Ethel. Sometimes the kid would dream at night that
Charlie had come home and was scratching at the trailer ramp to be let
in, and he'd wake Ethel and beg her to go out and see. When that
happened Doc and I could hear Ethel talking to him, low and steady,
until all hours of the morning, and when he finally went back to sleep
we'd hear her open the cupboard and take out the gin bottle.

But there came a night that was more than Ethel could take, a night
that changed Joey's routine and a lot more with it. It left a mark
you've seen yourself--everybody has that's got eyes to see--though
you never knew what made it. Nobody ever knew that but Joey and Ethel
Pond and Doc and me.

Doc and I were turning in around midnight that night when the kid sang
out next door. We heard Ethel get up and go to him, and we got up too
and opened a beer because we knew neither of us would sleep any more
till she got Joey quiet again. But this night was different. Ethel
hadn't talked to the kid long when he yelled, "Charlie! _Charlie!_"
and after that we heard both of them bawling.

A little later Ethel came out into the moonlight and shut the trailer
door behind her. She looked rumpled and beaten, her hair straggling
damply on her shoulders and her eyes puffed and red from crying. The
gin she'd had hadn't helped any either.

She stood for a while without moving, then she looked up at the sky
and said something I'm not likely to forget.

"Why couldn't You give the kid a break?" she said, not railing or
anything but loud enough for us to hear. "You, up there--what's
another lousy one-eyed mutt to You?"

Doc and I looked at each other in the half-dark of our own trailer.
"She's done it, Roy," Doc said.

I knew what he meant and wished I didn't. Ethel had finally told the
kid that Charlie wasn't coming back, not ever.

That's why I was worried about Joey when I came home the next evening
and found him watching the sky instead of the palmetto flats. It meant
he'd given up waiting for Charlie. And the quiet way the kid spoke of
moving the stars around worried me more, because it sounded outright
crazy.

Not that you could blame him for going off his head. It was tough
enough to be pinned to a wheelchair without being able to wiggle so
much as a toe. But to lose his dog in the bargain....

I was on my third beer when Doc Shull rolled in with a big package
under his arm. Doc was stone sober, which surprised me, and he was hot
and tired fr