Years later he remembered it well. Too well.
"Al, I gotta tell you something," Barney began as they trudged home from school, walking backward to keep the wind and the dust from their faces. 
"You already told me."  Barney told him every time they took showers in school. "You got more hair than me." Everyone in the locker room knew it and maybe some of the girls Barney backed into tiny spaces under the stairs also knew it. 
Then about eleven years old or twelve, Barney stood half a head taller than Al, chunky and broad-boned, firm, solid, compact. Next to Barney, Al looked not so much thin as wilted, loose-limbed, gangly and starting to wear glasses with lenses, Al moaned to his parents, as big as saucers. Barney could always out-rassle him and do more push-ups and chin-ups on the high bar than Al, but Al could outrun, duck and dodge faster in a game of tag. More important, Barney had the best batting average in school, which meant more than tag. No one else could come close, especially Al. "You're built for speed," Barney told him, sounding smug and superior. "I'm built for power." Al couldn't decide which he preferred. 
 "Listen Al," Barney told him, "you gotta help me out. It's serious." 
Must be serious, Al guessed, judging from Barney's glum expression. Barney had seemed morose and moody all day in school and never once tried to pinch any of the girls during lunch or recess. Very serious.
"I'm not doing your homework for you," Al informed him. "And I'm not sneaking any answers to you. I nearly got caught!" He did get caught, he wanted to remind Barney, that time Barney goosed a girl in the hallway at school, and she turned and punched Al in the stomach. "From now on, no more answers." 
Barney dismissed that. "This is more important. You gotta help me. We gotta get rid of Mr. Farfl." 
"Who?"
 "My violin teacher." 
"Don't you like the violin?" 
"I hate it, and I hate Mr. Farfl." 
Farfl was not his real name. They'd lopped off about ten letters and agreed that Farfl was the closest he and Barney could come to pronouncing it. Also Farfl had a nice ring to it. Farfl became their own private, satiric in-joke. "Spaghetti would be a better name," Al decided.
"Or Noodle," Barney laughed.
"Or Stringbean."
This time Barney wasn't laughing. "Listen..." The street was empty, no one in sight, hardly a sound save the wind whooshing around corners, but Barney pulled him aside and whispered into Al's ear. "Mr. Farfl's got evil designs on my mother." 
Al tingled with excitement. "Yeah?" 
"No crap." 
Barney looked around suspiciously. Papers scurried and scraped along the sidewalk, dust swirled in wispy little spirals. "He's after her money." 
"Mr. Farfl?" Al couldn't believe it. That skinny character who probably carried rocks in his violin case to keep him anchored against the Bronx wind? Al brushed past Barney. "You're nuts!" Barney trailed after him. "I know it for a fact," Barney insisted. "It's true. I swear it." 
Al stopped and faced him. "How do you know?"
"He's a widower, right? He's got no wife and three kids to support?" Al looked skeptical. "He said so," Barney continued. "He's lookin for a rich widow."
 "He said it?" 
"Not in so many words." 
"Your mother isn't rich." 
"Maybe not, but to him she's rich. `Specially with three starvin kids at home. That's how he got her to agree to the violin lessons. 
He needs the dough for his three starvin kids at home, he said. He practic'ly cried. You know my mother: Soft-hearted Sadie." 
Al kept mum. You couldn't get a glass of water from Soft-hearted Sadie. Or the right time. All she ever lavished was her affection on Barney. That's the extent of her generosity. "What's he get for a lesson?" Al asked. "A buck a week?" 
"One-fifty. For three starvin kids, it's not a whole lot."
  True. Al himself couldn't squeeze more than a quarter a week allowance from his old man. "Don't you know we're in hard times?"
 his father demanded, "that we're in the midst of a recession? Don't you read the papers? Just the other day in the papers, a man was killed on the street for fifty-two cents." Every cloud to him had a darker cloud inside. 
"Arnold," Al's mother called in from the next room, "raise the kid's allowance."
  "Jean, mind your own business." 
"What do you mean `evil'?" Al asked.
Barney lowered his voice. "You know." 
Al had a vague idea. Actually, he had no idea. You don't get to that until high school. On the other hand, there's no accounting for tastes, or desperation. If Barney says old Farfl has designs on his mother, maybe he has. Barney knew more about such things than Al. But Barney's mother? No one could be that desperate.
To Al, old Farfl looked like a stretched rubber band about to snap. Or a flamingo with a long neck and beak, its head thrust forward and bobbing up and down as he moved. He even walked like a flamingo, on long spindly legs that he picked up high and put down softly, stealthily, as he walked, or stalked rather, in a slow, deliberate manner. Come to think of it, Al decided, there is something birdlike as well as sinister about Mr. Farfl. 
