I'm Dick Felder!

For no apparent reason, Felder's son, on his tenth birthday, decided to change his name from Chuck to Shecky. The boy, whose main interest was plumbing equipment, gave no explanation. But he was so insistent that Felder went ahead and picked up the necessary forms at city hall one day after work, though he had no intention of actually mailing them off once the child had filled them out.

The Shecky-Chuck situation was just one new thing about his own life that Felder did not understand. Lately, there seemed to be more and more of them, such as why his wife, Gene--short for Eugenia--had suddenly become so feverish on their bed of matrimony. The pair had wed when Felder was fresh out of Colgate Dental and setting up his own practice. (Felder could never mention his alma mater without thinking of his father, a retired tool-and-die man. "How do you like that," Felder Sr. would joke each Thanksgiving when Felder came to visit, "the kid wants to be a dentist, so he picks a school they named after a tooth paste!" Every year, until the stroke that paralyzed his tongue, restricting him to excited snapping noises, Felder's dad had come up with a new angle on his Colgate gag. After he died, Felder had tried to cook up a few holiday tooth-paste jokes of his own, in the old man's honor, but it wasn't the same.)

Even in their office-sweetheart days, Gene had never really fallen into what the manuals they consulted called the Ardent category, sexual relations-wise. She was a long, languid girl who tended to clear her throat after a while and ask if Felder was finished yet. Now, though, all he had to do was stroke her back to send her rippling through a series of shrieks and twitches. Which was fine with Felder--except that twice in one week, he thought he'd heard her pronounce the name Elroy before launching into a bout of twitching shrieks in bed beneath him. This was another new thing he didn't quite get.

Felder had fallen in love with his wife because of her overbite. He was a cream puff for overbites. The sight of one on a languid redhead with a swath of freckles and perfect, mile-long legs had made him swoon the minute he met her. Gene was the only girl he had interviewed to be his dental assistant. He saw her first and simply told the others to go away. As it happened, though, the girl's good looks were not matched by a flair for oral hygiene. Gene would often gaze across a patient's upturned face and hold her nose, her way of hinting that the breath of that peppy-bachelor beneath them was "worse than the city dump" (her favorite saying). She talked right over people or commented on their clothes. To her, they were just 32 teeth she had to rinse and pick at.

For weeks, Felder wrestled with himself. Finally, he decided he had to either fire her or ask her to marry him. So he did both. Soon thereafter, Mrs. Felder was pregnant with Shecky-Chuck, and Felder had already put another ad in Dental Week. This time, he hired Uni, a gentle Japanese hygienist with long black hair and such skilled hands that everybody whose plaque she removed came away glowing. Once, over coffee, the petite assistant confided that in Japan, her mother actually got up early to put the tooth paste on her husband's brush. Felder hated to admit it, but he might have liked that--if not every day, then at least on his birthday and major holidays. Instead, for the past 11 years, he'd had Gene, who had announced just last week, their first night in the split-level Felder had nailed down with a variable mortgage--another new thing--that she had no more intention of sitting home watching soaps than she did of hopping to Miami on her clit. That was the kind of remark Gene made lately, which was also sort of new. When Felder met her, she couldn't say "Dog do" without blushing.

"I have my Tupperware, I have my child, I have my shopping and I have you," Gene informed him after her clit remark. And Felder's heart sank to think that if his wife were an Olympic event, he wouldn't even have brought home a bronze.

There were new developments at the office, too--such as Mrs. Pfennig's mouth. Mrs. Pfennig was one of dozens of ancient patients Felder had inherited from Dr. Nance, the dentist with whom he'd recently signed on. Nearly all of Nance's patients were of rest-home age. This meant a busload of denture work--never Felder's favorite activity. And yet, in a piece of good fortune that still astonished him, Nance had dropped the entire practice into his lap after state dental inspectors began sniffing around for Medicare infractions. His partner of only a few months, the senior dentist retired at 42 to concentrate on sport fishing in Bimini. And Felder, incredibly, was left with a battery of lucrative blue-hairs all his own. Almost without trying, it seemed, he had become fairly wealthy. There were drawbacks, of course--aside from all those retirees, he never got used to showing up every day at a shopping mall, where Nance's office was wedged between The Puff Hut, "a feline boutique," and Mister Jackie's, a hairpiece salon for men. But still, as his wife kept telling him, only a fool would complain about falling into something so sweet. So Felder kept his senior-shopping-mall queasiness to himself

Mrs. Pfennig, though, was a majestic, well-coifed woman, the widow of a judge. She had a swanlike neck that required his keeping the dental chair as low to the floor as possible. For rear-molar work, Felder, even at 5'8", had to stand on a telephone book. And in recent weeks, Mrs. Pfennig had required massive amounts of rear molar. She'd been in almost constantly, complaining that some fillings Felder had given her were bringing in a country-and-western radio station. What seemed to bother the stately patient was not that her fillings picked up music but the kind of music they were picking up. "Really," she complained, as though this lapse in taste were somehow a reflection on Felder, "they keep playing this dreadful song about Jesus kicking some man's soul through the goal posts of heaven. Now, that's when Prue Pfennig says enough!"

