Killeen, taking his little family with him, fled to his new job in a river town in the northeast as if pursued by furies. He had written the rest of their savings out of the bank and purchased a two-year-old Plymouth Voyager van and packed Diane and Chad, who was four, into that automobile with a haste that was somewhere beyond incautious.

"I start on Friday," Killeen told his family. "This is Monday."

"Who in the hell starts a job on Friday?" Diane wanted to know. But she went along with him. She was ready for a change herself. Of course, she really had no idea how active Killeen's demons had become.

Obsessive compulsions, in truth. Killeen had already known the exact terminology, but he had gone to the library and looked it up anyway. He really couldn't remember when they had started, but he knew the exact moment when they had gone on long enough. He had been in a meeting, a Chamber of Commerce meeting in the stuffy old City Hall of the small East Texas town he now had fled. Towns down there were built on squares, and that building had sat in the smack middle of everything. Never converted to central air, the structure employed window units which did little but groan against the stifling June heat. And here, at something past three on a sunblasted Wednesday afternoon,- Killeen realized that something in his head had turned a corner, that things had gone too far.

He found himself with the horrifying need to count each and every point at which an article of furniture in the room touched the floor. Every one. To this point, nothing so extreme had been visited upon him. As far as counting went, he had mostly been plagued by things in fours: the need to read just four more pages of a report, or to write four more of his own before he turned off the computer. But now, born of the utter boredom of yet another planning session for the Downtown Renovation Program he had been hired to supervise, Killeen saw that things truly had gone around the bend. He found himself counting every leg of every one of the twenty or so chairs in the room, and then moving to the desks. What would he do about the podium, which had no discernable legs at all? Count it as one big block? Grant it the four points of contact? One man in the room, an aged and contentious board member who had never liked Killeen, used a cane. Should he count that? And, for that matter, what of feet? Pair upon pair of human feet, twenty perhaps in all? Killeen expelled a long and audible sigh.

"Something wrong, Dennis?" the Chairwoman asked him. This was Betsy Armitrage, one of Killeen's few champions.

"I have to leave," Killeen announced. He stood up.

Twenty-plus pairs of eyes turned to him. Killeen fought down a compulsion to count those, too.

"Don't you feel well?" Betsy inquired. She had removed her glasses and looked honestly concerned.

"I have to leave," Killeen repeated, and walked out of the room. No one followed. He stood briefly on the marble stairs, feeling the sweat pour down his face. Then he went home. The next week, he quit his job.

It wasn't quite that simple, but it was close. Historical renovation programs have networks, too, and Killeen had only to contact two colleagues he'd met at conferences before he had an interview. Two days later he had a position-administrative assistant, but still a position--in a city far from home. Diane was adamant about not giving up her job with the Headstart program at first, but when the Main Street people in the new town offered to help her get a public school position on a temporary certificate, she agreed. And so they fled. Through Kansas and Missouri and selected parts of Illinois and Indiana, they fled. Up through northern Kentucky, they fled. And when they came at last to the river they turned east, and within hours they had found a new place to live.

Not a home, exactly. The town, which was named Beaudine's Spring, was old, older than the Killeens, with their southwestern orientation, could imagine. And the people were defeated, their only remaining factories having closed. The only source of jobs now seemed to be the nuclear plant up the road. The only constant in the town's long history seemed to be the spring for which it was named, an inexhaustible fount of water just above the town square which had been found by the pirate who gave it his name over two hundred years before. But lately somebody had sold the community on the idea of downtown renovation, and the city council and the Chamber had bought in to the point of hiring the necessary Personnel.

"The city is suffering from leukemia," Killeen's boss proclaimed to him. "And our program is perceived as its chemotherapy." The boss's name was Fairleigh, and he was dangerously overweight. Killeen had quickly observed that Fairleigh wasn't alone: a large portion of the community seemed to be carrying too many pounds, especially the women. This dismayed Killeen. It was, in fact his curse to be, even in middle age, mildly attractive. Women perceived that he knew this, and were willing to flirt with him in an almost taunting fashion. Both they and Killeen understood that they were playing a game that would come to nothing. But now, as he gazed around him, Killeen could see that enthusiasm for the game was not going to come easily.

