Driving north on Gould Avenue—where the hell is the Blind Alley? It couldn’t be gone, everybody played there, I must have missed it—he did allow himself to consider, though with some wariness, the matter of the green convertible. At the time, his mind—having promptly skipped town, leaving no forwarding address but only those weary, cynical old suckers, his nerves and reflexes, to settle his debts and post bail one more time—had registered nothing but the driver’s huge helmet, the black man’s jaunty toy sword—was it a toy?—and the woman dressed entirely in gold chains. But the black guy was wearing something like a mantle, a bearskin? And the back seat had been tossing with velvet cloaks and stiff white ruffs and plumes like firelight in the fog as the old rag-top hurtled by. Doubtless the Avicenna Welcome Wagon. The one with the chains must be from the Native Daughters.

Gould was a long street, stretching from one end of Avicenna nearly to the other and effectively dividing student country and the hills beyond from the hot, black flatlands. Farrell drove until the used-car lots gave way to antique shops, those to office buildings and department stores—damn, what happened to that nice old fish market?—and those in turn to one- and two-story frame houses, white and blue and green, with stairs on the outside. They were old, thin houses, most of them, and in the dour morning air they looked like boats abandoned on the beach, unsafe to take to sea. Farrell’s breath tightened, just for a moment, at the southwest corner of Ortega; but the gray, bulging, fish-scaled house was gone, replaced by a Tas-T-Freeze.

They were trying to condemn that place all the time I lived there. As unseaworthy a house as ever I went deepsea sailing in. Ellen. Even after so much time, he touched the name cautiously with his tongue, like a sore tooth, but nothing happened.