Billy by Whitley Strieber Page B

author of the left, full of literate fire. Except his sentences were generally too long, his thoughts too complicated, his words too dry.
    He was a little heavy about the middle now, and he'd been fired a lot for his flaming love of the social ideal, but many sparks of his youth were yet unquenched.
    She loved his body on hers, loved it when he shook with passion, adored the tickle of his lips upon her breasts, adored sweating with him in the night.
    "I simply cannot cut it thin enough for the toaster," he shouted. "Help me!" The "help" was long and full of mourning.
    Laughing, she returned to the kitchen. The table was only half set and now Sally had disappeared. This just was not a morning for a formal breakfast. The Sunday paper lay on the counter, "Blondie" and "Prince Valiant" huge and colorful on the first page of the comics section. Billy loved the comics.
    "The kids are getting through the strainer," Mary said.
    "Help me cut this darn bread. It's great but it's got its gluish side."
    " 'Gluish' can't be a word."

    "Don't Funk & Wagnall me, help me!"
    'I'll just plain Funk you if you don't watch out," she whispered.
    "Bad girl." He popped her on the bottom.
    Sally came in the garage door. "His bike's gone."
    "That's odd, Mark."
    "Did you do something to him, Sally? Something that made him decide to escape your wrath?"
    "Mother, he's twelve years old. He doesn't run away from me anymore. He fights back as best he can with his thin little arms and tiny fists."
    They continued making their breakfast, as a ship might sail on even after its belly is sundered. Mary got the bread into the toaster and the water into the ancient percolator. Sally finished laying the table. Mark stood overseeing the bacon, Sunday comics in hand.
    Mary did not tell him to be careful. If he wanted to set the newspaper on fire with his cooking, that was his business. She had decided this ten years ago. This time the bacon cooked and the newspaper did not.
    They sat around the kitchen table eating bacon and toast and eggs, drinking frozen orange juice because they could not afford the kind that came in cartons. A pot of coffee steamed in the center of the table, beside the pile of Sunday paper.
    Wrinkles appeared in the yolks of Billy's eggs. Eventually his sister stole his bacon and his mother put the eggs in the oven with some foil over the plate. Little was said during breakfast; the radio played a series of forgettable tunes, cars passed, one or the other parent looked up whenever a child shouted in the street.
    "It isn't like him," his mother said. She was looking out the kitchen window into a yard flooded with sunlight.
    They finally decided to make calls to the parents of his friends. One after another, the same answer came back. By ten there was a definite quiver in their voices, but the reason remained unsaid. At eleven the family drove over to the mall, but it was closed. There were a couple of people at Burger King, but no kids.
    Knowing that his bike was gone, they drove the streets of  Stevensville. It was all useless, and at noon the family returned home.
    Sally, deeply upset, withdrew to her room. Outside the grasshoppers sang, lawn mowers clattered, sprinklers whirred. The strains of piano practice floated over from the Harpers' house, and an engine endlessly revved and died as young John O'Hara tried to bring life to the fifty-dollar car he'd bought from a junk dealer.
    Mark went to his daughter. She lay on her side reading and listening to the radio. Mark knew nothing about rock and roll, having lost interest when he realized at the age of fourteen that no girl would ever consider him a hep cat, never mind his pink shirt, black pants and Wildroot-soaked fenders. Mozart, Telemann, Bach: this was his music, the music of what the kids called "geese" in his day and time. His friends were boys with crooked horn-rims and sour-smelling white shirts, and pallid, bepimpled girls in harlequins and too few petticoats, who professed themselves