As she explained it, all the distinguished old woman wanted was for Felder to tune her in to "some nice Mantovani." And, to his own surprise, Felder found himself canceling other patients, clearing the decks to spend entire afternoons adjusting her fillings, rearranging things, splattering silver compound around on her dentures in hopes of providing the judicial widow some easy listening in her sunset years. For a while, all he could get her was the dispatcher for a black taxicab company, followed by a few days of news and weather, and then a batch of staticky police bulletins that Mrs. Pfennig claimed made the roof of her mouth itch.

Most remarkable of all for Felder was not just that he was going along with the music-loving dowager but how much he looked forward to tinkering with her transistorized teeth. It was strange. In the face of his son Shecky-Chuck's request, his wife's unbidden lust and the general pall of existence as an old people's dentist, the afternoon Mrs. Pfennig leaped up to exclaim that he'd finally snagged her some light classical, it struck Felder as a red-letter day, the high point of his recent life. Not a happy thought. After that, it was back to the other seniors and their crumbling gums.

It might have been this last realization that inspired Felder to walk past his Buick Regal in the mall parking lot that afternoon and just keep walking. Clad in his standard officewear--double-knit flares, brown Hush Puppies, a doctor's smock with three tiny mirrors and a canine pick still peeking out of the breast pocket--he strolled the two miles from the shopping mall to the interstate, where he stuck out his thumb.

In his wallet that day, Felder held $43, plus some credit cards and an I.D. from the American Dental Association. "What else," he asked himself, as a van full of teens slowed down to point at him, "does a guy need to run away from home?"

•

"You a beautician?" asked the girl behind the wheel after Felder managed to clamber across the gravel shoulder. The van had made an illegal U turn to pass him twice, which had him a little worried. But when they swung back a third time, he saw it was just a teenaged girl with her younger sister and pesky little brother in back.

"It's the smock," explained Felder as he climbed aboard. "I'm no beautician." And without thinking, he added, "I'm with the carnival."

The girl driving giggled, but her sister piped right up, "With those duds? You look like a dentist to me!"

"Well," said Felder, smoothing the part in his hair and settling in.

The younger sister was a squat girl with a thick face and a short bowl haircut who had popped out of the front seat as soon as Felder scrambled in. She might have been 12, and looked like a stunted version of the driver, a slender Audrey Hepburn look-alike of 17 or 18. Felder couldn't tell. On the driver, that bowl haircut seemed very stylish, and he imagined it might have been the latest rage in Paris or New York. Gene was always dragging Vogues into bed, but Felder never glanced at them unless she made him read the horoscope page, so she could wait until he was through and remind him that if she'd known about astrology before he proposed, she would never have said yes to a man with Felder's moons.

But now it was the little brother who turned on him. "There ain't no carnival," he croaked, bursting Felder's Vogue reverie. The child sounded like Froggy in The Little Rascals, and Felder wondered if he was doing it on purpose or if he'd suffered some kind of damage to his glottis. "There ain't no carnival, for one thing," the boy rushed on, "and for another, I know who you are. You're that dentist at the mall. I know, because my grandma went to you once. She said your hands were clammy." The youngster craned his square head over the seat back and put his face right in Felder's, like someone baiting an umpire. "Plus," he said, "I know because you're Shecky-Chuck's dad and he's in my gym class. How come you let him change his (continued on page 114)I'm Dick Felder!(continued from page 76) name to Shecky, anyway? If I asked my dad something like that, he'd strain my milk!"

"Cool it, Dooley!" the thick sister sniped at him. She rapped the child's bony skull with a metal ruler, and the high-strung Hepburn girl slapped the wheel and laughed. Watching the older sister, Felder forgot his uneasiness over being spotted long enough to think how much he liked her smile. She had the kind of uppers his professor called "perfs," like the ones in the after halves of all the before-and-after charts they studied that semester. The truth was, Felder loved braces. He loved the molding and measuring, loved laying them in. But mostly he loved that little Michelangelo feeling a dentist got when he pried the wires off a once-buck-toothed ten-year-old, then got to watch as the grateful pup finally realized that all the teasing, all the tears and pillow pounding, was worth while. "No more Bugs Bunny, Mommy ...!" It made him sigh.

