A Face in the Crowd

his red-and-blue striped shirt had ripped, the fishbelly skin of his chest showing through a fist-size hole. He didn’t resist as Kaz let go of his wrists, took hold of the tear in his shirt with both hands, and ripped it apart. The collar wouldn’t give, and Kaz tugged it off over Soupy’s ears in three hard jerks, then stood and twirled the shreds over his head like a lasso before flinging it down on Soupy and walking away. What astonished Evers, besides the inner wildness Kaz had tapped and the style with which he’d destroyed his opponent, was how fast it all happened. In total, it had taken maybe two minutes. The teachers still hadn’t even made it outside.
    When the kid disappeared a week later, Evers and his pals thought he must have run away. Soupy’s mother thought differently. He liked to go on wildlife walks, she said. He was a dreamy boy, he might have gotten lost. There was a massive search of the nearby woods, including baying teams of bloodhounds brought from Boston. As Boy Scouts, Evers and his friends were in on it. They heard the commotion at the dam end of Marsden’s Pond and came running. Later, when they saw the eyeless thing that rose dripping from the spillway, they would all wish they hadn’t.
    And now, thanks to God only knew what agency, here was Lester Embree at Tropicana Field, standing with the other fans watching the play at the plate. His fingers were mostly gone, but he still seemed to have his thumbs. His eyes and nose, too. Well, most of his nose. Lester was looking through the television screen at Dean Evers, just like Miss Nancy looking through her magic mirror on the old Romper Room show. “Romper, stomper, bomper, boo,” Miss Nancy liked to chant in the way-back-when. “My magic mirror can see you.”
    Lester’s pointing finger-stub. Lester’s moving mouth. Saying what? Evers only had to watch it twice to be sure: You murdered me .
    “Not true!” he yelled at the boy in the red-and-blue striped shirt. “Not true! You fell in Marsden’s! You fell in the pond! You fell in the pond and it was your own goddamned fault! ”
    He turned off the TV and went to bed. He lay there awhile thrumming like a wire, then got up and took two Ambiens, washing them down with a healthy knock of scotch. The pill-and-booze combo killed the thrumming, at least, but he still lay wakeful, staring into the dark with eyes that felt as large and smooth as brass doorknobs. At three he turned the clock-radio around to face the wall. At five, as the first traces of dawn backlit the drapes, a comforting thought came to him. He wished he could share this comforting thought with Soupy Embree, but since he couldn’t, he did the next best thing and spoke it aloud.
    “If it were possible to go back in a time machine and change the stupid things some of us did in grammar school and junior high, Soups old buddy, that gadget would be booked up right into the twenty-third century.”
    Exactamundo. You couldn’t blame kids. Grown-ups knew better, but kids were stupid by nature. Sometimes malevolent by nature too. He seemed to remember something about a girl in New Zealand who’d bludgeoned her best friend’s mother to death with a brick. She’d hit the poor woman fifty times or more with that old brick, and when the girl was found guilty she went to jail for . . . what? Seven years? Five? Less? When she got out, she went to England and became an airline stewardess. Later she became a very popular mystery novelist. Who’d told him that story? Ellie, of course. El had been a great reader of mysteries, always trying—and often succeeding—in guessing whodunit.
    “Soupy,” he told his lightening bedroom, “you can’t blame me. I plead diminished capacity.” That actually made him smile.
    As if it had just been waiting for this conclusion, another comforting thought arose. I don’t need to watch the game tonight. Nothing’s forcing me to .
    That was finally enough to send him off. He woke shortly after noon, the first time he’d slept so late since college. In the kitchen he briefly considered the oatmeal, then fried himself three eggs in butter. He would have tossed in some bacon, if he’d had any. He did the next-best thing, adding it to the grocery list stuck to the fridge with a cucumber magnet.
    “No game tonight for me,” he told the empty condo. “Ah b’leeve Ah maht . . .”
    He heard what his voice was doing and stopped, bewildered. It came to him that he might not be suffering