eventually asking odd questions. First a uniformed sergeant came, questioning, slowly inserting the knife under thin skin. Then, after the topic was broached, a lieutenant of detectives came, a cigar in his mouth as he stepped from the car and came up the front walk. He didn’t stumble or trip over his words, bringing them up quickly and darkly from the cavern of his chest, half cough and half words, “Why was your father so attached to the child?” “Harrumph. Hack. Hack. Harrumph.” “He’s his grandchild. He loves him.” “Was it not an unusual love? Is it possible that the old man has taken the baby? Harrumph. Hack. Hack. Harrumph. That right now he’s with him someplace?”

People of the neighborhood began to talk. The mailman heard the talk and carried it. Some of those old stories

were, in fact, made up. The old man wasn’t what he appeared to be after all. What have we made him? What kind of a man would drive his daughter into this near madness? You really don’t know, do you, what lurks in the heart of a man.

***

He’d been mystified by many things in life: the small man down in Homestead, Florida who secretly moved stones weighing many tons, supposedly by himself; a rocking chair sculpted from stone and weighing thousands of pounds, a tall vertical solid stone gate of equal tonnage that swung on small points of balance, seemingly immovable yet moved and placed. How the all-state halfback he played behind when he was a young man told him, just before the big game of the year, that his turn was coming,

and there he was rushing on the field breathless in the first quarter. What had pulled him up that mountain in Korea to what he thought was certain death. How had he been able to go into the cold water to save those men after almost drowning under a raft in Lake Hwachon when his unit crossed by rafts mounted on boats with outboard motors and a mortar round had landed right beside them, all of them trussed in full gear? He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten out of the clutches of all that web equipment, or Sanders’ hands pulling at him, hauling him down.

And he never professed to understand the knowledge that came to him about Shag from the moment of the boy’s birth. That they were connected was enough for him. The corners of the boy’s mouth when he smiled up at

him were locked behind his eyes. And here he was, seven days later, vaguely answering some unlimited connection, some communication, coming at him. He didn’t know where it was coming from, and he had driven endlessly it seemed from the day he had left home, sometimes three or four hundred miles a day, sometimes fifty to sit in the middle of a park or a village green, listening.

Now, on the seventh day, hearing his name and description aired over the radio, also a subject of search, he was on the outskirts of Schenectady. He did not know how he had gotten here, but the urge was unarguable, unimpeachable. Shag was calling him. It had been that way in the beginning. It would always be that way.
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