Winterbelle snapped her out of this. "Why don't you just do what we did at our school?"

  The girl attended some kind of unorthodox learning center whose curriculum was based on the "indications of Rudolph Steiner." Ludi was fuzzy about the details—as she believed Pippa was also—but the building was nice. Lots of big trapezoidal windows.

  Everyone gave Winterbelle their full attention. They were glad to have somebody taking charge. Ludi was no different. But at least she had the sense of irony to recognize how appropriate this was: that the Street Theater, which had been founded by Tex and Molly, had progressed to the point of taking directions from a second-grader.

  "At school," Winterbelle told them, "we wanted to put on I think it was The Empire Strikes Back. But the trouble was, there were only six of us in my grade and everybody wanted to be Princess Leia except for the boys who wanted to be Darth Vader. Even after we talked Keanu into being Luke Skywalker, that didn't leave anybody for a lot of important parts."

  "Somebody named their kid Keanu?" asked Eben.

  "There's two Keanus," said Winterbelle. "But the little one's just in Old Testament Stories. So anyway. What we did was, we made up signs with names on them and two pieces of ribbon—brown for the good guys and white for the bad guys. Then when the grown-ups came to see the play, we stopped them at the door and hung a sign over their head, and we said, That's who you are. Because see, everybody has seen the movie a hundred times except for Denim's mother's lover who doesn't believe in supporting violent adversarial cinema. But Denim had seen it a hundred times anyway, I'm not sure how."

  "What two separate people named their kids Keanu?" Eben said.

  "Get beyond it," said Ludi. She nodded to Winterbelle. "Go on."

  "So everybody got to be who they wanted except the grown-ups. And even Denim's mother's lover who didn't know who Yoda was, somebody told her he's this little monster who's like a Zen master, so when it was her turn to talk she just made up these heavy sayings. 'Agriculture is mechanized land-rape' and things like that. It was cool."

  The Street Players weighed this information. Deep Herb settled back in the grass. Eben shook his head, still coming to grips with the Keanu thing. Pippa stroked her daughter's hair.

  "You were really wonderful, honey," she said.

  Winterbelle ducked out of her mommy's reach.

  "So what you're telling us," said Ludi, "is that you just went out onstage without a definite script, and you just kind of acted it out. And everybody knew the story because they had seen the movie. Is that it?"

  "No," said Winterbelle. "That's not it at all."

  Ludi was stumped.

  "We didn't go out onstage, for one thing. We don't have a stage. And mostly, except for right at the beginning, we let the grown-ups kind of do most of the acting. They really got into it, after they got over thinking how weird it was. We all just mostly ran around the Star Destroyer and the boys blasted each other with fazers."

  "Do they have fazers in Star Wars?" Deep Herb said from his hole.

  "It wasn't Star Wars," Winterbelle crossly reminded him.

  "Aren't we forgetting something?" said Ludi.

  They all looked at her. No one could remember what they were forgetting.

  "What story are we supposed to be acting out? I mean, that's the most important thing, right? If we're going to try to do this, we've got to think of some story that everybody knows."

  "Not necessarily," said Winterbelle.

  Ludi was slightly irked. You could carry this out-of-the-mouths-of-babes thing only so far. "Why not necessarily?"

  "Because," said Winterbelle, "Denim's mother's lover didn't know the story, and she was great."

  "That's true." Pippa nodded. "She stole the show."

  "I stand corrected," said Ludi. "We still need, however—correct me if I'm wrong about this—a plot. We can't just go out there and hand out signs with nothing written on them, and say Welcome to the Clueless Revue."

  "Then it's easy," said Winterbelle. "You just pick some story that everybody knows. Right?"

  "Sure," said Eben.

  But Ludi thought, What story is that?

  INTO THE WOODS

  She drove to Gene Deere's house. She had promised days ago to help him with the little bear and she hadn't exactly forgotten, but her summer job at the bookstore had started, plus there were Molly's plants to water and Goblin to feed. You cannot possibly save the world with so many distractions.