But that was a blessing. Killeen secretly suspected that the obsessive compulsions which plagued him were actually punishment for his lust. Did he not, after all, have a caring if unimaginative wife? A beautiful child? Should he not have given his life over to joyous denial long ago? Perhaps now, surrounded by overweight women, he could. Perhaps he had been sent here for a purpose. Abnegation; self-denial--a time spent learning to be thankful for his blessings. From Beaudine's Springs he would draw the healing water which would make him a new and better person.

Diane took to her new job quickly and easily. Most of the children in her class were poor, and their home lives were wrecks.  "We have so much, when you think about it," Diane would say, surveying their three-bedroom rent house. "If you could see the way those kids come to school, Dennis, you'd understand that."

Killeen, pondering the same surroundings, was not so impressed. But at least they were not on the street. And a fringe benefit of having been plunged into the Land of the Fat Women was that Diane herself had begun to look downright beautiful to him. Their lovemaking, never of much frequency, suddenly accelerated in this new environment. Killeen found himself counting less things and saying less chanting prayers as he anticipated nocturnal sessions with his own wife. It was amazing to him. Was it possible that at long last, he really had made a right guess; obeyed a worthwhile impulse?

Chad remained Chad. He had always been a model boy-one who Killeen feared in his paranoia might actually die young because he was so quiet, so pliable. In that complacency which parents usually take for good behavior. Chad had few equals-certainly none in the neighborhood where the Killeens rented. Killeen saw the strident obnoxiousness of his neighbors' offspring and again had reason to be thankful. Little Chad, whose bland features and pale complexion accentuated his sweet agreeableness, was the immediate darling of every adult he met. Even his blond bangs look angelic, like a child in one of those pictures where the angels hover near.  In all his four years. Chad had asked his father for one thing that Killeen could remember: a lunchbox for preschool-one of the old sort, the army green kind that construction workers carried with them to the site. Why the boy had seized upon that Killeen never knew. But Chad had lost it once, and cried inconsolably. It was one of the few times Killeen had ever heard his son cry-even when quite ill, as with the time he was two and had the horrible thrush.  Killeen had rushed into the night to purchase another for the child, stalking the Wal-Mart like a man in search of antitoxin. At last he had found an identical box and sped home with it. Chad waited in his bed, quite awake.

"I love you. Chad," Killeen said every night as he tucked his boy in.

"I love you. Daddy," the boy would reply, snuggled amongst his Snoopy covers, a ragged Teddy crooked in one arm and a dinosaur in the other.

"I love you more," Killeen would say. It was another of his compulsions. And, of course, he could not leave the room until he heard Chad, there in the glow of the nightlight, reply: "No, Daddy. I love you more." And even after that Killeen would have to check two, even three times a night to make sure the boy still slumbered where he had been left, that he still breathed and that he had not been spirited away into the shadows in some new version of the Lindbergh Kidnap. These, of course, were dear obsessions, and Killeen did not know if he would wish to part with them, even if he could.

Even if he could. Things were more serious than he had until this point been willing to admit. He had a kind of mental leukemia, and it was now up to Beaudine's Spring to be the cure. But in those first days in that new town, days which were ironically the dying days of a swelteringly humid northeastern August, Killeen felt almost optimistic. The refrain from the old song "Enjoy Yourself" popped into his mind one day at the office:

"Enjoy yourself--
It's later than you think.
Enjoy yourself--
While you're still in the pink."

But for the life of him he could not remember any of the verse. He got the next part all right;

"The years go by
As quickly as a wink--"

And there his memory ran out. It was necessary to stop at the Public Library that evening and find a nostalgia song book which actually contained the lyrics. But it was worth it, since Killeen was able to sing the entire song to himself on the rest of the drive home.

***

Beaudine's Spring had a small community college, an extension branch of one of the state universities. Its campus was picturesquely placed on a bluff overlooking the river. Also perhaps dangerously, since pollution bequeathed by the chemical plant upstream kept killing the fish which inhabited it. Dozens of them would float, on the sparkling morning surface of the water. And as if in echo of Killeen's boss's medical allegory, an actual high incidence of human beings with leukemia actually had been diagnosed among river communities over a distance of nearly two hundred miles, both sides.