One of the biggest regrets about his all-senior roster was that few, if any, of your elderlies went in for braces. "Welcome to Planet of the Dentures," Nance had toasted him his first day on the job.

"So what are you?" the sister in back demanded after hurting her brother. For a second, they stopped bickering, and Felder felt their outraged stares. The driver, he saw, was biting her fist to check her giggles, and Felder had one second where he imagined Gene speeding by on her way to a Tupperware rally, glancing up to see Felder side by side with this lovely but skittish Hepburn child. This seemed like the first whole thought he'd had since his Mrs. Pfennig triumph. He realized all at once that he'd have to make friends with these three or one of them would blab all over school that they'd picked up Shecky-Chuck's dad hitchhiking, "and he said he was joining the carnival!" No doubt that bit of news would shame his son, who always seemed slightly ashamed to begin with. Worse, it would be sure to send Gene off to the authorities to haul him back home. Back to the boy's name change and plumbing collection, back to his wife's Tupperware, her clit remarks and late-night Elroy noises.

Felder slid inches lower in his seat. "You're part right," he said, trying to chuckle and pat the lad's squarish head. "I am a dentist. But I'm also with the carnival. I fill the fat lady's cavities. I'm Stretch Felder, carnival dentist," he said solemnly, only to have the gravel-voiced youth roll his eyes. "Scout's honor!" A scout pledge always worked with Shecky-Chuck, who wasn't even a scout, and Felder had hoped it might pass muster here. "Anyway," he went on, "it's my twin brother who treated your grandma. We're both dentists, see, and sometimes I have to hitch in and see him when I need new tools. Like these," he said, seized by sudden inspiration. "Take one!" He plucked a dime-sized molar mirror from his pocket and held it out. "I picked up some extras, so why don't you keep this as a present. Just to keep everything sort of secret."

"Why?" asked the boy. "What did you do?"

"Yeah, what?" His wide-faced sister glared at him.

"I didn't do anything," Felder replied. He tried to act casual, though children made him nervous. He didn't know why they were so mean. He was half ready to just throw open the door and risk a major concussion leaping out. He seemed to remember a special on stunt men that said that if you kept rolling, you couldn't get hurt. Once on his feet, he could dust off and run away all over again. He would count this as a false start. Maybe the next time, he'd get scooped up by some hearty truck driver who'd take him north, get him work in a logging camp. They probably lost a lot of teeth in logging camps, and he could put them back in again. Felder pictured himself in a plaid shirt, bonding the crowns on a jolly red-haired fellow named Corky after a timber mishap. Doc Felder, he thought, Logging Camp Dentist.

Felder had his fingers wrapped around the door latch, ready to bounce off for the Great Northwest, when the pretty driver pinched him--just reached over and squeezed the love handle that spilled over his slacks. "Hey," she said, smiling her Audrey Hepburn smile. "I don't mind if you fool with Dooley and Isabelle. They're babies. But I know you're a beautician. Soon as I drop them off at Fred's, we'll shoot over to the Barb, maybe do some make-overs."

"Who's Fred?" Felder asked, though he really wanted to know who Barb was.

The girl gave him another smile. "Our father, silly. He gets us the second half of the week. But he works nights, so the minute I drop these two off, I'm heading straight for the Barb. I already decided."

She finished up with a teeny-nose wrinkle that left Felder's mouth dry. He hadn't planned on anything like this when he decided to run away. He hadn't really decided, if you wanted to get technical. He had just sort of waved goodbye to Uni and sauntered off onto the mall parking lot--as simple as that. Now that the pretty teenager at the wheel turned out to be so friendly--actually seemed to like him--it occurred to Felder that the best part of running away might not be escaping Gene and her Elroy twitches. It might be replacing her with a girl who twitched for him--though it was still hard to believe he could inspire anyone who looked ten minutes out of high school to anything like that.

•

After a half hour of sitting in the van in Fred's driveway, Felder wondered vaguely if he could be arrested for something. Could they just come over and book him for not going home? He had nearly persuaded himself to make a run for it, when the Audrey Hepburn girl dashed out of the front door and ran across the tiny yard to leap into Felder's side of the van. "Shove over," she cried, tossing the keys into his lap. "Let's go!"

