“There’s one thing about a Hide-behind: they don’t show in a mirror. Just like vampires don’t, you know? So this afternoon when I think I heard something slipping along behind me I reached in my pocket for my compass—this compass right here, see how it reflects good as a mirror?—and I held it up and looked behind me. And goddammit, Lee, you know? I couldn’t see nothing!” He stood there with his mouth open, and I knew I still had him and might of really poured it on if the old man hadn’t went to sputtering and choking and got me to where I couldn’t keep a straight face. Then it would be just like all the other times when he’d find himself hooked. “Ah, Hank,” the kid would holler, “ah, Hank,” then go storming off to his mother, who would give us a hard look and take him away from such lying lowbrows as us. So during the ride across the river, when I see how skittish he gets from my deviling him, I half expect him to holler, “Ah, Hank!” and go storming off. But things are different. As high-mettled and spooky and skittish as he still looks, I know he’s not a six-year-old any more. Behind those tight-honed features I can still see some of the old Lee, the little boy Lee I used to carry on my hip up from the dock, sitting there wondering how much of his crazy half-brother’s bullshit should he swallow, but things are different now. For one thing he’s a college graduate—the first that a family of illiterates can point to—and all that education has whetted him pretty keen. For another, there’s nobody for him to go storming off to any more. Watching him there across the boat from me, I see something in his eyes that lets me know he’s in no condition for any of my prime stupidity. He looks like this time it’s him that suspects a Hide-behind after him, like the ground is pretty shaky underfoot and things like what I said to him aren’t making it any steadier. So I mark myself down for a good butt-kicking when I get myself alone later, and try to make things a little easier the rest of the boat ride by asking him about school. He snaps at the chance, goes to running on about classes and seminars and the pressure of academic politics and keeps it up a blue streak all the way on toward the dock, idling that boat along slow as Christmas. All the time keeping a keen weather eye ahead for sunken snags, or checking up at the clouds, or watching a kingfisher dive, anything to keep from having to look at me. He doesn’t want to look at me. He doesn’t want to meet my eyes. So I quit looking at him, except sideways now and then while he talks. He’s made a good-sized gink, bigger than any of us would ever of expected. He must be an easy six foot, an inch or two taller than me and probably outweighs me a good twenty pounds, for all his lankiness. He’s all knobby shoulders and elbows and knees through the white shirt and slacks he’s wearing, hair long at the ears, glasses with rims that look like they’d peter a man’s neck out holding them up, a tweed jacket laid across his knees with a bulge in the pocket I’d give eight-to-five was a pipe... ball-point pen in his shirt pocket, dirty low-cut tennis shoes, dirty state-property gym socks. And I swear he looks like death warmed over. For one thing his face is all burned, like he fell asleep under a sunlamp; and there’s big inky pools under the eyes; and where he used to be deadpan as an owl, he’s took on a kind of beaten and fretful grin, like his mother had. Except there’s just the barest crook to his version, showing he knows just a skosh more than she did. And probably wishes he didn’t. When he talks, that crook comes into his grin for just a flicker, just a wink, making him look sadder than ever because the crook turns it into one of those grins you see on a man across the card table when you lay your full house on his ace-high straight and it’s been happening like that all day and he’s got inside information it’s going on happening like that all night. The way Boney Stokes grinned when he’d take the rag away from his cough and look down in it and see that his condition was just as bad as he feared . . . grinning because— well, look: . . . Boney Stokes was this oldtime acquaintance of Henry’s and figured the best way to pass the time of day was by gradually dying. Every so often Joe Ben—who figured the best way to pass the time of day was never gradually, but full steam ahead—would come across Boney at the Snag or when Boney and the old man were playing dominoes for the Centennial bucks Boney’d taken in at the store during Oregon Centennial and had hung on to past time to redeem, and Joe would rush over and pump Boney’s hand and tell him how good he looked. “Mr. Stokes, you’re lookin’ sicker’n I seen you in months.” &l............