Killeen had to go to the college's public relations office on business. He needed some historic photographs of the school and the PR director, whom had talked with on the phone, had told him to come and get them.

Her name was Alexis Reid and she was not fat. She was beautiful. She might have been as old as thirty-five, Killeen could see, but he had never been able to judge the middle years well in others. And Alexis Reid was black; that made judging somehow more difficult. She was tall, perhaps five-nine. Her skin was light; the color of cinnamon. She wore a tailored black suit with an open-collared white blouse. Her skirt was shorter than it needed to be, and her black pumps were perhaps a bit higher. Killeen was almost audibly aware of every good resolve of the past few days crumbling as he shook her hand. She was lovely.

"I have your pictures," she told him. Not a trace of a dialect; pure, nongeographic English. Well, what had he expected?  Amos 'n Andy? Mild shame fluttered in Killeen's vision, as it did on a fairly regular basis anyway. He drew back. From her? From himself?

"I appreciate it," he told her. She had beckoned him into another office and he now followed. It was a filing room, unwindowed. The air was close. Alexis Reid crossed to one cabinet and took a manila folder from its top.

"Some good stuff in here," she said, walking to him as she opened the folder. "There's one of a girl's glee club, I think it's 1910, and it's priceless."

Killeen tried to look at the photographs. Several were sepia, a color he associated with the Republic Studios cowboy matinees of his youth. But he could smell her. Soap. Some kind of expensive soap.

He shut the folder. "Where are you from?" he asked her.

"Here?"

She laughed, taken off guard. "Kansas," she said. "Derby, Kansas." She looked at him. "You been there?"

"Derby," he said. "Outside of Wichita. The Air Force used to be there. "

She smiled. Killeen could see that her teeth were incredible
.
"That's the place," she told him. "I was an Air Force brat."

"And how'd you wind up...."

"Here? You'd be surprised."

Killeen was sure he would be. Flinging all caution aside, he offered to buy her a five o'clock drink in the bar at the Day's Inn down the road. Astoundingly, she agreed. They sat in a booth far in the back, next to the restrooms. She smoked unfiltered Pall Malls and wore a small lapel watch-Killeen hadn't even noticed it at first-which looked expensive. In its utterly decorative nature, it seemed to Killeen sensual beyond belief. He was Friday afternoon-infatuated.  But at that moment, it might as well have been love.

She finally asked about his family.

"My wife's a teacher," he told her. "And I have a little boy I'm pretty fond of. He's four."

She smiled and said nothing. They finished their drinks and talked about the town's history. He walked her to her car in the parking lot. And as soon as he got into his own, he began to fully hate himself. Or hate himself as fully as he could. He had done wrong, and now he was surely doomed. As he drove home he remembered how his own father, a man as quiet in nature as Killeen's own son was, had treated difficult driving situations. If his father approached any potentially dangerous circumstance while behind the wheel, he would say: "I hope this all comes out all right." His father's own version of a Jesus Prayer, Killeen reflected. Those simple words were clearly thought by his father to ward off the evils spirits of traffic. Killeen shook his head.
Though it was still quite warm, it seemed to him on that Friday evening that the weather was turning.

***

Killeen now recommenced to fret about AIDS, even though he had done nothing to get it. Not quite true. There had been that pitiful series of liaisons now eleven years ago with the graduate student in Library Science. She had offered something like diversion at the time: desultory couplings in freeway motels whose gaudy curtains didn't quite shut out the dying sunlight of late afternoons. Every time Killeen picked up one of those articles about how long it really takes for full-blown AIDS to manifest itself--ten years; fifteen-he would feel faint for days. A cold sore could ruin a week. Inexplicably, his one-time flirtation with Alexis Reid intensified this periodic fear into a constant numbing, throbbing horror. Instant love turned to endless misery within days. By the third week after he had made his fateful trip to the campus, it was all Killeen could do to go to work. What if his decade-old transgression was now at last to be revenged? What if he had already passed it on to Diane? To Chad? His new obsession became to keep the first and middle finger on at least one hand crossed constantly. In order to conceal this potentially noticeable aberration from the eyes of others, Killeen now kept his hands in his pockets a good deal of the time.

Late on a blustery, leafstrewn Wednesday, he sat in his office, thinking about Chernobyl. Fairleigh burst in upon him suddenly, a guest in tow.

