I could tell it was Pushton blowing the bugle and I got out of bed tearing half of the bedclothes with me. I ran to the door and yelled, “Drown it! Drown it! Drown it!” and then I slammed the door and went along the row of beds and pulled the covers off the rest of the guys and said:

“Come on, get up. Get up! Don’t you hear Pushton out there blowing his stinky lungs out?”

I hate bugles anyway, but the way this guy Pushton all but murders reveille kills me. I hadn’t slept very well, thinking of the news I was going to hear this morning, one way or the other, and then to be jarred out of what sleep I could get by Pushton climaxed everything.

I went back to my bed and grabbed my shoes and puttees and slammed them on the floor in front of me, then I began unbuttoning my pajamas. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to ask the guys in this wing. They wouldn’t know anything. When they did see a paper all they read was the funnies. That’s the trouble with Clark’s. I know it’s one of the best military academies in the West and that it costs my old man plenty of dough to keep me here, but they sure have some dopey ideas on how to handle kids. Like dividing the dormitories according to ages. Anybody with any sense knows that it should be according to grades because just take for instance this wing. I swear there isn’t a fourteen-year-old punk in it that I could talk to without wanting to push in his face. And I have to live with the little pukes.

So I kept my mouth shut and got dressed, then I beat it out into the company street before the battalion got lined up for the flag raising. That’s a silly thing, isn’t it? Making us stand around with empty stomachs, shivering goose pimples while they pull up the flag and Pushton blows the bugle again. But at that I guess I’d have been in a worse place than Clark’s Military Academy if my pop hadn’t had a lot of influence and plenty of dollars. I’d be in a big school where they knock you around and don’t ask you whether you like it or not. I know. I was there a month. So I guess the best thing for me to do was to let the academy have their Simple Simon flag-waving fun and not kick about it.

I was running around among the older guys now, collaring each one and asking the same question: “Were you on home-going yesterday? Did you see a paper last night? What about Tommy Smith?” That was what I wanted to know. What about Tommy Smith.

“He didn’t get it,” a senior told me.

“You mean the governor turned him down?”

“Yeah. He hangs Friday.”

That hit me like a sledge on the back of my head and I felt words rushing to the tip of my tongue and then sliding back down my throat. I felt weak, like my stomach was all tied up in a knot. I’d thought sure Tommy Smith would have had his sentence changed to life. I didn’t think they really had enough evidence to swing him. Not that I cared, particularly, only he had lived across the street and when they took him in for putting a knife through his old man’s back —that was what they charged him with — it had left his two sisters minus both father and brother and feeling pretty badly.

Where I come in is that I got a crush on Marie, the youngest sister. She’s fifteen. A year older than me. But as I explained, I’m not any little dumb dope still in grammar school. I’m what you’d call bright.

So that was it; they were going to swing Tommy after all, and Marie would be bawling on my shoulder for six months. Maybe I’d drop the little dame. I certainly wasn’t going to go over and take that for the rest of my life.

I got lined up in the twelve-year-old company, at the right end because I was line sergeant. We did squads right and started marching toward the flagpole. I felt like hell. We swung to a company front and halted.

Pushton started in on the bugle. I watched him with my eyes burning. Gee, I hate buglers, and Pushton is easy to hate anyway. He’s fat and wears horn-rimmed glasses. He’s got a body like a bowling ball and a head like a pimple. His face looks like yesterday’s oatmeal. And does he think being bugler is an important job! The little runt struts around like he was Gabriel, and he walks with his buttocks sticking out one way and his chest the other.

I watched him now, but I was thinking more about Tommy Smith. Earlier that night of the murder I had been there seeing Marie and I had heard part of Tommy’s argument with his old man. Some silly thing. A girl Tommy wanted to marry and the old man couldn’t see it that way. I will say he deserved killing, the old grouch. He used to chase me with his cane. Marie says he used to get up at night and wander around stomping that cane as he walked.

Tommy’s defense was that the old boy lifted the cane to bean him. At least that was the defense the lawyer wanted to present. He wanted to present that, with Tommy pleading guilty, and hope for an acquittal. But Tommy stuck to straight denials on everything. Said he hadn’t killed his father. The way everything shaped up the state proved he was a drunken liar and the jury saw it that way.

Tommy was a nice enough sort. He played football at his university, was a big guy with blond hair and a ruddy face, and blue eyes. He had a nice smile, white and clean like he scrubbed his teeth a lot. I guess his old man had been right about that girl, though, because when all this trouble started she dropped right out of the picture, went to New York or somewhere with her folks.

I was thinking about this when we began marching again; and I was still thinking about it when we came in for breakfast about forty minutes later, after having had our arms thrown out of joint in some more silly stuff called setting-up exercises. What they won’t think of! As though we didn’t get enough exercise running around all day!

Then we all trooped in to eat.

I sat at the breakfast table cracking my egg and watching the guy across from me hog six of them. I wanted to laugh. People think big private schools are the ritz and that their sons, when they go there, mix with the cream of young America. Bushwa! There are a few kids whose last names you might see across the front of a department store like Harker Bros., and there are some movie stars’ sons, but most of us are a tough, outcast bunch that couldn’t get along in public school and weren’t wanted at home. Tutors wouldn’t handle most of us for love or money. So they put us here.

Clark’s will handle any kid and you can leave the love out of it so long as you lay the money on the line. Then the brat is taken care of so far as his parents are concerned, and he has the prestige of a fancy Clark uniform.

There wasn’t another school in the state that would have taken me, public or private, after looking at my record. But when old man Clark had dough-ray-me clutched in his right fist he was blind to records like that. Well, that’s the kind of a bunch we were.

Well, as I say, I was watching this glutton stuff eggs down his gullet which he thought was a smart thing to do even though he got a bellyache afterward, when the guy on my right said:

“I see Tommy Smith is going to hang.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s rotten, ain’t it?”

“Rotten?” he replied. “It’s wonderful. It’s what that rat has coming to him.”

“Listen,” said I, “one more crack like that and I’ll smack your stinking little face in.”

“You and how many others?” he said.

“Just me,” I said, “and if you want to come outside I’ll do it right now.”

The kid who was table captain yelled: “Hey, you two pipe down. What’s the argument anyway?”

“They’re going to hang Tommy Smith,” I said, “and I think it’s a dirty rotten shame. He’s as innocent as a babe in the woods.”

“Ha-ha,” said the table captain, “you’re just bothered about Marie Smith.”

“Skirt crazy! Skirt crazy!” mumbled the guy stuffing down the eggs.

I threw my water in his face, then I got up, facing the table captain and the guy on my right. “Listen,” I said, “Tommy Smith is innocent. I was there an hour before the murder happened, wasn’t I? What do you loudmouthed half-wits think you know about it? All you morons know is what you read in the papers. Tommy didn’t do it. I should know, shouldn’t I? I was right there in the house before it happened. I’ve been around there plenty since. I’ve talked to the detectives.”

I sat down, plenty mad. I sat down because I had seen a faculty officer coming into the dining room. We all kept still until he walked on through. Then the table captain sneered and said:

“Tommy Smith is a dirty stinker. He’s the one that killed his father all right. He stuck a knife right through his back!”

“A lie! A lie!” I screamed.

“How do you know it’s a lie?”

“Well, I — I know, that’s all,” I said.

“Yeah, you know! Listen to him! You know! That’s hot. I think I’ll laugh!”

“Damn it,” I said. “I do know!”

“How? How? Tell us that!”

“Well, maybe I did it. What do you think about that?”

“You!” shouted the table captain. “A little fourteen-year-old wart like you killing anybody! Ha!”

“Aw, go to hell,” I said, “that’s what you can do. Go straight to hell!”

“A little wart like you killing anybody,” the table captain kept saying, and he was holding his sides and laughing.

All that Monday I felt pretty bad thinking about Tommy, what a really swell guy he had been, always laughing, always having a pat on the back for you. I knew he must be in a cell up in San Quentin now, waiting, counting the hours, maybe hearing them build his scaffold.

I imagine a guy doesn’t feel so hot waiting for a thing like that, pacing in a cell, smoking up cigarettes, wondering what it’s like when you’re dead. I’ve read some about it. I read about Two Gun Crowley, I think it was, who went to the chair with his head thrown back and his chest out like he was proud of it. But there must have been something underneath, and Crowley, at least, knew that he had it coming to him. The real thing must be different than what you read in the papers. It must be pretty awful.

But in spite of all this I had sense enough to stay away from Marie all day. I could easily have gone to her house, which was across the street from the campus, but I knew that she and her sister, Ruth, and that Duff Ryan, the young detective who had made the arrest — because, as he said, he thought it was his duty — had counted on the commutation of sentence. They figured they’d have plenty of time to clear up some angles of the case which had been plenty shaky even in court. No, sir. Sweet Marie would be in no mood for my consolation, and besides I was sick of saying the same things over and over and watching her burst into tears every time I mentioned Tommy’s name.

I sat in the study hall Monday evening thinking about the whole thing. Outside the window I could see the stars crystal clear; and though it was warm in the classroom I could feel the cold of the air in the smoky blue of the night, so that I shivered. When they marched us into the dormitory at eight-thirty, Simmons, the mess captain, started razzing me about Tommy being innocent again, and I said:

“Listen, putrid, you wanta get hurt?”

“No,” he said, then he added: “Sore head.”

“You’ll have one sore face,” I said, “if you don’t shut that big yap of yours.”

There was no more said, and when I went to bed and the lights went off I lay there squirming while that fat-cheeked Pushton staggered through taps with his bugle. I was glad that Myers had bugle duty tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to listen to Pushton.

But long after taps I still couldn’t sleep for thinking of Tommy. What a damn thing that was — robbing me of my sleep! But I tell you, I did some real fretting, and honestly, if it hadn’t been for the fact that God and I parted company so long ago, I might have even been sap enough to pray for him. But I didn’t. I finally went to sleep. It must have been ten o’clock.

I didn’t show around Marie’s Tuesday afternoon either, figuring it was best to keep away But after chow, that is, supper, an orderly came beating it out to the study hall for me and told me I was wanted on the telephone. I chased up to the main building and got right on the wire. It was Duff Ryan, that young detective I told you about.

“You’ve left me with quite a load, young man,” he said.

“Explain,” I said. “I’ve no time for nonsense.” I guess I must have been nervous to say a thing like that to the law, but there was something about Duff Ryan’s cool gray eyes that upset me and I imagined I could see those eyes right through the telephone.

“I mean about Ruth,” he said softly, “she feels pretty badly. Now I can take care of her all right, but little Marie is crying her eyes out and I can’t do anything with her.”

“So what?” I said.

“She’s your girl, isn’t she, Martin?” he asked.

“Listen,” I said, “in this school guys get called by their last name. Martin sounds sissy. My name is Thorpe.”

“I’m sorry I bothered you, Martin,” Duff said in that same soft voice. “If you don’t want to cooperate—”

“Oh, I’ll cooperate,” I said. “I’ll get right over. That is, provided I can get permission.”

“I’ve already arranged that,” Duff told me. “You just come on across the street and don’t bother mentioning anything about it to anyone.”

“OK,” I said, and hung up. I sat there for a minute. This sounded fishy to me. Of course, Duff might be on the level, but I doubted it. You can never tell what a guy working for the law is going to do.

I trotted out to the campus and on across to the Smith house. Their mother had died a long while ago, so with the father murdered, and Tommy in the death house, there were only the two girls left.

Duff answered the door himself. I looked up at the big bruiser and then I sucked in my breath. I wouldn’t have known him! His face was almost gray. Under his eyes were the biggest black rings I had ever seen. I don’t mean the kind you get fighting. I mean the other kind, the serious kind you get from worry. He had short clipped hair that was sort of reddish, and shoulders that squared off his figure, tapering it down to a nice V.

Of course, he was plenty old, around twenty-six, but at this his being a detective surprised you because ordinarily he looked so much like a college kid. He always spoke in a modulated voice and never got excited over anything. And he had a way of looking at you that I hated. A quiet sort of way that asked and answered all of its own questions.

Personally, as a detective, I thought he was a big flop. The kind of detectives that I prefer seeing are those giant fighters that blaze their way through a gangster barricade. Duff Ryan was none of this. I suppose he was tough but he never showed it. Worst of all, I’d never even seen his gun!

“Glad you came over, Martin,” he said.

“The name is Thorpe,” I said.

He didn’t answer, just stepped aside so I could come in. I didn’t see Ruth, but I spotted Marie right away. She was sitting on the divan with her legs pulled up under her and her face hidden. She had a handkerchief pressed in her hand. She was a slim kid, but well developed for fifteen, so well developed in fact that for a while I had been razzed about this at school.

Like Tommy, she had blond hair, only hers was fluffy and came partway to her shoulders. She turned now and her face was all red from crying, but I still thought she was pretty. I’m a sucker that way. I’ve been a sucker for women ever since I was nine.

She had wide-spaced green eyes, and soft, rosy skin, and a generous mouth. Her only trouble, if any, was that she was a prude. Wouldn’t speak to anybody on the Clark campus except me. Maybe you think I didn’t like that! I’d met her at Sunday school, or rather coming out, since I had been hiding around waiting for it to let out, and I walked home with her four Sundays straight before she would speak to me. That is, I walked along beside her holding a one-way conversation. Finally I skipped a Sunday, then the next one she asked me where I had been, and that started the ball rolling.

“Thorpe,” she said — that was another thing, she always called me by my last name because that was the one I had given her to start with — “Thorpe, I’m so glad you’re here. Come over here and sit down beside me.”

I went over and sat down and she straightened up, like she was ashamed that she had been crying, and put on a pretty good imitation of a smile. “How’s everything been?” she said.

“Oh, pretty good,” I said. “The freshmen are bellyaching about Latin this week, and just like algebra, I’m already so far ahead of them it’s a crying shame.”

“You’re so smart, Thorpe,” she told me.

“Too bad about Tommy,” I said. “There’s always the chance for a reprieve though.”

“No,” she said, and her eyes began to get dim again, “no, there isn’t. This — this decision that went through Sunday night — that’s the — Unless, of course, something comes up that we — the lawyer can—” and she began crying.

I put my arm around her, which was a thing she hadn’t let me do much, and I said, “Come on, kid. Straighten up. Tommy wouldn’t want you to cry.”

About five minutes later she did straighten up. Duff Ryan was sitting over in the corner looking out the window, but it was just like we were alone.

“I’ll play the piano,” she said.

“Do you know anything hot yet?”

“Hot?” she said.

“Something popular, Marie,” I explained. Blood was coming up into my face.

“Why, no,” she replied. “I thought I would —”

“Play hymns!” I half screamed. “No! I don’t want to hear any of those damned hymns!”

“Why, Thorpe!”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’ve told you about that enough times. Those kinds of songs just drone along in the same pitch and never get anywhere. If you can’t play something decent stay away from the piano.”

My fists were tight now and my fingers were going in and out. She knew better than to bring up that subject. It was the only thing we had ever argued about. Playing hymns. I wanted to go nuts every time I heard “Lead Kindly Light” or one of those other goofy things. I’d get so mad I couldn’t see straight. Just an obsession with me, I guess.

“All right,” she said, “but I wish you wouldn’t swear in this house.”

I said, “All right, I won’t swear in this house.”

“Or anywhere else,” she said.

I was feeling good now. “OK, honey, if you say so.”

She seemed pleased, and at least the argument had gotten her to quit thinking about Tommy for a minute. But it was then that her sister came downstairs.

Ruth was built on a smaller scale than Marie so that even though she was nineteen she wasn’t any taller. She had darker hair too, and an oval face, very white now, making her brown eyes seem brighter. Brighter though more hollow. I will say she was beautiful.

She wore only a rich blue lounging robe, which was figure-fitting though it came down past her heels and was clasped in a high collar around her pale throat.

“I think it’s time for you to come to bed, Marie,” she said. “Hello, Thorpe.”

“Hello,” I said.

Marie got up wordlessly and pressed my hand, and smiled again, that faint imitation, and went off. Ruth stood there in the doorway from the dining room and as though it was a signal — which I suspect it was — Duff Ryan got up.

“I guess it’s time for us to go, Martin,” he said.

“You don’t say,” I said.

He looked at me fishily. “Yeah. I do say. We’ve got a job to do. Do you know what it is, Martin? We’ve got to kill a kitten. A poor little kitten.”

I started to answer but didn’t. The way he was saying that, and looking at me, put a chill up my back that made me suddenly ice cold. I began to tremble all over. He opened the door and motioned for me to go out.

That cat thing was a gag of some kind, I thought, and I was wide awake for any funny stuff from detectives, but Duff Ryan actually had a little kitten hidden in a box under the front steps of the house. He picked it up now and petted it.

“Got hit by a car,” he said. “It’s in terrible pain and there isn’t a chance for recovery. I gave it a shot of stuff that eased the pain for a while but it must be coming back. We’ll have to kill the cat.”

I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t killed it in the first place, whenever he had picked it up from under the car, but I kept my mouth shut and we walked along, back across the street to the Clark campus. There were no lights at all here and we walked in darkness, our feet scuffing on the dirt of the football gridiron.

“About that night of the murder, Martin,” Duff said. “You won’t mind a few more questions, will you? We want to do something to save Tommy. I made the arrest but I’ve been convinced since that he’s innocent. I want desperately to save him before it’s too late. It’s apparent that we missed on something because — well, the way things are.”

I said, “Are you sure of Tommy’s innocence, or are you stuck on Ruth?”

“Sure of his innocence,” he said in that soft voice. “You want to help, don’t you, Martin? You don’t want to see Tommy die?”

“Quit talking to me like a kid,” I said. “Sure I want to help.”

“All right. What were you doing over there that night?”

“I’ve answered that a dozen times. Once in court. I was seeing Marie.”

“Mr. Smith — that is, her father — chased you out of the house though, didn’t he?”

“He asked me to leave,” I said.

“No, he didn’t, Martin. He ordered you out and told you not to come back again.”

I stopped and whirled toward him. “Who told you that?”

“Marie,” he said. “She was the only one who heard him. She didn’t want to say it before because she was afraid Ruth would keep her from seeing you. That little kid has a crush on you and she didn’t think that had any bearing on the case.”

“Well, it hasn’t, has it?”

“Maybe not,” snapped Duff Ryan, “but he did chase you out, didn’t he? He threatened to use his cane on you?”

“I won’t answer,” I said.

“You don’t have to,” he told me. “But I wish you’d told the truth about it in the first place.”

“Why?” We started walking again. “You don’t think I killed him, do you?” I shot a quick glance in his direction and held my breath.

“No,” he said, “nothing like that, only—”

“Only what?”

“Well, Martin, haven’t you been kicked out of about every school in the state?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say every school.”

Duff said, “Quite a few though, eh?”

“Enough,” I said.

“That’s what I thought.” He went on quietly, “I went over and had a look at your record, Martin. I wish I had thought of doing that sooner.”

“Listen —”

“Oh, don’t get excited,” he said, “this may give us new leads, that’s all. We’ve nothing against you. But when you were going to school at Hadden, you took the goat, which was a class mascot, upstairs with you one night and then pushed him down the stairs so that he broke all his legs. You did that, didn’t you?”

“The goat slipped,” I said.

“Maybe,” whispered Duff. He lit a cigarette, holding on to the crippled cat with one hand. “But you stood at the top of the stairs and watched the goat suffer until somebody came along.”

“I was so scared I couldn’t move.”

“Another time,” Duff continued, “at another school, you pushed a kid into an oil hole that he couldn’t get out of and you were ducking him — maybe trying to kill him — when someone came along and stopped you.”

“He was a sissy. I was just having some fun!”

“At another school you were expelled for roping a newly born calf and pulling it up on top of a barn where you stabbed it and watched it bleed to death.”

“I didn’t stab it! It got caught on a piece of tin from the drain while I was pulling it up. You haven’t told any of this to Marie, have you?”

“No,” Duff said.

“All those things are just natural things,” I said. “Any kid is liable to do them. You’re just nuts because you can’t pin the guilt on anybody but the guy who is going to die Friday and you’re trying to make me look bad!”

“Maybe,” Duff answered quietly, and we came into the chapel now and stopped. He dropped his cigarette, stepped on it, then patted the cat. Moonlight shone jaggedly through the rotting pillars. I could see the cat’s eyes shining. “Maybe,” Duff breathed again, “but didn’t you land in a reform school once?”

“Twice,” I said.

“And once in an institution where you were observed by a staff of doctors? It was a state institution, I think. Sort of a rest home.”

“I was there a month,” I said. “Some crab sent me there, or had me sent. But my dad got me out.”

“Yes,” Duff replied, “the crab had you sent there because you poisoned two of his Great Dane dogs. Your dad had to bribe somebody to get you out, and right now he pays double tuition for you here at Clark’s.”

I knew all this but it wasn’t anything sweet to hear coming from a detective. “What of it?” I said. “You had plenty of chance to find that out.”

“But we weren’t allowed to see your records before,” Duff answered. “As a matter of fact I paid an orderly to steal them for me, and then return them.”

“Why, you dirty crook!”

I could see the funny twist of his smile there in the moonlight. His face looked pale and somehow far away. He looked at the cat and petted it some more. I was still shaking. Scared, I guess.

He said, “Too bad we have to kill you, kitten, but it’s better than that pain.”

Then, all at once I thought he had gone mad. He swung the cat around and began batting its head against the pillar in the chapel. I could see the whole thing clearly in the moonlight, his arm swinging back and forth, the cat’s head being battered off, the bright crimson blood spurting all over.

He kept on doing it and my temples began to pound. My heart went like wildfire. I wanted to reach over and help him. I wanted to take that little cat and squeeze the living guts out of it. I wanted to help him smash its brains all over the chapel. I felt dizzy. Everything was going around. I felt myself reaching for the cat.

But I’m smart. I’m no dummy. I’m at the head of my class. I’m in high school. I knew what he was doing. He was testing me. He wanted me to help him. The son of a-wasn’t going to trick me like that. Not Martin Thorpe. I put my arms behind me and grabbed my wrists and with all my might I held my arms there and looked the other way.

I heard the cat drop with a thud to the cement, then I looked up, gasping to catch my breath. Duff Ryan looked at me with cool gray eyes, then he walked off. I stood there, still trying to get my breath and watching his shadow blend with the shadows of the dark study hall. I was having one hell of a time getting my breath.

But I slept good all night. I was mad and I didn’t care about Tommy anymore. Let him hang. I slept good but I woke up ten minutes before reveille remembering that it was Pushton’s turn at the bugle again. He and Myers traded off duty every other day.

I felt pretty cocky and got up putting on only my slippers and went down to the eleven-year-old wing. Pushton was sitting on the edge of the bed working his arms back and forth and yawning. The fat little punk looked like an old man. He took himself that seriously. You would have thought maybe he was a general.

“What you want, Thorpe?” he said.

“I want your bugle. I’m going to break the damn thing.”

“You leave my bugle alone,” he said. “My folks aren’t as rich as yours and I had to save all my spending money to buy it.” This was true. They furnished bugles at school but they were awful and Pushton took his music so seriously that he had saved up and bought his own instrument.

“I know it,” I said, “so the school won’t be on my neck if I break it.” I looked around. “Where is it?”

“I won’t tell you!”

I looked under the bed, under his pillow, then I grabbed him by the nose. “Come on, Heinie. Where is it?”

“Leave me alone!” he wailed. “Keep your hands off me.” He was talking so loud now that half the wing was waking up.

“All right, punk,” I said. “Go ahead and blow that thing, and I hope you blow your tonsils out.”

I went back to my bed and held my ears. Pushton blew the bugle all right, I never did find out where he had the thing hidden.

I dressed thinking, well, only two more days and Tommy gets it. I’d be glad when it was over. Maybe all this tension would ease up then and Marie wouldn’t cry so much because once he was dead there wouldn’t be anything she could do about it. Time would go by and eventually she would forget him. One person more or less isn’t so important in the world anyway, no matter how good a guy he is.

Everything went swell Wednesday right through breakfast and until after we were marching out of the chapel and into the schoolroom. Then I ran into Pushton, who was trotting around with his bugle tucked under his arm. I stopped and looked him up and down.

His little black eyes didn’t flicker. He just said, “Next time you bother me, Thorpe, I’m going to report you.”

“Go ahead, punk,” I said, “and see what happens to you.”

I went on into school then, burning up at his guts, talking to me that way.

I was still burned up and sore at the guy when a lucky break came, for me, that is, not Pushton. It was during the afternoon right after we had been dismissed from the classroom for the two-hour recreation period.

I went into the main building, which was prohibited in the daytime so that I had to sneak in, to get a book I wanted to read. It was under my pillow. I slipped up the stairs, crept into my wing, got the book, and started out. It was then that I heard a pounding noise.

I looked around, then saw it was coming from the eleven-year-old wing.

I walked in and there it was! You wouldn’t have believed anything so beautiful could have been if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes. At least that was the way I felt about it. For who was it but Pushton.

The bugler on duty has the run of the main building and it was natural enough that he was here, but I hadn’t thought about it. There was a new radio set, a small portable, beside his bed. I saw that the wires and earphone — which you have to use in the dormitory—were connected with the adjoining bed as well and guessed that it belonged to another cadet. But Pushton was hooking it up. He was leaning halfway out the window trying, pounding with a hammer, to make some kind of a connection on the aerial wire.

Nothing could have been better. The window was six stories from the ground, with cement down below. No one knew I was in the building. I felt blood surge into my temples. My face got red, hot red, and I could feel fever throbbing in my throat. I moved forward slowly, on cat feet, my hands straight at my sides. I didn’t want him to hear me. But I was getting that dizzy feeling now. My fingers were itching.

Then suddenly I lunged over, I shoved against him. He looked back once, and that was what I wanted. He looked back for an instant, his fat face green with the most unholy fear I have ever seen. Then I gave him another shove and he was gone. Before he could call out, before he could say a word, he was gone, falling through the air!

I risked jumping up on the bed so I could see him hit, and I did see him hit. Then I got down and straightened the bed and beat it out.

I ran down the stairs as fast as I could. I didn’t see anybody. More important, no one saw me. But when I was on the second floor I ran down the hall to the end and lifted the window. I jumped out here, landing squarely on my feet.

I waited for a minute, then I circled the building from an opposite direction. My heart was pounding inside me. It was difficult for me to breathe. I managed to get back to the play field through an indirect route.

Funny thing, Pushton wasn’t seen right away. No one but myself had seen him fall. I was on the play field at least ten minutes, plenty long enough to establish myself as being there, before the cry went up. The kids went wild. We ran in packs to the scene.

I stood there with the rest of them looking at what was left of Push-ton. He wouldn’t blow any more bugles. His flesh was like a sack of water that had fallen and burst full of holes. The blood was splattered out in jagged streaks all around him.

We stood around about five minutes, the rest of the kids and I, nobody saying anything. Then a faculty officer chased us away, and that was the last I saw of Pushton.

Supper was served as usual but there wasn’t much talk. What there was of it seemed to establish the fact that Pushton had been a thick-witted sort and had undoubtedly leaned out too far trying to fix the aerial wire and had fallen.

I thought that that could have easily been the case, all right, and since I had hated the little punk I had no conscience about it. It didn’t bother me nearly so much as the fact that Tommy Smith was going to die. I had liked Tommy. And I was nuts about his sister, wasn’t I?

That night study hall was converted into a little inquest meeting. We were all herded into one big room and Major Clark talked to us as though we were a bunch of Boy Scouts. After ascertaining that no one knew any more about Pushton’s death than what they had seen on the cement, he assured us that the whole thing had been unavoidable and even went so far as to suggest that we might spare our parents the worry of telling them of so unfortunate an incident. All the bloated donkey was worrying about was losing a few tuitions.

Toward the end of the session Duff Ryan came in and nodded at me, and then sat down. He looked around at the kids, watched Major Clark a while, and then glanced back at me. He kept doing that until we were dismissed. He made me nervous.

Friday morning I woke up and listened for reveille but it didn’t come. I lay there, feeling comfortable in the bedclothes and half lazy, but feeling every minute that reveille would blast me out of my place. Then I suddenly realized why the bugle hadn’t blown. I heard the splash of rain across the window and knew that we wouldn’t have to raise the flag or take our exercises this morning. On rainy days we got to sleep an extra half-hour.

I felt pretty good about this and put my hands behind my head there on the pillow and began thinking. They were pleasant, what you might call mellow, thoughts. A little thing like an extra half-hour in bed will do that.

Things were working out fine and after tonight I wouldn’t have anything to worry about. For Duff Ryan to prove Tommy was innocent after the hanging would only make him out a damn fool. I was glad it was raining. It would make it easier for me to lay low, to stay away from Marie until the final word came …

That was what I thought in the morning, lying there in bed. But no. Seven-thirty that night Duff came over to the school in a slicker. He came into the study hall and got me. His eyes were wild. His face was strained.

“Ruth and I are going to see the lawyer again,” he said. “You’ve got to stay with Marie.”

“Nuts,” I said.

He jerked me out of the seat, then he took his hands off me as though he were ashamed. “Come on,” he said. “This is no time for smart talk.”

So I went.

Ruth had on a slicker too and was waiting there on the front porch. I could see her pretty face. It was pinched, sort of terrible. Her eyes were wild too. She patted my hand, half crying, and said, “You be good to Marie, honey. She likes you, and you’re the only one in the world now that can console her.”

“What time does Tommy go?” I asked.

“Ten-thirty,” said Duff.

I nodded. “OK.” I stood there as they crossed the sidewalk and got into Duff Ryan’s car and drove away. Then I went in to see Marie. The kid looked scared, white as a ghost.

“Oh, Thorpe,” she said, “they’re going to kill him tonight!”

“Well, I guess there’s nothing we can do,” I said.

She put her arms around me and cried on my shoulder. I could feel her against me, and believe me, she was nice. She had figure, all right. I put my arms around her waist and then I kissed her neck and her ears. She looked at me, tears on her cheeks, and shook her head. “Don’t.”

She said that because I had never kissed her before, but now I saw her lips and I kissed her. She didn’t do anything about it, but kept crying.

Finally I said, “Well, let’s make fudge. Let’s play a game. Let’s play the radio. Let’s do something. This thing’s beginning to get me.”

We went to the kitchen and made fudge for a while.

But I was restless. The rain had increased. There was thunder and lightning in the sky now. Again I had that strange feeling of being cold, although the room was warm. I looked at the clock and it said ten minutes after eight. Only ten minutes after eight! And Tommy wasn’t going to hang until ten-thirty!

“You’ll always stay with me, won’t you, Thorpe?” said Marie.

“Sure,” I told her, but right then I felt like I wanted to push her face in. I had never felt that way before. I couldn’t understand what was the matter with me. Everything that had been me was gone. My wit and good humor.

I kept watching the clock, watching every minute that ticked by, and thinking of Tommy up there in San Quentin in the death cell pacing back and forth. I guess maybe he was watching the minutes too. I wondered if it was raining up there and if rain made any difference in a hanging.

We wandered back into the living room and sat down at opposite ends of the divan. Marie looking at nothing, her eyes glassy, and me watching and hating the rain, and hearing the clock.

Then suddenly Marie got up and went to the piano. She didn’t ask me if she could or anything about it. She just went to the piano and sat down. I stared after her, even opened my mouth to speak. But I didn’t say anything. After all, it was her brother who was going to die, wasn’t it? I guess for one night at least she could do anything she wanted to do.

But then she began playing. First, right off, “Lead Kindly Light,” and then “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and then “Little Church in the Wildwood.” I sat there wringing my hands with that agony beating in my ears. Then I leapt to my feet and began to shout at her.

“Stop that! Stop it! Do you want to drive me crazy?”

But her face was frozen now. It was as though she was in a trance. I ran to her and shook her shoulder, but she pulled away from me and played on.

I backed away from her and my face felt as though it was contorted. I backed away and stared at her, her slim, arched back. I began biting my fingernails, and then my fingers. That music was killing me. Those hymns …those silly, inane hymns. Why didn’t she stop it? The piano and the rain were seeping into my bloodstream.

I walked up and down the room. I walked up and down the room faster and faster. I stopped and picked up a flower vase and dropped it, yelling: “Stop it! For the love of heaven, stop!”

But she kept right on. Again I began staring at her, at her back, and her throat, and the profile of her face. I felt blood surging in me. I felt those hammers in my temples …

I tried to fight it off this time. I tried to go toward her to pull her away from that damn piano but I didn’t have the strength to move in her direction. I stood there feeling the breath go out of me, feeling my skin tingle. And I didn’t want to be like that. I looked at my hands, and one minute they were tight fists and the next my fingers were working in and out like mad.

I looked toward the kitchen, and then I moved quietly into it. She was still slamming at the piano when I opened the drawer and pulled out the knife I had used to kill her father.

At least it was a knife like it. I put it behind me and tiptoed back into the room. She wasn’t aware that I had moved. I crept up on her, waited.

Her hands were flying over the piano keys. Once more I shouted, and my voice was getting hoarse: “Stop it!”

But of course she didn’t. She didn’t and I swore. I swore at her. She didn’t hear this either. But I’d show the little slut a thing or two.

I was breathing hard, looking around the room to make sure no one was here. Then I lifted the knife and plunged down with it.

I swear I never knew where Duff Ryan came from. It must have been from behind the divan. A simple place like that and I hadn’t seen him, merely because I had been convinced that he went away in the car. But he’d been in the room all the time waiting for me to do what I almost did.

It had been a trick, of course, and this time I’d been sap enough to fall into his trap. He had heard me denounce hymns, he knew I’d be nervous tonight, highly excitable, so he had set the stage and remained hidden, and Marie had done the rest.

He had told Marie then, after all.

Duff Ryan grabbed my wrist just at the right moment, as he had planned on doing, and of course being fourteen I didn’t have much chance against him. He wrested away the knife, then he grabbed me and shouted:

“Why did you murder Maries father?”

“Because the old boy hated me! Because he thought Marie was too young to know boys! Because he kicked me out and hit me with his cane!” I said all this, trying to jerk away from him, but I couldn’t so I went on:

“That’s why I did it. Because I had a lot of fun doing it! So what? What are you going to do about it? I’m a kid, you can’t hang me! There’s a law against hanging kids. I murdered Pushton too. I shoved him out the window! How do you like that? All you can do is put me in reform school!”

As my voice faded, and it faded because I had begun to choke, I heard Ruth at the telephone. She had come back in too. She was calling long distance. San Quentin.

Marie was sitting on the divan, her face in her hands. You would have thought she was sorry for me. When I got my breath I went on:

“I came back afterward, while Tommy was in the other room. I got in the kitchen door. The old man was standing there and I just picked up the knife and let him have it. I ran before I could see much. But Pushton. Let me tell you about Pushton —”

Duff Ryan shoved me back against the piano. “Shut up,” he said. “You didn’t kill Pushton. You’re just bragging now. But you did kill the old man and that’s what we wanted to know!”

Bragging? I was enraged. But Duff Ryan clipped me and I went out cold.

So I’m in reform school now and — will you believe it? —I can’t convince anyone that I murdered Pushton. Is it that grownups are so unbelieving because I’m pretty young? Are they so stupid that they still look upon fourteen-year-old boys as little innocents who have no minds of their own? That is the bitterness of youth. And I am sure that I won’t change or see things any differently. I told the dopes that too, but everyone assures me I will.

But the only thing I’m really worried about is that no one will believe about Pushton, not even the kids here at the reform school, and that hurts. It does something to my pride.

I’m not in the least worried about anything else. Things here aren’t so bad, nor so different from Clark’s. Doctors come and see me now and then but they don’t think anything is wrong with my mind.

They think I knifed old man Smith because I was in a blind rage when I did it, and looking at it that way, it would only be second-degree murder even if I were older. I’m not considered serious. There are lots worse cases here than mine. Legally, a kid isn’t responsible for what he does, so I’ll be out when I’m twenty-one. Maybe before, because my old man’s got money…

You’ll always remember me, won’t you? Because I’ll be out when I’m older and you might be the one I’ll be seeing.

I first met Nelson Tare when he was around five or six years old, and I was around the same. I had watched his family moving into the creek house on a cold, snowless morning in early winter.

Two lumber wagons went by, with iron beds and old kitchen chairs and mattresses tied all over them. They rumbled down the hill past Mr. Boston’s barn and stopped in front of the creek house. I could see men and girls working, carrying the stuff inside.

In midafternoon I was outdoors again, and I coasted to the corner in my little wagon to see whether the moving-in activities were still going on.

Then Nelson Tare appeared. He had climbed the hill by himself; probably he was looking for guns, although I couldn’t know that at the time. He was a gaunt little child with bright blue beads for eyes, and a sharp-pointed nose.

He said, “Hello, kid. Want to pway?”

Nelson was only about a month younger than I, it turned out, but he still talked a lot of baby talk. I think kids are apt to do that more when their parents don’t talk to them much.

I told him that I did want to play, and asked him what he wanted to do.

He asked, “Have you got any guns?” What he actually said was, “Dot any duns?” and for a while I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, when I understood, I coasted back to the house in my wagon, with Nelson walking beside me. We went into the living room.

I had three guns: a popgun with the pop gone, and a glass pistol that used to have candy inside — but now the candy was all eaten up — and a cap gun and holster.

The cap gun was the best. It was nickel-plated, and the holster was made of black patent leather. It was the shape and possibly half the size of an ordinary .32-caliber revolver.

Nelson Tare’s eyes pushed out a little when he saw it. He made a grab, and belted it on before I had time to protest and tell him that I wanted to play with the cap gun and he could play with the glass pistol or the broken pop rifle. He went swaggering around with the gun on, and it kind of scared me the way he did it — all of a sudden he’d snatch the revolver out of its holster and aim it at me.

I took the glass pistol and tried to imitate him. But the glass pistol couldn’t click, and at least the hammer of the cap gun would come down with a resounding click. Nelson, or Nelly, as I came to know him, fairly shot the daylights out of me. I began to protest, and he kept on advancing and kind of wrangling and threatening me, until he had me backed up in a corner.

He hadn’t taken off his little red coat with its yellow horn buttons, and he was perspiring inside it. I still recollect how he smelled when he got close enough to wool me around; I had never smelled a smell like that before. I remember his face, too, when he came close — the tiny, expressionless turquoise eyes, the receding chin and baby mouth still marked with the tag ends of his dinner; and in between them, that inhuman nose whittled out to a point.

I tried to push him away as he kept battling me and shooting me, and I guess I began to cry.

Nelson said that it wasn’t a real gun.

“It might go off!”

He said that it couldn’t go off; that it wasn’t “weal.”

“‘Course it isn’t real!” I cried. “I guess there isn’t any boy in the world got a real gun!”

Well, he said that he had one, and when I was still disbelieving he said that he would go home and fetch it. His coat had come unbuttoned in our scufflings, and I remember how he looked as I watched through the window and saw him flapping down the last length of concrete sidewalk past the big maple tree.

My mother came from upstairs while I waited at the window. She said that she had heard voices. “Did you have company?” she asked.

“It was a new boy.”

“What new boy?”

“He moved into the creek house down there.”

My mother said doubtfully, “Oh, yes. I heard there was a ditcher’s family moving in down there.”

Well, I wanted to know what a ditcher was, and while Mother was explaining to me about drainage ditches out on the prairie and how the tile was laid in them, here came Nelly hustling up the road as fast as he could leg it. He had something big and heavy that he had to carry in both hands. When he got into the yard we could see that he did have a revolver, and it looked like a real one.

Mother exclaimed, and went to open the door for him. He ducked inside, bareheaded and cold, with his dirty, thin, straw-colored hair sticking every which way, and the old red coat still dangling loose.

“I dot my dun,” he said.

It was a large revolver — probably about a .44. It had a yellow handle, but the metal parts were a mass of rust. The cylinder and hammer were rusted tight and couldn’t be moved.

“Why, little boy,” Mother exclaimed in horror, “where on earth did you get this?”

He said that he got it at home.

Mother lured it out of his hands, but only after she had praised it extravagantly. She got him to put the revolver on the library table, and then she took us both out to the kitchen, where we had milk and molasses cookies.

My father came home from his newspaper office before Nelly had gone. We showed Father the gun, and he lighted the lamp on the library table and examined the revolver thoroughly.

“My goodness, Ethel,” he said to my mother, “it’s got cartridges in it!”

“Cartridges?”

“Yes, it sure has. They’re here in the cylinder, all rusted in tight. Good thing the rest of it is just as rusty.”

He put on his coat again and said that he’d take Nelson home. It was growing dark and was almost suppertime, and he was afraid the boy might be lost there in the new surroundings of Elm City. Nelson wanted his gun, but my father said no and put it in his own overcoat pocket. I was allowed to go along with them.

When we got to the creek house, Father rapped on the door and Nelly’s mother opened it. She was a scrawny, pale-faced woman, very round-shouldered, in a calico dress. Nelly’s father wasn’t there; he had gone to take one of the teams back. There were several girls — Nelly’s sisters — strung out all the way from little kids to a big, bony creature as tall as her mother.

Father brought out the gun and said that it wasn’t wise to let little kids go carrying things like that around.

“You little devil!” said Nelly’s mother to Nelly, and she laughed when she said it. “What on earth were you doing with that?”

The girls crowded close and looked. “Why, it’s Jay’s gun!” said the eldest one.

Father wanted to know who Jay was. They laughed a lot while they were telling him, although they were remarkably close-lipped about it at the same time. All that Father could get out of them was the fact that they used to live in Oklahoma, and Jay was somebody who used to stay at their house. He had left that gun there once, and they still kept it — as a kind of memorial for Jay, it would seem.

“I swear Nelly must have taken it out of the bureau drawer,” said Mrs. Tare, still smiling. “You little devil, you got to behave yourself, you got to!” And she gave him a kind of spat with her hand, but not as if she were mad. They all seemed to think it was cute, for him to sneak off with that gun.

Father said goodbye and we went home. It was dark now, and all the way up the hill and past Mr. Boston’s farmyard, I kept wondering about this new little boy and the rusty revolver. I kept breathing hard, trying to breathe that strange oily smell out of my nose. It was the odor of their house and of themselves — the same odor I had noticed when Nelly tussled with me.

My father said quite calmly that he supposed Jay was an Oklahoma outlaw. Unintentionally, he thus gave Nelson Tare a fantastic importance in my eyes. I did not dream then that Jay, instead of old Barton Tare with his sloppy mustache, might have been Nelly’s own father. Perhaps it is a dream, even as I write the words now. But I think not.

When Nelly grew older, he possessed a great many physical virtues. He was remarkably agile in the use of his hands and arms. He had no fear of height; he would climb any windmill within reach and he could stump any boy in that end of town when it came to Stump-the-Leader. But Nelly Tare liked guns better than he did games.

At the air-rifle stage of our development, Nelly could shoot rings around any of us. He and I used to go up in our barn and lie on the moldy, abandoned hay of the old mow. There were rats that sometimes came into the chicken run next door, to eat the chickens’ food. I never did shoot a rat with my BB gun, and for some reason Nelly never did either. That was funny, because he was such a good shot. We used to amuse ourselves, while waiting for rats, by trying to peck away at the chickens’ water pan. It was a good healthy distance, and I’d usually miss. But the side of the pan which faced our way had the enamel all spotted off by Nelly’s accurate fire.

He owned an air-pump gun of his own, but not for long. He traded it to somebody for an old .22, and after that there was little peace in the neighborhood. He was always shooting at tin cans or bottles on the roadside dump. He was always hitting too.

In the winter of 1914, Nelly and I went hunting with Clyde Boston. Clyde was a huge, ruddy-faced young man at least ten years older than Nelly and I. He lived with his parents across from our corner.

One day there was deep snow, and Nelly and I were out exploring. He had his .22, and every now and then he’d bang away at a knot on a fence post. At last we wandered into Boston’s barnyard, and found Clyde in the barn, filling his pockets with shotgun shells.

He had a shotgun too — a fine repeater, gleaming blue steel — and Nelly wanted to know what Clyde was doing. “Going hunting?”

“Come on, Clyde,” I said, “let us go! Nelly’s got his gun.”

Clyde took the little rifle and examined it critically. “This won’t do for hunting around here,” he said. “I’m going out after rabbits, and you got to have a shotgun for that. Rifle bullets are apt to carry too far and hit somebody, or maybe hit a pig or something. Anyway, you couldn’t hit a cottontail on the run with that.”

“Hell I couldn’t,” said Nelly.

I said, “Clyde, you let us go with you and we’ll beat up the game. We’ll scare the rabbits out of the weeds, because you haven’t got any dog. Then you can shoot them when they run out. Maybe you’ll let us have one shot each, huh, Clyde — maybe?”

Clyde said that he would see, and he made Nelly leave his rifle at the barn. We went quartering off through the truck garden on the hillside.

The snow had fallen freshly, but already there was a mass of rabbit tracks everywhere. You could see where the cottontails had run into the thickest, weediest coverts to feed upon dry seeds.

Clyde walked in the middle, with his face apple-colored with the cold and his breath blowing out. Nelly and I spread wide, to scare up the game. We used sticks and snowballs to alarm the thickets, and we worked hard at it. The big twelve-gauge gun began to bang every once in a while. Clyde had three cottontails hanging furry from his belt before we got to the bend in the creek opposite the Catholic cemetery. Then finally he passed the gun over to me and told me I could have the next chance.

It came pretty soon. We saw a cottontail in his set — a gray little mound among the vervain stalks. I lifted the muzzle, but Clyde said that it wasn’t fair to shoot rabbits in the set, and made Nelly throw a snowball. The cottontail romped out of there in a hurry, and I whaled away with the shotgun and managed to wound the rabbit and slow him down. I fired again and missed, and Clyde caught up with the rabbit after a few strides. He put the poor peeping thing out of its misery by rapping it on the head.

I tied the rabbit to the belt of my mackinaw, and Clyde passed the shotgun over to Nelly.

Nelly’s face was pale.

“Watch your step,” said Clyde. “Remember to keep the safety on until you see something to shoot.”

“Sure,” said Nelly Tare.

We crossed the creek without starting any more rabbits, and came down the opposite side of the stream. Then a long-legged jack jumped up out of a deep furrow where there had been some fall plowing, and ran like a mule ahead of us.

“Look at those black ears!” Clyde sang out. “It’s a jack! Get him, Nelly — get him!”

Well, Nelson had the gun at his shoulder; at first I thought he had neglected to touch the safety— I thought he couldn’t pull the trigger because the safety was on. He kept swinging the muzzle of the gun, following the jackrabbit in its erratic course, until the rabbit slowed up a little.

The jack bobbed around behind a tree stump, and then came out on the other side. It squatted down on top of the snow and sat looking at us. It hopped a few feet farther and then sat up again to watch.

“For gosh sakes,” said Clyde Boston, “what’s the matter with you, kid? There he is, looking at you.”

Nelson Tare just stood like a snow man, or rather like a snow boy. He kept the rabbit covered; his dirty blue finger didn’t move. The trigger waited, the shell in the barrel waited, and so did we.

Nelly’s face was deathly white under the dirt that streaked it. The eyes were blank little marbles, as always; even his nose seemed pointed like the sights of a gun. And yet he did not shoot.

Clyde said, half under his breath, “I guess that’s what they call buck fever. You got the buck, Nelly.” He hurried over to take the shotgun.

Blood from the last-killed rabbit made little dots on the snow around my feet, though the animal was freezing fast.

“Can’t you see him, Nelly?”

Nelson said, “Yes. I —”

Clyde lost all patience. “Oh, for gosh sake!” he exclaimed, and grabbed the gun. But our combined motions startled the jackrabbit, and he vanished into the creek gorge beyond.

Something had happened there in the snow; none of us knew exactly what had happened. But whatever it was, it took the edge off our sport. We tramped along a cattle path next to the stream, with Clyde carrying the shotgun. We boys didn’t scare up any more game. Nelly kept looking at the rabbits, which bounced and rubbed their frozen red against Clyde Boston’s overalls.

Clyde teased him, all the way back to the Boston barnyard. He’d say, “Nelly, I thought you were supposed to be the Daniel Boone of the neighborhood. Gosh, Nelly, I thought you could shoot. I thought you were just gun crazy!”

We walked through the fresh warm mire behind the Boston barn. Clyde said that he didn’t need three rabbits; that his mother could use only two, and would Nelly want the other one?

“No,” said Nelson. We went into the barn, and Nelly picked up his .22 rifle.

“Look out while you’re on the way home,” said Clyde, red-faced and jovial as ever. “Look out you don’t meet a bear. Maybe he wouldn’t set around and wait like that jackrabbit did.”

Nelson Tare sucked in his breath. “You said I couldn’t shoot, didn’t you, Mister Clyde?”

“You had your chance. Look at Dave there. He’s got a rabbit to take home that he shot himself, even though he didn’t kill it first crack.”

“I can shoot,” said Nelly. He worked a cartridge into the breech of his rifle. “Dave,” he said to me, “you throw up a snowball.”

“Can’t anybody hit a snowball with a twenty-two,” said big Clyde Boston.

Nelly said, “Throw a snowball, Dave.”

I stepped down from the sill of the barn door and made a ball about the size of a Duchess apple. I threw it high toward the telephone wires across the road. Nelly Tare pinked it apart with his .22 before the ball ever got to the wires. Then he went down the road to the creek house, with Clyde Boston and me looking after him. Clyde was scratching his head, but I just looked.

Nelly began to get into trouble when he was around fourteen. His first trouble that anyone knew about happened in the cloakroom of the eighth grade at school. Miss Cora Petersen was a great believer in corporal punishment, and when Nelly was guilty of some infraction of rules, Miss Petersen prepared to thrash him with a little piece of white rubber hose. Teachers used to be allowed to do that.

But if the pupil did not permit it to be done to him, but instead drew a loaded revolver from inside his shirt and threatened to kill his teacher, that was a different story. It was a story in which the superintendent of schools and the local chief of police and hard-faced old Mr. Tare were all mixed together in the climax.

There was some talk about the reform school, too, but the reform school did not materialize until a year later.

That was after Meisner’s Hardware and Harness Store had been robbed. The thief or thieves had a peculiar taste in robbery; the cash drawer was untouched, but five revolvers and a lot of ammunition were taken away. A mile and a quarter away, to be exact. They were hidden beneath planks and straw in Mr. Barton Tare’s wagon shed, and Chief of Police Kelcy found them after the simplest kind of detective work.

This time the story had to be put in the paper, no matter how much my father regretted it. This time it was the reform school for sure.

We boys in the south end of town sat solemnly on our new concrete curbstone and talked of Nelly Tare in hushed voices. The judge had believed, sternly and simply, that Nelly was better off at Eldora than at home. He gave him two years. Nelly didn’t serve all of that time. He got several months off for good behavior, which must have come as a surprise to many people in Elm City.

He emerged from the Eldora reformatory in the spring of 1918. His parents were out of the picture by this time. His mother was dead; his father had moved to South Dakota with the two youngest girls, and the other girls had married or drifted away.

Nelly may have been under age, but when he expressed a preference for the cavalry, and when he flourished a good report sheet from the reformatory superintendent, no one cared to say him nay. Once he came home on furlough from a camp in New Mexico. I remember how he looked, standing in front of Frank Wanda’s Recreation Pool Hall, with the flashing badge of a pistol expert pinned upon his left breast, and all the little kids grouped around to admire the polish on his half-leather putts.

He never got a chance to use any guns against the Germans. He wasn’t sent to France, and came back to Elm City in the spring of 1919. It was reasonable for him to come there. Elm City was the only real hometown he had, and one of his sisters was married to Ira Flagler, a garage mechanic who lived out on West Water Street. Nelly went to live with the Flaglers.

He began working at Frank Wanda’s pool hall. I have spoken about his skill with his hands; he employed that skill to good advantage in the pool hall. He had developed into a remarkable player during his year in the Army. He also ran the cigar counter and soft drinks for Frank Wanda, who was getting old and couldn’t stand on his feet very long at a time.

It used to be that in every pool hall there was somebody who played for the house, if people came along and really wanted to bet anything. Nelly would play on his own, too, taking money away from farm boys or from some out-of-towner who thought he was good. He was soon making real money, but he didn’t spend it in the usual channels. He spent it on guns.

All sorts. Sometimes he’d have an especially good revolver down there in the billiard parlor with him, and he’d show it to me when I dropped in for cigarettes. He had a kind of private place out along the Burlington tracks where he used to practice shooting on Sundays. And in 1923 a carnival came to town.

Miss Antoinette McReady, the Outstanding Six-Gun Artiste of Two Nations, was supposed to come from Canada. Maybe she did. They built up a phony Royal Canadian Mounted Police atmosphere for her act. A fellow in a shabby red coat and yellow-striped breeches sold tickets out in front. An extra girl in the same kind of comic uniform assisted the artiste with her fancy shooting. They had a steel backstop at the rear of the enclosure to stop the bullets. I went to the carnival on the first night, and dropped in to see the shooting act.

The girl was pretty good. Her lady assistant put on a kind of crown with white chalks sticking up in it, and Miss McReady shot the chalks out of the crown quite accurately, missing only one or two shots and not killing the lady assistant at all. She did mirror shooting and upside-down-leaning-backward shooting; she balanced on a chair and shot. She was a very pretty redhead, though necessarily painted.

Then the Royal Canadian Mounted manager made a speech. He said that frequently during her extensive travels, Miss McReady had been challenged by local pistol-artists, but that she was so confident of her ability that she had a standing offer of one hundred dollars to anybody who could outshoot her.

The only condition was that the challenging local artist should agree to award Miss McReady an honorarium of twenty dollars, provided she outshot him.

Nelly Tare climbed up on the platform; he showed the color of his money and the bet was on.

Miss Antoinette McReady shot first, shooting at the tiny target gong with great deliberation; she rang the gong five out of six times. Nelly took her gun, aimed, and snapped it a few times before ejecting the empty shells, to acquaint himself with the trigger pull. Then he loaded up, with the whole audience standing to watch him. He fired his six rounds, rapid fire, and everyone yipped when he rang the gong with every shot.

Miss Antoinette McReady smiled and bowed as if she had done the shooting instead of Nelly; she went over to congratulate him. They got ready for the next competition. The girl assistant started to put on the crown thing with its chalks sticking out of the sockets. Nelly talked to her a minute in a low voice; he took the crown and put it on his own head.

He stood against the backstop. His face was very red, but he stood there stiff at Army attention, with his hands against his sides.

“Go ahead, sister,” he told Miss McReady.

Well, they made him sign a waiver first, in case of accident. You could have heard an ant sneeze in that place when Miss McReady stood up to do her shooting. She fired six times and broke four of the chalks. The people in the audience proceeded to wake up babies two blocks away, and Miss Antoinette McReady went over to Nelly with those little dancing, running steps that circus and vaudeville folks use. She made him come down to the front and take applause with her. Then she said she’d wear the crown for Nelly, and this time there was no waiver signed.

Nelly broke all six chalks in six steady shots, and Miss Antoinette McReady kissed him, and Frank Wanda had to get a new fellow for the pool hall when Nelly left town with the show after the last performance on Saturday night.

It was six months later when I heard my father exclaim, while he was taking press dispatches over the out-of-town wire. He often did that when some news came through which particularly interested or excited him. I left my desk and went to look over his shoulder, while his fat old fingers pushed out the story on the typewriter.

hampton, Colorado, April 2. — Two desperate trick-shot artists gave Hampton residents an unscheduled exhibition today. When the smoke had cleared away the Hampton County Savings Bank discovered it had paid more than $7,000 to watch the show.

Shortly after the bank opened this morning, a young man and a young woman, identified by witnesses as “Cowboy” Nelson Tare and Miss Antoinette McReady, walked into the bank and commanded tellers and customers to lie down on the floor. They scooped up $7,150 in small bills, and were backing toward an exit, when Vice-President O. E. Simms tried to reach for a telephone.

The trick-shot bandits promptly shot the telephone off the desk. They pulverized chandeliers, interior glass, and window lights in a rapid fusillade which covered their retreat to their car.

Within a few minutes a posse was in hot pursuit, but lost the trail near Elwin, ten miles south of this place. A stolen car, identified as the one used by the bandits, was found abandoned this noon near Hastings City. State and county officers immediately spread a dragnet on surrounding highways.

Nelson Tare and his female companion were easily recognized as stunt shooters with a traveling carnival which became stranded in El-win a week ago. A full description of the hard-shooting pair has been broadcast to officials of five nearby states.

All the time I was reading it, I kept thinking of Nelly Tare, half-pint size in a dirty red coat, asking me, “Dot any duns?”

They were captured in Oklahoma that summer, after another robbery. Antoinette McReady, whose real name turned out to be Ruth Riley, was sent to a women’s penal institution; Nelly Tare went to McAlester Prison. He managed his escape during the winter two years later, and started off on a long series of holdups which carried him south into Texas, over to Arkansas, and north into Missouri.

Those were the days of frequent and daring bank robberies throughout that region. There were a lot of other bad boys around, and Nelly was only one of the herd. Still, he began to appear in the news dispatches with increasing regularity, and when some enterprising reporter called him Nice Nelly, the name stuck and spread. It was a good news name, like Baby Face or Pretty Boy.

They recaptured him in Sedalia; the story of his escape from the Jefferson City Penitentiary in 1933 was front-page stuff all over the nation. It was always the same — he was always just as hard to catch up with. He was always just as able to puncture the tires of pursuing cars, to blast the headlights that tried to pick him out through the midnight dust.

Federal men didn’t enter the picture until the next January, when Nelly kidnapped a bank cashier in Hiawatha, Kansas, and carried him nearly to Lincoln, Nebraska. That little state line made all the difference in the world. The so-called Lindbergh Law had come into existence, and Nice Nelly Tare became a public enemy on an elaborate scale.

It is not astonishing that some people of Elm City basked in this reflected notoriety.

Reporters from big-city papers, photographers from national magazines, came poking around all the time. They interviewed Nelly’s sister, poor Mrs. Ira Flagler, until she was black in the face — until she was afraid to let her children play in the yard.

They took pictures of Frank Wanda’s pool hall, and they would have taken pictures of Frank if he hadn’t been dead. They managed to shake Miss Cora Petersen, late of Elm City’s eighth grade, from asthmatic retirement. Her homely double-chinned face appeared in a fine-screen cut, in ugly halftones — a million different impressions of it. read teacher’s story of how nice nelly, baby bandit, drew his first bead on her. other pictures on page seven.

Clyde Boston and I used to talk about it, over in Clyde’s office in the courthouse. Clyde Boston had been sheriff for two terms; he was just as apple-cheeked and good-natured as ever, though most of his hair was gone. He would shake his head when we talked about Nelly Tare, which we did often.

“You know,” he’d say, “a lot of people probably doubt those stories about Nelly’s fancy shooting — people who haven’t seen him shoot. But I still remember that time he had you throw a snowball for him to break with a rifle. He certainly is gun crazy.”

It was during the late summer of 1934 — the bad drought year — when Nelly held up a bank at Northfield, Minnesota, and was promptly dubbed the Modern Jesse James.

Officers picked up Nelly’s trail in Sioux Falls, and that was a relief to us in Elm City, because people had always feared that Nelly might be struck with a desire to revisit his boyhood haunts and stage a little shooting right there in the lobby of the Farmers’ National Bank. Nelly’s trail was lost again, and for two weeks he slid out of the news.

Then came the big story. Federal men very nearly recaptured him in Council Bluffs, though he got away from them even there. Then silence again.

About two o’clock of the following Thursday afternoon, I went up to the courthouse on printing business. I had stopped in at Sheriff Clyde Boston’s office and was chewing the rag with Clyde, when his telephone rang.

Clyde picked up the phone. He said, “Yes …Yes, Barney …He did? …Yes …Glad you called me.” He hung up the receiver and sat drumming his fingers against a desk blotter.

“Funny thing,” he said. “That was young Barney Meisner, down at the hardware store.”

“What did he have to say?”

“He said that one of the Flagler kids was in there a while ago and bought two boxes of forty-five shells. Funny, isn’t it?”

We looked at each other. “Maybe Ira Flagler’s decided to emulate his wife’s folks,” I said, “and take up trick shooting on the side.”

Clyde Boston squeezed out a smile. “Guess I’ll ride up to their house and ask about it.”

So I went along with him, and when we got to the green-and-white Flagler house on West Water Street, we saw a coupe parked in the drive. Clyde breathed rapidly for a moment; I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel, until he could read the license number of the car. Clyde relaxed. It was a Vera Cruz County number; it was one of our own local cars; I remembered that I had seen Ira Flagler driving that car sometimes.

Clyde parked across the street, although down a little way. He got out on the driver’s side and I got out on the other side. When I walked around the rear of the car and looked up at the Flagler house, Nelly Tare was standing on the porch with a revolver in his hand.

I guess neither Clyde nor I could have said anything if we had been paid. Clyde didn’t have his own gun on; sheriffs didn’t habitually carry guns in our county anymore. There was Nelly on the porch, covering us and looking just about the same as ever, except that his shoulders had sagged and his chin seemed to have receded a good deal more.

He said, “Lay down on the ground. That’s right — both of you. Lay down. That’s right — keep your hands up.”

When we were on the ground, or rather on the asphalt pavement which formed the last block of Water Street, Nelly fired four shots. He put them all into the hood and engine of the car, and then we heard his feet running on the ground. I didn’t look for a minute, but Clyde had more nerve than I, and got up on his haunches immediately.

By that time Nelly was in the Flagler coupe. He drove it right across their vegetable garden, across Lou Miller’s yard, and out onto the pavement of Prospect Street. Prospect Street connected with a wide gravel road that went south toward the Rivermouth country and the town of Liberty beyond. Nelly put his foot on the gas; dust went high.

Those four bullets had made hash out of the motor. The starter was dead when Clyde got his foot on it; gas and water were leaking out underneath. Mrs. Ira Flagler stumbled out upon the porch with one of her children; they were both crying hysterically.

She said, “Oh, thank God he didn’t shoot you, Mr. Boston!”

Later she told her story. Nelly had showed up there via boxcar early that morning, but Ira was working on a hurry-up job at the garage and didn’t know about it. Nelly had made his sister and the children stay in the house all day. Finally he persuaded the youngest boy that it would be great fun and a joke on everybody if he would go downtown and buy him two boxes of .45 shells.

But all this revelation came later, for Clyde Boston was well occupied at the telephone. He called the courthouse and sent a carload of vigilantes after Nelly on Primary No. 37. He called the telephone office and had them notify authorities in Liberty, Prairie Flower, Mannville, and Fort Hood. Then he called the state capital and talked to federal authorities himself. Government men started arriving by auto and airplane within two hours.

About suppertime Nelly showed up at a farmhouse owned by Larry Larsen, fourteen miles southwest of Elm City. He had been circling around all afternoon, trying to break through the cordon. They had heavy trucks across all the roads; late-summer cornfields don’t make for good auto travel, even when there has been a drought.

He took Larsen’s sedan and made the farmer fill it with gas out of his tractor tank. Nelly had cut the telephone wires; he forced the farmer’s family to tie one another up, and then he tied the last one himself. Nelly saw to it that the tying was well done; it was after eight o’clock before one of the kids got loose and they shouted forth their story over a neighbor’s telephone.

Things were wild enough down at the Chronicle office that evening. But I had a reliable staff, and at eight-thirty I thought it was safe to take a run up to the courthouse.

“I kind of expected you’d be up, Dave,” said Clyde Boston.

I told him that I thought he’d be out on the road somewhere.

“Been out for the last four hours.” He took his feet down off the desk, and then put them up again. “If I can get loose from all these state and national efficiency experts, how’d you like to take a little drive with me in your car? Mine’s kind of out of order.”

Well, I told him that I’d be glad to drive him anywhere he said, but I didn’t want to come back with bullet holes in the cowling. So he got loose from the efficiency experts, and he made me strike out south of town and then east, on Primary No. 6.

Clyde didn’t talk. Usually it was his way to talk a lot, in a blissful, middle-aged, baldheaded fashion. We passed two gangs of guards and identified ourselves each time, and finally Clyde had me stop at a farm where some cousins of his lived. He borrowed a log chain — a good big one with heavy links. This rusty mass Clyde dumped down into my clean back seat, and then he directed me to drive south again.

