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it.
    Milt and I were approaching The Inventor’s out in North Wash one day, and a sixteen-foot truck pulled away from the curb, all marked over with graffiti. But a block and a half up the driver got out and it was Umo and he went in a bungalow as we waited staring till The Inventor’s old door painted purple on the top half and saffron orange on the bottom opened. Milt, too tall and starved-appearing, was arguing with The Inventor almost before we got inside—his stark skeleton towering over the unthinkably-dark or Dravidian Indian (or part “Paki” it was said he might be) who always welcomed us as his “collectors,” his “discoveries,” his “fellow citizenry,” and made a little speech which would irritate Milt, who I think really understood The Inventor but was nervous for some reason; and when I looked out the shop’s side window facing north the truck up the street was gone. But then Umo came out onto the porch of the bungalow and looked up and down the street, turning only his head, and looked in this direction and went back in.
    Almost everything at The Inventor’s was secondhand, yet each visit we found something new. New for us. Third-hand, fourth-hand, sixth-, it occurs to me. A Watchman comic from way back when we were twelve, an action figure of the President to maybe tickle even my father; yet now among toys, curios, weird Peruvian crafts—Brazilian gods, Mexican animals, two Sumatran buffalos squaring off on a pedestal of polished wood—there were surprises in the back room and, of recent months, yellow and amber gum-stuffs the smells of which The Inventor could name—Pacific pine, woman hair, foot-sweet, gold, rank—and especially now these white business envelopes you had to buy without knowing what they held, and a slanting reference to current events and an old-world turn of phrase as when some Sacramento name I thought I recognized was said to be “close to the loins of the Administration,” meaning I assumed Washington.
    The Inventor showed Milt a model fishing canoe made by a blind child and Milt was shaking his head this time with awe. “That’s ill.” The Inventor said he was giving it to Milt. I asked him later what it was that blew him away. He said The Inventor had had a daughter but had lost her. I envied Milt that he knew such a thing, for did not The Inventor confide in me as well? Umo’s truck had left; without Umo, I was certain. Suspicious especially when receiving a gift, Milt picked an argument with me when The Inventor went to find a box, Milt suddenly wondering why in our discussion of a cousin of his somewhat blinded by this awful foreign mainly skin disease erysipelas I mentioned a Korean chick I’d met at the high school track one Saturday morning who saw me spit on the ground of the long-jump approach run-up and told me to save my spit, Jesus had spat in the eyes of a blind man in Saint Mark and he could see. Why had I made up that nonsense, Milt wanted to know. No such thing, I said, she had grinned at me so maybe she was kidding. She was cute. Which was why I went home and looked it up in the Bible in my sister’s room and my mom found me there and I tried to explain the miracle to her, the truth behind it, Jesus at work, but my mom shut me up though not till she had heard enough. (Well, I had added a bit to it.) It wasn’t a happy moment though it sounds funny. No, it doesn’t, said my sister when she came home that night. There it was in the 8 th chapter anyway, and when I saw Milt at the pool I had told him and he went ballistic, he was a minister’s son (was he ashamed of that?) and here at The Inventor’s he came back to it because he was amazed The Inventor was giving him the canoe. I could understand all this. And it was only then that Milt asked if Umo in that truck had unloaded something at The Inventor’s.
    Oh Umo was around. Seldom out of work. The work