"Phil," this is Dennis Killeen," Fairleigh explained. "Dennis-Phil Dunham. He's got the United Fund campaign." Though the afternoon was full of fall, Killeen's superior was sweating steadily. Killeen was depressed to note sad evidence beneath Fairleigh's ample paunch: during his last trip to the bathroom, the man had carelessly zipped his shirttail into his fly. Killeen had to restrain himself from shaking his head in empathic sorrow. Instead, he removed a hand from his pocket, uncrossed his fingers, and extended it to the visitor, who took it. Dunham was a lean fellow with the physique of a runner, clearly in far better shape than was Killeen himself. His thin fingers were loose and a little sweaty. Killeen began to wonder if it were he who was out of step here; perhaps he, too, should perspiring from at least some bodily outlet.

"We're raising some money for you," Dunham said, as if to justify his presence.

"We can use it," Killeen replied bouncily. He was relieved. This man posed no apparent threat. In Killeen's current frame of mind, he would not have been surprised by the arrival of Squeaky Fromme, the entire Family trailing behind her.

"I'll leave you two," Fairleigh confided. He jiggled out quickly, apparently bound for more significant endeavors.

"Sit down," Killeen offered. He considered briefly, and settled on a jocular approach. "How can we help you help us?" he inquired.

"This isn't my preferred work," Phil Dunham countered.

Killeen felt he must have misunderstood. "I beg your pardon?" he said.

"I mean," Dunham told him, gazing rather sadly about the room, "I would prefer to be doing what I've trained myself for."

I don't need this, Killeen thought, but what he said was:   "And what might that be? I mean, what did you train yourself for?"

"Mnemonic retention," Dunham explained.

"I know that word," Killeen admitted, "but I can't remember what it means."

"Exactly," Dunham said. He crossed his arms smugly.

"Exactly?" Killeen repeated.

"Mnemonic. It means something that improves the memory. Doesn't it tell you something that you couldn't remember the meaning of the word?" Dunham leaned forward expectantly.

"I see what you mean," Killeen said. He had begun to suspect that he had prematurely branded the man harmless. He was clearly a lunatic. And here he was in charge of the United Fund. Killeen stuffed both hands more deeply in his pockets, slouched in his chair even further, and firmly crossed both fingers. This is the kind of nut you play along with, he told himself.

"Name the Great Lakes," Dunham challenged.

"Erie, Huron...." Killeen faltered.

"Homes," Dunham said.

"Homes," Killeen echoed, dumfounded.

"Homes," Dunham repeated triumphantly. "H-O-M-E-S. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Get it?"

Killeen nodded slowly. But he was beginning to see the horror of this. How in the world could an obsessive begin to deal with
acronyms?

"I teach this stuff," Dunham continued. "I teach a class in it. That's what I really like to do. I love it, in fact." Killeen saw that he was expected to say something. "That's very interesting," he mustered.

"Know all your prepositions?" Dunham now challenged.

"Probably not."

"Think about a mouse and a haystack. Name every possible way that mouse can get on the other side of that haystack. You got the prepositions."

Over, under, around-they flooded Killeen's brain like loose sewage. If he had dared remove his hands from his pockets, he
might have slammed them to his ears, such was the roaring.

"So can you put this to work for the United Fund?" Killeen asked hopefully.

"Four major functions of government?' Dunham insisted. He raised a hand above his head. "Education," he intoned. Then he stuck out a thumb, hitchhiker style. "Transportation," he explained. Next he extended the hand, palm up. Welfare, Killeen thought.

"Welfare," Dunham explained, and then he doubled his fingers into a raised fist. "What's this?"

"Defense," Killeen replied weakly.

"This Stuff'11 do you a world of good," Dunham said, now clearly feeling victorious. Killeen felt that he might vomit. The violent roaring of prepositions still filled his head. Thankfully, Dunham, sated at last, now fell to business. A quarter hour later they parted, long after Killeen had begun to sweat in earnest.

***

At Halloween, Killeen took Chad to the carnival in the college parking lot by the river. The entire affair was brightly lit.  Killeen could see high school kids sitting on the levee. He thought they must have a spectacular twilight view: the carnival on one side and the river on the other. A country-western band played on a makeshift stage. A Ferris wheel moved lazily above the other rides.