The katydids exclaimed in every grove.

“You know,” said Clyde, “I used to do a lot of rabbit hunting and prairie-chicken hunting down this way, when I was younger. And you used to do a lot of hiking around down here with the boys. Fact is, only boys who were raised in these parts would know this country completely. Isn’t that a fact? Outside officers wouldn’t know it.”

Well, I agreed that they wouldn’t, and then Clyde began to talk about Nelly Tare. He said that Nelly’s one chance to get out of those several hundred square miles that he was surrounded in was to ride out on a railroad train. He wouldn’t be likely to try it on foot, not unless he was crazy, and Clyde Boston didn’t think he was crazy. Except gun crazy, as always.

“Now, the railroads all cross up here in this end of the county, up north of the river. Don’t they?”

“That’s right.”

“So to get from where Nelly was at suppertime to where he’d like to be, he’d have to go diagonally from southwest to northeast. Now, the river timber runs diagonally from southwest to northeast —”

I began to see a little light. “You’re talking about the old Rivermouth road.” And Clyde said that he was.

He said that he had picnicked there with his family in recent years. The ancient timber road was still passable by car, if a driver proceeded slowly and cautiously enough. It meant fording several creeks; it couldn’t be managed when the creeks were up.

“It comes out on the prairie just below the old Bemis farm,” said Clyde. “You go down between pastures on a branch-off lane, and then you’re right in the woods. That’s where I think maybe he’ll come out.”

When he got to the Bemis place we turned off on the side lane and drove to the edge of the timber. The forest road emerged — a wandering sluice with yellow leaves carpeting it. We left my car parked at the roadside, and Clyde dragged the log chain down the timber road until he found a good place.

Cottonwoods and thin saplings made a wall along either side, where the road twisted out of the gully. A driver couldn’t tell that the road was blocked until he had climbed the last curve in low gear.

Clyde wrapped the log chain around two cottonwoods. It sagged, stiff and heavy, across the path.

I said, “He’ll kill you, Clyde. Don’t expect me to help you try to grab him and get killed at the same time.”

“There won’t be any killing.” Clyde settled himself in the darkness. “I’m going to take Nelly Tare back to Elm City. Alive.”

Old logs and gullies are thick in the Rivermouth country; hazel brush fairly blocks the forgotten road in a hundred places. It was long before Nelly’s headlights came sneaking through the trees. The katydids spoke a welcome; the dull parking lights went in and out, twisting, exploring, poking through the brush; they came on, with the motor growling in low.

Nelly made quite a spurt and went into second for a moment as the car swung up out of the gorge; sleek leaves flew from under his rear wheels; little rocks pattered back into the shrubbery.

Then Nelly saw the log chain. He jammed his brakes and the car slewed around until it was broadside. Nelly turned off the motor and lights in half a second; the car door swung; he was out on the log-chain side, and he had a gun in his hand.

“Don’t shoot, Nelly,” said Clyde Boston, stepping in front of the trees and turning on his flashlight.

I didn’t want to be killed, so I stood behind a tree and watched them. The flashlight thrust out a long, strong beam; Clyde stood fifteen feet away from the car’s radiator, but the shaft of his lamp was like whitewash on Nelly Tare.

“It’s Clyde,” the sheriff said. “Clyde Boston. You remember me? I was up at your sister’s place today.”

Nelly cried, “Turn off that light!”

“No,” Clyde said. “And I’m warning you not to shoot the light out, because I’m holding it right in front of my stomach. My stomach’s a big target. You wouldn’t want to shoot my stomach, would you, Nelly?”

Nelson Tare’s hair was too long, and he needed a shave. He looked like some wild thing that had been dug out of the woods. “Clyde! I’m telling you for the last time! Turn it off!”

Clyde’s voice was a smooth rumble. “Remember one time when we went hunting rabbits?” He edged forward a little. “You and Dave and me. Remember? A big jack sat down, waiting for you to kill him. And you couldn’t pull the trigger. You couldn’t kill him.”

Nelly had his face screwed into a wad, and his teeth showed between his lips.

“Never shot anything or anybody, did you, Nelly?” There was a snapping sound, and I jumped. It was only a stick breaking under Clyde’s foot as he moved nearer to the car. “You never shot a soul. Not a jack-rabbit or anything. You couldn’t.”

He was only ten feet away from Nelly and Nelly’s gun.

“You just pretended you could. But the guards in Oklahoma and Missouri didn’t know you the way I do. They hadn’t ever gone hunting with you, had they?”

He took another step forward. Another. Nelly was something out of a waxworks in a sideshow, watching him come. Then a vague suffusion of light began to show around them; a carload of deputies had spotted my car at the head of the lane; their headlamps came hurtling toward us.

“You shot telephones off of desks,” Clyde purred to Nelly, “and tires off of cars. You’ve been around and you’ve done a lot of shooting. But you never shot things that the blood ran out of…Now, you drop your gun, Nelly. Drop it on the ground. Gosh, I was crazy this afternoon. I shouldn’t have laid down when you told me to. I should have just stood there.”

Maybe he was right and maybe he was wrong, I don’t know. The car stopped and I heard men yell, “Look out, Sheriff!” They were ready with their machine guns, trying to hustle themselves into some position where they could spatter the daylights out of Nelly Tare without shooting Clyde Boston too. Clyde didn’t give them a chance to do it. He dove forward; he flung his arms around Nelly and crushed him to the ground.

Nelly cried, and I don’t like to think about it; sometimes I wake up in the night and think I hear him crying. My memory goes back to our haymow days and to the rats in the chicken pen — the rats that Nelly couldn’t shoot — and I remember the bloody cottontails dangling from Clyde’s belt.

Nelly cried, but not solely because he was captured and would never be free again. He wept because the world realized something he had tried to keep hidden, even from himself. When he was taken back into prison, he wore an expression of tragic perplexity. It must have been hideous for him to know that he, who had loved guns his whole life long, should at last be betrayed by them.

If there were any letters of fire on Assistant State’s Attorney Brad Sorrel’s broad and distinguished brow, they were invisible to his fellow passengers in the lighted cabin of the Washington-Chicago plane, as it circled the Cicero Airport at fifteen minutes to midnight. The stewardess, appraising his broad shoulders, graying temples, and hearty laughter, considered the woman to whom he was returning very fortunate indeed. His seat mate had found him intelligent and sympathetic.

At no time during the flight, or during the hours preceding it, had there been anything in Sorrel’s voice or demeanor to which anyone could point and say, “I knew it at the time. He was nervous. He couldn’t concentrate. His conversation was forced. He talked and acted like a man about to kill his wife.”

It was no sudden decision on Sorrel’s part. He had considered killing Frances, often; only a firm respect for the law that he himself represented had deterred him. He had, in the name of the state, asked for, and been given, the lives of too many men to be careless with his own. Intolerable as his marital situation had become, it was preferable to facing a jury whom he had lost the right to challenge.

The no smoking and please fasten your seat belt panels over the door of the pilot’s compartment blinked on. The lights of the field rushed up to meet the plane.

This is it, Sorrel thought. In twenty minutes, thirty at the most, Frances will be dead. Poor soul.

His seat mate wound up the telling of the involved argument and verbal slug-fest in which he had just engaged with the Office of Price Administration. Sorrel gave him one-half of his mind, sympathizing hugely, assuring him he had been right, that it couldn’t last forever, and agreeing that it seemed that private business was headed for a boom.

The other half of his mind considered the thing that he had to do. It would not be pleasant. In his search for a solution to his problem, he had inspected, weighed, and judged the none-too-many means by which murder could be done. The alleged clever methods — accidental death, suicide, death by misadventure — he had rejected almost immediately. They left too many loopholes for failure; few of them ever succeeded. There was a reason. No matter how brilliant a killer might be, he was seldom, if ever, a match for the combined technical, executive, and judicial branches of the law.

Crime detection, trial, and judgment had become akin to an exact science.

The art of killing, the three Ms, means, method, motive, had changed little in the known history of man. To take a life, one still had to shoot, knife, drown, strike, strangle, or poison the party of the unwanted part. And, as with most basic refinements to the art of living, the first known method of murder used — that of striking the party to be removed with whatever object came first to hand —was still the most difficult of detection, providing of course that the party who did the striking could maintain a reasonable plea of being elsewhere at the time.

It was, after mature consideration, that method that Sorrel had chosen. He had even chosen his weapon, one of the heavy cut-glass candlesticks that stood on Frances’s dressing table.

“Murphy. J. P. Murphy is the name,” his seat mate identified himself. He shook Sorrel’s hand vigorously. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Prosecutor. And if you decide to enter the senatorial race, as I’ve seen hinted at in the papers, you can count on my vote as certain.”

Sorrel’s hearty laugh filled the plane. “Thanks. I’ll remember that, Murphy.”

His only luggage was his briefcase. The stewardess insisted on getting it down from the rack for him. He tucked a forbidden bill in the breast pocket of her uniform. “Nice trip.” He smiled. “And thanks.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sorrel!” She beamed. One met such few really nice men. Most tipping hands brushed or hovered, seeking a partial return on their investment.

Sorrel stood in the open door of the plane a moment, sniffing the night air. The fine weather was still holding. It was neither too hot nor too cold.

He descended the steps and lifted a hand in greeting to the pilot as he passed the nose of the plane. He did so habitually on his not-infrequent trips. There must be no departure from the norm, no errors of omission or commission, no nervously spilled milk in which the bacteria of suspicion might breed.

He, John Sorrel, assistant state’s attorney, was returning from Washington with nothing on his mind but the successful conclusion of the business that had taken him there. He wasn’t nervous. He felt fine. He assured himself that he did.

In the doorway of the terminal, Murphy touched his arm. “I’m taking a cab to the Loop. If you’d like to share it, Sorrel…”

“Thanks, no,” Sorrel said. “My car should be waiting.” He managed to edge his words with the proper amount of innuendo without being vulgar. “You see, I — well, I’m not going directly home.”

The other man winked. “I — see.”

They parted after shaking hands again. He was, Sorrel realized, running the risk of being slightly too clever. But the more people who knew, or who thought they knew, that he had gone directly from the plane to Evelyn’s apartment, the stronger would be his alibi.

He had never kept their affair a secret. He doubted that any prosecutor, judge, or jury —if it should come to that —would question so embarrassing an alibi as a husbands being forced to admit that, while his wife had been killed, he had been with another woman, railing against the deceased because she had refused to divorce him.

Despite the lateness of the hour, the terminal was crowded. He saw three or four men whom he knew and nodded cordially to as he passed through the terminal.

Jackson was waiting behind the wheel of a department car. Sorrel tossed his case into the back seat and slid in beside him. “So you got my wire.”

“And why not?” Jackson asked. “You wanna go home, the office, or …” He left the question open.

Sorrel sighed. “Home, I suppose. But let’s drop by the Eldorado first.”

“I figured that,” Jackson said.

Sorrel rode, the night wind cool cn his cheeks, eager to be done with what he had to do, wishing that Frances had been reasonable. If she had been, if she had been willing to divorce him, none of this would have to be.

In front of the building he told Jackson, “I won’t be long, I think.”

Jackson fished in his vest pocket for a toothpick, found one. “Take your time.”

He meant it. He liked Sorrel. He liked Evelyn, too. For all of her good looks, she was a lady. Frances Sorrel wasn’t, what with her calling a spade a dirty shovel and her drinking and her fighting — she was no wife for a man who soon might be a senator. Although, at that, he reflected, he had heard someone say that she had worked like a dog for the money that had put Sorrel through law school, and she had always sworn she hadn’t started to drink and chase until he had gone lace curtain Irish on her.

Under the marquee of the building, the colored doorman grinned whitely at Sorrel. “Glad to see you back, Mr. Smith. Been missin’ you for a week now.”

Sorrel creased a five-dollar bill and slipped it into his hand. “I’ve been in Washington saving the nation.”

The doorman chuckled, hugely amused. “He say he been in Washington savin’ the nation,” he confided to Jackson.

Jackson continued to pick at his teeth. “Yair.”

Inside the lobby, Sorrel paused briefly, suddenly short of breath. This was murder. He, John Sorrel, an assistant states attorney who would have been state’s attorney had it not been for his wife, and who was being considered by the party as a senatorial candidate, was proposing to steal into his own home by stealth and remove the sole obstacle who stood in the path of his political success.

That angle would not enter the case, however. It would not be considered a motive. None of the powers-that-were had ever mentioned Frances. But, he knew, there was the feminine vote to consider. And what with things as they were, the party couldn’t afford to take a chance. Frances’s scenes were too well known. She drank; she cursed; she was unfaithful. Not that he had ever been so fortunate as to obtain proof that would stand in a court of law.

He closed his eyes and saw his wife as he had seen her, fat, slovenly dressed, her face puffed with drink, during the last public scene that she had made. That had been in the lobby of the Chalmers House, before a delighted ring of onlookers.

“Sure I’m drunk. An’ I’m a tramp,” she had taunted while he had tried vainly to hush her. “An’ don’t you tell me to shut up. Wash a hell. I’m human. The trouble with you is that you’ve got too big for your bed. You’re one of them whitened sepelcurs like Father Ryan wash always talking about.” She had turned to the crowd, her voice suddenly gin-throaty, maudlin tears spilling down her cheeks. “I’m not good enough for him anymore. Me, who put him through school, who loved him when he didn’t have a dime.” She had attempted to embrace him. “Cansha understand? I still love you, Johnny.” The tears had dried as abruptly as they had come. “An’ I’ll shee you in hell before I’ll let some painted young tart make a bigger fool of you than you are. Now go ahead an’ hit me. I dare you to, you blankety blankety blank.”

Sorrel opened his eyes, his moment of weakness gone. There was only the one thing to do. But at least in one respect she was wrong. He was very human. He wanted to feel Evelyn’s arms soft and cool around his neck, hear her assure him again that someday everything would be all right, if only they were patient.

His jaw muscles tightening, he opened the door of the self-service elevator and punched the twelfth-floor button. He was finished with being patient. He had been patient for ten years. It was not his fault, it was her own fault, that Frances had not grown with him. One thing he knew, he could no longer stand the sight or sound or touch of her.

Tonight must end it.

In front of Evelyn’s door he slipped his key from his pocket, paused at the realization that if he saw her now he would make her a party to his crime. More, she would attempt to dissuade him. It was best that she know nothing about it, until the affair was over.

Light streamed out from under her door. Her radio was playing softly. He could hear the sound of movement, a drawer being opened and closed. It was enough to know that she was home, that she had received his wire and was waiting. Good girl. Evelyn was a brick. Whatever happened, he could count on her.

He descended to the second floor, left the elevator and walked down the service stairs and out of the side door. The coupe was parked where he had left it. His one fear had been that he might find it stripped.

The motor started easily. He glanced at his watch in the dash light. Five of the thirty minutes that he had allotted himself were gone. Driving at forty miles an hour, the three miles he had to travel would take him two minutes each way. It was fifteen minutes of one. Allow even six more minutes for mishaps and he still had plenty of time to do what he had to do and be back in Evelyn’s apartment within a half hour from the time that he had left Jackson. At one-fifteen he would phone down to the doorman and ask him to have Jackson bring up his briefcase and the bottle of rye it contained.

He had no fear that Frances would not be at home. His telegram had stated that his plane was arriving at midnight. Clinging to the tattered remnants of their marriage, she always made it a practice to be home and more or less sober whenever he returned.

“You’ll never catch me that way,” she had told him once. “I’m a good wife to you, Johnny, see? And I’m willing to be a better one if you would only let me. Why can’t we start all over?”

There were a dozen answers to that one, the best of which was Evelyn. The two women had never met. Frances knew that she existed, that was all. That was enough.

As he slowed for the intersection at Sixty-third Street, Sorrel smiled wryly at a suggestion that Evelyn, intrigued by the fact that they had never met, had made.

“We know she’s not true to you, Johnny,” she had pointed out. “She has no right to point a finger. She doesn’t know me. So why can’t I strike up a drinking acquaintance with her, or take a job as her maid, or something, and get some concrete proof that would stand up in a divorce court?”

Sorrel had refused to hear of it. Frances was shrewd. A scene between the two was unthinkable. Frances fought as they fought in back of the yards, where both of them had been born — for keeps. Then, too, a sense of guilt had assailed him. His own hands were not clean. He, and he alone, was responsible for Frances’s infidelities. She was merely reaching out for the love that he denied her. He had told Evelyn at the time that whatever was done, he would do. He was keeping his word now.

There were few cars on Sixty-third Street. There were none on the darker residential street onto which he turned. He drove for another quarter mile and parked a half a block and across the street from his home.

There were lights in both the kitchen and in Frances’s bedroom. The shades of the bedroom were drawn, but, as he watched, a vague figure crossed the room, too far back of the shade to seem more than a passing shadow.

His eyes felt suddenly hot and strained. His throat contracted. His mouth was dry. His hands felt cold and clammy on the wheel. He sat a moment longer, wondering at himself, revolted by the thing he had come to do. This was murder. This was what other men had done for reasons no better than his own, and he, in his smug superiority, safe in the law’s ivory tower, had thundered against them and denounced them as cool-blooded conniving scoundrels.

He stepped from the car with an effort and crossed the street. He had come a long way in his climb up — he intended to go still further. With Frances dead and Evelyn beside him, there was no goal to which he might not aspire.

He stopped under a spreading elm tree in the yard and cursed his shaking hands. There was no reason to be afraid. The law would never touch him. He had planned too well. There would be no insurance angle. Frances had none. His only gain would be peace of mind and that wasn’t considered a motive for murder. A few of the boys in his own office might suspect him but no one would be able to prove a thing.

Frances’s failings were well known. She had come home drunk. She had left the door unlocked. A night prowler had entered and killed her. No one would be more surprised and shocked than he when he returned with Jackson an hour from now and found her — dead.

He slipped his key in the front door. The inner bolt was shot and it refused to open. He considered ringing the bell and killing her in the hall. He decided to stay, as far as possible, with his original plan. There was no convenient weapon in the hall. A single scream would shatter the stillness of the sleeping street. What he had to do must be done in silence.

The back door leading into the kitchen was open but the screen door was locked. He slipped on a pair of gloves and fumbled in one corner of the porch where he had remembered seeing a rusty ice pick. His luck was holding. The pick was there. He probed it through the screen and lifted the hood from its eyes.

The door open, he waited, listening, hearing nothing. There was a half-emptied bottle of milk, a clouded glass, and the remains of a peanut butter sandwich on the kitchen table.

Frances, he decided, was playing the sober and repentant wife this time.

Believe me, John. I love you. I’ll stop drinking. I’ll do anything you say. You’re all that matters to me. Why can’t we start all over?

He had heard it so many times that he could play the record by heart. He noted that the kitchen shade was up. Anyone entering the kitchen would be visible from the darkened windows of the house next door. Sweat beading on his forehead, he slipped in a hand before him and snapped the switch, thankful that he had noticed the shade in time. It was the little things of murder that sent men to the chair.

The darkness magnified his strain. His mouth grew even drier. He heard, or thought he heard, the pounding of his heart. He had to force himself to cross the kitchen, feeling his way along the wall to the rear stairs.

Now he could hear sounds in the bedroom. She seemed to be opening and closing drawers, probably in search of one of the bottles she was always hiding from herself.

He crossed the dark hall toward the closed bedroom door and his weight caused a board to creak. The light in the bedroom went out and the door opened. They stood only feet apart in the black hallway, aware of each other but unable to see.

The blood, Sorrel thought suddenly. It will splatter. I’ll be covered with blood. Damn it! Why didn’t I think of that!

Then he realized he still was clutching the rusted ice pick in his hand. It was as good a weapon as any, better than most. Murder Incorporated had used them as the chief tool of their trade. An ice pick had been used in the case of the State versus Manny Capper. The sweat on his brow turned cold. Manny had gone to the chair.

Galvanized by his own terror, crying out hoarsely, Sorrel sprang forward. His groping hand felt teeth in time to clamp his palm over the welling scream. It died stillborn as he plunged the pick in his hand repeatedly into the yielding flesh. The body he held ceased squirming and sagged limply. He allowed it to fall to the floor, relieved to be rid of it.

The ice pick fell from his nerveless hand. He tried to fumble a match from his pocket and could not. His hands were shaking too badly. Afraid of the dark, afraid of the woman whom he had killed, he squatted beside the body and felt for a pulse with the back of his wrist, where flesh gaped between glove and coat cuff. There was no pulse. It was over, done with, finis. He was free.

He crept back down the stairs and out through the kitchen to the porch. Then he remembered the pick. It would have no fingerprints on it. He considered returning for it and his stomach rebelled.

So there were no fingerprints on the death weapon. So what? Most house prowlers with the sense of gnats wore gloves. It was nothing for him to worry over.

He walked silently, unseen, back to his car and examined his gloves in the dash light. One was slightly splattered with blood but there seemed to be none on the cuffs of his suit. All that remained to be done was to rid himself of the gloves.

It was over, done. He was free. There was nothing to stop him now, nothing to stop the boys from running him for whatever office they pleased. Frances had made her last scene. He was young, under forty. His new life was just beginning.

As he drove, the horror of the thing that he had been forced to do left him. He wanted to sing, to yell, to shout to the stars that he was free. He contented himself with a grin.

It had been a relatively simple matter, after all. He wadded the gloves into a ball and tossed them out the car window. They could not be traced to him. There was nothing to tie him to the murder but the fact that he and Frances were married. Back at the Eldorado, he parked the coupe in the same space it had occupied before and glanced at his watch before switching off the lights. It was eleven minutes past one. He was four minutes ahead of schedule.

He expended them by walking to the corner and peering around it cautiously. The doorman and Jackson were deep in some discussion. Satisfied that he had not been missed, he entered the side door.

Telling Evelyn would take some doing. She would be horrified at first, but she was quick-witted enough to realize that no other course had been open to him. It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was that the thing was done.

His throat and mouth were normal again. In the bright light of the cage he could see no bloodstains on his suit. He had been fortunate. He was whistling softly, almost cheerfully, as he inserted his key in the door.

The radio was still playing softly. A bottle of his best scotch beside her, Frances was sitting in one of Evelyn’s easy chairs. “I knew you’d come here first,” she said. “What’s a matter? Was your plane late?”

He stared at her open-mouthed, screams he was unable to utter tearing at his throat.

“You poor damn fool,” his wife continued. “Why didn’t you let me meet her? Why didn’t you make me realize what a swell kid she really was? Why didn’t you tell me that the boys wanted to run you for senator? You should have known me better, John. You’re my man. You always will be. No tramp was goin’ to take you from me. But a sweet kid like that is another matter.” She fluffed at her frowsy hair. “I feel kind of honored like.”

Sorrel managed to gasp one word, “Evelyn …”

Frances nipped at the scotch. “Oh, you didn’t know. Well, she showed at the house this morning and gave me a song and dance about being a maid out of work, her with fingernails that long.” She laughed, shortly “So I hired her and I pumped her. She’s probably goin’ through all my things right now, spyin’ on me.” Frances picked an oblong scrap of yellow paper from the table. “She never even got a chance to see her telegram because I copped her key from her purse and come over here shortly after I got the telegram that you sent me. Mine was all right. But after I read this one I kinda wondered.” She read it aloud: “‘Sweetheart. Be in your apartment at twelve tonight. Don’t leave it for any reason. And don’t let anyone in but me. This is important, more important than you realize.’”

His voice sounding strange to himself, Sorrel asked, “You — knew?”

Frances Sorrel smiled thinly. “I know you,” she admitted. “But don’t worry. Think nothing of it. As long as your plane was late, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

The stocky man handed his coat and hat to the attendant and went through the foyer to the main lounge of the club. He stood in the doorway for a scant second, but in that time his eyes had seen all that was to be seen; the chess game beside the windows, the foursome at cads, and the lone man at the rear of the room sipping a drink.

He crossed between the tables, nodding briefly to the card players, and went directly to the back of the room. The other man looked up from his drink with a smile. “Afternoon, Inspector. Sit down. Drink?”

“Hello, Dune. Same as you’re drinking.”

Almost languidly, the fellow made a motion with his hand. The waiter nodded and left. The inspector settled himself in his chair with a sigh. He was a big man, heavy without being given to fat. Only his high shoes proclaimed him for what he was. When he looked at Chester Duncan he grimaced inwardly, envying him his poise and manner, yet not willing to trade him for anything.

Here, he thought smugly, is a man who should have everything, yet has nothing. True, he has money and position, but the finest of all things, a family life, was denied him. And with a brood of five in all stages of growth at home, the inspector felt that he had achieved his purpose in life.

The drink came and the inspector took his, sipping it gratefully. When he put it down he said, “I came to thank you for that, er …tip. You know, that was the first time I’ve ever played the market.”

“Glad to do it,” Duncan said. His hands played with the glass, rolling it around in his palms. His eyebrows shot up suddenly, as though he was amused at something. “I suppose you heard all the ugly rumors.”

A flush reddened the inspector’s face. “In an offhand way, yes. Some of them were downright ugly.” He sipped his drink again and tapped a cigarette on the side table. “You know,” he said, “if Walter Harrison’s death hadn’t been so definitely a suicide, you might be standing an investigation right now.”

Duncan smiled slowly. “Come now, Inspector. The market didn’t budge until after his death, you know.”

“True enough. But rumor has it that you engineered it in some manner.” He paused long enough to study Duncan’s face. “Tell me, did you?”

“Why should I incriminate myself?”

“It’s over and done with. Harrison leaped to his death from the window of a hotel room. The door was locked, and there was no possible way anyone could have gotten in that room to give him a push. No, we’re quite satisfied that it was suicide, and everybody that ever came in contact with Harrison agrees that he did the world a favor when he died. However, there’s still some speculation about you having a hand in things.”

“Tell me, Inspector, do you really think I had the courage or the brains to oppose a man like Harrison, and force him to kill himself?”

The inspector frowned, then nodded. “As a matter of fact, yes. You did profit by his death.”

“So did you.” Duncan laughed.

“Ummmm.”

“Though it’s nothing to be ashamed about,” Duncan added. “When Harrison died, the financial world naturally expected that the stocks he financed were no good and tried to unload. It so happened that I was one of the few who knew they were as good as gold and bought while I could. And, of course, I passed the word on to my friends. Somebody had might as well profit by the death of a …a rat.”

Through the haze of the smoke, Inspector Early saw his face tighten around the mouth. He scowled again, leaning forward in his chair. “Duncan, we’ve been friends quite a while. I’m just cop enough to be curious and I’m thinking that our late Walter Harrison was cursing you just before he died.”

Duncan twirled his glass around. “I’ve no doubt of it,” he said. His eyes met the inspectors. “Would you really like to hear about it?”

“Not if it means your confessing to murder. If that has to happen, I’d much rather you spoke directly to the DA.”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that at all. No, not a bit, Inspector. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t do a thing that would impair either my honor or reputation. You see, Walter Harrison went to his death through his own greediness.”

The inspector settled back in his chair. The waiter came with drinks to replace the empties and the two men toasted each other silently.

“Some of this you probably know already, Inspector,” Duncan said…

Nevertheless, I’ll start at the beginning and tell you everything that happened. Walter Harrison and I met in law school. We were both young and not too studious. We had one thing in common and only one. Both of us were the products of wealthy parents who tried their best to spoil their children. Since we were the only ones who could afford certain— er — pleasures, we naturally gravitated to each other, though when I think back, even at that time, there was little true friendship involved.

It so happened that I had a flair for my studies, whereas Walter didn’t give a damn. At examination time, I had to carry him. It seemed like a big joke at the time, but actually I was doing all the work while he was having his fling around town. Nor was I the only one he imposed upon in such a way. Many students, impressed with having his friendship, gladly took over his papers. Walter could charm the devil himself if he had to.

And quite often he had to. Many’s the time he’s talked his way out of spending a weekend in jail for some minor offense — and I’ve even seen him twist the dean around his little finger, so to speak. Oh, but I remained his loyal friend. I shared everything I had with him, including my women, and even thought it amusing when I went out on a date and met him, only to have him take my girl home.

In the last year of school the crash came. It meant little to me, because my father had seen it coming and got out with his fortune increased. Walter’s father tried to stick it out and went under. He was one of the ones who killed himself that day.

Walter was quite stricken, of course. He was in a blue funk and got stinking drunk. We had quite a talk, and he was for quitting school at once, but I talked him into accepting the money from me and graduating. Come to think of it, he never did pay me back that money. However, it really doesn’t matter.

After we left school I went into business with my father and took over the firm when he died. It was that same month that Walter showed up. He stopped in for a visit and wound up with a position; though at no time did he deceive me as to the real intent of his visit. He got what he came after and in a way it was a good thing for me. Walter was a shrewd businessman.

His rise in the financial world was slightly less than meteoric. He was much too astute to remain in anyone’s employ for long, and with the Street talking about Harrison, the boy wonder of Wall Street, in every other breath, it was inevitable that he open up his own office. In a sense, we became competitors after that, but always friends.

Pardon me, Inspector, let’s say that I was his friend, he never was mine. His ruthlessness was appalling at times, but even then he managed to charm his victims into accepting their lot with a smile. I for one know that he managed the market to make himself a cool million on a deal that left me gasping. More than once he almost cut the bottom out of my business, yet he was always in with a grin and a big hello the next day as if it had been only a tennis match he had won.

If you’ve followed his rise then you’re familiar with the social side of his life. Walter cut quite a swath for himself. Twice, he was almost killed by irate husbands, and if he had been, no jury on earth would have convicted his murderer. There was the time a young girl killed herself rather than let her parents know that she had been having an affair with Walter and had been trapped. He was very generous about it. He offered her money to travel, her choice of doctors, and anything she wanted …except his name for her child. No, he wasn’t ready to give his name away then. That came a few weeks later.

I was engaged to be married at the time. Adrianne was a girl I had loved from the moment I saw her, and there aren’t words enough to tell how happy I was when she said she’d marry me. We spent most of our waking hours poring over plans for the future. We even selected a site for our house out on the Island and began construction. We were timing the wedding to coincide with the completion of the house, and if ever I was a man living in a dream world, it was then. My happiness was complete, as was Adrianne’s, or so I thought. Fortune seemed to favor me with more than one smile at the time. For some reason my own career took a sudden spurt and whatever I touched turned to gold, and in no time the Street had taken to following me rather than Walter Harrison. Without realizing it, I turned several deals that had him on his knees, though I doubt if many ever realized it. Walter would never give up the amazing front he affected.

At this point Duncan paused to study his glass, his eyes narrowing. Inspector Early remained motionless, waiting for him to go on …

Walter came to see me, Duncan said. It was a day I shall never forget. I had a dinner engagement with Adrianne and invited him along. Now I know that what he did was done out of sheer spite, nothing else. At first I believed that it was my fault, or hers, never giving Walter a thought…

Forgive me if I pass over the details lightly, Inspector. They aren’t very pleasant to recall. I had to sit there and watch Adrianne captivated by this charming rat to the point where I was merely a decoration in the chair opposite her. I had to see him join us day after day, night after night, then hear the rumors that they were seeing each other without me, then discover for myself that she was in love with him.

Yes, it was quite an experience. I had the idea of killing them both, then killing myself. When I saw that that could never solve the problem, I gave it up.

Adrianne came to me one night. She sat and told me how much she hated to hurt me, but she had fallen in love with Walter Harrison and wanted to marry him. What else was there to do? Naturally, I acted the part of a good loser and called off the engagement. They didn’t wait long. A week later they were married and I was the laughingstock of the Street.

Perhaps time might have cured everything if things hadn’t turned out the way they did. It wasn’t very long afterwards that I learned of a break in their marriage. Word came that Adrianne had changed, and I knew for a fact that Walter was far from being true to her.

You see, now I realized the truth. Walter never loved her. He never loved anybody but himself. He married Adrianne because he wanted to hurt me more than anything else in the world. He hated me because I had something he lacked …happiness. It was something he searched after desperately himself and always found just out of reach.

In December of that year Adrianne took sick. She wasted away for a month and died. In the final moments, she called for me, asking me to forgive her; this much I learned from a servant of hers. Walter, by the way, was enjoying himself at a party when she died. He came home for the funeral and took off immediately for a sojourn in Florida with some attractive showgirl.

God, how I hated that man! I used to dream of killing him! Do you know, if ever my mind drifted from the work I was doing, I always pictured myself standing over his corpse with a knife in my hand, laughing my head off.

Every so often I would get word of Walter’s various escapades, and they seemed to follow a definite pattern. I made it my business to learn more about him, and before long I realized that Walter was almost frenzied in his search to find a woman he could really love. Since he was a fabulously wealthy man, he was always suspicious of a woman wanting him more than his wealth, and this very suspicion always was the thing that drove a woman away from him.

It may seem strange to you, but regardless of my attitude, I saw him quite regularly. And equally strange, he never realized that I hated him so. He realized, of course, that he was far from popular in any quarter, but he never suspected me of anything else save a stupid idea of friendship. But having learned my lesson the hard way, he never got the chance to impose upon me again, though he never really had need to.

It was a curious thing, the solution I saw to my problem. It had been there all the time, I was aware of it being there, yet using the circumstances never occurred to me until the day I was sitting on my veranda reading a memo from my office manager. The note stated that Walter had pulled another coup in the market and had the Street rocking on its heels. It was one of those times when any variation in Wall Street reflected the economy of the country, and what he did was undermine the entire economic structure of the United States. It was with the greatest effort that we got back to normal without toppling, but in doing so a lot of places had to close up. Walter Harrison, however, had doubled the wealth he could never hope to spend anyway.

As I said, I was sitting there reading the note when I saw her behind the window in the house across the way. The sun was streaming in, reflecting the gold in her hair, making a picture of beauty so exquisite as to be unbelievable. A servant came and brought her a tray, and as she sat down to lunch I lost sight of her behind the hedges and the thought came to me of how simple it would all be.

I met Walter for lunch the next day. He was quite exuberant over his latest adventure, treating it like a joke.

I said, “Say, you’ve never been out to my place on the Island, have you?

He laughed, and I noticed a little guilt in his eyes. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I would have dropped in if you hadn’t built the place for Adrianne. After all…”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Walter. What’s done is done. Look, until things get back to normal, how about staying with me a few days. You need a rest after your little deal.”

“Fine, Duncan, fine! Anytime you say.”

“All right, I’ll pick you up tonight.”

We had quite a ride out, stopping at a few places for drinks and hashing over the old days at school. At any other time I might have laughed, but all those reminiscences had taken on an unpleasant air. When we reached the house I had a few friends in to meet the fabulous Walter Harrison, left him accepting their plaudits, and went to bed.

We had breakfast on the veranda. Walter ate with relish, breathing deeply of the sea air with animal-like pleasure. At exactly nine o’clock the sunlight flashed off the windows of the house behind mine as the servant threw them open to the morning breeze.

Then she was there. I waved and she waved back. Walter’s head turned to look, and I heard his breath catch in his throat. She was lovely, her hair a golden cascade that tumbled around her shoulders. Her blouse was a radiant white that enhanced the swell of her breasts, a gleaming contrast to the smooth tanned flesh of her shoulders.

Walter looked like a man in a dream. “Lord, she’s lovely!” he said. “Who is she, Dune?”

I sipped my coffee. “A neighbor,” I said lightly.

“Do you…do you think I could get to meet her?”

“Perhaps. She’s quite young and just a little bit shy and it would be better to have her see me with you a few times before introductions are in order.”

He sounded hoarse. His face had taken on an avid, hungry look. “Anything you say, but I have to meet her.” He turned around with a grin. “By golly, I’ll stay here until I do, too!”

We laughed over that and went back to our cigarettes, but every so often I caught him glancing back toward the hedge with that desperate expression creasing his face.

Being familiar with her schedule, I knew that we wouldn’t see her again that day, but Walter knew nothing of this. He tried to keep away from the subject, yet it persisted in coming back. Finally he said, “Incidentally, just who is she?”

“Her name is Evelyn Vaughn. Comes from quite a well-to-do family.”

“She here alone?”

“No, besides the servants she has a nurse and a doctor in attendance. She hasn’t been quite well.”

“Hell, she looks the picture of health.”

“Oh, she is now,” I agreed. I walked over and turned on the television and we watched the fights. For the sixth time a call came in for Walter, but his reply was the same. He wasn’t going back to New York. I felt the anticipation in his voice, knowing why he was staying, and had to concentrate on the screen to keep from smiling.

Evelyn was there the next day and the next. Walter had taken to waving when I did, and when she waved back his face seemed to light up until it looked almost boyish. The sun had tanned him nicely and he pranced around like a colt, especially when she could see him. He pestered me with questions and received evasive answers. Somehow he got the idea that his importance warranted a visit from the house across the way. When I told him that to Evelyn neither wealth nor position meant a thing, he looked at me sharply to see if I was telling the truth. To have become what he was he had to be a good reader of faces, and he knew that it was the truth, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

So I sat there day after day watching Walter Harrison fall helplessly in love with a woman he hadn’t met yet. He fell in love with the way she waved, until each movement of her hand seemed to be for him alone. He fell in love with the luxuriant beauty of her body, letting his eyes follow her as she walked to the water from the house, aching to be close to her. She would turn sometimes and see us watching, and wave.

At night he would stand by the window, not hearing what I said because he was watching her windows, hoping for just one glimpse of her, and often I would hear him repeating her name slowly, letting it roll off his tongue like a precious thing.

It couldn’t go on that way. I knew it and he knew it. She had just come up from the beach and the water glistened on her skin. She laughed at something the woman said who was with her and shook her head back so that her hair flowed down her back.

Walter shouted and waved and she laughed again, waving back. The wind brought her voice to him and Walter stood there, his breath hot in my face. “Look here, Duncan, I’m going over and meet her. I can’t stand this waiting. Good Lord, what does a guy have to go through to meet a woman?”

“You’ve never had any trouble before, have you?”

“Never like this!” he said. “Usually they’re dropping at my feet. I haven’t changed, have I? There’s nothing repulsive about me, is there?”

I wanted to tell the truth, but I laughed instead. “You’re the same as ever. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was dying to meet you, too. I can tell you this …she’s never been outside as much as since you’ve been here.”

His eyes lit up boyishly. “Really, Dune. Do you think so?”

“I think so. I can assure you of this, too. If she does seem to like you, it’s certainly for yourself alone.”

As crudely as the barb was placed, it went home. Walter never so much as glanced at me. He was lost in thought for a long time, then: “I’m going over there now, Duncan. I’m crazy about that girl. By God, I’ll marry her if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Don’t spoil it, Walter. Tomorrow, I promise you. I’ll go over with you.”

His eagerness was pathetic. I don’t think he slept a wink that night. Long before breakfast, he was waiting for me on the veranda; we ate in silence, each minute an eternity for him. He turned repeatedly to look over the hedge, and I caught a flash of worry when she didn’t appear.

Tight little lines had appeared at the corners of his eyes, and he said, “Where is she, Dune? She should be there by now, shouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It does seem strange. Just a moment.” I rang the bell on the table and my housekeeper came to the door. “Have you seen the Vaughns, Martha?” I asked her.

She nodded sagely. “Oh, yes, sir. They left very early this morning to go back to the city.”

Walter turned to me. “Hell!”

“Well, she’ll be back,” I assured him.

“Damn it, Dune, that isn’t the point!” He stood up and threw his napkin on the seat. “Can’t you realize that I’m in love with the girl? I can’t wait for her to get back!”

His face flushed with frustration. There was no anger, only the crazy hunger for the woman. I held back my smile. It happened. It happened the way I planned for it to happen. Walter Harrison had fallen so deeply in love, so truly in love, that he couldn’t control himself. I might have felt sorry for him at that moment if I hadn’t asked him, “Walter, as I told you, I know very little about her. Supposing she is already married.”

He answered my question with a nasty grimace. “Then she’ll get a divorce if I have to break the guy in pieces. I’ll break anything that stands in my way, Duncan. I’m going to have her if it’s the last thing I do!”

He stalked off to his room. Later I heard the car roar down the road. I let myself laugh then.

I went back to New York and was there a week when my contacts told me of Walter’s fruitless search. He used every means at his disposal, but he couldn’t locate the girl. I gave him seven days, exactly seven days. You see, that seventh day was the anniversary of the date I introduced him to Adrianne. I’ll never forget it. Wherever Walter is now, neither will he.

When I called him, I was amazed at the change in his voice. He sounded weak and lost. We exchanged the usual formalities; then I said, “Walter, have you found Evelyn yet?”

He took a long time to answer. “No, she’s disappeared completely.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I said.

He didn’t get it at first. It was almost too much to hope for. “You…mean you know where she is?”

“Exactly.”

“Where? Please, Dune …where is she?” In a split second he became a vital being again. He was bursting with life and energy, demanding that I tell him.

I laughed and told him to let me get a word in and I would. The silence was ominous then. “She’s not very far from here, Walter, in a small hotel right off Fifth Avenue.” I gave him the address and had hardly finished when I heard his phone slam against the desk. He was in such a hurry he hadn’t bothered to hang up …

Duncan stopped and drained his glass, then stared at it remorsefully. The inspector coughed lightly to attract his attention, his curiosity prompting him to speak. “He found her?” he asked eagerly.

“Oh yes, he found her. He burst right in over all protests, expecting to sweep her off her feet.”

This time the inspector fidgeted nervously. “Well, go on.”

Duncan motioned for the waiter and lifted a fresh glass in a toast. The inspector did the same. Duncan smiled gently. “When she saw him, she laughed and waved. Walter Harrison died an hour later …from a window in the same hotel.”

It was too much for the inspector. He leaned forward in his chair, his forehead knotted in a frown. “But what happened? Who was she? Damn it, Duncan …”

Duncan took a deep breath, then gulped the drink down.

“Evelyn Vaughn was a hopeless imbecile,” he said.

“She had the beauty of a goddess and the mentality of a two-year-old. They kept her well tended and dressed so she wouldn’t be an object of curiosity. But the only habit she ever learned was to wave bye-bye …”

At five past five the elevator operated by Freddy Lamb came to a stop on the street floor. Freddy smiled courteously to the departing passengers. As he said good night to the office-weary faces of secretaries and bookkeepers and executives, his voice was soothing and cool-sweet, almost like a caress for the women and a pat on the shoulder for the men. People were very fond of Freddy. He was always so pleasant, so polite and quietly cheerful. Of the five elevator-men in the Chambers Trust Building, Freddy Lamb was the favorite.

His appearance blended with his voice and manner. He was neat and clean and his hair was nicely trimmed. He had light brown hair parted on the side and brushed flat across his head. His eyes were the same color, focused level when he addressed you, but never too intent, never probing. He looked at you as though he liked and trusted you, no matter who you were. When you looked at him you felt mildly stimulated. He seemed much younger than his thirty-three years. There were no lines on his face, no sign of worry or sluggishness or dissipation. The trait that made him an ideal elevator man was the fact that he never asked questions and never talked about himself.

At twenty past five, Freddy got the go-home sign from the starter, changed places with the night man, and walked down the corridor to the locker room. Taking off the uniform and putting on his street clothes, he yawned a few times. And while he was sitting on the bench and tying his shoelaces, he closed his eyes for a long moment, as though trying to catch a quick nap. His fingers fell away from the shoelaces and his shoulders drooped and he was in that position when the starter came in.

“Tired?” the starter asked.

“Just a little.” Freddy looked up.

“Long day,” the starter said. He was always saying that. As though each day was longer than any other.

Freddy finished with the shoelaces. He stood up and said, “You got the dollar-fifty?”

“What dollar-fifty?”

“The loan,” Freddy said. He smiled offhandedly. “From last week. You ran short and needed dinner money. Remember?”

The starters face was blank for a moment. Then he snapped his fingers and nodded emphatically. “You’re absolutely right,” he declared. “I’m glad you reminded me.”

He handed Freddy a dollar bill and two quarters. Freddy thanked him and said good night and walked out. The starter stood there, lighting a cigarette and nodding to himself and thinking, Nice guy, he waited a week before he asked me, and then he asked me so nice, he’s really a nice guy.

At precisely eight-ten, Freddy Lamb climbed out of the bathtub on the third floor of the uptown rooming house in which he lived. In his room, he opened a dresser drawer, took out silk underwear, silk socks, and a silk handkerchief. When he was fully dressed, he wore a pale gray roll-collar shirt that had cost fourteen dollars, a gray silk gabardine suit costing ninety-seven fifty, and dark gray suede shoes that had set him back twenty-three ninety-five. He broke open a fresh pack of cigarettes and slipped them into a wafer-thin sterling silver case, and then he changed wristwatches. The one he had been wearing was of mediocre quality and had a steel case. The one he wore now was fourteen-karat white gold. But both kept perfect time. He was very particular about the watches he bought. He wouldn’t wear a watch that didn’t keep absolutely perfect time.

The white-gold watch showed eight-twenty when Freddy walked out of the rooming house. He walked down Sixteenth to Ontario, then over to Broad and caught a cab. He gave the driver an address downtown. The cab’s headlights merged with the flooded glare of southbound traffic. Freddy leaned back and lit a cigarette.

“Nice weather,” the driver commented.

“Yes, it certainly is,” Freddy said.

“I like it this time of year,” the driver said, “it ain’t too hot and it ain’t too cold. It’s just right.” He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw that his passenger was putting on a pair of dark glasses. He said, “You in show business?”

“No,” Freddy said.

“What’s the glasses for?”

Freddy didn’t say anything.

“What’s the glasses for?” the driver asked.

“The headlights hurt my eyes,” Freddy said. He said it somewhat slowly, his tone indicating that he was rather tired and didn’t feel like talking.

The driver shrugged and remained quiet for the rest of the ride. He brought the cab to a stop at the corner of Eleventh and Locust. The fare was a dollar twenty. Freddy gave him two dollars and told him to keep the change. As the cab drove away, Freddy walked west on Locust to Twelfth, walked south on Twelfth, then turned west again, moving through a narrow alley. There were no lights in the alley except for a rectangle of green neon far down toward the other end. The rectangle was a glowing frame for the neon wording, Billy’s Hut. It was also a beckoning finger for that special type of citizen who was never happy unless he was being ripped off in a clip joint. They’d soon be flocking through the front entrance on Locust Street. But Freddy Lamb, moving toward the back entrance, had it checked in his mind that the place was empty now. The dial of his wristwatch showed eight fifty-seven, and he knew it was too early for customers. He also knew that Billy Donofrio was sound asleep on a sofa in the backroom used as a private office. He knew it because he’d been watching Donofrio for more than two weeks and he was well acquainted with Donofrio’s nightly habits.

When Freddy was fifteen yards away from Billy’s Hut, he reached into his inner jacket pocket and took out a pair of white cotton gloves. When he was five yards away, he came to a stop and stood motionless, listening. There was the sound of a record player from some upstairs flat on the other side of the alley. From another upstairs flat there was the noise of lesbian voices saying, “You did,” and “I didn’t,” and “You did, you did—”

He listened for other sounds and there were none. He let the tip of his tongue come out just a little to moisten the center of his lower lip. Then he took a few forward steps that brought him to a section of brick wall where the bricks were loose. He counted up from the bottom, the light from the green neon showing him the fourth brick, the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh. The eighth brick was the one he wanted. He got a grip on its edges jutting away from the wall, pulled at it very slowly and carefully. Then he held it in one hand and his other hand reached into the empty space and made contact with the bone handle of a switchblade. It was a six-inch blade and he’d planted it there two nights ago.

He put the brick back in place and walked to the back door of Billy’s Hut. Bending to the side to see through the window, he caught sight of Billy Donofrio on the sofa. Billy was flat on his back, one short leg dangling over the side of the sofa, one arm also dangling, with fat fingers holding the stub of an unlit cigar. Billy was very short and very fat, and in his sleep he breathed as though it were a great effort. Billy was almost completely bald and what hair he had was more white than black. Billy was fifty-three years old and would never get to be fifty-four.

Freddy Lamb used a skeleton key to open the back door. He did it without a sound. And then, without a sound, he moved toward the sofa, his eyes focused on the crease of flesh between Billy’s third chin and Billy’s shirt collar. His arm went up and came down and the blade went into the crease, went in deep to cut the jugular vein, moved left, moved right, to widen the cut so that it was almost from ear to ear. Billy opened his eyes and tried to open his mouth but that was as far as he could take it. He tried to breathe and he couldn’t breathe. He heard the voice of Freddy Lamb saying very softly, almost gently, “Good night, Billy.” Then he heard Freddy’s footsteps moving toward the door, and the door opening, and the footsteps walking out.

Billy didn’t hear the door as it closed. By that time he was far away from hearing anything.

On Freddy’s wrist, the hands of the white-gold watch pointed to nine twenty-six. He stood on the sidewalk near the entrance of a nightclub called Yellow Cat. The place was located in a low-rent area of South Philadelphia, and the neighboring structures were mostly tenements and garages and vacant lots heaped with rubbish. The club’s exterior complied with the general trend; it was dingy and there was no paint on the wooden walls. But inside it was a different proposition. It was glittering and lavish, the drinks were expensive, and the floorshow featured a first-rate orchestra and singers and dancers. It also featured a unique type of striptease entertainment, a quintet of young females who took off their clothes while they sat at your table. For a reasonable bonus they’d let you keep the brassiere or garter or whatnot for a souvenir.

The white-gold watch showed nine twenty-eight. Freddy decided to wait another two minutes. His appointment with the owner of Yellow Cat had been arranged for nine-thirty. He knew that Herman Charn was waiting anxiously for his arrival, but his personal theory of punctuality stipulated split-second precision, and since they’d made it for nine-thirty he’d see Herman at nine-thirty, not a moment earlier or later.

A taxi pulled up and a blonde stepped out. She paid the driver and walked toward Freddy and he said, “Hello, Pearl.”

Pearl smiled at him. “Kiss me hello.”

“Not here,” he said.

“Later?”

He nodded. He looked her up and down. She was five-five and weighed 110 and nature had given her a body that caused men’s eyes to bulge. Freddy’s eyes didn’t bulge, although he told himself she was something to see. He always enjoyed looking at her. He wondered if he still enjoyed the nights with her. He’d been sharing the nights with her for the past several months and it had reached the point where he wasn’t seeing any other women and maybe he was missing out on something. For just a moment he gazed past Pearl, telling himself that she needed him more than he needed her, and knowing it wouldn’t be easy to get off the hook.

Well, there wasn’t any hurry. He hadn’t seen anything else around that interested him. But he wished Pearl would let up on the clinging routine. Maybe he’d really go for her if she wasn’t so hungry for him all the time.

Pearl stepped closer to him. The hunger showed in her eyes. She said, “Know what I did today? I took a walk in the park.”

“You did?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I went to Fairmount Park and took a long walk. All by myself.”

“That’s nice,” he said. He wondered what she was getting at.

She said, “Let’s do it together sometimes. Let’s go for a walk in the park. It’s something we ain’t never done. All we do is drink and listen to jazz and find all sorts of ways to knock ourselves out.”

He gave her a closer look. This was a former call girl who’d done a stretch for prostitution, a longer stretch for selling cocaine, and had finally decided she’d done enough time and she might as well go legitimate. She’d learned the art of stripping off her clothes before an audience, and now at twenty-six she was earning a hundred-and-a-half a week. It was clean money, as far as the law was concerned, but maybe in her mind it wasn’t clean enough. Maybe she was getting funny ideas, like this walk-in-the-park routine. Maybe she’d soon be thinking in terms of a cottage for two and a little lawn in the front and shopping for a baby carriage.

He wondered what she’d look like, wearing an apron and standing at a sink and washing dishes.

For some reason the thought disturbed him. He couldn’t understand why it should disturb him. He heard her saying, “Can we do it, Freddy? Let’s do it on Sunday. We’ll go to Fairmount Park.”

“We’ll talk about it,” he cut in quickly. He glanced at his wristwatch. “See you after the show.”

He hurried through the club entrance, went past the hatcheck counter, past the tables and across the dance floor and toward a door marked private. There was a button adjoining the door and he pressed the button: one short, two longs, another short, and then there was a buzzing sound. He opened the door and walked into the office. It was a large room and the color motif was yellow and gray. The walls and ceiling were gray and the thick carpet was pale yellow. The furniture was bright yellow. There was a short skinny man standing near the desk and his face was gray. Seated at the desk was a large man whose face was a mixture of yellow and gray.

Freddy closed the door behind him. He walked toward the desk. He nodded to the short, skinny man and then he looked at the large man and said, “Hello, Herman.”

Herman glanced at a clock on the desk. He said, “You’re right on time.”

“He’s always on time,” said the short, skinny man.

Herman looked at Freddy Lamb and said, “You do it?”

Before Freddy could answer, the short, skinny man said, “Sure he did it.”

“Shut up, Ziggy,” Herman said. He had a soft, sort of gooey voice, as though he spoke with a lot of marshmallow in his mouth. He wore a suit of very soft fabric, thin and fleecy, and his thick hands were pressed softly on the desktop. On the little finger of his left hand he wore a large star emerald that radiated a soft green light. Everything about him was soft, except for his eyes. His eyes were iron.

“You do it?” he repeated softly.

Freddy nodded.

“Any trouble?” Herman asked.

“He never has trouble,” Ziggy said.

Herman looked at Ziggy. “I told you to shut up.” Then, very softly, “Come here, Ziggy.”

Ziggy hesitated. He had a ferret face that always looked sort of worried and now it looked very worried.

“Come here,” Herman purred.

Ziggy approached the large man. Ziggy was blinking and swallowing hard. Herman reached out and slowly took hold of Ziggy’s hand. Herman’s thick fingers closed tightly on Ziggy’s bony fingers and gave a yank. Ziggy moaned.

“When I tell you to shut up,” Herman said, “you’ll shut up.” He smiled softly and paternally at Ziggy. “Right?”

“Right,” Ziggy said. Then he moaned again. His fingers were free now and he looked down at them as an animal gazes sadly at its own crushed paws. He said, “They’re all busted.”

“They’re not all busted,” Herman said. “They’re damaged just enough to let you know your place. That’s one thing you must never forget. Every man who works for me has to know his place.” He was still smiling at Ziggy. “Right?”

“Right,” Ziggy moaned.

Then Herman looked at Freddy Lamb and said, “Right?”

Freddy didn’t say anything. He was looking at Ziggy’s fingers. Then his gaze climbed to Ziggy’s face. The lips quivered, as though Ziggy was trying to hold back sobs. Freddy remembered the time when nothing could hurt Ziggy, when Ziggy and he were their own bosses and did their engineering on the waterfront. There were a lot of people on the waterfront who were willing to pay good money to have other people placed on stretchers or in caskets. In those days the rates had been fifteen dollars for a broken jaw, thirty for a fractured pelvis, and a hundred for the complete job. Ziggy handled the blackjack work and the bullet work and Freddy took care of such special functions as switchblade slicing, lye in the eyes, and various powders and pills slipped into a glass of beer or wine or a cup of coffee. There were orders for all sorts of jobs in those days.

Fifteen months ago, he was thinking. And times had sure changed. The independent operator was swallowed up by the big combines. It was especially true in this line of business, which followed the theory that competition, no matter how small, was not good for the overall picture. So the moment had come when he and Ziggy had been approached with an offer, and they knew they had to accept, there wasn’t any choice, if they didn’t accept they’d be erased. They didn’t need to be told about that. They just knew. As much as they hated to do it, they had to do it. The proposition was handed to them on a Wednesday afternoon and that same night they went to work for Herman Charn.

He heard Herman saying, “I’m talking to you, Freddy.”

“I hear you,” he said.

“You sure?” Herman asked softly. “You sure you hear me?”

Freddy looked at Herman. He said quietly, “I’m on your payroll. I do what you tell me to do. I’ve done every job exactly the way you wanted it done. Can I do any more than that?”

“Yes,” Herman said. His tone was matter-of-fact. He glanced at Ziggy and said, “From here on it’s a private discussion. Me and Freddy. Take a walk.”

Ziggy’s mouth opened just a little. He didn’t seem to understand the command. He’d always been included in all the business conferences, and now the look in his eyes was a mixture of puzzlement and injury.

Herman smiled at Ziggy. He pointed to the door. Ziggy bit hard on his lip and moved toward the door and opened it and walked out of the room.

For some moments it was quiet in the room and Freddy had a feeling it was too quiet. He sensed that Herman Charn was aiming something at him, something that had nothing to do with the ordinary run of business.

There was the creaking sound of leather as Herman leaned back in the desk chair. He folded his big soft fingers across his big soft belly and said, “Sit down, Freddy. Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

Freddy pulled a chair toward the desk. He sat down. He looked at the face of Herman and for just a moment the face became a wall that moved toward him. He winced; his insides quivered. It was a strange sensation, he’d never had it before and he couldn’t understand it. But then the moment was gone and he sat there relaxed, his features expressionless, as he waited for Herman to speak.

Herman said, “Want a drink?”

Freddy shook his head.

“Smoke?” Herman lifted the lid of an enamel cigarette box.

“I got my own,” Freddy murmured. He reached into his pocket and took out the flat silver case.

“Smoke one of mine,” Herman said. He paused to signify it wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. And then, as though Freddy were a guest, rather than an employee, “These smokes are special-made. Come from Egypt. Cost a dime apiece.”

Freddy took one. Herman flicked a table-lighter, applied the flame to Freddy’s cigarette, lit one for himself, took a slow, soft drag, and let the smoke come out of his nose. Herman waited until all of the smoke was out and then said, “You didn’t like what I did to Ziggy.”

It was a flat statement that didn’t ask for an answer. Freddy sipped at the cigarette, not looking at Herman.

“You didn’t like it,” Herman persisted softly. “You never like it when I let Ziggy know who’s boss.”

Freddy shrugged. “That’s between you and Ziggy.”

“No,” Herman said. And he spoke very slowly, with a pause between each word. “It isn’t that way at all. I don’t do it for Ziggy’s benefit. He already knows who’s top man around here.”

Freddy didn’t say anything. But he almost winced. And again his insides quivered.

Herman leaned forward. “Do you know who the top man is?”

“You,” Freddy said.

Herman smiled. “Thanks, Freddy. Thanks for saying it.” Then the smile vanished and Herman’s eyes were hammerheads. “But I’m not sure you mean it.”

Freddy took another sip from the Egyptian cigarette. It was strongly flavored tobacco but somehow he wasn’t getting any taste from it.

Herman kept leaning forward. “I gotta be sure, Freddy,” he said. “You been working for me more than a year. And just like you said, you do all the jobs exactly the way I want them done. You plan them perfect, it’s always clean and neat from start to finish. I don’t mind saying you’re one of the best. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cooler head. You’re as cool as they come, an icicle on wheels.”

“That’s plenty cool,” Freddy murmured.

“It sure is,” Herman said. He let the pause drift in again. Then, his lips scarcely moving, “Maybe it’s too cool.”

Freddy looked at the hammerhead eyes. He wondered what showed in his own eyes. He wondered what thoughts were burning under the cool surface of his own brain.

He heard Herman saying, “I’ve done a lot of thinking about you. A lot more than you’d ever imagine. You’re a puzzler, and one thing I always like to do is play stud poker with a puzzler.”

Freddy smiled dimly. “Want to play stud poker?”

“We’re playing it now. Without cards.” Herman gazed down at the desktop. His right hand was on the desktop and he flicked his wrist as though he was turning over the hole card. His voice was very soft as he said, “I want you to break it up with Pearl.”

Freddy heard himself saying, “All right, Herman.”

It was as though Freddy hadn’t spoken. Herman said, “I’m waiting, Freddy.”

“Waiting for what?” He told the dim smile to stay on his lips. It stayed there. He murmured, “You tell me to give her up and I say all right. What more do you want me to say.”

“I want you to ask me why. Don’t you want to know why?”

Freddy didn’t reply. He still wore the dim smile and he was gazing past Herman’s head.

“Come on, Freddy. I’m waiting to see your hole card.”

Freddy remained quiet.

“All right,” Herman said. “I’ll keep on showing you mine. I go for Pearl. I went for her the first time I laid eyes on her. That same night I took her home with me and she stayed over. She did what I wanted her to do but it didn’t mean a thing to her, it was just like turning a trick. I thought it wouldn’t bother me, once I have them in bed I can put them out of my mind. But this thing with Pearl, it’s different. I’ve had her on my mind and it gets worse all the time and now it’s gotten to the point where I have to do something about it. First thing I gotta do is clear the road.”

“It’s cleared,” Freddy said. “I’ll tell her tonight I’m not seeing her anymore.”

“Just like that?” And Herman snapped his fingers.

“Yes,” Freddy said. His fingers made the same sound. “Just like that.”

Herman leaned back in the soft leather chair. He looked at the face of Freddy Lamb as though he was trying to solve a cryptogram. Finally he shook his head slowly, and then he gave a heavy sigh and he said, “All right, Freddy. That’s all for now.”

Freddy stood up. He started toward the door. Halfway across the room he stopped and turned and said, “You promised me a bonus for the Donofrio job.”

“This is Monday,” Herman said. “I hand out the pay on Friday.”

“You said I’d be paid right off.”

“Did I?” Herman smiled softly.

“Yes,” Freddy said. “You said the deal on Donofrio was something special and the customer was paying fifteen hundred. You told me there was five hundred in it for me and I’d get the bonus the same night I did the job.”

Herman opened a desk drawer and took out a thick roll of bills.

“Can I have it in tens and twenties?” Freddy asked.

Herman lifted his eyebrows. “Why the small change?”

“I’m an elevator man,” Freddy said. “The bank would wonder what I was doing with fifties.”

“You’re right,” Herman said. He counted off the five hundred in tens and twenties, and handed the money to Freddy. He leaned back in the chair and watched Freddy folding the bills and pocketing them and walking out of the room. When the door was closed Herman said aloud to himself, “Don’t try to figure him out, he’s all ice and no soul, strictly a professional.”

The white-gold watch showed eleven thirty-five. Freddy sat at a table watching the floorshow and drinking from a tall glass of gin and ginger ale. The Yellow Cat was crowded now and Freddy wore the dark glasses and his table was in a darkly shadowed section of the room. He sat there with Ziggy and some other men who worked for Herman. There was Dino, who did his jobs at long range and always used a rifle. There was Shikey, six foot six and weighing three hundred pounds, an expert at bone cracking, gouging, and the removing of teeth. There was Riley, another bone-cracker and strangling specialist.

A tall, pretty boy stood in front of the orchestra, clutching the mike as though it was the only support he had in the world. He sang with an ache in his voice, begging someone to “— please understand.” The audience liked it and he sang it again. Then two colored lap-dancers came out and worked themselves into a sweat and were gasping for breath as they finished the act. The MC walked on and motioned the orchestra to quiet down and grinned at ringside faces as he said, “Ready for dessert?”

“Yeah,” a man shouted from ringside. “Let’s have the dessert.”

“All right,” the MC said. He cupped his hands to his mouth and called offstage, “Bring it out, we’re all starved for that sweetmeat.”

The orchestra went into medium tempo, the lights changing from glaring yellow to a soft violet. And then they came out, seven girls wearing horn-rimmed glasses and ultraconservative costumes. They walked primly, and all together they resembled the stiff-necked females in a cartoon lampooning the WCTU. It got a big laugh from the audience, and there was some appreciative applause. The young ladies formed a line and slowly waved black parasols as they sang, “— Father, oh father, come home with me now.” But then it became, “—Daddy, oh daddy, come home with me now.” And as they emphasized the daddy angle, they broke up the line and discarded the parasols and took off their ankle-length dark blue coats. Then, their fingers loosening the buttons of dark blue dresses, they moved separately toward the ringside tables. The patrons in the back stood up to get a better look and in the balcony the lenses of seven lamps were focused on seven young women getting undressed.

Dino, who had a footwear fetish, said loudly, “I’ll pay forty for a high-heeled shoe.”

One of the girls took off her shoe and flung it toward Freddy’s table. Shikey caught it and handed it to Dino. A waiter came over and Dino handed him four tens and he took the money to the girl. Riley looked puzzledly at Dino and said, “Whatcha gonna do with a high-heeled shoe?” And Shikey said, “He boils ‘em and eats em.” But Ziggy had another theory. “He bangs the heel against his head,” Ziggy said. “That’s the way he gets his kicks.” Dino sat there gazing lovingly at the shoe in his hand while his other hand caressed the kidskin surface. Then gradually his eyes closed and he murmured, “This is nice, this is so nice.”

