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Show Blue Run/32 and it was just us three in this vacuum. Only our puny voices. Me, with my too-white fake tooth, and Joey, who knew how bad this hurt him-I've always heard the young bounce back What next? More pathetic pictures of my son as a bird, crawling spirals and talking to the grass? Here was our ridiculous family tree of three What a profound joke we must have looked like then at the beginning of August 1962. What an utterly crazy picture we must have made that day, Buddy with his hair combed back, tapping those mailman letters he'd faked on his palm, his mind running a mile-a-minute. He'd say whatever he had to say, do whatever had to be done-it was all that far along now, I could tell. And me? Twenty-one, thinking my life was over-the me I used to be, sweet and trusting as white bread. All my life I've trusted people to a fault. For good or bad, that's how I'm wired. Maybe it's a Stepwell thing, that's the way it's always worked, and I know now-with full force-that it'll get me, it'll be undoing sure as the word. So there we were in Arkansas: mother, father and child stuck in this crazy vacuum time-warp thing I'd taken the little exacto-knife out of my supply box and was fully prepared to cut Buddy's throat when Dee's car blared into the driveway I held onto Joey and Buddy gave me that look, like his heart would break. And the hell of it is, I might have gone back to him. It's stupid, I know, but that's how I've always been, with O W., and Shawn Terrence, the whole sorry lot. I don't know why There was lunging and screaming and Dee called the cops on the kitchen phone while we screamed at each other Joey trembled and I held the artist exacto knife out in front of my face, the silver blade very bright and real. Across the street, a couple came out of their house. The man said, "Hey Mister, you need some help?" Even when the police came, when they cuffed him and banged his head in the back seat of |