Page 132
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Walking back toward Dani with the sense that a change is coming, the narrator drifts into a later dream-framed memory of his father, Uncle Jackie, Hammerigan, the jukebox business, Senate trouble, and an old betrayal over a property swap.
The motion inward continues, but now family business replaces street theater as the source of corruption and dread. The father is drawn as more basically honest than the others, which makes the coming dream feel less like accusation than inheritance.
The night turns inward. Walking Michael toward a 'change... coming hard,' he sees in Daniel's 'lifted face' 'a man alone in a field waiting for God to say, disappear,' and recognizes 'it was myself I was seeing.' He resolves 'to go away from what I had thought myself to be.' Then the dream frame opens: lying awake he sorts the syndicate politics - 'Uncle Jackie and Hammerigan were closer in their way of thinking,' both 'power seekers,' while his father, 'a basicly honest man, whose honestly was used for profit,' refused to 'interchange properties' for Hammerigan's protection, so Jackie 'severed his association.' Thinking 'of the viciousness of that twisted world,' he falls asleep into his father's dark office under 'a single light beam.'