Riley was watching Dino and saying, “I don’t get it.”

Ziggy shrugged philosophically. “Some things,” he said, “just can’t be understood.”

“You’re so right.” It was Freddy talking. He didn’t know his lips were making sounds. He was looking across the tables at Pearl. She sat with some ringsiders and already she’d taken off considerable clothing; she was half-naked. On her face there was a detached look and her hands moved mechanically as she unbuttoned the buttons and unzipped the zippers. There were three men sitting with her and their eyes feasted on her, they had their mouths open in a sort of mingled fascination and worship. At nearby tables the other strippers were performing but they weren’t getting undivided attention. Most of the men were watching Pearl. One of them offered a hundred dollars for her stocking. She took off the stocking and let it dangle from her fingers. In a semiwhisper she asked if there were any higher bids. Freddy told himself that she wasn’t happy doing what she was doing. Again he could hear her plaintive voice as she asked him to take her for a walk in the park. Suddenly, he knew that he’d like that very much. He wanted to see the sun shining on her hair, instead of the nightclub lights. He heard himself saying aloud, “Five hundred.”

He didn’t shout it, but at the ringside tables they all heard it, and for a moment there was stunned silence. At his own table the silence was very thick. He could feel the pressure of it, and the moment seemed to have substance, something on the order of iron wheels going around and around, making no sound and getting nowhere.

Some things just can’t be understood, he thought. He was taking the tens and twenties from his jacket pocket. The five hundred seemed to prove the truth of Ziggy’s vague philosophy. Freddy got up from his chair and moved toward an empty table behind some potted ferns adjacent to the orchestra stand. He sat down and placed green money on a yellow tablecloth. He wasn’t looking at Pearl as she approached the table. From ringside an awed voice was saying, “For one silk stocking she gets half a grand —”

She seated herself at the table. He shoved the money toward her. He said, “There’s your cash. Let’s have the stocking.”

“This a gag?” she asked quietly. Her eyes were somewhat sullen. There was some laughter from the table where Ziggy and some of the others were seated; they now had the notion it was some sort of joke.

Freddy said, “Take off the stocking.”

She looked at the pile of tens and twenties. She said, “Whatcha want the stocking for?”

“Souvenir,” he said.

It was the tone of his voice that did it. Her face paled. She started to shake her head very slowly, as though she couldn’t believe him.

“Yes,” he said, with just the trace of a sigh. “It’s all over, Pearl. It’s the end of the line.”

She went on shaking her head. She couldn’t talk.

He said, “I’ll hang the stocking in my bedroom.”

She was biting her lip. “It’s a long time till Christmas.”

“For some people it’s never Christmas.”

“Freddy—” She leaned toward him. “What’s it all about? Why’re you doing this?”

He shrugged. He didn’t say anything.

Her eyes were getting wet. “You won’t even give me a reason?”

All he gave her was a cool smile. Then his head was turned and he saw the faces at Ziggy’s table and then he focused on the face of the large man who stood behind the table. He saw the iron in the eyes of Herman Charn. He told himself he was doing what Herman had told him to do. And just then he felt the quiver in his insides. It was mostly in the spine, as though his spine was gradually turning to jelly.

He spoke to himself without a sound. He said, No, it isn’t that, it can’t be that.

Pearl was saying, “All right, Freddy, if that’s the way it is.”

He nodded very slowly.

Pearl bent over and took the stocking off her leg. She placed the stocking on the table. She picked up the five hundred, counted it off to make sure it was all there.

Then she stood up and said, “No charge, mister. I’d rather keep the memories.”

She put the tens and twenties on the tablecloth and walked away. Freddy glanced off to the side and saw a soft smile on the face of Herman Charn.

The floorshow had ended and Freddy was still sitting there at the table. There was a bottle of bourbon in front of him. It had been there for less than twenty minutes and already it was half empty. There was also a pitcher of ice water and the pitcher was full. He didn’t need a chaser because he couldn’t taste the whiskey. He was drinking the whiskey from the water glass.

A voice said, “Freddy —”

And then a hand tugged at his arm. He looked up and saw Ziggy sitting beside him.

He smiled at Ziggy. He motioned toward the bottle and shot glass and said, “Have a drink.”

Ziggy shrugged. “I might as well while I got the chance. At the rate you’re going, that bottle’ll soon be empty.”

“It’s very good bourbon,” Freddy said.

“Yeah?” Ziggy was pouring a glass for himself. He swished the liquor into his mouth. Then, looking closely at Freddy, “You don’t care whether it’s good or not. You’d be gulping it if it was shoe polish.”

Freddy was staring at the tablecloth. “Let’s go somewhere and drink some shoe polish.”

Ziggy tugged again at Freddy’s arm. He said, “Come out of it.”

“Come out of what?”

“The clouds,” Ziggy said. “You’re in the clouds.”

“It’s nice in the clouds,” Freddy said. “I’m up here having a dandy time. I’m floating.”

“Floating? You’re drowning.” Ziggy pulled urgently at his arm, to get Iris hand away from a water glass filled with whiskey. “You’re not a drinker, Freddy. What do you want to do, drink yourself into a hospital?”

Freddy grinned. He aimed the grin at nothing in particular. For some moments he sat there motionless. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and took out the silk stocking. He showed it to Ziggy and said, “Look what I got.”

“Yeah,” Ziggy said. “I seen her give it to you. What’s the score on that routine?”

“No score,” Freddy said. He went on grinning. “It’s a funny way to end a game. Nothing on the scoreboard. Nothing at all.”

Ziggy frowned. “You trying to tell me something?”

Freddy looked at the whiskey in the water glass. He said, “I packed her in.”

“No,” Ziggy said. His tone was incredulous. “Not Pearl. Not that pigeon. That ain’t no ordinary merchandise. You wouldn’t walk out on Pearl unless you had a very special reason.”

“It was special, all right.”

“Tell me about it, Freddy.” There was something plaintive in Ziggy’s voice, a certain feeling for Freddy that he couldn’t put into words. The closest he could get to it was: “After all, I’m on your side, ain’t I?”

“No,” Freddy said. The grin was slowly fading. “You’re on Herman’s side.” He gazed past Ziggy’s head. “We’re all on Herman’s side.”

“Herman? What’s he got to do with it?”

“Everything,” Freddy said. “Herman’s the boss, remember?” He looked at the swollen fingers of Ziggy’s right hand. “If Herman wants something done, it’s got to be done. He gave me orders to break with Pearl. He’s the employer and I’m the hired man, so I did what I had to do. I carried out his orders.”

Ziggy was quiet for some moments. Then, very quietly, “Well, it figures he wants her for himself. But it don’t seem right. It just ain’t fair.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Freddy said. “Who the hell are we to say what’s fair?”

“We’re human, aren’t we?”

“No,” Freddy said. He gazed past Ziggy’s head. “I don’t know what we are. But I know one thing, we’re not human. We can’t afford to be human, not in this line of business.”

Ziggy didn’t get it. It was just a little too deep for him. All he could say was “You getting funny ideas?”

“I’m not reaching for them, they’re just coming to me.”

“Take another drink,” Ziggy said.

“I’d rather have the laughs.” Freddy showed the grin again. “It’s really comical, you know? Especially this thing with Pearl. I was thinking of calling it quits anyway. You know how it is with me, Ziggy. I never like to be tied down to one skirt. But tonight Pearl said something that spun me around. We were talking outside the club and she brought it in out of left field. She asked me to take her for a walk in the park.”

Ziggy blinked a few times. “What?”

“A walk in the park,” Freddy said.

“What for?” Ziggy wanted to know. “She gettin’ square all of a sudden? She wanna go around picking flowers?”

“I don’t know,” Freddy said. “All she said was ‘It’s very nice in Fairmount Park.’ She asked me to take her there and we’d be together in the park, just taking a walk.”

Ziggy pointed to the glass. “You better take that drink.”

Freddy reached for the glass. But someone else’s hand was there first. He saw the thick soft fingers, the soft green glow of the star emerald. As the glass of whiskey was shoved out of his reach, he looked up and saw the soft smile on the face of Herman Charn.

“Too much liquor is bad for the kidneys,” Herman said. He bent down lower to peer at Freddy’s eyes. “You look knocked out, Freddy. There’s a soft couch in the office. Go in there and lie down for a while.”

Freddy got up from the chair. He was somewhat unsteady on his feet. Herman took his arm and helped him make it down the aisle, past the tables to the door of the office. He could feel the pressure of Herman’s hand on his arm. It was very soft pressure but somehow it felt like a clamp of iron biting into his flesh.

Herman opened the office door and guided him toward the couch. He fell onto the couch, sent an idiotic grin toward the ceiling, then closed his eyes and went to sleep.

He slept until four-forty in the morning. The sound that woke him up was a scream.

At first it was all blurred, there was too much whiskey-fog in his brain, he had no idea where he was or what was happening. He pushed his knuckles against his eyes. Then, sitting up, he focused on the faces in the room. He saw Shikey and Riley and they had girls sitting in their laps. They were on the other couch at the opposite side of the room. He saw Dino standing near the couch with his arm around the waist of a slim brunette. Then he glanced toward the door and he saw Ziggy. That made seven faces for him to look at. He told himself to keep looking at them. If he concentrated on that, maybe he wouldn’t hear the screaming.

But he heard it. The scream was an animal sound and yet he recognized the voice. It came from near the desk, and he turned his head very slowly, telling himself he didn’t want to look but knowing he had to look.

He saw Pearl kneeling on the floor. Herman stood behind her. With one hand he was twisting her arm up high between her shoulder blades. His other hand was on her head and he was pulling her hair so that her face was drawn back, her throat stretched.

Herman spoke very softly. “You make me very unhappy, Pearl. I don’t like to be unhappy.”

Then Herman gave her arm another upward twist and pulled tighter on her hair and she screamed again.

The girl in Shikey’s lap gave Pearl a scornful look and said, “You’re a damn fool.”

“In spades.” It came from the stripper who nestled against Riley. “All he wants her to do is kiss him like she means it.”

Freddy told himself to get up and walk out of the room. He lifted himself from the couch and took a few steps toward the door and heard Herman saying, “Not yet, Freddy. I’ll tell you when to go.”

He went back to the couch and sat down.

Herman said, “Be sensible, Pearl. Why can’t you be sensible?”

Pearl opened her mouth to scream again. But no sound came out. There was too much pain and it was choking her.

The brunette who stood with Dino was saying, “It’s a waste of time, Herman, she can’t give you what she hasn’t got. She just don’t have it for you, Herman.”

“She’ll have it for him,” Dino said. “Before he’s finished, he’ll have her crawling on her belly.”

Herman looked at Dino. “No,” he said. “She won’t do that. I wouldn’t let her do that.” He cast a downward glance at Pearl. His lips shaped a soft smile. There was something tender in the smile and in his voice. “Pearl, tell me something, why don’t you want me?”

He gave her a chance to reply, his fingers slackening the grip on her wrist and her hair. She groaned a few times and then she said, “You got my body, Herman. You can have my body anytime you want it.”

“That isn’t enough,” Herman said. “I want you all the way, a hundred percent. It’s got to be like that, Pearl. You’re in me so deep it just can’t take any other route. It’s got to be you and me from here on in, you gotta need me just as much as I need you.”

“But Herman —” She gave a dry sob. “I can’t lie to you. I just don’t feel that way.”

“You’re gonna feel that way,” Herman said.

“No.” Pearl sobbed again. “No. No.”

“Why not?” He was pulling her hair again, twisting her arm. But it seemed he was suffering more than Pearl. The pain racked his pleading voice. “Why can’t you feel something for me?”

Her reply was made without sound. She managed to turn her head just a little, toward the couch. And everyone in the room saw her looking at Freddy.

Herman’s face became very pale. His features tightened and twisted and it seemed he was about to burst into tears. He stared up at the ceiling.

Herman shivered. His body shook spasmodically, as though he stood on a vibrating platform. Then all at once the tormented look faded from his eyes, the iron came into his eyes, and the soft smile came onto his lips. He released Pearl, turned away from her, went to the desk, and opened the cigarette box. It was very quiet in the room while Herman stood there lighting the cigarette. He took a slow, easy drag and then he said quietly, “All right, Pearl, you can go home now.”

She started to get up from the floor. The brunette came over and helped her up.

“I’ll call a cab for you,” Herman said. He reached for the telephone and put in the call. As he lowered the phone, he was looking at Pearl and saying, “You want to go home alone?”

Pearl didn’t say anything. Her head was lowered and she was leaning against the shoulder of the brunette.

Herman said, “You want Freddy to take you home?”

Pearl raised her head just a little and looked at the face of Freddy Lamb.

Herman laughed softly. “All right,” he said. “Freddy’ll take you home.”

Freddy winced. He sat there staring at the carpet.

Herman told the brunette to fix a drink for Pearl. He said, “Take her to the bar and give her anything she wants.” He motioned to the other girls and they got up from the laps of Shikey and Riley. Then all the girls walked out of the room. Herman was quiet for some moments, taking slow drags at the cigarette and looking at the door. Then gradually his head turned and he looked at Freddy. He said, “You’re slated, Freddy.”

Freddy went on staring at the carpet.

“You’re gonna bump her,” Herman said.

Freddy closed his eyes.

“Take her somewhere and bump her and bury her,” Herman said.

Shikey and Riley looked at each other. Dino had his mouth open and he was staring at Herman. Standing next to the door, Ziggy had his eyes glued to Freddy’s face.

“She goes,” Herman said. And then, speaking aloud to himself, “She goes because she gives me grief.” He hit his hand against his chest. “She hits me here, where I live. Hits me too hard. Hurts me. I don’t appreciate getting hurt. Especially here.” Again his hand thumped his chest. He said, “You’ll do it, Freddy. You’ll see to it that I get rid of the hurt.”

“Let me do it,” Ziggy said. Herman shook his head. He pointed a finger at Freddy. His finger jabbed empty air, and he said, “Freddy does it. Freddy.”

Ziggy opened his mouth, tried to close it, couldn’t close it, and blurted, “Why take it out on him?”

“That’s a stupid question,” Herman said mildly. “I’m not taking it out on anybody. I’m giving the job to Freddy because I know he’s dependable. I can always depend on Freddy.”

Ziggy made a final, frantic try. “Please, Herman,” he said. “Please don’t make him do it.”

Herman didn’t bother to reply. All he did was give Ziggy a slow appraising look up and down. It was like a soundless warning to Ziggy, letting him know he was walking on thin ice and the ice would crack if he opened his mouth again.

Then Herman turned to Freddy and said, “Where’s your blade?”

“Stashed,” Freddy said. He was still staring at the carpet.

Herman opened a desk drawer. He took out a black-handled switchblade. “Use this,” he said, coming toward the couch. He handed the knife to Freddy. “Give it a try,” he said.

Freddy pressed the button. The blade flicked out. It glimmered blue-white. He pushed the blade into the handle and tried the button again. He went on trying the button and watching the flash of the blade. It was quiet in the room as the blade went in and out, in and out. Then from the street there was the sound of a horn. Herman said, “That’s the taxi.” Freddy nodded and got up from the sofa and walked out of the room. As he moved toward the girls who stood at the cocktail bar, he could feel the weight of the knife in the inner pocket of his jacket. He was looking at Pearl and saying, “Come on, let’s go,” and as he said it, the blade seemed to come out of the knife and slice into his own flesh.

The taxi was cruising north on Sixteenth Street. On Freddy’s wrist the white-gold watch said five-twenty. He was watching the parade of unlit windows along the dark street. Pearl was saying something but he didn’t hear her. She spoke just a bit louder and he turned and looked at her. He smiled and murmured, “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

“Can’t you sit closer?”

He moved closer to her. A mixture of moonlight and streetlamp glow came pouring into the back seat of the taxi and illuminated her face. He saw something in her eyes that caused him to blink several times.

She noticed the way he was blinking and said, “What’s the matter?”

He didn’t answer. He tried to stop blinking and he couldn’t stop.

“Hangover?” Pearl asked.

“No,” he said. “I feel all right now, I feel fine.”

For some moments she didn’t say anything. She was rubbing her sore arm. She tried to stretch it, winced and gasped with pain, and said, “Oh Jesus, it hurts. It really hurts. Maybe it’s broken.”

“Let me feel it,” he said. He put his hand on her arm. He ran his fingers down from above her elbow to her wrist. “It isn’t broken,” he murmured. “Just a little swollen, that’s all. Sprained some ligaments.”

She smiled at him. “The hurt goes away when you touch it.”

He tried not to look at her, but something fastened his eyes to her face. He kept his hand on her arm. He heard himself saying, “I feel sorry for Herman. If he could see you now, I mean if you’d look at him like you’re looking at me —”

“Freddy,” she said. “Freddy.” Then she leaned toward him. She rested her head on his shoulder.

Then somehow everything was quiet and still and he didn’t hear the noise of the taxi’s engine, he didn’t feel the bumps as the wheels hit the ruts in the cobblestone surface of Sixteenth Street. But suddenly there was a deep rut and the taxi gave a lurch. He looked up and heard the driver cursing the city engineers. “Goddamn it,” the driver said. “They got a deal with the tire companies.”

Freddy stared past the driver’s head, his eyes aimed through the windshield to see the wide intersection where Sixteenth Street met the Parkway. The Parkway was a six-laned drive slanting to the left of the downtown area, going away from the concrete of Philadelphia skyscrapers and pointing toward the green of Fairmount Park.

“Turn left,” Freddy said.

They were approaching the intersection, and the driver gave a backward glance. “Left?” the driver asked. “That takes us outta the way. You gave me an address on Seventeenth near Lehigh. We gotta hit it from Sixteenth —”

“I know,” Freddy said quietly. “But turn left anyway.”

The driver shrugged. “You’re the captain.” He beat the yellow of a traffic light and the taxi made a left turn onto the Parkway.

Pearl said, “What’s this, Freddy? Where’re we going?”

“In the park.” He wasn’t looking at her. “We’re gonna do what you said we should do. We’re gonna take a walk in the park.”

“For real?” Her eyes were lit up. She shook her head as though she could scarcely believe what he’d just said.

“We’ll take a nice walk,” he murmured. “Just the two of us. The way you wanted it.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, Freddy—”

The driver shrugged again. The taxi went past the big monuments and fountains of Logan Circle, past the Rodin Museum and the Art Museum and onto River Drive. For a mile or so they stayed on the highway, bordering the moonlit water of the river and then, without being told, the driver made a turn off the highway, made a series of turns that took them deep into the park. They came to a section where there were no lights, no movement, no sound except the autumn wind drifting through the trees and bushes and tall grass and flowers.

“Stop here,” Freddy said.

The taxi came to a stop. They got out and he paid the driver. The driver gave him a queer look and said, “You sure picked a lonely spot.”

Freddy looked at the cabman. He didn’t say anything.

The driver said, “You’re at least three miles off the highway. It’s gonna be a problem getting a ride home.”

“Is it your problem?” Freddy asked gently.

“Well, no—”

“Then don’t worry about it,” Freddy said. He smiled amiably. The driver threw a glance at the blonde, smiled, and told himself that the man might have the right idea, after all. With an item like that, any man would want complete privacy. He thought of the bony, bucktoothed woman who waited for him at home, crinkled his face in a distasteful grimace, put the car in gear, and drove away.

“Ain’t it nice?” Pearl said. “Ain’t it wonderful?”

They were walking through a glade where the moonlight showed the autumn colors of fallen leaves. The night air was fragrant with the blended aromas of wildflowers. He had his arm around her shoulder and was leading her toward a narrow lane sloping downward through the trees.

She laughed lightly, happily. “It’s like as if you know the place. As if you’ve been here before.”

“No,” he said. “I’ve never been here before.”

There was the tinkling sound of a nearby brook. A bird chirped in the bushes. Another bird sang a tender reply. “Listen,” Pearl murmured. “Listen to them.”

He listened to the singing of the birds. Now he was guiding Pearl down along the slope and seeing the way it leveled at the bottom and then went up again on all sides. It was a tiny valley down there with the brook running along the edge. He told himself it would happen when they reached the bottom.

He heard Pearl saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stay here?”

He looked at her. “Stay here?”

“Yes,” she said. “If we could live here for the rest of our lives. Just be here, away from everything —”

“We’d get lonesome.”

“No we wouldn’t,” she said. “We’d always have company. I’d have you and you’d have me.”

They were nearing the bottom of the slope. It was sort of steep now and they had to move slowly. All at once she stumbled and pitched forward and he caught her before she could fall on her face. He steadied her, smiled at her, and said, “OK?”

She nodded. She stood very close to him and gazed into his eyes and said, “You wouldn’t let me fall, would you?”

The smile faded. He stared past her. “Not if I could help it.”

“I know,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

He went on staring past her. “Tell you what?”

“The situation.” She spoke softly, almost in a whisper. “I got it figured, Freddy. It’s so easy to figure.”

He wanted to close his eyes; he didn’t know why he wanted to close his eyes.

He heard her saying, “I know why you packed me in tonight. Orders from Herman.”

“That’s right.” He said it automatically, as though the mention of the name was the shifting of a gear.

“And another thing,” she said. “I know why you brought me here.” There was a pause, and then, very softly, “Herman.” He nodded.

She started to cry. It was quiet weeping and contained no fear, no hysteria. It was the weeping of farewell. She was crying because she was sad. Then, very slowly, she took the few remaining steps going down to the bottom of the slope. He stood there and watched her face as she turned to look up at him.

He walked down to where she stood, smiling at her and trying to pretend his hand was not on the switchblade in his pocket. He tried to make himself believe he wasn’t going to do it, but he knew that wasn’t true. He’d been slated for this job. The combine had him listed as a top-rated operator, one of the best in the business. He’d expended a lot of effort to attain that reputation, to be known as the grade-A expert who’d never muffed an assignment.

He begged himself to stop. He couldn’t stop. The knife was open in his hand and his arm flashed out and sideways with the blade sliding in neatly and precisely, cutting the flesh of her throat. She went down very slowly, tried to cough, made a few gurgling sounds, and then rolled over on her back and died looking up at him.

For a long time he stared at her face. There was no expression on her features now. At first he didn’t feel anything, and then he realized she was dead, and he had killed her.

He tried to tell himself there was nothing else he could have done, but even though that was true it didn’t do any good. He took his glance away from her face and looked down at the white-gold watch to check the hour and the minute, automatically. But somehow the dial was blurred, as though the hands were spinning like tiny propellers. He had the weird feeling that the watch was showing time traveling backward, so that he found himself checking it in terms of years and decades. He went all the way back to the day when he was eleven years old and they took him to reform school.

In reform school he was taught a lot of things. The thing he learned best was the way to use a knife. The knife became his profession. But somewhere along the line he caught onto the idea of holding a daytime job to cover his nighttime activities. He worked in stockrooms and he did some window cleaning and drove a truck for a fruit dealer. And finally he became an elevator operator and that was the job he liked best. He’d never realized why he liked it so much but he realized now. He knew that the elevator was nothing more than a moving cell, and that the only place for him was a cell. The passengers were just a lot of friendly visitors walking in and out, saying “Good morning, Freddy,” and “Good night, Freddy,” and they were such nice people. Just the thought of them brought a tender smile to his lips.

Then he realized he was smiling down at her. He sensed a faint glow coming from somewhere, lighting her face. For an instant he had no idea what it was. Then he realized it came from the sky. It was the first signal of approaching sunrise.

The white-gold watch showed five fifty-three. Freddy Lamb told himself to get moving. For some reason he couldn’t move. He was looking down at the dead girl. His hand was still clenched about the switchblade, and as he tried to relax it he almost dropped the knife. He looked down at it.

The combine was a cell, too, he told himself. The combine was an elevator from which he could never escape. It was going steadily downward and there were no stops until the end. There was no way to get out.

Herman had made him kill the girl. Herman would make him do other things. And there was no getting away from that. If he killed Herman there would be someone else.

The elevator was carrying Freddy steadily downward. Already, he had left Pearl somewhere far above him. He realized it all at once, and an unreasonable terror filled him.

Freddy looked at the white-gold watch again. A minute had passed and he knew suddenly that he was slated to do a job on someone in exactly three minutes now. The minutes passed and he stood there alone.

At precisely five fifty-seven he said goodbye to his profession and plunged the blade into his heart.

Nolan placed both hands on the railing of the veranda, and unconsciously squeezed the wood until the muscles in his arms corded and ached. He looked down, across the immaculately trimmed green lawn, past the palms and the Australian pines, to the beach, gleaming whitely under the late-morning sun.

The Gulf was crisply green today, and calm, broken only by the happy frolicking of the man and woman — laughing, swimming. His wife, Helen, and Latimer, the photographer from the magazine in New York, down to do a picture story of the island.

Nolan turned his gaze away, lifted his hands, and stared at his palms. His hands were trembling and his thin cotton shirt was soaked with perspiration.

He couldn’t stand it. He left the veranda and walked swiftly into the sprawling living room of his home. He paced back and forth for a moment, his feet whispering on the grass rug. Then he stood quietly in the center of the room, trying to think. For two weeks it had been going on. At first he’d thought he would last. Now he knew it no longer mattered, about lasting.

He would have to do something. He strode rapidly across the room into his study, opened the top drawer of his desk, and looked down at the .45 automatic. He slammed the drawer shut, whirled, and went back into the living room.

Why had he ever allowed the man entrance to the island?

Oh, he knew why, well enough. Because Helen had wanted it. And now he couldn’t order Latimer away. It would be as good as telling Helen the reason. She knew how much he loved her; why did she act this way? Why did she torture him? She must realize, after all these years, that he couldn’t stand another man even looking at her beauty.

Why did she think they lived here — severed from all mainland life?

He stiffened, making an effort to wipe away the frown on his face. He reached for his handkerchief and swabbed at the perspiration on his arms and forehead. They were coming, laughing and talking, up across the lawn.

Quickly, he selected a magazine from the rack and settled into a wicker chair with his back to the front entrance. He flipped the periodical open and was engrossed in a month-old mystery story when they stomped loudly across the veranda.

Every step was a kind of unbearable thunder to Nolan. He was reaching such a pitch of helpless irritability that he nearly screamed.

“Darling!” Helen called. “Where are you — oh, there!”

She stepped toward him, her bare feet softly thumping the grass rug. He half-glanced up at her. She was coffee-brown, her eyes excited and happier than he’d seen them in a long time. She wore one of the violent-lined red, yellow, and green cloth swimming suits that she’d designed for herself.

He abruptly realized how meager the suit was and his neck burned. He had contrived to have her make the suit with the least expenditure of material. It was his pleasure to look at her.

But not now — not with Latimer here!

“What have you been doing?” she asked.

He started to reply, looking across at Latimer standing at the entranceway, but she rippled on. “You really should have come swimming with us, dear. It was wonderful this morning.” She reached out and tousled his hair. “You haven’t been near the water in days.”

Nolan cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “Well, Mr. Latimer. About caught up? About ready with your story?”

He wanted to shout: When are you leaving! He could not. He sat there, staring at Latimer. The sunny days here on the island had done the man good. He was bronzed and healthy and young and abrim with a vitality that had not been present when he’d first come over from the mainland.

“A few more days, I guess,” Latimer said. “I wish you’d call me Jack. And I sure wish you two would pose for a few pictures. It’s nice enough, the way you’ve been about letting me photograph the island, your home, but —” Latimer left the protest unspoken, smiling halfheartedly.

Nolan glanced at his wife. She reached down and touched his arm, her fingers trembling. “After lunch Jack and I are going to take a walk, clear around the island,” she said. “You know, we haven’t done that in a terribly long while. Why don’t you come along?”

“Sorry,” Nolan said quickly. “I’ve some things I’ve got to attend to.”

“Sure wish you’d come,” Latimer said.

Nolan said nothing.

“Well,” Latimer said. “I’ve got to write a letter. Guess I’ll do it while you’re fixing lunch, Helen.”

“Right,” Helen said. “I’d better get busy.” She turned and hurried off toward the kitchen, humming softly.

“By the way,” Latimer said to Nolan. “Anything you’d like done in town? I’ll be taking the boat across this evening, so I can mail some stuff off.”

“Thank you,” Nolan said. “There’s nothing.”

“Well,” Latimer said. He sighed and started across the room toward the hallway leading to his bedroom. It had been a storage room, but Nolan had fixed it up with a bed and a table for Latimer’s typewriter when Helen insisted the photographer stay on the island. Latimer paused by the hallway. “Sure you won’t come with us this afternoon?”

Nolan didn’t bother to answer. He couldn’t answer. If he had tried, he knew he might have shouted, even cursed — maybe actually gone at the man with his bare hands.

He would not use his bare hands. He wouldn’t soil them. He would use the gun. He listened as Latimer left the room, and sat there breathing stiffly, his fingers clenched into the magazines crumpled pages.

Yes, that’s what he would do. Latimer’s saying he was going to remain on the island longer still clinched it. Nolan knew why Latimer had said that. He wasn’t fooling anybody. Taking advantage of hospitality for his own sneaking reasons. Didn’t Helen see what kind of a man Latimer was? Was she blind? Or did she want it this way?

The very thought of such a thing sent Nolan out of the chair, stalking back and forth across the room. He could hear Latimer’s typewriter ticking away from the far side of the house.

Their paradise. Their home. Their love. Torn and twisted and broken by this insensitive person. He heard Helen call them to lunch then, and moving toward the table in the dining room, he felt slightly relieved. He knew that while they were gone this afternoon, he would get everything ready.

With Latimer’s unconscious aid, Nolan knew exactly how he was going to do it. He sat at the table, picking at his food, listening to them talk and laugh. He tried vainly to concentrate away from the sounds of their voices.

“This salad’s terrific,” Latimer said. “Helen, you’re wonderful! You two’ve got it made out here!”

Helen lowered her gaze to her plate. Nolan stared directly at Latimer and Latimer reddened and looked away. Nolan grinned inside. He had caught the man. But the victory was empty. The long afternoon, thinking about her out there with Latimer, would be painful.

They finished lunch in silence. Almost before Nolan realized it, the house was again empty. He could hear them laughing still, their voices growing faint as they moved down along the beach.

Helen had even insisted on taking several bottles of cold beer wrapped in insulated bags to keep cool, and carried in the old musette.

Nolan could not stand still. He paced back and forth across the extent of the house, thinking about tonight. If he didn’t do it tonight, it might be too late. He did not want Helen too attached to Latimer, and he felt sure it had gone very far already.

He knew Latimer intended to stay on and stay on — until he could take Helen away with him. But tonight would end it. He would go along with Latimer to the mainland. Only, Latimer would never reach the mainland. The boat would swamp.

Nolan knew how to swamp a boat. He knew Latimer wasn’t much of a swimmer, and anyhow, a man couldn’t swim with a .45 slug in his heart. But Nolan could swim well. He would kill Latimer, take him out into the Gulf, weight him, and sink him. Then he’d bring the boat in and swamp it and swim ashore. He would report it, and rent a boat and come home. He knew they were in for a bit of heavy weather tonight. It would be just perfect.

And Helen and he would be happy again. The way they had always been.

He looked back, thinking over the good times. The time before they’d come to the island, when he’d been hard-working at the glass-cutting business he’d inherited from his father. Then more and more he’d become conscious of Helen’s beauty and the effect she had on men. And loving her as wildly as he did, he could no longer bear the endless suspense; the knowledge that sooner or later she would leave him. So he sold the business, retired. His little lie. So far as she knew, he simply wanted island life — quiet, unhurried, alone with her. It was true. But not a complete truth.

All this time they had been happy. Until now. Somebody’d got wind of the beauty of the island and Latimer had shown up to do his story. Under conditions imposed by Nolan — no pictures of either himself or Helen. He had allowed one fuzzy negative of them standing against a blossoming hibiscus near the house, at twilight — that was all.

Wandering through the house, trying not to think of what they were doing now, he found himself in Latimer’s room. The unmade bed, the photographic equipment, the typewriter set up on the table.

Beside the machine was a typewritten letter.

Nolan turned away. But something drew him over to the table. Pure curiosity in this man Latimer. He stood there, staring down at the obviously unfinished letter. An addressed envelope lay beside it. There was a half-completed sentence on the sheet in the typewriter, numbered Page 2.

The letter was addressed to the editor of the magazine where Latimer worked.

Nolan began reading, at first leisurely, then feverishly.

Dear Bart:

Really have this thing wrapped up, but I’m staying on a while longer, just to settle a few things in my own mind and maybe I’ll come up with a bunch of pix and a yarn that’ll knock your head off…sure beautiful scenery on the island…house is a regular bamboo and cypress mansion…unhealthy, Bart, really sick…he watches her like a hawk. He’s ripped with jealousy and it would be laughable, except that they’re both so very old. He must be in his eighties, but she’s a bit harder to read. I did a lousy thing. I confronted her with it. You would have, too. She’s so obviously just enduring everything for his sake. Humoring him. My God, think of it! All these years he’s kept her out here, away from everybody, imprisoned. It’s pure hell. She as much as admitted it. I’m staying on, just to see if I can’t work it somehow. Get her back to civilization, if only for a vacation, Bart. She deserves it. You should hear her ask how things are out there — it would break your damned heart…

There was more, and Nolan read all of it through twice. For a moment longer he stood there, seeing everything clearly for the first time in nearly a half century.

Then he walked through the house to his study, opened the desk drawer, took out the .45 automatic. He sat down in his chair by the desk, put the muzzle of the gun into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

The boy sitting opposite him was his enemy.

The boy sitting opposite him was called Tigo, and he wore a green silk jacket with an orange stripe on each sleeve. The jacket told Dave that Tigo was his enemy. The jacket shrieked ‘Enemy, enemy!’

‘This is a good piece,’ Tigo said, indicating the gun on the table. ‘This runs you close to forty-five bucks, you try to buy it in a store.’

The gun on the table was a Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special.

It rested exactly in the centre of the table, its sawed-off two-inch barrel abruptly terminating the otherwise lethal grace of the weapon. There was a checked walnut stock on the gun, and the gun was finished in a flat blue. Alongside the gun were three .38 Special cartridges.

Dave looked at the gun disinterestedly. He was nervous and apprehensive, but he kept tight control of his face. He could not show Tigo what he was feeling. Tigo was the enemy, and so he presented a mask to the enemy, cocking one eyebrow and saying, ‘I seen pieces before. There’s nothing special about this one.’

‘Except what we got to do with it,’ Tigo said. Tigo was studying him with large brown eyes. The eyes were moist-looking. He was not a bad-looking kid, Tigo, with thick black hair and maybe a nose that was too long, but his mouth and chin were good. You could usually tell a cat by his mouth and his chin. Tigo would not turkey out of this particular rumble. Of that, Dave was sure.

‘Why don’t we start?’ Dave asked. He wet his lips and looked across at Tigo.

‘You understand,’ Tigo said. ‘I got no bad blood for you.’

‘I understand.’

‘This is what the club said. This is how the club said we should settle it. Without a big street diddlebop, you dig? But I want you to know I don’t know you from a hole in the wall—except you wear a blue and gold jacket.’

‘And you wear a green and orange one,’ Dave said, ‘and that’s enough for me.’

“Sure, but what I was trying to say …”

‘We going to sit and talk all night, or we going to get this thing rolling?’ Dave asked.

‘What I’m trying to say,’ Tigo went on, ‘is that I just happened to be picked for this, you know? Like to settle this thing that’s between the two clubs. I mean, you got to admit your boys shouldn’t have come in our territory last night.’

‘I got to admit nothing,’ Dave said flatly.

‘Well, anyway, they shot at the candy store. That wasn’t right. There’s supposed to be a truce on.’

‘Okay, okay,’ Dave said.

‘So like …like this is the way we agreed to settle it. I mean, one of us and …and one of you. Fair and square. Without any street boppin’, and without any Law trouble.’

‘Let’s get on with it,’ Dave said.

‘I’m trying to say, I never even seen you on the street before this. So this ain’t nothin’ personal with me. Which­ever way it turns out, like …”

‘I never seen you neither,’ Dave said.

Tigo stared at him for a long time. ‘That’s ‘cause you’re new around here. Where you from originally?’

‘My people come down from the Bronx.’

‘You got a big family?’

‘A sister and two brothers, that’s all.’

‘Yeah, I only got a sister,’ Tigo shrugged. ‘Well.’ He sighed. ‘So.’ He sighed again. ‘Let’s make it, huh?’

‘I’m waitin’,’ Dave said.

Tigo picked up the gun, and then he took one of the cartridges from the table top. He broke open the gun, slid the cartridge into the cylinder, and then snapped the gun shut and twirled the cylinder. ‘Round and round she goes,’ he said, ‘and where she stops, nobody knows. There’s six chambers in the cylinder, and only one cartridge. That makes the odds five-to-one that the cartridge’ll be in firing position when the cylinder stops twirling. You dig?’

‘I dig.’

‘I’ll go first,’ Tigo said.

Dave looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘You want to go first?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’m giving you a break.’ Tigo grinned. ‘I may blow my head off first time out.’

‘Why you giving me a break?’ Dave asked.

Tigo shrugged. ‘What’s the hell’s the difference?’ He gave the cylinder a fast twirl.

‘The Russians invented this, huh?’ Dave asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘I always said they was crazy bastards.’

‘Yeah, I always …’ Tigo stopped talking. The cylinder was still now. He took a deep breath, put the barrel of the .38 to his temple, and then squeezed the trigger.

The firing pin clicked on an empty chamber.

‘Well, that was easy, wasn’t it?’ he asked. He shoved the gun across the table. ‘Your turn, Dave.’

Dave reached for the gun. It was cold in the basement room, but he was sweating now. He pulled the gun toward him, then left it on the table while he dried his palms on his trousers. He picked up the gun then and stared at it.

‘It’s a nifty piece.’ Tigo said. ‘I like a good piece.’

‘Yeah, I do too,’ Dave said. ‘You can tell a good piece just by the way it feels in your hand.’

Tigo looked surprised. ‘I mentioned that to one of the guys yesterday, and he thought I was nuts.’

‘Lots of guys don’t know about pieces,’ Dave said, shrugging.

‘I was thinking,’ Tigo said, ‘when I get old enough, I’ll join the Army, you know? I’d like to work around pieces.’

‘I thought of that, too. I’d join now, only my old lady won’t give me permission. She’s got to sign if I join now.’

‘Yeah, they’re all the same,’ Tigo said, smiling. ‘Your old lady born here or the island?’

‘The island,’ Dave said.

‘Yeah, well, you know they got these old-fashioned ideas.’

‘I better spin,’ Dave said.

‘Yeah,’ Tigo agreed.

Dave slapped the cylinder with his left hand. The cylinder whirled, whirled and then stopped. Slowly, Dave put the gun to his head. He wanted to close his eyes, but he didn’t dare. Tigo, the enemy, was watching him. He returned Tigo’s stare, and then he squeezed the trigger.

His heart skipped a beat, and then over the roar of his blood he heard the empty click. Hastily, he put the gun down on the table.

‘Makes you sweat, don’t it?’ Tigo said.

Dave nodded, saying nothing. He watched Tigo. Tigo was looking at the gun.

‘Me now, huh?’ he said. He took a deep breath, then picked up the .38.

He shrugged. ‘Well.’ He twirled the cylinder, waited for it to stop, and then put the gun to his head.

‘Bang!’ he said, and then he squeezed the trigger. Again, the firing pin clicked on an empty chamber. Tigo let out his breath and put the gun down.

‘I thought I was dead that time,’ he said.

‘I could hear the harps,’ Dave said.

‘This is a good way to lose weight, you know that?’ He laughed nervously, and then his laugh became honest when he saw that Dave was laughing with him. ‘Ain’t it the truth? You could lose ten pounds this way.’

‘My old lady’s like a house,’ Dave said laughing. ‘She ought to try this kind of a diet.’ He laughed at his own humour, pleased when Tigo joined him.

‘That’s the trouble,’ Tigo said. ‘You see a nice deb in the street, you think it’s crazy, you know? Then they get to be our people’s age, and they turn to fat.’ He shook his head.

‘You got a chick?’ Dave asked.

‘Yeah, I got one.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Aw, you don’t know her.’

‘Maybe I do,’ Dave said.

‘Her name is Juana.’ Tigo watched him. ‘She’s about five-two, got these brown eyes …’

‘I think I know her,’ Dave said. He nodded. ‘Yeah, I think I know her.’

‘She’s nice, ain’t she?’ Tigo asked. He leaned forward, as if Dave’s answer was of great importance to him.

‘Yeah, she’s nice,’ Dave said.

‘The guys rib me about her. You know, all they’re after — well, you know—they don’t understand some­thing like Juana.’

‘I got a chick, too,’ Dave said.

‘Yeah? Hey, maybe sometime we could …’ Tigo cut himself short. He looked down at the gun, and his sud­den enthusiasm seemed to ebb completely. ‘It’s your turn,’ he said.

‘Here goes nothing,’ Dave said. He twirled the cylin­der, sucked in his breath, and then fired.

The empty click was loud in the stillness of the room.

‘Man!’ Dave said.

‘We’re pretty lucky, you know?’ Tigo said.

‘So far.’

‘We better lower the odds. The boys won’t like it if we …’ He stopped himself again, and then reached for one of the cartridges on the table. He broke open the gun again, and slipped the second cartridge into the cylinder. ‘Now we got two cartridges in here,’ he said. ‘Two cartridges, six chambers. That’s four-to-two. Divide it, and you get two-to-one.’ He paused. ‘You game?’

‘That’s …that’s what we’re here for, ain’t it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Okay then.’

‘Gone,’ Tigo said, nodding his head. ‘You got courage, Dave.’

‘You’re the one needs the courage,’ Dave said gently. ‘It’s your spin.’

Tigo lifted the gun. Idly, he began spinning the cylinder.

‘You live on the next block, don’t you?’ Dave asked.

‘Yeah.’ Tigo kept slapping the cylinder. It spun with a gently whirring sound.

‘That’s how come we never crossed paths, I guess. Also I’m new on the scene.’

‘Yeah, well you know, you get hooked up with one club, that’s the way it is.’

‘You like the guys on your club?’ Dave asked, wondering why he was asking such a stupid question, listening to the whirring of the cylinder at the same time.

‘They’re okay.’ Tigo shrugged. ‘None of them really send me, but that’s the club on my block, so what’re you gonna do, huh?’ His hand left the cylinder. It stopped spinning. He put the gun to his head.

‘Wait!’ Dave said.

Tigo looked puzzled. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to say …I mean …’ Dave frowned. ‘I don’t dig too many of the guys on my club, cither.’

Tigo nodded. For a moment, their eyes locked. Then Tigo shrugged, and fired.

The empty click filled the basement room.

‘Phew,’ Tigo said.

‘Man, you can say that again.’

Tigo slid the gun across the table.

Dave hesitated an instant. He did not want to pick up the gun. He felt sure that this time the firing pin would strike the percussion cap of one of the cartridges. He was sure that this time he would shoot himself.

‘Sometimes I think I’m turkey,’ he said to Tigo, surprised that his thoughts had found voice.

‘I feel that way sometimes, too,’ Tigo said.

‘I never told that to nobody,’ Dave said. ‘The guys on my club would laugh at me, I ever told them that.’

‘Some things you got to keep to yourself. There ain’t nobody you can trust in this world.’

‘There should be somebody you can trust,’ Dave said. ‘Hell, you can’t tell nothing to your people. They don’t understand.’

Tigo laughed. ‘That’s an old story. But that’s the way things are. What’re you gonna do?’

‘Yeah. Still, sometimes I think I’m turkey.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Tigo said. ‘It ain’t only that, though. Like sometimes …well, don’t you wonder what you’re doing stomping some guy in the street? Like…you know what I mean? Like…who’s the guy to you? What you got to beat him up for? ‘Cause he messed with somebody else’s girl?’ Tigo shook his head. ‘It gets complicated sometimes.’

‘Yeah, but …” Dave frowned again. ‘You got to stick with the club. Don’t you?’

‘Sure, sure …no question.’ Again, their eyes locked.

‘Well, here goes,’ Dave said. He lifted the gun. ‘It’s just …’ He shook his head, and then twirled the cylinder. The cylinder spun, and then stopped. He studied the gun, wondering if one of the cartridges would roar from the barrel when he squeezed the trigger.

Then he fired.

It was a few minutes before five o’clock when Ardis Clinton unlocked the rear door of her apartment and admitted her lover. He was a cow-eyed young man with a wild mass of curly black hair. He worked as a dishwasher at Joe’s Diner, which was directly across the alley.

They embraced passionately. Her body pressed against the meat cleaver concealed inside his shirt, and Ardis shivered with delicious anticipation. Very soon now, it would all be over. That stupid ox, her husband, would be dead. He and his stupid cracks —- all the dullness and boredom — would be gone forever. And with the twenty thousand insurance money, ten thousand dollars double-indemnity…

“We’re going to be so happy, Tony,” she whispered. “You’ll have your own place, a real swank little restaurant with what they call one of those intimate bars. And you’ll just manage it, just kind of saunter around in a dress suit, and —”

“And we’ll live happily ever after,” Tony said. “Just me and you, baby, walking down life’s highway together.”

Ardis let out a gasp. She shoved him away from her, glaring up into his handsome empty face. “Don’t!” she snapped. “Don’t say things like that! I’ve told you and told you not to do it, and if I have to tell you again, I’ll —!”

“But what’d I say?” he protested. “I didn’t say nothin’.”

“Well …” She got control of herself, forcing a smile. “Never mind, darling. You haven’t had any opportunities and we’ve never really had a chance to know each other, so — so never mind. Things will be different after we’re married.” She patted his cheek, kissed him again. “You got away from the diner all right? No one saw you leave?”

“Huh-uh. I already took the stuff up to the steam-table for Joe, and the waitress was up front too, y’know, filling the sugar bowls and the salt and pepper shakers like she always does just before dinner. And—”

“Good. Now, suppose someone comes back to the kitchen and finds out you’re not there. What’s your story going to be?”

“Well…I was out in the alley dumping some garbage. I mean —” He corrected himself hastily, “maybe I was. Or maybe I was down in the basement, getting some supplies. Or maybe I was in the john — the lavatory, I mean — or —”

“Fine,” Ardis said approvingly. “You don’t say where you were, so they can’t prove you weren’t there. You just don’t remember where you were, understand, darling? You might have been any number of places.”

Tony nodded. Looking over her shoulder into the bedroom, he frowned worriedly. “Why’d you do that now, honey? I know this has got to look like a robbery. But tearin’ up the room now, before he gets here —”

“There won’t be time afterwards. Don’t worry, Tony. I’ll keep the door closed.”

“But he might open it and look in. And if he sees all them dresser drawers dumped around, and—”

“He won’t. He won’t look into the bedroom. I know exactly what he’ll do, exactly what he’ll say, the same things that he’s always done and said ever since we’ve been married. All the stupid, maddening, dull, tiresome—!” She broke off abruptly, conscious that her voice was rising. “Well, forget it,” she said, forcing another smile. “He won’t give us any trouble.”

“Whatever you say.” Tony nodded docilely. “If you say so, that’s the way it is, Ardis.”

“But there’ll be trouble —from the cops. I know I’ve already warned you about it, darling. But it’ll be pretty bad, worse than anything you’ve ever gone through. They won’t have any proof, but they’re bound to be suspicious, and if you ever start talking, admitting anything —”

“I won’t. They won’t get anything out of me.”

“You’re sure? They’ll try to trick you. They’ll probably tell you that I’ve confessed. They may even slap you around. So if you’re not absolutely sure…”

“They won’t get anything out of me,” he repeated stolidly. “I won’t talk.”

And studying him, Ardis knew that he wouldn’t.

She led the way down the hall to the bathroom. He parted the shower curtains and stepped into the tub. Drawing a pair of gloves from his pocket, he pulled them onto his hands. Awkwardly, he fumbled the meat cleaver from beneath his shirt.

“Ardis. Uh — look, honey.”

“Yes?”

“Do I have to hit you? Couldn’t I just maybe give you a little shove, or —“

“No, darling,” she said gently “You have to hit me. This is supposed to be a robbery. If you killed my husband without doing anything to me, well, you know how it would look.”

“But I never hit no woman —any woman — before. I might hit you too hard, and —”

“Tony!”

“Well, all right,” he said sullenly. “I don’t like it, but all right.”

Ardis murmured soothing endearments. Then, brushing his lips quickly with her own, she returned to the living room. It was a quarter after five, exactly five minutes—but exactly—until her husband, Bill, would come home. Closing the bedroom door, she lay down on the lounge. Her negligee fell open, and she left it that way, grinning meanly as she studied the curving length of her thighs.

Give the dope a treat for a change, she thought. Let him get one last good look before he gets his.

Her expression changed. Wearily, resentfully, she pulled the material of the negligee over her legs. Because, of course, Bill would never notice. She could wear a ring in her nose, paint a bull’s-eye around her navel, and he’d never notice.

If he had ever noticed, just once paid her a pretty compliment…

If he had ever done anything different, ever said or done anything different at all — even the teensiest little bit…

But he hadn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. So what else could she do but what she was doing? She could get a divorce, sure, but that was all she’d get. No money; nothing with which to build a new life. Nothing to make up for those fifteen years of slowly being driven mad.

It’s his own fault, she thought bitterly. I can’t take any more. If I had to put up with him for just one more night, even one more hour…!

She heard heavy footsteps in the hallway. Then a key turned in the door latch, and Bill came in. He was a master machinist, a solidly built man of about forty-five. The old-fashioned gold-rimmed glasses on his pudgy nose gave him a look of owlish solemnity.

“Well,” he said, setting down his lunch bucket. “Another day, another dollar.”

Ardis grimaced. He plodded across to the lounge, stooped, and gave her a halfhearted peck on the cheek.

“Long time no see,” he said. “What we havin’ for supper?”

Ardis gritted her teeth. It shouldn’t matter now; in a few minutes it would all be over. Yet somehow it did matter. He was as maddening to her as he had ever been.

“Bill…” She managed a seductive smile, slowly drawing the negligee apart. “How do I look, Bill?”

“OK,” he yawned. “Got a little hole in your drawers, though. What’d you say we was havin’ for supper?”

“Slop,” she said. “Garbage. Trash salad with dirt dressing.”

“Sounds good. We got any hot water?”

Ardis sucked in her breath. She let it out again in a kind of infuriated moan. “Of course we’ve got hot water! Don’t we always have? Well, don’t we? Why do you have to ask every night?”

“So what’s to get excited about?” He shrugged. “Well, guess I’ll go splash the chassis.”

He plodded off down the hall. Ardis heard the bathroom door open and close. She got up, stood waiting by the telephone. The door banged open again, and Tony came racing up the hall.

He had washed off the cleaver. While he hastily tucked it back inside his shirt, Ardis dialed the operator. “Help,” she cried weakly. “Help …police …murder!”

She let the receiver drop to the floor, spoke to Tony in a whisper. “He’s dead? You’re sure of it?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure I’m sure. What do you think?”

“All right. Now, there’s just one more thing …”

“I can’t, Ardis. I don’t want to. I —”

“Hit me,” she commanded, and thrust out her chin. “Tony, I said to hit me!”

He hit her. A thousand stars blazed through her brain and disappeared. And she crumpled silently to the floor.

…When she regained consciousness, she was lying on the lounge. A heavyset man, a detective obviously, was seated at her side, and a white-jacketed young man with a stethoscope draped around his neck hovered nearby.

She had never felt better in her life. Even the lower part of her face, where Tony had smashed her, was surprisingly free of pain. Still, because it was what she should do, she moaned softly; spoke in a weak, hazy voice.

“Where am I?” she said. “What happened?”

“Lieutenant Powers,” the detective said. “Suppose you tell me what happened, Mrs. Clinton.”

“I …I don’t remember. I mean, well, my husband had just come home, and gone back to the bathroom. And there was a knock on the door, and I supposed it was the paperboy or someone like that. So —”

“You opened the door and he rushed in and slugged you, right? Then what happened?”

“Well, then he rushed into the bedroom and started searching it. Yanking out the dresser drawers and —”

“What was he searching for, Mrs. Clinton? You don’t have any considerable amount of money around, do you? Or any jewelry aside from what you’re wearing? And it wasn’t your husband’s payday, was it?”

“Well, no. But—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was crazy. All I know is what he did.”

“I see. He must have made quite a racket, seems to me. How come your husband didn’t hear it?”

“He couldn’t have. He had the shower running, and —”

She caught herself, fear constricting her throat. Lieutenant Powers grinned grimly.

“Missed a bet, huh, Mrs. Clinton?”

“I — I don’t know what you’re —”

“Come off of it! The bathtub’s dry as an oven. The shower was never turned on, and you know why it wasn’t. Because there was a guy standing inside of it.”

“B-but —but I don’t know anything. I was unconscious, and—”

“Then, how do you know what happened? How do you know this guy went into the bedroom and started tearing it apart? And how did you make that telephone call?”

“Well, I…I wasn’t completely unconscious. I sort of knew what was going on without really—

“Now, you listen to me,” he said harshly. “You made that fake call of yours —yes, I said fake — to the operator at twenty-three minutes after five. There happened to be a prowl car right here in the neighborhood, so two minutes later, at five twenty-five, there were cops here in your apartment. You were unconscious then, more than an hour ago. You’ve been unconscious until just now.”

Ardis’s brain whirled. Then it cleared suddenly, and a great calm came over her.

“I don’t see quite what you’re hinting at, Lieutenant. If you’re saying that I was confused, mixed up — that I must have dreamed or imagined some of the things I told you — I’ll admit it.”

“You know what I’m saying! I’m saying that no guy could have got in and out of this place, and done what this one did, in any two minutes!”

“Then the telephone operator must have been mistaken about the time,” Ardis said brightly. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Powers grunted. He said he could give her a better explanation — and he gave it to her. The right one. Ardis listened to it placidly, murmuring polite objections.

“That’s ridiculous, Lieutenant. Regardless of any gossip you may have heard, I don’t know this, uh, Tony person. And I most certainly did not plot with him or anyone else to kill my husband. Why—”

“He says you did. We got a signed confession from him.”

“Have you?” But of course they didn’t have. They might have found out about Tony, but he would never have talked. “That hardly proves anything, does it?”

“Now, you listen to me, Mrs. Clinton! Maybe you think that —”

“How is my husband, anyway? I do hope he wasn’t seriously hurt.”

“How is he?” the lieutenant snarled. “How would he be after gettin’ worked over with—” He broke off, his eyes flickering. “As a matter of fact,” he said heavily, “he’s going to be all right. He was pretty badly injured, but he was able to give us a statement and —”

“I’m so glad. But why are you questioning me, then?” It was another trick. Bill had to be dead. “If he gave you a statement, then you must know that everything happened just like I said.”

She waited, looked at him quizzically. Powers scowled, his stern face wrinkling with exasperation.

“All right,” he said at last. “All right, Mrs. Clinton. Your husband is dead. We don’t have any statement from him, and we don’t have any confession from Tony.”

“Yes?”

“But we know that you’re guilty, and you know that you are. And you’d better get it off your conscience while you still can.”

“While I still can?”

“Doc” — Powers jerked his head at the doctor. At the man, that is, who appeared to be a doctor. “Lay it on the line, Doc. Tell her that her boyfriend hit her a little too hard.”

The man came forward hesitantly. He said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Clinton. You have a — uh — you’ve sustained a very serious injury.”

“Have I?” Ardis smiled. “I feel fine.”

“I don’t think,” the doctor said judiciously, “that that’s quite true. What you mean is that you don’t feel anything at all. You couldn’t. You see, with an injury such as yours —”

“Get out,” Ardis said. “Both of you get out.”

“Please, Mrs. Clinton. Believe me, this isn’t a trick. I haven’t wanted to alarm you, but—”

“And you haven’t,” she said. “You haven’t scared me even a little bit, mister. Now, clear out!”

She closed her eyes, kept them closed firmly. When, at last, she reopened them, Powers and the doctor — if he really had been a doctor — were gone. And the room was in darkness.

She lay smiling to herself, congratulating herself. In the corridor outside, she heard heavy footsteps approaching; and she tensed for a moment. Then, remembering, she relaxed again.

Not Bill, of course. She was through with that jerk forever. He’d driven her half out of her mind, got her to the point where she couldn’t have taken another minute of him if her life depended on it. But now …

The footsteps stopped in front of her door. A key turned in the lock, the door opened and closed.

There was a clatter of a lunch pail being set down; then a familiar voice — maddeningly familiar words:

“Well. Another day, another dollar.”

Ardis’s mouth tightened; it twisted slowly in a malicious grin. So they hadn’t given up yet! They were pulling this one last trick. Well, let them; she’d play along with the gag.

The man plodded across the room, stooped, and gave her a halfhearted peck on the cheek. “Long time no see,” he said. “What we havin’ for supper?”

“Bill…” Ardis said. “How do I look, Bill?”

“OK. Got your lipstick smeared, though. What’d you say we was having for supper?”

“Stewed owls! Now, look, mister. I don’t know who you —”

“Sounds good. We got any hot water?”

“Of course, we’ve got hot water! Don’t we always have? Why do you always have to ask if — if—”

She couldn’t go through with it. Even as a gag — even someone who merely sounded and acted like he did — it was too much to bear.

“Y-you get out of here!” she quavered. “I don’t have to stand for this! I c-can’t stand it! I did it for fifteen years, and —”

“So what’s to get excited about?” he said. “Well, guess I’ll go splash the chassis.”

“Stop it! STOP IT!” Her screams filled the room …silent screams ripping through silence. “He’s —you’re dead! I know you are! You’re dead, and I don’t have to put up with you for another minute. And — and —!”

“Wouldn’t take no bets on that if I was you,” he said mildly. “Not with a broken neck like yours.”

He trudged off toward the bathroom, wherever the bathroom is in Eternity.

Their eyes met in Rome. On a street in Rome — the Via Piemonte.

He was coming down it, coming along toward her, when she first saw him. She didn’t know it but he was also coming into her life, into her destiny — bringing what was meant to be.

Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.

If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.

As their eyes met, they held. For just a heartbeat.

He wasn’t cheap. He wasn’t sidewalk riffraff. His clothes were good clothes, and his air was a good air.

He was a personable-looking man. First your eye said: he’s not young anymore, he’s not a boy anymore. Then your eye said: but he’s not old. There was something of youth hovering over and about him, and yet refusing to land in any one particular place. As though it were about to take off and leave him. Yet not quite that, either. More as though it had never fully been there in the first place. In short, the impression it was, was agelessness. Not young, not old, not callow, not mature — but ageless. Thirty-six looking fifty-six, or fifty-six looking thirty-six, but which it was you could not say.

Their eyes met — and held. For just a heartbeat.

Then they passed one another by, on the Via Piemonte, but without any turn of their heads to prolong the look.

I wonder who that was, she thought.

What he thought couldn’t be known — at least, not by her.

Three nights later they met again, at a party the friend she was staying with took her to.

He came over to her, and she said, “I’ve seen you before. I passed you on Monday on the Via Piemonte. At about four in the afternoon.”

“I remember you, too,” he said. “I noticed you that day, going by.”

I wonder why we remember each other like that, she mused; I’ve passed dozens, hundreds of other people since, and he must have too. I don’t remember any of them.

“I’m Mark Ramsey,” he said.

“I’m Linda Harris.”

An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of love, and none of its drawbacks. No jealousy, no quarrels, no greed to possess, no fear of losing possession, no hatred (which is very much a part of love), no surge of passion, and no hangover afterward. It never reaches the heights, and it never reaches the depths.

As a rule it comes on subtly. As theirs did. As a rule the two involved are not even aware of it at first. As they were not. As a rule it only becomes noticeable when it is interrupted in some way, or broken off by circumstances. As theirs was. In other words, its presence only becomes known in its absence. It is only missed after it stops. While it is still going on, little thought is given to it, because little thought needs to be.

It is pleasant to meet, it is pleasant to be together. To put your shopping packages down on a little wire-backed chair at a little table at a sidewalk cafe, and sit down and have a vermouth with someone who has been waiting there for you. And will be waiting there again tomorrow afternoon. Same time, same table, same sidewalk cafe. Or to watch Italian youth going through the gyrations of the latest dance craze in some inexpensive indigenous night-place — while you, who come from the country where the dance originated, only get up to do a sedate fox trot. It is even pleasant to part, because this simply means preparing the way for the next meeting.

One long continuous being-together, even in a love affair, might make the thing wilt. In an attachment it would surely kill the thing off altogether. But to meet, to part, then to meet again in a few days, keeps the thing going, encourages it to flower.

And yet it requires a certain amount of vanity, as love does: a desire to please, to look one’s best, to elicit compliments. It inspires a certain amount of flirtation, for the two are of opposite sex. A wink of understanding over the rim of a raised glass, a low-voiced confidential aside about something and the smile of intimacy that answers it, a small impromptu gift — a necktie on the one part because of an accidental spill on the one he was wearing, or of a small bunch of flowers on the other part because of the color of the dress she has on.

So it goes.

And suddenly they part, and suddenly there’s a void, and suddenly they discover they have had an attachment.

Rome passed into the past, and became New York.

Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again — while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting — then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love.

She was thinking of him at the moment the phone rang. And that helped, too, by its immediacy, by its telephonic answer to her wistful wish of remembrance. Memory is a mirage that fools the heart…

“You’ll never guess what I’m holding in my hand, right while I’m talking to you…

“I picked it up only a moment ago, and just as I was standing and looking at it, the phone rang. Isn’t that the strangest thing!…

“Do you remember the day we stopped in and you bought it…

“I have a little one-room apartment on East Seventieth Street. I’m by myself now, Dorothy stayed on in Rome …”

A couple of months later, they were married …

They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now.

But she failed to add: If you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn’t you be unable to know what the whole thing’s about? Just blindly clutch and hold and fear that it will get away. But unable to stop, to think, to give it any name.

Just two more people sharing a common human experience. Infinite in its complexity, tricky at times, but almost always successfully surmounted in one of two ways: either blandly content with the results as they are, or else vaguely discontent but chained by habit. Most women don’t marry a man, they marry a habit. Even when a habit is good, it can become monotonous; most do. When it is bad in just the average degree it usually becomes no more than a nuisance and an irritant; and most do.

But when it is darkly, starkly evil in the deepest sense of the word, then it can truly become a hell on earth.

Theirs seemed to fall midway between the first two, for just a little while. Then it started veering over slowly toward the last. Very slowly, at the start, but very steadily…

They spent their honeymoon at a New Hampshire lakeshore resort. This lake had an Indian name which, though certainly barbaric in sound to the average English-speaker, in her special case presented such an impassable block both in speech and in mental pre-speech imagery (for some obscure reason, Freudian perhaps, or else simply an instinctive retreat from something with distressful connotations) that she gave up trying to say it and it became simply “the lake.” Then as time drew it backward, not into forgetfulness but into distance, it became “that lake.”

Here the first of the things that happened, happened. The first of the things important enough to notice and to remember afterward, among a great many trifling but kindred ones that were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful gestures. (Once he accidentally poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of a waitress’s wrist, by not waiting long enough for the waitress to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by turning his head momentarily the other way. The waitress yelped, and he apologized, but he showed his teeth as he did so, and you don’t show your teeth in remorse.)

One morning when she woke up, he had already dressed and gone out of the room. They had a beautifully situated front-view of rooms which overlooked the lake itself (the bridal suite, as a matter of fact), and when she went to the window she saw him out there on the white-painted little pier which jutted out into the water on knock-kneed piles. He’d put on a turtleneck sweater instead of a coat and shirt, and that, over his spare figure, with the shoreward breeze alternately lifting and then flattening his hair, made him look younger than when he was close by. A ripple of the old attraction, of the old attachment, coursed through her and then was quickly gone. Just like the breeze out there. The little sidewalk-cafe chairs of Rome with the braided-wire backs and the piles of parcels on them, where were they now? Gone forever; they couldn’t enchant anymore.

The lake water was dark blue, pebbly-surfaced by the insistent breeze that kept sweeping it like the strokes of invisible broom-straws, and mottled with gold flecks that were like floating freckles in the nine o’clock September sunshine.