Before Felder even had time to panic, she was banging him on the thigh. "For God's sake, drive!" she shrieked. "Come on!" Normally, Felder would have explained that he never drove anything but Buicks, that he didn't know about stick shifts. But there wasn't time. He found the ignition and managed to back down to the street just as a bald man in Bermuda shorts came bursting out of the house. The man was waving something in his hand, and Felder looked away before he could see if it was a gun or not.

"I should have told you ...!" The girl shouted over whatever the bald man was screaming and the crash of a garbage can Felder had sideswiped. "I'm running away from home!"

"You ... what?" The garbage can seemed to clatter after them, and Felder had to shout back as they lurched down the street. "Is that why he's mad?"

"N-O spells no!" said the girl, tugging the giant T-shirt she wore down over her fish-net stockings. "He's mad 'cause he thinks we eloped. He thinks we're taking his van and going to Vegas."

The girl began to giggle again, and Felder clutched his stomach. Why hadn't he heard how maniacal she sounded before this? With Dooley and Isabelle, the teenager had seemed a textbook big sis. Now Felder peered over and saw a juvenile delinquent, a girl in fish nets. Even her bowl haircut looked antisocial. She still had that Hepburn thing, but Felder realized that for the 1000th time, he'd been taken in by nice teeth.

"We gotta make time," the girl cried, reaching over to punch him in his thigh again. No girl had ever done that before, and he wasn't sure he liked it.

"I don't even know your name," Felder told the girl suddenly, "and I don't know about any Vegas, either. I just want to get (continued on page 170)I'm Dick Felder!(continued from page 114) out right where I got in."

"It's Evie, and you can't," she said.

"Why can't I?"

"Because," giggled Evie, punctuating each word with a light tap at Felder's groin, "Fred's seen you! He's probably told everybody down at the station what happened. They might even be looking!"

The groin taps got to him, and he felt his resolve weakening. "What station?" he asked, hoping she'd say Exxon or Texaco.

"The TV station, silly. Fred does nightly news briefs on nine--eight-ten, ten-ten, twelve-ten and sign-off, plus bulletins."

"Great," said Felder, though, oddly, now that he had a new reason to run away, he felt better about the whole thing. "Do you really think he saw me?"

"Who cares? We're going straight to the Barb, anyway. You can give yourself a whole new look while you're there."

"But the police!" Felder's palms went clammy, the way they did in deceased denture operations. Looking to stretch their dental dollar, a spate of patients had taken to willing their bridgework to loved ones, like shares in IBM. Whenever Felder had to pluck out a deceased's dentures, his palms became clammy right away. "They'll be looking for this van," he said, shuddering. "I could be wanted!"

"Don't be so weird." Evie grinned and showed her lowers, as though they'd discussed fleeing the police together a zillion times. "I told you where I'm going!"

"Well," said Felder, "all I know is, I've never been wanted before. I've never even known anyone who was wanted! In all those fugitive movies, you always see these guys in fedoras hanging around train stations or waiting at the airport...."

"God! We're not taking a train," said the girl. "We're in a Ford Econoline van!"

"OK, then," Felder countered. "What about the roadblocks? The highway patrol?"

In his own mind, the dentist was not sure how he'd stand up against Brod Crawford on a lonely stretch of interstate. He figured he'd be OK if he could sneak out his canine pick. Otherwise, the burly patrolman would probably cut him to ribbons against the hood of his car.

The girl popped a gum ball into her mouth and made a face. "They don't have roadblocks anymore; they have helicopters. You don't even have to come if you don't feel like it."

Dick Felder, San Quentin Dentist. "What I feel like," he told his new friend, "is lying down in the back. You take the wheel."

"A real man," said the girl; and for the life of him, Felder could not tell whether this was the charming Hepburn side of her or the smart-aleck-delinquent side. Who knew? "There's some sucks back there if you want," she told him as he crawled over the seat, "under the spare-tire cover. Just don't be too big a piggo."

•

Felder had missed the hippie thing entirely. He'd been swept up in dent and predent at the height of it. Only occasionally would he stare wistfully at the rainbow-colored vans as they passed by the campus on their way to such places as Santa Cruz or Colorado. When there were marches on the dinnertime news, he'd gaze a long time at the banners and the protesters packing the parade. For a spell, Felder had thought of starting a dentists-for-peace brigade, a ragtime battery of future malocclusion men, on the march against Amerikan decay. But he never did. The truth was, Felder had never succumbed to hippiedom or radical politics or strange drugs or any kind of extramarital temptation, because he did not want to get in trouble. He could not say for certain what made him this way, any more than he could say what trouble would be like if he ever slipped up and got in a little. All Felder knew was that until this minute, fleeing with Evie, he had never stared trouble right in the face. If it turned out to be no big deal, he'd have to thank his lucky stars he had found out before he was too old to do anything about it.

