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"You have a nice body," Cushie Percy whispered to Garp, and he squeezed her hand back.

"So do you," he told her, honestly. She had, in fact, an absurd body. Small but wholly bloomed, a compact blossom. Her name, Garp thought, should not have been Cushman but Cushion--and since their childhood together, he had sometimes called her that. "Hey, Cushion, want to take a walk?" She said she knew a place.

"Where are you taking me?" Garp asked her.

"Ha!" she said. "You're taking me. I'm just showing you the way. And the place," she sa

id.

They went off the path by the part of the Steering River that long ago was called The Gut. A ship had been mired there once, but there was no visible evidence. Only the shore betrayed a history. It was at this narrow bend that Everett Steering had imagined obliterating the British--and here were Everett's cannons, three huge iron tubes, rusting into the concrete mountings. Once they had swiveled, of course, but the later-day town fathers had fixed them forever in place. Beside them was a permanent cluster of cannon balls, grown together in cement. The balls were greenish and red with rust, as if they belonged to a vessel long undersea, and the concrete platform where the cannons were mounted was now littered with youthful trash--beer cans and broken glass. The grassy slope leading down to the still and almost empty river was trampled, as if nibbled by sheep--but Garp knew it was merely pounded by countless Steering schoolboys and their dates. Cushie's choice of a place to go was not very original, though it was like her, Garp thought.

Garp liked Cushie, and William Percy had always treated Garp well. Garp had been too young to know Stewie Two, and Dopey was Dopey. Young Pooh was a strange, scary child, Garp thought, but Cushie's touching brainlessness was straight from her mother, Midge Steering Percy. Garp felt dishonest with Cushie for not mentioning what he took to be the utter assholery of her father, Fat Stew.

"Haven't you ever been here before?" Cushie asked Garp.

"Maybe with my mother," Garp said, "but it's been a while." Of course he knew what "the cannons" were. The pet phrase at Steering was "getting banged at the cannons"--as in "I got banged at the cannons last weekend," or "You should have seen old Fenley blasting away at the cannons." Even the cannons themselves bore these informal inscriptions: "Paul banged Betty, '58," and "M. Overton, '59, shot his wad here."

Across the languid river Garp watched the golfers from the Steering Country Club. Even far away, their ridiculous clothing looked unnatural against the green fairway and beyond the marsh grass that grew down to the mudflats. Their madras prints and plaids among the green-brown, gray-brown shoreline made them look like cautious and out-of-place land animals following their hopping white dots across a lake. "Jesus, golf is silly," Garp said. His thesis of games with balls and clubs, again; Cushie had heard it before and wasn't interested. She settled down in a soft place--the river below them, bushes around them, and over their shoulders the yawning mouths of the great cannons. Garp looked up into the mouth of the nearest cannon and was startled to see the head of a smashed doll, one glassy eye on him.

Cushie unbuttoned his shirt and lightly bit his nipples.

"I like you," she said.

"I like you, Cushion," he said.

"Does it spoil it?" Cushie asked him. "Us being old friends?"

"Oh no," he said. He hoped they would hurry ahead to "it" because it had never happened to Garp before, and he was counting on Cushie for her experience. They kissed wetly in the well-pounded grass; Cushie was an open-mouthed kisser, artfully jamming her hard little teeth into his.

Honest, even at this age, Garp tried to mumble to her that he thought her father was an idiot.

"Of course he is," Cushie agreed. "Your mother's a little strange, too, don't you think?"

Well, yes, Garp supposed she was. "But I like her anyway," he said, most faithful of sons. Even then.

"Oh, I like her, too," Cushie said. Thus having said what was necessary, Cushie undressed. Garp undressed, but she asked him, suddenly, "Come on, where is it?"

Garp panicked. Where was what? He'd thought she was holding it.

"Where's your thing?" Cushie demanded, tugging what Garp thought was his thing.

"What?" Garp said.

"Oh wow, didn't you bring any?" Cushie asked him. Garp wondered what he was supposed to have brought.

"What?" he said.

"Oh, Garp," Cushie said. "Don't you have any rubbers?"

He looked apologetically at her. He was only a boy who'd lived his whole life with his mother, and the only rubber he'd seen had been slipped over the doorknob of their apartment in the infirmary annex, probably by a fiendish boy named Meckler--long since graduated and gone on to destroy himself.

Still, he should have known: Garp had heard much conversation of rubbers, of course.

"Come here," Cushie said. She led him to the cannons. "You've never done this, have you?" she asked him. He shook his head, honest to his sheepish core. "Oh, Garp," she said. "If you weren't such an old friend." She smiled at him, but he knew she wouldn't let him do it, now. She pointed into the mouth of the middle cannon. "Look," she said. He looked. A jewel-like sparkle of ground glass, like pebbles he imagined might make up a tropical beach; and something else--not so pleasant. "Rubbers," Cushie told him.

The cannon was crammed with old condoms. Hundreds of prophylactics! A display of arrested reproduction. Like dogs urinating around the borders of their territory, the boys of the Steering School had left their messes in the mouth of the mammoth cannon guarding the Steering River. The modern world had left its stain upon another historical landmark.

Cushie was getting dressed. "You don't know anything," she teased him, "so what are you going to write about?" He had suspected this would pose a problem for a few years--a kink in his career plans.