  Gene wasn't home, but somebody else was: a short Native man with a beer belly. He was out on the front porch, which had big wide columns, shingled up to handrail-level, playing with little Tex. When Ludi got out of her car he stood and introduced himself as Jesse Openhood.

  The name was familiar. "Are you a friend of Tex's?" she guessed.

  The man looked down at the bear, which was pawing and scratching at his leg. "Looks like I'm a friend of two Texes now."

  "I'm Ludi," she said, holding a hand out. He shook it. His hand was thick and warm. "I'm a friend of Tex's, too. And Molly's. Have you seen them?"

  Jesse gave her a funny look. "I'm not sure. I don't think so."

  Let it pass, Ludi decided. She said, "Isn't he cute?"

  "And big," said Jesse, "for his age."

  "That's what I thought too." She swatted at a black fly. "So, are you waiting for Gene?"

  "I met him one time," said Jesse. Not exactly what she had asked. He went on, "Thistle told me where his place was. She told me about the little bear."

  "Oh: Thistle." Ludi waved her hand back and forth in front of her face. There were so many flies that you couldn't deal with them on an individual basis. Jesse smelled strongly of citronella. "Are you, ah, Thistle's—"

  Jesse looked at her. Like, waiting to hear what she was going to say. In the end she couldn't decide what she wanted to know, so she asked instead, "Why are there so many damned bugs around here?"

  Jesse smiled. "Well, it's funny," he said, "but there's a story about that."

  "I bet."

  "It's a story about Laks—you know who he is?"

  Ludi shook her head. Tex was rolling around on his back in the wet driveway, evidently intent on getting as dirty as possible. She sat down on the porch steps.

  "Laks is a very evil fellow," Jesse said. "There's a lot of stories about him. He can be kind, too, but that's usually just to fool you."

  "So this is some kind of legendary figure? Like a Native American thing?"

  "Passamaquoddy," said Jesse. "I guess you could say he's legendary. Some people would tell you he's pretty real. Anyway, this Laks was up on top of a mountain once and he saw a great big rock and decided he'd pry the rock up and roll it down into the valley. So he did that and when the rock went rolling, he thought he'd race it and beat it to the bottom. And so he did. But when he went past the rock he yelled, 'Hey, Rock. You're slow and you're stupid!' Then he ran on down and he made a little camp and caught some fish and was cooking his dinner. But all of a sudden there was a big whooshing sound and here comes Rock, crashing through the forest and knocking down big oak trees here and hemlocks there. And before Laks could do anything, Rock had come along and flattened him out and squashed him dead. There was blood everywhere, and all his limbs were torn off."

  Ludi wondered where the bugs came in. Jesse sat still for a minute—thinking, presumably, but his face was completely blank. Then he said: "Laks can't die, though. He's a hard one to get rid of. He was all splattered around there except for his spine, which is where the life is, but he called out, Bones, come here! And his bones got up and came to him, and he said, Now muscles, come! And on like that, and soon he stood up and he was alive and whole again. Now Laks gets madder than anyone when somebody tricks him, so he made up his mind he was going to get even with that Rock. So he followed the trail where it had gone rolling through the forest, and finally he found it lying down in a little hollow full of water. So Laks picked up some boulders and he pounded at Rock until it was all smashed up into little pieces, then he took the pieces in his hands and he crushed them into smaller pieces until there was nothing left but dust.

  "But see, you can't kill Rock, just like you can't kill Laks. So when Laks went away, Rock turned himself into a million little black flies and midges and mosquitos, and they rose up out of the water there and they've been tormenting people ever since. And they'll go on tormenting people till everybody goes away and takes that evil Laks with them. That's the end of the story."

  Ludi nodded appreciatively. She liked it a lot. It sounded neat and authentic. She wasn't sure it sufficed as an explanation of the black fly phenomenon, however.

