That night, at Homer’s house, we had beef stroganoff that was pink. That was his mother’s specialty: pink stroganoff. She made it with sour cream and real mushrooms, not canned, and red wine, not white — that was what made it pink. Mr. Ashmont was a taller version of Homer, a big, cool hound dog with deep creases in his cheeks. He shoveled up the stroganoff and made jokes no one understood. He was a lieutenant commander in the navy, and went from here to there in a battleship. Homer’s mom was the tallest one: all teeth and long, stringy brown arms. The daughters looked like Homer, too, girlish Homers. The whole family had a rich, square-jawed, dimply, big-toothed vitality. They were swimmers and ballplayers, horseback riders and golfers. They put their napkins in their laps. They treated me as if I were twenty-six years old. They took a keen, warm interest in the dullest details of my life. They were Catholics. (I had never known any Catholics before.) I scooped up a little pink stroganoff and took a taste off the tip of my spoon, expecting raspberry, but it was beef, creamy beef with wine and melted onions. I had to restrain myself from eating too fast.

The Ashmonts were the only people on the block who owned a color TV. Other than that, their house was just like my house — a clean house with clean air in it, not hot, hairy, vegetable-soup-smelling air, like at the Carrs’ or the Sambeauxs’. The Ashmonts’ air smelled like after-shave from the 1940s. These are Illinois people, I kept telling myself. In my mind, Illinois was another country: cornstalks rustling in the breeze; old men sitting on a bench in front of the post office; kids racing their Flexies down the hill in the weightless thickness of twilight; friendly drunks with bottles of red wine who give you a dollar; a guy with a handlebar mustache polishing the chrome spigots at the soda fountain. There was a sort of unaccountable, cottony religion of humanity about them. This is how people are supposed to be! I thought. My head began to spin with the subtle intoxication of wholesomeness. It was a shock to my system, like Shangri-La to the downed American war pilot.

We had ice cream with hot-fudge sauce for dessert, and after dinner Homer took me down to his room and we played two games of Stratego and one of Battleship. We didn’t speak once about adult temptations, not a word about unspeakable desire. When Homer swore, he said shoot, or nuts. Our only talk about growing up was about the Major Leagues. He would pitch for a good club. They would call him the Cobra, on account of the fantastic way his curveball broke.

I did not know, when I walked out of my mustard-colored house now, whether it was I or the world that had changed. Somewhere, a war was on that I was only dimly aware of. In our town, a trial was on that I was only dimly aware of, even though my mother was a principal witness, and the children across the street — my friends — were the unwilling plaintiffs. Sometime in that year of 1967, the first kiddie-consumptive, recreational drugs began to appear on our street. They came with the war. They were anesthesia for the war. They were packed like candy; they even looked like candy, and had edible, colorful names: greenies and blue devils and yellow sunshine. They were in the songs on the radio, and in the magic feeling of being young and blossoming in a changing world. Many of the children did not resist their siren call, the Carrs and the Sambeauxs especially. Homer was not in the least tempted. He knew what “devils” were. The devil comes around just to mess you up; he doesn’t want you to pitch in the Major Leagues. I envied the logic and cleanliness of his mind. I tried to think of myself as an Illinois farm boy with the Virgin Mary watching over me.

When I saw them on the street, my old pals were quivering like little electric beasts. They stood out under the threatening sky like lightning rods for adulthood. Queenie Carr, ten years old, already had green eyelids and a slinky walk and a bleary lipstick grin and tacky, thrilling, hussy perfume and a rack of whites for a dollar in her purse. She would sidle up to me and dabble her fingers along my ribs. Meet me later, big boy, she’d say; ten o’clock, out by the gas meter. They gathered in little crowds on the sidewalk like old men around trash fires, their movements jagged or slow, shattered or dreamy, wrong-eyed, puppet-wired, bamboozled. They watched me with bitter cigarette scowls as I walked down to Homer’s house. He was going to be a ballplayer, and to be a ballplayer you had to live clean. Sex might take some of the bite off your curveball, and you certainly didn’t eat speed or drink malt liquor. He and I got some money from our parents and went to the grocery store and bought packages of Carl Buddig smoked meats. We came back and Homer built a fire in the fireplace. There was a movie on that night: Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. We got out the plates, pickles, cocktail peanuts, cream soda. The sparks from the chimney whirled up into stars.

The Sambeaux trial dragged on. At first, the children tried to protect their father. Opinions varied as to the degree of his guilt and what should be done with him afterward. My mother came home every day from the trial with reports, and rendered careful, Victorian scenes. My playmates painted cruder portraits. Neighbors volunteered scraps and morsels. Rumors and suspicions abounded. I reconstructed the entire chilling tale in my head.

Every weekend, Homer and I went to the matinee at the Helix Theater. Then we rode our bicycles four miles to the great blue-green vat of urine and chlorine called La Mesa Public Pool. Our moms drove us to the beach, and we learned how to surf on ten-foot boards. We tried to stay off the street as much as possible. The street was the enemy.

Mr. Sambeaux was sent away to a work camp for two years to sharpen up his ping-pong and metallurgy skills. (He was originally sentenced to a mental facility, but since this man who covered up things for a living would never admit to any wrongdoing, they were unable to treat him.) My mother, who had a new interest in the law, began to attend court-reporting school. The Sambeaux house was strangely quiet now. Bizzy went away for a while. Langston left, too, to live with an uncle in Florida. The remaining Sambeaux children had crumpled shoulders and bewildered, ruined expressions and smoldering eyes, like snuffed-out candles.

When eighth grade started, Homer and I tried to get into the same classes. We walked to school together every day, and Roland came with us once or twice a week, whenever he got organized enough to go. He followed along glumly, walking most of the way in the gutter, head down, kicking scraps. He carried a pack of cigarettes to school in his jacket — tricked up in his sleeve, slipped into the lining somehow — and he’d light one on the way, smoking it sullenly, cupping it in his palm. Homer and I were antismoking; it was the same as being antideath. Roland was tough, though. He didn’t care if he died. He had once considered Homer his best friend.

The next fall, when Roland found out he’d flunked eighth grade, he was so shocked he couldn’t speak. He hadn’t imagined that he could flunk. You went to school and they passed you along. It happened to everyone. All you had to do was go through the motions. It was the first day of ninth grade. We’d gone in to get our schedules, and they’d told Roland he’d have to do eighth grade over again. Now we stood outside under the clouds, and he looked at us and blinked in disbelief. Then his face shrank into a wrinkle, his big green eyes disappeared, and he began to bawl. He wept freely without covering his face, the water pouring down his cheeks. Homer and I patted his shoulder and said that it was probably some kind of mistake. But we walked home from ninth grade by ourselves that afternoon. And the next morning it was the same, and I hardly ever saw Roland after that. He watched me from the shadows, a slow, bitter shadow himself. I had taken his luck and his best friend — I might as well have taken his life.

Much later, Roland and I got to be something like friends again, though it was never the same. There would always be that wound of resentment, those long months of insurmountable shame. And even when he was married and I was his best man and he was happy for a few days and thanked me for being someone who had never turned on him, it didn’t change. I was simply too lucky to be forgiven.

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