There was a little boy in bathing trunks, tanned as a caramel, sitting on the side of the pier, dangling his legs above the water. She’d noticed him about in recent days. And there was his dog, a noisy, friendly, ungainly little mite, a Scotch terrier that was under everyone’s feet all the time.

The boy was throwing a stick in, and the dog was splashing after it, retrieving it, and paddling back. Over and over, with that tirelessness and simplicity of interest peculiar to all small boys and their dogs. Off to one side a man was bringing up one of the motorboats that were for rent, for Mark to take out.

She could hear him in it for a while after that, making a long slashing ellipse around the lake, the din of its vibration alternately soaring and lulling as it passed from the far side to the near and then back to the far side again.

Then it cut off suddenly, and when she went back to look it was rocking there sheepishly engineless. The boy was weeping and the dog lay huddled dead on the lake rim, strangled by the boiling backwash of the boat that had dragged it — how many times? — around and around in its sweep of the lake. The dogs collar had become snagged some way in a line with a grappling hook attached, left carelessly loose over the side of the boat. (Or aimed and pitched over as the boat went slashing by?) The line trailed limp now, and the lifeless dog had been detached from it.

“If you’d only looked back,” the boy’s mother said ruefully to Mark. “He was a good swimmer, but I guess the strain was too much and his little heart gave out.”

“He did look! He did! He did! I saw him!” the boy screamed, agonized, peering accusingly from in back of her skirt.

“The spray was in the way,” Mark refuted instantly. But she wondered why he said it so quickly. Shouldn’t he have taken a moment’s time to think about it first, and then say, “The spray must have been — “ or “I guess maybe the spray — “ But he said it as quickly as though he’d been ready to say it even before the need had arisen.

Everyone for some reason acted furtively ashamed, as if something unclean had happened. Everyone but the boy, of course. There were no adult nuances to his pain.

The boy would eventually forget his dog.

But would she? Would she?

They left the lake — the farewells to Mark were a bit on the cool side, she noticed — and moved into a large rambling country house in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, not far from Pittsfield, which he told her had been in his family for almost seventy-five years. They had a car, an Alfa Romeo, which he had brought over from Italy, and, at least in all its outward aspects, they had a not too unpleasant life together. He was an art importer, and financially a highly successful one; he used to commute back and forth to Boston, where he had a gallery with a small-size apartment above it. As a rule he would stay over in the city, and then drive out Friday night and spend the weekend in the country with her.

(She always slept so well on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Thursdays she always lay awake half the night reminding herself that the following night was Friday. She never stopped to analyze this; if she had, what would it have told her? What could it have, if she didn’t realize it already?)

As far as the house was concerned, let it be said at once that it was not a depressing house in itself. People can take their moods from a house, but by the same token a house can take its mood from the people who live in it. If it became what it became, it was due to him — or rather, her reaction to him.

The interior of the house had crystallized into a very seldom evoked period, the pre-World War I era of rococo and gimcrack elegance. Either its last occupant before them (an unmarried older sister of his) had had a penchant for this out of some girlhood memory of a war-blighted romance and had deliberately tried to re-create it, or what was more likely, all renovations had stopped around that time and it had just stayed that way by default.

Linda discovered things she had heard about but never seen before. Claw legs on the bathtub, nacre in-and-out pushbuttons for the lights, a hanging stained-glass dome lamp over the dining-room table, a gramophone with a crank handle — she wondered if they’d first rolled back the rug and then danced the hesitation or the one-step to it. The whole house, inside and out, cried out to have women in the straight-up-and-down endlessly long tunics of 1913, with side-puffs of hair over their ears, in patent-leather shoes with beige suede tops up to the middle of the calf, suddenly step out of some of the rooms; and in front of the door, instead of his slender-bodied, bullet-fast Italian compact, perhaps a four-cornered Chalmers or Pierce-Arrow or Hupmobile shaking all over to the beat of its motor.

Sometimes she felt like an interloper, catching herself in some full-length mirror as she passed it, in her over-the-kneetop skirt and short free down-blown hair. Sometimes she felt as if she were under a magic spell, waiting to be disenchanted. But it wasn’t a good kind of spell, and it didn’t come wholly from the house or its furnishings …

One day at the home of some people Mark knew who lived in the area, where he had taken her on a New Year’s Day drop-in visit, she met a young man named Garrett Hill. He was branch head for a company in Pittsfield.

It was as simple as that — they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be simple, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple.

Then she met him a second time, by accident. Then a third, by coincidence. A fourth, by chance …Or directed by unseen forces?

Then she started to see him on a regular basis, without meaning anything, certainly without meaning any harm. The first night he brought her home they chatted on the way in his car; and then at the door, as he held out his hand, she quickly put hers out of sight behind her back.

“Why are you afraid to shake my hand?”

“I thought you’d hurt me.”

“How can anyone hurt you by just shaking your hand?”

When he tried to kiss her, she turned and fled into the house, as frightened as though he’d brandished a whip at her.

When he tried it again, on a later night, again she recoiled sharply — as if she were flinching from some sort of punishment.

He looked at her, and his eyes widened, both in sudden understanding and in disbelief. “You’re afraid physically,” he said, almost whispering. “I thought it was some wifely scruple the other night. But you’re physically afraid of being kissed! As if there were pain attached to it.”

Before she could stop herself or think twice she blurted out, “Well, there is, isn’t there?”

He said, his voice deadly serious, “What kind of kissing have you been used to?”

She hung her head. And almost the whole story had been told.

His face was white as a sheet. He didn’t say another word. But one man understands another well; all are born with that particular insight.

The next week she went into the town to do some small shopping — shopping she could have done as easily over the phone. Did she hope to run across him during the course of it? Is that why she attended to it in person? And after it was taken care of she stepped into a restaurant to sit down over a cup of coffee while waiting for her bus. He came into the place almost immediately afterward; he must have been sitting in his car outside watching for her.

He didn’t ask to sit down; he simply leaned over with his knuckles resting on the table, across the way from her, and with a quick back glance toward the door by which he had just entered, took a book out from under his jacket and put it down in front of her, its title visible.

“I sent down to New York to get this for you,” he said. “I’m trying to help you in the only way I know how.”

She glanced down at it. The title was: The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Writings.

“Who was he?” she asked, looking up. She pronounced it with the long a, as if it were an English name. “Sayd.”

“Sod,” he instructed. “He was a Frenchman. Just read the book” was all he would say. “Just read the book.”

He turned to leave her, and then he came back for a moment and added, “Don’t let anyone else see — “ Then he changed it to “Don’t let him see you with it. Put a piece of brown wrapping paper around it so the title won’t be conspicuous. As soon as you’ve finished, bring it back; don’t leave it lying around the house.”

After he’d gone she kept staring at it. Just kept staring.

They met again three days later at the same little coffee shop off the main business street. It had become their regular meeting place by now. No fixed arrangement to it; he would go in and find her there, or she would go in and find him there.

“Was he the first one?” she asked when she returned the book.

“No, of course not. This is as old as man — this getting pleasure by giving pain. There are some of them born in every generation. Fortunately not too many. He simply was the first one to write it up and so when the world became more specialized and needed a separate tag for everything, they used his name. It became a word — sadism, meaning sexual pleasure got by causing pain, the sheer pleasure of being cruel.”

She started shaking all over as if the place were drafty. “It is that.” She had to whisper it, she was so heartsick with the discovery. “Oh, God, yes, it is that.”

“You had to know the truth. That was the first thing. You had to know, you had to be told. It isn’t just a vagary or a whim on his part. It isn’t just a — well, a clumsiness or roughness in making love. This is a frightful thing, a deviation, an affliction, and — a terrible danger to you. You had to understand the truth first.”

“Sometimes he takes his electric shaver — “ She stared with frozen eyes at nowhere out before her. “He doesn’t use the shaver itself, just the cord — connects it and — “

She backed her hand into her mouth, sealing it up.

Garrett did something she’d never seen a man do before. He lowered his head, all the way over. Not just onto his chest, but all the way down until his chin was resting on the tabletop. And his eyes, looking up at her, were smoldering red with anger. But literally red, the whites all suffused. Then something wet came along and quenched the burning in them.

“Now you know what you’re up against,” he said, straightening finally. “Now what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” She started to sob very gently, in pantomime, without a sound. He got up and stood beside her and held her head pressed against him. “I only know one thing,” she said. “I want to see the stars at night again, and not just the blackness and the shadows. I want to wake up in the morning as if it was my right, and not have to say a prayer of thanks that I lived through the night. I want to be able to tell myself there won’t be another night like the last one.”

The fear Mark had put into her had seeped and oozed into all parts of her; she not only feared fear, she even feared rescue from fear.

“I don’t want to make a move that’s too sudden,” she said in a smothered voice.

“I’ll be standing by, when you want to and when you do.”

And on that note they left each other. For one more time.

On Friday he was sitting there waiting for her at their regular table, smoking a cigarette. And another lay out in the ashtray, finished. And another. And another.

She came up behind him and touched him briefly but warmly on the shoulder, as if she were afraid to trust herself to speak.

He turned and greeted her animatedly. “Don’t tell me you’ve been in there that long! I thought you hadn’t come in yet. I’ve been sitting out here twenty minutes, watching the door for you.”

Then when she sat down opposite him and he got a good look at her face, he quickly sobered.

“I couldn’t help it. I broke down in there. I couldn’t come out any sooner. I didn’t want everyone in the place to see me, the way I was.”

She was still shaking irrepressibly from the aftermath of long-continued sobs.

“Here, have one of these,” he offered soothingly. “May make you feel better — “ He held out his cigarettes toward her.

“No!” she protested sharply, when she looked down and saw what it was. She recoiled so violently that her whole chair bounced a little across the floor. He saw the back of her hand go to the upper part of her breast in an unconscious gesture of protection, of warding off.

His face turned white when he understood the implication. White with anger, with revulsion. “So that’s it,” he breathed softly. “My God, oh, my God.”

They sat on for a long while after that, both looking down without saying anything. What was there to say? Two little cups of black coffee had arrived by now—just as an excuse for them to stay there.

Finally he raised his head, looked at her, and put words to what he’d been thinking. “You can’t go back anymore, not even once. You’re out of the house and away from it now, so you’ve got to stay out. You can’t go near it again, not even one more time. One more night may be one night too many. He’ll kill you one of these nights — he will even if he doesn’t mean to. What to him is just a thrill, an excitement, will take away your life. Think about that — you’ve got to think about that.”

“I have already,” she admitted. “Often.”

“You don’t want to go to the police?”

“I’m ashamed.” She covered her eyes reluctantly with her hand for a moment. “I know I’m not the one who should be, he’s the one. But I am nevertheless. I couldn’t bear to tell it to an outsider, to put it on record, to file a complaint — it’s so intimate. Like taking off all your clothes in public. I can hardly bring myself even to have you know about it. And I haven’t told you everything — not everything.”

He gave her a shake of the head, as though he knew.

“If I try to hide out in Pittsfield, he’ll find me sooner or later — it’s not that big a place — and come after me and force me to come back, and either way there’ll be a scandal. And I don’t want that. I couldn’t stand that. The newspapers …”

All at once, before they quite knew how it had come about, or even realized that it had come about, they were deep in the final plans, the final strategy and staging that they had been drawing slowly nearer and nearer to all these months. Nearer to with every meeting, with every look and with every word. The plans for her liberation and her salvation.

He took her hands across the table.

“No, listen. This is the way, this is how. New York. It has to be New York; he won’t be able to get you back; it’s too big; he won’t even be able to find you. The company’s holding a business conference there on Tuesday, with each of the regional offices sending a representative the way they always do. I was slated to go, long before this came up. I was going to call you on Monday before I left. But what I’m going to do now is to leave ahead of time, tonight, and take you with me.”

He raised one of her hands and patted it encouragingly.

“You wait for me here in the restaurant. I have to go back to the office, wind up a few things, then I’ll come back and pick you up — shouldn’t take me more than half an hour.”

She looked around her uneasily. “I don’t want to sit here alone. They’re already giving me knowing looks each time they pass, the waitresses, as if they sense something’s wrong.”

“Let them, the hell with them,” he said shortly, with the defiance of a man in the opening stages of love.

“Can’t you call your office from here? Do it over the phone?”

“No, there are some papers that have to be signed — they’re waiting for me on my desk.”

“Then you run me back to the house and while you’re doing what you have to at the office I’ll pick up a few things; then you can stop by for me and we’ll start out from there.”

“Isn’t that cutting it a little close?” he said doubtfully. “I don’t want you to go back there.” He pivoted his wristwatch closer to him. “What time does he usually come home on Fridays?”

“Never before ten at night.”

He said the first critical thing he’d ever said to her. “Just like a girl. All for the sake of a hairbrush and a cuddly negligee you’re willing to stick your head back into that house.”

“It’s more than just a hairbrush,” she pointed out. “I have some money there. It’s not his, it’s mine. Even if this friend from my days in Rome — the one I’ve spoken to you about — even if she takes me in with her at the start, I’ll need some money to tide me over until I can get a job and find a place of my own. And there are other things, like my birth certificate, that I may need later on; he’ll never give them up willingly once I leave.”

“All right,” he gave in. “We’ll do it your way.”

Then just before they got up from the table that had witnessed such a change in both their lives, they gave each other a last look. A last, and yet a first one. And they understood each other.

She didn’t wait for him to say it, to ask it. There is no decorum in desperation, no coyness in a crisis. She knew it had been asked unsaid, anyway. “I want to rediscover the meaning of gentle love. I want to lie in your bed, in your arms. I want to be your wife.”

He took hold of her left hand, raised the third finger, stripped off the wedding band and in its place firmly guided downward a massive fraternity ring that had been on his own hand until that very moment. Heavy, ungainly, much too large for her — and yet everything that love should be.

She put it to her lips and kissed it.

They were married now.

The emptied ring rolled off the table and fell on the floor, and as they moved away his foot stepped on it, not on purpose, and distorted it into something warped, misshapen, no longer round, no longer true. Like what it had stood for.

He drove her back out to the house and dropped her off at the door, and they parted almost in silence, so complete was their understanding by now, just three muted words between them: “About thirty minutes.”

It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.

His car had hummed off; she’d finished and brought down a small packed bag to the ground floor when the phone rang. It would be Garry, naturally, telling her he’d finished at the office and was about to leave.

“Hello — “ she began, urgently and vitally and confidentially, the way you share a secret with just one person and this was the one.

Mark’s voice was at the other end.

“You sound more chipper than you usually do when I call up to tell you I’m on the way home.”

Her expectancy stopped. And everything else with it. She didn’t know what to say. “Do I?” And then, “Oh, I see.”

“Did you have a good day? You must have had a very good day.”

She knew what he meant, she knew what he was implying.

“I — I — oh, I did nothing, really. I haven’t been out of the house all day.”

“That’s strange,” she heard him say. “I called you earlier — about an hour ago?” It was a question, a pitfall of a question. “You didn’t come to the phone.”

“I didn’t hear it ring,” she said hastily, too hastily. “I might have been out front for a few minutes. I remember I went out there to broom the gravel in the drivew — “

Too late she realized he hadn’t called at all. But now he knew that she hadn’t been in the house all day, that she’d been out somewhere during part of it.

“I’ll be a little late.” And then something that sounded like “That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

“What?” she said quickly. “What?”

“I said I’ll be a little late.”

“What was it you said after that?”

“What was it you said after that?” he quoted studiedly, giving her back her own words.

She knew he wasn’t going to repeat it, but by that very token she knew she’d heard it right the first time.

He knows, she told herself with a shudder of premonition as she got off the phone and finally away from him. (His voice could hold fast to you and enthrall you, too; his very voice could torture you, as well as his wicked, cruel fingers.) He knows there’s someone; he may not know who yet, but he knows there is someone.

A remark from one of the nightmare nights came back to her: “There’s somebody else who wouldn’t do this, isn’t there? There’s somebody else who wouldn’t make you cry”

She should have told Garry about it long before this. Because now she had to get away from Mark at all cost, even more than she had had to ever before. Now there would be a terrible vindictiveness, a violent jealousy sparking the horrors, where before there had sometimes been just an irrational impulse, sometimes dying as quickly as it was born. Turned aside by a tear or a prayer or a run around a chair.

And then another thing occurred to her, and it frightened her even more immediately, here and now. What assurance was there that he was where he’d said he was, still in the city waiting to start out for here? He might have been much closer, ready to jump out at her unexpectedly, hoping to throw her off-guard and catch her away from the house with someone, or (as if she could have possibly been that sort of person) with that someone right here in the very house with her. He’d lied about calling the first time; why wouldn’t he lie about where he was?

And now that she thought of it, there was a filling station with a public telephone less than five minutes’ drive from here, on the main thru-way that came up from Boston. An eddy of fear swirled around her, like dust rising off the floor in some barren, drafty place. She had to do one of two things immediately—there was no time to do both. Either call Garry at his office and warn him to hurry, that their time limit had shrunk. Or try to trace Mark’s call and find out just how much margin of safety was still left to them.

She chose the latter course, which was the mistaken one to choose.

Long before she’d been able to identify the filling station exactly for the information operator to get its number, the whole thing had become academic. There was a slither and shuffle on the gravel outside and a car, someone’s car, had come to a stop in front of the house.

Her first impulse, carried out immediately without thinking why, was to snap off all the room lights. Probably so she could see out without being seen from out there.

She sprang over to the window, and then stood there rigidly motionless, leaning a little to peer intently out. The car had stopped at an unlucky angle of perspective — unlucky for her. They had a trellis with tendrils of wisteria twining all over it like bunches of dangling grapes. It blanked out the midsection of the car, its body shape, completely. The beams of the acetylene-bright headlights shone out past one side, but they told her nothing; they could have come from any car. The little glimmer of color on the driveway, at the other side, told her no more.

She heard the door crack open and clump closed. Someone’s feet, obviously a man’s, chopped up the wooden steps to the entrance veranda, and she saw a figure cross it, but it was too dark to make out who he was.

She had turned now to face the other way, and without knowing it her hand was holding the place where her heart was. This was Mark’s house, he had the front-door key. Garry would have to ring. She waited to hear the doorbell clarinet out and tell her she was safe, she would be loved, she would live.

Instead there was a double click, back then forth, the knob twined around, and the door opened. A spurt of cool air told her it had opened.

Frightened back into childhood fears, she turned and scurried, like some little girl with pigtails flying out behind her, scurried back along the shadowed hall, around behind the stairs, and into a closet that lay back there, remote as any place in the house could be. She pushed herself as far to the back as she could, and crouched down, pulling hanging things in front of her to screen and to protect her, to make her invisible. Sweaters and mackintoshes and old forgotten coveralls. And she hid her head down between her knees — the way children do when a goblin or an ogre is after them, thinking that if they can’t see it, that fact alone will make the terror go away.

The steps went up the stairs, on over her, up past her head. She could feel the shake if not hear the sound. Then she heard her name called out, but the voice was blurred by the many partitions and separations between — as if she were listening to it from underwater. Then the step came down again, and the man stood there at the foot of the stairs, uncertain. She tried to teach herself how to forget to breathe, but she learned badly.

There was a little tick! of a sound, and he’d given himself more light. Then each step started to sound clearer than the one before, as the distance to her thinned away. Her heart began to stutter and turn over, and say: here he comes, here he comes. Light cracked into the closet around three sides of the door, and two arms reached in and started to make swimming motions among the hanging things, trying to find her.

Then they found her, one at each shoulder, and lifted her and drew her outside to him. (With surprising gentleness.) And pressed her to his breast. And her tears made a new pattern of little wet polka dots all over what had been Garry’s solid-colored necktie until now.

All she could say was “Hurry, hurry, get me out of here!”

“You must have left the door open in your hurry when you came back here. I tried it, found it unlocked, and just walked right in. When I looked back here, I saw that the sleeve of that old smock had got caught in the closet door and was sticking out. Almost like an arm, beckoning me on to show me where you were hiding. It was uncanny. Your guardian angel must love you very much, Linda.”

But will he always? she wondered. Will he always?

He took her to the front door, detoured for a moment to pick up the bag, then led her outside and closed the door behind them for good and all.

“Just a minute,” she said, and stopped, one foot on the ground, one still on the wooden front steps.

She opened her handbag and took out her key—-the key to what had been her home and her marriage. She flung it back at the door, and it hit and fell, with a cheap shabby little clop!— like something of not much value.

Once they were in the car they just drove; they didn’t say anything more for a long time.

All the old things had been said. All the new things to be said were still to come.

In her mind’s eye she could see the saw-toothed towers of New York climbing slowly up above the horizon before her at the end of the long road. Shimmering there, iridescent, opalescent, rainbows of chrome and glass and hope. Like Jerusalem, like Mecca, or some other holy spot. Beckoning, offering heaven. And of all the things New York has meant to various people at various times — fame, success, fulfillment — it probably never meant as much before as it meant to her tonight: a place of refuge, a sanctuary, a place to be safe in.

“How long does the trip take?” she asked him wistful-eyed.

“I usually make it in less than four hours. Tonight I’ll make it in less than three.”

I’ll never stray out of New York again, she promised herself. Once I’m safely there, I’ll never go out in the country again. I never want to see a tree again, except way down below me in Central Park from a window high up.

“Oh, get me there, Garry, get me there.”

“I’ll get you there,” Garry promised, like any new bridegroom, and bent to kiss the hand she had placed over his on the wheel.

Two car headlights from the opposite direction hissed by them — like parallel tracer bullets going so fast they seemed to swirl around rather than undulate with the road’s flaws.

She purposely waited a moment, then said in a curiously surreptitious voice, as though it shouldn’t be mentioned too loudly, “Did you see that?”

All he answered, noncommittally, was “Mmm.”

“That was the Italian compact.”

“You couldn’t tell what it was,” he said, trying to distract her from her fear. “Went by too fast.”

“I know it too well. I recognized it.”

Again she waited a moment, as though afraid to make the movement she was about to. Then she turned and looked back, staring hard and steadily into the funneling darkness behind them.

Two back lights had flattened out into a bar, an ingot. Suddenly this flashed to the other side of the road, then reversed. Then, like a ghastly scimitar chopping down all the tree trunks in sight, the headlights reappeared, rounded out into two spheres, gleaming, small — but coming back after them.

“I told you. It’s turned and doubled back.”

He was still trying to keep her from panic. “May have nothing to do with us. May not be the same car we saw go by just now.”

“It is. Why would he make a complete about-turn like that in the middle of nowhere? There’s no intersection or side road back there — we haven’t passed one for miles.”

She looked again.

“They keep coming. And they already look bigger than when they started back. I think they’re gaining on us.”

He said, with an unconcern that he didn’t feel, “Then we’ll have to put a stop to that.”

They burst into greater velocity, with a surge like a forward billow of air.

She looked, and she looked again. Finally, to keep from turning so constantly, she got up on the seat on the point of one knee and faced backward, her hair pouring forward all around her, jumping with an electricity that was really speed.

“Stay down,” he warned. “You’re liable to get thrown that way. We’re up to sixty-five now.” He gave her a quick tug for additional emphasis, and she subsided into the seat once more.

“How is it now?” he checked presently. The rearview mirror couldn’t reflect that far back.

“They haven’t grown smaller, but they haven’t grown larger.”

“We’ve stabilized, then,” he translated. “Dead heat.”

Then after another while and another look, “Wait a minute!” she said suddenly on a note of breath-holding hope. Then, “No,” she mourned quickly afterward. “For a minute I thought — but they’re back again. It was only a dip in the road.

“They hang on like leeches, can’t seem to shake them off,” she complained in a fretful voice, as though talking to herself. “Why don’t they go away? Why don’t they?”

Another look, and he could sense the sudden stiffening of her body.

“They’re getting bigger. I know I’m not mistaken.”

He could see that, too. They were finally peering into the rearview mirror for the first time. They’d go offside, then they’d come back in again. In his irritation he took one hand off the wheel long enough to give the mirror a backhand slap that moved it out of focus altogether.

“Suppose I stop, get out, and face him when he comes up, and we have it out here and now. What can he do? I’m younger, I can outslug him.”

Her refusal to consent was an outright scream of protest. All her fears and all her aversion were in it.

“All right,” he said. “Then we’ll run him into the ground if we have to.”

She covered her face with both hands — not at the speed they were making, but at the futility of it.

“They sure build good cars in Torino, damn them to hell!” he swore in angry frustration.

She uncovered and looked. The headlights were closer than before. She began to lose control of herself.

“Oh, this is like every nightmare I ever had when I was a little girl! When something was chasing me, and I couldn’t get away from it. Only now there’ll be no waking up in the nick of time.”

“Stop that,” he shouted at her. “Stop it. It only makes it worse, it doesn’t help.”

“I think I can feel his breath blowing down the back of my neck.”

He looked at her briefly, but she could tell by the look on his face he hadn’t been able to make out what she’d said.

Streaks of wet that were not tears were coursing down his face in uneven lengths. “My necktie,” he called out to her suddenly, and raised his chin to show her what he meant. She reached over, careful not to place herself in front of him, and pulled the knot down until it was loose. Then she freed the buttonhole from the top button of his shirt.

A long curve in the road cut them off for a while, from those eyes, those unrelenting eyes behind them. Then the curve ended, and the eyes came back again. It was worse somehow, after they’d been gone like that, than when they remained steadily in sight the whole time.

“He holds on and holds on and holds on — like a mad dog with his teeth locked into you.”

“He’s a mad dog all right.” All pretense of composure had long since left him. He was lividly angry at not being able to win the race, to shake the pursuer off. She was mortally frightened. The long-sustained tension of the speed duel, which seemed to have been going on for hours, compounded her fears, raised them at last to the pitch of hysteria.

Their car swerved erratically, the two outer wheels jogged briefly over marginal stones and roots that felt as if they were as big as boulders and logs. He flung his chest forward across the wheel as if it were something alive that he was desperately trying to hold down; then the car recovered, came back to the road, straightened out safely again with a catarrhal shudder of its rear axle.

“Don’t,” he warned her tautly in the short-lived lull before they picked up hissing momentum again. “Don’t grab me like that again. It went right through the shoulder of my jacket. I can’t manage the car, can’t hold it, if you do that. I’ll get you away. Don’t worry, I’ll get you away from him.”

She threw her head back in despair, looking straight up overhead. “We seem to be standing still. The road has petrified. The trees aren’t moving backwards anymore. The stars don’t either. Neither do the rocks along the side. Oh, faster, Garry, faster!”

“You’re hallucinating. Your senses are being tricked by fear.”

“Faster, Garry, faster!”

“Eighty-five, eighty-six. We’re on two wheels most of the time — two are off the ground. I can’t even breathe, my breath’s being pulled out of me.”

She started to beat her two clenched fists against her forehead in a tattoo of hypnotic inability to escape. “I don’t care, Garry! Faster, faster! If I’ve got to die, let it be with you, not with him!”

“I’ll get you away from him. If it kills me.”

That was the last thing he said.

If it kills me.

And as though it had overheard, and snatched at the collateral offered i(, that unpropitious sickly greenish star up there — surely Mark’s star, not theirs —at that very moment a huge tremendous thing came into view around a turn in the road. A skyscraper of a long-haul van, its multiple tiers beaded with red warning lights. But what good were they that high up, except to warn off planes?

It couldn’t maneuver. It would have required a turntable. And they had no time or room.

There was a soft crunchy sound, like someone shearing the top off a soft-boiled egg with a knife. At just one quick slice. Then a brief straight -into-the face blizzard effect, but with tiny particles of glass instead of frozen flakes. Just a one-gust blizzard — and then over with. Then an immense whirl of light started to spin, like a huge Ferris wheel all lit up and going around and around, with parabolas of light streaking off in every direction and dimming. Like shooting stars, or the tails of comets.

Then the whole thing died down and went out, like a blazing amusement park sinking to earth. Or the spouts of illuminated fountains settling back into their basins …

She could tell the side of her face was resting against the ground, because blades of grass were brushing against it with a feathery tickling feeling. And some inquisitive little insect kept flitting about just inside the rim of her ear. She tried to raise her hand to brush it away, but then forgot where it was and what it was.

But then forgot…

When they picked her up at last, more out of this world than in it, all her senses gone except for reflex-actions, her lips were still quivering with the unspoken sounds of “Faster, Garry, faster! Take me away — “

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and — needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle — a jab into a vein …

Then at last her head cleared, her eyes cleared, her mind and voice came back from where they’d been. Each day she became a little stronger, and each day became a little longer. Until they were back for good, good as ever before. Life came back into her lungs and heart. She could feel it there, the swift current of it. Moving again, eager again. Sun again, sky again, rain and pain and love and hope again. Life again — the beautiful thing called life.

Each day they propped her up in a chair for a little while. Close beside the bed, for each day for a little while longer.

Then at last she asked, after many starts that she could never finish, “Why doesn’t Garry come to me? Doesn’t he know I’ve been hurt?”

“Garry can’t come to you,” the nurse answered. And then, in the way that you whip off a bandage that has adhered to a wound fast, in order to make the pain that much shorter than it would be if you lingeringly edged it off a little at a time, then the nurse quickly told her, “Garry won’t come to you anymore.”

The black tears, so many of them, such a rain of them, blotted out the light and brought on the darkness…

Then the light was back again, and no more tears. Just — Garry won’t come to you anymore.

Now the silent words were: Not so fast, Garry, not so fast; you’ve left me behind and I’ve lost my way

Then in a little while she asked the nurse, “Why don’t you ever let me get up from this chair? I’m better now, I eat well, the strength has come back to my arms, my hands, my fingers, my whole body feels strong. Shouldn’t I be allowed to move around and exercise a little? To stand up and take a few steps?”

“The doctor will tell you about that,” the nurse said evasively.

The doctor came in later and he told her about it. Bluntly, in the modern way, without subterfuges and without false hopes. The kind, the sensible, the straight-from-the-shoulder modern way.

“Now listen to me. The world is a beautiful world, and life is a beautiful life. In this beautiful world everything is comparative; luck is comparative. You could have come out of it stone-blind from the shattered glass, with both your eyes gone. You could have come out of it minus an arm, crushed and having to be taken off. You could have come out of it with your face hideously scarred, wearing a repulsive mask for the rest of your life that would make people sicken and turn away. You could have come out of it dead, as — as someone else did. Who is to say you are lucky, who is to say you are not? You have come out of it beautiful of face. You have come out of it keen and sensitive of mind, a mind with all the precision and delicate adjustment of the works inside a fine Swiss watch. A mind that not only thinks, but feels. You have come out of it with a strong brave youthful heart that will carry you through for half a century yet, come what may.”

“But— “

She looked at him with eyes that didn’t fear.

“You will never again take a single step for all the rest of your life. You are hopelessly, irreparably paralyzed from the waist down. Surgery, everything, has been tried. Accept this …Now you know — and so now be brave.”

“I am. I will be,” she said trustfully. “I’ll learn a craft of some kind, that will occupy my days and earn me a living. Perhaps you can find a nursing home for me at the start until I get adjusted, and then maybe later I can find a little place all to myself and manage there on my own. There are such places, with ramps instead of stairs — “

He smiled deprecatingly at her oversight.

“All that won’t be necessary You’re forgetting. There is someone who will look after you. Look after you well. You’ll be in good capable hands. Your husband is coming to take you home with him today.”

Her scream was like the death cry of a wounded animal. So strident, so unbelievable, that in the stillness of its aftermath could be heard the slithering and rustling of people looking out the other ward-room doors along the corridor, nurses and ambulatory patients, asking one another what that terrified cry had been and where it had come from.

“Two cc’s of M, and hurry,” the doctor instructed the nurse tautly. “It’s just the reaction from what she’s been through. This sometimes happens — going-home happiness becomes hysteria.”

The wet kiss of alcohol on her arm. Then the needle again — the needle meant to be kind.

One of them patted her on the head and said, “You’ll be all right now.”

A tear came to the corner of her eyes, and just lay there, unable to retreat, unable to fall…

Myopically she watched them dress her and put her in her chair. Her mind remained awake, but everything was downgraded in intensity — the will to struggle had become reluctance, fear had become unease. She still knew there was ‘cause to scream, but the distance had become too great, the message had too far to travel.

Through lazy, contracting pupils she looked over and saw Mark standing in the doorway, talking to the doctor, shaking the nurse’s hand and leaving something behind in it for which she smiled her thanks.

Then he went around in back of her wheelchair, with a phantom breath for a kiss to the top of her head, and started to sidle it toward the door that was being held open for the two of them. He tipped the front of the chair ever so slightly, careful to avoid the least jar or impact or roughness, as if determined that she reach her destination with him in impeccable condition, unmarked and unmarred.

And as she craned her neck and looked up overhead, and then around and into his face, backward, the unspoken message was so plain, in his shining eyes and in the grim grin he showed his teeth in, that though he didn’t say it aloud, there was no need to; it reached from his mind into hers without sound or the need of sound just as surely as though he had said it aloud.

Now I’ve got you.

Now he had her — for the rest of her life.

That autumn we live in a house in the country, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man. It is so strange a doubling, so intense, so unsettling, that I am moved to work again, to try to paint it.

So I study the hardware store, the grain barrels in front, the twin square pillars holding up the drooping balcony onto which seared wax-faced men and women from the old peoples hotel above come to sit and rock and watch. They look like the same aging people I saw as a boy, the wood of the pillars and balcony looks as splintered.

Forgetful of time while I work, I do not begin the long walk home until late, at dusk. The day has been warm, but now in my shirt I am cold, and a half mile along I am caught in a sudden shower and forced to leave the gravel road for the shelter of a tree, its leaves already brown and yellow. The rain becomes a storm, streaking at me sideways, drenching me; I cinch the neck of my canvas bag to protect my painting and equipment, and decide to run, socks spongy in my shoes, when at last I reach the lane down to the house and barn.

The house and barn. They and my mother, they alone have changed, as if as one, warping, weathering, joints twisted and strained, their gray so unlike the white I recall as a boy. The place is weakening her. She is in tune with it, matches its decay. That is why we have come here to live. To revive. Once I thought to convince her to move away. But of her sixty-five years she has spent forty here, and she insists she will spend the rest, what is left to her.

The rain falls stronger as I hurry past the side of the house, the light on in the kitchen, suppertime and I am late. The house is connected with the barn the way the small base of an I is connected to its stem. The entrance I always use is directly at the joining, and when I enter out of breath, clothes clinging to me cold and wet, the door to the barn to my left, the door to the kitchen straight ahead, I hear the dripping in the basement down the stairs to my right.

“Meg. Sorry I’m late,” I call to my wife, setting down the water-beaded canvas sack, opening the kitchen door. There is no one. No settings on the table. Nothing on the stove. Only the yellow light from the 60-watt bulb in the ceiling. The kind my mother prefers to the white of 100. It reminds her of candlelight, she says.

“Meg,” I call again, and still no one answers. Asleep, I think. Dusk coming on, the dark clouds of the storm have lulled them, and they have lain down for a nap, expecting to wake before I return.

Still the dripping. Although the house is very old, the barn long disused, roofs crumbling, I have not thought it all so ill-maintained, the storm so strong that water can be seeping past the cellar windows, trickling, pattering on the old stone floor. I switch on the light to the basement, descend the wood stairs to the right, worn and squeaking, reach where the stairs turn to the left the rest of the way down to the floor, and see not water dripping. Milk. Milk everywhere. On the rafters, on the walls, dripping on the film of milk on the stones, gathering speckled with dirt in the channels between them. From side to side and everywhere.

Sarah, my child, has done this, I think. She has been fascinated by the big wood dollhouse that my father made for me when I was quite young, its blue paint chipped and peeling now. She has pulled it from the far corner to the middle of the basement. There are games and toy soldiers and blocks that have been taken from the wicker storage chest and played with on the floor, all covered with milk, the dollhouse, the chest, the scattered toys, milk dripping on them from the rafters, milk trickling on them.

Why has she done this, I think. Where can she have gotten so much milk? What was in her mind to do this thing?

“Sarah,” I call. “Meg.” Angry now, I mount the stairs into the quiet kitchen. “Sarah,” I shout. She will clean the mess and stay indoors the remainder of the week.

I cross the kitchen, turn through the sitting room past the padded flower-patterned chairs and sofa that have faded since I knew them as a boy, past several of my paintings that my mother has hung up on the wall, bright-colored old ones of pastures and woods from when I was in grade school, brown-shaded new ones of the town, tinted as if old photographs. Two stairs at a time up to the bedrooms, wet shoes on the soft worn carpet on the stairs, hand streaking on the smooth polished maple banister.

At the top I swing down the hall. The door to Sarah’s room is open, it is dark in there. I switch on the light. She is not on the bed, nor has been; the satin spread is unrumpled, the rain pelting in through the open window, the wind fresh and cool. I have the feeling then and go uneasy into our bedroom; it is dark as well, empty too. My stomach has become hollow. Where are they? All in Mother’s room?

No. As I stand at the open door to Mother’s room I see from the yellow light I have turned on in the hall that only she is in there, her small torso stretched across the bed.

“Mother,” I say, intending to add, “Where are Meg and Sarah?” But I stop before I do. One of my mother’s shoes is off, the other askew on her foot. There is mud on the shoes. There is blood on her cotton dress. It is torn, her brittle hair disrupted, blood on her face, her bruised lips are swollen.

For several moments I am silent with shock. “My God, Mother,” I finally manage to say, and as if the words are a spring releasing me to action I touch her to wake her. But I see that her eyes are open, staring ceilingward, unseeing though alive, and each breath is a sudden full gasp, then slow exhalation.

“Mother, what has happened? Who did this to you? Meg? Sarah?”

But she does not look at me, only constant toward the ceiling.

“For God’s sake, Mother, answer me! Look at me! What has happened?”

Nothing. Eyes sightless. Between gasps she is like a statue.

What I think is hysterical. Disjointed, contradictory. I must find Meg and Sarah. They must be somewhere, beaten like my mother. Or worse. Find them. Where? But I cannot leave my mother. When she comes to consciousness, she too will be hysterical, frightened, in great pain. How did she end up on the bed?

In her room there is no sign of the struggle she must have put up against her attacker. It must have happened somewhere else. She crawled from there to here. Then I see the blood on the floor, the swath of blood down the hall from the stairs. Who did this? Where is he? Who would beat a gray, wrinkled, arthritic old woman? Why in God’s name would he do it? I shudder. The pain of the arthritis as she struggled with him.

Perhaps he is still in the house, waiting for me.

To the hollow sickness in my stomach now comes fear, hot, pulsing, and I am frantic before I realize what I am doing — grabbing the spare cane my mother always keeps by her bed, flicking on the light in her room, throwing open the closet door and striking in with the cane. Viciously, sounds coming from my throat, the cane flailing among the faded dresses.

No one. Under the bed. No one. Behind the door. No one.

I search all the upstairs rooms that way, terrified, constantly checking behind me, clutching the cane and whacking into closets, under beds, behind doors, with a force that would certainly crack a skull. No one.

“Meg! Sarah!”

No answer, not even an echo in this sound-absorbing house.

There is no attic, just an overhead entry to a crawlspace under the eaves, and that opening has long been sealed. No sign of tampering. No one has gone up.

I rush down the stairs, seeing the trail of blood my mother has left on the carpet, imagining her pain as she crawled, and search the rooms downstairs with the same desperate thoroughness. In the front closet. Behind the sofa and chairs. Behind the drapes.

No one.

I lock the front door, lest he be outside in the storm waiting to come in behind me. I remember to draw every blind, close every drape, lest he be out there peering at me. The rain pelts insistently against the windowpanes.

I cry out again and again for Meg and Sarah. The police. My mother. A doctor. I grab for the phone on the wall by the front stairs, fearful to listen to it, afraid he has cut the line outside. But it is droning. Droning. I ring for the police, working the handle at the side around and around and around.

They are coming, they say. A doctor with them. Stay where I am, they say. But I cannot. Meg and Sarah, I must find them. I know they are not in the basement where the milk is dripping — all the basement is open to view. Except for my childhood things, we have cleared out all the boxes and barrels and the shelves of jars the Saturday before.

But under the stairs. I have forgotten about under the stairs and now I race down and stand dreading in the milk; but there are only cobwebs there, already re-formed from Saturday when we cleared them. I look up at the side door I first came through, and as if I am seeing through a telescope I focus largely on the handle. It seems to fidget. I have a panicked vision of the intruder bursting through, and I charge up to lock the door, and the door to the barn.

And then I think: if Meg and Sarah are not in the house they are likely in the barn. But I cannot bring myself to unlock the barn door and go through. He must be there as well. Not in the rain outside but in the shelter of the barn, and there are no lights to turn on there.

And why the milk? Did he do it and where did he get it? And why? Or did Sarah do it before? No, the milk is too freshly dripping. It has been put there too recently. By him. But why? And who is he? A tramp? An escapee from some prison? Or asylum? No, the nearest institution is far away, hundreds of miles. From the town then. Or a nearby farm.

I know my questions are for delay, to keep me from entering the barn. But I must. I take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and unlock the door to the barn, force myself to go in quickly, cane ready, flashing my light. The stalls are still there, listing; and some of the equipment, churners, separators, dull and rusted, webbed and dirty. The must of decaying wood and crumbled hay, the fresh wet smell of the rain gusting through cracks in the walls. Once this was a dairy, as the other farms around still are.

Flicking my light toward the corners, edging toward the stalls, boards creaking, echoing, I try to control my fright, try to remember as a boy how the cows waited in the stalls for my father to milk them, how the barn was once board-tight and solid, warm to be in, how there was no connecting door from the barn to the house because my father did not want my mother to smell the animals in her kitchen.

I run my light down the walls, sweep it in arcs through the darkness before me as I draw nearer to the stalls, and in spite of myself I recall that other autumn when the snow came early, four feet deep by morning and still storming thickly, how my father went out to the barn to milk and never returned for lunch, nor supper. There was no phone then, no way to get help, and my mother and I waited all night, unable to make our way through the storm, listening to the slowly dying wind; and the next morning was clear and bright and blinding as we shoveled out to find the cows in agony in their stalls from not having been milked and my father dead, frozen rock-solid in the snow in the middle of the next field where he must have wandered when he lost his bearings in the storm.

There was a fox, risen earlier than us, nosing at him under the snow, and my father had to be sealed in his coffin before he could lie in state. Days after, the snow was melted, gone, the barnyard a sea of mud, and it was autumn again and my mother had the connecting door put in. My father should have tied a rope from the house to his waist to guide him back in case he lost his way. Certainly he knew enough. But then he was like that, always in a rush. When I was ten.

Thus I think as I light the shadows near the stalls, terrified of what I may find in any one of them, Meg and Sarah, or him, thinking of how my mother and I searched for my father and how I now search for my wife and child, trying to think of how it was once warm in here and pleasant, chatting with my father, helping him to milk, the sweet smell of new hay and grain, the different sweet smell of fresh droppings, something I always liked and neither my father nor my mother could understand. I know that if I do not think of these good times I will surely go mad in awful anticipation of what I may find. Pray God they have not died!

What can he have done to them? To assault a five-year-old girl? Split her. The hemorrhaging alone can have killed her.

And then, even in the barn, I hear my mother cry out for me. The relief I feel to leave and go to her unnerves me. I do want to find Meg and Sarah, to try to save them. Yet I am relieved to go. I think my mother will tell me what has happened, tell me where to find them. That is how I justify my leaving as I wave the light in circles around me, guarding my back, retreating through the door and locking it.

Upstairs she sits stiffly on her bed. I want to make her answer my questions, to shake her, to force her to help, but I know it will only frighten her more, maybe push her mind down to where I can never reach.

“Mother,” I say to her softly, touching her gently. “What has happened?” My impatience can barely be contained. “Who did this? Where are Meg and Sarah?”

She smiles at me, reassured by the safety of my presence. Still she cannot answer.

“Mother. Please,” I say. “I know how bad it must have been. But you must try to help. I must know where they are so I can help them.”

She says, “Dolls.”

It chills me. “What dolls, Mother? Did a man come here with dolls? What did he want? You mean he looked like a doll? Wearing a mask like one?”

Too many questions. All she can do is blink.

“Please, Mother. You must try your best to tell me. Where are Meg and Sarah?”

“Dolls,” she says.

As I first had the foreboding of disaster at the sight of Sarah’s unrumpled satin bedspread, now I am beginning to understand, rejecting it, fighting it.

“Yes, Mother, the dolls,” I say, refusing to admit what I know. “Please, Mother. Where are Meg and Sarah?”

“You are a grown boy now. You must stop playing as a child. Your father. Without him you will have to be the man in the house. You must be brave.”

“No, Mother.” I can feel it swelling in my chest.

“There will be a great deal of work now, more than any child should know. But we have no choice. You must accept that God has chosen to take him from us, that you are all the man I have left to help me.”

“No, Mother.”

“Now you are a man and you must put away the things of a child.”

Eyes streaming, I am barely able to straighten, leaning wearily against the doorjamb, tears rippling from my face down to my shirt, wetting it cold where it had just begun to dry. I wipe my eyes and see her reaching for me, smiling, and I recoil down the hall, stumbling down the stairs, down, through the sitting room, the kitchen, down, down to the milk, splashing through it to the dollhouse, and in there, crammed and doubled, Sarah. And in the wicker chest, Meg. The toys not on the floor for Sarah to play with, but taken out so Meg could be put in. And both of them, their stomachs slashed, stuffed with sawdust, their eyes rolled up like dolls’ eyes.

The police are knocking at the side door, pounding, calling out who they are, but I am powerless to let them in. They crash through the door, their rubber raincoats dripping as they stare down at me.

“The milk,” I say.

They do not understand. Even as I wait, standing in the milk, listening to the rain pelting on the windows while they come over to see what is in the dollhouse and in the wicker chest, while they go upstairs to my mother and then return so I can tell them again, “The milk.” But they still do not understand.

“She killed them of course,” one man says. “But I don’t see why the milk.”

Only when they speak to the neighbors down the road and learn how she came to them, needing the cans of milk, insisting she carry them herself to the car, the agony she was in as she carried them, only when they find the empty cans and the knife in a stall in the barn, can I say, “The milk. The blood. There was so much blood, you know. She needed to deny it, so she washed it away with milk, purified it, started the dairy again. You see, there was so much blood.”

That autumn we live in a house in the country, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man …

Edward “skip” skipperton spentmostofhislifefeelingangry.lt was his nature. When he was a boy he had a bad temper; now, as a man, he was impatient with people who were slow or stupid. He often met such people in his work, which was to give advice on managing companies. He was good at his job: he could see when people were doing something the wrong way, and he told them in a loud, clear voice how to do it better. The company directors always followed his advice.

Now Skipperton was fifty-two. His wife had left him two years ago, because she couldn’t live with his bad temper. She had met a quiet university teacher in Boston, ended her marriage with Skip, and married the teacher. Skip wanted very much to keep their daughter, Maggie, who was then fifteen. With the help of clever lawyers he succeeded.

A few months after he separated from his wife, Skip had a heart attack. He was better again in six months, but his doctor gave him some strong advice.

“Stop smoking and drinking now, or you’re a dead man, Skip! And I think you should leave the world of business, too — you’ve got enough money. Why don’t you buy a small farm and live quietly in the country?”

So Skip looked around, and bought a small farm in Maine with a comfortable farmhouse. A little river, the Coldstream, ran along the bottom of the garden, and the house was called Coldstream Heights. He found a local man, Andy Humbert, to live on the farm and work for him.

Maggie was moved from her private school in New York to one in Switzerland; she would come home for the holidays. Skip did stop smoking and drinking: when he decided to do something, he always did it immediately. There was work for him on the farm. He helped Andy to plant corn in the field behind the house; he bought two sheep to keep the grass short, and a pig, which soon gave birth to twelve more.

There was only one thing that annoyed him: his neighbor. Peter Frosby owned the land next to his, including the banks of the Coldstream and the right to catch fish in it. Skip wanted to be able to fish a little. He also wanted to feel that the part of the river which he could see from the house belonged to him. But when he offered to buy the fishing rights, he was told that Frosby refused to sell. Skip did not give up easily. The next week he telephoned Frosby, inviting him to his house for a drink. Frosby arrived in a new Cadillac, driven by a young man. He introduced the young man as his son, also called Peter. Frosby was a rather small, thin man with cold gray eyes.

“The Frosbys don’t sell their land,” he said. “We’ve had the same land for nearly three hundred years, and the river’s always been ours. I can’t understand why you want it.”

“I’d just like to do a little fishing in the summer,” said Skip. “And think you’ll agree that the price I offer isn’t bad — twenty thousand dollars for about two hundred meters of fishing rights. You won’t get such a good offer again in your lifetime.”

“I’m not interested in my lifetime,” Frosby said with a little smile. “I’ve got a son here.”

The son was a good-looking boy with dark hair and strong shoulders, taller than his father. He sat there with his arms across his chest, and appeared to share his father’s negative attitude. Still, he smiled as they were leaving and said, “You’ve made this house look very nice, Mr. Skipperton.” Skip was pleased. He had tried hard to choose the most suitable furniture for the sitting room.

“I see you like old-fashioned things,” said Frosby. “That scarecrow in your field — we haven’t seen one of those around here for many years.”

“I’m trying to grow corn out there,” Skip said. “I think you need a scarecrow in a cornfield.”

Young Peter was looking at a photograph of Maggie, which stood on the hall table. “Pretty girl,” he said.

Skip said nothing. The meeting had failed. Skip wasn’t used to failing. He looked into Frosby’s cold gray eyes and said: “I’ve one more idea. I could rent the land by the river for the rest of my life, and then it goes to you — or your son. I’ll give you five thousand dollars a year.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Skipperton. Thank you for the drink, and — goodbye.”

“Stupid man,” said Skip to Andy as the Cadillac moved off. But he smiled. Life was a game, after all. You won sometimes, you lost sometimes.

It was early May. The corn which they had planted was beginning to come up through the earth. Skip and Andy had made a scarecrow from sticks joined together — one stick for the body and head, another for the arms, and two more for the legs. They had dressed it in an old coat and trousers that Andy had found, and had put an old hat of Skip’s on its head.

The weeks passed and the corn grew high. Skip tried to think of ways to annoy Frosby, to force him to rent part of the stream to him.

But he forgot about Frosby when Maggie came home for the summer holidays. Skip met her at the airport in New York, and they drove up to Maine. Skip thought she looked taller; she was certainly more beautiful!

“I’ve got a surprise for you at home,” Skip said.

“Oh — a horse, perhaps?”

Skip had forgotten she was learning to ride. “No, not a horse.” The surprise was a red Toyota. He had remembered, at least, that Maggie’s school had taught her to drive. She was very excited, and threw her arms round Skip’s neck. “You’re so sweet! And you’re looking very well!”

Skip and Maggie went for a drive in the new car the next morning. In the afternoon Maggie asked her father if she could go fishing in the stream. He had to tell her that she couldn’t, and he explained the reason.

“Well, never mind, there are a lot of other things to do.” Maggie enjoyed going for walks, reading, and doing little jobs in the house.

Skip was surprised one evening when Maggie arrived home in her Toyota carrying three fish. He was afraid she had been fishing in the stream, against his instructions.

“Where did you get those?”

“I met the boy who lives there. We were both buying petrol, and he introduced himself—he said he’d seen my photograph in your house. Then we had coffee together—”

“The Frosby boy?”

“Yes. He’s very nice. Perhaps it’s only the father who’s not nice. Well, Pete said, ‘Come and fish with me this afternoon,’ so I did.”

“I don’t — please, Maggie, I don’t want you to mix with the Frosbys.”

Maggie was surprised, but said nothing.

The next day, Maggie said she wanted to go to the village to buy some shoes. She was away for nearly three hours. With a great effort, Skip didn’t question her.

Then on Saturday morning, Maggie said there was a dance in the nearest town, and she was going.

“I can guess who you’re going with,” Skip said angrily.

“I’m going alone, I promise you. Girls don’t need a boy to take them to dances now.”

Skip realized that he couldn’t order her not to go to a dance. But he knew the Frosby boy would be there. And he knew what was going to happen. His daughter was falling in love with Pete Frosby.

Maggie got home very late that night, after Skip had gone to bed. At breakfast, she looked fresh and happy.

“I expect the Frosby boy was at the dance?” said Skip.

“I don’t know what you’ve got against him, Father.”

“I don’t want you to fall in love with an uneducated country boy. I sent you to a good school.”

“Pete had three years at Harvard University.” Maggie stood up. “I’m almost eighteen, Father. I don’t want to be told who I can and can’t see.”

Skip shouted at her: “They’re not our kind of people!”

Maggie left the room.

During the next week Skip was in a terrible state. In his business life he had always been able to force people to do what he wanted — but he couldn’t think of a way to do that with his daughter.

The following Saturday evening, Maggie said she was going to a party. It was at the house of a boy called Wilmers, who she had met at the dance. By Sunday morning, Maggie hadn’t come home. Skip telephoned the Wilmerses’ house.

A boy’s voice said that Maggie had left the party early.

“Was she alone?”

“No, she was with Pete Frosby. She left her car here.”

Skip felt the blood rush to his face. His hand was shaking as he picked up the telephone to call the Frosby house. Old Frosby answered. He said Maggie was not there. And his son was out at the moment.

“What do you mean? He was there and he went out?”

“Mr. Skipperton, my son has his own ways, his own room, his own key — his own life. I’m not going to —”

Skip put the telephone down.

Maggie was not home by Sunday evening or Monday morning. Skip didn’t want to inform the police. On Tuesday there was a letter from Maggie, written from Boston. It said that she and Pete had run away to be married.

…You may think this is sudden, but we do love each other, and we know what we’re doing. I didn’t really want to go back to school. Please don’t try to find me—you’ll hear from me next week. I was sorry to leave my nice new car.

Love always,

maggie

For two days Skip didn’t go out of the house, and he ate almost nothing. He felt three-quarters dead. Andy was very worried about him. When he needed to go to the village to buy some food, he asked Skip to go with him.

While Andy did the shopping, Skip sat in the car, looking at nothing. But then a figure coming down the street caught his eye. Old Frosby! He hoped Frosby wouldn’t see him in the car, but Frosby did. He didn’t pause, but he smiled his unpleasant little smile. Skip realized how much he hated Frosby. His blood boiled with anger, and he felt much better: he was himself again. Frosby must be punished! He began to make a plan.

That evening, Skip suggested to Andy that he should go away for the weekend and enjoy himself. “You’ve earned a holiday!” he said, and gave him three hundred dollars.

Andy left on Saturday evening, in the car. Skip then telephoned old Frosby, and said it was time they became friends. Frosby was surprised, but he agreed to come on Sunday morning at about eleven for a talk. He arrived in the Cadillac, alone.

Skip acted quickly. He had his heavy gun ready, and as soon as Frosby was inside the door he hit him on the head several times with the end of the gun until Frosby was dead. He then took off his clothes and tied an old cloth around the body. He burned Frosby’s clothes in the fireplace, and hid his watch and rings in a drawer.

Then Skip put one arm around Frosby’s body, and pulled him out of the house and up the field to the scarecrow. The corn had already been cut. He pulled down the old scarecrow and took the clothes off the sticks. He dressed Frosby in the old coat and trousers, tied a small cloth round his face, and pushed the hat onto his head.

When he stood the scarecrow up again it looked almost the same as before. As Skip went back to the house, he turned around many times to admire his work.

He had solved the problem of what to do with the body.

Next he buried Frosby’s watch and rings under a big plant in the garden. It was now half past twelve, and he had to do something with the Cadillac. He drove it to some woods a few kilometers away and left it there, after cleaning off all his fingerprints. He hadn’t seen anybody.

Soon after he got home a woman telephoned from Frosby’s house (his housekeeper, Skip guessed) to ask if Frosby was with him. He told her that Frosby had left his house at about twelve, and he hadn’t said where he was going. He said the same thing to the policeman who came to see him in the evening, and to Maggie when she telephoned from Boston. He found it easy to lie about Frosby.

Andy arrived back the next morning, Monday. He had already heard the story in the village, and also knew that the police had found Frosby’s car not far away in the woods. He didn’t ask any questions.

In the next week Skip spent a lot of time watching the scarecrow from his upstairs bedroom window. He thought with pleasure of old Frosby’s body there, drying —slowly, slowly in the wind.

After ten days the policeman came back, with a detective. They looked over Skip’s house and land, and they looked at his two guns. They didn’t find anything.

That evening, Maggie came to see him; she and Pete were at the Frosby house. It was hard for Skip to believe she was married.

“Pete’s very worried and upset,” she said. “Was Mr. Frosby unhappy when he visited you?”

Skip laughed. “No, very cheerful! And pleased with the marriage. Are you going to live at the Frosby house?”

“Yes. I’ll take some things back with me.”

She seemed cold and sad, which made Skip unhappy.

“I know what’s in that scarecrow,” said Andy one day.

“Do you? What are you going to do about it?” Skip asked.

“Nothing. Nothing,” Andy answered with a smile.

“Perhaps you would like some money, Andy? A little present — for keeping quiet?”

“No sir,” Andy said quietly. “I’m not that kind of man.”

Skip didn’t understand. He was used to men who liked money, more and more of it. Andy was different. He was a good man.

The leaves were falling from the trees and winter was coming. The children in the area were getting ready to celebrate the evening of October 31, when people wore special clothes and had special things to eat, and lit great fires outside and danced around them singing songs. No one came to Skip’s house that evening. There was a party at the Frosbys’ house — he could hear the music in the distance. He thought of his daughter dancing, having a good time. Skip was lonely, for the first time in his life. Lonely. He very much wanted a drink, but he decided to keep his promise to himself.

At that moment he saw a spot of light moving outside the window. He looked out. There was a line of figures crossing his field, carrying lights. Anger and fear rushed through him. They were on his land! They had no right! And they were children, he realized. The figures were small.

He ran downstairs and out into the field. “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Get off my property!”

The children didn’t hear him. They were singing a song. “We’re going to burn the scarecrow…”

“Get off my land!” Skip fell and hurt his knee. Now the children had heard him, he was sure, but they weren’t stopping. They were going to reach the scarecrow before him. He heard a cry. They had got there.

There were more cries, of terror mixed with pleasure.

Perhaps their hands had touched the body.

Skip made his way back to his house. It was worse than the police. Every child was going to tell his parents what he had found. Skip knew he had reached the end. He had seen a lot of men in business reach the end. He had known men who had jumped out of windows.

Skip went straight to his gun. He put the end in his mouth and fired. When the children came running back across the field to the road, Skip was dead.

Andy heard the shot from his room over the garage. He had also seen the children crossing the field, and heard Skip shouting. He understood what had happened.

He began walking toward the house. He would have to call the police. Andy decided to say that he didn’t know anything about the body in the scarecrow’s clothes. He had been away that weekend, after all.

The buick trudged toward the summit, each step slower than the last, the automatic gearing slipping ever lower as the air thinned and the grade steepened and the trucks were rendered snails. At the top the road leveled, and the Buick spent a brief sigh of relief before coasting thankfully down the other side, atop the stiff gray strap that was Interstate 5. As it passed from Oregon to California the car seemed cheered. Its driver shared the mood, though only momentarily.

He blinked his eyes and shrugged his shoulders and twisted his head. He straightened his leg and shook it. He turned up the volume of the radio, causing a song to be sung more loudly than it merited. But the acid fog lay still behind his eyes, eating at them. As he approached a roadside rest area he decided to give both the Buick and himself a break.

During the previous week he had chased a wild goose in the shape of a rumor all the way to Seattle, with tantalizing stops in Eugene and Portland along the way. Eight hours earlier, when he had finally recognized the goose for what it was, he had headed home, hoping to make it in one day but realizing as he slowed for the rest area that he couldn’t reach San Francisco that evening without risking more than was sensible in the way of vehicular manslaughter.

He took the exit, dropped swiftly to the bank of the Klamath River, and pulled into a parking slot in the Randolph Collier safety rest area. After making use of the facilities, he pulled out his map and considered where to spend the night. Redding looked like the logical place, out of the mountains, at the head of the soporific valley that separated him from home. He was reviewing what he knew about Redding when a voice, aggressively gay and musical, greeted him from somewhere near the car. He glanced to his side, sat up straight, and rolled down the window. “Hi,” the thin voice said again.

“Hi.”

She was blond, her long straight tresses misbehaving in the wind that tumbled through the river canyon. Her narrow face was white and seamless, as though it lacked flesh, was only skull. Her eyes were blue and tardy. She wore a loose green blouse gathered at the neck and wrists’ and a long skirt of faded calico, fringed in white ruffles. Her boots were leather and well worn, their tops disappearing under her skirt the way the tops of the mountains at her back disappeared into a disk of cloud.

He pegged her for a hitchhiker, one who perpetually roams the roads and provokes either pity or disapproval in those who pass her by. He glanced around to see if she was fronting for a partner, but the only thing he saw besides the picnic and toilet facilities and travelers like himself was a large bundle resting atop a picnic table at the far end of the parking lot. Her worldly possessions, he guessed; her only aids to life. He looked at her again and considered whether he wanted to share some driving time and possibly a motel room with a girl who looked a little spacy and a little sexy and a lot heedless of the world that delivered him his living.

“My name’s Iris,” she said, wrapping her arms across her chest, shifting her weight from foot to foot, shivering in the autumn chill.

“Mine’s Marsh.”

“You look tired.” Her concern seemed genuine, his common symptoms for some reason alarming to her.

“I am,” he admitted.

“Been on the road long?”

“From Seattle.”

“How far is that about?” The question came immediately, as though she habitually erased her ignorance.

“Four hundred miles. Maybe a little more.”

She nodded as though the numbers made him wise. “I’ve been to Seattle.”

“Good.”

“I’ve been lots of places.”

“Good.”

She unwrapped her arms and placed them on the door and leaned toward him. Her musk was unadulterated. Her blouse dropped open to reveal breasts sharpened to twin points by the mountain air. “Where you headed, Marsh?”

“South.”

“L.A.?”

He shook his head. “San Francisco.”

“Good. Perfect.”

He expected it right then, the flirting pitch for a lift, but her request was slightly different. “Could you take something down there for me?”

He frowned and thought of the package on the picnic table. Drugs? “What?” he asked.

“I’ll show you in a sec. Do you think you could, though?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I’m kind of on a tight schedule, and …”

She wasn’t listening. “It goes to …” She pulled a scrap of paper from the pocket of her skirt and uncrumpled it. “It goes to 95 Albosa Drive, in Hurley City. That’s near Frisco, isn’t it? Marvin said it was.”

He nodded. “But I don’t…”

She put up a hand. “Hold still. I’ll be right back.”

She skipped twice, her long skirt hopping high above her boots to show a shaft of gypsum thigh, then trotted to the picnic table and picked up the bundle. Halfway back to the car she proffered it like a prize soufflé.

“Is this what you want me to take?” he asked as she approached.

She nodded, then looked down at the package and frowned. “I don’t like this one,” she said, her voice dropping to a dismissive rasp.

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t happy. It’s from the B Box, so it can’t help it, I guess, but all the same it should go back, I don’t care what Marvin says.”

“What is it? A puppy?”

She thrust the package through the window. He grasped it reflexively, to keep it from dropping to his lap. As he secured his grip the girl ran off. “Hey! Wait a minute,” he called after her. “I can’t take this thing. You’ll have to …”

He thought the package moved. He slid one hand beneath it and with the other peeled back the cotton strips that swaddled it. A baby—not canine but human — glared at him and screamed. He looked frantically for the girl and saw her climbing into a gray Volkswagen bug that was soon scooting out of the rest area and climbing toward the freeway.

He swore, then rocked the baby awkwardly for an instant, trying to quiet the screams it formed with every muscle. When that didn’t work, he placed the child on the seat beside him, started the car, and backed out. As he started forward he had to stop to avoid another car, and then to reach out wildly to keep the child from rolling off the seat.

He moved the gear to park and gathered the seat belt on the passenger side and tried to wrap it around the baby in a way that would be more safe than throttling. The result was not reassuring. He unhooked the belt and put the baby on the floor beneath his legs, put the car in gear, and set out after the little gray VW that had disappeared with the child’s presumptive mother. He caught it only after several frantic miles, when he reached the final slope that descended to the grassy plain that separated the Siskiyou range from the lordly aspect of Mount Shasta.

