Mohawk

sleeps at the switchboard in the station in case there’s a call. In Mohawk there is no all-night diner or all-night anything. Harry tried to keep the Grill open for a while, but it was more trouble than it was worth. The nightman treated the business as if it were his own—which is to say, he kept the profits. In midweek there isn’t even a poker game upstairs.
    In front of the Grouse home on Mountain sits a large moving van. The driver had pulled in late that afternoon and left it parked there so they could get anearly start in the morning. To load the furniture and boxes from the upstairs flat won’t take long. The truck is already three-quarters full with the belongings of a Rochester family moving into a four-bedroom in the Stamford area. Anne Grouse can see the top of the truck from where she sits, surrounded by boxes, on the sofa. Her bed and frame are disassembled, and if she sleeps tonight, it will be right where she’s sitting. Her intention was to work through the night, but Mrs. Grouse and Randall have pitched in and everything’s ahead of schedule, leaving her with nothing to do but battle the vague presentiment that going away amounts to running away. Still, she is as committed as a person can be, having signed agreements, made promises, paid money.
    The house is so still that when the refrigerator clicks on, she’s startled. She decides to look in on Randall, not because he needs looking in on but because she needs to look in. The move will be good for him, at least, especially now that he has been formally elevated to hero status with his picture in the
Mohawk Republican
and three civic groups fighting over dates to honor him in official ceremonies. He has dealt with all of this better than she herself has. But then Randall has always been contemptuous of the opinions of others, even when that opinion happened to be flattering. He is a strange boy. Just when she’s convinced that he’s going to pass through life aloof, a wry critic, he risks his life for a perfect stranger. And Billy Gaffney, of all people. The symmetry is so perfect as to suggest there might be a Supreme Architect after all, or something.
    Billy Gaffney—she hadn’t thought of him in years. For the longest time after her father had put his foot down about him, Billy had followed her home fromschool, pretending he had some legitimate reason for standing on the corner, watching the house. Perhaps he was awaiting another surge of courage, or for the sense of humiliation to diminish, or to explain or apologize for the men in the shop. He continued to haunt the neighborhood even after she and Dallas started dating. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t around any more. She had known that he was in love with her, but she was discovering some things about love herself at the time—like the fact that it was just as easy to fall out of it as into it, and with as little reason. Dallas didn’t require much time to teach her that. She assumed that Billy Gaffney had made a parallel discovery.
    According to the newspaper, he’d been living in the abandoned hospital. Well, he wouldn’t have to any more. After Randall told his story about what had really happened in the alley the day the boy was injured, charges against Wild Bill were dropped. Unfortunately public sentiment still ran against him, and he was packed off to Utica for observation until his fate, which had already been decided, could be formally ratified. The fact that a good boy had very nearly been injured on Wild Bill’s behalf proved, if further proof was needed, that Wild Bill was at the very least a public nuisance. When she heard, Anne was furious. If unfortunates like Billy Gaffney were summarily institutionalized, she told her father, then half of Mohawk County could well end up behind bars. Mather Grouse agreed, having always believed that half of Mohawk County belonged behind bars.
    Randall rolls over in bed but does not wake up. Asleep he is beginning to look more like a man than a boy, and it occurs to Anne that youth must have something to do with movement. Perhaps this explainswhy it’s so difficult to judge someone’s age from a photograph. She has a recent snapshot of Dan Wood, asleep by the pool in his back yard, one arm draped over his head, that makes him look twenty. He had dozed that way, briefly, some fifteen years ago in a motel room in Albany. She had watched him sleep, wanting to run her fingers through his damp hair, but not wanting to wake him. Since