The staked Goat

shape.
     
    The Button. Not his real name, of course. He was one of the first blacks to arrive (and therefore one of the last to be welcomed) in a predominantly Irish neighborhood in Dorchester, a working-class section of wooden three-deckers and family-owned stores south of Back Bay and the South End. The Button had spent twenty years in the navy and was known to almost every cop, private investigator, and industrial spy in eastern Massachusetts. If he’d located ten years later in a classier part of town, he’d be a consultant, not a parts supplier.
    The Button, you see, is in e -lectronics, accent on the first ”e.” He sells nothing that is per se illegal, only components that a knowledgeable pair of hands can assemble into just about anything. Occasionally, the Button can be cajoled into giving even a professional a little advice. He also has a brother who runs a gunshop in predominantly black Roxbury down the road. While the brother is competent, however, the Button is a genius.
    I pushed open the door, and the wind chimes attached to it tinkled and sang. A few steps later, the Button appeared through a dark red curtain across a doorway behind his main counter. The chimes were a little masquerade the Button played for the rest of the world. Behind his drapes was the control board of a sensor and closed-circuit TV system that had picked me up as soon as I left my car half a block away.
    The Button nevertheless feigned surprise and delight at seeing me. Perhaps he had forgotten he once had shown me the control board. Or maybe somebody finally had ripped it off.
    ”Why, John Francis. It is so good to see you.” His face was deep coal in color and cracked with his wide smile. A fringe of short-cropped white hair rode up in front of his ears, then slid down as he dropped the smile. ”I just realized I haven’t laid eyes on you since your wife’s passing.”
    ”I got your card. It was good of you to think of me, and poor form for me not to acknowledge it.”
    The Button smiled again, more mellow than bright. He dismissed my confession, like an admiral forgiving an aide’s blunder. ”Please, no apologies are necessary. Perhaps, though, an explanation?” The Button put an index finger to his chin, creasing and raising his eyes thoughtfully. ”I could have sworn I read something quite disquieting about you in the Globe this morning.”
    I shrugged. ”Surely you don’t believe all that you read.”
    The Button dropped his hands and fussed with the arrangement of a few small gizmos on the countertop. ”No, but it is good to see that Mark Twain’s response is applicable to an old and valued customer as well.”
    I smiled at the ”Reports of my death...” allusion and began to explain what I wanted. He stopped me at one point and brought a clipboard with graph paper out from under the counter. The Button diagramed and labeled a bit as I talked. He was like a secretary taking a visual form of dictation.
    I pointed to one part of the diagram. ”I need this to be mountable inside the engine compartment of a car.”
    ”Hmmmm,” went the Button, as he sketched and scribbled a few extra parts specifications on the margin of the diagram.
    ”It’ll also have to be simple enough to be set up entirely by me.”
    ”Hmmmm,” said the Button, ”that simple, eh.”
    ”Uh-huh.”
    He scratched out a few connecting lines on the diagram and drew some more direct ones.
    ”Lastly,” I said, ”I need a special kind of triggering mechanism.”
    ”What kind?” he said.
    ”I want a trigger that will activate when I release it, not when I depress it.”
    The Button frowned. ”When you release it?”
    ”That’s right.”
    The Button doodled a bit on the diagram and looked up. ”Like what they use on a subway train?”
    ”Subway train?”
    ”Yes. They call it a dead-man’s switch.”
    I exhaled a bit longer than usual. ”Exactly,” I said.
    The Button crossed to the door, swung the gone-to-lunch side of the sign outward and pushed a red plastic square at the baseboard. He came back and beckoned me through the curtain. There he assembled and demonstrated each component, including the two-step arming of the switch. When he was satisfied I was familiar with the system, he slipped it into a brown shopping bag along with four mounting braces of varying angles and metal screws of varying diameters.
    I pulled out some money, and he asked if that was it.
    ”Almost,” I replied. ”Now I’d like to call your