I can appreciate now the spare and elegant architecture of this little labyrinth. For years I thought my mother and Gene had rigged the whole thing as a kind of scavenger hunt for my adulthood: from the runes of Sports Illustrated to the half-distracted man in the living room, who will direct you to the bedroom where a woman folding laundry will provide the next clue to maturity. But much later my mother told me the Sidd Finch Incident was entirely unplanned; I think its very fortuity may have clinched its organic perfection.

But while I stand there comically deceived, the adolescent update of a kid whose ice cream has fallen off the proverbial cone, what is passing above my head between them? Gene must be dying to tell her about Rita. Maybe Mom has already figured it out and is just waiting for him to find the courage to confess. The weekend last autumn when he went to Blowing Rock "alone, to think" was obviously no solo camping trip. When he tells her, the bottom will drop out of five lives. Or maybe he has already told her, and the hoax here isn't the one they've just revealed to me, but the one she must now collude with him in hiding. Sidd Finch fastballs are flying all over the room, too fast to see and too painful to catch; but like a revolution, sudden and violent, they are as unstoppable as they are unbelievable. For now we acknowledge only the one that shatters the imposter who pretends to fire them. The true marksman, Gene, lurks behind.

A few months later I lay on the floor of his room in the boarding house, and in the dark I asked him for answers. Gene said my mother would be fine, that she and my sister were strong, that he loved me. It all was or would be true, and so he could not be accused of telling lies. Yet he didn't tell the living truth, the fire-truth to which his hands had to be held, because it was too hot: it was about himself. We despise little as much as lies, but there are at least two kinds of deception worse than willful falsehood: there are the immediate and necessary truths we don't say; and there are the lies whose teller has begun to believe them.

And finally, a laggard answer to an essential question. According to the Kansas City T-Bones' web site:

Dirty Al Gallagher received his nickname in college at the University of Santa Clara. During a 25-game winning streak, Gallagher had hits in each game and refused to wash his uniform, including his undergarments, as a way to keep both streaks alive. His teammates quickly learned to affectionately call him "Dirty" Al.