Felder sighed and ran his fingers over the red fur pasted to the van's floor and sides. Above him, the cherry fuzz poked out between the mirrored tiles stuck to the ceiling. He gazed up at himself and stared dreamily. Dick Felder, Dentist on the Run....

"Earth to Felder, Earth to Felder," Evie called over her shoulder. "The suck's right beside you, behind the spare."

Felder caught her glare in the rearview and said, "Okey-doke." He felt around under the tire cover--also furred--and pulled out a Sucrets case with a single wrinkled cigarette inside.

The girl tossed back a plastic lighter with a Happi Face on it, but Felder barely had time to flick it and take a modest puff before she started snapping her fingers. "Oh, terrif," she chided him, "we've got a real greedy-poo back there, don't we?"

•

Felder did not realize he had passed out until he heard the helicopter landing on his head. "Whoa ... hold on there!" he shouted, opening one eye to see a razor-thin fellow with half his hair shaved off wielding an electric barber shears just above him. The left half of the boy's head dripped dirty yellow ringlets. The right showed blotchy pink, like a diseased lamb.

"Evie says you're a famous beautician," the half-haired fellow said over his buzzing implement. "I wanted, like, to do some stuff on you, so you could see it. I'm kinda new, but I think I do some original stuff."

"Hold on!" cried Felder again. He needed at least 15 minutes of David Hartman to really wake up, and here he'd just tumbled out of a chopper nightmare into a live set of clippers.

"Original stuff," the boy was saying. "A whole new you.... Evie says you have to change what you look like, since her dad saw you kidnap her. They put all the kidnap guys up in the post office, so I figured you wouldn't mind a change."

Felder could hardly take it all in. In his fog, he had only just realized he was no longer in the van. He rubbed his eyes as Evie appeared and knelt beside him. But before he could say a word, she gave him her Audrey look and leaned over to paste her lips on his, releasing a cloud of perfumy smoke inside his mouth. Herpes, he thought automatically, the dentist's enemy! The kiss tickled a spot on his spine he'd never felt before, but the perfumy mouthful sent him straight from sleep into confusion. Chanel brain.

Suddenly, the girl grabbed him by the shoulders and screeched in his face, "All-points bulletin! Fred worked you into his briefs! Eight-ten and ten-ten. Stay tuned!"

"He what? When?"

"He tattled," the half-haired youngster interrupted. "That means I get a chance to work on my technique--and you get a new look. One beauty guy helping another."

Evie giggled her way into a nasty cackle, and Felder felt himself flush. "I don't see what's so funny," he said, wishing he could open a vent in his skull and let out some perfume. "I'm supposed to be running away; meanwhile, I'm stuck someplace I don't even know."

"Lighten up," said the girl. "You're at the Barb's."

"Where is she?"

Evie rolled her eyes like her baby brother. "There's no she, boob face. It's B-A-R-B, the Be Aware Runaway Brigade. There's twenty-six branches, and the founder's an ex-prostitute. I saw all about it on Donahue and called the toll-free number. You're allowed to stay until you decide what you want to do."

"You mean, it's a crash pad?" Felder almost felt like crying.

"A what?"

Evie and the half-haired boy exchanged smirks, but Felder didn't notice. "Never mind," he mumbled, as a wave of nostalgia came crashing over him. There was a phase in his life when it seemed as if all the people he knew were either hitching across Europe or "just back from the Coast." From what Felder could gather, they all got to stay in crash pads, bouncing in and out of sleeping bags with girls named Wheat or Zinnia who thought sex was just another plane of existence. Felder, of course, was either off at school or at home tending his summer paper route while they were crashing. (He kept the route until he was 24, when one of the neighbors complained that his eight-year-old ought to have a crack at it.) Frequently, back then, Felder imagined what it would be like in a real crash pad. And now, in his mid-30s, the owner of a Buick Regal, he had finally landed in one.

Felder felt a little tingly as he gazed around. Things were almost exactly as he had expected. The room in which he was sprawled was bright yellow, as casual as a dorm rec room. In one corner, giant slabs of foam rubber were stacked between a pair of battered couches, and a circle of folding chairs had been set up in the middle. A plastic AM radio blasted next to one of the couches, where a pair of wayward BARBies sat tapping their boots to a tune Felder recognized from Mrs. Pfennig's teeth.

