The Night Listener and Others Read Free Page B

still is. But when hunger disguises itself as something else—kindness, maybe—it turns ugly, makes us less than human.
    To look at the Youngers, you never would have imagined that hunger in them. When I first looked at them with more than casual interest, I guessed that they were in their early sixties. He was gray at the temples and near the top, but there were still dark brown patches. She too had streaks of gray-white, but the tawny hair around the whiteness made it look almost platinum in contrast. Neither was overweight, and both their complexions were healthily ruddy. The only outward signs of age were that the man limped slightly and carried a cane, and both wore thick bifocals. Their clothing was neat and clean, if a bit out of date. They looked well cared for, as one might make a suit last for years by judicious handling.
    The Youngers. God, how that name suits them. So many don’t. A potential assassin named Hinckley? A successful one named Oswald? Those are the names of buzzard towns and cartoon rabbits. But Younger —that sums up their deeds nicely, while smacking of the outlaw family too, though I doubt a connection. What my Youngers have done is soft and subtle, far from gunshots and holdups.
    I noticed them, really noticed them for the first time, giving candy to a kid. I was twenty yards behind where they were sitting on their bench, and there was one of those sudden hushes that comes to the park once in a while, and I easily heard what they said.
    “Young fella?’’ The man’s voice was hearty and friendly. The boy, about ten, stopped but didn’t say anything. “Want this?” the man went on, holding out a Hershey bar.
    I tensed. I kept hearing my mother and father and teachers and the state trooper who visited the school once a year saying, “ Never take candy from strangers! ‘‘ For kids, it replaced the commandment about adultery.
    “We just can’t eat two,” the woman said kindly. “And it’ll melt in this hot sun. Won’t you take it?”
    The kid came closer and smiled a little. He looked cautious, like he’d heard the warnings too, but shrugged and took the candy. I guess he figured there were people all around, and that’s what I figured too. “Okay. Thanks a lot,” he said, and walked away with the candy. I watched the couple a moment longer, just long enough to see them smile at each other, as if to enjoy a good deed shared. But there was something else in the look, something more than gratification at giving away a 35¢ candy bar.
    I started to notice the Youngers every day now, occasionally walking around the park, but mostly just sitting on the bench near the bandshell, whether a show was going on or not. For the life of me, I didn’t see how people were able to sit through “Babes on Broadway” once, let alone five times a day, six on weekends. But the Youngers were always there, holding the bench like a fort, watching with interest as our “professional cast” butchered songs from A Chorus Line and Oklahoma! , or when little kids scrambled up into the bandshell between shows and pretended that they were our music school dropouts who moved their mouths to the canned tunes.
    And they kept giving away candy, too. I’d see them do it once or twice a week, and since I spent only a little of my time watching them, they must have done it far more frequently than that. It was the last week of July when I got suspicious. I saw the woman give a Hershey bar to a little girl of six or seven. I smiled, for I’d written the couple off as just nice, generous folks with no grandchildren of their own to spoil, getting their parental kicks by making kids happy with chocolate. But a few hours later, I saw the same little girl, white as a skull, sitting with her worried parents in the nurse’s station.
    Little kids are always getting sick in the park—the station doles out twenty or thirty doses of Pepto-Bismol a day to deal with the gut-wrenching mixture of rides and junk food. But