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Show 347 waited at the baggage-claim carousel. None of them had said a word yet. Out of the corner of his eye Lorin saw an old friend from high school who looked blankly at him and went on past, without a flicker of recognition. His mother's shoulders were heaving and suddenly he realized his father had been talking to him. It was something about Lorin's younger brother, who was working that night, so couldn't come with them. His sisters were both out on dates, no point in making this a bigger deal for them than i t had to be. They'd talk about i t in the next few days. His mother was taking i t pretty hard. No point in hashing through i t tonight. Walking to the loading curb in company with an insolent skycap who wheeled a dolly, Lorin noticed his father now had a pronounced stoop, his mother a brave erectness. He pulled out a pistol and shot himself behind the ear. He helped the skycap load his bags into the back of his father's station wagon. He opened a clasp knife and s l i t through veins and cartilage in his wrist and died on the curb before his mother's weeping face and his father's heavy shaking of the head and the skycap's sullen stare, and devils crept out of the storm sewer and drew a bag over his head and body and pulled i t shut, tying the string in d i f f i c u l t knots. * * * * * * He did not go to the bishop for a post-mortem. He did not go to church the following Sunday and confess publicly. He did not even stay long under his father's roof in the pink clapboard house near Thirty-third South and Highland. Two days after his return he rose, did not shave, dressed in his levis and fatigue shirt that had been l e f t hanging at the back of his-now Stephen's-closet, found and assembled his easel, his cases of paints and brushes, the tubes split and hardened in the interval, twenty |
