The Centaur by John Updike

manners. But in getting into the back seat he behaved curiously. He did not lift his fingers from the sill of my window until with the other arm, awkwardly pinching the bundle against his side, he had worked open the back door. As if we were, my selfless father and my innocent self, a treacherous black animal he was capturing. Once safe in the cavity behind us, he sighed and said, in one of those small ichorous voices that seems always to be retracting in mid-sentence, “What a fucking day. Freeze your sucking balls off.”
    My father let out the clutch and did a shocking thing: turning his head to talk to the stranger, he turned off my radio. The musical choo-choo with all its freight of dreaming dropped over a cliff. The copious purity of my future shrank to the meagre confusion of my present. “Just as long as it doesn’t snow,” my father said. “That’s all the hell I care about. Every morning I pray: ‘Dear Lord, no snow.’ ”
    Unseen behind me the hitchhiker was snuffling and liquidly enlarging like some primeval monster coming to life again out of a glacier. “How about you, boy?” he said, andthrough the hairs on my neck I could feel him hunch forward. “You don’t mind the snow, do ya?”
    “The poor kid,” my father said, “he never gets a chance to go sledding any more. We took him out of the town where he loved to be and stuck him in the sticks.”
    “I bet he likes the snow real good,” the hitchhiker said. “I bet he likes it fine.” Snow seemed to mean something else to him; he certainly was a fairy. I was more angered than frightened; my father was with me.
    He, too, seemed disturbed by our guest’s obsession. “How about it, Peter?” he asked me. “Does it still mean a lot to you?”
    “No,”
I said.
    The hitchhiker snorted moistly. My father called back to him, “Where’ve you come from, mister?”
    “North.”
    “You heading into Alton.”
    “Guess so.”
    “You know Alton?”
    “I been there before.”
    “What’s your profession?”
    “Annnh—I cook.”
    “You
cook!
That’s a wonderful accomplishment, and I know you’re not lying to me. What’s your plan? To stay in Alton?”
    “
Ihnnn
. Just to get a job enough to get me south.”
    “You know, mister,” my father said, “you’re doing what I’ve always wanted to do. Bum around from place to place. Live like the birds. When the cold weather hits, just flap your wings and go south.”
    The hitchhiker giggled, puzzled.
    My father went on, “I’ve always wanted to live in Florida, and I never got within smelling distance of it. The furthrestsouth I ever got in my whole life was the great state of Maryland.”
    “Nothin’ much in Maryland.”
    “I remember in grammar school back in Passaic,” my father said, “how they were always telling us about the white stoops of Baltimore. Every morning, they said, the housewives would get out there with the bucket and scrub-brush and wash these white marble stoops until they shone. Ever see that?”
    “I been in Baltimore but I never seen that.”
    “That’s what I thought. They lied to us. Why the hell would anybody spend their life washing a white marble stoop that as soon as you scrub it up some moron with dirty shoes comes along and puts his footprint on it? It never seemed credible to me.”
    “I never seen it,” the hitchhiker said, as if regretting that he had caused such a radical disillusion. My father brought to conversations a cavernous capacity for caring that dismayed strangers. They found themselves involved, willy-nilly, in a futile but urgent search for the truth. This morning my father’s search seemed especially urgent, as if time were running out. He virtually shouted his next question. “How’d you get caught up here? If I was in your shoes, mister, I’d be in Florida so fast you wouldn’t see my dust.”
    “I was living with a guy up in Albany,” the hitchhiker said reluctantly.
    My heart shrivelled to hear my fears confirmed; but my