![]() "Not hungry," he said, and stood up gladly, leading the way to his bedroom. ![]() "Harvey," said his mother, "are you hungry? Show your room, please." Yet he was enough his practical father's son to know that the dream's existence was at once its denial and so he sat with the adults exercising that tolerance which being a boy sometimes demands. He seemed impatiently expectant, as though he were both wishing to get this conversation over with and at the same time hoping that, miraculously, some magician from the comic books he habitually reads would appear, sweep away those coral-and-ebony pieces, those subtly indirect lights and those marbleized tabletops and plant in their stead the tangled, sunburnt bush and the sweeping vistas of his recently beloved Angola. Speaking, he mamboed from foot to foot, letting his shy, breathless sentences fly like buckshot sitting and listening, he stared at his fidgeting, unresting hands in something close to wonder, as though he had grown them only a moment before. He moved with a springy clumsiness, like a young beast that, having achieved nearly full growth, has not quite learned to manage it. He was attired in khaki pants and a khaki shirt, both of which he had worn in Africa. Harvey Schur's softly boyish face, with round, almost pudgy cheeks and the brown curly hair above it, looked incongruous atop his brawny body. He said to me, 'Ben, the kid's got a natural marksman's eye.' I said, 'How much does that mean he's got in the bank?' " Benjamin Schur winked and lighted one of the Portuguese cigars Harvey had brought him from Angola. I used to let Harvey go up there weekends by himself up 'til he was about 11-Frank taught him to shoot, handle guns, take care of himself, like, out in the woods. "This Frank Kesicke, he's a retired police captain he's got a farm near Rhinebeck, New York. "I'm not forgetting Frank Kesicke," Benjamin Schur said, inclining his head toward his prompter. Harvey, he's still walkin' around all over the place." "Whatever he was, a friend of mine and I, we took him along deer hunting in Sullivan County. "I never killed an animal myself," Benjamin Schur said, "because I never saw one. All he wants to do is hunt and fish-and is he determined!" "Believe me, you can't get him interested in anything else. Schur, sitting on a coral-pink sofa off to one side, a little behind her husband.
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