  They sat there for a few minutes, playing with the bear. In time it became evident that Jesse was one of those people who are comfortable sitting in silence, while Ludi was not. Restless, she said, "I bet Tex has made a mess inside."

  Cautiously she got up and nudged the door open, just a little. It smelled like a zoo, only without evidence of regular upkeep.

  "Oh my," she said, pushing the door open all the way. The bungalow was worse than anything she had imagined. It was worse than anything she could have imagined. She wasn't sure where to assign the blame for this, but it seemed possible that it was at least fractionally her own fault. If she started now, maybe she could make a dent in it by the time Gene got home from work.

  Of the rooms downstairs, the kitchen looked most salvageable. She began by collecting the garbage spewing out of two plastic bags that little Tex had mauled. Gene, she saw, did not separate his compostable kitchen waste from the rest of the trash, which was why the bear had found it so appealing. There were even a couple of recyclable juice bottles. Ludi made a noise of disapproval with her tongue and teeth that cannot be transliterated. The bear took this as a note of approval. He prowled around her calves, nearly causing her to topple.

  Ludi got tired of the kitchen after that and ambled through the other rooms, picking things up and putting them where she guessed they ought to go. She had heard stories of houses where the interior designers had placed tiny red dots so that you would know exactly where the little tabletop accessories belong. With Gene's house there was no telling. Where would an anal-retentive science dweeb put the latest issue of The Absolute Sound! On the coffee table or beside the sacred stereo?

  That sort of mind-game got tiresome too, so Ludi followed a trail of abused clothing through the hallway to the stair landing. She picked up a polo shirt, a cotton sweater, a pair of striped athletic socks, piling them onto her forearm. Item by item she made her way up the stairs. She suspected that what she was actually doing was yielding in a very sneaky way to the promptings of curiosity. By the time she reached the largest of the three bedrooms (the other two of which were completely empty), she had amassed a heap of clothes almost too large to see over. She waddled across the room and dumped it on a chair next to the bed.

  It hit her all in a flash.

  She was standing in the middle of her little brother's bedroom.

  Her brother had been a soldering-iron sort of kid. His room had been filled with contraptions that looked as though they might blow the house up or electrocute somebody, model rockets that he planned to blast off in the back yard, a computer programmed to make up dirty limericks from lists of randomly chosen words. She could see immediately that Gene Deere had been that sort of kid exactly, and in fact that he had never grown out of it. The soldering iron was gone, but in its place were equivalent grown-up gadgets—a negative ion generator, a Grundig multiband radio, some sort of Scandinavian all-in-one exercise apparatus, various stainless steel and wood executive playthings that you set in motion or contort into physically implausible shapes, and a very complicated mobile that Ludi took to represent a molecule of DNA. There were also a home weather station, a very sophisticated telephone, and an autographed photo of Richard Feynmann. She wondered if he had some kind of household robot to fetch his slippers for him.

  Ludi fell into a kind of nostalgic reverie. She thought about her brother and the mysteries of the male/female dichotomy—and also the dweeb/normal person dichotomy—and she was reluctant to come out of it, even when she heard Jesse's footsteps on the stairs. The footsteps came down the hallway and stopped at the bedroom door.

  "Check this out," Ludi said, turning to him. But it was not Jesse.

  It was Gene Deere. He stared at her in what could not have been absolute astonishment (her Volkswagen was shiny orange and it was parked in plain view out front), though it certainly looked that way.

  "You are standing in my room," Gene told her.

  "Yeah." She gestured weakly toward the pile of mangled laundry. "I was just picking up your clothes—"

  "You were in my house, picking up my clothes!"

  He didn't get it. For some reason she knew that she would be unable to explain it to him. She tried anyway. "Yeah—they were like, all over the stairs and the living room and they had teeth marks all over them."

  Gene came forward, shaking his head. "I'm not believing this," he said. "I am simply not believing what I see here."

  Ludi tried changing the subject. "Did you run into Jesse downstairs?"

  "Who's Jesse?" demanded Gene. He was getting hotter in the brainpan the longer he was in the room with her. "Some other animal you've dragged home to live with me?"

