Terrors of teen-age fashion, dressed in their everyday Halloween best; a half dozen gum-chewing, toothpick-sucking, lipstick-nibbling oral compulsives, outfitted for an ordinary day with the gang. A carful of young America in living color, chemical monsters created by du Pont, with nylon flesh over neon veins pumping Dayglo blood to Orlon hearts. “What’s buggin’ you, dad? You look rank. I mean you look rank!” “Nothing. I’m just having a narrow escape is all.” “Yeah? Yeah? An’ what happened?” “I was on my way across town when I was captured by a band of aliens.” “Yeah? Brass band? Ball-point pens? Bamboo who? Who?” A group giggle punctured by pistol cracks of gumfire unnerved me slightly, but I was nevertheless able to decipher their code. “Bam-bee thee,” I answered. “See ...?” The giggling stopped, and the gum-cracking. “So ...how’s the life?” the driver inquired, after a cease-fire of silence. “Rife,” I answered, a little less enthusiastically this time. My coded witticism met with silence a second time, and something in the tone of this silence told me that my companions did not take kindly to squares turning their own slang back on them. So I kept quiet to let my benefactors concentrate on the road and their gum (Ran and hid, and ran again from alley to alley and shadow to shadow until he was confronted by the head-lighted sweep of asphalt highway). After a few moments of gum-clacking the driver laid his hand on my sleeve. “Well now. That church key, man.” I handed him the opener. He took it without thanks and went to work on a seed between his teeth with its plated point. I began to get worried. The air was charged with a sadism too overt to be imagined; I had got into hot water this time and no fantasy. There is a certain kind of impending violence that one can never mistake, no matter how rampant the imagination. But just as I was about to throw open the door and leap from the speeding car a girl leaned up from the back seat to whisper something in the driver’s ear and he glanced at me and blanched, his maniacal leer changing to a little boy’s ingratiating grin. “Oh...uh...but look, mister ...unless you want a glass of root beer, I mean right now at the A and W up ahead, where can we drop you? Electric chair? Frigidaire?” “There!” I pointed at a pair of fading ruts leading off the highway west into the push of green. “Right there!” (The child lay in the ditch until his panting slowed; then he dashed across to a private dirt road hedged high on both sides with dense undergrowth.) Again on impulse, plus the desire to flee my newfound friends: “Right there will be fine, thanks. . . .” “There? I declare. Nothing up that road but cedar keys and sand coons dunes. It’s wild child out there.” He slowed the car to a stop.  “It’s wild in here,” I noted, setting off a new sputter of giggling and opening the door to step out. “Well, I thank you...” “You, hey. They say you’re Hank Stamper’s brother? Huh? Hey, well anyway, here’s where you wanted out.” The driver waved with a casual lift of his hand, grinning in a way to let me know that for reasons unknown to me I was either very lucky or very unlucky to be Hank Stamper’s brother. “Blue-tail fly,” he called meaningfully. “Good-by.” The whitewalls jumped, spinning gravel back at me as the car pulled back onto the pavement and I scuttled into the underbrush before another carful of good Samaritans came along. Free from the car’s predatory atmosphere, Lee tries once more to calm himself: What’s the hurry? I have at least another hour before I meet her . . . loads of time (The boy walked through the overhanging dark, able for the first time to question his sudden flight; he knew that it hadn’t been the house that he ran from, nor did he really fear his brother— Hank would never hurt him, never let anything get him—so what had he run from? He walked on, knotting his little features to understand his actions . . .) So, seriously now, what is the hurry? If I expected to find respite in Mother Nature’s lush green arms I was disappointed. After continuing for a few minutes, the wobbling road petered out completely and I left the last hu............