"Al, you gotta help me," Barney insisted.
"What do you want me to do about it?" 
"Get rid of him." 
"What do you mean get rid of him?" 
"Use your imagination."
 "What'll I do? Shoot him?" 
"Nah. Where would you get a gun?"
 "My father's got a gun," said Al. 
Barney stopped walking and faced him. "No shit?" Al nodded and pushed past him. "He bought it years ago from an old army buddy who needed the money. So he could sell apples, or something." 
Barney grabbed his arm. "That's the answer!"
 Al pulled himself free. "You're strictly nuts."
 "He's talking my mom into giving me more lessons!"
 "So?"
 Barney stepped in front of Al and blocked his way. "So I won't be able to play for the team."
 "You're the best second base man we got!"
 "And the best batter too." 
"We're practically the champs!"
 "Not for long. We'll lose and it'll be your fault." 
This was more than serious. It was catastrophic! "What do you want me to do?" 
"You got the gun. It's up to you."
 Getting Barney's mother to part with even a dime should have got Mr. Farfl an Oscar for Best Performance of the Year, thought Al. No wonder Barney's worried. He'd worry too under the circumstances, but no way was he going to use his father's gun on Mr. Farfl. Or any other weapon. Besides, it had no bullets. His father said so. Yet something had to be done. "But why me?" Al demanded. 
"Because you're my best friend," Barney decided. "That's what best friends are for!" 
The logic of that escaped Al. Only his anger and annoyance remained, and the fact that he was somehow firmly, irrevocably committed to getting rid of Mr. Farfl. 
How to get rid of Mr. Farfl. Al pondered it for days.  Clear to all except Barney's mother was the fact that Barney and the violin lent him by Mr. Farfl hated each other. Barney attacked it with venom; the violin hissed and snarled and scratched back. Glaring at Mr. Farfl, Barney scraped away dolefully, the violin wept bitter tears. While his mother beamed, Barney and the violin continued making rude noises.  Al, helping Barney with his homework, cringed. Nails scraping on glass sounded better. Or cats being tortured. Or tires screeching on the pavement. "Very good," cooed Mr. Farfl. He's tone deaf, Al decided. The violin gave voice to the agony both Al and Barney felt. "Nice, very nice. Lovely!" gushed Mr. Farfl, eyes closed in ecstasy.  "Positively gorgeous," sighed Soft-Hearted Sadie. Al expected all the window panes to shatter. Barney at last ground to a halt. "Now let us begin again," Mr. Farfl urged. "A trifle slower this time. Lento. Lento." Al jumped up. "I gotta go." Al tiptoed past Barney's baleful glance and let himself out. 
To "rub out" Mr. Farfl, as they said in the movies, proved to be an exciting problem. Also a challenge and a bit scary, but that's what made it exciting. Scary? That's the answer! Al knew he'd find a way.
"The Cat and the Canary" gave him his clue. In the movie, Al recalled, the killer-maniac tries to frighten the heroine, Paulette Goddard, to death. He doesn't; Bob Hope, the hero, comes to her rescue, but it struck Al as a good idea. He didn't need a mansion crumbling into a bayou to do it. Besides, where can you find a bayou in the Bronx? 
"OK," Al told Barney one morning on the way to school. "I'll get rid of Mr. Farfl for you." 
"Yeah? How?" 
"You'll see." Al refused to tell him more.
 Barney's mother was not the least suspicious when Al arrived that fateful afternoon: he always came to help Barney with his homework or to write his essays for him. It's so nice of Barney, she beamed, to let Al do that for him. Behind their books, Barney showed Al some dirty pictures he had drawn in school during social studies and pointedly whispered that You-Know-Who is due to arrive in five minutes. Al knew he had to work fast. He turned towards Barney's mother.
"How's Barney coming along with his music?" he asked pleasantly. 
"How should he be doing?" She glowed with pleasure. "Beautiful!"  Silly to ask. Maybe Al ain't so smart after all. 
"Do you know," Al began casually, "that three-quarters of all those who play the violin get consumption?"
 "How sad," Mrs. Koenig replied, shelling peas into a pot on her lap. "Imagine that." Not the reaction Al expected.
 "That's because of the long hours they have to spend practicing day and night," he continued. "They can't go out in the fresh air and sunshine and play like normal kids. They gotta stay indoors all day and practice." 
"That's true," she nodded, the very model of contentment. "It's for a good cause." Barney began to look worried. Three minutes to go! Al felt less self-assured than before. 
"And half of those who get consumption also go out of their minds," he added. "My father read it."
 "What nonsense. Heifetz is mad?" 