The VW buzzed toward the mammoth mountain like a mad mouse assaulting an elephant. He considered overtaking the car, forcing Iris to stop, returning the baby, then getting the hell away from her as fast as the Buick would take him. But something in his memory of her look and words made him keep his distance, made him keep Iris in sight while he waited for her to make a turn toward home.

The highway flattened, then crossed the high meadow that nurtured sheep and cattle and horses below the lumps of the southern Cascades and the Trinity Alps. Traffic was light, the sun low above the western peaks, the air a steady splash of autumn. He checked his gas gauge. If Iris didn’t turn off in the next fifty miles he would either have to force her to stop or let her go. The piercing baby sounds that rose from beneath his knees made the latter choice impossible.

They reached Yreka, and he closed to within a hundred yards of the bug, but Iris ignored his plea that the little city be her goal. Thirty minutes later, after he had decided she was nowhere near her destination, Iris abruptly left the interstate, at the first exit to a village that was handmaiden to the mountain, a town reputed to house an odd collection of spiritual seekers and religious zealots.

The mountain itself, volcanic, abrupt, spectacular, had been held by the Indians to be holy, and the area surrounding it was replete with hot springs and mud baths and other prehistoric marvels. Modern mystics had accepted the mantle of the mountain, and the crazy girl and her silly bug fit with what he knew about the place and those who gathered there. What didn’t fit was the baby she had foisted on him.

He slowed and glanced at his charge once again and failed to receive anything resembling contentment in return. Fat little arms escaped the blanket and pulled the air like taffy. Spittle dribbled down its chin. A translucent bubble appeared at a tiny nostril, then broke silently and vanished.

The bug darted through the north end of town, left, then right, then left again, quickly, as though it sensed pursuit. He lagged behind, hoping Iris was confident she had ditched him. He looked at the baby again, marveling that it could cry so loud, could for so long expend the major portion of its strength in unrequited pleas. When he looked at the road again the bug had disappeared.

He swore and slowed and looked at driveways, then began to plan what to do if he had lost her. Houses dwindled, the street became dirt, then flanked the log decks and lumber stacks and wigwam burners of a sawmill. A road sign declared it unlawful to sleigh, toboggan, or ski on a county road. He had gasped the first breaths of panic when he saw the VW nestled next to a ramshackle cabin on the back edge of town, empty, as though it had been there always.

A pair of firs sheltered the cabin and the car, made the dwindling day seem night. The driveway was mud, the yard bordered by a falling wormwood fence. He drove to the next block and stopped his car, the cabin now invisible.

He knew he couldn’t keep the baby much longer. He had no idea what to do, for it or with it, had no idea what it wanted, no idea what awaited it in Hurley City, had only a sense that the girl, Iris, was goofy, perhaps pathologically so, and that he should not abet her plan.

Impossibly, the child cried louder. He had some snacks in the car — crackers, cookies, some cheese — but he was afraid the baby was too young for solids. He considered buying milk, and a bottle, and playing parent. The baby cried again, gasped and sputtered, then repeated its protest.

He reached down and picked it up. The little red face inflated, contorted, mimicked a steam machine that continuously whistled. The puffy cheeks, the tiny blue eyes, the round pug nose, all were engorged in scarlet fury. He cradled the baby in his arms as best he could and rocked it. The crying dimmed momentarily, then began again.

His mind ran the gauntlet of childhood scares — diphtheria, smallpox, measles, mumps, croup, even a pressing need to burp. God knew what ailed it. He patted its forehead and felt the sticky heat of fever.

Shifting position, he felt something hard within the blanket, felt for it, finally drew it out. A nippled baby bottle, half-filled, body-warm. He shook it and presented the nipple to the baby, who sucked it as its due. Giddy at his feat, he unwrapped his package further, enough to tell him he was holding a little girl and that she seemed whole and healthy except for her rage and fever. When she was feeding steadily he put her back on the floor and got out of the car.

The stream of smoke it emitted into the evening dusk made the cabin seem dangled from a string. Beneath the firs the ground was moist, a spongy mat of rotting twigs and needles. The air was cold and damp and smelled of burning wood. He walked slowly up the drive, courting silence, alert for the menace implied by the hand-lettered sign, nailed to the nearest tree, that ordered him to keep out.

The cabin was dark but for the variable light at a single window. The porch was piled high with firewood, both logs and kindling. A maul and wedge leaned against a stack of fruitwood piled next to the door. He walked to the far side of the cabin and looked beyond it for signs of Marvin.

A tool shed and a broken-down school bus filled the rear yard. Between the two a tethered nanny goat grazed beneath a line of drying clothes, silent but for her neck bell, the swollen udder oscillating easily beneath her, the teats extended like accusing fingers. Beyond the yard a thicket of berry bushes served as fence, and beyond the bushes a stand of pines blocked further vision. He felt alien, isolated, exposed, threatened, as Marvin doubtlessly hoped all strangers would.

He thought about the baby, wondered if it was all right, wondered if babies could drink so much they got sick or even choked. A twinge of fear sent him trotting back to the car. The baby was fine, the bottle empty on the floor beside it, its noises not wails but only muffled whimpers. He returned to the cabin and went onto the porch and knocked at the door and waited.

Iris wore the same blouse and skirt and boots, the same eyes too shallow to hold her soul. She didn’t recognize him; her face pinched only with uncertainty.

He stepped toward her and she backed away and asked him what he wanted. The room behind her was a warren of vague shapes, the only source of light far in the back by a curtain that spanned the room.

“I want to give you your baby back,” he said.

She looked at him more closely, then opened her mouth in silent exclamation, then slowly smiled. “How’d you know where I lived?”

“I followed you.”

“Why? Did something happen to it already?”

“No, but I don’t want to take it with me.”

She seemed truly puzzled. “Why not? It’s on your way, isn’t it? Almost?”

He ignored the question. “I want to know some more about the baby.”

“Like what?”

“Like whose is it? Yours?”

Iris frowned and nibbled her lower lip. “Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’? Did you give birth to it?”

“Not exactly.” Iris combed her hair with her fingers, then shook it off her face with an irritated twitch. “What are you asking all these questions for?”

“Because you asked me to do you a favor and I think I have the right to know what I’m getting into. That’s only fair, isn’t it?”

She paused. Her pout was dubious. “I guess.”

“So where did you get the baby?” he asked again.

“Marvin got it.”

“From whom?”

“Those people in Hurley City. So I don’t know why you won’t take it back, seeing as how it’s theirs and all.”

“But why …”

His question was obliterated by a high glissando, brief and piercing. He looked at Iris, then at the shadowy interior of the cabin.

There was no sign of life, no sign of anything but the leavings of neglect and a spartan bent. A fat gray cat hopped off a shelf and sauntered toward the back of the cabin and disappeared behind the blanket that was draped on the rope that spanned the rear of the room. The cry echoed once again. “What’s that?” he asked her.

Iris giggled. “What does it sound like?”

“Another baby?”

Iris nodded.

“Can I see it?”

“Why?”

“Because I like babies.”

“If you like them, why won’t you take the one I gave you down to Hurley City?”

“Maybe I’m changing my mind. Can I see this one?”

“I’m not supposed to let anyone in here.”

“It’ll be OK. Really. Marvin isn’t here, is he?”

She shook her head. “But he’ll be back any time. He just went to town.”

He summoned reasonableness and geniality. “Just let me see your baby for a second, Iris. Please? Then I’ll go. And take the other baby with me. I promise.”

She pursed her lips, then nodded and stepped back. “I got more than one,” she suddenly bragged. “Let me show you.” She turned and walked quickly toward the rear of the cabin and disappeared behind the blanket.

When he followed he found himself in a space that was half kitchen and half nursery Opposite the electric stove and Frigidaire, along the wall between the wood stove and the rear door, was a row of wooden boxes, seven of them, old orange crates, dividers removed, painted different colors and labeled A to G. Faint names of orchards and renderings of fruits rose through the paint on the stub ends of the crates. Inside boxes C through G were babies, buried deep in nests of rags and scraps of blanket. One of them was crying. The others slept soundly, warm and toasty, healthy and happy from all the evidence he had.

“My God,” he said.

“Aren’t they beautiful? They’re just the best little things in the whole world. Yes they are. Just the best little babies in the whole wide world. And Iris loves them all a bunch. Yes, she does. Doesn’t she?”

Beaming, Iris cooed to the babies for another moment, then her face darkened. “The one I gave you, she wasn’t happy here. That’s because she was a B Box baby. My B babies are always sad, I don’t know why. I treat them all the same, but the B babies are just contrary. That’s why the one I gave you should go back. Where is it, anyway?”

“In the car.”

“By itself?”

He nodded.

“You shouldn’t leave her there like that,” Iris chided. “She’s pouty enough already.”

“What about these others?” he asked, looking at the boxes. “Do they stay here forever?”

Her whole aspect solidified. “They stay till Marvin needs them. Till he does, I give them everything they want. Everything they need. No one could be nicer to my babies than me. No one.”

The fire in the stove lit her eyes like ice in sunlight. She gazed raptly at the boxes, one by one, and received something he sensed was sexual in return. Her breaths were rapid and shallow, her fists clenched at her sides. “Where’d you get these babies?” he asked softly.

“Marvin gets them.” She was only half-listening.

“Where?”

“All over. We had one from Nevada one time, and two from Idaho I think. Most are from California, though. And Oregon. I think that C Box baby’s from Spokane. That’s Oregon, isn’t it?”

He didn’t correct her. “Have there been more besides these?”

“Some.”

“How many?”

“Oh, maybe ten. No, more than that. I’ve had three of all the babies except G babies.”

“And Marvin got them all for you?”

She nodded and went to the stove and turned on a burner. “You want some tea? It’s herbal. Peppermint.”

He shook his head. “What happened to the other babies? The ones that aren’t here anymore?”

“Marvin took them.” Iris sipped her tea.

“Where?”

“To someone that wanted to love them.” The declaration was as close as she would come to gospel.

The air in the cabin seemed suddenly befouled, not breathable. “Is that what this is all about, Iris? Giving babies to people that want them?”

“That want them and will love them. See, Marvin gets these babies from people that don’t want them, and gives them to people that do. It’s his business.”

“Does he get paid for it?”

She shrugged absently. “A little, I think.”

“Do you go with Marvin when he picks them up?”

“Sometimes. When it’s far.”

“And where does he take them? To Idaho and Nevada, or just around here?”

She shrugged again. “He doesn’t tell me where they go. He says he doesn’t want me to try and get them back.” She smiled peacefully. “He knows how I am about my babies.”

“How long have you and Marvin been doing this?”

“I been with Marvin about three years.”

“And you’ve been trading in babies all that time?”

“Just about.”

She poured some more tea into a ceramic cup and sipped it. She gave no sign of guile or guilt, no sign that what he suspected could possibly be true.

“Do you have any children of your own, Iris?”

Her hand shook enough to spill her tea. “I almost had one once.”

“What do you mean?”

She made a face. “I got pregnant, but nobody wanted me to keep it so I didn’t.”

“Did you put it up for adoption?”

She shook her head.

“Abortion?”

Iris nodded, apparently in pain, and mumbled something. He asked her what she’d said. “I did it myself,” she repeated. “That’s what I can’t live with. I scraped it out of there myself. I passed out. I…”

She fell silent. He looked back at the row of boxes that held her penance. When she saw him look she began to sing a song. “Aren’t they just perfect?” she said when she was through. “Aren’t they all just perfect?”

“How do you know where the baby you gave me belongs?” he asked quietly.

“Marvin’s got a book that keeps track. I sneaked a look at it one time when he was stoned.”

“Where’s he keep it?”

“In the van. At least that’s where I found it.” Iris put her hands on his chest and pushed. “You better go before Marvin gets back. You’ll take the baby, won’t you? It just don’t belong here with the others. It fusses all the time and I can’t love it like I should.”

He looked at Iris’s face, at the firelight washing across it, making it alive. “Where are you from, Iris?”

“Me? Minnesota.”

“Did you come to California with Marvin?”

She shook her head. “I come with another guy. I was tricking for him when I got knocked up. After the abortion I told him I wouldn’t trick no more so he ditched me. Then I did a lot of drugs for a while, till I met Marvin at a commune down by Mendocino.”

“What’s Marvin’s last name?”

“Hessel. Now you got to go. Really. Marvin’s liable to do something crazy if he finds you here.” She walked toward him and he retreated.

“OK, Iris. Just one thing. Could you give me something for the baby to eat? She’s real hungry.”

Iris frowned. “She only likes goat’s milk, is the problem, and I haven’t milked today.” She walked to the Frigidaire and returned with a bottle. “This is all I got. Now, git.”

He nodded, took the bottle from her, then retreated to his car.

He opened the door on the stinging smell of ammonia. The baby greeted him with screams. He picked it up, rocked it, talked to it, hummed a tune, finally gave it the second bottle, which was the only thing it wanted.

As it sucked its sustenance he started the car and let the engine warm, and a minute later flipped the heater switch. When it seemed prudent, he unwrapped the child and unpinned her soggy diaper and patted her dumplinged bottom dry with a tissue from the glove compartment. After covering her with her blanket he got out of the car, pulled his suitcase from the trunk, and took out his last clean T-shirt, then returned to the car and fashioned a bulky diaper out of the cotton shirt and affixed it to the child, pricking his finger in the process, spotting both the garment and the baby with his blood. Then he sat for a time, considering his obligations to the children that had suddenly littered his life.

He should go to the police, but Marvin might return before they responded and might learn of Iris’s deed and harm the children or flee with them. He could call the police and wait in place for them to come, but he doubted his ability to convey his precise suspicions over the phone. As he searched for other options, headlights ricocheted off his mirror and into his eyes, then veered off. When his vision was reestablished he reached into the glove compartment for his revolver. Shoving it into his pocket, he got out of the car and walked back to the driveway and disobeyed the sign again.

A new shape had joined the scene, rectangular and dark. Marvin’s van, creaking as it cooled. He waited, listened, and when he sensed no other presence he approached it. A converted bread truck, painted navy blue, with sliding doors into the driver’s cabin and hinged doors at the back. The right fender was dented, the rear bumper wired in place. A knobby-tired motorcycle was strapped to a rack on the top. The door on the driver’s side was open, so he climbed in.

The high seat was rotted through, its stuffing erupting like white weeds through the dirty vinyl. The floorboards were littered with food wrappers and beer cans and cigarette butts. He activated his pencil flash and pawed through the refuse, pausing at the only pristine object in the van — a business card, white with black engraving, taped to a corner of the dash: “J. Arnold Rasker, Attorney at Law. Practice in all Courts. Initial Consultation Free. Phone day or night.”

He looked through the cab for another minute, found nothing resembling Marvin’s notebook and nothing else of interest. After listening for Marvin’s return and hearing nothing he went through the narrow doorway behind the driver’s seat into the cargo area in the rear, the yellow ball that dangled from his flash bouncing playfully before him.

The entire area had been carpeted, ceiling included, in a matted pink plush that was stained in unlikely places and coming unglued in others. A roundish window had been cut into one wall by hand, then covered with plastic sheeting kept in place with tape. Two upholstered chairs were bolted to the floor on one side of the van, and an Army cot stretched out along the other. Two orange crates similar to those in the cabin, though empty, lay between the chairs. Above the cot a picture of John Lennon was tacked to the carpeted wall with a rusty nail. A small propane bottle was strapped into one corner, an Igloo cooler in another. Next to the Lennon poster a lever-action rifle rested in two leather slings. The smells were of gasoline and marijuana and unwashed flesh. Again he found no notebook.

He switched off his light and backed out of the van and walked to the cabin, pausing on the porch. Music pulsed from the interior, heavy metal, obliterating all noises including his own. He walked to the window and peered inside.

Iris, carrying and feeding a baby, paced the room, eyes closed, mumbling, seemingly deranged. Alone momentarily, she was soon joined by a wide and woolly man, wearing cowboy boots and Levi’s, a plaid shirt, full beard, hair to his shoulders. A light film of grease coated flesh and clothes alike, as though he had just been dipped. Marvin strode through the room without speaking, his black eyes angry, his shoulders tipping to the frenetic music as he sucked the final puffs of a joint held in an oddly dainty clip.

Both Marvin and Iris were lost in their tasks. When their paths crossed they backed away as though they feared each other. He watched them for five long minutes. When they disappeared behind the curtain in the back he hurried to the door and went inside the cabin.

The music paused, then began again, the new piece indistinguishable from the old. The heavy fog of dope washed into his lungs and lightened his head and braked his brain. Murmurs from behind the curtain erupted into a swift male curse. A pan clattered on the stove; wood scraped against wood. He drew his gun and moved to the edge of the room and sidled toward the curtain and peered around its edge.

Marvin sat in a chair at a small table, gripping a bottle of beer. Iris was at the stove, her back to Marvin, opening a can of soup. Marvin guzzled half the bottle, banged it on the table, and swore again. “How could you be so fucking stupid?”

“Don’t, Marvin. Please?”

“Just tell me who you gave it to. That’s all I want to know. It was your buddy Gretel, wasn’t it? Had to be, she’s the only one around here as loony as you.”

“It wasn’t anyone you know. Really. It was just a guy.”

“What guy?”

“Just a guy. I went out to a rest area way up by Oregon, and I talked to him and he said he was going to Frisco so I gave it to him and told him where to take it. You know it didn’t belong here, Marvin. You know how puny it was.”

Marvin stood up, knocking his chair to the floor. “You stupid bitch.” His hand raised high, Marvin advanced on Iris with beer dribbling from his chin. “I’ll break your jaw, woman. I swear I will.”

“Don’t hit me, Marvin. Please don’t hit me again.”

“Who was it? I want a name.”

“I don’t know, I told you. Just some guy going to Frisco. His name was Mark, I think.”

“And he took the kid?”

Iris nodded. “He was real nice.”

“You bring him here? Huh? Did you bring the son of a bitch to the cabin? Did you tell him about the others?”

“No, Marvin. No. I swear. You know I’d never do that.”

“Lying bitch.”

Marvin grabbed Iris by the hair and dragged her away from the stove and slapped her across the face. She screamed and cowered. Marvin raised his hand to strike again.

Sucking a breath, he raised his gun and stepped from behind the curtain. “Hold it,” he told Marvin. “Don’t move.”

Marvin froze, twisted his head, took in the gun, and released his grip on Iris and backed away from her, his black eyes glistening. A slow smile exposed dark and crooked teeth. “Well, now,” Marvin drawled. “Just who might you be besides a fucking trespasser? Don’t tell me; let me guess. You’re the nice man Iris gave a baby to. The one she swore she didn’t bring out here. Right?”

“She didn’t bring me. I followed her.”

Both men glanced at Iris. Her hand was at her mouth and she was nibbling a knuckle. “I thought you went to Frisco” was all she said.

“Not yet.”

“What do you want?” Her question assumed a fearsome answer.

Marvin laughed. “You stupid bitch. He wants the rest of them. Then he wants to throw us in jail. He wants to be a hero, Iris. And to be a hero he has to put you and me behind bars for the rest of our fucking lives.” Marvin took a step forward.

“Don’t be dumb.” He raised the gun to Marvin’s eyes.

Marvin stopped, frowned, then grinned again. “You look like you used that piece before.”

“Once or twice.”

“What’s your gig?”

“Detective. Private.”

Marvin’s lips parted around his crusted teeth. “You must be kidding. Iris flags down some bastard on the freeway and he turns out to be a private cop?”

“That’s about it.”

Marvin shook his head. “Judas H. Priest. And here you are. A professional hero, just like I said.”

He captured Marvin’s eyes. “I want the book.”

“What book?” Marvin burlesqued ignorance.

“The book with the list of babies and where you got them and where you took them.”

Marvin looked at Iris, stuck her with his stare. “You’re dead meat, you know that? You bring the bastard here and tell him all about it and expect him to just take off and not try to stop us? You’re too fucking dumb to breathe, Iris. I got to put you out of your misery.”

“I’m sorry, Marvin.”

“He’s going to take them back, Iris. Get it? He’s going to take those sweet babies away from you and give them back to the assholes that don’t want them. And then he’s going to the cops and they’re going to say you kidnapped those babies, Iris, and that you were bad to them and should go to jail because of what you did. Don’t you see that, you brain-fried bitch? Don’t you see what he’s going to do?”

“I…” Iris stopped, overwhelmed by Marvin’s incantation. “Are you?” she asked, finally looking away from Marvin.

“I’m going to do what’s best for the babies, Iris. That’s all.”

“What’s best for them is with me and Marvin.”

“Not anymore,” he told her. “Marvin’s been shucking you, Iris. He steals those babies. Takes them from their parents, parents who love them. He roams up and down the coast stealing children and then he sells them, Iris. Either back to the people he took them from or to people desperate to adopt. I think he’s hooked up with a lawyer named Rasker, who arranges private adoptions for big money and splits the take with Marvin. He’s not interested in who loves those kids, Iris. He’s only interested in how much he can sell them for.”

Something had finally activated Iris’s eyes. “Marvin? Is that true?”

“No, baby. The guy’s blowing smoke. He’s trying to take the babies away from you and then get people to believe you did something bad, just like that time with the abortion. He’s trying to say you did bad things to babies again, Iris. We can’t let him do that.”

He spoke quickly, to erase Marvin’s words. “People don’t give away babies, Iris. Not to guys like Marvin. There are agencies that arrange that kind of thing, that check to make sure the new home is in the best interests of the child. Marvin just swipes them and sells them to the highest bidder, Iris. That’s all he’s in it for.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just give me Marvin’s notebook and we can check it out, contact the parents and see what they say about their kids. Ask if they wanted to be rid of them. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“Iris?”

“What, Marvin?”

“I want you to pick up that pan and knock this guy on the head. Hard. Go on, Iris. He won’t shoot you, you know that. Hit him on the head so he can’t put us in jail.”

He glanced at Iris, then as quickly to Marvin and to Iris once again. “Don’t do it, Iris. Marvin’s trouble. I think you know that now.” He looked away from Iris and gestured at her partner. “Where’s the book?”

“Iris?”

Iris began to cry. “I can’t, Marvin. I can’t do that.”

“The book,” he said to Marvin again. “Where is it?”

Marvin laughed. “You’ll never know, Detective.”

“OK. We’ll do it your way. On the floor. Hands behind your head. Legs spread. Now.”

Marvin didn’t move. When he spoke the words were languid. “You don’t look much like a killer, Detective, and I’ve known a few, believe me. So I figure if you’re not gonna shoot me I don’t got to do what you say. I figure I’ll just take that piece away from you and feed it to you inch by inch. Huh? Why don’t I do just that?”

He took two quick steps to Marvin’s side and sliced open Marvin’s cheek with a quick swipe of the gun barrel. “Want some more?”

Marvin pawed at his cheek with a grimy hand, then examined his bloody fingers. “You bastard. OK. I’ll get the book. It’s under here.”

Marvin bent toward the floor, twisting away from him, sliding his hands toward the darkness below the stove. He couldn’t tell what Marvin was doing, so he squinted, then moved closer. When Marvin began to stand he jumped back, but Marvin wasn’t attacking, Marvin was holding a baby, not a book, holding a baby by the throat.

“OK, pal,” Marvin said through his grin. “Now, you want to see this kid die before your eyes, you just keep hold of that gun. You want to see it breathe some more, you drop it.”

He froze, his eyes on Marvin’s fingers, which inched further around the baby’s neck and began to squeeze.

The baby gurgled, gasped, twitched, was silent. Its face reddened; its eyes bulged. The tendons in Marvin’s hand stretched taut. Between grimy gritted teeth, Marvin wheezed in rapid streams of glee.

He dropped his gun. Marvin told Iris to pick it up. She did, and exchanged the gun for the child. Her eyes lapped Marvin’s face, as though to renew its acquaintance. Abruptly, she turned and ran around the curtain and disappeared.

“Well, now.” Marvin’s words slid easily. “Looks like the worm has turned, Detective. What’s your name, anyhow?”

“Tanner.”

“Well, Tanner, your ass is mine. No more John Wayne stunts for you. You can kiss this world goodbye.”

Marvin fished in the pocket of his jeans, then drew out a small spiral notebook and flashed it. “It’s all in here, Tanner. Where they came from; where they went. Now watch.”

Gun in one hand, notebook in the other, Marvin went to the wood stove and flipped open the heavy door. The fire made shadows dance.

“Don’t.”

“Watch, bastard.”

Marvin tossed the notebook into the glowing coals, fished in the box beside the stove for a stick of kindling, then tossed it in after the notebook and closed the iron door. “Bye-bye babies.” Marvin’s laugh was quick and cruel. “Now turn around. We’re going out back.”

He did as he was told, walking toward the door, hearing only a silent shuffle at his back. As he passed her he glanced at Iris. She hugged the baby Marvin had threatened, crying, not looking at him. “Remember the one in my car,” he said to her. She nodded silently, then turned away.

Marvin prodded him in the back and he moved to the door. Hand on the knob, he paused, hoping for a magical deliverance, but none came. Marvin prodded him again and he moved outside, onto the porch, then into the yard. “Around back,” Marvin ordered. “Get in the bus.”

He staggered, tripping over weeds, stumbling over rocks, until he reached the rusting bus. The moon and stars had disappeared; the night was black and still but for the whistling wind, clearly Marvin’s ally. The nanny goat laughed at them, then trotted out of reach. He glanced back at Marvin. In one hand was a pistol, in the other a blanket. “Go on in. Just pry the door open.”

He fit his finger between the rubber edges of the bus door and opened it. The first step was higher than he thought, and he tripped and almost fell. “Watch it. I almost blasted you right then.”

He couldn’t suppress a giggle. For reasons of his own, Marvin matched his laugh. “Head on back, Tanner. Pretend you’re on a field trip to the zoo.”

He walked down the aisle between the broken seats, smelling rot and rust and the lingering scent of skunk. “Why here?” he asked as he reached the rear.

“Because you’ll keep in here just fine till I get time to dig a hole out back and open that emergency door and dump you in. Plus it’s quiet. I figure with the bus and the blanket no one will hear a thing. Sit.”

He sat. Marvin draped the blanket across the arm that held the gun, then extended the shrouded weapon toward his chest. He had no doubt that Marvin would shoot without a thought or fear. “Any last words, Tanner? Any parting thoughts?”

“Just that you forgot something.”

“What?”

“You left the door open.”

Marvin glanced quickly toward the door in the front of the bus. He dove for Marvin’s legs, sweeping at the gun with his left hand as he did so, hoping to dislodge it into the folds of the blanket where it would lie useless and unattainable.

“Cocksucker.”

Marvin wrested the gun from his grasp and raised it high, tossing off the blanket in the process. He twisted frantically to protect against the blow he knew was coming, but Marvin was too heavy and strong, retained the upper hand by kneeling on his chest. The revolver glinted in the darkness, a missile poised to descend.

Sound split the air, a piercing scream of agony from the cabin or somewhere near it. “What the hell?” Marvin swore, started to retreat, then almost thoughtlessly clubbed him with the gun, once, then again. After a flash of pain a broad black creature held him down for a length of time he couldn’t calculate.

When he was aware again he was alone in the bus, lying in the aisle. His head felt crushed to pulp. He put a hand to his temple and felt blood. Midst throbbing pain he struggled to his feet and made his way outside and stood leaning against the bus while the night air struggled to clear his head.

He took a step, staggered, took another and gained an equilibrium, then lost it and sat down. Back on his feet, he trudged toward the porch and opened the door. Behind him, the nanny laughed again.

The cabin was dark, the only light the faint flicker from the stove behind the curtain. He walked carefully, trying to avoid the litter on the floor, the shapes in the room. Halfway to the back his foot struck something soft. As he bent to shove it out of his way it made a human sound. He knelt, saw that it was Iris, then found a lamp and turned it on.

She was crumpled, face-down, in the center of the room, arms and legs folded under her, her body curled to avoid assault. He knelt again, heard her groan once more, and saw that what he’d thought was a piece of skirt was in fact a pool of blood and what he’d thought was shadow was a broad wet trail of the selfsame substance leading toward the rear of the cabin.

He ran his hands down her body, feeling for wounds. Finding none, he rolled Iris to her side, then to her back. Blood bubbled from a point beneath her sternum. Her eyelids fluttered, open, closed, then open again. “He shot me,” she said. “It hurt so bad I couldn’t stop crying so he shot me.”

“I know. Don’t try to talk.”

“Did he shoot the babies, too? I thought I heard …”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you look? Please?”

He nodded, stood up, fought a siege of vertigo, then went behind the curtain, then returned to Iris. “They’re all right.”

She tried to smile her thanks. “Something scared him off. I think some people were walking by outside and heard the shot and went for help. I heard them yelling.”

“Where would he go, Iris?”

“Up in the woods. On his dirt bike. He knows lots of people up there. They grow dope, live off the land. The cops’ll never find him.” Iris moaned again. “I’m dying, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. Is there a phone here?”

She shook her head. “Down at the end of the street. By the market.”

“I’m going down and call an ambulance. And the cops. How long ago did Marvin leave?”

She closed her eyes. “I blacked out. Oh, God. It’s real bad now, Mr. Tanner. Real bad.”

“I know, Iris. You hang on. I’ll be back in a second. Try to hold this in place.” He took out his handkerchief and folded it into a square and placed it on her wound. “Press as hard as you can.” He took her left hand and placed it on the compress, then stood up.

“Wait. I have to …”

He spoke above her words. “You have to get to a hospital. I’ll be back in a minute and we can talk some more.”

“But…”

“Hang on.”

He ran from the cabin and down the drive, spotted the lights of the convenience market down the street and ran to the phone booth and placed his calls. The police said they’d already been notified and a car was on the way. The ambulance said it would be six minutes. As fast as he could he ran back to the cabin, hoping it would be fast enough.

Iris had moved. Her body was straightened, her right arm outstretched toward the door, the gesture of a supplicant. The sleeve of her blouse was tattered, burned to a ragged edge above her elbow. Below the sleeve her arm was red in spots, blistered in others, dappled like burned food. The hand at its end was charred and curled into a crusty fist that was dusted with gray ash. Within the fingers was an object, blackened, burned, and treasured.

He pried it from her grasp. The cover was burned away, and the edges of the pages were curled and singed, but they remained decipherable, the written scrawl preserved. The list of names and places was organized to match the gaily painted boxes in the back. Carson City. Boise. Grants Pass. San Bernardino. Modesto. On and on, a gazetteer of crime.

“I saved it,” Iris mumbled. “I saved it for my babies.”

He raised her head to his lap and held it till she died. Then he went to his car and retrieved his B Box baby and placed her in her appointed crib. For the first time since he’d known her the baby made only happy sounds, an irony that was lost on the five dead children at her flank and on the just dead woman who had feared it all.

Then there are the nights when I can’t sleep, when the blankets seem wrapped around me too tight, when the room is so stuffy that I imagine the air is full of dust and age, and when my wife Carols sighs and breathing are enough to make me tremble with tension. On these nights I slip out of bed and put on my heavy flannel bathrobe, and in bare feet I pad down the hallway —past the twins’ bedroom — and go downstairs to the kitchen. I’m smart enough to know that drinking at night will eventually ‘cause problems, but I ignore what my doctor tells me and I mix a ginger and Jameson’s in a tall glass and go to the living room and look out the large bay window at the stars and the woods and the hills. Remembering what we had planned, what we had stolen, the blood that had been spilled, the tears and the anguish, I sip at my drink and think, well, it wasn’t what we wanted to do. We weren’t stealing for drugs or clothes or to impress the chunky, giggly girls Brad and I went to high school with. We were stealing for a ticket, for a way out. In the end, only one of us got out. That thought doesn’t help me sleep at all.

It began on an August day in 1976, about a month before Brad Leary and I were going in as seniors to our high school. That summer we worked at one of the shoe mills in Boston Falls, keeping a tradition going in each of our families. Brad’s father worked in one of the stitching rooms at Devon Shoe, while my dad and two older brothers worked on the other side of the Squamscott River at Parker Shoe. My dad was an assistant bookkeeper, which meant he wore a shirt and tie and earned fifty cents more an hour than the “blue-collar boys” that worked among the grinding and dirty machinery.

Brad and I worked in the packing room, piling up cardboard boxes of shoes and dodging the kicks and punches from the older men who thought we were moving too slow or too sloppily. We usually got off at three, and after buying a couple of cans of 7-Up or Coke and a bag of Humpty Dumpty potato chips we hiked away from the mills up Mast Road to the top of Cavalry Hill, which looked over the valley where Boston Falls was nestled. Well, maybe nestled’s too nice a word. It was more tumbled in than nestled in.

On that day, we both wore the standard uniform of the summer, dark green T-shirts, blue jeans, and sneakers. We were on an exposed part of the hill, past the town cemetery, looking down at the dirty red-brick mill buildings with the tiny windows that rose straight up from both sides of the Squamscott River. Steam and smoke fumes boiled away from tall brick stacks, and neither of us really had gotten used to the pungent, oily smell that seemed to stay right in the back of the throat. The old-timers never mind the smell. They sniff and say, “Aah,” and say, “Boys, that’s the smell of money.” We weren’t so dumb that we didn’t know if Devon Shoe and Parker Shoe and the lumberyard shut down, Boston Falls would crumple away like a fall leaf in November.

But Brad never liked the smell.

“God,” he said, popping open his can of soda. “It seems worse today.”

“Wind’s out of the south,” I replied. “Can’t be helped.”

Our bikes were on their sides in the tall grass. There was a low buzz of insects and Brad took a long swallow from his soda, water beading up on the side of the can. It was a hot day. Brad’s long hair was combed over to one side in a long swoop, and I was jealous of him because my dad made me keep my hair about two inches long, with no sideburns. But then again, Brad wore thick glasses and my vision was perfect.

“Brad,” I said, “we’re in trouble.”

He tossed his empty soda can over his shoulder. “How are you doing?”

“With the sixty from last week, I got four hundred and twelve.”

“Idiot. You should have four hundred and fifteen like me. Where’s the other three?”

“I had to buy a dress shirt for Aunt Sara’s funeral last week. I tore my last good one in June and Mom’s been bugging me.”

“Mothers.” Brad hunched forward and rested his chin on his knee.

“State says we need at least a thousand for the first year.”

“Yeah.”

“And we can’t get part-time jobs this winter, there won’t be any around.”

“Yeah.”

“So what do we do?”

“I’m thinking. Shut up, will you?”

I let it slide, knowing what he was thinking. We were both six hundred dollars’ short for the first-year tuition at the state college. My dad had made some brave noises about helping out when the time came, but six months ago my oldest brother Tom had wrapped his ‘68 Chevy around a telephone pole and now he was wired up to a bed in a hospital in Hanover and my parents’ bank account was shrinking every month. But at least my father had offered to help. Brad’s father usually came home drunk from the mill every night, sour-mad and spoiling for a light. I’d slept over Brad’s house only once, when we were both fourteen and had just become friends. It was a Friday night, and by midnight Brad’s father and mother were screaming and swinging at each other with kitchen knives. Brad and I snuck out to the backyard with our blankets and pillows and we never talked about it again. But one day Brad came to school with his face lumpy and swollen from bruises, and I knew he must have told his father he wanted to go to college.

“Monroe,” he said, finally speaking up.

“Go ahead.”

“We’re special people, aren’t we?”

“Hunh?”

“I mean, compared to the rest of the kids at school, we’re special, right? Who’s at the top of the class? You and me, right?”

“Right.”

“So we’re special, we’re better than they are.”

“Oh, c’mon —”

“Face it, Monroe. Just sit there and face it, will you? That’s all I ask right now. Just face it.”

Well, he was somewhat right, but then you have to understand our regional high school, Squamscott High. Kids from Boston Falls, Machias, and Albion go there, and those other towns are no better off than ours. And in our state there’s little aid for schools, so the towns have to pay the salaries and supplies. Which means a school building with crumbling plaster ceilings. Which means history books that talk about the promise of the Kennedy administration and science books that predict man will go into space one day. Which means teachers like Mr. Hensely, who stumbles into his afternoon history classes, his breath reeking of mouthwash, and Miss Tierney, the English teacher, not long out of college, who also works Saturday and Sunday mornings as a waitress at Mona’s Diner on Front Street.

“All right, Brad,” I said. “I guess we’re special. We study hard and get good marks. We like books and we want to go places.”

“But we’re trapped here, Monroe,” he said. “All we got here is Boston Falls, the Mohawk Cinema, Main Street — and the Wentworth Shopping Plaza ten miles away. And a lot of brick and smoke and trees and hills. Here, straight As and straight Fs will get you the same thing.”

“I know. The lumberyard or Parker or Devon Shoe.”

“Or maybe a store or a gas station. We’re too smart for that, damn it.”

“And we’re too broke for college.”

“That we are,” he said, resting his head on his knees. “That we are.”

He remained silent for a while, a trait of Brad’s. We’d been friends since freshman year, when we were the only two students who were interested in joining the debate team — which lasted a week because no one else wanted to join. We shared a love of books and a desire to go to college, but no matter how many hours we spent together, there was always a dark bit of Brad I could never reach or understand. It wasn’t something dramatic or apparent, just small things. Like his bedroom. Mine had the usual posters of cars and rocket ships and warplanes, but his had only one picture — a framed photograph of Joseph Stalin. I was pretty sure no one else in Brad’s family recognized the picture — I got the feeling he told his father the man had been a famous scientist. When I asked Brad why Stalin of all people, he said, “The man had drive, Monroe. He grew up in a peasant society and grabbed his ticket. Look where it took him.”

Brad wanted to become a lawyer and I wanted to write history books.

“Feel it,” he said, his voice low, rocking back and forth. “Feel how it’s strangling us?”

I felt it. If we didn’t go to State, then next summer we’d be on that slippery slope where we couldn’t get off, a life at the mill, a life of praying and hoping for a nickel-an-hour wage increase, of waiting for the five o’clock whistle. A life where we would find our friends and amusement at the Legion Hall, Drakes Pub, or Pete’s Saloon, where we would sit comfortable on the barstools, swapping stories about who scored what winning touchdown at what state tournament, sipping our beers and feeling ourselves and our tongues getting thick with age and fear. Just getting along, getting older and slower, the old report cards with the perfect marks hidden away in some desk drawer, buried under old bills, a marriage certificate, and insurance policies.

“We gotta get out,” I said.

“We do. And I know how.” Brad had gotten to his feet, brushing potato-chip crumbs from his pants. “Monroe, we’re going to become thieves.”

The next day we were at Outland Rock, tossing pebble’s into the river. We were upstream from the mills, and the waters flowed fast and clean. About another mile south, after the river passed through town, the waters were slow and slate-gray, clogged with chemical foam and wood chips and scraps of leather. Outland Rock was a large boulder that hung over the riverbank. We were too lazy to swim, so we sat and tossed pebbles into the river, watching the wide arcs of the ripples rise up and fade away.

“What are we going to steal?” I asked. “Gold? Diamonds? The bank president’s Cadillac?”

Brad was on his stomach, his feet heading up to the bank, his head over the water. “Don’t screw with me, Monroe. I’m serious.”

I shook my head, tossing another rock in. “OK, so you’re serious. Answer the question.”

“Cash.” He had a stick in his hand, a broken piece of pine, and he stirred it in the water like he was casting for something. “Anything else can be traced. We steal cash and we’re set.”

The day was warm and maybe it was the lazy August mood I was in — the comfortable, hazy feeling that the day would last forever and school and September would never come — but I decided to go along with him.

“OK, cash. But you gotta realize what we’re working with.”

He looked up at me, his eyes unblinking behind the thick glasses. “Go ahead, Monroe.”

“Our parents still won’t let us drive by ourselves, so we’re stuck with our bikes. Unless you want to steal a car to get out of town — which doubles the danger. So whatever we go after has to be in Boston Falls.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“There’s another thing,” I said. “We can’t go into the National Bank or Trussen’s Jewelers in broad daylight and rob em. In an hour they’d be looking for two kids our age and they wouldn’t have a hard time tracking us down.” I lay back on the rock, the surface warm against my back, and closed my eyes, listening to some birds on the other side of the river and the swish-swish as Brad moved the stick back and forth in the water.

“Burglary,” he said. I sat up, shading my face with one hand. “Burglary?”

“Yeah. We find someone who’s got a lot of cash and break into their house. Do it when no one’s home and they’ll blame it on some drifters or something.”

Somewhere a dog barked. “Do you realize we’re actually talking about stealing, Brad? Not only is it a crime, but it’s wrong. Are you thinking about that?”

He turned to me and his face changed — I had the strange feeling I knew what he’d look like in ten years.

“Don’t get soft on me, Monroe. In another three weeks we’ll be back at school. If we don’t get more money this summer we’re done for. ‘Wrong.’ Isn’t it wrong that you and me have to grow up in a place like this? Isn’t it wrong that we have to live alongside people who haven’t read a book in years? Don’t you think it’s wrong that for lack of a few measly bucks we have to rot here?”

He bent over the rock and pointed. “Look.” In the shallow water I saw a nesting of mussels, their shells wide open. “There you have,” he continued, “the population of Boston Falls, New Hampshire. Sitting still, dumb and happy and open, letting everything go by them, ready to snap at anything that comes within reach.” He pushed his stick into one of the mussels and it snapped shut against the wood. He pulled the stick out, the mussel hanging onto the stick, dripping water. “See how they grab the first thing that comes their way?”

He slammed the end of the stick onto the rock and the mussel exploded into black shards.

“We’re not going to grab the first thing that comes our way, Monroe. We’re going to plan and get the hell out of here. That will take cash, and if that means stealing from the fat, dumb mussels in this town, that’s what we’ll do.”

On the ride home, Brad slowed and stopped and I pulled my rusty five-speed up next to him. A thick bank of rolling gray clouds over the hills promised a thunderstorm soon. Our T-shirts were off and tied around our waists. I was tanned from working in our garden all summer but Brad was thin and white, and his chest was a bit sunken, like he’d been punched hard there and never recovered.

“Look there,” he said. I did and my stomach tightened up.

A dead woodchuck was in the middle of the road, its legs stiff. Two large black grackles hopped around the swollen brown body, their sharp beaks at work.

“So it’s a burglary,” I said. “Whose house?”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I’ll find the right one. I’ll go roaming.”

Roaming. It was one of Brad’s favorite things to do. At night, after everyone at his house was asleep, he would sneak out and roam around the dark streets and empty backyards of Boston Falls. The one time I’d gone with him, I thought he was just being a Peeping Tom or something, but it wasn’t that simple. He just liked watching what people did, I think, and he moved silently from one lighted window to another. I didn’t like it at all. I wasn’t comfortable out on the streets or in the fields at night, and I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was trespassing.

Brad rolled his bike closer to the dead woodchuck. “Are you in, Monroe? We’re running out of time.”

Thunder boomed from the hills and I glanced up and saw a flash of lightning. “We better get going if we’re going to beat the storm.”

“I said, are you with me?”

The wind shifted, blowing the leaves on the trees in great gusts. “Brad, we gotta get moving.”

“You get moving,” he said, his lips tense. “You get moving wherever you’re going. I’m staying here for a bit.”

I pedaled away as fast as I could, pumping my legs up and down, thinking, I’ll save a bit here and there, maybe deliver some papers, maybe just work an extra summer — there’s got to be another way to get the money.

A week later. Suppertime at my house. My brothers Jim and Henry had eaten early and gone out, leaving me alone with my parents. My brother Tom was still in the hospital in Hanover. My parents visited him every Saturday and Sunday, bringing me along when I wasn’t smart enough to leave the house early. I guess you could say I loved my brother, but the curled-over, thin figure with wires and tubes in the noisy hospital ward didn’t seem to be him anymore.

We sat in the kitchen, a plastic tablecloth on the table, my mother, looking worn and tired, still wearing her apron. My dad wore his shirt and tie. His crewcut looked sweaty and he smelled of the mill. On his right shirt pocket was a plastic penholder that said parker does it right with four pens. Supper was fried baloney, leftover mashed potatoes, and canned yellow string beans. I tried to talk about what went on at the mill that day—a pile of boxes stuffed full of leather hiking boots had fallen and almost hit me — but my parents nodded and said nothing and I finally concentrated on quietly cleaning my plate. The fried baloney left a puddle of grease that flowed into the lumpy white potatoes.

My father looked over at Mom and she hung her head, and he seemed to shrug his shoulders before he said, “Monroe?”

“Yes?”

He put his knife and fork down and folded his hands, as if we were suddenly in church.

“At work today they announced a cutback.” He looked at me and then looked away, as if someone had walked past the kitchen window. “Some people are being laid off and the rest of us are having a pay cut.”

“Oh.” The baloney and potatoes were now very cold.

“Tom is still very sick, and until he — gets better, we still have to pay the bills. With the cutback — well, Monroe, we need the money you’ve saved.”

I looked at my mother, but she didn’t look up. “Oh,” I said, feeling dumb, feeling blank.

“I know you’ve got your heart set on college, but this is a family emergency—that has to come first, a family has to stick together. Jim and Henry have agreed to help —”

“With what?” I said, clenching my knife and fork tight. “They don’t save anything at all.”

“No, but they’re giving up part of their paychecks. All we ask is that you do your part.”

Then Mom spoke up. “There’s always next year,” she said. “Not all of your friends are going to college, are they? You’ll be with them next summer.”

Dad gave me a weak smile. “Besides, I never went to college, and I’m doing all right. Monroe, it’s just temporary, until things improve with Tom.”

Until he gets better or until he dies, I thought. I didn’t know what to say next, so I finished eating and went down the hallway to my bedroom and got the dark brown passbook from First Merchants of Boston Falls and brought it back and gave it to my father.

Back in my bedroom, I lay on the bed, staring up at the models of airplanes and rocket ships hanging from thin black threads attached to the ceiling. I looked at my textbooks and other books on the bookshelves I made myself. I curled up and didn’t think of much at all, and after a while I fell asleep.

There was a tapping at my window and I threw the top sheet off and went over, lifting up the window screen. I stood there in my shorts, looking at Brad on the back lawn. My glow-in-the-dark clock said it was two in the morning.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“I found it,” he whispered back, leaning forward so his head was almost through the open window. “I found the place.”

“Whose house is it?”

“Mike Willard’s.”

“Mike? The ex-Marine?”

“That’s right,” Brad said. “I’ve watched him two nights in a row. He goes into his bedroom and underneath his bed he’s got this little strongbox—before shutting off the light and going to bed he opens it up and goes through it. Monroe, he’s got tons of money in there. Wads as big as your fist.”

“You saw it?”

“Of course I did. I was in a tree in his yard. He must’ve been saving up all his life. You never saw so much money.”

The night air was warm but goose bumps traveled up and down my arms. “How do we do it?”

“Easy. He lives out on Tanner Avenue. We can get to it by cutting through the woods. His house has hedges all around. It’ll be a cinch.”

I chewed on my lip. “When?” I asked.

Brad grinned at me. I could almost smell the sense of excitement. “Tomorrow. It’s Saturday — your parents will be in Hanover and Mike goes to the Legion Hall every afternoon. We’ll do it while he’s there.”

I didn’t argue. “Fine,” I said.

The next afternoon we were in a stand of trees facing a well-mowed backyard. Tall green hedges flanked both sides of the yard, and the two-story white house with the tall gables was quiet. Beside me, Brad was hunched over, peering around a tree trunk. We heard a door slam and saw Mike Willard walk down his drive and down the street. His posture was straight as a pine, his white hair cut in a crewcut.

“Let’s give him a few minutes,” Brad said. “Make sure he didn’t forget anything.”

I nodded. My heart was pounding so hard I wondered if Brad could hear it. I knew what we were doing was wrong, I knew it wouldn’t be right to steal Mike Willard’s money, but money was all I could think of. Wads as big as my fist, Brad had said.

“Go time,” Brad said, and he set off across the yard. I followed. There were no toys or picnic tables or barbecue sets in Mike Willard’s backyard, just a fine lawn, as if he mowed it every other day. Up on the back porch I had the strange feeling we should knock or something. I was scared Mike would come back and yell, “Boys, what the hell do you want?” or that a mailman would walk up the drive and ask if Mike was home. I almost hoped a mailman would come, but Brad picked up a rock and went to the door and it was too late. He smashed a pane of glass — the sound was so loud it seemed like every police cruiser within miles would be sent around — then he reached in and unlocked the door, motioning me to follow him inside. A small voice told me to stay outside and let him go in alone, but I followed him into the kitchen, my sneakers crunching on the glass.

The kitchen smelled clean and everything was shiny and still. There weren’t even any dishes in the sink.

“God, look how clean it is,” I said.

“Tell me about it. My mom should keep our house so clean.”

The kitchen table was small and square, with only two chairs. There was one placemat out, a blue woven thing with stars and anchors, and I thought of Mike Willard coming home every night to this empty house, opening a can of spaghetti maybe and eating alone at his table. I looked at Brad and wanted to say, “Come on, let’s not do it,” because I got a bad feeling at the thought of Mike coming home and finding he’d been robbed, that someone had been in his house, but Brad looked at me hard and I followed him down the hallway.

The bedroom was small and cramped, with neatly labeled cardboard boxes piled on one side of the room and a long bureau on the other, on the other side of the bed. The labels on the boxes read china 34, IWO 45, OCC, and things like that. Brad pointed at the walls, where pictures and other items were hanging. “Look, there’s Mike there, I think. I wonder where it was taken. Guadalcanal, maybe?”

The faded black-and-white picture showed a group of young men standing in a jungle clearing, tired-looking, in uniforms and beards, holding rifles and automatic weapons. There was no name on the picture but I recognized a younger Mike Willard, hair short and ears sticking out, standing off to one side.

I heard a board creak. “Shh!” I said. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah. This is an old house, Monroe.”

“Well, let’s get going,” I said, rubbing my palms against my jeans. They were very sweaty.

“What’s the rush?” Brad said, his eyes laughing at me from behind his glasses. “Old Mike’s down at the Legion, telling the boys how he won the big one back in ‘45. Look here.”

Below an American flag and a furled Japanese flag was a sheathed curved sword resting on two wooden pegs. Brad took it down and slid it out of its scabbard. He ran a thumb across the blade and took a few swings through the air. “I wonder if Mike bought it or got it off some dead Jap.”

By now I was glancing out the window, wondering if anyone could see us. Brad put the sword down and climbed onto the bed. “Hold on a sec,” he said.

The bed was a brown four-poster. Brad reached under the pillows and pulled out a handgun, large and oily-looking. “A .45. Can you believe it? Old Mike sleeps with a .45 under his pillow.”

“Brad, stop fooling around,” I said. “Let’s get the box and go.” But I could tell he was enjoying himself too much.

“Hold it, I just want to see if it works.” He moved his hand across the top of the gun and part of it slid back and forth with a loud click-clack. “There,” he said. “Just call me John Wayne. This sucker’s ready to fire. I might take it with me when we leave.”

He took the gun and stuck it in his waistband, then reached over and pulled a dull gray strongbox with a simple clasp lock from under the bed. My mouth felt dry and suddenly I was no longer nervous. I was thinking of all the money.

Brad rubbed his hands across the box. “Look, partner. In here’s our ticket out.”

Then Mike Willard was at the bedroom door, his face red, and I could smell the beer from where I was standing, almost five feet away. “You!” he roared. “What the hell are you doing in here? I’m gonna beat the crap out of you boys!”

I back-stepped quickly, tripping over the cardboard boxes and falling flat on my butt, wondering what to do next, wondering what I could say. Brad scampered across the other side of the bed, pulling out the gun and saying in a squeaky voice, “Hold it.” Mike Willard swore and took two large steps, grabbing the sword and swinging it at Brad. I closed my eyes and there was a loud boom that jarred my teeth. There was a crash and an awful grunt, and another crash, then a sharp scent of smoke that seemed to cut right through me.

When I opened my eyes, Brad was sitting across from me, the gun in his lap, both of his hands pressed against his neck. He was very pale and his glasses had been knocked off—without them he looked five years younger.

“It hurts,” he said. And then I saw the bright redness seep through his fingers and trickle down his bare arms.

“God,” I breathed.

“I can’t see,” he said. “Where’s Mike?”

I got up, weaving slightly, and saw Mike’s feet sticking out from the other side of the bed. I crawled across the bed and peered over. Mike was on his back, his arms splayed out, his mouth open like he was still trying to yell, but his eyes were closed and there was a blossom of red spreading across his green work shirt. I stared at him for what seemed hours but his chest didn’t move. When I looked up, Brad was resting his back against the bed. Both of his arms were soaked red and I gazed at him, almost fascinated by the flow of blood down his thin wrists. His face was now the color of chalk.

“Wait, I’ll get a towel,” I said.

“No, you idiot. If I take my hands away, I’m dead. An artery’s gone. Listen. Take the box and call an ambulance.”

“I think Mike’s dead, Brad.”

“Shut up,” he said, his teeth clenched. “Just grab the box, hide it, and get help! We’re juveniles — nothing’s going to happen to us! Get going!” I grabbed the box and was out of the house, running through the woods, the strongbox tight against my chest. The air was fresh and smelled wonderful, and I ran all the way home.

Three days later Mike Willard was buried with full military honors and a Marine Corps honor guard at Cavalry Hill Cemetery. I learned from his front-page obituary that his wife died five years earlier and he had a daughter who lived in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. I also learned that Mike had been in the Marines since he was seventeen, stationed in China in the 1930s and in the Pacific in the 1940s, island-hopping, fighting the Japanese. Then after occupation duty and a year in Korea, he pulled embassy duty until he retired. His nickname had been Golden Mike, for in all his years on active duty he’d never been wounded, never been shot or scratched by shrapnel. The newspaper said he’d come home early that day to dig out a magazine clipping to show some friends at the Legion Hall. To settle a bet.

I kept the strongbox hidden in the attic. Despite the temptation and the worries and the urging, I didn’t open it until that day in May after my college acceptance letter came, followed by a bill for the first year’s tuition. Then I went up with a chisel and hammer and broke open the lock. The wads of money were in there, just as Brad had said, thick as my fist. They were buried under piles of fragile, yellowed letters, some newspaper and magazine clippings, and a few medals. The money was banded together by string, and in the dim light of the attic I wasn’t sure of what I had. I bicycled over to Machias, to a coin shop, and the owner peered over his half-glasses and looked up at me, the money spread over his display case.

“Interesting samples,” he said. He wore a dark green sweater and his hair was white. “Where did you get them?”

“From my uncle,” I lied. “Can you tell me what they’re worth?”

“Hmm,” he said, lifting the bills up to the light. “Nineteen thirties, it looks like. What you have here is Chinese money from that time, what old soldiers and sailors called LC, or local currency. It varied from province to province, and I’d say this is some of it.”

He put the bills back on the counter. “Practically worthless,” he said. I thanked him and rode back to Boston Falls. That afternoon I burned some of the paper money along with my acceptance letter and tuition bill. I didn’t go to college that fall and ended up never going at all.

My ginger and Jameson is gone and I continue looking out at the stars, watching the moon rise over the hill, Cavalry Hill. And even though it’s miles away, I imagine I can see the white stone markers up there, marking so many graves.

In the end I stayed in Boston Falls and took a job at a bank. I worked a little and now I’m an assistant branch manager. Some years ago I married Carol, a teller I helped train, and now we’re out of Boston Falls, in Machias. It’s just over the line, but I get some satisfaction from getting that far.

Upstairs I still have the old strongbox with some of the money, and though I don’t look at it all that often I feel like I have to have something, something I can tell myself I got from that day we broke into Mike Willard’s house. I have to have something to justify what we did, and what I did. Especially what I did.

After running all that distance home, I stashed the strongbox in the attic, and as I came downstairs my parents came home. Dad patted me on the back and Mom started supper and I thought of the strongbox upstairs and the blood and the acrid smoke and Mike Willard on his back and Brad holding on to his neck like that. I knew no one had seen me. Mom offered me some lemonade and I took it and went to the living room and watched television with my dad, cheering on the Red Sox as they beat the Yankees — all the while waiting and waiting, until finally the sirens went by.

Brad was buried about a hundred feet from Mike Willard a day later. On the day of his funeral, I said I was sick and stayed home, curled up in a ball on my bed, not thinking, not doing anything, just knowing that I had the box and the money.

I put down my empty glass and open the back door, hoping the fresh air will clear my head so I can go back upstairs and try to sleep. Outside there’s a slight breeze blowing in from Boston Falls, and like so many other nights I go down the porch steps and stand with my bare feet cool on the grass, the breeze on my face bringing with it the stench of the mills from Boston Falls. The smell always seems to stick in the back of my throat, and no matter how hard I try I can never get the taste of it out.

During the postwar years I served two masters — running interference and hauling dirty laundry for the two men who defined L.A. at that time better than anyone else. To Howard Hughes I was security boss at his aircraft plant, pimp, and troubleshooter for RKO Pictures — the ex-cop who could kibosh blackmail squeezes, fix drunk drivings, and arrange abortions and dope cures. To Mickey Cohen — rackets overlord and would-be nightclub shtickster — I was a bagman to the LAPD, the former Narco detective who skimmed junk off nigger-town dope rousts, allowing his Southside boys to sell it back to the hordes of schwartzes eager to fly White Powder Airlines. Big Howard: always in the news for crashing an airplane someplace inappropriate, stubbing his face on the control panel in some hicktown beanfield, then showing up at Romanoff’s bandaged like the Mummy with Ava Gardner on his arm; Mickey C.: also a pussy hound par excellence, pub crawling with an entourage of psychopathic killers, press agents, gag writers, and his bulldog Mickey Cohen Jr. — a flatulent beast with a schlong so large that the Mick’s stooges strapped it to a roller skate so it wouldn’t drag on the ground.

Howard Hughes. Mickey Cohen. And me — Turner “Buzz” Meeks, Lizard Ridge, Oklahoma, armadillo poacher; strikebreaker goon; cop; fixer; and keeper of the secret key to his masters’ psyches: they were both cowards mano a mano; airplanes and lunatic factotums their go-betweens — while I would go anywhere, anyplace — gun or billy club first, courting a front-page death to avenge my second-banana life. And the two of them courted me because I put their lack of balls in perspective: it was irrational, meshugah, bad business — a Forest Lawn crypt years before my time. But I got the last laugh there: I always knew that when faced with the grave I’d pull a smart segue to keep kicking — and I write this memoir as an old, old man — while Howard and Mickey stuff caskets, bullshit biographies their only legacy.

Howard. Mickey. Me.

Sooner or later, my work for the two of them had to produce what the yuppie lawyer kids today call “conflict of interest.” Of course, it was over a woman — and, of course, being a suicidal Okie shitkicker, forty-one years old and getting tired, I decided to play both ends against the middle. A thought just hit me: that I’m writing this story because I miss Howard and Mickey, and telling it gives me a chance to be with them again. Keep that in mind — that I loved them — even though they were both world-class shitheels.

January 15,1949.

It was cold and clear in Los Angeles, and the papers were playing up the two-year anniversary of the Black Dahlia murder case — still unsolved, still speculated on. Mickey was still mourning Hooky Rothman’s death — he French-kissed a sawed-off shotgun held by an unknown perpetrator — and Howard was still pissed at me over the Bob Mitchum reefer roust: he figured that my connections with Narco Division were still so solid that I should have seen it coming. I’d been shuttling back and forth between Howard and Mickey since New Year’s. The Mick’s signature fruit baskets stuffed with C-notes had to be distributed to cops, judges, and City Council members he wanted to grease, and the pilot/mogul had me out bird-dogging quiff: prowling bus depots and train stations for buxom young girls who’d fall prey to RKO contracts in exchange for frequent nighttime visits. I’d been having a good run: a half-dozen Midwestern farm maidens were now ensconced in Howard’s fuck pads — strategically located apartments tucked all over L.A. And I was deep in hock to a darktown bookie named Leotis Dineen, a six-foot-six jungle bunny who hated people of the Oklahoma persuasion worse than poison. I was sitting in my Quonset-hut office at Hughes Aircraft when the phone rang.

“That you, Howard?”

Howard Hughes sighed. “What happened to ‘Security, may I help you?

“You’re the only one calls this early, Boss.”

“And you’re alone?”

“Right. Per your instructions to call you Mr. Hughes in the presence of others. What’s up?”

“Breakfast is up. Meet me at the corner of Melrose and La Brea in half an hour.”

“Right, Boss.”

“Two or three, Buzz? I’m hungry and having four.”

Howard was on his all-chilidog diet; Pink’s Dogs at Melrose and La Brea was his current in-spot. I knew for a fact that their chili was made from horse meat air-freighted up daily from Tijuana. “One kraut, no chili.”

“Heathen. Pink’s chili is better than Chasen’s.”

“I had a pony when I was a boy.”

“So? I had a governess. You think I wouldn’t eat —”

I said, “Half an hour,” and hung up. I figured if I got there five minutes late I wouldn’t have to watch the fourth-richest man in America eat.

Howard was picking strands of sauerkraut off his chin when I climbed in the back seat of his limousine. He said, “You didn’t really want it, did you?”

I pressed the button that sent up the screen that shielded us from the driver. “No, coffee and doughnuts are more my style.”

Howard gave me a long, slow eyeballing — a bit ill at ease because sitting down we were the same height, while standing I came up to his shoulders. “Do you need money, Buzz?”

I thought of Leotis Dineen. “Can niggers dance?”

“They certainly can. But call them colored, you never know when one might be listening.”

Larry the chauffeur was Chinese; Howard’s comment made me wonder if his last plane crash had dented his cabeza. I tried my standard opening line. “Getting any, Boss?”

Hughes smiled and burped; horse grease wafted through the back seat. He dug into a pile of papers beside him — blueprints, graphs, and scraps covered with airplane doodles, pulling out a snapshot of a blond girl naked from the waist up. He handed it to me and said, “Gretchen Rae Shoftel, age nineteen. Born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, July 26, 1929. She was staying at the place on South Lucerne — the screening house. This is the woman, Buzz. I think I want to marry her. And she’s gone — she flew the coop on the contract, me, all of it.”

I examined the picture. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was prodigiously lunged — no surprise — with a blond pageboy and smarts in her eyes, like she knew Mr. Hughes’s two-second screen test was strictly an audition for the sack and an occasional one-liner in some RKO turkey. “Who found her for you, Boss? It wasn’t me — I’d have remembered.”

Howard belched again — my hijacked sauerkraut this time. “I got the picture in the mail at the studio, along with an offer —a thousand dollars cash to a PO box in exchange for the girl’s address. I did it, and met Gretchen Rae at her hotel downtown. She told me she posed for some dirty old man back in Milwaukee, that he must have pulled the routine for the thousand. Gretchen Rae and I got to be friends, and, well…”

“And you’ll give me a bonus to find her?”

“A thousand, Buzz. Cash, off the payroll.”

My debt to Leotis Dineen was eight hundred and change; I could get clean and get even on minor-league baseball — the San Diego Seals were starting their preseason games next week. “It’s a deal. What else have you got on the girl?”

“She was carhopping at Scrivner’s Drive-in. I know that.”

“Friends, known associates, relatives here in L.A.?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

I took a deep breath to let Howard know a tricky question was coming. “Boss, you think maybe this girl is working an angle on you? I mean, the picture out of nowhere, the thousand to a PO box?”

Howard Hughes harrumphed. “It had to be that piece in Confidential, the one that alleged my talent scouts take topless photographs and that I like my women endowed.”

“Alleged, Boss?”

“I’m practicing coming off as irate in case I sue Confidential somewhere down the line. You’ll get on this right away?”

“Rápidamente.”

“Outstanding. And don’t forget Sid Weinberg’s party tomorrow night. He’s got a new horror picture coming out from the studio, and I need you there to keep the autograph hounds from going crazy. Eight, Sid’s house.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Find Gretchen Rae, Buzz. She’s special.”

Howard’s one saving grace with females is that he keeps falling in love with them — albeit only after viewing Brownie snaps of their lungs. It more or less keeps him busy between crashing airplanes and designing airplanes that don’t fly.

“Right, Boss.”