"Listen, guy," said the half-hair, giving Felder's chin a playful punch. "Me and Evie got some important beauty biz. See you back at group, huh?"

"Sure thing," said Felder, too busy soaking it all in to notice as they ambled off.

By now, a handful of young people had come straggling in, the new kind he recognized as punks. Not punk punks, like when he was in high school--guys with pointy shoes who smoked Pall Malls in the boys' room--but modern punks, with spiky hair and earrings and swastikas on their jackets. Felder had read about them in Time.

As Felder basked in his crash-pad experiences, a swollen-looking youth swaggered over and stuck out his hand. The boy was clad entirely in denim, with gaping holes at both knees and a red bandanna around his ankle. One of his front teeth was missing, and he wore a peroxide crewcut. Felder was not sure which kind of shake to go with--a standard or the soul shake favored in his own day. As it happened, the swollen, peroxide boy didn't shake at all but just slapped his hand sideways, capping the gesture with a clap on Felder's back. "Bad do," said the boy. "I heard you're into doing make-up for videos. I guess that's a good job for dressing any way you want. That's my problem. I could see getting a job and everything, but I can't find one where you can dress the way you want."

"It's a definite plus," Felder said. Not sure whether or not the boy was making fun of him, he checked down at his flares and Hush Puppies. He knew flares were "out" but hadn't gotten around to deflaring his slacks yet. Now here he was, running away, stuck with flapping ankles while all these kids were packed into their snug straight-legs.

"Don't worry, it works," said the half-haired boy, as though reading the dentist's fears about his appearance. Felder had not even noticed he was back. He hunched with his ringlet side facing him, winding the cord around his clippers and slipping them into a Greyhound kit bag. "The flares, the Puppies, the hairstyle--it's a special look. It's, like, really you...."

"Well, I found him," Evie chimed in, and Felder tingled again to think she might actually like him. But then, mooning up at her, he realized something had happened. Since she had gone off with the clippers fellow, her bowl haircut had become a melon slice, a cantaloupe plume sprouting down the middle of a baldy. She'd gone Mohawk.

"We're twins," she giggled at Felder's surprise. "I told Oleo I wanted just what he gave you."

"Oleo?" Things weren't sinking in.

"That's me," said the budding beautician, raising his Greyhound bag. "Have snips, will Mohawk!"

Felder chuckled right along with them, though he was not sure he understood. A moment later, the door opened and a chill hit his scalp. He reached up and gasped. The side of his head felt like a kneecap. He quickly touched the other side--more kneecap--and was about to cry out when he felt the thick swath of hair left in the middle.

"Thank God!" he sighed. Felder knew he must look pretty peculiar, but just knowing he had that swath, if nothing else, made him feel a bit better.

He stopped touching himself as a tiny pimpled girl ambled over to their group and sat at his feet. The waif arranged a patent-leather hatbox on her lap and began talking. "You're new here, right? OK, we've got counseling, individual and group, plus a deal with the phone company so kids can call their parents if they decide they want to go home, free of charge. I've got a kitty," she confided, tapping her hatbox, "but house rules are no pets, so I only let her out in the laundry room. Her name's Ethel, the same as mine."

"You're a lucky little lady," said Felder. He never knew what to say to strange children--including his own son. But as the room started to fill, more and more rambling teens came to cluster around him, to hang out with a veteran runaway. Evie rested her head on Felder's shoulder. The tiny pimpled girl knelt at his feet and Oleo stood proud sentry beside him. A little hemmed in, Felder tried to rearrange his legs on the floor, going tailor-seat. This was when he expected someone to pull out a folk guitar and break into Michael (Row the Boat Ashore) while everybody held hands and swayed. Felder had never done any serious swaying and wondered if there might be some on the agenda. But all the adolescents seemed to want to do was chat.

"I guess you've been on the road since Saturday Night Fever," ventured the pimpled girl with a kind of awe. And Felder felt a dozen pairs of teenaged eyes just glowing at him.

"I've been around," he said quietly, striking what he hoped was a rugged, world-weary pose for his new fans.

"The guy's even got Hush Puppies!" Oleo pointed at Felder's toast-colored loafers and shook his head. "That's class!"

"You work in video," sighed the peroxide boy, "you get to wear what you want."

They went on like that, Felder less than certain how to enjoy his new-found status. He guessed it was already about 11--somehow he'd lost his graduation watch, inscribed Happy Toothaches, From Dad--and Felder was anxious to find out when the lights went off. He still wanted to sample some sleeping-bag action, even if everyone else his age had tried it 15 years before.

