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Show -7 4 threw out a cinderblock on a rope for an anchor. The divers flopped into the water one by one, ungainly as loons. "I've only just started to understand how he screwed up our lives," I said. Half a dozen small dark birds flung themselves from the top of Adam's tree, wheeling and tumbling in a screeching feathery free-for-all. A lone crow,.startled and offended by the noise, flapped from his branch and slouched off, flying heavily upriver. "No. I take that back. No one screws up anybody's life but his own." I knew I was right as soon as I said it; children blame their parents, and parents their parents, and their parents the same in a serio-comic parade that goes back to Adam and Eve, but it means nothing. Each of us is responsible for what he does, and in all but rare and tragic cases, for what's done to him too. People who need it agree to victimize each other. It becomes a dance of little hatreds. Like Adam and Alice, perhaps. Or like myself and Wayne Thorneberry. Fat Wayne was Maybelle Carter's friend; he hired me as part of the self-improvement program she devised for her niece's husband. He and I both knew we were going to suffer by our association but we went right ahead; something perverse in us probably liked the idea. |