The limousine’s phone rang. Howard picked it up, listened, and murmured, “Yes. Yes, I’ll tell him.” Hanging up, he said, “The switchboard at the plant. Mickey Cohen wants to see you. Make it brief, you’re on my time now.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was Howard who introduced me to Mickey, right before I got wounded in a dope shootout and took my LAPD pension. I still give him a hand with his drug dealings — unofficial liaison to Narcotics Division, point man for the Narco dicks who skim x number of grams off every ounce of junk confiscated. The LAPD has got an unofficial heroin policy: it is to be sold only to coloreds, only east of Alvarado and south of Jefferson. I don’t think it should be sold anywhere, but as long as it is, I want the 5 percent. I test the shit with a chem kit I stole from the crime lab — no poor hophead is going to croak from a Mickey Cohen bindle bootjacked by Turner “Buzz” Meeks. Dubious morality: I sleep well 90 percent of the time and lay my bet action off with shine bookies, the old exploiter washing the hand that feeds him. Money was right at the top of my brain as I drove to Mickey’s haberdashery on the Strip. I always need cash, and the Mick never calls unless it is in the offing.

I found the man in his back room, surrounded by sycophants and muscle: Johnny Stompanato, guinea spit curl dangling over his handsome face — he of the long-term crush on Lana Turner; Davey Goldman, Mickey’s chief yes-man and the author of his nightclub shticks; and a diffident-looking little guy I recognized as Morris Hornbeck — an accountant and former trigger for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob in Milwaukee. Shaking hands and pulling up a chair, I got ready to make my pitch: You pay me now; I do my job after I run a hot little errand for Howard. I opened my mouth to speak, but Mickey beat me to it. “I want you to find a woman for me.”

I was about to say “What a coincidence,” when Johnny Stomp handed me a snapshot. “Nice gash. Not Lana Turner quality, but USDA choice tail nonetheless.”

Of course, you see it coming. The photo was a nightspot job: compliments of Preston Sturges’s Players Club, Gretchen Rae Shoftel blinking against flashbulb glare, dairy-state pulchritude in a tight black dress. Mickey Cohen was draping an arm around her shoulders, aglow with love. I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “Where was the wife, Mick? Off on one of her Hadassah junkets?”

Mickey grunted. “‘Israel, the New Homeland.’ Ten-day tour with her mahjong club. While the cat is away, the mice will play. Va-va-va-voom. Find her, Buzzchik. A grand.”

I got obstreperous, my usual reaction to being scared. “Two grand, or go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”

Mickey scowled and went into a slow burn; I watched Johnny Stomp savor my bravado, Davey Goldman write down the line for his boss’s shticks, and Morris Hornbeck do queasy double takes like he wasn’t copacetic with the play. When the Mick’s burn stretched to close to a minute, I said, “Silence implies consent. Tell me all you know about the girl, and I’ll take it from there.”

Mickey Cohen smiled at me — his coming-from-hunger minion. “Goyische shitheel. For a twosky I want satisfaction guaranteed within forty-eight hours.”

I already had the money laid off on baseball, the fights, and three-horse parlays. “Forty-seven and change. Go.”

Mickey eyed his boys as he spoke — probably because he was pissed at me and needed a quick intimidation fix. Davey and Johnny Stomp looked away; Morris Hornbeck just twitched, like he was trying to quash a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. “Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I met her at Scrivner’s Drive-in two weeks ago. She told me she’s fresh out of the Minnesota sticks, someplace like that. She —”

I interrupted. “She said ‘Minnesota’ specifically, Mick?”

“Right. Moosebreath, Dogturd, some boonies town — but definitely Minnesota.”

Morris Hornbeck was sweating now; I had myself a hot lead. “Keep going, Mick.”

“Well, we hit it off; I convince Lavonne to see Israel before them dune coons take it back; Gretchen Rae and I get together; we va-va-va-voom; it’s terrific. She plays cagey with me, won’t tell me where she’s staying, and she keeps taking off — says she’s looking for a man — some friend of her father’s back in Antelope Ass or wherever the fuck she comes from. Once she’s gassed on vodka Collinses and gets misty about some hideaway she says she’s got. That —”

I said, “Wrap it up.”

Mickey slammed his knees so hard that Mickey Cohen Jr., asleep in the doorway twenty feet away, woke up and tried to stand on all fours — until the roller skate attached to his wang pulled him back down. “I’ll fucking wrap you up if you don’t find her for me! That’s it! I want her! Find her for me! Do it now!”

I got to my feet wondering how I was going to pull this one off— with the doorman gig at Sid Weinberg’s party thrown smack in the middle of it. I said, “Forty-seven fifty-five and rolling,” and winked at Morris Hornbeck — who just happened to hail from Milwaukee, where Howard told me Gretchen Rae Shoftel told him a dirty old man had snapped her lung shots. Hornbeck tried to wink back; it looked like his eyeball was having a grand mal seizure. Mickey said, “Find her for me. And you gonna be at Sid’s tomorrow night?”

“Keeping autograph hounds at bay. You?”

“Yeah, I’ve got points in Sid’s new picture. I want hot dope by then, Buzzchik. Hot.”

I said, “Scalding,” and took off, almost tripping over Mickey Cohen Jr.’s appendage as I went out the door.

A potential three grand in my kick; Morris Hornbeck’s hinkyness doing a slow simmer in my gourd; an instinct that Gretchen Rae Shoftel’s “hideaway” was Howard Hughes’s fuck pad on South Lucerne — the place where he kept the stash of specially cantilevered bras he designed to spotlight his favorite starlets tits, cleavage gowns for his one-night inamoratas, and the stag film collection he showed to visiting defense contractors — some of them rumored to costar Mickey Cohen Jr. and a bimbo made up to resemble Howard’s personal heroine: Amelia Earhart. But first there was Scrivner’s Drive-in and a routine questioning of Gretchen Rae’s recent coworkers. Fear adrenaline was scorching my soul as I drove there — maybe I’d played my shtick too tight to come out intact.

Scrivner’s was on Sunset three blocks east of Hollywood High School, an eat-in-your-car joint featuring a rocket-ship motif—chromium scoops, dips, and portholes abounding — Jules Verne as seen by a fag set designer scraping the stars on marijuana. The carhops — all zaftig numbers — wore tight space-cadet outfits; the fry cooks wore plastic rocket helmets with clear face shields to protect them from spattering grease. Questioning a half-dozen of them was like enjoying the DTs without benefit of booze. After an hour of talk and chump-change handouts, I knew the following:

That Gretchen Rae Shoftel carhopped there for a month, was often tardy, and during midafternoon lulls tended to abandon her shift. This was tolerated because she was an atom-powered magnet that attracted men by the shitload. She could tote up tabs in her head, deftly computing sales tax — but had a marked tendency toward spilling milkshakes and French fries. When the banana-split-loving Mickey Cohen started snouting around after her, the manager gave her the go-by, no doubt leery of attracting the criminal elements who had made careers out of killing innocent bystanders while trying to kill the Mick. Aside from that I glommed one hard lead plus suppositions to hang it on: Gretchen Rae had persistently questioned the Scrivner’s crew about a recent regular customer —a man with a long German surname who’d been eating at the counter, doing arithmetic tricks with meal tabs, and astounding the locals with five-minute killings of the L.A. Times crossword. He was an old geez with a European accent — and he stopped chowing at Scrivner’s right before Gretchen Rae Shoftel hired on. Mickey told me the quail had spoken of looking for a friend of her father’s; Howard had said she was from Wisconsin; German accents pointed to the dairy state in a big way. And Morris Hornbeck, Mr. Shakes just a few hours before, had been a Milwaukee mob trigger and moneyman. And — the lovely Gretchen Rae had continued carhopping after becoming the consort of two of the richest, most powerful men in Los Angeles — an eye-opener if ever there was one.

I drove to a pay phone and made some calls, straight and collect. An old LAPD pal gave me the lowdown on Morris Hornbeck — he had two California convictions for felony statch rape, both complainants thirteen-year-old girls. A guy on the Milwaukee force that I’d worked liaison with supplied Midwestern skinny: Little Mo was a glorified bookkeeper for Jerry Katzenbach’s mob, run out of town by his boss in ‘47, when he was given excess gambling skim to invest as he saw best and opened a call house specializing in underaged poon dressed up as movie stars — greenhorn girls coiffed, cosmeticized, and gowned to resemble Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Veronica Lake, and the like. The operation was a success, but Jerry Katzenbach, Knights of Columbus family man, considered it bum PR. Adios, Morris — who obviously found an amenable home in L.A.

On Gretchen Rae Shoftel, I got bubbkis; ditto on the geezer with the arithmetic tricks similar to the carhop/vamp. The girl had no criminal record in either California or Wisconsin — but I was willing to bet she’d learned her seduction techniques at Mo Hornbeck’s whorehouse.

I drove to Howard Hughes’s South Lucerne Street fuck pad and let myself in with a key from my fourteen-pound Hughes Enterprises key ring. The house was furnished with leftovers from the RKO prop department, complete with appropriate female accoutrements for each of the six bedrooms. The Moroccan Room featured hammocks and settees from Casbah Nocturne and a rainbow array of low-cut silk lounging pajamas; the Billy the Kid Room — where Howard brought his Jane Russell look-alikes — was four walls of mock-saloon bars with halter-top cowgirl getups and a mattress covered by a Navajo blanket. My favorite was the Zoo Room: taxidermied cougar, bison, moose, and bobcats — shot by Ernest Hemingway — mounted with their eyes leering down on a narrow strip of sheet-covered floor. Big Ernie told me he decimated the critter population of two Montana counties in order to achieve the effect. There was a kitchen stocked with plenty of fresh milk, peanut butter, and jelly to sate teenage taste buds, a room to screen stag movies, and the master bedroom — my bet for where Howard installed Gretchen Rae Shoftel.

I took the back staircase up, walked down the hall, and pushed the door open, expecting the room’s usual state: big white bed and plain white walls — the ironic accompaniment to snatched virginity. I was wrong; what I saw was some sort of testament to squarejohn American homelife.

Mixmasters, cookie sheets, toasters, and matched cutlery sets rested on the bed; the walls were festooned with Currier & Ives calendars and framed Saturday Evening Post covers drawn by Norman Rockwell. A menagerie of stuffed animals was admiring the artwork — pandas and tigers and Disney characters placed against the bed, heads tilted upward. There was a bentwood rocker in a corner next to the room’s one window. The seat held a stack of catalogs. I leafed through them: Motorola radios, Hamilton Beach kitchen goodies, bed quilts from a mailorder place in New Hampshire. In all of them the less-expensive items were check-marked. Strange, since Howard let his master-bedroom poon have anything they wanted — top-of-the-line charge accounts, the magilla.

I checked the closet. It held the standard Hughes wardrobe — low-cut gowns and tight cashmere sweaters, plus a half-dozen Scrivner’s carhop outfits, replete with built-in uplift breastplates, which Gretchen Rae Shoftel didn’t need. Seeing a row of empty hangers, I checked for more catalogs and found a Bullocks Wilshire job under the bed. Flipping through it, I saw tweedy skirts and suits, flannel blazers, and prim and proper wool dresses circled; Howard’s charge account number was scribbled at the top of the back page. Gretchen Rae Shoftel, math whiz, searching for another math whiz, was contemplating making herself over as Miss Upper-Middle-Class Rectitude.

I checked out the rest of the fuck pad — quick eyeball prowls of the other bedrooms, a toss of the downstairs closets. Empty Bullocks boxes were everywhere — Gretchen Rae had accomplished her transformation. Howard liked to keep his girls cash-strapped to ensure their obedience, but I was willing to guess he stretched the rules for this one. Impersonating a police officer, I called the dispatcher’s office at the Yellow and Beacon cab companies. Pay dirt at Beacon: three days ago at 3:10 p.m., a cab was dispatched to 436 South Lucerne; its destination: 2281 South Mariposa.

Big pay dirt.

2281 South Mariposa was a Mickey Cohen hideout, an armed fortress where the Mick’s triggers holed up during their many skirmishes with the Jack Dragna gang. It was steel-reinforced concrete; shitloads of canned goods in the bomb shelter/basement; racks of Tommys and pump shotguns behind fake walls covered by cheesecake pics. Only Mickey’s boys knew about the place — making it conclusive proof that Morris Hornbeck was connected to Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I drove to Jefferson and Mariposa — quicksville.

It was a block of wood-frame houses, small, neatly tended, mostly owned by Japs sprung from the relocation camps, anxious to stick together and assert their independence in new territory. 2281 was as innocuous and sanitary as any pad on the block: Mickey had the best Jap gardener in the area. No cars were in the driveway; the cars parked curbside looked harmless enough, and the nearest local taking the sun was a guy sitting on a porch swing four houses down. I walked up to the front door, punched in a window, reached around to the latch, and let myself in.

The living room — furnished by Mickey’s wife, Lavonne, with sofas and chairs from the Hadassah thrift shop — was tidy and totally silent. I was half-expecting a killer hound to pounce on me before I snapped that Lavonne had forbid the Mick to get a dog because it might whiz on the carpeting. Then I caught the smell.

Decomposition hits you in the tear ducts and gut about simultaneously. I tied my handkerchief over my mouth and nose, grabbed a lamp for a weapon, and walked toward the stink. It was in the right front bedroom, and it was a doozie.

There were two stiffs — a dead man on the floor and another on the bed. The floor man was lying face-down, with a white nightgown still pinned with a Bullocks price tag knotted around his neck. Congealed beef stew covered his face, the flesh cracked and red from scalding. A saucepan was upended a few feet away, holding the caked remains of the goo. Somebody was cooking when the altercation came down.

I laid down the lamp and gave the floor stiff a detailed eyeing. He was fortyish, blond and fat; whoever killed him had tried to burn off his fingerprints — the tips on both hands were scorched black, which meant that the killer was an amateur: the only way to eliminate prints is to do some chopping. A hot plate was tossed in a corner near the bed; I checked it out and saw seared skin stuck to the coils. The bed stiff was right there, so I took a deep breath, tightened my mask, and examined him. He was an old guy, skinny, dressed in clothes too heavy for winter L.A. There was not one mark of any kind on him; his singed-fingered hands had been folded neatly on his chest, rest in peace, like a mortician had done the job. I checked his coat and trouser pockets — goose egg — and gave him a few probes for broken bones. Double gooser. Just then a maggot crawled out of his gaping mouth, doing a spastic little lindy hop on the tip of his tongue.

I walked back into the living room, picked up the phone, and called a man who owes me a big, big favor pertaining to his wife’s association with a Negro nun and a junior congressman from Whittier. The man is a crime-scene technician with the Sheriff’s Department; a med school dropout adept at spot-checking cadavers and guessing causes of death. He promised to be at 2281 South Mariposa within the hour in an unmarked car — ten minutes of forensic expertise in exchange for my erasure of his debt.

I went back to the bedroom, carrying a pot of Lavonne Cohen’s geraniums to help kill the stink. The floor stiff’s pockets had been picked clean; the bed stiff had no bruises on his head, and there were now two maggots doing a tango across his nose. Morris Hornbeck, a pro, probably packed a silencered heater like most Mickey muscle — he looked too scrawny to be a hand-to-hand killer. I was starting to make Gretchen Rae Shoftel for the snuffs — and I was starting to like her.

Lieutenant Kirby Falwell showed up a few minutes later, tap-tap-tap on the window I broke. I let him in, and he lugged his evidence kit into the bedroom, pinching his nose. I left him there to be scientific, staying in the living room so as not to bruise his ego with my inside scoop on his wife. After half an hour he came out and greeted me:

“We’re even, Meeks. The clown on the floor was hit on the head with a flat, blunt object, maybe a frying pan. It probably knocked him silly. Then somebody threw their dinner in his face and gave him second-degree burns. Then they strangled him with that negligee. I’ll give you asphyxiation as ‘cause of death. On Pops, I’d say heart attack—natural causes. I mighta said poison, but his liver isn’t distended. Heart attack, fifty-fifty odds. Both dead about two days. I picked the scabs off both sets of fingers and rolled their prints. I suppose you want a forty-eight-state Teletype on them?”

I shook my head. “California and Wisconsin — but quick.”

“Inside four hours. We’re even, Meeks.”

“Take the nightgown home to the wife, Kirby. She’ll find a use for it.”

“Fuck you, Meeks.”

“Adios, Lieutenant.”

I settled in, the lights off, figuring if Mo Hornbeck and Gretchen Rae were some kind of partners, he would be by to dump the stiffs, or she would be, or someone would drop in to say hello. I sat in a chair by the front door, the lamp in my hand ready to swing if it came to that kind of play. Danger juice was keeping me edgy; my brain fluids were roiling, trying to figure a way out of the parlay—my two benefactors hiring me to glom one woman for their exclusive use, two corpses thrown in. As hard as I brainstormed, I couldn’t think up squat. With half an hour to kill before I called Kirby Falwell, I gave up and tried the Other Guy Routine.

The Other Guy Routine dates back to my days as a youth in Oklahoma, when my old man would beat the shit out of my old lady, and I’d haul a mattress out into the scrub woods so I wouldn’t have to listen. I’d set my armadillo traps down, and every once in a while I’d hear a snap-squeak as some stupid ‘dillo ate my bait and got his spine crunched for his trouble. When I finally fell asleep, I’d usually wake up to screeches — men hurting women — always just wind playing havoc with the scrub pines. I’d start thinking then: ways to get the old man off the old lady’s back without consulting my brother Fud — in the Texas Pen for armed robbery and grievous aggravated assault. I knew I didn’t have the guts to confront Pop myself, so I started thinking about other people just to get him off my mind. And that always let me develop a play: some church woman conned into dropping off a pie and religious tracts to calm the old man down; steering some local slick who thought Mom was a beauty in her direction, knowing Pop was a coward with other men and would love up the old girl for weeks and weeks just to keep her. That last play stood all of us good at the end — it was right before the old lady caught typhus. She took to bed with a fever, and the old man got in with her to keep her warm. He caught it himself— and died — sixteen days after she did. Under the circumstances, you have to believe there was nothing but love between them — right up to curtains.

So the Other Guy Routine gets you out of the hole and makes some other poor fuck feel good in the process. I worked it in niggertown as a cop: let some pathetic grasshopper slide, send him a Mickey fruit basket at Christmas, get him to snitch a horse pusher and skim 5 percent full of yuletide cheer. The only trouble with it this time is that I was locked on the horns of a jumbo dilemma: Mickey, Howard — two patrons, only one woman. And claiming failure with either man was against my religion.

I gave up thinking and called Kirby Falwell at the Sheriff’s Bureau. His two-state Teletype yielded heat:

The floor stiff was Fritz Steinkamp, Chicago-Milwaukee gunsel, one conviction for attempted murder, currently on parole and believed to be a Jerry Katzenbach torpedo. Mr. Heart Attack was Voyteck Kirnipaski, three-time loser, also a known Katzenbach associate, his falls for extortion and grand larceny — specifically stock swindles. The picture getting a little less hazy, I called Howard Hughes at his flop at the Bel Air Hotel. Two rings, hang up, three rings — so he’d know it’s not some gossip columnist.

“Yes?”

“Howard, you been in Milwaukee the past few years?”

“I was in Milwaukee in the spring of’47. Why?”

“Any chance you went to a whorehouse that specialized in girls made up like movie stars?”

Howard sighed. “Buzz, you know my alleged propensity in that department. Is this about Gretchen Rae?”

“Yeah. Did you?”

“Yes. I was entertaining some colleagues from the Pentagon. We had a party with several young women. My date looked just like Jean Arthur, only a bit more …endowed. Jean broke my heart, Buzz. You know that.”

“Yeah. Did the high brass get looped and start talking shop around the girls?”

“Yes, I suppose so. What does this —”

“Howard, what did you and Gretchen Rae talk about — besides your sex fantasies?”

“Well, Gretchy seemed to be interested in business — stock mergers, the little companies I’ve been buying up, that sort of thing. Also politics. My Pentagon chums have told me about Korea heating up, implying lots of aircraft business. Gretchy seemed interested in that, too. A smart girl always interests herself in her lovers’ endeavors, Buzz. You know that. Have you got leads on her?”

“I surely have. Boss, how have you managed to stay alive and rich so long?”

“I trust the right people, Buzz. Do you believe that?”

“I surely do.”

I gave my sitting-in-the-dark stakeout another three hours, then raided the icebox for energy and took the Other Guy Routine on the road, a mitzvah for Mickey in case I had to play an angle to shoot Gretchen Rae to Howard — his very own teenage murderess. First I wrapped up Fritz Steinkamp in three windows’ worth of chintz curtains and hauled him out to my car; next I mummified Voyteck Kirnipaski in a bedspread and wedged him into the trunk between Fritz and my spare tire. Then it was a routine wipe of my own possible prints, lights off, and a drive out to Topanga Canyon, to the chemical debris dump operated by the Hughes Tool Company —a reservoir bubbling with caustic agents adjacent to a day camp for underprivileged kids: a Howard tax dodge. I dumped Fritz and Voyteck into the cauldron and listened to them snap, crackle, and pop like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. Then, just after midnight, I drove to the Strip to look for Mickey and his minions.

They weren’t at the Trocadero, the Mocambo, or the La Rue; they weren’t at Sherry’s or Dave’s Blue Room. I called the DMV night information line, played cop, and got a read on Mo Hornbeck’s wheels —1946 tan Dodge Coupe, CAL-4986-J, 896¼  Moonglow Vista, South Pasadena — then took the Arroyo Seco over the hill to the address, a block of bungalow courts.

At the left side tail end of a stucco streamline job was 896V4 — rounded handrails and oblong louvers fronting tiny windows strictly for show. No lights were burning; Hornbeck’s Dodge was not in the carport at the rear. Maybe Gretchen Rae was inside, armed with stuffed animals, negligee garrotes, stew pots, and frying pans — and that suddenly made me not give a fuck whether the world laid, prayed, stayed, or strayed. I kicked the door in, flipped on a wall light, and got knocked flat on my ass by a big furry mother with big, shiny, razor-white teeth.

It was a Doberman, sleek black muscle out for blood — mine. The dog snapped at my shoulder and got a snootful of Hart, Schaffner & Marx worsted; he snapped at my face and got an awkwardly thrown Meeks right jab that caused him to flinch momentarily. I dug in my pocket for my Arkansas toad stabber, popped the button, and flailed with it; I grazed the beast’s paws and snout — and he still kept snapping and snarling.

Giving the fucker a stationary target was the only way. I put my left arm over my eyes and tried to stay supine; Rex the Wonder Dog went for my big, fat, juicy elbow. I hooked my shiv up at his gut, jammed it in, and yanked forward. Entrails dropped all over me; Rex vomited blood in my face and died with a snap-gurgle.

I kicked the day’s third corpse off of me, stumbled to the bathroom, rummaged through the medicine cabinet, and found witch hazel. I doused my elbow bite and the blood-oozing teeth marks on my knuckles. Deep breathing, I splashed sink water on my face, looked in the mirror, and saw a middle-aged fat man, terrified and pissed to his drawers, in deep, deep shit without a depth gauge. I held the gaze, thinking it wasn’t me for long seconds. Then I smashed the image with the witch hazel bottle and eyeballed the rest of the bungalow.

The larger of the two bedrooms had to be Gretchen Rae’s. It was all girlish gewgaws: pandas and arcade Kewpie dolls, pinups of matinee idols and college pennants on the walls. Kitchen appliances still in their boxes were stacked on the dresser; publicity glossies of RKO pretty boys littered the bedspread.

The other bedroom reeked of VapoRub and liniment and sweat and flatulence — bare walls, the floor space almost completely taken up by a sagging Murphy bed. There was a medicine bottle on the nightstand — Dr. Revelle prescribing Demerol for Mr. Hornbeck — and checking under the pillow got me a .38 Police Special. I flipped the cylinder, extracted four of the shells, and stuck the gun in my waistband, then went back to the living room and picked up the dog, gingerly, so as not to drench myself in his gore. I noticed that it was a female; that a tag on its collar read janet. That hit me as the funniest thing since vaudeville, and I started laughing wildly, shock coming on. I spotted an Abercrombie & Fitch dog bed in the corner, dumped Janet in it, doused the lights in the room, found a couch, and collapsed. I was heading into some sort of weird heebie-jeebie haze when wood creaking, a choked “Oh my God!” and hot yellow glare jolted me to my feet.

“Oh Janet, no!”

Mo Hornbeck beelined for the dead dog, not even noticing me. I stuck out my leg and tripped him; he hit the floor almost snout to snout with Janet. And I was right there, gun at his head, snarling like the psycho Okie killer I could have been. “Boy, you’re gonna blab on you, Gretchen Rae, and them bodies on Mariposa. You’re gonna spill on her and Howard Hughes, and I mean now.”

Hornbeck found some balls quicksville, averting his eyes from the dog, latching them onto me. “Fuck you, Meeks.”

“Fuck you” was acceptable from a ranking sheriff’s dick in my debt, but not from a statch raper hoodlum. I opened the .38s cylinder and showed Hornbeck the two rounds, then spun it and put the muzzle to his head. “Talk. Now.”

Hornbeck said, “Fuck you, Meeks”; I pulled the trigger; he gasped and looked at the dog, turning purple at the temples, red at the cheeks. Seeing myself in a cell next to Fud, the Meeks boys playing pinochle sideways through the bars, I popped off another shot, the hammer clicking on an empty chamber. Hornbeck bit at the carpet to stanch his tremors, going deep purple, then subsiding into shades of crimson, pink, death’s-head white. Finally he spat dust and dog hair and gasped, “The pills by my bed and the bottle in the cupboard.”

I obeyed, and the two of us sat on the porch like good buddies and killed the remains of the jug — Old Overholt Bonded. Hornbeck blasted Demerol pills along with the juice, flew to cloud nine, and told me the saddest goddamn story I’d ever heard.

Gretchen Rae Shoftel was his daughter. Mom hit the road shortly after she was born, hightailing it to parts unknown with a Schlitz Brewery driver rumored to be double-digit hung, like the human equivalent of Mickey Cohen Jr.; he raised Gretch as best he could, nursing a bad case of the hots for her, ashamed of it until he picked up scads of unrelated skinny: that his wife was servicing the entire Schlitz night shift during the time his little girl was conceived. On general principles he stayed hands-off, taking his lust out on girls from the greenhorn hooker camps up in Green Bay and Saint Paul.

Gretchy grew up strange, ashamed of her old man — a gang stooge and occasional killer. She took her old lady’s maiden name and buried her head in books, loving arithmetic tricks, figures, calculations — stuff that proved she was smart. She also took up with a rough South Milwaukee crowd. One crazy Polack boyfriend beat her silly every night for a week straight when she was fifteen. Mo found out, put the kid in cement skates, and dumped him in Lake Michigan. Father and daughter were happily reunited by the revenge.

Mo moved up in Jerry Katzenbach’s organization; Gretch got a bundle together tricking the hotel bars in Chicago. Mo installed Gretchen Rae as sixteen-year-old pit boss of a swank whorehouse: movie-star surrogates, the rooms bugged to pick up gangland and political skinny that might prove valuable to Jerry K. Gretch got friendly with stock swindler Voyteck Kirnipaski; she just happened to be listening through a vent one night when Howard Hughes and a cadre of Army three-stars were cavorting with Jean Arthur, Lupe Velez, and Carole Lombard, greenhorn versions. Gretch picked up lots of juicy Wall Street gossip, and realized that this could be the start of something big. Mo contracted stomach cancer about that time and got the word: half a decade tops — enjoy life while you can. Cash skimmed off Jerry Katzenbach’s books provided class-A treatment. Mo held his own against the Big C. Jerry K. got bum press for his whorehouse, kiboshed it, and banished Mo to the Coast, where Mickey Cohen welcomed him with open arms, using his juice to get Mo’s two statch-rape indiscretions plea-bargained to bubbkis.

Back in Milwaukee, Gretchen Rae audited business classes at Marquette, and hauled Voyteck Kirnipaski’s ashes for free when she learned he was working for Jerry K. and was dissatisfied with the pay. Then Mo had a relapse and came back to Milwaukee on a visit; Voyteck Kirnipaski skipped town with a bundle of Katzenbach’s money so he could bankroll stock swindles in L.A.; Gretchen Rae, always reading the papers with an eye toward political repercussions, put her overheard dope from Howard and the high brass together with whispers on the Korea situation and decided to get more info from the man himself. Mo took some lung shots of his little girl and mailed them to Big How; he bit; Gretchy glommed leads that the on-the-lam and hotly pursued Voyteck was hanging out at Scrivner’s Drive-in, and, wanting to enlist his aid in possible squeeze plays, got a job there. Mickey Cohen’s crush on her put a monkey wrench into things — but she thought, somehow, that the little big man could be tapped for juice. She became his consort concurrent with Howard, father and daughter pretending to be strangers at Mickey’s nightclub get-togethers. Then, at a Santa Monica motel, she located Voyteck, terrified that Katzenbach triggers were right behind him. Mo gave her the key to Mickey’s Mariposa Street hideout; she ensconced Voyteck there, moving back and forth between Howard’s fuck pad, pumping information subtly and pumping Kirnipaski blatantly — attempting to lure him into her web of schemes. She was making progress when Fritz Steinkamp made the scene. And damned if Gretchy didn’t rise to the occasion and throttle, scald, and frying pan him to death. She attempted to soothe the terrified Voyteck afterward, but he went into cardiac arrest: the volatile combo of a murder attempt, a murder, and a murderess’s tongue. Gretchen Rae panicked and took off with Voyteck’s pilfered cash — and was currently trying to unload “secret insider” prospectuses on Hughes stock to a list of potential customers Kirnipaski had compiled. The girl was holed up someplace — Mo didn’t know where — and tomorrow she would be calling at the homes and offices of her last wave of potential “clients.”

Somewhere in the course of the story I started liking Mo almost as much as I liked Gretchen Rae. I still couldn’t see anyway out of the mess, but I was curious about one thing: the girly gewgaws, the appliances, all the squarejohn homey stuff Gretchy had glommed. When Mo finished his tale, I said, “What’s with all the clothes and gadgets and stuffed animals?”

Morris Hornbeck, worm bait inside six months, just sighed. “Lost time, Meeks. The father-and-daughter act someplace safe, the shtick we shoulda played years ago. But that’s tap city, now.”

I pointed to the dead dog, its paws starting to curl with rigor mortis like it was going to be begging biscuits for eternity. “Maybe not. You sure ain’t gonna have a trusty mascot, but you might get a little taste of the rest.”

Morris went to his bedroom and passed out. I laid down on the homey dreambed, holding a stuffed panda, the lights off to ensure some good brainwork. Straight manipulation of Mickey and Howard fell by the wayside quick, so I shifted to the Other Guy Routine and made a snag.

Sid Weinberg.

RKO line producer.

Filthy-rich purveyor of monster cheapies, drive-in circuit turkeys that raked in the cash.

A valuable RKO mainstay—his pictures never flopped. Howard kissed his ass, worshiped his dollars-and-cents approach to moviemaking, and gave him carte blanche at the studio.

“I’d rather lose my you-know-what than lose Sid Weinberg.”

Mickey Cohen was indebted to Sid Weinberg, the owner of the Blue Lagoon Saloon, where Mickey was allowed to perform his atrocious comedy routines without cops hanging around — Sid had LAPD connections.

The Mick: “I’d be without a pot to piss in without Sid. I’d have to buy my own nightclub, and that’s no fun — it’s like buying your own baseball team so you can play yourself.”

Sid Weinberg was a widower, a man with two grown daughters who patronized him as a buffoon. He often spoke of his desire to find himself a live-in housekeeper to do light dusting and toss him a little on the side. About fifteen years ago, he was known to be in love with a dazzling blond starlet named Glenda Jensen, who hotfooted it off into the sunset one day, never to be seen again. I’d seen pictures of Glenda; she looked suspiciously like my favorite teenage killer. At eight tomorrow night Sid Weinberg was throwing a party to ballyhoo Bride of the Surf Monster. I was to provide security. Mickey Cohen and Howard Hughes would be guests.

I fell asleep on the thought, and dreamed that benevolent dead dogs were riding me up to heaven, my pockets full of other guys’ money.

In the morning we took off after the prodigal daughter. I drove, Mo Hornbeck gave directions — where he figured Gretchen Rae would be, based on their last conversation — a panicky talk two days ago; the girl afraid of phone taps; Mo saying he would let the evidence chill, then dispose of it.

Which, of course, he didn’t. According to Mo, Gretch told him Voyteck Kirnipaski had given her a list of financial-district sharks who might be interested in her Hughes Enterprises graphs: when to buy and sell shares in Toolco, Hughes Aircraft, and its myriad subsidiaries — based on her new knowledge of upcoming defense contracts and her assessment of probable stock price fluctuations. Mo stressed that was why Gretchy raped the Bullocks catalog — she wanted to look like a businesswoman, not a seductress/killer.

So we slow-lane trawled downtown, circuiting the Spring Street financial district, hoping to catch a streetside glimpse of Gretchen Rae as she made her office calls. I’d won Mo partially over with kind words and a promise to plant Janet in a ritzy West L.A. pet cemetery, but I could still tell he didn’t trust me — I was too close to Mickey for too long. He gave me a steady sidelong fisheye and only acknowledged my attempts at conversation with grunts.

The morning came and went; the afternoon followed. Mo had no leads on Gretchen Rae’s home calls, so we kept circling Spring Street — Third to Sixth and back again — over and over, taking piss stops at the Pig & Whistle on Fourth and Broadway every two hours. Dusk came on, and I started getting scared: my Other Guy Routine would work to perfection only if I brought Gretchy to Sid Weinberg’s party right on time.

6:00.

6:30.

7:00.

7:09. I was turning the corner onto Sixth Street when Mo grabbed my arm and pointed out the window at a sharkskin-clad secretary type perusing papers by the newsstand. “There. That’s my baby.”

I pulled over; Mo stuck his head out the door and waved, then shouted, “No! Gretchen!”

I was setting the hand brake when I saw the girl — Gretch with her hair in a bun — notice a man on the street and start running. Mo piled out of the car and headed toward the guy; he pulled a monster hand-cannon, aimed, and fired twice. Mo fell dead on the sidewalk, half his face blown off; the man pursued Gretchen Rae; I pursued him.

The girl ran inside an office building, the gunman close behind. I caught up, peered in, and saw him at the top of the second-floor landing. I slammed the door and stepped back; the act coaxed two wasted shots out of the killer, glass and wood exploding all around me. Four rounds gone, two to go.

Screams on the street; two sets of footsteps scurrying upstairs; sirens in the distance. I ran to the landing and shouted, “Police!” The word drew two ricocheting bang-bangs. I hauled my fat ass up to floor 3 like a flabby dervish.

The gunman was fumbling with a pocketful of loose shells; he saw me just as he flicked his pieces cylinder open. I was within three stairs of him. Not having time to load and fire, he kicked. I grabbed his ankle and pulled him down the stairs; we fell together in a tangle of arms and legs, hitting the landing next to an open window.

We swung at each other, two octopuses, blows and gouges that never really connected. Finally he got a chokehold on my neck; I reached up through his arms and jammed my thumbs hard in his eyes. The bastard let go just long enough for me to knee his balls, squirm away, and grab him by the scalp. Blinded now, he flailed for me. I yanked him out the window head first, pushing his feet after him. He hit the pavement spread-eagled, and even from three stories up I could hear his skull crack like a giant eggshell.

I got some more breath, hauled up to the roof, and pushed the door open. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was sitting on a roll of tarpaper, smoking a cigarette, two long single tears rolling down her cheeks. She said, “Did you come to take me back to Milwaukee?”

All I could think of to say was “No.”

Gretchen reached behind the tarpaper and picked up a briefcase — brand-new, Bullocks Wilshire quality. The sirens downstairs were dying out; two bodies gave lots of cops lots to do. I said, “Mickey or Howard, Miss Shoftel? You got a choice.”

Gretch stubbed out her cigarette. “They both stink.” She hooked a thumb over the roof in the direction of the dead gunman. “I’ll take my chances with Jerry Katzenbach and his friends. Daddy went down tough. So will I.”

I said, “You’re not that stupid.”

Gretchen Rae said, “You play the market?”

I said, “Want to meet a nice rich man who needs a friend?”

Gretchen Rae pointed to a ladder that connected the roof to the fire escape of the adjoining building. “If it’s now, I’ll take it.”

In the cab to Beverly Hills I filled Gretchy in on the play, promising all kinds of bonuses I couldn’t deliver, like the Morris Hornbeck Scholarship for impoverished Marquette University Business School students. Pulling up to Sid Weinberg’s Tudor mansion, the girl had her hair down, makeup on, and was ready to do the save-my-ass tango.

At 8:03 the manse was lit up like a Christmas tree — extras in green rubber monster costumes handing out drinks on the front lawn and loudspeakers on the roof blasting the love theme from a previous Weinberg tuna, Attack of the Atomic Gargoyles. Mickey and Howard always arrived at parties late in order not to appear too eager, so I figured there was time to set things up.

I led Gretchen Rae inside, into an incredible scene: Hollywood’s great, near-great, and non-great boogie-woogieing with scads of chorus boys and chorus girls dressed like surf monsters, atomic gargoyles, and giant rodents from Mars; bartenders sucking punch out of punchbowls with ray-gun-like siphons; tables of cold cuts dyed surf-monster green — passed up by the guests en masse in favor of good old booze — the line for which stood twenty deep. Beautiful gash was abounding, but Gretchen Rae, hair down like Sid Weinberg’s old love Glenda Jensen, was getting the lion’s share of the wolf stares. I stood with her by the open front door, and when Howard Hughes’s limousine pulled up, I whispered, “Now.”

Gretchen slinked back to Sid Weinberg’s glass-fronted private office in slow, slow motion; Howard, tall and handsome in a tailored tux, walked in the door, nodding to me, his loyal underling. I said, “Good evening, Mr. Hughes” out loud; under my breath, “You owe me a grand.”

I pointed to Sid’s office; Howard followed. We got there just as Gretchen Rae Shoftel/Glenda Jensen and Sid Weinberg went into a big open-mouthed clinch. I said, “I’ll lean on Sid, boss. Kosher is kosher. He’ll listen to reason. Trust me.”

Inside of six seconds I saw the fourth-richest man in America go from heartsick puppy dog to hard-case robber baron and back at least a dozen times. Finally he jammed his hands in his pockets, fished out a wad of C-notes, and handed them to me. He said, “Find me another one just like her,” and walked back to his limo.

I worked the door for the next few hours, chasing crashers and autograph hounds away, watching Gretchen/Glenda and Sid Weinberg work the crowd, instant velvet for the girl, youth recaptured for the sad old man. Gretchy laughed, and I could tell she did it to hold back tears; when she squeezed Sid’s hand I knew she didn’t know who it belonged to. I kept wishing I could be there when her tears broke for real, when she became a real little girl for a while, before going back to being a stock maven and a whore. Mickey showed up just as the movie was starting. Davey Goldman told me he was pissed: Mo Hornbeck got himself bumped off by a Kraut trigger from Milwaukee who later nosedived out a window; the Mariposa Street hideout had been burglarized, and Lavonne Cohen was back from Israel three days early and henpecking the shit out of the Mick. I barely heard the words. Gretchy and Sid were cooing at each other by the cold cuts table — and Mickey was headed straight toward them.

I couldn’t hear their words, but I could read the three faces. Mickey was taken aback, but paid gracious respect to his beaming host; Gretch was twitching with the aftershocks of her old man’s death. L.A.’s number one hoodlum bowed away, walked up to me, and flicked my necktie in my face. “All you get is a grand, you hump. You shoulda found her quicker.”

So it worked out. Nobody made me for snuffing the Milwaukee shooter; Gretchy walked on the Steinkamp killing and her complicity in Voyteck Kirnipaski’s demise — the chemical-sizzled stiffs, of course, were never discovered. Mo Hornbeck got a plot at Mount Sinai Cemetery, and Davey Goldman and I stuffed Janet into the casket with him at the mortuary— I gave the rabbi a hot tip on the trotters, and he left the room to call his bookie. I paid off Leotis Dineen and promptly went back into hock with him; Mickey took up with a stripper named Audrey Anders; Howard made a bundle off airplane parts for the Korean War and cavorted with the dozen or so Gretchen Rae Shoftel look-alikes I found him. Gretchy and Sid Weinberg fell in love, which just about broke the poor pilot-mogul’s heart.

Gretchen Rae and Sid.

She did her light dusting —and must have thrown him a lot on the side. She also became Sid’s personal investment banker, and made him a giant bundle, of which she took a substantial percentage cut, invested it in slum property, and watched it grow, grow, grow. Slumlord Gretch also starred in the only Sid Weinberg vehicle ever to lose money, a tear-jerker called Glenda about a movie producer who falls in love with a starlet who disappears off the face of the earth. The critical consensus was that Gretchen Rae Shoftel was a lousy actress, but had great lungs. Howard Hughes was rumored to have seen the movie over a hundred times.

In 1950 I got involved in a grand jury investigation that went bad in an enormous way, and I ended up taking it on the road permanently, Mr. Anonymous in a thousand small towns. Mickey Cohen did a couple of fed jolts for income tax evasion, got paroled as an old man, and settled back into L.A. as a much-appreciated local character, a reminder of the colorful old days. Howard Hughes ultimately went squirrelshit with drugs and religion, and a biography that I read said that he carried a torch for a blond whore straight off into the deep end. He’d spend hours at the Bel Air Hotel looking at her picture, playing a torchy rendition of “Since I Don’t Have You” over and over. I know better: it was probably scads of different pictures, lung shots all, the music a lament for a time when love came cheap. Gretchy was special to him, though. I still believe that.

I miss Howard and Mickey, and writing this story about them has only made it worse. It’s tough being a dangerous old man by yourself — you’ve got nothing but memories and no one with the balls to understand them.

Right after World War II everybody in southern Louisiana thought he was going to get rich in the oil business. My father convinced himself that all his marginal jobs in the oil fields would one day give him the capital to become an independent wildcatter, perhaps even a legendary figure like Houston’s Glenn McCarthy, and he would successfully hammer together a drilling operation out of wooden towers and rusted junk, punch through the top of a geological dome, and blow salt water, sand, chains, pipe casing, and oil into the next parish.

So he worked on as a roughneck on drilling rigs and as a jug-hustler with a seismograph outfit, then began contracting to build board roads in the marsh for the Texaco company. By mid-1946, he was actually leasing land in the Atchafalaya Basin and over in East Texas. But that was also the year that I developed rheumatic fever and he drove my mother off and brought Mattie home to live with us.

I remember the terrible fight they had the day she left. My mother had come home angry from her waitress job in a beer garden on that burning July afternoon, and without changing out of her pink dress with the white piping on the collar and pockets, she had begun butchering chickens on the stump in the backyard and shucking off their feathers in a big iron cauldron of scalding water. My father came home later than he should have, parked his pickup truck by the barn, and walked naked to the waist through the gate with his wadded-up shirt hanging out the back pocket of his Levi’s. He was a dark Cajun, and his shoulders, chest, and back were streaked with black hair. He wore cowboy boots, a red sweat handkerchief tied around his neck, and a rakish straw hat that had an imitation snakeskin band around the crown.

Headless chickens were flopping all over the grass, and my mother’s forearms were covered with wet chicken feathers. “I know you been with her. They were talking at the beer joint,” she said, without looking up from where she sat with her knees apart on a wood chair in front of the steaming cauldron.

“I ain’t been with nobody,” he said, “except with them mosquitoes I been slapping out in that marsh.”

“You said you’d leave her alone.”

“You children go inside,” my father said.

“That gonna make your conscience right ‘cause you send them kids off, you? She gonna cut your throat one day. She been in the crazy house in Mandeville. You gonna see, Verise.”

“I ain’t seen her.”

“You son of a bitch, I smell her on you,” my mother said, and she swung a headless chicken by its feet and whipped a diagonal line of blood across my father’s chest and Levi’s.

“You ain’t gonna act like that in front of my children, you,” he said, and started toward her. Then he stopped. “Y’all get inside. You ain’t got no business listening to this. This is between me and her.”

My two older brothers, Weldon and Lyle, were used to our parents’ quarrels, and they went inside sullenly and let the back screen slam behind them. But my little sister, Drew, whom my mother nicknamed Little Britches, stood mute and fearful and alone under the pecan tree, her cat pressed flat against her chest.

“Come on, Drew. Come see inside. We’re gonna play with the Monopoly game,” I said, and tried to pull her by the arm. But her body was rigid, her bare feet immobile in the dust.

Then I saw my father’s large, square hand go up in the air, saw it come down hard against the side of my mother’s face, heard the sound of her weeping, as I tried to step into Drew’s line of vision and hold her and her cat against my body, hold the three of us tightly together outside the unrelieved sound of my mother’s weeping.

Three hours later, her car went through the railing on the bridge over the Atchafalaya River. I dreamed that night that an enormous brown bubble rose from the submerged wreck, and when it burst on the surface, her drowned breath stuck against my face as wet and rank as gas released from a grave.

That fall I began to feel sick all the time, as though a gray cloud of mosquitoes were feeding at my heart. During recess at school I didn’t play with the other children and instead hung about on the edges of the dusty playground or, when Brother Daniel wasn’t looking, slipped around the side of the old red-brick cathedral and sat by myself on a stone bench in a bamboo-enclosed, oak-shaded garden where a statue of Mary rested in a grotto and camellia petals floated in a big goldfish pond. Sometimes Sister Roberta was there saying her rosary.

She was built like a fire hydrant. Were it not for the additional size that the swirl of her black habit and the wings of her veil gave her, she would not have been much larger than the students in her fifth-grade class. She didn’t yell at us or hit our knuckles with rulers like the other nuns did, and in fact she always called us “little people” rather than children. But sometimes her round face would flare with anger below her white, starched wimple at issues which to us, in our small parochial world, seemed of little importance. She told our class once that criminals and corrupt local politicians were responsible for the slot and racehorse machines that were in every drugstore, bar, and hotel lobby in New Iberia, and another time she flung an apple core at a carload of teenagers who were baiting the Negro janitor out by the school incinerator.

She heard my feet on the dead oak leaves when I walked through the opening in the bamboo into the garden. She was seated on the stone bench, her back absolutely erect, the scarlet beads of her rosary stretched across the back of her pale hand like drops of blood. She stopped her prayer and turned her head toward me. Fine white hair grew on her upper lip.

“Do you feel sick again, Billy Bob?” she asked.

“Yes, Sister.”

“Come here.”

“What?”

“I said come here.” Her hand reached out and held my forehead. Then she wiped the moisture off her palm with her fingers. “Have you been playing or running?”

“No, Sister.”

“Has your father taken you to a doctor?”

I didn’t answer.

“Look at me and answer my question,” she said.

“He don’t — he doesn’t have money right now. He says it’s because I had the flu. He boiled some honey and onions for me to eat. It made me feel better. It’s true, Sister.”

“I need to talk to your father.”

She saw me swallow.

“Would he mind my calling him?” she asked.

“He’s not home now. He works all the time.”

“Will he be home tonight?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Who takes care of you at night when he’s not home?”

“A lady, a friend of his.”

“I see. Come back to the classroom with me. It’s too windy out here for you,” she said.

“Sister, you don’t need to call, do you? I feel OK now. My father’s got a lot on his mind now. He works real hard.”

“What’s wrong in your house, Billy Bob?”

“Nothing. I promise, Sister.” I tried to smile. I could taste bile in my throat.

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not. I promise I’m not.”

“Yes, I can see that clearly. Come with me.”

The rest of the recess period she and I sharpened crayons in the empty loom with tiny pencil sharpeners, stringing long curlicues of colored wax into the wastebasket. She was as silent and as seemingly self-absorbed as a statue. Just before the bell rang she walked down to the convent and came back with a tube of toothpaste.

“Your breath is bad. Go down to the lavatory and wash your mouth out with this,” she said.

Mattie wore shorts and sleeveless blouses with sweat rings under the arms, and in the daytime she always seemed to have curlers in her hair. When she walked from room to room she carried an ashtray with her into which she constantly flicked her lipstick-stained Chesterfields. She had a hard, muscular body, and she didn’t close the bathroom door all the way when she bathed, and once I saw her kneeling in the tub, scrubbing her big shoulders and chest with a large, flat brush. The area above her head was crisscrossed with improvised clotheslines from which dropped her wet underthings. Her eyes fastened on mine; I thought she was about to reprimand me for staring at her, but instead her hard-boned, shiny face continued to look back at me with a vacuous indifference that made me feel obscene.

If my father was out of town on a Friday or Saturday night, she fixed our supper (sometimes meat on Friday, the fear in our eyes not worthy of her recognition), put on her blue suit, and sat by herself in the living room, listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hay ride, while she drank apricot brandy from a coffee cup. She always dropped cigarette ashes on her suit and had to spot-clean the cloth with dry-cleaning fluid before she drove off for the evening in her old Ford coupe. I don’t know where she went on those Friday or Saturday nights, but a boy down the road told me that Mattie used to work in Broussard’s Bar on Railroad Avenue, an infamous area in New Iberia where the women sat on the galleries of the cribs, dipping their beer out of buckets and yelling at the railroad and oil-field workers in the street.

Then one morning when my father was in Morgan City, a man in a new silver Chevrolet sedan came out to see her. It was hot, and he parked his car partly on our grass to keep it in the shade. He wore sideburns, striped brown zoot slacks, two-tone shoes, suspenders, a pink shirt without a coat, and a fedora that shadowed his narrow face. While he talked to her, he put one shoe on the car bumper and wiped the dust off it with a rag. Then their voices grew louder and he said, “You like the life. Admit it, you. He ain’t given you no wedding ring, has he? You don’t buy the cow, no, when you can milk through the fence.”

“I am currently involved with a gentleman. I do not know what you are talking about. I am not interested in anything you are talking about,” she said.

He threw the rag back inside the car and opened the car door. “It’s always trick, trade, or travel, darlin’,” he said. “Same rules here as down on Railroad. He done made you a nigger woman for them children, Mattie.”

“Are you calling me a nigra?” she said quietly.

“No, I’m calling you crazy, just like everybody say you are. No, I take that back, me. I ain’t calling you nothing. I ain’t got to, ‘cause you gonna be back. You in the life, Mattie. You be phoning me to come out here, bring you to the crib, rub your back, put some of that warm stuff in your arm again. Ain’t nobody else do that for you, huh?”

When she came back into the house, she made us take all the dishes out of the cabinets, even though they were clean, and wash them over again.

It was the following Friday that Sister Roberta called. Mattie was already dressed to go out. She didn’t bother to turn down the radio when she answered the phone, and in order to compete with Red Foley’s voice, she had to almost shout into the receiver.

“Mr. Sonnier is not here,” she said. “Mr. Sonnier is away on business in Texas City…No, ma’am, I’m not the housekeeper. I’m a friend of the family who is caring for these children …There’s nothing wrong with that boy that I can see …Are you calling to tell me that there’s something wrong, that I’m doing something wrong? What is it that I’m doing wrong? I would like to know that. What is your name?”

I stood transfixed with terror in the hall as she bent angrily into the mouthpiece and her knuckles ridged on the receiver. A storm was blowing in from the Gulf, the air smelled of ozone, and the southern horizon was black with thunderclouds that pulsated with white veins of lightning. I heard the wind ripping through the trees in the yard and pecans rattling down on the gallery roof like grapeshot.

When Mattie hung up the phone, the skin of her face was stretched as tight as a lampshade and one liquid eye was narrowed at me like someone aiming down a rifle barrel.

The next week, when I was cutting through the neighbor’s sugarcane field on the way home from school, my heart started to race for no reason, my spit tasted like pecans, and my face filmed with perspiration even though the wind was cool through the stalks of cane; then I saw the oaks and cypress trees along Bayou Teche tilt at an angle, and I dropped my books and fell forward in the dirt as though someone had wrapped a chain around my chest and snapped my breastbone.

I lay with the side of my face pressed against the dirt, my mouth gasping like a fish’s, until Weldon found me and went crashing through the cane for help. A doctor came out to the house that night, examined me and gave me a shot, then talked with my father out in the hall. My father didn’t understand the doctor’s vocabulary, and he said, “What kind of fever that is?”

“Rheumatic, Mr. Sonnier. It attacks the heart. I could be wrong, but I think that’s what your boy’s got. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“How much this gonna cost?”

“It’s three dollars for the visit, but you can pay me when you’re able.”

“We never had nothing like this in our family. You sure about this?”

“No, I’m not. That’s why I’ll be back. Good night to you, sir.”

I knew he didn’t like my father, but he came to see me one afternoon a week for a month, brought me bottles of medicine, and always looked into my face with genuine concern after he listened to my heart. Then one night he and my father argued and he didn’t come back.

“What good he do, huh?” my father said. “You still sick, ain’t you? A doctor don’t make money off well people. I think maybe you got malaria, son. There ain’t nothing for that, either. It just goes away. You gonna see, you. You stay in bed, you eat cush-cush Mattie and me make for you, you drink that Hadacol vitamin tonic, you wear this dime I’m tying on you, you gonna get well and go back to school.”

He hung a perforated dime on a piece of red twine around my neck. His face was lean and unshaved, his eyes as intense as a butane flame when he looked into mine. “You blame me for your mama?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I lied.

“I didn’t mean to hit her. But she made me look bad in front of y’all. A woman can’t be doing that to a man in front of his kids.”

“Make Mattie go away, Daddy.”

“Don’t be saying that.”

“She hit Weldon with the belt. She made Drew kneel in the bathroom corner because she didn’t flush the toilet.”

“She’s just trying to be a mother, that’s all. Don’t talk no more. Go to sleep. I got to drive back to Texas City tonight. You gonna be all right.”

He closed my door and the inside of my room was absolutely black. Through the wall I heard him and Mattie talking, then the weight of their bodies creaking rhythmically on the bedsprings.

When Sister Roberta knew that I would not be back to school that semester, she began bringing my lessons to the house. She came three afternoons a week and had to walk two miles each way between the convent and our house. Each time I successfully completed a lesson she rewarded me with a holy card. Each holy card had a prayer on one side and a beautiful picture on the other, usually of angels and saints glowing with light or ethereal paintings of Mary with the Infant Jesus. On the day after my father had tied the dime around my neck, Sister Roberta had to walk past our neighbors field right after he had cut his cane and burned off the stubble, and a wet wind had streaked her black habit with ashes. As soon as she came through my bedroom door her face tightened inside her wimple, and her brown eyes, which had flecks of red in them, grew round and hot. She dropped her book bag on the foot of my bed and leaned within six inches of my face as though she were looking down at a horrid presence in the bottom of a well. The hair on her upper lip looked like pieces of silver thread.

“Who put that around your neck?” she asked.

“My father says it keeps the gris-gris away.”

“My suffering God,” she said, and went back out the door in a swirl of cloth. Then I heard her speak to Mattie: “That’s right, madam. Scissors. So I can remove that cord from his neck before he strangles to death in his sleep. Thank you kindly.”

She came back into my bedroom, pulled the twine out from my throat with one finger, and snipped it in two. “Do you believe in this nonsense, Billy Bob?” she asked.

“No, Sister.”

“That’s good. You’re a good Catholic boy, and you mustn’t believe in superstition. Do you love the church?”

“I think so.”

“Hmmmm. That doesn’t sound entirely convincing. Do you love your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see. Do you love your sister and your brothers?”

“Yes. Most of the time I do.”

“That’s good. Because if you love somebody, or if you love the church, like I do, then you don’t ever have to be afraid. People are only superstitious when they’re afraid. That’s an important lesson for little people to learn. Now, let’s take a look at our math test for this week.”

Over her shoulder I saw Mattie looking at us from the living room, her hair in foam rubber curlers, her face contorted as though a piece of barbed wire were twisting behind her eyes.

That winter my father started working regular hours, what he called “an indoor job,” at the Monsanto Chemical Company in Texas City, and we saw him only on weekends. Mattie cooked only the evening meal and made us responsible for the care of the house and the other two meals. Weldon started to get into trouble at school. His eighth-grade teacher, a laywoman, called and said he had thumbtacked a girls dress to the desk during class, causing her to almost tear it off her body when the bell rang, and he would either pay for the dress or be suspended. Mattie hung up the phone on her, and two days later the girl’s father, a sheriff’s deputy, came out to the house and made Mattie give him four dollars on the gallery.

She came back inside, slamming the door, her face burning, grabbed Weldon by the collar of his T-shirt, and walked him into the backyard, where she made him stand for two hours on an upended apple crate until he wet his pants.

Later, after she had let him come back inside and he had changed his underwear and blue jeans, he went outside into the dark by himself, without eating supper, and sat on the butcher stump, striking kitchen matches on the side of the box and throwing them at the chickens. Before we went to sleep he sat for a long time on the side of his bed, next to mine, in a square of moonlight with his hands balled into fists on his thighs. There were knots of muscle in the backs of his arms and behind his ears. Mattie had given him a burr haircut, and his head looked as hard and scalped as a baseball.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. We’re going to listen to the LSU-Rice game,” I said.

“Some colored kids saw me from the road and laughed.”

“I don’t care what they did. You’re brave, Weldon. You’re braver than any of us.”

“I’m gonna fix her.”

His voice made me afraid. The branches of the pecan trees were skeletal, like gnarled fingers against the moon.

“Don’t be thinking like that,” I said. “It’ll just make her do worse things. She takes it out on Drew when you and Lyle aren’t here.”

“Go to sleep, Billy Bob,” he said. His eyes were wet. “She hurts us because we let her. We ax for it. You get hurt when you don’t stand up. Just like Mama did.”

I heard him snuffling in the dark. Then he lay down with his face turned toward the opposite wall. His head looked carved out of gray wood in the moonlight.

I went back to school for the spring semester. Maybe because of the balmy winds off the Gulf and the heavy, fecund smell of magnolia and wisteria on the night air, I wanted to believe that a new season was beginning in my heart as well. I couldn’t control what happened at home, but the school was a safe place, one where Sister Roberta ruled her little fifth-grade world like an affectionate despot.

I was always fascinated by her hands. They were like toy hands, small as a child’s, as pink as an early rose, the nails not much bigger than pearls. She was wonderful at sketching and drawing with crayons and colored chalk. In minutes she could create a beautiful religious scene on the blackboard to fit the church’s season, but she also drew pictures for us of Easter rabbits and talking Easter eggs. Sometimes she would draw only the outline of a figure — an archangel with enormous wings, a Roman soldier about to be dazzled by a blinding light — and she would let us take turns coloring in the solid areas. She told us the secret to great classroom art was to always keep your chalk and crayons pointy.

Then we began to hear rumors about Sister Roberta, of a kind that we had never heard about any of the nuns, who all seemed to have no lives other than the ones that were immediately visible to us. She had been heard weeping in the confessional, she had left the convent for three days without permission, two detectives from Baton Rouge had questioned her in the Mother Superior’s office.

She missed a week of school and a lay teacher took her place. She returned for two weeks, then was gone again. When she came back the second time she was soft-spoken and removed, and sometimes she didn’t even bother to answer simple questions that we asked her. She would gaze out the window for long periods, as though her attention were fixed on a distant object, then a noise — a creaking desk, an eraser flung from the cloakroom — would disturb her, and her eyes would return to the room, absolutely empty of thought or meaning.

I stayed after school on a Friday to help her wash the blackboards and pound erasers.

“You don’t need to, Billy Bob. The janitor will take care of it,” she said, staring idly out the window.

“All the kids like you, Sister,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“You’re the only one who plays with us at recess. You don’t ever get mad at us, either. Not for real, anyway.”

“It’s nice of you to say that, but the other sisters are good to you, too.”

“Not like you are.”

“You shouldn’t talk to me like that, Billy Bob.” She had lost weight, and there was a solitary crease, like a line drawn by a thumbnail, in each of her cheeks.

“It’s wrong for you to be sad,” I said.

“You must run along home now. Don’t say anything more.”

I wish you were my mother, I thought I heard myself say inside my head.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me what you said.”

“I don’t think I said anything. I really don’t think I did.”

My heart was beating against my rib cage, the same way it had the day I fell unconscious in the sugarcane field.

“Billy Bob, don’t try to understand the world. It’s not ours to understand,” she said. “You must give up the things you can’t change. You mustn’t talk to me like this anymore. You —”

But I was already racing from the room, my soul painted with an unrelieved shame that knew no words.

The next week I found out the source of Sister Roberta’s grief. A strange and seedy man by the name of Mr. Trajan, who always had an American flag pin on his lapel when you saw him inside the wire cage of the grocery and package store he operated by the Negro district, had cut an article from copies of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate and the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and mailed it to other Catholic businessmen in town. An eighth-grader who had been held back twice, once by Sister Roberta, brought it to school one day, and after the three o’clock bell Lyle, Weldon, and I heard him reading it to a group of dumbfounded boys on the playground. The words hung in the air like our first exposure to God’s name being deliberately used in vain.

Her brother had killed a child, and Sister Roberta had helped him hide in a fishing camp in West Baton Rouge Parish.

“Give me that,” Weldon said, and tore the news article out of the boy’s hand. He stared hard at it, then wadded it up and threw it on the ground. “Get the fuck out of here. You go around talking about this again and I’ll kick your ass.” “That’s right, you dumb fuck,” Lyle said, putting his new baseball cap in his back pocket and setting his book satchel down by his foot.

“That’s right, butt face,” I added, incredulous at the boldness of my own words.

“Yeah?” the boy said, but the resolve in his voice was already breaking.

“Yeah!” Weldon said, and shoved him off balance. Then he picked up a rock and chased the boy and three of his friends toward the street. Lyle and I followed, picking up dirt clods in our hands. When the boy was almost to his father’s waiting pickup truck, he turned and shot us the finger. Weldon nailed him right above the eye with the rock.

One of the brothers marched us down to Father Higgins’s office and left us there to wait for Father Higgins, whose razor strop and black-Irish, crimson-faced tirades were legendary in the school. The office smelled of the cigar butts in the wastebasket and the cracked leather in the chairs. A walnut pendulum clock ticked loudly on the wall. It was overcast outside, and we sat in the gloom and silence until four o’clock.

“I ain’t waiting anymore. Y’all coming?” Weldon said, and put one leg out the open window.

“You’ll get expelled,” I said.

“Too bad. I ain’t going to wait around just to have somebody whip me,” he said, and dropped out the window.

Five minutes later, Lyle followed him.

The sound of the clock was like a spoon knocking on a hollow wood box. When Father Higgins finally entered the room, he was wearing his horn-rimmed glasses and thumbing through a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard. The hairline on the back of his neck was shaved neatly with a razor. At first he seemed distracted by my presence, then he flipped the sheets of paper to a particular page, almost as an afterthought, and studied it. He put an unlit cigar stub in his mouth, looked at me, then back at the page.

“You threw a rock at somebody?” he said.

“No, Father.”

“Somebody threw a rock at you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“That’s interesting. All right, since you don’t know why you’re here, how about going somewhere else?”

“I’ll take him, Father,” I heard Sister Roberta say in the doorway. She put her hand on my arm, walked me down the darkly polished corridor to the breezeway outside, then sat me down on the stone bench inside the bamboo-enclosed garden where she often said her rosary.

She sat next to me, her small white hands curved on the edges of the bench, and looked down at the goldfish pond while she talked. A crushed paper cup floated among the hyacinth leaves. “You meant well, Billy Bob, but I don’t want you to defend me anymore. It’s not the job of little people to defend adults.”

“Sister, the newspaper said—”

“It said what?”

“You were in trouble with the police. Can they put you in jail?”

She put her hand on top of mine. Her fingernails looked like tiny pink seashells. “They’re not really interested in me, Billy Bob. My brother is an alcoholic, and he killed a little boy with his car, then he ran away. But they probably won’t send my brother to prison because the child was a Negro.” Her hand was hot and damp on top of mine. Her voice clicked wetly in her throat. “He’ll be spared, not because he’s a sick man, but because it was a colored child he killed.”

When I looked at her again, her long eyelashes were bright with tears. She stood up with her face turned away from me. The sun had broken through the gray seal of clouds, and the live oak tree overhead was filled with the clattering of mockingbirds and blue jays. I felt her tiny fingernails rake gently through my hair, as though she were combing a cat.

