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age of 10,000 B.C. , their numbers were severely depleted, although there is evidence of some having existed within the Black Sea basin as recently as 500 B.C.
    I shook my head. “They weren’t extinct twenty thousand years ago—it says here they found some in Europe in 500 B.C. So—”
    Hillary rolled his eyes. “So that’s still over two thousand years ago, Lit! Listen—there’s no way anyone ever had an Irish Elk in Kamensic, okay?”
    “I’m just telling you what the sign said in the Courthouse Museum.”
    “The sign in the Courthouse is wrong. And what the hell would Mrs. Langford know about it, anyway? She believes in Bigfoot.” Hillary collected his books and swept back upstairs, yelling his parting shot. “Your dad just called. You’re supposed to go home.”
    Hillary was my best friend and next-door neighbor. His parents were the Fabulous Wellers, Natalie and Edmund: English actors who had made their debuts alongside Laurence Olivier in a 1940s production of Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and gone on to mainstream success in the 1950s and early ’60s with a series of Ealing comedies in which they played Flo and Moe Fleck, divorced private investigators who continued to work together despite past (and continuing) infidelities. In real life, both were homosexual. Natty’s youthful passions were notorious and flamboyant. She had run off with the wife of a Chicago financier and later had a long-term, dish-throwing relationship with a predatory blonde starlet named Ada Morn, before marrying Edmund, whose own lovers tended to be men of his own age and temperament: stable, soft-spoken, quietly humorous.
    Now both were in their early fifties. Like my father, Natalie and Edmund were part of the repertory company at the Avalon Shakespeare Theater in Avon, Connecticut, and otherwise spent their time raising bees and restoring old-stock apple trees with names like Foxwhelp and Ten Commandments. Hillary was their only child. He was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, a family friend.
    “It was actually quite a sacrifice for them to make,” he remarked once when we were hanging out at Deer Park. “I mean, probably they really wanted to name me Bob, or Stan—”
    “Or Butch.”
    “Or Butch.” He nodded sagely and took another swig of his beer. “But they stuck to their guns and named me Hillary, damn it. They’re good people, my parents. Good damn people.”
    I don’t remember the first time I met Hillary. He was just always there, like the Wellers’ old apple trees and weathered colonial farmhouse that formed the backdrop to my own house. We were the same age and in the same grade at the Kamensic Village School, and, except for a dicey few months in early adolescence when we hated each other, completely inseparable. We roamed freely between our two homes, eating and playing and later sleeping together, companionable as puppies. When my parents were away, rehearsing or performing, I stayed with Hillary. When Natty and Edmund went to England for three months to tape a Flo and Moe reunion, Hillary lived with us. Some people thought we were brother and sister, and there was a superficial resemblance. We were both tall, with shoulder-length hair, though Hillary’s was jet-black and mine a rather dingy dark blonde. And we both had large, oblique eyes. Mine were such a pale gray as to seem luminous; Hillary’s a deep hazel, the color of new moss on old bark. When we were fourteen we began what was to be a long-time pattern of falling in and out of love with each other, alternating between passionate declarations and equally heartfelt platonic discussions of why it was a far far better thing to remain best friends. This didn’t stop us from sleeping together, usually after a night of drinking at Deer Park. Sex with Hillary was fun, the way sex with my other friends was fun: occasionally confusing but never punitive. Our parents were remarkably grown-up about steering us toward various methods of birth control, and so