n, mask-like cast to his features when
he smiled.

[Illustration]

He was eight when he saw his father killed. He was in the taxi the
older McKinney now drove for a living when the father stepped out of
the driver's side onto a busy street without looking back first. The
speeding truck took the car door and Jeff's father with it for half a
block, wedged between front wheel and fender. Jeff never forgot the
sound of that, and the screaming. Nor his shock when he suddenly
realized that the screams were his own.

Jeff was a strange boy. He didn't have an average childhood. The
poverty was more extreme after his father's death. He stayed home
alone while his mother was out working at whatever job she could get,
reading too much and thinking too much. Once, he looked at her with
haunted eyes and said: "Mother, why is life so bad? Why are people
even born into a world like this?"

What could she say to a question like that? She said: "Please,
Jefferson! Please don't talk that way. Life isn't all bad. You'll see.
Some day, in spite of everything, you'll be somebody and you'll be
happy. The good times will come."

They did, of course. A few of them. There was the day he went upstate
on an outing for underprivileged boys and went fishing for the first
time. He caught a whopping trout and won a prize for it. That was
nice; that was fun. That was when he was thirteen. That was the year
the gang of kids caught him on the way home from school and beat him
unconscious because he never laughed; because they couldn't _make_ him
laugh. The year before his mother died.

At the orphanage he didn't mingle much with the other boys. He spent
most of his after-classes hours alone in the school's chemistry lab.
He liked to tinker with chemicals. They were cold, emotionless, immune
to joy and sadness, yet they had purpose. He played the cello, too,
with haunting beauty, but not in the school band, only when he wanted
to, when nobody was around and he could really feel the music.

Once, on the way home from his cello lesson in the music building, he
saw some boys playing football on the orphanage athletic field. He was
suddenly seized with a fierce determination to belong, to grab at some
of the shouting, laughing happiness these boys seemed to have. He told
them he wanted to join in and play, too. He didn't understand why they
laughed so at this idea.

They stopped laughing, though, after the first time he ran with the
ball, and they