and the pungent dime-store fragrance of her hair brought him close to a delighted faint.

"Hey, you grabbin' my girl," said the blond boy, and, with a straight face, whipped a blue-veined, grenadelike fist into Stern's ulcer, stopping at the last possible instant and saying "Pow!" instead of landing the blow. Then he threw his head back and howled, saying, "You grab my girl, I got to give you one. Pow, pow, pow!"

"Suivez-moi to my petite habitat," said the girl, going up ahead of the group. "And a young girl shall lead them."

[Pg 150]

[Pg 150]

Not sure whether further waist encirclements were permissible, Stern walked beside her, and she said, "I used to work in a hardware store. You meet a princely selection of spooks there, it being near the main drag. One such spook came in one morning and said his friend wanted to spend the evening with me for $140. I asked him where yon friend was. He said he was across the street in a building watching the two of us with a telescope and would come down if I assented. I replied in the negative, of course. I'll entertain a man, to be sure, but not a telescoping type. You do agree there are many spooks in this land of ours." Stern, flattered that she had told him an anecdote, was not sure what to reply and decided he would tell her about his ulcer, testing her reaction.

"I've got something inside me. That's why I'm at the Home. I'm not sure how all this running around will affect me."

"The shits," she said. "I know them. The shits are a chore." She whirled around now and slid her fingers under the shirt of the tall, blond boy. "Does the darling midnight fool feel a cha-cha within him?" she asked. The blond boy took one hand off the wheelchair, tapped the underside of her breast, and said, "Flippety-flippety. Hey, Stern, you see that? Flippety-flippety."

The girl led them to the last house at the edge of a dead-end street; a sign saying "Tina's Beauty Salon" was in the center of the lawn alongside a thin and graceful tree. It had a white luminescent stripe across the bottom of its slender trunk, making it look like a thoroughbred horse's taped ankle.

"My queenly habitat," said the girl, and led them through the front door and down a long corridor with lined-up rows of hair-drying machines. She opened a door at the end of the corridor and guided them now into a small, sparely furnished room with a single bed and one[Pg 

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