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speaking the same lines they’d spoken before. Back and forth, back and forth they’d go at each other. Then finally they’d come back around to their little boy, who was such a shameful little bigot. Obviously, it wasn’t in their interest to acknowledge the truth—that foremost I was afraid, not bigoted. Calling me bigoted was simply a tactic for confusing the issue. Any hatred I displayed was epiphenomenal to my fear. Every child has his fears, and the worst of mine was a fear of them. Not my mother and father. Well, I was afraid of them, too—that’s not unusual. But as a child I didn’t hate them. I hated those others—the small people.
     
    ***
     
    One time my parents and I were on vacation. My father was at the wheel. He was smiling slightly and staring with concentration. That was how he always looked, even when he wasn’t driving—always smiling slightly and always staring with concentration. Next to him my mother sat quietly. The sun was shining on her smooth face. She had such a smooth face, Doctor, and big eyes. I was sitting in the middle of the back seat, minding my own business and taking in the wide spaces of the scenery, not focusing on anything in particular. Then I saw the sign just off the right side of the road. It had one of those simple faces on it, and written below were the words: SMALL COUNTRY. My whole body tightened, as it always did when I saw one of those road signs. The arrow at the bottom of the sign pointed straight up, so that drivers would know they were in range of small country.
    I slid over to the right side of the car and began to survey the landscape. A short distance from the road we were on was another road, a smaller road. It meandered through an open plain slightly below us. I shifted my eyes toward the front seat and saw my father looking in the rearview mirror at me. But I didn’t care. This was the closest I had ever been to small country, and I wanted to see all I could, which for a long while wasn’t anything except that empty plain with that small road passing through it. Such is the perversity born of fear. At the same time that I wanted to see something, I was terrified of what I might see. I felt as if I were having one of those dreams where you’re alone but still feel the presence of something unimaginably awful that might appear all of a sudden. It was at the height of this nightmarish sensation that I saw the little car turning a bend in the small road. About the same time, our road—the big road—started curving toward the other. The closer the little car came to us, the more I felt the urge to dive to the floor of our car. But then I would have missed seeing them.
    Their car, the little car, looked like a toy. It wasn’t exactly its size that demoted it from a properly motorized conveyance to a plaything, because the pretend car wasn’t so near our real car that I could compare the two. It was the flagrant actuality that everything about it was toy-like, as if it were made of molded plastic and rolling along on teetering wheels. And it bore none of the details on it of a real car, at least that I could tell. Structurally, it had a simple square body painted bright red. That had to be the color, of course, just so that it would stand out in the scene, and I could be all the more afraid than if its color had been white or yellow or some shade of blue. But I stopped attending to the car once I saw what was inside.
    Until then, I scarcely had a glimpse of any small people. My strange fear of them originated mostly from the simple face on the road signs that alerted people, real people, of their impending entry into small country. The mere idea of the smalls was enough to make me anxious about something I couldn’t name. And after looking into that red plastic toy, I was sorry I hadn’t thrown myself down onto the floor of our car, even knowing that my parents would have called me a shameful little bigot for the rest of the vacation.
    After our cars