Ron Powers' hometown is Hannibal, Missouri, home of Mark Twain, and therefore birthplace of our image of boyhood itself. Powers returns to Hannibal to chronicle the horrific story of two killings, both committed by minors, and the trials that followed. Seamlessly weaving the narrative of the events in Hannibal with the national withering of the very concept of childhood, Powers exposes a fragmented adult society where children are left adrift, transforming isolation into violence. From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore is a powerful, disturbing, and eye-opening dispatch from the homefront that will take its place alongside the works of Antony Lucas, Robert Coles, and Tracy Kidder. Ron Powers is the co-writer of The New York Times bestseller Flags of Our Father and the author of eight books, including Dangerous Water , a biography of young Samuel Clemens. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, he lives in Middlebury, Vermont. Tom and Huck Don't live here Anymore 1ROBIE AND WILLLate on a Tuesday afternoon in November 1997, around suppertime, two sixteen-year-old Missouri boys got into a 1988 Ford Bronco II and went out looking for some way to pass the time before heading over to the local Baptist college to watch a basketball game. They slipped into the continental cortege, the perpetual flow of kids in cars looking for something to do, some way to break through the blankness.Their town was Hannibal, Missouri--"America's Home Town," as it billed itself in tourist brochures, a salute to its legacy as the boyhood home of Mark Twain. The teenagers were named William D. Hill and Robie Wilson. Wilson (he pronounced his name "Robbie"), a serious-faced boy with short-cut blond hair and a sturdy build, was the son of a Hannibal city councilman and letter carrier named Kyle Wilson. He did not live with his father, who was twice divorced, but with his mother and her new husband. Hill, also blond, was an athlete, tall and muscular. He had recently moved to town from Iowa with his mother and stepfather.With Hill at the wheel, the two kids cruised around town for a while, looking for girls, for friends, for anything besides what they knew was and wasn't there.Not much to do.They stopped for a snack at a fast-food franchise, then headed out onto the streets again.It was around six P.M. when they spotted the jogger.They had found themselves rolling aimlessly along Pleasant Street--Pleasant Street of America's Home Town. The figure trotting toward them, up the grade, was a sixty-one-year-old machinist with Car Quest Auto Parts and an amateur railroad enthusiast named James Walker. Like Robie, he was a lifelong Hannibal resident. An army veteran, he had been married to Virginia Elliott Walker since 1957. Virginia, a pale and soft-spoken woman, had for a time served as the president of the Helen Cornelius Fan Club. Ms. Cornelius, a Hannibal native and country-western singer, had enjoyed some success as a three-time winner on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and later as an RCA recording artist in the 1970s. Her best-known hits were "We Still Sing Love Songs in Missouri" and "Tweedle-de-dee." The couple had one son, Michael Ray Walker, who lived in St. Louis.Just now, James Walker was about midway through his five-mile run, which he made several times a week, always along the same route. He was at work on his goal of completing fifty-seven miles of running by the end of the month. Another fifty-seven, to be chalked up in December, would give him a thousand miles of running for the year.Pleasant Street is an east-west road, both arterial and residential, near the western edge of town, two lanes of asphalt, no sidewalks. It had originated as a wooden plank road in about 1835, some sixteen years after first settlement, by a man named Fry, who cut it through three miles of hardwood forest in return for half of the fledgling town's remaining unsold lots. 1835 was the year of the birth, near Hannibal, of Samuel Langhorne Clemens--Mark Twain, the great mythifier of American boyhood.Winter dusk had settled in on this November afternoon. The streetlights had been turned on, and Walker was wearing his customary bright yellow shorts, reflective vest, and orange fluorescent hat.Walker chugged eastward on Pleasant, on the left side of the road, facing traffic. Hill and Wilson cruised westward on the downgrade. As they drew near the approaching figure, one of the boys--it was never conclusively established which--asked the other, "Do you want to door him?"It was William Hill, the owner of the Bronco and a promising high school baseball player, who had clued Robie Wilson in on "dooring"or "awarding the door prize." The two had talked about it the previous summer, while idly tooling around a small lake. "Dooring" was a car stunt pulled occasionally in Iowa high school parking lots. It entailed a driver drawing alongside a student on foot while the frontseat passenger opened the door, giving the stu