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Show 15 but about two inches to the right of it. No one in the world knew that except Lorin. Not even Jimmy knew it. Except that an angel had seen it too, Lorin would have felt sick. * * * If he lay on his back in bed carefully, his knees bent to create space under the blanket, the streetlight through the acanthus outside his window staining the wall, and if the traffic noises from Highland Drive were muted and he didn't turn his head so the pillowcase brushing his ear made a whisper that got in the way, he liked settling into himself and becoming Joseph Smith. It had seemed furtive in the beginning, but now he was comfortable with it and he always repented afterward. Depending on how far along he was, it sometimes took a few minutes to get the white farmhouse into focus, but he always started with the white farmhouse. He used his aunt's two-story white clapboard house in Idaho with a concrete porch on the west side filled with broken chairs that his uncle never had time to fix and a screen door whose mesh was broken loose around the edges and bulged out. He watched himself come out that door, wearing bib overalls, and peer around the corner of the porch to make sure his father and brother had gone off to the north forty and his mother had not come out the kitchen door to head him off, and then he watched himself creep down the wooden steps with their curls of green paint, cross the yard and push open the wagon-wheel gate and follow the dirt path up past the stock dam, and then he always joined himself, because the landscape from this point on was conjectural. He crawled through a break in the barbed-wire fence and walked for two miles along a shady road, his boots heavy with dung and cold mud, until he reached the edge of the woods belonging to a neighbor who had spread stories |