There was going to be a sorry boy on Farrow Street, and Rodney Parish knew who it would be. It would be Rodney Parish, and he could already feel his Daddy’s strap across his fanny. He hurried on through the twilight.

He mumblingly darned the kids who had urged him to join them, illicitly swimming in the condemned pond behind the Chesapeake Lumber Company. He darned and double-darned them, because he had missed dinner, and Daddy got madder than anything when that happened; Rodney’s Parish’s Daddy used his big wide barber’s strap pretty often, and Rodney hated that, hated the hurting. It wasn’t worth the swimming. No indeed not!

In fact, he didn’t much like his Daddy, when it came right down to it.

It was as he crossed Euclid Avenue that he saw the accident. The big blue car came out of the side street without stopping, and roared into the yellow-and-gray car with a smashing roar that made Rodney jump and clutch at his ears.

Rodney stared through his thick lenses at the two cars, and it made his strangely pudgy face squish up like when Miss Dexter made the chalk skip on the board. He ran over and looked in the yellow-and-gray car.

The man was crushed up against the door, and the steering wheel had been driven through his chest. There was blood coming out of the man’s mouth, and it had spattered across part of the shattered windshield. The man was not breathing, and Rodney noticed with interest that a yellow tinge had come over the open eyes.

A man with gray hair and a plaid vest stumbled out of the blue car, and staggered up to the broken window through which Rodney stared at the dead man. Rodney wanted to giggle at the way he looked.

The man in the plaid vest put his fist in his mouth, like he wanted to eat it, and he started moaning like Noobie when the cat scratched at his ears. Then the man in the plaid vest came around the car, and sank down on his knees in front of Rodney.