We walked on, the crust cracking uneasily under us. “Nervous in the service,” I said. “That
sounds like one of Brinker’s poems.”
“That bastard!”
“You wouldn’t know Brinker these days the way he’s changed—”
“I’d know that bastard if he’d changed into Snow White.”
“Well. He hasn’t changed into Snow White.”
“That’s too bad,” the strained laughter was back in his voice, “Snow White with Brinker’s face
on her. There’s a picture,” then he broke into sobs.
“Leper! What is it? What’s the matter, Leper? Leper!”
Hoarse, cracking sobs broke from him; another ounce of grief and he would have begun tearing
his country-store clothes. “Leper! Leper!” This exposure drew us violently together; I was the
closest person in the world to him now, and he to me. “Leper, for God sakes, Leper.” I was about
to cry myself. “Stop that, now just stop. Don’t do that. Stop doing that, Leper.”
When he became quieter, not less despairing but too exhausted to keep on, I said, “I’m sorry I
brought up Brinker. I didn’t know you hated him so much.” Leper didn’t look capable of such
hates. Especially now, with his rapid plumes of breath puffing out as from a toiling steam engine,
his nose and eyes gone red, and his cheeks red too, in large, irregular blotches—Leper had the
kind of fragile fair skin given to high, unhealthy coloring. He was all color, painted at random,
but none of it highlighted his grief. Instead of desperate and hate-filled, he looked, with his
checkered outfit and blotchy face, like a half-prepared clown.
“I don’t really hate Brinker, I don’t really hate him, not any more than anybody else.” His
swimming eyes cautiously explored me. The wind lifted a sail of snow and billowed it past us.
“It was only—” he drew in his breath so sharply that it made a whistling sound—”the idea of his
face on a woman’s body. That’s what made me psycho. Ideas like that. I don’t know. I guess they
must be right. I guess I am psycho. I guess I must be. I must be. Did you ever have ideas like
that?”
“No.”
“Would they bother you if you did, if you happened to keep imagining a man’s head on a
woman’s body, or if sometimes the arm of a chair turned into a human arm if you looked at it too
long, things like that? Would they bother you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Maybe everybody imagines things like that when they’re away from home, really far away, for
the first time. Do you think so? The camp I went to first, they called it a ‘Reception center,’ got