  "Jesse is a Passamaquoddy Indian and he was sitting on your front porch," said Ludi.

  That stopped him for a moment. "Oh," he said. "Jesse. He was here?"

  "The last I saw."

  "Well, he isn't now."

  "Oh. Too bad. I guess you missed him."

  "Why are we having this conversation? Why do I come home from a hellacious day at work to find you standing in the middle of my bedroom! Is there something I don't understand? Am I going to have to start locking my doors now?"

  "You might as well," said Ludi. She walked out to the hall. There was no talking to them when they got like this. Her brother had been exactly the same way. As though they really had anything to hide. What was he scared of—that she would find back issues of Penthouse tucked under the mattress? Semen stains on his pajamas? What?

  "And now you're just going to walk out?" Gene called after her.

  "Looks like it."

  He came down the stairs behind her. Tex the baby bear was asleep on the bottom landing. Poor thing, thought Ludi. He must have had a hard little day.

  "This is just too much," said Gene, looking over the wreckage of his living room. "I can't absorb any more."

  "I know the feeling," said Ludi. "I know you don't think I do, but I do. Give me a call when you feel more ordinary and we'll talk things over."

  "More ordinary?" he said.

  He was practically shouting now, as he trailed her out to the muddy driveway.

  "I never feel ordinary!" he shouted as she climbed into the driver's seat and shut the door on him.

  "Practice," she said, starting the car. Though she knew he couldn't hear her.

  2 AT ONCE IS TOO MUCH

  When the knock came at the door of her apartment—her first thought was, Is it him? Him meaning Gene.

  Her next thought was, No way.

  But along with that thought came another, semisecret one. Which was

  (If I think it's not him, then maybe it will be.)

  And it was in this state of mind, approximately, that she stepped past the Danish Modern living/dining ensemble and pulled open the door.

  "What is that music you're listening to?" said Guillermo.

  He proceeded directly to the kitchen, where he stood before the Formica-topped breakfast bar, glancing warily about: the guerrilla jefe checking for signs of government occupation.

  "English muffins?" he said, examining the remains of Ludi's breakfast.

  "It's Marilyn Home," said Ludi. " 'Lush Life.' Got a problem with that?"

  Guillermo appeared to notice her for the first time. "I was only asking."

  "What do you want?" she asked him. And before he could answer she tacked on: "Frank."

  His chest swelled up, held the air for a long moment, and dropped. The jefe recognizes with great sadness that his people have entered a time of unremitting struggle. "I haven't seen you for a while," he said. "I just thought I'd look in and see how you were getting on."

  "Getting on?" she said. "That sounds like something an old lady does. It's only been a week."

  "Week and a half."

  He walked out into the living/dining area and arranged himself prominently on the sofa, like an important element in the design. Decorating Rule #3: Create a focal point to draw the composition together.

  "Something interesting is about to happen," he announced.

  "I bet."

  "No, really. I just wanted to tell you, so you can be watching the news this evening."

  "What part, the weather report? Are you going to part the waters of Cold Bay so all the wage slaves can escape?''

  "All right, forget it." Guillermo shifted his position. More accommodating now. "So how are you doing? How's your play coming along?"

  Ludi sighed. Resistance was futile. He was going to keep working at her until she loosened up. If necessary, he would reach into some deep pocket and produce flowers, chocolates, groovy earrings, smooch her neck, run his hands up and down the inside of her thighs—and that was the last thing she needed.

  "The play's kind of blocked," she said, prophylactically. "I thought I had something, but now it's gone."

  From the bedroom, the Music of Your Life station was playing Kiri Te Kanawa's version of "Here Comes That Rainy Day."

  There was another knock on the door.

  "Want me to get it?" said Guillermo.

  "No," Ludi said—not stopping Guillermo, who bounded up and crossed the room in the time it took the Nelson Riddle Orchestra to drop a schmaltzy 7th diminished chord.