greenie’s in the first place had much to do with Rory Gaffney. Hadn’t he lain awake half the night planning and rehearsing the meeting? Why the old panic, then? Now of all times, after he’d convinced himself that such feelings belonged to the past. Why the paralysis, the sudden impulse to slink out before he was noticed? Mather Grouse gathered all his self-control to keep from throwing the remainder of his money on the bar and bolting for the street.
    Instead, he ordered another beer and again quickly drained half. The beer had a warming effect, and Mather Grouse felt something of his former determination restored. He was happy to feel it, too. The moment of panic had been senseless but real. He had felt it before, many times, and not always occasioned by Rory Gaffney. And perhaps it was foolish to force a confrontation.
    The boy was responsible. Facing annihilation, he had entered the collapsing building even as the very roof and walls were giving way, and in so doing had saved the life of the very man who had not been out of Mather Grouse’s thoughts for a single day for over fifteen years, and who had made him a virtual prisoner in his own home. In a single stroke the boy had redeemed his grandfather, saved his life more surely than Anne had done the afternoon he had collapsed after seeing the ragged bum urinating on the lawn and recognized in the man’s decrepit state and shameless behavior another man entirely.
    Had it not been for his daughter, Mather Grouse would have died that afternoon. But she hadn’t been able to bring him all the way back to life, not the way the boy did.
Think of it!
Mather Grouse had said to himself over and over.
Just think of it
. No man could have done it. Only a boy. But just the same. The boy calmly stepping through the chaos, hearing behind him the shouts of the other boys who had spied the figure at the window. Think of him leaving the others behind, gauging it all correctly, intuitively, knowing there wasn’t time to go back down the slope, around the school and back up Hospital Hill. Gauging correctly that even if there had been time, he wouldn’t have been able to make anyone believe him. Think of it: calmly climbing through the rubble, in through one of the broken windows on the ground floor, bricks and wiring and wood falling all around, the walls shuddering under the impact of the ball, the air too thick to breathe, at least not deeply enough to do any good. And then, once inside, even