Killeen was depressed to find that the place was mostly Midway, heavy on the games. The tired cries of the barkers depressed him as he and his son moved among the people and the aisles, but Chad seemed to enjoy them. As usual, he said almost nothing, but his wide eyes beamed, and his skin seemed to shine.

At a booth which offered toy balloons to burst, a wizened woman finally  stopped them. She might have been twenty or forty-five. Her face has a chamois; the cigarette between her lips a permanent fixture. "Good game for kids, mister," she croaked, offering her darts.

Chad had stopped. Killeen could see that he clearly wanted to play.

"All right," Killeen said suddenly. He offered a dollar. The woman handed down the darts to Chad. "Toss 'em. Honey," she said.

Chad hit two. The boy laughed out loud. The woman brought a small stuffed puppy from beneath the counter. "Two more bucks, mister," she told Killeen, "and he gets six darts. If he hits again, he gets the bigger dog." She pointed at the row of dangling toys above her booth.

Killeen looked at Chad. He produced two more dollars and handed them to the woman between his crossed fingers. She snapped them up. "Like the weatherman sez, mister," she told him as she stuffed the bills in the pocket of her overalls. "No change."

Chad threw each dart studiously in turn. He broke two more balloons, and the woman traded him a slightly larger toy for the one he had. He seemed pleased.

"Five bucks, mister," the woman said. "He gets the giant toy if he breaks two more."

"This one will do," Killeen told her. "Come on. Chad."

Clutching his toy. Chad took his father's hand in his free one. Killeen's crossed fingers against his son's palm felt somehow comforting. They came to a ride built around toy boats, suitable for smaller children. Killeen paid Chad's fare and watched as the attendant placed him in a boat. "Wave at me," Killeen called. The child sat stiffly in the tarnished green boat, holding tightly to the toy dog. The very sight brought a clutch to Killeen's throat.

The ride began. Only a couple of other children had boarded with Chad. It moved slowly, and Killeen watched Chad begin to relax a bit as he saw that the motion would be tolerable. Satisfied that he was all right, Killeen gazed about the park. His eyes came to rest upon Alexis Reid, maybe twenty feet away. She was laughing at a young black man who had evidently just dropped the contents out of a snow cone. She was dressed in cutoffs and a jean shirt knotted at the waist, tennis shoes with white cuffed socks. Killeen loved that look. He saw that her longish hair, which had reminded him a little of Diana Ross when he first saw her, now was tied back with a blue ribbon. The young man was handsome and at that moment looked quite embarrassed by his foible, as if he didn't know Alexis well and were desperate, as Killeen himself would have been, to please.

She was nearly the young man's height. She laughed again and reached forth  and hugged him. They turned away in the opposite direction. Killeen was certain that she had never even seen him. He watched them go.

Suddenly he was aware of movement behind him. He turned, images of Chad filling his mind as the prepositions had a few week before. He saw the other children who had ridden filing out, but he did not see Chad.

He first thought: So this is it. This is how I finally pay. And then he began calling his boy's name, circling the parameter of the ride. It occurred to him briefly that Alexis Reid might hear his voice, turn back and find the sight of him silly. Or she might rush back to help. He dismissed her. "I hope this all comes out all right," he muttered, and demanded of the attendant some news about Chad.

But before the startled man could answer, Killeen saw the boy. He had gone back, of course, to the balloon game. He stood there holding his dog and looking up at the larger one. Killeen sprinted to him and held him tightly. Chad, surprised, stuck his arm tentatively around his father's neck. Killeen could feel the plastic skin of the toy on his neck.

The country-western band was playing "Always On My Mind,' badly. The wind was rising. Killeen knelt and hugged his son to im in the middle of the little carnival. The two of them must appear to be very small, it occurred to Killeen, to anyone watching from the top of the levee there beneath a cold northeastern sky on a night in fall. He could not seem to remember just how he had gotten there, and he could not begin to imagine what steps he might take in order to stay. He felt unmoored, as if he and Chad had somehow gotten caught in the inexorable spin of lights on the sides of the Ferris wheel, and must stay there indefinitely, lost among the colored lights, far from home.