UNCLE BOB

by

John Paul Tegner

Bob Decker lived in a pleasant old house on a down-at-the-heel street that had once been fashionable. He was thirty-eight, with a long, bony frame, thinning hair, and a bulldog kind of face which he believed most people found repellent. He was an accountant for a local department store. It was a dreary, underpaid job. He hated it passively and aspired to nothing better.

His mother had died two years before, and he still found it hard to let himself into the empty house at night.

He had always been lonely. Now he was lonelier than ever, and to fill some of the emptiness, he took to going to Kirby Square in the evening.

The Square was a sounding-board, a meeting-place, a parade ground. It was the fiercest kind of jungle, too, and smooth-faced young policemen strolled the crowded walks in pairs, keenly vigilant for all their seeming nonchalance. Bob knew the danger of the place. It might have been that, in part, that took him there, as if danger could somehow give point and meaning to his life. Over the months he made his cautious contacts. The pattern of the encounters was usually the same. A park-bench conversation, a drink at a nearby bar, an hour in a cheap hotel room. And afterward the old despair.

On a Saturday night he sat alone. It was early spring, there was a chill in the air, and he was thinking of going home, when a boy came slowly into the Square.

Bob watched him slump down onto a bench nearby. He was slim and blond. He wore a dark suit that was neat but shabby. His face was shadowed and thin, and there was a beauty about him that left Bob shaken. And presently. as if he had no will of his own, he was on his feet, cigarete in hand.

He asked the boy, "Can you give me a light?"

The boy started and said, "What?"

"A light," Bob repeated gently.

The boy felt in his pockets. "Sorry. I don't seem to have one."

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