"Do we all ... sleep here?" he whispered to Evie, but just then, a strapping fellow of 30 or so strode into the room. "That's Brother Hank," the girl hissed, jamming an elbow into Felder's soft middle. "It's counseling time."

"You mean, a rap session?" This was another new experience, and Felder was excited. The counselor looked comfortable in turtleneck and khakis, like a man who knew how to handle youth groups. He straddled a tall stool up front and raised his right hand for quiet.

" 'Evening, boys and girls."

" 'Evening, Brother Hank."

"Any new faces?"

"Me," Evie piped up, indicating Felder, "and this is the guy who drove me."

Felder gave a sheepish wave, and a very young boy he hadn't seen before stood up and bowed. "Ace, here," said the boy, who might have been in sixth grade. He had on a pair of leather pants, a leather vest and a half dozen crisscrossing chains.

"Glad to see all of you," said Brother Hank. "Welcome! Now, Ace, how did you happen to join us?"

The boy glanced around the runaway circle, then gave his shoulders a tough little roll. "Daddy's in petrodollars, see? One day, he comes home and starts bawling about the crumbling price structure. He starts drinking martinis. He doesn't stop, see? That's a week ago. Then, this morning, he gives the old lady two black eyes. 'You're next,' he goes, 'you're not leaving this house!' And then--"

"Hang on!" Felder had sat through as much of this as he could. "You can't be more than eleven or twelve," he butted in. "I have a son nearly your age. His name used to be Chuck."

Ace clammed up, giving another shoulder roll, and Brother Hank aimed his smile Felder's way. "You are?"

"Dick Felder, D.D.S.," Felder said.

The counselor nodded. "What you're saying, doctor, is that you ran away from home and your son stayed?"

"Well," Felder heard himself say, "he likes it there...."

"Maybe you and I should speak later, in my office," said Brother Hank, glaring at him a second before getting back to Ace.

Felder's ears burned bright red. It was like getting yelled at in junior high, except now he was the same age as the teacher. Maybe the BARB wasn't for him. While Brother Hank went on to review kitchen privileges, Felder kept busy trying to make out bits of graffiti.

Everybody broke off in twos and threes after the session, and Felder found himself on the couch with the swollen, peroxide boy. His name turned out to be Link. Felder listened to Link's career-and-ward-robe problems, meanwhile trying to decide whether to talk to Brother Hank or to just walk out. He wasn't sure it would go down in the books as running away, but he thought of calling a cab to whisk him back to the interstate. He'd be blowing his shot at any on-the-floor stuff with Evie, but still....

Without making his mind up one way or the other, Felder leaped to his feet and announced that he was going for a walk. He could not spot Evie anywhere, and on a whim he asked Link if he knew where the freeway was. "Around the corner," sighed the swollen blond. "I guess a guy like you has a lot of cool videos to go back to." He made Felder take his name and his mother's address--in case anything "came up"--and they shook hands.

To Felder's surprise, the freeway really was around the corner. Weirder yet, when he stepped outside, he saw that the runaway house was a duplex on a tree-lined street in a normal residential area. He had expected a minority neighborhood.

A horseshoe drive wound down to the curb, and at the bottom Felder heard a peculiar mewing. It seemed to be coming from a parked Econoline van--little Evie's. He stepped toward it and tapped on the rear door. "What's up?" he called in his professional voice. "You OK?"

There was no answer for a second; then the door fell open and Felder got a blast of stale perfume smoke. "Oh, it's you," Evie mumbled, sounding hoarse and averting her eyes. "Come on in, I guess."

It was dark inside, but as he followed, Felder could see that the girl had nothing on but that giant T-shirt with Relax across the back. He made his way cautiously, taking stooped, tiny steps until they reached a giant beanbag pillow up by the seats. Evie settled in against the bag and looked away from Felder. "I got the heebie-jeebs," she confessed. "I came out here to think."

"Me, too."

Felder lowered himself and nestled beside her. He couldn't help gaze at the way her perfect high school legs sort of languished in front of him, crossed at the ankle, her smooth thighs bare against the scarlet pile. His own luck scared him.

"You're shaking," Felder said, half to take attention from his own quivers, and Evie laughed her brave little Breakfast at Tiffany's laugh. "I made a mistake," she whispered, as if it were the saddest secret in the world, and Felder felt something snap in his chest. He wasn't sure whose arms had flown around whom, but next thing he knew, they were rolling in that synthetic fur, Evie's fingers working his Sansabelt while he kissed the tears out of her mascara.

