"Pinna goes to prison," the Viper said, "at least he won't have to worry about taking care of himself no more."

     "Do you think he did it? Ground bodies up for the Mob?"

     "What makes you think he wouldn't?"

     Roy and the Viper were on a bus passing the lake, which was frozen over. Roy remembered seeing Louie Pinna with Jump Garcia and Terry the Whip, both of whom had done time in the reformatory at St. Charles, going into Rizzo and Phil's, a bar on Ravenswood Avenue, a couple of years before. The cuffs of Pinna's trousers came down only to the tops of his ankles and he was wearing white socks with badly scuffed brown shoes. Rizzo and Phil's, Roy had heard, was supposedly a hangout for Mob guys.

     "Pinna never picked on younger kids," Roy said. "He wasn't a bully."

     "He did the thing," said the Viper, "ain't no character witnesses from grammar school gonna do him no good."

     "Can't see what good it'd do to put Pinna away. He didn't harm a living person."

     That night, Roy's mother's husband, her third, a jazz drummer who used the name Sid "Spanky" Wade--his real name was Czeslaw Wanchovsky--almost drowned in the bathtub. He had been smoking marijuana, fallen asleep and gone under. Spanky woke up just in time to regurgitate the water he'd inhaled through his nostrils. Roy's mother heard him splashing and coughing, went into the bathroom and tried to pull Spanky out of the tub, but he was too heavy for her to lift by herself.

     "Roy!" she yelled. "Come help me!"

     Roy and his mother managed to drag Spanky over the side and onto the floor, where he lay puking and gagging. Roy saw the remains of the reefer floating in the tub. Spanky was short and stout. Lying there on the bathroom floor, to Roy he resembled a big red hog, the kind of animal Louie Pinna had shoved into an industrial sausage maker. Roy began to laugh. He tried to stop but he could not. His mother shouted at him. Roy looked at her. She kept shouting. Suddenly, he could no longer hear or see anything.