NO MORE FAVORS BRUCE BOTHWELL 28 He just appeared at the door of Mrs. Barclay's room one day from nowhere. He stood in the doorway like a sloppy giant, certainly not a defender of the good, nor the wicked destroyer of the masses. I sat in the desk at the back of the room closest to the door; and because I was bored with the silly story Mrs. Barclay was reading and was discovering minute details in the back of the room around which I could build a story in my own mind like the way the ledge at the top of the high door formed just the right angle with the door frame to suggest a long rifle and exciting buffalo hunts and Indian scalpings, I saw him. One minute he was not there and the next he was. I imagined that he might be a powerful jinni until I studied him more closely. He must have been six feet tall. He first impressed me as being massive, not powerfully massive, but massive in the sense that he was the first boy I had ever seen with so much fat. His whole face sagged down under the weight of thick cheeks, and his neck was nothing more than a gigantic chin. He had sunburned arms about the size of my thighs with caved dimples at the elbows. His enormous middle section reminded me of the fat lady I had seen in the sideshow two years before when the Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey circus had come to town. I didn't see how his legs, although big, could possibly hold up the terrible tonnage of his top half, expecially because they seemed relatively short compared to his expansive middle. At closer scrutiny, I noticed threads of sweat slipping down his red face, a face of squinting eyes, a short broad nose, and a thick, expressionless mouth. I could see dirt on the front of his wrinkled white shirt, and a tear ran along the seam in front at the armpit. Olive drab pants that narrowed as they went down like an inverted tent ended in sockless tennis shoes with the canvas peeling away from the rubber. I know I wasn't thinking of what must have been my agonizing stare, because I remember the slight ache in my jaw when I closed my mouth. Mrs. Barclay must have missed my movement in the back of the room; for just about the time I became conscious of staring, she stopped reading in the middle of a sentence, looked up from her book, and scowled contemptuously at the strange boy. I jerked a look at her when the drone of her voice cut off. With the abrupt interruption to the practiced and expected flow of 29