“Oh, you poor child, you have lice eggs in your hair,” she said. Then she pressed my head against her breast, and I felt her tears strike hotly on the back of my neck.

Three days later, Sister saw the cigarette burn on Drew’s leg in the lunchroom and reported it to the social welfare agency in town. A consumptive rail of a man in a dandruff-flecked blue suit drove out to the house and questioned Mattie on the gallery, then questioned us in front of her. Drew told him she had been burned by an ember that had popped out of a trash fire in the backyard.

He raised her chin with his knuckle. His black hair was stiff with grease. “Is that what happened?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.” Drew’s face was dull, her mouth down-turned at the corners. The burn was scabbed now and looked like a tightly coiled gray worm on her skin.

He smiled and took his knuckle away from her chin. “Then you shouldn’t play next to the fire,” he said.

“I would like to know who sent you out here,” Mattie said.

“That’s confidential.” He coughed on the back of his hand. His shirt cuff was frayed and for some reason looked particularly pretentious and sad on his thin wrist. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t really know. My supervisor didn’t tell me. I guess that’s how the chain of command works.” He coughed again, this time loud and hard, and I could smell the nicotine that was buried in his lungs. “But everything here looks all right. Perhaps this is much ado about nothing. Not a bad day for a drive, though.”

Weldon’s eyes were as hard as marbles, but he didn’t speak.

The man walked with Mattie to his car, and I felt like doors were slamming all around us. She put her foot on his running board and propped one arm on his car roof while she talked, so that her breasts were uplifted against her blouse and her dress made a loop between her legs.

“Let’s tell him,” Lyle said.

“Are you kidding? Look at him. He’d eat her shit with a spoon,” Weldon said.

It was right after first period the next morning that we heard about the disaster at Texas City. Somebody shouted something about it on the playground, then suddenly the whole school was abuzz with rumors. Cars on the street pulled to the curb with their radios tuned to news stations, and we could even hear the principal’s old boxwood radio blaring through the open window upstairs. A ship loaded with fertilizer had been burning in the harbor, and while people on the docks had watched firefighting boats pumping geysers of water onto the ship’s decks, the fire had dripped into the hold. The explosion filled the sky with rockets of smoke and rained an umbrella of flame down on the Monsanto chemical plant. The force of the secondary explosion was so great that it blew out windows in Houston, fifty miles away. But it wasn’t over yet. The fireball mushroomed laterally out into an adjacent oil field, and rows of storage tanks and wellheads went like strings of Chinese firecrackers. People said the water in the harbor boiled from the heat, the spars on steel derricks melting like licorice.

We heard nothing about the fate of my father either that afternoon or evening. Mattie got drunk that night and fell asleep in the living room chair by the radio. I felt nothing about my father’s possible death, and I wondered at my own callousness. We went to school the next morning, and when we returned home in the afternoon Mattie was waiting on the gallery to tell us that a man from the Monsanto Company had telephoned and said that my father was listed as missing. Her eyes were pink with either hangover or crying, and her face was puffy and round, like a white balloon.

When we didn’t respond, she said, “Your father may be dead. Do you understand what I’m saying? That was an important man from his company who called. He would not call unless he was gravely concerned. Do you children understand what is being said to you?”

Weldon brushed at the dirt with his tennis shoe, and Lyle looked into a place about six inches in front of his eyes. Drew’s face was frightened, not because of the news about our father, but instead because of the strange whirring of wheels that we could almost hear from inside Mattie’s head. I put my arm over her shoulders and felt her skin jump.

“He’s worked like a nigra for you, maybe lost his life for you, and you have nothing to say?” Mattie asked.

“Maybe we ought to start cleaning up our rooms. You wanted us to clean up our rooms, Mattie,” I said.

But it was a poor attempt to placate her.

“You stay outside. Don’t even come in this house,” she said.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lyle said.

“Then you can just do it in the dirt like a darky,” she said, and went inside the house and latched the screen behind her.

By the next afternoon, my father was still unaccounted for. Mattie had an argument on the phone with somebody, I think the man in zoot pants and two-tone shoes who had probably been her pimp at one time, because she told him he owed her money and she wouldn’t come back and work at Broussard’s Bar again until he paid her. After she hung up she breathed hard at the kitchen sink, smoking her cigarette and staring out into the yard. She snapped the cap off a bottle of Jax and drank it half empty, her throat working in one long, wet swallow, one eye cocked at me.

“Come here,” she said.

“What?”

“You tracked up the kitchen. You didn’t flush the toilet after you used it, either.”

“I did.”

“You did what?”

“I flushed the toilet.”

“Then one of the others didn’t flush it. Every one of you come out here. Now!”

“What is it, Mattie? We didn’t do anything,” I said.

“I changed my mind. Every one of you outside. All of you outside. Weldon and Lyle, you get out there right now. Where’s Drew?”

“She’s playing in the yard. What’s wrong, Mattie?” I made no attempt to hide the fear in my voice. I could see the web of blue veins in the top of her muscular chest.

Outside, the wind was blowing through the trees in the yard, flattening the purple clumps of wisteria that grew against the barn wall.

“Each of you go to the hedge and cut the switch you want me to use on you,” she said.

It was her favorite form of punishment for us. If we broke off a large switch, she hit us fewer times with it. If we came back with a thin or small switch, we would get whipped until she felt she had struck some kind of balance between size and number.

We remained motionless. Drew had been playing with her cat. She had tied a piece of twine around the cat’s neck, and she held the twine in her hand like a leash. Her knees and white socks were dusty from play.

“I told you not to tie that around the kitten’s neck again,” Mattie said.

“It doesn’t hurt anything. It’s not your cat, anyway,” Weldon said.

“Don’t sass me,” she said. “You will not sass me. None of you will sass me.”

“I ain’t cutting no switch,” Weldon said. “You’re crazy. My mama said so. You ought to be in the crazy house.”

She looked hard into Weldon’s eyes, then there was a moment of recognition in her colorless face, a flicker of fear, as though she had seen a growing meanness of spirit in Weldon that would soon become a challenge to her own. She wet her lips.

“We shall see who does what around here,” she said. She broke off a big switch from the myrtle hedge and raked it free of flowers and leaves, except for one green sprig on the tip.

I saw the look in Drew’s face, saw her drop the piece of twine from her palm as she stared up into Mattie’s shadow.

Mattie jerked her by the wrist and whipped her a half-dozen times across her bare legs. Drew twisted impotently in Mattie’s balled hand, her feet dancing with each blow. The switch raised welts on her skin as thick and red as centipedes.

Then suddenly Weldon ran with all his weight into Mattie’s back, stiff-arming her between the shoulder blades, and sent her tripping sideways over a bucket of chicken slops. She righted herself and stared at him open-mouthed, the switch limp in her hand. Then her eyes grew hot and bright, and I could see the bone flex along her jaws.

Weldon burst out the back gate and ran down the dirt road between the sugarcane fields, the soles of his dirty tennis shoes powdering dust in the air.

She waited for him a long time, watching through the screen as the mauve-colored dusk gathered in the trees and the sun’s afterglow lit the clouds on the western horizon. Then she took a bottle of apricot brandy into the bathroom and sat in the tub for almost an hour, turning the hot water tap on and off until the tank was empty. When we needed to go to the bathroom, she told us to take our problem outside. Finally she emerged in the hall, wearing only her panties and bra, her hair wrapped in a towel, the dark outline of her sex plainly visible to us.

“I’m going to dress now and go into town with a gentleman friend,” she said. “Tomorrow we’re going to start a new regime around here. Believe me, there will never be a reoccurrence of what happened here today. You can pass that on to young Mr. Weldon for me.”

But she didn’t go into town. Instead, she put on her blue suit, a flower-print blouse, her nylon stockings, and walked up and down on the gallery, her cigarette poised in the air like a movie actress.

“Why not just drive your car, Mattie?” I said quietly through the screen.

“It has no gas. Besides, a gentleman caller will be passing for me anytime now,” she answered.

“Oh.”

She blew smoke at an upward angle, her face aloof and flat-sided in the shadows.

“Mattie?”

“Yes?”

“Weldon’s out back. Can he come in the house?”

“Little mice always return where the cheese is,” she said.

I hated her. I wanted something terrible to happen to her. I could feel my fingernails knifing into my palms.

She turned around, her palm supporting one elbow, her cigarette an inch from her mouth, her hair wreathed in smoke. “Do you have a reason for staring through the screen at me?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“When you’re bigger, you’ll get to do what’s on your mind. In the meantime, don’t let your thoughts show on your face. You’re a lewd little boy.”

Her suggestion repelled me and made water well up in my eyes. I backed away from the screen, then turned and ran through the rear of the house and out into the backyard where Weldon, Lyle, and Drew sat against the barn wall, fireflies lighting in the wisteria over their heads.

No one came for Mattie that evening. She sat in the stuffed chair in her room, putting on layers of lipstick until her mouth had the crooked, bright red shape of a clowns. She smoked a whole package of Chesterfields, constantly wiping the ashes off her dark blue skirt with a hand towel soaked in dry-cleaning fluid; then she drank herself unconscious.

It was hot that night, and dry lightning leaped from the horizon to the top of the blue-black vault of sky over the Gulf. Weldon sat on the side of his bed in the dark, his shoulders hunched, his fists between his white thighs. His burr haircut looked like duck down on his head in the flicker of lightning through the window. When I was almost asleep he shook both me and Lyle awake and said, “We got to get rid of her. You know we got to do it.”

I put my pillow over my head and rolled away from him, as though I could drop away into sleep and rise in the morning into a sun-spangled and different world.

But in the false dawn I woke to both Lyles and Weldon’s faces close to mine. Weldon’s eyes were hollow, his breath rank with funk. The mist was heavy and wet in the pecan trees outside the window.

“She’s not gonna hurt Drew again. Are you gonna help or not?” Weldon said.

I followed them into the hallway, my heart sinking at the realization of what I was willing to participate in, my body as numb as if I had been stunned with Novocaine. Mattie was sleeping in the stuffed chair, her hose rolled down over her knees, an overturned jelly glass on the rug next to the can of spot cleaner.

Weldon walked quietly across the rug, unscrewed the cap on the can, laid the can on its side in front of Mattie’s feet, then backed away from her. The cleaning fluid spread in a dark circle around her chair, the odor as bright and sharp as a slap across the face.

Weldon slid open a box of kitchen matches and we each took one, raked it across the striker, and, with the sense that our lives at that moment had changed forever, threw them at Mattie’s feet. But the burning matches fell outside the wet area. The blood veins in my head dilated with fear, my ears hummed with a sound like the roar of the ocean in a seashell, and I jerked the box from Weldon’s hand, clutched a half-dozen matches in my fist, dragged them across the striker, and flung them right on Mattie’s feet.

The chair was enveloped in a cone of flame, and she burst out of it with her arms extended, as though she were pushing blindly through a curtain, her mouth and eyes wide with terror. We could smell her hair burning as she raced past us and crashed through the screen door out onto the gallery and into the yard. She beat at her flaming clothes and raked at her hair as though it were swarming with yellow jackets.

I stood transfixed in mortal dread at what I had done.

A Negro man walking to work came out of the mist on the road and knocked her to the ground, slapping the fire out of her dress, pinning her under his spread knees as though he were assaulting her. Smoke rose from her scorched clothes and hair as in a depiction of a damned figure on one of my holy cards.

The Negro rose to his feet and walked toward the gallery, a solitary line of blood running down his cheek where Mattie had scratched him.

“Yo’ mama ain’t hurt bad. Get some butter or some bacon grease. She gonna be all right, you gonna see. You children don’t be worried, no,” he said. His gums were purple with snuff when he smiled.

The volunteer firemen bounced across the cattle guard in an old fire truck whose obsolete hand-crank starter still dangled from under the radiator. They coated Mattie’s room with foam from a fire extinguisher and packed Mattie off in an ambulance to the charity hospital in Lafayette. Two sheriff’s deputies arrived, and before he left, one of the volunteers took them aside in the yard and talked with them, looking over his shoulder at us children, then walked over to us and said, “The fire chief gonna come out here and check it out. Y’all stay out of that bedroom.”

His face was narrow and dark with shadow under the brim of his big rubber fireman’s hat. I felt a fist squeeze my heart.

But suddenly Sister Roberta was in the midst of everything. Someone had carried word to the school about the fire, and she’d had one of the brothers drive her out to the house. She talked with the deputies, helped us fix cereal at the kitchen table, and made telephone calls to find a place for us to stay besides the welfare shelter. Then she looked in Mattie’s bedroom door and studied the interior for what seemed a long time. When she came back in the kitchen, her eyes peeled the skin off our faces. I looked straight down into my cereal bowl.

She placed her small hand on my shoulder. I could feel her fingers tapping on the bone, as though she were processing her own thoughts. Then she said, “Well, what should we do here today? I think we should clean up first. Where’s the broom?”

Without waiting for an answer she pulled the broom out of the closet and went to work in Mattie’s room, sweeping the spilled and unstruck matches as well as the burned ones in a pile by a side door that gave onto the yard. The soot and blackened threads from the rug swirled up in a cloud around her veils and wings and smudged her starched wimple.

One of the deputies put his hand on the broomstick. “There ain’t been an investigation yet. You can’t do that till the fire chief come out and see, Sister,” he said.

“You always talked like a fool, Gaspard,” she said. “Now that you have a uniform, you talk like a bigger one. This house smells like an incinerator. Now get out of the way.” With one sweep of the broom she raked all the matches out into the yard.

We were placed in foster homes, and over the years I lost contact with Sister Roberta. But later I went to work in the oil fields, and I think perhaps I talked with my father in a nightclub outside of Morgan City. An enormous live oak tree grew through the floor and roof, and he was leaning against the bar that had been built in a circle around the tree. His face was puckered with white scar tissue, his ears burned into stubs, his right hand atrophied and frozen against his chest like a broken bird’s foot. But beyond the layers of mutilated skin I could see my father’s face, like the image in a photographic negative held up against a light.

“Is your name Sonnier?” I asked.

He looked at me curiously.

“Maybe. You want to buy me a drink?” he said.

“Yeah, I can do that,” I said.

He ordered a shot of Beam with a frosted schooner of Jax on the side.

“Are you Verise Sonnier from New Iberia?” I asked.

He grinned stiffly when he took the schooner of beer away from his mouth. “Why you want to know?” he said.

“I think I’m your son. I’m Billy Bob.”

His turquoise eyes wandered over my face, then they lost interest.

“I had a son. But you ain’t him. Buy me another shot?” he said.

“Why not?” I replied.

Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that’s just a poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer’s day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta’s rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people.

Once. I only went to bed with her once. Friends for eleven years—before and since—but it was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings: the two of us alone on a New Year’s Eve, watching rented Marx Brothers videos so we wouldn’t have to go out with a bunch of idiots and make noise and pretend we were having a good time when all we’d be doing was getting drunk, whooping like morons, vomiting on slow-moving strangers, and spending more money than we had to waste. And we drank a little too much cheap champagne; and we fell off the sofa laughing at Harpo a few times too many; and we wound up on the floor at the same time; and next thing we knew we had our faces plastered together, and my hand up her skirt, and her hand down in my pants…

But it was just the once, fer chrissakes! Talk about imposing on a cheap sexual liaison! She knew I went mixing in other peoples’ minds only when I absolutely had no other way to make a buck. Or I forgot myself and did it in a moment of human weakness.

It was always foul.

Slip into the thoughts of the best person who ever lived, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, just to pick an absolutely terrific person you’d think had a mind so clean you could eat off it (to paraphrase my mother), and when you come out—take my word for it—you’d want to take a long, intense shower in Lysol.

Trust me on this: I go into somebody’s landscape when there’s nothing else I can do, no other possible solution…or I forget and do it in a moment of human weakness. Such as, say, the IRS holds my feet to the fire; or I’m about to get myself mugged and robbed and maybe murdered; or I need to find out if some specific she that I’m dating has been using somebody else’s dirty needle or has been sleeping around without she’s taking some extra-heavy-duty AIDS precautions; or a co-worker’s got it in his head to set me up so I make a mistake and look bad to the boss and I find myself in the unemployment line again; or…

I’m a wreck for weeks after.

Go jaunting through a landscape trying to pick up a little insider arbitrage bric-a-brac, and come away no better heeled, but all muddy with the guy’s infidelities, and I can’t look a decent woman in the eye for days. Get told by a motel desk clerk that they’re all full up and he’s sorry as hell but I’ll just have to drive on for about another thirty miles to find the next vacancy, jaunt into his landscape and find him lit up with neon signs that got a lot of the word nigger in them, and I wind up hitting the sonofabitch so hard his grandmother has a bloody nose, and usually have to hide out for three or four weeks after. Just about to miss a bus, jaunt into the head of the driver to find his name so I can yell for him to hold it a minute Tom or George or Willie, and I get smacked in the mind with all the garlic he’s been eating for the past month because his doctor told him it was good for his system, and I start to dry-heave, and I wrench out of the landscape, and not only have I missed the bus, but I’m so sick to my stomach I have to sit down on the filthy curb to get my gorge submerged. Jaunt into a potential employer, to see if he’s trying to lowball me, and I learn he’s part of a massive cover-up of industrial malfeasance that’s caused hundreds of people to die when this or that cheaply-made grommet or tappet or gimbal mounting underperforms and fails, sending the poor souls falling thousands of feet to shrieking destruction. Then just try to accept the job, even if you haven’t paid your rent in a month. No way.

Absolutely: I listen in on the landscape only when my feet are being fried; when the shadow stalking me turns down alley after alley tracking me relentlessly; when the drywall guy I’ve hired to repair the damage done by my leaky shower presents me with a dopey smile and a bill three hundred and sixty bucks higher than the estimate. Or in a moment of human weakness.

But I’m a wreck for weeks after. For weeks.

Because you can’t, you simply can’t, you absolutely cannot know what people are truly and really like till you jaunt their landscape. If Aquinas had had my ability, he’d have very quickly gone off to be a hermit, only occasionally visiting the mind of a sheep or a hedgehog. In a moment of human weakness.

That’s why in my whole life—and, as best I can remember back, I’ve been doing it since I was five or six years old, maybe even younger—there have only been eleven, maybe twelve people, of all those who know that I can “read minds,” that I’ve permitted myself to get close to. Three of them never used it against me, or tried to exploit me, or tried to kill me when I wasn’t looking. Two of those three were my mother and father, a pair of sweet old black folks who’d adopted me, a late-in-life baby, and were now dead (but probably still worried about me, even on the Other Side), and whom I missed very very much, particularly in moments like this. The other eight, nine were either so turned off by the knowledge that they made sure I never came within a mile of them—one moved to another entire country just to be on the safe side, although her thoughts were a helluva lot more boring and innocent than she thought they were—or they tried to brain me with something heavy when I was distracted—I still have a shoulder separation that kills me for two days before it rains—or they tried to use me to make a buck for them. Not having the common sense to figure it out, that if I was capable of using the ability to make vast sums of money, why the hell was I living hand-to-mouth like some overaged grad student who was afraid to desert the university and go become an adult?

Now they was some dumb-ass muthuhfugguhs.

Of the three who never used it against me—my mom and dad—the last was Allison Roche. Who sat on the stool next to me, in the middle of May, in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of Clanton, Alabama, squeezing ketchup onto her All-American Burger, imposing on the memory of that one damned New Year’s Eve sexual interlude, with Harpo and his sibs; the two of us all alone except for the fry-cook; and she waited for my reply.

“I’d sooner have a skunk spray my pants leg,” I replied.

She pulled a papkin from the chrome dispenser and swabbed up the red that had overshot the sesame-seed bun and redecorated the Formica countertop. She looked at me from under thick, lustrous eyelashes; a look of impatience and violet eyes that must have been a killer when she unbottled it at some truculent witness for the defense. Allison Roche was a Chief Deputy District Attorney in and for Jefferson County, with her office in Birmingham. Alabama. Where near we sat, in Clanton, having a secret meeting, having All-American Burgers; three years after having had quite a bit of champagne, 1930s black-and-white video rental comedy, and black-and-white sex. One extremely stupid New Year’s Eve.

Friends for eleven years. And once, just once; as a prime example of what happens in a moment of human weakness. Which is not to say that it wasn’t terrific, because it was; absolutely terrific; but we never did it again; and we never brought it up again after the next morning when we opened our eyes and looked at each other the way you look at an exploding can of sardines, and both of us said Oh Jeeezus at the same time. Never brought it up again until this memorable afternoon at the greasy spoon where I’d joined Ally, driving up from Montgomery to meet her halfway, after her peculiar telephone invitation.

Can’t say the fry-cook, Mr. All-American, was particularly happy at the pigmentation arrangement at his counter. But I stayed out of his head and let him think what he wanted. Times change on the outside, but the inner landscape remains polluted.

“All I’m asking you to do is go have a chat with him,” she said. She gave me that look. I have a hard time with that look. It isn’t entirely honest, neither is it entirely disingenuous. It plays on my remembrance of that one night we spent in bed. And is just dishonest enough to play on the part of that night we spent on the floor, on the sofa, on the coffee counter between the dining room and the kitchenette, in the bathtub, and about nineteen minutes crammed among her endless pairs of shoes in a walk-in clothes closet that smelled strongly of cedar and virginity. She gave me that look, and wasted no part of the memory.

“I don’t want to go have a chat with him. Apart from he’s a piece of human shit, and I have better things to do with my time than to go on down to Atmore and take a jaunt through this crazy sonofabitch’s diseased mind, may I remind you that of the hundred and sixty, seventy men who have died in that electric chair, including the original ‘Yellow Mama’ they scrapped in 1990, about a hundred and thirty of them were gentlemen of color, and I do not mean you to picture any color of a shade much lighter than that cuppa coffee you got sittin’ by your left hand right this minute, which is to say that I, being an inordinately well-educated African-American who values the full measure of living negritude in his body, am not crazy enough to want to visit a racist ‘co-rectional center’ like Holman Prison, thank you very much.”

“Are you finished?” she asked, wiping her mouth.

“Yeah. I’m finished. Case closed. Find somebody else.”

She didn’t like that. “There isn’t anybody else.”

“There has to be. Somewhere. Go check the research files at Duke University. Call the Fortean Society. Mensa. Jeopardy. Some 900 number astrology psychic hotline. Ain’t there some semi-senile Senator with a full-time paid assistant who’s been trying to get legislation through one of the statehouses for the last five years to fund this kind of bullshit research? What about the Russians…now that the Evil Empire’s fallen, you ought to be able to get some word about their success with Kirlian auras or whatever those assholes were working at. Or you could—”

She screamed at the top of her lungs. “Stop it, Rudy!”

The fry-cook dropped the spatula he’d been using to scrape off the grill. He picked it up, looking at us, and his face (I didn’t read his mind) said If that white bitch makes one more noise I’m callin’ the cops.

I gave him a look he didn’t want, and he went back to his chores, getting ready for the after-work crowd. But the stretch of his back and angle of his head told me he wasn’t going to let this pass.

I leaned in toward her, got as serious as I could, and just this quietly, just this softly, I said, “Ally, good pal, listen to me. You’ve been one of the few friends I could count on, for a long time now. We have history between us, and you’ve never, not once, made me feel like a freak. So okay, I trust you. I trust you with something about me that causes immeasurable goddam pain. A thing about me that could get me killed. You’ve never betrayed me, and you’ve never tried to use me.

“Till now. This is the first time. And you’ve got to admit that it’s not even as rational as you maybe saying to me that you’ve gambled away every cent you’ve got and you owe the mob a million bucks and would I mind taking a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City and taking a jaunt into the minds of some high-pocket poker players so I could win you enough to keep the goons from shooting you. Even that, as creepy as it would be if you said it to me, even that would be easier to understand than this!”

She looked forlorn. “There isn’t anybody else, Rudy. Please.”

“What the hell is this all about? Come on, tell me. You’re hiding something, or holding something back, or lying about—”

“I’m not lying!” For the second time she was suddenly, totally, extremely pissed at me. Her voice spattered off the white tile walls. The fry-cook spun around at the sound, took a step toward us, and I jaunted into his landscape, smoothed down the rippled Astro-Turf, drained away the storm clouds, and suggested in there that he go take a cigarette break out back. Fortunately, there were no other patrons at the elegant All-American Burger that late in the afternoon, and he went.

“Calm fer chrissakes down, will you?” I said.

She had squeezed the paper napkin into a ball.

She was lying, hiding, holding something back. Didn’t have to be a telepath to figure that out. I waited, looking at her with a slow, careful distrust, and finally she sighed, and I thought, Here it comes.

“Are you reading my mind?” she asked.

“Don’t insult me. We know each other too long.”

She looked chagrined. The violet of her eyes deepened. “Sorry.”

But she didn’t go on. I wasn’t going to be outflanked. I waited.

After a while she said, softly, very softly, “I think I’m in love with him. I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.”

I never expected that. I couldn’t even reply.

It was unbelievable. Unfuckingbelievable. She was the Chief Deputy D.A. who had prosecuted Henry Lake Spanning for murder. Not just one murder, one random slaying, a heat of the moment Saturday night killing regretted deeply on Sunday morning but punishable by electrocution in the Sovereign State of Alabama nonetheless, but a string of the vilest, most sickening serial slaughters in Alabama history, in the history of the Glorious South, in the history of the United States. Maybe even in the history of the entire wretched human universe that went wading hip-deep in the wasted spilled blood of innocent men, women and children.

Henry Lake Spanning was a monster, an ambulatory disease, a killing machine without conscience or any discernible resemblance to a thing we might call decently human. Henry Lake Spanning had butchered his way across a half-dozen states; and they had caught up to him in Huntsville, in a garbage dumpster behind a supermarket, doing something so vile and inhuman to what was left of a sixty-five-year-old cleaning woman that not even the tabloids would get more explicit than unspeakable; and somehow he got away from the cops; and somehow he evaded their dragnet; and somehow he found out where the police lieutenant in charge of the manhunt lived; and somehow he slipped into that neighborhood when the lieutenant was out creating roadblocks—and he gutted the man’s wife and two kids. Also the family cat. And then he killed a couple of more times in Birmingham and Decatur, and by then had gone so completely out of his mind that they got him again, and the second time they hung onto him, and they brought him to trial. And Ally had prosecuted this bottom-feeding monstrosity.

And oh, what a circus it had been. Though he’d been caught, the second time, and this time for keeps, in Jefferson County, scene of three of his most sickening jobs, he’d murdered (with such a disgustingly similar m.o. that it was obvious he was the perp) in twenty-two of the sixty-seven counties; and every last one of them wanted him to stand trial in that venue. Then there were the other five states in which he had butchered, to a total body-count of fifty-six. Each of them wanted him extradited.

So, here’s how smart and quick and smooth an attorney Ally is: she somehow managed to coze up to the Attorney General, and somehow managed to unleash those violet eyes on him, and somehow managed to get and keep his ear long enough to con him into setting a legal precedent. Attorney General of the State of Alabama allowed Allison Roche to consolidate, to secure a multiple bill of indictment that forced Spanning to stand trial on all twenty-nine Alabama murder counts at once. She meticulously documented to the state’s highest courts that Henry Lake Spanning presented such a clear and present danger to society that the prosecution was willing to take a chance (big chance!) of trying in a winner-take-all consolidation of venues. Then she managed to smooth the feathers of all those other vote-hungry prosecuters in those twenty-one other counties, and she put on a case that dazzled everyone, including Spanning’s defense attorney, who had screamed about the legality of the multiple bill from the moment she’d suggested it.

And she won a fast jury verdict on all twenty-nine counts. Then she got really fancy in the penalty phase after the jury verdict, and proved up the other twenty-seven murders with their flagrantly identical trademarks, from those other five states, and there was nothing left but to sentence Spanning—essentially for all fifty-six—to the replacement for the “Yellow Mama.”

Even as pols and power brokers throughout the state were murmuring Ally’s name for higher office, Spanning was slated to sit in that new electric chair in Holman Prison, built by the Fred A. Leuchter Associates of Boston, Massachusetts, that delivers 2,640 volts of pure sparklin’ death in 1⁄240th of a second, six times faster than the 1⁄40th of a second that it takes for the brain to sense it, which is—if you ask me—much too humane an exit line, more than three times the 700 volt jolt lethal dose that destroys a brain, for a pus-bag like Henry Lake Spanning.

But if we were lucky—and the scheduled day of departure was very nearly upon us—if we were lucky, if there was a God and Justice and Natural Order and all that good stuff, then Henry Lake Spanning, this foulness, this corruption, this thing that lived only to ruin…would end up as a pile of fucking ashes somebody might use to sprinkle over a flower garden, thereby providing this ghoul with his single opportunity to be of some use to the human race.

That was the guy that my pal Allison Roche wanted me to go and “chat” with, down to Holman Prison, in Atmore, Alabama. There, sitting on Death Row, waiting to get his demented head tonsured, his pants legs slit, his tongue fried black as the inside of a sheep’s belly…down there at Holman my pal Allison wanted me to go “chat” with one of the most awful creatures made for killing this side of a hammerhead shark, which creature had an infinitely greater measure of human decency than Henry Lake Spanning had ever demonstrated. Go chit-chat, and enter his landscape, and read his mind, Mr. Telepath, and use the marvelous mythic power of extra-sensory perception: this nifty swell ability that has made me a bum all my life, well, not exactly a bum: I do have a decent apartment, and I do earn a decent, if sporadic, living; and I try to follow Nelson Algren’s warning never to get involved with a woman whose troubles are bigger than my own; and sometimes I even have a car of my own, even though at that moment such was not the case, the Camaro having been repo’d, and not by Harry Dean Stanton or Emilio Estevez, lemme tell you; but a bum in the sense of—how does Ally put it?—oh yeah—I don’t “realize my full and forceful potential”—a bum in the sense that I can’t hold a job, and I get rotten breaks, and all of this despite a Rhodes scholarly education so far above what a poor nigrah-lad such as myself could expect that even Rhodes hisownself would’ve been chest-out proud as hell of me. A bum, mostly, despite an outstanding Rhodes scholar education and a pair of kind, smart, loving parents—even for foster-parents—shit, especially for being foster-parents—who died knowing the certain sadness that their only child would spend his life as a wandering freak unable to make a comfortable living or consummate a normal marriage or raise children without the fear of passing on this special personal horror…this astonishing ability fabled in song and story that I possess…that no one else seems to possess, though I know there must have been others, somewhere, sometime, somehow! Go, Mr. Wonder of Wonders, shining black Cagliostro of the modern world, go with this super nifty swell ability that gullible idiots and flying saucer assholes have been trying to prove exists for at least fifty years, that no one has been able to isolate the way I, me, the only one has been isolated, let me tell you about isolation, my brothers; and here I was, here was I, Rudy Pairis…just a guy, making a buck every now and then with nifty swell impossible ESP, resident of thirteen states and twice that many cities so far in his mere thirty years of landscape-jaunting life, here was I, Rudy Pairis, Mr. I-Can-Read-Your-Mind, being asked to go and walk through the mind of a killer who scared half the people in the world. Being asked by the only living person, probably, to whom I could not say no. And, oh, take me at my word here: I wanted to say no. Was, in fact, saying no at every breath. What’s that? Will I do it? Sure, yeah sure, I’ll go on down to Holman and jaunt through this sick bastard’s mind landscape. Sure I will. You got two chances: slim, and none.

All of this was going on in the space of one greasy double cheeseburger and two cups of coffee.

The worst part of it was that Ally had somehow gotten involved with him. Ally! Not some bimbo bitch…but Ally. I couldn’t believe it.

Not that it was unusual for women to become mixed up with guys in the joint, to fall under their “magic spell,” and to start corresponding with them, visiting them, taking them candy and cigarettes, having conjugal visits, playing mule for them and smuggling in dope where the tampon never shine, writing them letters that got steadily more exotic, steadily more intimate, steamier and increasingly dependent emotionally. It wasn’t that big a deal; there exist entire psychiatric treatises on the phenomenon; right alongside the papers about women who go stud-crazy for cops. No big deal indeed: hundreds of women every year find themselves writing to these guys, visiting these guys, building dream castles with these guys, fucking these guys, pretending that even the worst of these guys, rapists and woman-beaters and child molesters, repeat pedophiles of the lowest pustule sort, and murderers and stick-up punks who crush old ladies’ skulls for food stamps, and terrorists and bunco barons…that one sunny might-be, gonna-happen pink cloud day these demented creeps will emerge from behind the walls, get back in the wind, become upstanding nine-to-five Brooks Bros. Galahads. Every year hundreds of women marry these guys, finding themselves in a hot second snookered by the wily, duplicitous, motherfuckin’ lying greaseball addictive behavior of guys who had spent their sporadic years, their intermittent freedom on the outside, doing just that: roping people in, ripping people off, bleeding people dry, conning them into being tools, taking them for their every last cent, their happy home, their sanity, their ability to trust or love ever again.

But this wasn’t some poor illiterate naive woman-child. This was Ally. She had damned near pulled off a legal impossibility, come that close to Bizarro Jurisprudence by putting the Attorneys General of five other states in a maybe frame of mind where she’d have been able to consolidate a multiple bill of indictment across state lines! Never been done; and now, probably, never ever would be. But she could have possibly pulled off such a thing. Unless you’re a stone court-bird, you can’t know what a mountaintop that is!

So, now, here’s Ally, saying this shit to me. Ally, my best pal, stood up for me a hundred times; not some dip, but the steely-eyed Sheriff of Suicide Gulch, the over-forty, past the age of innocence, no-nonsense woman who had seen it all and come away tough but not cynical, hard but not mean.

“I think I’m in love with him.” She had said.

“I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.” She had said.

I looked at her. No time had passed. It was still the moment the universe decided to lie down and die. And I said, “So if you’re certain this paragon of the virtues isn’t responsible for fifty-six murders—that we know about—and who the hell knows how many more we don’t know about, since he’s apparently been at it since he was twelve years old—remember the couple of nights we sat up and you told me all this shit about him, and you said it with your skin crawling, remember?—then if you’re so damned positive the guy you spent eleven weeks in court sending to the chair is innocent of butchering half the population of the planet—then why do you need me to go to Holman, drive all the way to Atmore, just to take a jaunt in this sweet peach of a guy?

“Doesn’t your ‘woman’s intuition’ tell you he’s squeaky clean? Don’t ‘true love’ walk yo’ sweet young ass down the primrose path with sufficient surefootedness?”

“Don’t be a smartass!” she said.

“Say again?” I replied, with disfuckingbelief.

“I said: don’t be such a high-verbal goddamned smart aleck!”

Now I was steamed. “No, I shouldn’t be a smartass: I should be your pony, your show dog, your little trick bag mind-reader freak! Take a drive over to Holman, Pairis; go right on into Rednecks from Hell; sit your ass down on Death Row with the rest of the niggers and have a chat with the one white boy who’s been in a cell up there for the past three years or so; sits down nicely with the king of the fucking vampires, and slide inside his garbage dump of a brain—and what a joy that’s gonna be, I can’t believe you’d ask me to do this—and read whatever piece of boiled shit in there he calls a brain, and see if he’s jerking you around. That’s what I ought to do, am I correct? Instead of being a smartass. Have I got it right? Do I properly pierce your meaning, pal?”

She stood up. She didn’t even say Screw you, Pairis!

She just slapped me as hard as she could.

She hit me a good one straight across the mouth.

I felt my upper teeth bite my lower lip. I tasted the blood. My head rang like a church bell. I thought I’d fall off the goddam stool.

When I could focus, she was just standing there, looking ashamed of herself, and disappointed, and mad as hell, and worried that she’d brained me. All of that, all at the same time. Plus, she looked as if I’d broken her choo-choo train.

“Okay,” I said wearily, and ended the word with a sigh that reached all the way back into my hip pocket. “Okay, calm down. I’ll see him. I’ll do it. Take it easy.”

She didn’t sit down. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, of course not,” I said, unable to form the smile I was trying to put on my face. “How could you possibly hurt someone by knocking his brains into his lap?”

She stood over me as I clung precariously to the counter, turned halfway around on the stool by the blow. Stood over me, the balled-up paper napkin in her fist, a look on her face that said she was nobody’s fool, that we’d known each other a long time, that she hadn’t asked this kind of favor before, that if we were buddies and I loved her, that I would see she was in deep pain, that she was conflicted, that she needed to know, really needed to know without a doubt, and in the name of God—in which she believed, though I didn’t, but either way what the hell—that I do this thing for her, that I just do it and not give her any more crap about it.

So I shrugged, and spread my hands like a man with no place to go, and I said, “How’d you get into this?”

She told me the first fifteen minutes of her tragic, heartwarming, never-to-be-ridiculed story still standing. After fifteen minutes I said, “Fer chrissakes, Ally, at least sit down! You look like a damned fool standing there with a greasy napkin in your mitt.”

A couple of teen-agers had come in. The four-star chef had finished his cigarette out back and was reassuringly in place, walking the duckboards and dishing up All-American arterial cloggage.

She picked up her elegant attaché case and without a word, with only a nod that said let’s get as far from them as we can, she and I moved to a double against the window to resume our discussion of the varieties of social suicide available to an unwary and foolhardy gentleman of the colored persuasion if he allowed himself to be swayed by a cagey and cogent, clever and concupiscent female of another color entirely.

See, what it is, is this:

Look at that attaché case. You want to know what kind of an Ally this Allison Roche is? Pay heed, now.

In New York, when some wannabe junior ad exec has smooched enough butt to get tossed a bone account, and he wants to walk his colors, has a need to signify, has got to demonstrate to everyone that he’s got the juice first thing he does, he hies his ass downtown to Barney’s, West 17th and Seventh, buys hisself a Burberry, loops the belt casually behind, leaving the coat open to suhwing, and he circumnavigates the office.

In Dallas, when the wife of the CEO has those six or eight upper-management husbands and wives over for an intime, faux-casual dinner, sans placecards, sans entrée fork, sans cérémonie, and we’re talking the kind of woman who flies Virgin Air instead of the Concorde, she’s so in charge she don’t got to use the Orrefors, she can put out the Kosta Boda and say give a fuck.

What it is, kind of person so in charge, so easy with they own self, they don’t have to laugh at your poor dumb struttin’ Armani suit, or your bedroom done in Laura Ashley, or that you got a gig writing articles for TV Guide. You see what I’m sayin’ here? The sort of person Ally Roche is, you take a look at that attaché case, and it’ll tell you everything you need to know about how strong she is, because it’s an Atlas. Not a Hartmann. Understand: she could afford a Hartmann, that gorgeous imported Canadian belting leather, top of the line, somewhere around nine hundred and fifty bucks maybe, equivalent of Orrefors, a Burberry, breast of guinea hen and Mouton Rothschild 1492 or 1066 or whatever year is the most expensive, drive a Rolls instead of a Bentley and the only difference is the grille…but she doesn’t need to signify, doesn’t need to suhwing, so she gets herself this Atlas. Not some dumb chickenshit Louis Vuitton or Mark Cross all the divorcée real estate ladies carry, but an Atlas. Irish hand leather. Custom tanned cowhide. Hand tanned in Ireland by out of work IRA bombers. Very classy. Just a state understated. See that attaché case? That tell you why I said I’d do it?

She picked it up from where she’d stashed it, right up against the counter wall by her feet, and we went to the double over by the window, away from the chef and the teen-agers, and she stared at me till she was sure I was in a right frame of mind, and she picked up where she’d left off.

The next twenty-three minutes by the big greasy clock on the wall she related from a sitting position. Actually, a series of sitting positions. She kept shifting in her chair like someone who didn’t appreciate the view of the world from that window, someone hoping for a sweeter horizon. The story started with a gang-rape at the age of thirteen, and moved right along: two broken foster-home families, a little casual fondling by surrogate poppas, intense studying for perfect school grades as a substitute for happiness, working her way through John Jay College of Law, a truncated attempt at wedded bliss in her late twenties, and the long miserable road of legal success that had brought her to Alabama. There could have been worse places.

I’d known Ally for a long time, and we’d spent totals of weeks and months in each other’s company. Not to mention the New Year’s Eve of the Marx Brothers. But I hadn’t heard much of this. Not much at all.

Funny how that goes. Eleven years. You’d think I’d’ve guessed or suspected or something. What the hell makes us think we’re friends with anybody, when we don’t know the first thing about them, not really?

What are we, walking around in a dream? That is to say: what the fuck are we thinking!?!

And there might never have been a reason to hear any of it, all this Ally that was the real Ally, but now she was asking me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go, to do something that scared the shit out of me; and she wanted me to be as fully informed as possible.

It dawned on me that those same eleven years between us hadn’t really given her a full, laser-clean insight into the why and wherefore of Rudy Pairis, either. I hated myself for it. The concealing, the holding-back, the giving up only fragments, the evil misuse of charm when honesty would have hurt. I was facile, and a very quick study; and I had buried all the equivalents to Ally’s pains and travails. I could’ve matched her, in spades; or blacks, or just plain nigras. But I remained frightened of losing her friendship. I’ve never been able to believe in the myth of unqualified friendship. Too much like standing hip-high in a fast-running, freezing river. Standing on slippery stones.

Her story came forward to the point at which she had prosecuted Spanning; had amassed and winnowed and categorized the evidence so thoroughly, so deliberately, so flawlessly; had orchestrated the case so brilliantly; that the jury had come in with guilty on all twenty-nine, soon—in the penalty phase—fifty-six. Murder in the first. Premeditated murder in the first. Premeditated murder with special ugly circumstances in the first. On each and every of the twenty-nine. Less than an hour it took them. There wasn’t even time for a lunch break. Fifty-one minutes it took them to come back with the verdict guilty on all charges. Less than a minute per killing. Ally had done that.

His attorney had argued that no direct link had been established between the fifty-sixth killing (actually, only his 29th in Alabama) and Henry Lake Spanning. No, they had not caught him down on his knees eviscerating the shredded body of his final victim—ten-year-old Gunilla Ascher, a parochial school girl who had missed her bus and been picked up by Spanning just about a mile from her home in Decatur—no, not down on his knees with the can opener still in his sticky red hands, but the m.o. was the same, and he was there in Decatur, on the run from what he had done in Huntsville, what they had caught him doing in Huntsville, in that dumpster, to that old woman. So they couldn’t place him with his smooth, slim hands inside dead Gunilla Ascher’s still-steaming body. So what? They could not have been surer he was the serial killer, the monster, the ravaging nightmare whose methods were so vile the newspapers hadn’t even tried to cobble up some smart-aleck name for him like The Strangler or The Backyard Butcher. The jury had come back in fifty-one minutes, looking sick, looking as if they’d try and try to get everything they’d seen and heard out of their minds, but knew they never would, and wishing to God they could’ve managed to get out of their civic duty on this one.

They came shuffling back in and told the numbed court: hey, put this slimy excuse for a maggot in the chair and cook his ass till he’s fit only to be served for breakfast on cinnamon toast. This was the guy my friend Ally told me she had fallen in love with. The guy she now believed to be innocent.

This was seriously crazy stuff.

“So how did you get, er, uh, how did you…?”

“How did I fall in love with him?”

“Yeah. That.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and pursed her lips as if she had lost a flock of wayward words and didn’t know where to find them. I’d always known she was a private person, kept the really important history to herself—hell, until now I’d never known about the rape, the ice mountain between her mother and father, the specifics of the seven-month marriage—I’d known there’d been a husband briefly; but not what had happened; and I’d known about the foster homes; but again, not how lousy it had been for her—even so, getting this slice of steaming craziness out of her was like using your teeth to pry the spikes out of Jesus’s wrists.

Finally, she said, “I took over the case when Charlie Whilborg had his stroke…”

“I remember.”

“He was the best litigator in the office, and if he hadn’t gone down two days before they caught…” she paused, had trouble with the name, went on, “…before they caught Spanning in Decatur, and if Morgan County hadn’t been so worried about a case this size, and bound Spanning over to us in Birmingham…all of it so fast nobody really had a chance to talk to him…I was the first one even got near him, everyone was so damned scared of him, of what they thought he was…”

“Hallucinating, were they?” I said, being a smartass.

“Shut up.

“The office did most of the donkeywork after that first interview I had with him. It was a big break for me in the office; and I got obsessed by it. So after the first interview, I never spent much actual time with Spanky, never got too close, to see what kind of a man he really…“

I said: “Spanky? Who the hell’s ‘Spanky’?”

She blushed. It started from the sides of her nostrils and went out both ways toward her ears, then climbed to the hairline. I’d seen that happen only a couple of times in eleven years, and one of those times had been when she’d farted at the opera. Lucia di Lammermoor.

I said it again: “Spanky? You’re putting me on, right? You call him Spanky?” The blush deepened. “Like the fat kid in The Little Rascals…c’mon, I don’t fuckin’ believe this!”

She just glared at me.

I felt the laughter coming.

My face started twitching.

She stood up again. “Forget it. Just forget it, okay?” She took two steps away from the table, toward the street exit. I grabbed her hand and pulled her back, trying not to fall apart with laughter, and I said, “Okay okay okay…I’m sorry…I’m really and truly, honest to goodness, may I be struck by a falling space lab no kidding 100% absolutely sorry…but you gotta admit…catching me unawares like that…I mean, come on, Ally…Spanky!?! You call this guy who murdered at least fifty-six people Spanky? Why not Mickey, or Froggy, or Alfalfa…? I can understand not calling him Buckwheat, you can save that one for me, but Spanky???”

And in a moment her face started to twitch; and in another moment she was starting to smile, fighting it every micron of the way; and in another moment she was laughing and swatting at me with her free hand; and then she pulled her hand loose and stood there falling apart with laughter; and in about a minute she was sitting down again. She threw the balled-up napkin at me.

“It’s from when he was a kid,” she said. “He was a fat kid, and they made fun of him. You know the way kids are…they corrupted Spanning into ‘Spanky’ because The Little Rascals were on television and…oh, shut up, Rudy!”

I finally quieted down, and made conciliatory gestures.

She watched me with an exasperated wariness till she was sure I wasn’t going to run any more dumb gags on her, and then she resumed. “After Judge Fay sentenced him, I handled Spa…Henry’s case from our office, all the way up to the appeals stage. I was the one who did the pleading against clemency when Henry’s lawyers took their appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta.

“When he was denied a stay by the appellate, three-to-nothing, I helped prepare the brief when Henry’s counsel went to the Alabama Supreme Court; then when the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, I thought it was all over. I knew they’d run out of moves for him, except maybe the Governor; but that wasn’t ever going to happen. So I thought: that’s that.

“When the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear it three weeks ago, I got a letter from him. He’d been set for execution next Saturday, and I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to see me.”

I asked, “The letter…it got to you how?”

“One of his attorneys.”

“I thought they’d given up on him.”

“So did I. The evidence was so overwhelming; half a dozen counselors found ways to get themselves excused; it wasn’t the kind of case that would bring any litigator good publicity. Just the number of eyewitnesses in the parking lot of that Winn-Dixie in Huntsville…must have been fifty of them, Rudy. And they all saw the same thing, and they all identified Henry in lineup after lineup, twenty, thirty, could have been fifty of them if we’d needed that long a parade. And all the rest of it…”

I held up a hand. I know, the flat hand against the air said. She had told me all of this. Every grisly detail, till I wanted to puke. It was as if I’d done it all myself, she was so vivid in her telling. Made my jaunting nausea pleasurable by comparison. Made me so sick I couldn’t even think about it. Not even in a moment of human weakness.

“So the letter comes to you from the attorney…”

“I think you know this lawyer. Larry Borlan; used to be with the ACLU; before that he was senior counsel for the Alabama Legislature down to Montgomery; stood up, what was it, twice, three times, before the Supreme Court? Excellent guy. And not easily fooled.”

“And what’s he think about all this?”

“He thinks Henry’s absolutely innocent.”

“Of all of it?”

“Of everything.”

“But there were fifty disinterested random eyewitnesses at one of those slaughters. Fifty, you just said it. Fifty, you could’ve had a parade. All of them nailed him cold, without a doubt. Same kind of kill as all the other fifty-five, including that schoolkid in Decatur when they finally got him. And Larry Borlan thinks he’s not the guy, right?”

She nodded. Made one of those sort of comic pursings of the lips, shrugged, and nodded. “Not the guy.”

“So the killer’s still out there?”

“That’s what Borlan thinks.”

“And what do you think?”

“I agree with him.”

“Oh, jeezus, Ally, my aching boots and saddle! You got to be workin’ some kind of off-time! The killer is still out here in the mix, but there hasn’t been a killing like those Spanning slaughters for the three years that he’s been in the joint. Now what do that say to you?”

“It says whoever the guy is, the one who killed all those people, he’s days smarter than all the rest of us, and he set up the perfect freefloater to take the fall for him, and he’s either long far gone in some other state, working his way, or he’s sitting quietly right here in Alabama, waiting and watching. And smiling.” Her face seemed to sag with misery. She started to tear up, and said, “In four days he can stop smiling.”

Saturday night.

“Okay, take it easy. Go on, tell me the rest of it. Borlan comes to you, and he begs you to read Spanning’s letter and…?”

“He didn’t beg. He just gave me the letter, told me he had no idea what Henry had written, but he said he’d known me a long time, that he thought I was a decent, fair-minded person, and he’d appreciate it in the name of our friendship if I’d read it.”

“So you read it.”

“I read it.”

“Friendship. Sounds like you an’ him was good friends. Like maybe you and I were good friends?”

She looked at me with astonishment.

I think I looked at me with astonishment.

“Where the hell did that come from?” I said.

“Yeah, really,” she said, right back at me, “where the hell did that come from?” My ears were hot, and I almost started to say something about how if it was okay for her to use our Marx Brothers indiscretion for a lever, why wasn’t it okay for me to get cranky about it? But I kept my mouth shut; and for once knew enough to move along. “Must’ve been some letter,” I said.

There was a long moment of silence during which she weighed the degree of shit she’d put me through for my stupid remark, after all this was settled; and having struck a balance in her head, she told me about the letter.

It was perfect. It was the only sort of come-on that could lure the avenger who’d put you in the chair to pay attention. The letter had said that fifty-six was not the magic number of death. That there were many, many more unsolved cases, in many, many different states; lost children, runaways, unexplained disappearances, old people, college students hitchhiking to Sarasota for Spring Break, shopkeepers who’d carried their day’s take to the night deposit drawer and never gone home for dinner, hookers left in pieces in Hefty bags all over town, and death death death unnumbered and unnamed. Fifty-six, the letter had said, was just the start. And if she, her, no one else, Allison Roche, my pal Ally, would come on down to Holman, and talk to him, Henry Lake Spanning would help her close all those open files. National rep. Avenger of the unsolved. Big time mysteries revealed. “So you read the letter, and you went…”

“Not at first. Not immediately. I was sure he was guilty, and I was pretty certain at that moment, three years and more, dealing with the case, I was pretty sure if he said he could fill in all the blank spaces, that he could do it. But I just didn’t like the idea. In court, I was always twitchy when I got near him at the defense table. His eyes, he never took them off me. They’re blue, Rudy, did I tell you that…?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember. Go on.”

“Bluest blue you’ve ever seen…well, to tell the truth, he just plain scared me. I wanted to win that case so badly, Rudy, you can never know…not just for me or the career or for the idea of justice or to avenge all those people he’d killed, but just the thought of him out there on the street, with those blue eyes, so blue, never stopped looking at me from the moment the trial began…the thought of him on the loose drove me to whip that case like a howling dog. I had to put him away!”

“But you overcame your fear.”

She didn’t like the edge of ridicule on the blade of that remark. “That’s right. I finally ‘overcame my fear’ and I agreed to go see him.”

“And you saw him.”

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t know shit about no other killings, right?”

“Yes.”

“But he talked a good talk. And his eyes was blue, so blue.”

“Yes, you asshole.”

I chuckled. Everybody is somebody’s fool.

“Now let me ask you this—very carefully—so you don’t hit me again: the moment you discovered he’d been shuckin’ you, lyin’, that he didn’t have this long, unsolved crime roster to tick off, why didn’t you get up, load your attaché case, and hit the bricks?”

Her answer was simple. “He begged me to stay a while.”

“That’s it? He begged you?”

“Rudy, he has no one. He’s never had anyone.” She looked at me as if I were made of stone, some basalt thing, an onyx statue, a figure carved out of melanite, soot and ashes fused into a monolith. She feared she could not, in no way, no matter how piteously or bravely she phrased it, penetrate my rocky surface.

Then she said a thing that I never wanted to hear.

“Rudy…”

Then she said a thing I could never have imagined she’d say. Never in a million years.

“Rudy…”

Then she said the most awful thing she could say to me, even more awful than that she was in love with a serial killer.

“Rudy…go inside…read my mind…I need you to know, I need you to understand…Rudy…”

The look on her face killed my heart.

I tried to say no, oh god no, not that, please, no, not that, don’t ask me to do that, please please I don’t want to go inside, we mean so much to each other, I don’t want to know your landscape. Don’t make me feel filthy, I’m no peeping-tom, I’ve never spied on you, never stolen a look when you were coming out of the shower, or undressing, or when you were being sexy…I never invaded your privacy, I wouldn’t do a thing like that…we’re friends, I don’t need to know it all, I don’t want to go in there. I can go inside anyone, and it’s always awful…please don’t make me see things in there I might not like, you’re my friend, please don’t steal that from me…

“Rudy, please. Do it.”

Oh jeezusjeezusjeezus, again, she said it again!

We sat there. And we sat there. And we sat there longer. I said, hoarsely, in fear, “Can’t you just…just tell me?”

Her eyes looked at stone. A man of stone. And she tempted me to do what I could do casually, tempted me the way Faust was tempted by Mefisto, Mephistopheles, Mefistofele, Mephostopilis. Black rock Dr. Faustus, possessor of magical mind-reading powers, tempted by thick, lustrous eyelashes and violet eyes and a break in the voice and an imploring movement of hand to face and a tilt of the head that was pitiable and the begging word please and all the guilt that lay between us that was mine alone. The seven chief demons. Of whom Mefisto was the one “not loving the light.”

I knew it was the end of our friendship. But she left me nowhere to run. Mefisto in onyx.

So I jaunted into her landscape.

I stayed in there less than ten seconds. I didn’t want to know everything I could know; and I definitely wanted to know nothing about how she really thought of me. I couldn’t have borne seeing a caricature of a bug-eyed, shuffling, thick-lipped darkie in there. Mandingo man. Steppin Porchmonkey Rudy Pair…

Oh god, what was I thinking!

Nothing in there like that. Nothing! Ally wouldn’t have anything like that in there. I was going nuts, going absolutely fucking crazy, in there, back out in less than ten seconds. I want to block it, kill it, void it, waste it, empty it, reject it, squeeze it, darken it, obscure it, wipe it, do away with it like it never happened. Like the moment you walk in on your momma and poppa and catch them fucking, and you want never to have known that.

But at least I understood.

In there, in Allison Roche’s landscape, I saw how her heart had responded to this man she called Spanky, not Henry Lake Spanning. She did not call him, in there, by the name of a monster; she called him a honey’s name. I didn’t know if he was innocent or not, but she knew he was innocent. At first she had responded to just talking with him, about being brought up in an orphanage, and she was able to relate to his stories of being used and treated like chattel, and how they had stripped him of his dignity, and made him afraid all the time. She knew what that was like. And how he’d always been on his own. The running-away. The being captured like a wild thing, and put in this home or that lockup or the orphanage “for his own good.” Washing stone steps with a tin bucket full of gray water, with a horsehair brush and a bar of lye soap, till the tender folds of skin between the fingers were furiously red and hurt so much you couldn’t make a fist.

She tried to tell me how her heart had responded, with a language that has never been invented to do the job. I saw as much as I needed, there in that secret landscape, to know that Spanning had led a miserable life, but that somehow he’d managed to become a decent human being. And it showed through enough when she was face to face with him, talking to him without the witness box between them, without the adversarial thing, without the tension of the courtroom and the gallery and those parasite creeps from the tabloids sneaking around taking pictures of him, that she identified with his pain. Hers had been not the same, but similar; of a kind, if not of identical intensity.

She came to know him a little.

And came back to see him again. Human compassion. In a moment of human weakness.

Until, finally, she began examining everything she had worked up as evidence, trying to see it from his point of view, using his explanations of circumstantiality. And there were inconsistencies. Now she saw them. Now she did not turn her prosecuting attorney’s mind from them, recasting them in a way that would railroad Spanning; now she gave him just the barest possibility of truth. And the case did not seem as incontestable.

By that time, she had to admit to herself, she had fallen in love with him. The gentle quality could not be faked; she’d known fraudulent kindness in her time.

I left her mind gratefully. But at least I understood.

“Now?” she asked.

Yes, now. Now I understood. And the fractured glass in her voice told me. Her face told me. The way she parted her lips in expectation, waiting for me to reveal what my magic journey had conveyed by way of truth. Her palm against her cheek. All that told me. And I said, “Yes.”

Then, silence, between us.

After a while she said, “I didn’t feel anything.”

I shrugged. “Nothing to feel. I was in for a few seconds, that’s all.”

“You didn’t see everything?”

“No.”

“Because you didn’t want to?”

“Because…”

She smiled. “I understand, Rudy.”

Oh, do you? Do you really? That’s just fine. And I heard me say, “You made it with him yet?”

I could have torn off her arm; it would’ve hurt less.

“That’s the second time today you’ve asked me that kind of question. I didn’t like it much the first time, and I like it less this time.”

“You’re the one wanted me to go into your head. I didn’t buy no ticket for the trip.”

“Well, you were in there. Didn’t you look around enough to find out?”

“I didn’t look for that.”

“What a chickenshit, wheedling, lousy and cowardly…”

“I haven’t heard an answer, Counselor. Kindly restrict your answers to a simple yes or no.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! He’s on Death Row!”

“There are ways.”

“How would you know?”

“I had a friend. Up at San Rafael. What they call Tamal. Across the bridge from Richmond, a little north of San Francisco.”

“That’s San Quentin.”

“That’s what it is, all right.”

“I thought that friend of yours was at Pelican Bay?”

“Different friend.”

“You seem to have a lot of old chums in the joint in California.”

“It’s a racist nation.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“But Q ain’t Pelican Bay. Two different states of being. As hard time as they pull at Tamal, it’s worse up to Crescent City. In the Shoe.”

“You never mentioned ‘a friend’ at San Quentin.”

“I never mentioned a lotta shit. That don’t mean I don’t know it. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

We sat silently, the three of us: me, her, and Walt Whitman. We’re fighting, I thought. Not make-believe, dissin’ some movie we’d seen and disagreed about; this was nasty. Bone nasty and memorable. No one ever forgets this kind of fight. Can turn dirty in a second, say some trash you can never take back, never forgive, put a canker on the rose of friendship for all time, never be the same look again.

I waited. She didn’t say anything more; and I got no straight answer; but I was pretty sure Henry Lake Spanning had gone all the way with her. I felt a twinge of emotion I didn’t even want to look at, much less analyze, dissect, and name. Let it be, I thought. Eleven years. Once, just once. Let it just lie there and get old and withered and die a proper death like all ugly thoughts.

“Okay. So I go on down to Atmore,” I said. “I suppose you mean in the very near future, since he’s supposed to bake in four days. Sometime very soon: like today.”

She nodded.

I said, “And how do I get in? Law student? Reporter? Tag along as Larry Borlan’s new law clerk? Or do I go in with you? What am I, friend of the family, representative of the Alabama State Department of Corrections; maybe you could set me up as an inmate’s rep from ‘Project Hope’.”

“I can do better than that,” she said. The smile. “Much.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet you can. Why does that worry me?”

Still with the smile, she hoisted the Atlas onto her lap. She unlocked it, took out a small manila envelope, unsealed but clasped, and slid it across the table to me. I pried open the clasp and shook out the contents.

Clever. Very clever. And already made up, with my photo where necessary, admission dates stamped for tomorrow morning, Thursday, absolutely authentic and foolproof.

“Let me guess,” I said, “Thursday mornings, the inmates of Death Row have access to their attorneys?”

“On Death Row, family visitation Monday and Friday. Henry has no family. Attorney visitations Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I couldn’t count on today. It took me a couple of days to get through to you…”

“I’ve been busy.”

“…but inmates consult with their counsel on Wednesday and Thursday mornings.”

I tapped the papers and plastic cards. “This is very sharp. I notice my name and my handsome visage already here, already sealed in plastic. How long have you had these ready?”

“Couple of days.”

“What if I’d continued to say no?”

She didn’t answer. She just got that look again.

“One last thing,” I said. And I leaned in very close, so she would make no mistake that I was dead serious. “Time grows short. Today’s Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Thursday. They throw those computer-controlled twin switches Saturday night midnight. What if I jaunt into him and find out you’re right, that he’s absolutely innocent? What then? They going to listen to me? Fiercely high-verbal black boy with the magic mind-read power?

“I don’t think so. Then what happens, Ally?”

“Leave that to me.” Her face was hard. “As you said: there are ways. There are roads and routes and even lightning bolts, if you know where to shop. The power of the judiciary. An election year coming up. Favors to be called in.”

I said, “And secrets to be wafted under sensitive noses?”

“You just come back and tell me Spanky’s telling the truth,” and she smiled as I started to laugh, “and I’ll worry about the world one minute after midnight Sunday morning.”

I got up and slid the papers back into the envelope, and put the envelope under my arm. I looked down at her and I smiled as gently as I could, and I said, “Assure me that you haven’t stacked the deck by telling Spanning I can read minds.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Tell me.”

“I haven’t told him you can read minds.”

“You’re lying.”

“Did you…?”

“Didn’t have to. I can see it in your face, Ally.”

“Would it matter if he knew?”

“Not a bit. I can read the sonofabitch cold or hot, with or without. Three seconds inside and I’ll know if he did it all, if he did part of it, if he did none of it.”

“I think I love him, Rudy.”

“You told me that.”

“But I wouldn’t set you up. I need to know…that’s why I’m asking you to do it.”

I didn’t answer. I just smiled at her. She’d told him. He’d know I was coming. But that was terrific. If she hadn’t alerted him, I’d have asked her to call and let him know. The more aware he’d be, the easier to scorch his landscape.

I’m a fast study, king of the quick learners: vulgate Latin in a week; standard apothecary’s pharmacopoeia in three days; Fender bass on a weekend; Atlanta Falcons’ play book in an hour; and, in a moment of human weakness, what it feels like to have a very crampy, heavy-flow menstrual period, two minutes flat.

So fast, in fact, that the more somebody tries to hide the boiling pits of guilt and the crucified bodies of shame, the faster I adapt to their landscape. Like a man taking a polygraph test gets nervous, starts to sweat, ups the galvanic skin response, tries to duck and dodge, gets himself hinky and more hinky and hinkyer till his upper lip could water a truck garden, the more he tries to hide from me…the more he reveals…the deeper inside I can go.

There is an African saying: Death comes without the thumping of drums.

I have no idea why that one came back to me just then.

Last thing you expect from a prison administration is a fine sense of humor. But they got one at the Holman facility.

They had the bloody monster dressed like a virgin.

White duck pants, white short sleeve shirt buttoned up to the neck, white socks. Pair of brown ankle-high brogans with crepe soles, probably neoprene, but they didn’t clash with the pale, virginal apparition that came through the security door with a large, black brother in Alabama Prison Authority uniform holding onto his right elbow.

Didn’t clash, those work shoes, and didn’t make much of a tap on the white tile floor. It was as if he floated. Oh yes, I said to myself, oh yes indeed: I could see how this messianic figure could wow even as tough a cookie as Ally. Oh my, yes.

Fortunately, it was raining outside.

Otherwise, sunlight streaming through the glass, he’d no doubt have a halo. I’d have lost it. Right there, a laughing jag would not have ceased. Fortunately, it was raining like a sonofabitch.

Which hadn’t made the drive down from Clanton a possible entry on any deathbed list of Greatest Terrific Moments in My Life. Sheets of aluminum water, thick as misery, like a neverending shower curtain that I could drive through for an eternity and never really penetrate. I went into the ditch off the I-65 half a dozen times. Why I never plowed down and buried myself up to the axles in the sucking goo running those furrows, never be something I’ll understand.

