Hide and Seek

I decided a few days later that Rafferty's sense of humor was

Maybe it was the tourists turning up so early this year because of the

good weather- they could breed a bitter irony in you made up of easy

money and bad manners, privilege and your own unquestionable need. One

day I saw a fat man in sunglasses and fishing tackle and drinking

eggnog right out of the carton.

It was pretty sickening.

Then that same day Rafferty tells me this story about some woman over

in Portland who was suing an Italian spaghetti-sauce company for mental

anguish because she opened a can of marinara and found a woman's finger

inside a rubber glove pointing fingernail-up at her.

The next day he had another one.

I I j I 'j. He d read it in the paper.

The body of a night watchman had been found in a hog pen at a

meat-packing firm on the South Side of Chicago. It had been partly

eaten by the hogs. There were hundreds of them in the pen, and the

guy's face and abdomen were in pretty bad shape. But here's the

kicker.

His clothes were hanging neatly on a nearby fence.

Rafferty made some nasty obvious comments about going after pigs in the

dark.

So I thought he was getting strange lately.