Whipple's Castle by Thomas Williams

careful,” Wood said.
    â€œI know you are.” It was strange to see Al stopped, contemplative, not on his way somewhere. Now, for a moment he looked at Wood appraisingly. “I can’t figure you out, Wood,” he said. He paused, then spoke too softly, and Wood couldn’t hear him.
    â€œCan’t hear you.”
    â€œI said you don’t seem so damned innocent, somehow.”
    Suddenly Wood felt great tenderness for Al, and he put his hand on Al’s shoulder. “You’re a good man,” he said, and Al actually blushed. It was like a dark light passing across his usually pale, bluish face and scalp—a dark color, not really red at all. Al patted him on the arm with his wounded hand, and turned to go. “I wish you weren’t headed for the Army,” he said. “But then I don’t suspect we could keep you here anyway.”
    Back in the cellar at his push trucks, Wood wondered why he had felt it necessary at that moment to put his hand on Al’s shoulder—why, without really thinking at all, he had done that little thing. It was almost as though he asked for the authority he didn’t want. Perhaps it was because he wanted to say to Al, “Look, here’s another one like you, living in a world of irresponsible children, never without the curse of responsibility.” But that was to ask for duty, and he knew it.
    At eighteen he seemed to have been an adult all his life—a grown man, even an old man. He resented the loss of his childhood, and for a moment remembered with nostalgia jumping from a barn beam twenty feet into hay—that feeling of being totally in the power of some higher force. Gravity. He could do nothing for twenty feet but fall, fall, and land in the hay that was infinitely soft and forgiving. And then to climb again up the sticks of ladder nailed to the heavy upright, and inch out on the beam where danger disappeared, where any fall was safe.
    When he got up to cut more lath into struts, a girl stood next to the elevator, looking at him. Her face was in shadow, but she looked familiar to him—a big girl. Then she turned and went up the stairs, her blue skirt rippling above the flash of her leg. Beady immediately stuck his head around the corner by the stairwell and said, “Missed again, dammit!”
    â€œToo bad,” Wood said, and then asked, because it was always something that had puzzled him, “Beady, how can you want it all the time, when you’re married?”
    â€œAh, youth,” Beady said, coming over. “I thought the same thing, once. ‘Get married, and when it itches, scratch it’”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œThere’s a lot of different kinds of itches, Woodie.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    Beady looked at him and shook his head. He pulled the lobe of one ear, and his whole face seemed to tilt upon his stationary head, as if his hardened face were all one piece. “You really want an answer to that question?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou really do.”
    â€œYes.”
    Beady took his marking pencil from behind his other ear and began, idly, to draw stripes on the white laths. “Woodie, I don’t know why I want to do it, but I want…I really want to do it to every broad in Leah. There’s something about a woman makes me think I have to do it to her. Does that explain it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œEven the ugly ones. I mean it. Sometimes it’s like a holy place I’ve got to visit. I mean like a shrine. It’s like religion to me. I really mean that, Woodie. I don’t know why the hell I’m telling you. I never thought of it that way before. But I mean it. When a girl turns me down, hell, I laugh and make out it was a joke all the time, but I’ll tell you I feel like God cast me out. I do. Cast me out into the everlasting darkness. Out of grace. Out.” Beady shook his head sadly. “I’m nuts, of course,” he