"He's from the other half." She seemed unconcerned. 
"My father saw it in the paper just the other day," Al pursued, ignoring Barney's gestures to hurry up. "Always looking at all those little black notes, that's what does it. They can even go blind!" 
She looked up. "Blind?" 
"It's a fact. And the calluses they get on the tips of the fingers: cancer!" 
"Oh my!"
"It's true," Al insisted. Barney studied his own fingertips. "But there's one good thing," Al pursued. "If he doesn't go blind or mad or get cancer or all three..." 
"God forbid!" 
"... he can always play on street corners for pennies. He won't be good for anything else, but he won't starve. My parents wouldn't pay even a nickel a week for that," said Al.
 "I'm sorry," Barney's mother told the teacher when he arrived, "my boy I'm afraid he ain't so interested in the violin after all." Mr. Farfl's immediate response, Al thought, should have been to flap his wings and soar aloft. But Mr. Farfl instead started to protest. Mrs. Koenig cut in. "Do you know all the violin players get consumption?" Mr. Farfl was so taken aback he began to sputter, then cough. "A-ha!" she cried, pushing Barney into a far corner of the room and shielding him withher body; Al could fend for himself. "See that!" The more Mr. Farfl tried to protest, the more he choked and coughed and turned red. He appealed to Barney. 
"Oh, I like it OK," said Barney from behind his mother's back. "But Al here says it's unhealthy." Al wanted, simultaneously, to sink through the floor and hit Barney with the violin. The teacher craned his neck three feet and glared down at Al. "What do you mean..." 
Mrs. Koenig told him. "Consumption they get. Cancer they get in the fingertips. Out of their minds they go and blind. All from the violin."  Before Mr. Farfl knew it, he and Barney's violin found themselves out in the hall. The door slammed in his face. 
Exit Mr. Farfl. 
The incident was closed but not ended, at least, not for Al.
 "Hey, Al," Barney began a few days later, "did ya read in the papers about the guy who committed suicide?" They were trudging back to school, the wind moaned eerily past the buildings, clouds scudded ominously low overhead, full of rain and covered with soot. A day for evil deeds and dark doings, just like in "The Cat and the Canary". 
"What guy?" 
"This real old guy, he was about thirty-three, they think maybe. It said so in The News. He jumped off a the Williamsburg Bridge. They don't know his name. He had no identification." 
"So?" 
"All he had with him was a violin!" 
They stopped walking. Al turned pale. "So what about it?" 
"I bet it was ol' Farfl!" 
"Nah."
 "I bet'cha it was."
 Al felt cold. The wind whipped through his clothing.  He remembered the look on Farfl's face just before the door closed. Surprise, confusion, consternation, possibly horror.  The look of a man who hears his own death knell. "Probably no connection at all," Al murmured. 
"I bet it's him," Barney insisted.  "I bet they find he left three starvin kids at home and no wife. Jeez, I bet that's why he killed hisself." 
"Himself," Al corrected. His teeth chattered.
 "Because he couldn't bear to see his three starvin kids starvin anymore. And just think," Barney pursued. "You done it." 
"Me!" Al turned and faced him, anger, pain, confusion flitting over his face. "Whaddya mean me?" 
"Sure you did. I was prob'ly the only pupil he had left."
 "You didn't want to take lessons," Al reminded him. "You told me so. You hate the violin, you said." 
"Yeah, I do," Barney agreed. "If it wasn't for you, I'd be sawin away at that thing, sure, but Mr. Farfl, he'd still be alive. Poor ol' Farfl," moaned Barney. 
Al could scarcely finish the morning at school. He felt flustered and feverish and asked to be excused. The school nurse, Mrs. Malowitz, consented. He did indeed look ill. She felt his head. Sort of warmish. The flu, no doubt. It's that time of year. She had visions of an epidemic starting and quickly excused him from school.
Al had hardly strength enough to make it home. Anxiously his mother put him to bed and called the doctor. The doctor dismissed her diagnosis of either tonsillitis, measles or chicken pox, and prescribed an enema "To see what develops". Nothing developed. The man who jumped off the bridge was not, it turned out, Mr. Farfl. "I told you it wasn't Mr. Farfl," Al crowed to Barney, when two days later he returned to school. "It was another violin teacher." 
"That's true," Barney admitted. "But it coulda been him.  He'll be next!" Barney added. "And it'll still be your fault." 
Al had no answer for that. Thirty-odd years later, he pinpointed the start of his ulcers, hypertension and chronic indigestion to that day and that moment when he realized that maybe he should have got rid not of Mr. Farfl but of Barney.  
Well, Al decided, it's never too late, is it.