The Progress of Love

brown-and-yellow checked pants, not too bold a check, a yellow sports shirt and dark-red neckerchief. “Doesn’t he look nice?” said Sylvia, not for the first time. “Eddy, you’re such a dresser! Colin just don’t want to hear me tell the rest.”
    “The rest is the best,” Ross said. “Coming up!”
    “I want to show Eddy something and ask him something,” Colin said. “In private.”
    “This part of it is like something you would read in the newspaper,” said Sylvia.
    Glenna said, “It’s horrible.”
    “He’s going to show Eddy his precious grass,” said Sylvia. “Plus, he really does want to get away from me telling it. Why? Wasn’t his fault. Well, partly. But it’s the kind of thing has happened over and over again with others, only the outcome has been worse. Tragic.”
    “It sure could’ve been tragic,” Ross said, laughing.
    Colin, guiding Eddy around to the front of the house, could hearRoss laughing. He got Eddy past the string fence and the new grass. In the front yard there was some light from the streetlight, not really enough. He turned on the light by the front door.
    “Now. How good can you see Ross’s car?” Colin said.
    Eddy said, “I seen it all before.”
    “Wait.”
    Colin’s car was parked so that the lights would shine where he wanted them to, and he had the keys in his pocket. He got in and started the motor and turned on the lights.
    “There,” he said. “Take a look at the engine now while I got the lights on.”
    Eddy said, “Okay,” and walked over into the car light and stood contemplating the engine.
    “Now look at the body.”
    “Yeah,” said Eddy, doing a quarter-turn but not stooping to look. In those clothes, he wouldn’t want to get too close to anything.
    Colin turned off the lights and the motor and got out of the car. In the dark he heard Ross laughing again.
    “Somebody was saying to me that the engine was too big to be put in there,” Colin said. “This person said it would break the universal and the drive shaft would go and the car would somersault. Now, I don’t know enough about cars. Is that true?”
    He wasn’t going to say that the person was Nancy, not because Nancy was a woman but because Eddy was apt to regard anything Nancy said or did with such mesmerized delight that you would never be able to get an opinion out of him. It was not easy to get opinions out of him in any case.
    “It’s a big engine,” Eddy said. “It’s a V-8 350. It’s a Chevy engine.”
    Colin didn’t say he knew this already. “Is it too big?” he said. “Is it a danger?”
    “It is a bit big.”
    “Have you seen them put this kind of an engine in this kind of body before?
    “Oh, yeah. I seen them do everything.”
    “Would it cause an accident, like this person said?”
    “Hard to say.”
    After most people say that, they go on and tell you what it is that is hard to say. Not Eddy.
    “Would it be sure to break the universal?”
    “Oh, not sure,” said Eddy agreeably. “I wouldn’t say that.”
    “It might?”
    “Well.”
    “Should I say anything to Ross?”
    Eddy chuckled nervously. “Sylvia don’t take it too well when you say anything to Ross.”
    Colin had not been into the spiked punch. He and Ross and the half-dozen other boys did not go that close to the heart of the party. They ignored the party, staying on the fringes of it, drinking only out of cans—cans of Coca-Cola and Orange that somebody had brought and left beside the back steps. They ate potato chips that were provided, but did not bother with the food set out on tables that required plates or forks. They did not pay attention to what the adults were doing. A few years ago, they would have been hanging around watching everything, with the idea, mostly, of making fun of and disrupting it. Now they would not give that world—the world of adults, at the party or anywhere else—credit for existing.
    Things that belonged to adults were another story. Those were still interesting, and in the cars parked along the black lane they found plenty. Tools, shovels, last winter’s chains, boots, some traps. Torn raincoats, a blanket, magazines with dirty pictures. A gun.
    The gun was lying along the back seat of an unlocked car. It was a hunting rifle. There was no question that they would have to lift it out, look at it and comment on it in a knowledgeable way, aim it at imaginary birds.
    Some said to be careful.
    “It isn’t loaded.”
    “How do you