“Thanks again, Mr. Thomas!” I called. He didn’t turn, but raised a hand to me before putting it back in the pocket of his shorts. I was getting an excellent view of his plumber’s crack (that’s what Mom called it when she spotted a guy wearing low-riding jeans), and if that’s also too much information for you, too bad. We made him tell us—in one hour!—everything it had taken him months of thinking to come up with. He couldn’t say no, and maybe that gave him the right to show us his ass.

John in Frisco, Texas, is puzzled by his dad’s phrase tougher than a boiled owl. Although it sounds unappetizing, the phrase has a fascinating backstory. In the 18th century, owls were associated with drunkenness, and often invoked in the phrase drunk as an owl. Among the many synonyms for “intoxicated” is the adjective stewed, which eventually was conflated with boiled. So a boiled owl is simply a “drunk owl.” The connection between owls and drunkenness may have to do with their glassy-eyed stare, the way they regurgitate undigested food, and the clumsy way they fly when startled.

Sitting across the narrow aisle of the little bus in the first passenger seat, the Raggedy Man only sat and stared at Clay with the half-vacant malevolence of a stupid child about to pull the wings off a few flies.

 “Clay?” Tom asked, low. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
 “No,” Clay said. Now that he was face-to-face with it, there were too many unanswered questions. What they would do if it went wrong was only one of them. What they would do if it went right was another. Because passenger pigeons were incapable of revenge. Those things out there, on the other hand—
 “But I’m going to.”
 “Then do it,” Tom said. “Because, all else aside, ‘You Light Up My Life’ blows dead rats in hell.”

 “You risked your life, you know,” Clay said.
 “I had little choice,” the Head replied. “It was like being hypnotized. I quickly grasped the fact that they were unconscious even though their eyes were open, and a few simple experiments with the tip of my cane confirmed the depth of the state.”
 Clay thought of the Head’s limp, thought of asking him if he’d considered what would have happened to him if he’d been wrong and they’d come after him, and held his tongue. The Head would no doubt reiterate what he’d already said: no knowledge obtained without risk. Jordan was right—this was one very old-school dude. Clay certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be fourteen and standing on his disciplinary carpet.

“Except maybe for California, Massachusetts has got the toughest gun law in the country. If the cops find a concealed handgun in your car—meaning like in the glove compartment with your registration and insurance card—they can put you away for I think seven years. Get stopped with a loaded rifle in your pickup, even in hunting season, and you could get slapped with a ten-thousand-dollar fine and two years of community service. You can own a handgun and keep it in your home if you’re not a felon, but a license to carry? Maybe if you’ve got Father O’Malley of the Boys’ Club to cosign, but maybe not even then.”

He had a Boston accent, not the blue-collar-Southie kind Clay was most familiar with from Maine, where it seemed that every third person you met was a Massachusetts expat, but the fussy I-wish-I-were-British one.

Looking at Emery Paulson’s remains, a snatch of Shakespeare from my high school days recurred

the only way to go on is to go on