lifted.

He had wanted to join with them, their jokes, their talk, but did not know how to. He had never understood, for example, why the way he spoke was funnier than the way they did. Their eyes when they looked at him had been grave, wary. At the end of a week, pay day. These were all men working illegally for one reason or another, and they were paid less than half the union rate. But Ben had earned enough money to take to the old woman, and she had been pleased with him. Two more weeks . and a new man had arrived on the job and from the first he had needled Ben, taunted him, grunted and growled. Ben had not at first known that these were meant to be his sounds, nor had he at once understood when the man had pushed and jostled him, once dangerously, when Ben was standing high, streets far below, his feet straddled from beam to beam over space. The foreman had sharply intervened, but after that Ben had kept an eye on this youth, a grinning, careless, show-off redhead, and had tried to keep out of his way. Another week. The money had been paid out inside a little shelter the men used for moments of rest, or when it was raining too badly. He and the redhead had been last in the line to be paid, and this was how his enemy had planned it, for when Ben's envelope was put into his hand, the young man had grabbed it from him and run off, grunting and scratching himself and crouching low and bounding up, and then again: Ben had known this was meant to be a monkey. He had visited the zoo, moving from cage to cage looking at beasts whose names he had been called, ape, baboon, pig-man, pongo, yeti. There was no yeti in the zoo, nor a pongo either, and he had wondered about them, for he knew he was looking for something like himself.