In no time, Felder was sprawled naked on the itchy fiber, Evie beside him, with her T-shirt pushed up to her navel. As they embraced, Felder got a glimpse of their reflection in the mirrored ceiling. He'd always wanted to try it with mirrors--not with Gene, necessarily--but was not sure if this qualified, since he couldn't recognize himself. What thrill was it watching a couple frolic in the mirror if you weren't sure which one was you? Was that him--in the Mohawk? For a few seconds, his stomach threatened to quease up. What would his patients think? But no sooner did he quease up than he dequeased. He had a flash, as they used to say, that there was no point worrying about his haircut. What good had a regular boy's ever done him? He'd had a regular boy's for 30 years and had ended up with a Tupperware wife and a fleet of senior denture wearers. He'd had the Mohawk half a day, and here he was tussling in a mirrored van with a lovely 18-year-old.

The thought fortified him, and Felder got back into the swing. The trouble was, he'd never seen his own buttocks before, and every time he looked up, there they were. He had no idea how much hip fat he'd been packing on. But somehow, Evie worked it so his bottom was always in view, and Felder had to struggle to forget about it. "Come on," the girl panted in his ear, "really ride me, Daddy!" As they got going, she kept up the patter like a peppy infielder, squealing, "Make me bad, make me real bad!" until Felder asked if she could quiet down for a sec so he could concentrate. He wasn't used to all that chatter, and he had a feeling she'd picked it up from some kind of movie.

The second he'd spoken up, Felder knew he had blown it. Evie stopped wriggling, and her voice went flat. "Don't mind me," she huffed, and Felder found himself more or less finishing up on his own.

The girl maintained a sullen silence until he was through, at which point she said, "Ooh-ah" and pulled her T-shirt back down.

•

So now he'd done it. Felder had hitchhiked, had tried sex in a van. He'd been to a crash pad and had gotten a wild haircut. He'd even tried drugs. It occurred to him that this pretty much covered all the fun things he could have done if he'd run away years ago--in a single day. If he wanted to, he could just pop back into the office the next morning, a new man.

Felder considered all this as he stood under a streetlight, buttoning his smock. The freeway, as Link had promised, was just down the road, and Felder could hardly explain the cheer he felt as he strolled up the on ramp. He stuck out his thumb as the first headlights approached. They turned out to be from a Wonder-bread truck, which struck him as wholesome. He could use a little wholesomeness, he thought, after what he'd been through.

Felder took a step forward when the bread truck slowed. He gave a big grin, but the driver only slid open his window and hollered something that sounded like "No Greek"--whatever that meant. Still, as chilly as the night was getting, Felder felt stout of spirit. He stamped his feet and clapped his hands together. It started drizzling, which was OK, too, since most folks would probably feel sorry for a lonely soul out on the highway in rainy weather. He knew it was late--he had never found his Happy Toothaches watch--but it wasn't that late. A half dozen more automobiles went by, nearly all slowing to stare and point, until Felder himself was obliged to turn around and look behind him, just to see what they were gawking at.

At last, as the drizzle turned to a light downpour, a car whooshing off in the distance gave Felder a special feeling. "This one's lucky," he said out loud, blowing into his hands. He held out his thumb with what he felt was a longing gaze. In the old days, all the kids would do up giant signs saying things like California or West! But even if he'd thought of it, Felder knew he would have felt too silly holding up a square of cardboard saying Mall.

As the car swung into view, Felder gave a happy yelp. "A Buick!" Since he drove one himself, Felder felt a special affinity for other Buick owners. They weren't as showy as, say, Cadillac owners. They were regular people who made enough money to live comfortably without getting cocky about it--Dick Felder's kind of people.

A Buick Le Sabre approached and slowed down on the shoulder before him.

"How do!" Felder called out and trotted up to lean into the passenger window. He saw to his relief that the man at the wheel was actually Mister Jackie, owner of the hairpiece salon beside him in the mall. "Mister Jackie," Felder cried. "It's me, Dick Felder--the dentist next door!"

The wig man stared for a second, and the window shot back up. Felder saw his reflection in the window. For the second time, it startled him. He looked like a middle-aged Apache. The gleaming sides of his skull lent the rest of his face a leering, demented sheen.

The toupee baron sped off and left him in a spray of gravel. "Wait!" Felder yelled. "I've got an office...."

He kept on that way, yelling and chasing after the Le Sabre, long after it had disappeared down the highway. By now it was pouring, and Felder had no choice but to keep on running.

" 'He's mad 'cause he thinks we eloped. He thinks we're taking his van and going to Vegas.' "

"She leaned over to paste her lips on his. Herpes, he thought automatically, the dentist's enemy!"