But each time I skidded off the Interstate, even the twice I did a complete three-sixty and nearly rolled the old Fairlane I’d borrowed from John the C Hepworth, even then I just kept digging, slewed like an epileptic seizure, went sideways and climbed right up the slippery grass and weeds and running, sucking red Alabama goo, right back onto that long black anvil pounded by rain as hard as roofing nails. I took it then, as I take it now, to be a sign that Destiny was determined the mere heavens and earth would not be permitted to fuck me around. I had a date to keep, and Destiny was on top of things.

Even so, even living charmed, which was clear to me, even so: when I got about five miles north of Atmore, I took the 57 exit off the I-65 and a left onto 21, and pulled in at the Best Western. It wasn’t my intention to stay overnight that far south—though I knew a young woman with excellent teeth down in Mobile—but the rain was just hammering and all I wanted was to get this thing done and go fall asleep. A drive that long, humping something as lame as that Fairlane, hunched forward to scope the rain…with Spanning in front of me…all I desired was surcease. A touch of the old oblivion.

I checked in, stood under the shower for half an hour, changed into the three-piece suit I’d brought along, and phoned the front desk for directions to the Holman facility.

Driving there, a sweet moment happened for me. It was the last sweet moment for a long time thereafter, and I remember it now as if it were still happening. I cling to it.

In May, and on into early June, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper blossoms. In the forests and the woodland bogs, and often on some otherwise undistinguished slope or hillside, the yellow and purple orchids suddenly appear.

I was driving. There was a brief stop in the rain. Like the eye of the hurricane. One moment sheets of water, and the next, absolute silence before the crickets and frogs and birds started complaining; and darkness on all sides, just the idiot staring beams of my headlights poking into nothingness; and cool as a well between the drops of rain; and I was driving. And suddenly, the window rolled down so I wouldn’t fall asleep, so I could stick my head out when my eyes started to close, suddenly I smelled the delicate perfume of the sweet May-blossoming Lady’s Slipper. Off to my left, off in the dark somewhere on a patch of hilly ground, or deep in a stand of invisible trees, Cypripedium calceolus was making the night world beautiful with its fragrance.

I neither slowed, nor tried to hold back the tears.

I just drove, feeling sorry for myself; for no good reason I could name.

Way, way down—almost to the corner of the Florida Panhandle, about three hours south of the last truly imperial barbeque in that part of the world, in Birmingham—I made my way to Holman. If you’ve never been inside the joint, what I’m about to say will resonate about as clearly as Chaucer to one of the gentle Tasaday.

The stones call out.

That institution for the betterment of the human race, the Organized Church, has a name for it. From the fine folks at Catholicism, Lutheranism, Baptism, Judaism, Islamism, Druidism…Ismism…the ones who brought you Torquemada, several spicy varieties of Inquisition, original sin, holy war, sectarian violence, and something called “pro-lifers” who bomb and maim and kill…comes the catchy phrase Damned Places.

Rolls off the tongue like God’s On Our Side, don’t it?

Damned Places.

As we say in Latin, the situs of malevolent shit. The venue of evil happenings. Locations forever existing under a black cloud, like residing in a rooming house run by Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond. The big slams are like that. Joliet, Dannemora, Attica, Rahway State in Jersey, that hellhole down in Louisiana called Angola, old Folsom—not the new one, the old Folsom—Q, and Ossining. Only people who read about it call it “Sing Sing.” Inside, the cons call it Ossining. The Ohio State pen in Columbus. Leavenworth, Kansas. The ones they talk about among themselves when they talk about doing hard time. The Shoe at Pelican Bay State Prison. In there, in those ancient structures mortared with guilt and depravity and no respect for human life and just plain meanness on both sides, cons and screws, in there where the walls and floors have absorbed all the pain and loneliness of a million men and women for decades…in there, the stones call out.

Damned places. You can feel it when you walk through the gates and go through the metal detectors and empty your pockets on counters and open your briefcase so that thick fingers can rumple the papers. You feel it. The moaning and thrashing, and men biting holes in their own wrists so they’ll bleed to death.

And I felt it worse than anyone else.

I blocked out as much as I could. I tried to hold on to the memory of the scent of orchids in the night. The last thing I wanted was to jaunt into somebody’s landscape at random. Go inside and find out what he had done, what had really put him here, not just what they’d got him for. And I’m not talking about Spanning; I’m talking about every one of them. Every guy who had kicked to death his girl friend because she brought him Bratwurst instead of spicy Cajun sausage. Every pale, wormy Bible-reciting psycho who had stolen, buttfucked, and sliced up an altar boy in the name of secret voices that “tole him to g’wan do it!” Every amoral druggie who’d shot a pensioner for her food stamps. If I let down for a second, if I didn’t keep that shield up, I’d be tempted to send out a scintilla and touch one of them. In a moment of human weakness.

So I followed the trusty to the Warden’s office, where his secretary checked my papers, and the little plastic cards with my face encased in them, and she kept looking down at the face, and up at my face, and down at my face, and up at the face in front of her, and when she couldn’t restrain herself a second longer she said, “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Pairis. Uh. Do you really work for the President of the United States?”

I smiled at her. “We go bowling together.”

She took that highly, and offered to walk me to the conference room where I’d meet Henry Lake Spanning. I thanked her the way a well-mannered gentleman of color thanks a Civil Servant who can make life easier or more difficult, and I followed her along corridors and in and out of guarded steel-riveted doorways, through Administration and the segregation room and the main hall to the brown-paneled, stained walnut, white tile over cement floored, roll-out security windowed, white draperied, drop ceiling with 2” acoustical Celotex squared conference room, where a Security Officer met us. She bid me fond adieu, not yet fully satisfied that such a one as I had come, that morning, on Air Force One, straight from a 7-10 split with the President of the United States.

It was a big room.

I sat down at the conference table; about twelve feet long and four feet wide; highly polished walnut, maybe oak. Straight back chairs: metal tubing with a light yellow upholstered cushion. Everything quiet, except for the sound of matrimonial rice being dumped on a connubial tin roof. The rain had not slacked off. Out there on the I-65 some luck-lost bastard was being sucked down into red death.

“He’ll be here,” the Security Officer said.

“That’s good,” I replied. I had no idea why he’d tell me that, seeing as how it was the reason I was there in the first place. I imagined him to be the kind of guy you dread sitting in front of, at the movies, because he always explains everything to his date. Like a bracero laborer with a valid green card interpreting a Woody Allen movie line-by-line to his illegal-alien cousin Humberto, three weeks under the wire from Matamoros. Like one of a pair of Beltone-wearing octogenarians on the loose from a rest home for a wild Saturday afternoon at the mall, plonked down in the third level multiplex, one of them describing whose ass Clint Eastwood is about to kick, and why. All at the top of her voice.

“Seen any good movies lately?” I asked him.

He didn’t get a chance to answer, and I didn’t jaunt inside to find out, because at that moment the steel door at the far end of the conference room opened, and another Security Officer poked his head in, and called across to Officer Let-Me-State-the-Obvious, “Dead man walking!”

Officer Self-Evident nodded to him, the other head poked back out, the door slammed, and my companion said, “When we bring one down from Death Row, he’s gotta walk through the Ad Building and Segregation and the Main Hall. So everything’s locked down. Every man’s inside. It takes some time, y’know.”

I thanked him.

“Is it true you work for the President, yeah?” He asked it so politely, I decided to give him a straight answer; and to hell with all the phony credentials Ally had worked up. “Yeah,” I said, “we’re on the same bocce ball team.”

“Izzat so?” he said, fascinated by sports stats.

I was on the verge of explaining that the President was, in actuality, of Italian descent, when I heard the sound of the key turning in the security door, and it opened outward, and in came this messianic apparition in white, being led by a guard who was seven feet in any direction.

Henry Lake Spanning, sans halo, hands and feet shackled, with the chains cold-welded into a wide anodized steel belt, shuffled toward me; and his neoprene soles made no disturbing cacophony on the white tiles.

I watched him come the long way across the room, and he watched me right back. I thought to myself, Yeah, she told him I can read minds. Well, let’s see which method you use to try and keep me out of the landscape. But I couldn’t tell from the outside of him, not just by the way he shuffled and looked, if he had fucked Ally. But I knew it had to’ve been. Somehow. Even in the big lockup. Even here.

He stopped right across from me, with his hands on the back of the chair, and he didn’t say a word, just gave me the nicest smile I’d ever gotten from anyone, even my momma. Oh, yes, I thought, oh my goodness, yes. Henry Lake Spanning was either the most masterfully charismatic person I’d ever met, or so good at the charm con that he could sell a slashed throat to a stranger.

“You can leave him,” I said to the great black behemoth brother.

“Can’t do that, sir.”

“I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Sorry, sir; I was told someone had to be right here in the room with you and him, all the time.”

I looked at the one who had waited with me. “That mean you, too?”

He shook his head. “Just one of us, I guess.”

I frowned. “I need absolute privacy. What would happen if I were this man’s attorney of record? Wouldn’t you have to leave us alone? Privileged communication, right?”

They looked at each other, this pair of Security Officers, and they looked back at me, and they said nothing. All of a sudden Mr. Plain-as-the-Nose-on-Your-Face had nothing valuable to offer; and the sequoia with biceps “had his orders.”

“They tell you who I work for? They tell you who it was sent me here to talk to this man?” Recourse to authority often works. They mumbled yessir yessir a couple of times each, but their faces stayed right on the mark of sorry, sir, but we’re not supposed to leave anybody alone with this man. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d believed I’d flown in on Jehovah One.

So I said to myself fuckit, and I slipped into their thoughts, and it didn’t take much rearranging to get the phone wires re-strung and the underground cables rerouted and the pressure on their bladders something fierce.

“On the other hand…” the first one said.

“I suppose we could…” the giant said.

And in a matter of maybe a minute and a half one of them was entirely gone, and the great one was standing outside the steel door, his back filling the double-pane chickenwire-imbedded security window. He effectively sealed off the one entrance or exit to or from the conference room; like the three hundred Spartans facing the tens of thousands of Xerxes’s army at the Hot Gates.

Henry Lake Spanning stood silently watching me.

“Sit down,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He pulled out the chair, came around, and sat down.

“Pull it closer to the table,” I said.

He had some difficulty, hands shackled that way, but he grabbed the leading edge of the seat and scraped forward till his stomach was touching the table.

He was a handsome guy, even for a white man. Nice nose, strong cheekbones, eyes the color of that water in your toilet when you toss in a tablet of 2000 Flushes. Very nice looking man. He gave me the creeps.

If Dracula had looked like Shirley Temple, no one would’ve driven a stake through his heart. If Harry Truman had looked like Freddy Krueger, he would never have beaten Tom Dewey at the polls. Joe Stalin and Saddam Hussein looked like sweet, avuncular friends of the family, really nice looking, kindly guys—who just incidentally happened to slaughter millions of men, women, and children. Abe Lincoln looked like an axe murderer, but he had a heart as big as Guatemala.

Henry Lake Spanning had the sort of face you’d trust immediately if you saw it in a tv commercial. Men would like to go fishing with him, women would like to squeeze his buns. Grannies would hug him on sight, kids would follow him straight into the mouth of an open oven. If he could play the piccolo, rats would gavotte around his shoes.

What saps we are. Beauty is only skin deep. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Dress for success. What saps we are.

So what did that make my pal, Allison Roche?

And why the hell didn’t I just slip into his thoughts and check out the landscape? Why was I stalling?

Because I was scared of him.

This was fifty-six verified, gruesome, disgusting murders sitting forty-eight inches away from me, looking straight at me with blue eyes and soft, gently blond hair. Neither Harry nor Dewey would’ve had a prayer.

So why was I scared of him? Because; that’s why.

This was damned foolishness. I had all the weaponry, he was shackled, and I didn’t for a second believe he was what Ally thought he was: innocent. Hell, they’d caught him, literally, redhanded. Bloody to the armpits, fer chrissakes. Innocent, my ass! Okay, Rudy, I thought, get in there and take a look around. But I didn’t. I waited for him to say something.

He smiled tentatively, a gentle and nervous little smile, and he said, “Ally asked me to see you. Thank you for coming.”

I looked at him, but not into him.

He seemed upset that he’d inconvenienced me. “But I don’t think you can do me any good, not in just three days.”

“You scared, Spanning?”

His lips trembled. “Yes I am, Mr. Pairis. I’m about as scared as a man can be.” His eyes were moist.

“Probably gives you some insight into how your victims felt, whaddaya think?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes were moist.

After a moment just looking at me, he scraped back his chair and stood up. “Thank you for coming, sir. I’m sorry Ally imposed on your time.” He turned and started to walk away. I jaunted into his landscape.

Oh my god, I thought. He was innocent.

Never done any of it. None of it. Absolutely no doubt, not a shadow of a doubt. Ally had been right. I saw every bit of that landscape in there, every fold and crease; every bolt hole and rat run; every gully and arroyo; all of his past, back and back and back to his birth in Lewistown, Montana, near Great Falls, thirty-six years ago; every day of his life right up to the minute they arrested him leaning over that disemboweled cleaning woman the real killer had tossed into the dumpster.

I saw every second of his landscape; and I saw him coming out of the Winn-Dixie in Huntsville; pushing a cart filled with grocery bags of food for the weekend. And I saw him wheeling it around the parking lot toward the dumpster area overflowing with broken-down cardboard boxes and fruit crates. And I heard the cry for help from one of those dumpsters; and I saw Henry Lake Spanning stop and look around, not sure he’d heard anything at all. Then I saw him start to go to his car, parked right there at the edge of the lot beside the wall because it was a Friday evening and everyone was stocking up for the weekend, and there weren’t any spaces out front; and the cry for help, weaker this time, as pathetic as a crippled kitten; and Henry Lake Spanning stopped cold, and he looked around; and we both saw the bloody hand raise itself above the level of the open dumpster’s filthy green steel side. And I saw him desert his groceries without a thought to their cost, or that someone might run off with them if he left them unattended, or that he only had eleven dollars left in his checking account, so if those groceries were snagged by someone he wouldn’t be eating for the next few days…and I watched him rush to the dumpster and look into the crap filling it…and I felt his nausea at the sight of that poor old woman, what was left of her…and I was with him as he crawled up onto the dumpster and dropped inside to do what he could for that mass of shredded and pulped flesh.

And I cried with him as she gasped, with a bubble of blood that burst in the open ruin of her throat, and she died. But though I heard the scream of someone coming around the corner, Spanning did not; and so he was still there, holding the poor mass of stripped skin and black bloody clothing, when the cops screeched into the parking lot. And only then, innocent of anything but decency and rare human compassion, did Henry Lake Spanning begin to understand what it must look like to middle-aged hausfraus, sneaking around dumpsters to pilfer cardboard boxes, who see what they think is a man murdering an old woman.

I was with him, there in that landscape within his mind, as he ran and ran and dodged and dodged. Until they caught him in Decatur, seven miles from the body of Gunilla Ascher. But they had him, and they had positive identification, from the dumpster in Huntsville; and all the rest of it was circumstantial, gussied up by bedridden, recovering Charlie Whilborg and the staff in Ally’s office. It looked good on paper—so good that Ally had brought him down on twenty-nine-cum-fifty-six counts of murder in the vilest extreme.

But it was all bullshit.

The killer was still out there.

Henry Lake Spanning, who looked like a nice, decent guy, was exactly that. A nice, decent, goodhearted, but most of all innocent guy.

You could fool juries and polygraphs and judges and social workers and psychiatrists and your mommy and your daddy, but you could not fool Rudy Pairis, who travels regularly to the place of dark where you can go but not return.

They were going to burn an innocent man in three days.

I had to do something about it.

Not just for Ally, though that was reason enough; but for this man who thought he was doomed, and was frightened, but didn’t have to take no shit from a wiseguy like me.

“Mr. Spanning,” I called after him.

He didn’t stop.

“Please,” I said. He stopped shuffling, the chains making their little charm bracelet sounds, but he didn’t turn around.

“I believe Ally is right, sir,” I said. “I believe they caught the wrong man; and I believe all the time you’ve served is wrong; and I believe you ought not die.”

Then he turned slowly, and stared at me with the look of a dog that has been taunted with a bone. His voice was barely a whisper. “And why is that, Mr. Pairis? Why is it that you believe me when nobody else but Ally and my attorney believed me?”

I didn’t say what I was thinking. What I was thinking was that I’d been in there, and I knew he was innocent. And more than that, I knew that he truly loved my pal Allison Roche.

And there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for Ally.

So what I said was: “I know you’re innocent, because I know who’s guilty.”

His lips parted. It wasn’t one of those big moves where someone’s mouth flops open in astonishment; it was just a parting of the lips. But he was startled; I knew that as I knew the poor sonofabitch had suffered too long already.

He came shuffling back to me, and sat down.

“Don’t make fun, Mr. Pairis. Please. I’m what you said, I’m scared. I don’t want to die, and I surely don’t want to die with the world thinking I did those…those things.”

“Makin’ no fun, captain. I know who ought to burn for all those murders. Not six states, but eleven. Not fifty-six dead, but an even seventy. Three of them little girls in a day nursery, and the woman watching them, too.”

He stared at me. There was horror on his face. I know that look real good. I’ve seen it at least seventy times.

“I know you’re innocent, cap’n because I’m the man they want. I’m the guy who put your ass in here.”

In a moment of human weakness. I saw it all. What I had packed off to live in that place of dark where you can go but not return. The wall-safe in my drawing-room. The four-foot-thick walled crypt encased in concrete and sunk a mile deep into solid granite. The vault whose composite laminate walls of judiciously sloped extremely thick blends of steel and plastic, the equivalent of six hundred to seven hundred mm of homogenous depth protection approached the maximum toughness and hardness of crystaliron, that iron grown with perfect crystal structure and carefully controlled quantities of impurities that in a modern combat tank can shrug off a hollow charge warhead like a spaniel shaking himself dry. The Chinese puzzle box. The hidden chamber. The labyrinth. The maze of the mind where I’d sent all seventy to die, over and over and over, so I wouldn’t hear their screams, or see the ropes of bloody tendon, or stare into the pulped sockets where their pleading eyes had been.

When I had walked into that prison, I’d been buttoned up totally. I was safe and secure, I knew nothing, remembered nothing, suspected nothing.

But when I walked into Henry Lake Spanning’s landscape, and I could not lie to myself that he was the one, I felt the earth crack. I felt the tremors and the upheavals, and the fissures started at my feet and ran to the horizon; and the lava boiled up and began to flow. And the steel walls melted, and the concrete turned to dust, and the barriers dissolved; and I looked at the face of the monster.

No wonder I had such nausea when Ally had told me about this or that slaughter ostensibly perpetrated by Henry Lake Spanning, the man she was prosecuting on twenty-nine counts of murders I had committed. No wonder I could picture all the details when she would talk to me about the barest description of the murder site. No wonder I fought so hard against coming to Holman.

In there, in his mind, his landscape open to me, I saw the love he had for Allison Roche, for my pal and buddy with whom I had once, just once…

Don’t try tellin’ me that the Power of Love can open the fissures. I don’t want to hear that shit. I’m telling you that it was a combination, a buncha things that split me open, and possibly maybe one of those things was what I saw between them.

I don’t know that much. I’m a quick study, but this was in an instant. A crack of fate. A moment of human weakness. That’s what I told myself in the part of me that ventured to the place of dark: that I’d done what I’d done in moments of human weakness.

And it was those moments, not my “gift,” and not my blackness, that had made me the loser, the monster, the liar that I am.

In the first moment of realization, I couldn’t believe it. Not me, not good old Rudy. Not likeable Rudy Pairis never done no one but hisself wrong his whole life.

In the next second I went wild with anger, furious at the disgusting thing that lived on one side of my split brain. Wanted to tear a hole through my face and yank the killing thing out, wet and putrescent, and squeeze it into pulp.

In the next second I was nauseated, actually wanted to fall down and puke, seeing every moment of what I had done, unshaded, unhidden, naked to this Rudy Pairis who was decent and reasonable and law-abiding, even if such a Rudy was little better than a well-educated fuckup. But not a killer…I wanted to puke.

Then, finally, I accepted what I could not deny.

For me, never again, would I slide through the night with the scent of the blossoming Yellow Lady’s Slipper. I recognized that perfume now.

It was the odor that rises from a human body cut wide open, like a mouth making a big, dark yawn.

The other Rudy Pairis had come home at last.

They didn’t have half a minute’s worry. I sat down at a little wooden writing table in an interrogation room in the Jefferson County D.A.’s offices, and I made up a graph with the names and dates and locations. Names of as many of the seventy as I actually knew. (A lot of them had just been on the road, or in a men’s toilet, or taking a bath, or lounging in the back row of a movie, or getting some cash from an ATM, or just sitting around doing nothing but waiting for me to come along and open them up, and maybe have a drink off them, or maybe just something to snack on…down the road.) Dates were easy, because I’ve got a good memory for dates. And the places where they’d find the ones they didn’t know about, the fourteen with exactly the same m.o. as the other fifty-six, not to mention the old-style rip-and-pull can opener I’d used on that little Catholic bead-counter Gunilla Whatsername, who did Hail Mary this and Sweet Blessed Jesus that all the time I was opening her up, even at the last, when I held up parts of her insides for her to look at, and tried to get her to lick them, but she died first. Not half a minute’s worry for the State of Alabama. All in one swell foop they corrected a tragic miscarriage of justice, nobbled a maniac killer, solved fourteen more murders than they’d counted on (in five additional states, which made the police departments of those five additional states extremely pleased with the law enforcement agencies of the Sovereign State of Alabama), and made first spot on the evening news on all three major networks, not to mention CNN, for the better part of a week. Knocked the Middle East right out of the box. Neither Harry Truman nor Tom Dewey would’ve had a prayer.

Ally went into seclusion, of course. Took off and went somewhere down on the Florida coast, I heard. But after the trial, and the verdict, and Spanning being released, and me going inside, and all like that, well, oo-poppa-dow as they used to say, it was all reordered properly. Sat cito si sat bene, in Latin: “It is done quickly enough if it is done well.” A favorite saying of Cato. The Elder Cato.

And all I asked, all I begged for, was that Ally and Henry Lake Spanning, who loved each other and deserved each other, and whom I had almost fucked up royally, that the two of them would be there when they jammed my weary black butt into that new electric chair at Holman.

Please come, I begged them.

Don’t let me die alone. Not even a shit like me. Don’t make me cross over into that place of dark, where you can go, but not return—without the face of a friend. Even a former friend. And as for you, captain, well, hell didn’t I save your life so you could enjoy the company of the woman you love? Least you can do. Come on now; be there or be square!

I don’t know if Spanning talked her into accepting the invite, or if it was the other way around; but one day about a week prior to the event of cooking up a mess of fried Rudy Pairis, the Warden stopped by my commodious accommodations on Death Row and gave me to understand that it would be SRO for the barbeque, which meant Ally my pal, and her boy friend, the former resident of the Row where now I dwelt in durance vile.

The things a guy’ll do for love.

Yeah, that was the key. Why would a very smart operator who had gotten away with it, all the way free and clear, why would such a smart operator suddenly pull one of those hokey courtroom “I did it, I did it!” routines, and as good as strap himself into the electric chair?

Once. I only went to bed with her once.

The things a guy’ll do for love.

When they brought me into the death chamber from the holding cell where I’d spent the night before and all that day, where I’d had my last meal (which had been a hot roast beef sandwich, double meat, on white toast, with very crisp french fries, and hot brown country gravy poured over the whole thing, apple sauce, and a bowl of Concord grapes), where a representative of the Holy Roman Empire had tried to make amends for destroying most of the gods, beliefs, and cultures of my black forebears, they held me between Security Officers, neither one of whom had been in attendance when I’d visited Henry Lake Spanning at this very same correctional facility slightly more than a year before.

It hadn’t been a bad year. Lots of rest; caught up on my reading, finally got around to Proust and Langston Hughes, I’m ashamed to admit, so late in the game; lost some weight; worked out regularly; gave up cheese and dropped my cholesterol count. Ain’t nothin’ to it, just to do it.

Even took a jaunt or two or ten, every now and awhile. It didn’t matter none. I wasn’t going anywhere, neither were they. I’d done worse than the worst of them; hadn’t I confessed to it? So there wasn’t a lot that could ice me, after I’d copped to it and released all seventy of them out of my unconscious, where they’d been rotting in shallow graves for years. No big thang, Cuz.

Brought me in, strapped me in, plugged me in.

I looked through the glass at the witnesses.

There sat Ally and Spanning, front row center. Best seats in the house. All eyes and crying, watching, not believing everything had come to this, trying to figure out when and how and in what way it had all gone down without her knowing anything at all about it. And Henry Lake Spanning sitting close beside her, their hands locked in her lap. True love.

I locked eyes with Spanning.

I jaunted into his landscape.

No, I didn’t.

I tried to, and couldn’t squirm through. Thirty years, or less, since I was five or six, I’d been doing it; without hindrance, all alone in the world the only person who could do this listen in on the landscape trick; and for the first time I was stopped. Absolutely no fuckin’ entrance. I went wild! I tried running at it full-tilt, and hit something khaki-colored, like beach sand, and only slightly giving, not hard, but resilient. Exactly like being inside a ten-foot-high, fifty-foot-diameter paper bag, like a big shopping bag from a supermarket, that stiff butcher’s paper kind of bag, and that color, like being inside a bag that size, running straight at it, thinking you’re going to bust through…and being thrown back. Not hard, not like bouncing on a trampoline, just shunted aside like the fuzz from a dandelion hitting a glass door. Unimportant. Khaki-colored and not particularly bothered.

I tried hitting it with a bolt of pure blue lightning mental power, like someone out of a Marvel comic, but that wasn’t how mixing in other people’s minds works. You don’t think yourself in with a psychic battering-ram. That’s the kind of arrant foolishness you hear spouted by unattractive people on public access cable channels, talking about The Power of Love and The Power of the Mind and the ever-popular toe-tapping Power of a Positive Thought. Bullshit; I don’t be home to that folly!

I tried picturing myself in there, but that didn’t work, either. I tried blanking my mind and drifting across, but it was pointless. And at that moment it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how I jaunted. I just…did it. One moment I was snug in the privacy of my own head, and the next I was over there in someone else’s landscape. It was instantaneous, like teleportation, which also is an impossibility, like telepathy.

But now, strapped into the chair, and them getting ready to put the leather mask over my face so the witnesses wouldn’t have to see the smoke coming out of my eye-sockets and the little sparks as my nose hairs burned, when it was urgent that I get into the thoughts and landscape of Henry Lake Spanning, I was shut out completely. And right then, that moment, I was scared!

Presto, without my even opening up to him, there he was: inside my head.

He had jaunted into my landscape.

“You had a nice roast beef sandwich, I see.”

His voice was a lot stronger than it had been when I’d come down to see him a year ago. A lot stronger inside my mind.

“Yes, Rudy, I’m what you knew probably existed somewhere. Another one. A shrike.” He paused. “I see you call it ‘jaunting in the landscape.’ I just called myself a shrike. A butcherbird. One name’s as good as another. Strange, isn’t it; all these years; and we never met anyone else? There must be others, but I think—now I can’t prove this, I have no real data, it’s just a wild idea I’ve had for years and years—I think they don’t know they can do it.”

He stared at me across the landscape, those wonderful blue eyes of his, the ones Ally had fallen in love with, hardly blinking.

“Why didn’t you let me know before this?”

He smiled sadly. “Ah, Rudy. Rudy, Rudy, Rudy; you poor benighted pickaninny.

“Because I needed to suck you in, kid. I needed to put out a bear trap, and let it snap closed on your scrawny leg, and send you over. Here, let me clear the atmosphere in here…” And he wiped away all the manipulation he had worked on me, way back a year ago, when he had so easily covered his own true thoughts, his past, his life, the real panorama of what went on inside his landscape—like bypassing a surveillance camera with a continuous-loop tape that continues to show a placid scene while the joint is being actively burgled—and when he convinced me not only that he was innocent, but that the real killer was someone who had blocked the hideous slaughters from his conscious mind and had lived an otherwise exemplary life. He wandered around my landscape—and all of this in a second or two, because time has no duration in the landscape, like the hours you can spend in a dream that are just thirty seconds long in the real world, just before you wake up—and he swept away all the false memories and suggestions, the logical structure of sequential events that he had planted that would dovetail with my actual existence, my true memories, altered and warped and rearranged so I would believe that I had done all seventy of those ghastly murders…so that I’d believe, in a moment of horrible realization, that I was the demented psychopath who had ranged state to state to state, leaving piles of ripped flesh at every stop. Blocked it all, submerged it all, sublimated it all, me. Good old Rudy Pairis, who never killed anybody. I’d been the patsy he was waiting for.

“There, now, kiddo. See what it’s really like?

“You didn’t do a thing.

“Pure as the driven snow, nigger. That’s the truth. And what a find you were. Never even suspected there was another like me, till Ally came to interview me after Decatur. But there you were, big and black as a Great White Hope, right there in her mind. Isn’t she fine, Pairis? Isn’t she something to take a knife to? Something to split open like a nice piece of fruit warmed in a summer sunshine field, let all the steam rise off her…maybe have a picnic…”

He stopped.

“I wanted her right from the first moment I saw her.

“Now, you know, I could’ve done it sloppy, just been a shrike to Ally that first time she came to the holding cell to interview me; just jump into her, that was my plan. But what a noise that Spanning in the cell would’ve made, yelling it wasn’t a man, it was a woman, not Spanning, but Deputy D.A. Allison Roche…too much noise, too many complications. But I could have done it, jumped into her. Or a guard, and then slice her at my leisure, stalk her, find her, let her steam…

“You look distressed, Mr. Rudy Pairis. Why’s that? Because you’re going to die in my place? Because I could have taken you over at any time, and didn’t? Because after all this time of your miserable, wasted, lousy life you finally find someone like you, and we don’t even have the convenience of a chat? Well, that’s sad, that’s really sad, kiddo. But you didn’t have a chance.”

“You’re stronger than me, you kept me out,” I said.

He chuckled.

“Stronger? Is that all you think it is? Stronger? You still don’t get it, do you?” His face, then, grew terrible. “You don’t even understand now, right now that I’ve cleaned it all away and you can see what I did to you, do you?

“Do you think I stayed in a jail cell, and went through that trial, all of that, because I couldn’t do anything about it? You poor jig slob. I could have jumped like a shrike any time I wanted to. But the first time I met your Ally I saw you.”

I cringed. “And you waited…? For me, you spent all that time in prison, just to get to me…?”

“At the moment when you couldn’t do anything about it, at the moment you couldn’t shout ‘I’ve been taken over by someone else, I’m Rudy Pairis here inside this Henry Lake Spanning body, help me, help me!’ Why stir up noise when all I had to do was bide my time, wait a bit, wait for Ally, and let Ally go for you.”

I felt like a drowning turkey, standing idiotically in the rain, head tilted up, mouth open, water pouring in. “You can…leave the mind…leave the body…go out…jaunt, jump permanently…”

Spanning sniggered like a schoolyard bully.

“You stayed in jail three years just to get me?”

He smirked. Smarter than thou.

“Three years? You think that’s some big deal to me? You don’t think I could have someone like you running around, do you? Someone who can ‘jaunt’ as I do? The only other shrike I’ve ever encountered. You think I wouldn’t sit in here and wait for you to come to me?”

“But three years…”

“You’re what, Rudy…thirty-one, is it? Yes, I can see that. Thirty-one. You’ve never jumped like a shrike. You’ve just entered, jaunted, gone into the landscapes, and never understood that it’s more than reading minds. You can change domiciles, black boy. You can move out of a house in a bad neighborhood—such as strapped into the electric chair—and take up residence in a brand, spanking, new housing complex of million-and-a-half-buck condos, like Ally.”

“But you have to have a place for the other one to go, don’t you?” I said it just flat, no tone, no color to it at all. I didn’t even think of the place of dark, where you can go…

“Who do you think I am, Rudy? Just who the hell do you think I was when I started, when I learned to shrike, how to jaunt, what I’m telling you now about changing residences? You wouldn’t know my first address. I go a long way back.

“But I can give you a few of my more famous addresses. Gilles de Rais, France, 1440; Vlad Tepes, Romania, 1462; Elizabeth Bathory, Hungary, 1611; Catherine DeShayes, France, 1680; Jack the Ripper, London, 1888; Henri Désiré Landru, France, 1915; Albert Fish, New York City, 1934; Ed Gein, Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1954; Myra Hindley, Manchester, 1963; Albert DeSalvo, Boston, 1964; Charles Manson, Los Angeles, 1969; John Wayne Gacy, Norwood Park Township, Illinois, 1977.

“Oh, but how I do go on. And on. And on and on and on, Rudy, my little porch monkey. That’s what I do. I go on. And on and on. Shrike will nest where it chooses. If not in your beloved Allison Roche, then in the cheesy fucked-up black boy, Rudy Pairis. But don’t you think that’s a waste, kiddo? Spending however much time I might have to spend in your socially unacceptable body, when Henry Lake Spanning is such a handsome devil? Why should I have just switched with you when Ally lured you to me, because all it would’ve done is get you screeching and howling that you weren’t Spanning, you were this nigger son who’d had his head stolen…and then you might have manipulated some guards or the Warden…

“Well, you see what I mean, don’t you?

“But now that the mask is securely in place, and now that the electrodes are attached to your head and your left leg, and now that the Warden has his hand on the switch, well, you’d better get ready to do a lot of drooling.”

And he turned around to jaunt back out of me, and I closed the perimeter. He tried to jaunt, tried to leap back to his own mind, but I had him in a fist. Just that easy. Materialized a fist, and turned him to face me.

“Fuck you, Jack the Ripper. And fuck you twice, Bluebeard. And on and on and on fuck you Manson and Boston Strangler and any other dipshit warped piece of sick crap you been in your years. You sure got some muddy-shoes credentials there, boy.

“What I care about all those names, Spanky my brother? You really think I don’t know those names? I’m an educated fellah, Mistuh Rippuh, Mistuh Mad Bomber. You missed a few. Were you also, did you inhabit, hast thou possessed Winnie Ruth Judd and Charlie Starkweather and Mad Dog Coll and Richard Speck and Sirhan Sirhan and Jeffrey Dahmer? You the boogieman responsible for every bad number the human race ever played? You ruin Sodom and Gomorrah, burned the Great Library of Alexandria, orchestrated the Reign of Terror dans Paree, set up the Inquisition, stoned and drowned the Salem witches, slaughtered unarmed women and kids at Wounded Knee, bumped off John Kennedy?

“I don’t think so.

“I don’t even think you got so close as to share a pint with Jack the Ripper. And even if you did, even if you were all those maniacs, you were small potatoes, Spanky. The least of us human beings outdoes you, three times a day. How many lynch ropes you pulled tight, M’sieur Landru?

“What colossal egotism you got, makes you blind, makes you think you’re the only one, even when you find out there’s someone else, you can’t get past it. What makes you think I didn’t know what you can do? What makes you think I didn’t let you do it, and sit here waiting for you like you sat there waiting for me, till this moment when you can’t do shit about it?

“You so goddam stuck on yourself, Spankyhead, you never give it the barest that someone else is a faster draw than you.

“Know what your trouble is, Captain? You’re old, you’re real old, maybe hundreds of years who gives a damn old. That don’t count for shit, old man. You’re old, but you never got smart. You’re just mediocre at what you do.

“You moved from address to address. You didn’t have to be Son of Sam or Cain slayin’ Abel, or whoever the fuck you been…you could’ve been Moses or Galileo or George Washington Carver or Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth or Mark Twain or Joe Louis. You could’ve been Alexander Hamilton and helped found the Manumission Society in New York. You could’ve discovered radium, carved Mount Rushmore, carried a baby out of a burning building. But you got old real fast, and you never got any smarter. You didn’t need to, did you, Spanky? You had it all to yourself, all this ‘shrike’ shit, just jaunt here and jaunt there, and bite off someone’s hand or face like the old, tired, boring, repetitious, no-imagination stupid shit that you are.

“Yeah, you got me good when I came here to see your landscape. You got Ally wired up good. And she suckered me in, probably not even knowing she was doing it…you must’ve looked in her head and found just the right technique to get her to make me come within reach. Good, m’man; you were excellent. But I had a year to torture myself. A year to sit here and think about it. About how many people I’d killed, and how sick it made me, and little by little I found my way through it.

“Because…and here’s the big difference ‘tween us, dummy:

“I unraveled what was going on…it took time, but I learned. Understand, asshole? I learn! You don’t.

“There’s an old Japanese saying—I got lots of these, Henry m’man—I read a whole lot—and what it says is, ‘Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience—twenty times.’” Then I grinned back at him.

“Fuck you, sucker,” I said, just as the Warden threw the switch and I jaunted out of there and into the landscape and mind of Henry Lake Spanning.

I sat there getting oriented for a second; it was the first time I’d done more than a jaunt…this was…shrike; but then Ally beside me gave a little sob for her old pal, Rudy Pairis, who was baking like a Maine lobster, smoke coming out from under the black cloth that covered my, his, face; and I heard the vestigial scream of what had been Henry Lake Spanning and thousands of other monsters, all of them burning, out there on the far horizon of my new landscape; and I put my arm around her, and drew her close, and put my face into her shoulder and hugged her to me; and I heard the scream go on and on for the longest time, I think it was a long time, and finally it was just wind…and then gone…and I came up from Ally’s shoulder, and I could barely speak.

“Shhh, honey, it’s okay,” I murmured. “He’s gone where he can make right for his mistakes. No pain. Quiet, a real quiet place; and all alone forever. And cool there. And dark.”

I was ready to stop failing at everything, and blaming everything. Having fessed up to love, having decided it was time to grow up and be an adult—not just a very quick study who learned fast, extremely fast, a lot faster than anybody could imagine an orphan like me could learn, than anybody could imagine—I hugged her with the intention that Henry Lake Spanning would love Allison Roche more powerfully, more responsibly, than anyone had ever loved anyone in the history of the world. I was ready to stop failing at everything.

And it would be just a whole lot easier as a white boy with great big blue eyes.

Because—get on this now—all my wasted years didn’t have as much to do with blackness or racism or being overqualified or being unlucky or being high-verbal or even the curse of my “gift” of jaunting, as they did with one single truth I learned waiting in there, inside my own landscape, waiting for Spanning to come and gloat:

I have always been one of those miserable guys who couldn’t get out of his own way.

Which meant I could, at last, stop feeling sorry for that poor nigger, Rudy Pairis. Except, maybe, in a moment of human weakness.

At night, even in the chill mountain air, Mona Sue insisted on cranking the air conditioner all the way up. Her usual temperature always ran a couple of degrees higher than normal, and she claimed that the baby she carried made her constant fever even worse. She kept the cabin cold enough to hang meat. During the long, sleepless nights, Ben-bow spooned to her naked, burning skin, trying to stay warm.

In the mornings, too, Mona Sue forced him into the cold. The modern cabin sat on a bench in the cool shadow of Mount Nihart, and they broke their fast with a room-service breakfast on the deck, a robe wrapped loosely about her naked body while Benbow bundled into both sweats and a robe. She ate furiously, stoking a furnace, and recounted her dreams as if they were gospel, effortlessly consuming most of the spread of exotic cheeses and expensively unseasonable fruits, a loaf of sourdough toast, and four kinds of meat, all the while aimlessly babbling through the events of her internal night, the dreams of a teenage girl, languidly symbolic and vaguely frightening. She dreamed of her mother, young and lovely, devouring her litter of barefoot boys in the dark Ozark hollows. And her father, home from a Tennessee prison, his crooked member dangling against her smooth cheek.

Benbow suspected she left the best parts out and did his best to listen to the soft southern cadences without watching her face. He knew what happened when he watched her talk, watched the soft moving curve of her dark lips, the wise slant of her gray eyes. So he picked at his breakfast and tried to focus his stare downslope at the steam drifting off the large hot-water pool behind the old shagbark lodge.

But then she switched to her daydreams about their dubious future, which were as deadly specific as a .45 slug in the brainpan: after the baby, they could flee to Canada; nobody would follow them up there. He listened and watched with the false patience of a teenage boy involved in his first confrontation with pure lust and hopeless desire.

Mona Sue ate with the precise and delicate greed of a heart surgeon, the pad of her spatulate thumb white on the handle of her spoon as she carved a perfect curled ball from the soft orange meat of her melon. Each bite of meat had to be balanced with an equal weight of toast before being crushed between her tiny white teeth. Then she examined each strawberry poised before her darkly red lips as if it might be a jewel of great omen and she some ancient oracle, then sank her shining teeth into the fleshy fruit as if it were the mortal truth. Benbow’s heart rolled in his chest as he tried to fill his lungs with the cold air to fight off the heat of her body.

Fall had come to the mountains, now. The cottonwoods and alders welcomed the change with garish mourning dress, and in the mornings a rime of ice covered the windshield of the gray Taurus he had stolen at the Denver airport. New snow fell each night, moving slowly down the ridges from the high distant peaks of the Hard Rock Range, and slipped closer each morning down the steep ridge behind them. Below the bench the old lodge seemed to settle more deeply into the narrow canyon, as if hunkering down for eons of snow, and the steam from the hot springs mixed with wood smoke and lay flat and sinuous among the yellow creek willows.

Benbow suspected, too, that the scenery was wasted on Mona Sue. Her dark eyes seemed turned inward to a dreamscape of her life, her husband, R. L. Dark, the pig farmer, his bull-necked son, Little R. L., and the lumpy Ozark offal of her large worthless family.

“Coach,” she’d say — she thought it funny to call him Coach — interrupting the shattered and drifting narrative of her dreams. Then she would sweep back the thick black Indian hair from her face, tilt her narrow head on the slender column of her neck, and laugh. “Coach, that of R. L., he’s a-comin’. You stole somethin’ belonged to him, and you can bet he’s on his way. Lit’l R. L., too, prob’ly, ‘cause he tol’ me once he’d like to string your guts on a bob-wire fence,” she recited like a sprightly but not very bright child.

“Sweetheart, R. L. Dark can just barely cipher the numbers on a dollar bill or the spots on a card,” Benbow answered, as he had each morning for the six months they’d been on the run. “He can’t read a map that he hasn’t drawn himself, and by noon he’s too drunk to fit his ass in a tractor seat and find his hog pens…”

“You know, Puddin’, an ol’ boy’s got enough a them dollar bills, or stacks a them Franklins like we do,” she added, laughing, “he can hire-out that readin’ part, and the map part too. So he’s a-comin’. You can put that in your mama’s piggy bank.”

This was a new wrinkle in their morning ritual, and Benbow caught himself glancing down at the parking lot behind the lodge and at the single narrow road up Hidden Springs Canyon, but he shook it off quickly. When he made the fateful decision to take Mona Sue and the money, he vowed to go for it, never glancing over his shoulder, living in the moment.

And this was it. Once more. Leaving his breakfast untouched, again, he slipped his hand through the bulky folds of Mona Sue’s terry cloth robe to cradle the warm ripening fullness of her breasts and the long, thick nipples, already rock-hard before his touch, and he kissed her mouth, sweet with strawberry and melon. Once again, he marveled at the deep passionate growl from the base of her throat as he pressed his lips into the hollow, then Benbow lifted her small frame — she nestled the baby high under the smooth vault of her rib cage and even at seven months the baby barely showed — and carried her to the bedroom.

Benbow knew, from recent experience, that the horse wrangler who doubled as room-service waiter would be waiting to clear the picnic table when they came out of the house to finish the coffee. The wrangler might have patience with horses but not with guests who spent their mornings in bed. But he would wait for long minutes, silent as a Sioux scout, as Mona Sue searched her robe for his tip, occasionally exposing the rising contour of a breast or the clean scissoring of her long legs. Benbow had given him several hard looks, which the wrangler ignored as if the blunt stares were spoken in a foreign tongue. But nothing helped. Except to take the woman inside and avoid the wrangler altogether.

This morning Benbow laid Mona Sue on the featherbed like a gift, opened her robe, kissed the soft curve of her swollen belly, then blew softly on her feathery pubic hair. Mona Sue sobbed quickly, coughed as if she had a catfish bone caught in her throat, her long body arching. Benbow sobbed, too, his hunger for her more intense than the hunger growling in his empty stomach.

While Mona Sue had swelled through her pregnancy, Benbow had shed twenty-seven pounds from his blocky frame. Sometimes, just after they made love, it seemed as if her burning body had stolen the baby from his own muscled flesh, something stolen during the tangle of love, something growing hard and tight in her smooth, slim body.

As usual, they made love, then finished the coffee, ordered a fresh pot, tipped the wrangler, then made love again before her morning nap.

While Mona Sue slept, usually Benbow would drink the rest of the coffee as he read the day-old Meriwether newspaper, then slip into his sweats and running shoes, and jog down the switchbacks to the lodge to laze in the hot waters of the pools. He loved it there, floating in the water that seemed heavier than normal, thicker but cleaner, clearer. He almost felt whole there, cleansed and healthy and warm, taking the waters like some rich foreign prince, fleeing his failed life.

Occasionally, Benbow wished Mona Sue would interrupt her naps to join him, but she always said it might hurt the baby and she was already plenty hot with her natural fevers. As the weeks passed, Benbow learned to treasure his time alone in the hot pool and stopped asking her.

So their days wound away routinely, spooling like silk ribbons through their fingers, as placid as the deeply still waters of the pool.

But this noon, exhausted from the run and the worry, the lack of sleep and food, Benbow slipped effortlessly into the heated gravity of Mona Sue’s sleeping body and slept, only to wake suddenly, sweating in spite of the chill, when the air conditioner was switched off.

R. L. Dark stood at the foot of their bed. Grinning. The old man stretched his crinkled neck, sniffing the air like an ancient snapping turtle, testing the air for food or fun, since he had no natural enemies except for teenage boys with .22s. R. L. had dressed for the occasion. He wore a new Carhart tin coat and clean bib overalls with the old Webley .455 revolver hanging on a string from his neck and bagging the bib pocket.

Two good ol’ boys flanked him, one bald and the other wildly hirsute, both huge and dressed in Kmart flannel plaid. The bald one held up a small ball-peen hammer like a trophy. They weren’t grinning. A skinny man in a baggy white suit shifted from foot to foot behind them, smiling weakly like a gun-shy pointer pup.

“Well, piss on the fire, boys, and call the dogs,” R. L. Dark said, hustling the extra .455 rounds in his pocket as if they were his withered privates, “this hunt’s done.” The old man’s cackle sounded like the sunrise cry of a cannibalistic rooster. “Son, they say you coulda been some kinda football coach, and I know you’re one hell of a poker player, but I’d a never thought you’d come to this sorry end —a simple-minded thief and a chickenfuckin’ wife stealer.” Then R. L. brayed like one of the old plow mules he kept in the muddy bottoms of the White. “But you can run right smart, son. Gotta say that. Sly as an old boar coon. We might still be a-lookin if’n Baby Doll there ain’t a called her mama. Collect. To brag ‘bout the baby.”

Jesus, Benbow thought. Her mother. A toothless woman, now shaped like a potato dumpling, topped with greasy hair, seasoned with moles.

Mona Sue woke, rubbing her eyes like a child, murmuring, “How you been, Daddy Honey?”

And Benbow knew he faced a death even harder than his unlucky life, knew even before the monster on the right popped him behind the ear with the ball-peen hammer and jerked his stunned body out of bed as if he were a child and handed him to his partner, who wrapped him in a full nelson. The bald one flipped the hammer and rapped his nuts smartly with it, then flipped it again and began breaking the small bones of Benbow’s right foot with the round knob of the hammerhead.

Before Benbow fainted, harsh laughter raked his throat. Maybe this was the break he had been waiting for all his life.

Actually, it had all been Little R. L.’s fault. Sort of. Benbow had spotted the hulking bowlegged kid with the tiny ears and the thick neck three years earlier, when the downward spiral of his football coaching career had led him to Alabamphilia, a small town on the edge of the Ozarks, a town without hope or dignity or even any convincing religious fervor, a town that smelled of chicken guts, hog manure, and rampant incest, which seemed to be the three main industries.

Benbow first saw Little R. L. in a pickup touch-football game played on the hardscrabble playground, and knew from the first moment that the boy had the quick grace of a deer, combined with the strength of a wild boar. This kid was one of the best natural running backs he’d ever seen. Benbow also found out just as quickly that Little R. L. was one of the redheaded Dark boys, and the Dark boys didn’t play football.

Daddy R. L. thought football was a silly game, a notion with which Benbow agreed, and too much like work not to draw wages, with which once again Benbow agreed, and if’n his boys were going to work for free, they were damn well going to work for him and his hog operation, not some dirt-poor pissant washed-up football bum. Benbow had to agree with that, too, right to R. L.’s face, had to eat the old man’s shit to get to the kid. Because this kid could be Benbow’s ticket out of this Ozark hell, and he intended to have him. This was the one break Benbow needed to save his life. Once again.

It had always been that way for Benbow, needing that one break that never seemed to come. During his senior year at the small high school in western Nebraska, after three and a half years of mostly journeyman work as a blocking back in a pass-crazy offense, Benbow’s mother had worked double shifts at the truck-stop café — his dad had been dead so long nobody really remembered him — so they could afford to put together a videotape of his best efforts as a running back and pass receiver to send down to the university coaches in Lincoln. Once they had agreed to send a scout up for one game, Benbow had badgered his high school coach into a promise to let him carry the ball at least twenty times that night.

But the weather screwed him. On what should have been a lovely early October Friday night, a storm raced in from Canada, days early, and its icy wind blew Benbow’s break right out of the water. Before the game it rained two hard inches, then the field froze. During the first half it rained again, then hailed, and at the end of the second quarter it became a blinding snow squall.

Benbow had gained sixty yards, sure, but none of it pretty. And at halftime the Nebraska scout came by to apologize but if he was to get home in this weather, he had to start now. The lumpy old man invited Benbow to try a walk-on. Right, Benbow thought. Without a scholarship, he didn’t have the money to register for fall semester. Damn, Benbow thought as he kicked the water cooler, and damn it to hell, he thought as his big toe shattered and his senior season ended.

So he played football for some pissant Christian college in the Dakotas where he didn’t bother to take a degree. With his fused toe, he had lost a step in the open field and his cuts lost their precision, so he haunted the weight room, forced thick muscle over his running back’s body, and made himself into a solid if small fullback, but good enough to wrangle an invitation to one of the postseason senior bowl games. Then the first-string fullback, who was sure to be drafted by the pros, strained his knee in practice and refused to play. Oh, God, Benbow thought, another break.

But God foxed this one. The backfield coach was a born-again fundamentalist named Culpepper, and once he caught Benbow neither bowing his head nor even bothering to close his eyes during a lengthy team prayer, the coach became determined to convert the boy. Benbow played along, choking on his anger at the self-righteous bastard until his stomach cramped, swallowing the anger until he was throwing up three times a day, twice during practice and once before lights-out. By game day he’d lost twelve pounds and feared he wouldn’t have the strength to play.

But he did. He had a first half to praise the football gods, if not the Christian one: two rushing touchdowns, one three yards dragging a linebacker and a corner, the other thirty-nine yards of fluid grace and power; and one receiving, twenty-two yards. But the quarterback had missed the handoff at the end of the first half, jammed the ball against Benbow’s hip, and a blitzing linebacker picked it out of the air, then scored.

In the locker room at halftime, Culpepper was all over him like stink on shit. Pride goeth before a fall! he shouted. We’re never as tall as we are on our knees before Jesus! And all the other soft-brain clichés. Benbow’s stomach knotted like a rawhide rope, then rebelled. Benbow caught that bit of vomit and swallowed it. But the second wave was too much. He turned and puked into a nearby sink. Culpepper went mad. Accused him of being out of shape, of drinking, smoking, and fornicating. When Benbow denied the charges, Culpepper added another, screamed Prevaricator! his foamy spittle flying into Benbow’s face. And that was that.

Culpepper lost an eye from the single punch and nearly died during the operation to rebuild his cheekbone. Everybody said Benbow was lucky not to do time, like his father, who had killed a corrupt weighmaster down in Texas with his tire thumper, and was then killed himself by a bad Houston drug dealer down in the Ellis Unit at Huntsville when Benbow was six. Benbow was lucky, he guessed, but marked “Uncoachable” by the pro scouts and denied tryouts all over the league. Benbow played three years in Canada, then destroyed his knee in a bar fight with a Chinese guy in Vancouver. Then he was out of the game. Forever.

Benbow drifted west, fighting fires in the summers and dealing poker in the winter, taking the occasional college classes until he finally finished a PE teaching degree at Northern Montana and garnered an assistant coach’s job at a small town in the Sweetgrass Hills, where he discovered he had an unsuspected gift for coaching, as he did for poker: a quick mind and no fear. A gift, once discovered, that became an addiction to the hard work, long hours, loving the game, and paying the price to win.

Head coach in three years, then two state championships, and a move to a larger school in Washington State. Where his mother came to live with him. Or die with him, as it were. The doctors said it was her heart, but Benbow knew that she died of truck-stop food, cheap whiskey, and long-haul drivers whose souls were as full of stale air as their tires.

But he coached a state championship team the next year and was considering offers from a football power down in northern California when he was struck down by a scandalous lawsuit. His second-string quarterback had become convinced that Benbow was sleeping with his mother, which of course he was. When the kid attacked Benbow at practice with his helmet, Benbow had to hit the kid to keep him off. He knew this part of his life was over when he saw the kid’s eye dangling out of its socket on the grayish pink string of the optic nerve.

Downhill, as they say, from there. Drinking and fighting as often as coaching, low-rent poker games and married women, usually married to school-board members or dumb-shit administrators. Downhill all the way to Alabamphilia.

Benbow came back to this new world propped in a heap on the couch in the cottage’s living room, with a dull ache behind his ear and a thousand sharp pains in his foot, which was propped in a white cast on the coffee table, the fresh cast the size of a watermelon. Benbow didn’t have to ask what purpose it served. The skinny man sat beside him, a syringe in hand. Across the room, R. L.’s bulk stood black against a fiery sunset, Mona Sue sitting curled in a chair in his shadow, slowly filing her nails. Through the window, Benbow could see the Kmart twins walking slow guard tours back and forth across the deck.

“He’s comin’ out of it, Mr. Dark,” the old man said, his voice as sharp as his pale nose.

“Well, give him another dose, Doc,” R. L. said without turning. “We don’t want that boy a-hurtin none. Not yet.”

Benbow didn’t understand what R. L. meant as the doctor stirred beside him, releasing a thin, dry stench like a limestone cavern or an open grave. Benbow had heard that death supposedly hurt no more than having a tooth pulled, and he wondered who had brought back that bit of information as the doctor hit him in the shoulder with a blunt needle, then he slipped uneasily into an enforced sleep like a small death.

When he woke again, Benbow found little changed but the light. Mona Sue still curled in her chair, sleeping now, below her husband’s hulk against the full dark sky. The doctor slept, too, leaning the fragile bones of his skull against Benbow’s sore arm. And Benbow’s leg was also asleep, locked in position by the giant cast resting on the coffee table. He sat very still for as long as he could, waiting for his mind to clear, willing his dead leg to awaken, and wondering why he wasn’t dead, too.

“Don’t be gettin’ no ideas, son,” R. L. said without turning.

Of all the things Benbow had hated during the long Sundays shoveling pig shit or dealing cards for R. L. Dark —that was the trade he and the old man had made for Little R. L.’s football services — he hated the bastard calling him “son.”

“I’m not your son, you fucking old bastard.”

R. L. ignored him, didn’t even bother to turn. “How hot’s that there water?” he asked calmly as the doctor stirred.

Benbow answered without thinking. “Somewhere between 98 and 102. Why?”

“How ‘bout half a dose, Doc?” R. L. said, turning now. “And see ‘bout makin’ that boy’s cast waterproof. I’m thinkin’ that hot water might take the edge off my rheumatism and I for sure want the coach there to keep me company…”

Once again Benbow found the warm, lazy path back to the darkness at the center of his life, half listening to the old man and Mona Sue squabble over the air conditioner.

After word of his bargain with R. L. Dark for the gridiron services of his baby son spread throughout every tuck and hollow of the county, Benbow could no longer stop after practice for even a single quiet beer at any one of the rank honky-tonks that surrounded the dry town without hearing snickers as he left. It seemed that whatever he might have gained in sympathy, he surely lost in respect. And the old man treated him worse than a farting joke.

On the Saturdays that first fall, when Benbow began his days exchanging his manual labor for Little R. L.’s rushing talents, the old man dogged him all around the hog farm on a small John Deere tractor, endlessly pointing out Benbow’s total ignorance of the details of trading baton for bread and his general inability to perform hard work, complaining at great length, then cackling wildly and jacking the throttle on the tractor as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Even knowing that Little R. L. was lying on the couch in front of the television and soothing his sore muscles with a pint jar of shine couldn’t make Ben-how even begin to resent his bargain, and he never even bothered to look at the old man, knowing that this was his only escape.

Sundays, though, the old man left him alone. Sunday was Poker Day. Land-rich farmers, sly country lawyers with sharp eyes and soft hands, and small-town bankers with the souls of slave traders came from as far away as West Memphis, St. Louis, and Fort Smith to gather in R. L.’s double-wide for a table stakes hold ‘em game, a game famous in at least four states, and occasionally in northern Mexico.

On the sabbath he was on his own, except for the surly, lurking presence of Little R. L., who seemed to blame his coach for every ache and pain, and the jittery passage of a slim, petulant teenage girl who slopped past him across the muddy farmyard in a shapeless feed-sack dress and oversized rubber boots, trailing odd, throaty laughter, the same laughter she had when one of the sows decided to dine on her litter. Benbow should have listened.

But these seemed minor difficulties when balanced against the fact that Little R. L. gained nearly a hundred yards a game his freshman year.

The next fall, the shit-shoveling and the old man’s attitude seemed easier to bear. Then when Benbow casually let slip that he had once dealt and played poker professionally, R. L.’s watery blue eyes suddenly glistened with greed, and the Sunday portion of Benbow’s bargain became both easier and more complicated. Not that the old man needed him to cheat. R. L. Dark always won. The only times the old man signaled him to deal seconds was to give hands to his competitors to keep them in the game so the old man could skin them even deeper.

The brutal and dangerous monotony of Benbow’s life continued, controlled and hopeful until the fall of Little R. L.’s junior year, when everything came apart. Then back together with a terrible rush. A break, a dislocation, and a connection.

On the Saturday afternoon after Little R. L. broke the state rushing record the night before, the teenage girl stopped chuckling long enough to ask a question. “How long you have to go to college, Coach, to figure out how to scoot pig shit off concrete with a fire hose?”

When she laughed, Benbow finally asked, “Who the fuck are you, honey?”

“Mrs. R. L. Dark, Senior,” she replied, the perfect arch of her nose in the air, “that’s who.” And Benbow looked at her for the first time, watched the thrust of her hard, marvelous body naked beneath the thin fabric of her cheap dress.

Then Benbow tried to make conversation with Mona Sue, made the mistake of asking Mona Sue why she wore rubber boots. “Hookworms,” she said, pointing at his sockless feet in old Nikes. Jesus, he thought. Then Jesus wept that night as he watched the white worms slither through his dark, bloody stool. Now he knew what the old man had been laughing about.

On Sunday a rich Mexican rancher tried to cover one of R. L.’s raises with a Rolex, then the old man insisted on buying the fifteen-thousand-dollar watch with five K cash, and when he opened the small safe set in the floor of the trailers kitchen, Benbow glimpsed the huge pile of banded stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills that filled the safe.

The next Friday night Little R. L. broke his own rushing record with more than a quarter left in the game, which was good because in the fourth quarter the turf gave way under his right foot, which then slid under a pursuing tackle. Benbow heard the pop all the way from the sidelines as the kid’s knee dislocated.

Explaining to R. L. that a bargain was a bargain, no matter what happened with the kid’s knee, the next day Benbow went about his chores just long enough to lure Mona Sue into a feed shed and out of her dress. But not her rubber boots. Benbow didn’t care. He just fucked her. The revenge he planned on R. L. Dark a frozen hell in his heart. But the soft hunger of her mouth and the touch of her astonishing body — diamond-hard nipples, fast-twitch cat muscle slithering under human skin, her cunt like a silken bag of rich, luminous seed pearls suspended in heavenly fucking fire — destroyed his hope of vengeance. Now he simply wanted her. No matter the cost.

Two months later, just as her pregnancy began to show, Benbow cracked the safe with a tablespoon of nitro, took all the money, and they ran.

Although he was sure Mona Sue still dreamed, she’d lost her audience. Except for the wrangler, who still watched her as if she were some heathen idol. But every time she tried to talk to the dark cowboy, the old man pinched her thigh with horny fingers so hard it left blood blisters.

Their mornings were much different now. They all went to the hot water. The doctor slept on a poolside bench behind Mona Sue, who sat on the side of the pool, her feet dangling in the water, her blotched thighs exposed, and her eyes as vacant as her half-smile. R. L. Dark, Curly, and Bald Bill, wearing cutoffs and cheap T-shirts, stood neck-deep in the steamy water, loosely surrounding Benbow, anchored by his plastic-shrouded cast, which loomed like a giant boulder under the heavy water.

A vague sense of threat, like an occasional sharp sniff of sulfur, came off the odd group and kept the other guests at a safe distance, and the number of guests declined every day as the old man rented each cabin and room at the lodge as it came empty. The rich German twins who owned the place didn’t seem to care who paid for their cocaine.

During the first few days, nobody had much bothered to speak to Benbow, not even to ask where he had hidden the money. The pain in his foot had retreated to a dull ache, but the itch under the cast had become unbearable. One morning, the doctor had taken pity on him and searched the kitchen drawers for something for Benbow to use to scratch beneath the cast, finally coming up with a cheap shish kebab skewer. Curly and Bald Bill had examined the thin metal stick as if it might be an Arkansas toothpick or a bowie knife, then laughed and let Benbow have it. He kept it holstered in his cast, waiting, scratching the itch. And a deep furrow in the rear of the cast.

Then one morning as they stood silent and safe in the pool, a storm cell drifted slowly down the mountain to fill the canyon with swirling squalls of thick, wet snow, and the old man raised his beak into the flakes and finally spoke: “I always meant to come back to this country,” he said.

“What?”

Except for the wrangler slowly gathering damp towels and a dark figure in a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses standing inside the bar, the pool and the deck had emptied when the snow began. Benbow had been watching the snow gather in the dark waves of Mona Sue’s hair as she tried to catch a spinning flake on her pink tongue. Even as he faced death, she still stirred the banked embers glowing in Benbow’s crotch.

“During WW Two,” the old man said softly, “I got in some trouble over at Fort Chaffee — stuck a noncom with a broomstick — so the Army sent me up here to train with the Tenth Mountain. Stupid assholes thought it was some kinda punishment. Always meant to come back someday…”

But Benbow watched the cold wind ripple the stolid surface of the hot water as the snowflakes melted into it. The rising steam became a thick fog.

“I always liked it,” Benbow said, glancing up at the mountain as it appeared and disappeared behind the roiling clouds of snow. “Great hunting weather,” he added. “There’s a little herd of elk bedded just behind that first ridge.” As his keepers’ eyes followed his upslope, he drifted slowly through the fog toward Mona Sue’s feet aimlessly stirring the water. “If you like it so much, you old bastard, maybe you should buy it.”

“Watch your tongue, boy,” Curly said as he cuffed Benbow on the head. Benbow stumbled closer to Mona Sue.

“I just might do that, son,” the old man said, cackling, “just to piss you off. Not that you’ll be around to be pissed off.”

“So what the fuck are we hanging around here for?” Benbow asked, turning on the old man, which brought him even closer to Mona Sue.

The old man paused as if thinking. “Well, son, we’re waitin’ for that baby. If’n that baby has red hair and you tell us where you hid the money, we’ll just take you home, kill you easy, then feed you to the hogs.”

“And if it doesn’t have red hair, since I’m not about to tell you where to find the money?”

“We’ll just find a hungry sow, son, and feed you to her,” the old man said, “startin’ with your good toes.”

Everybody laughed then: R. L. Dark threw back his head and howled; the hulks exchanged high-fives and higher giggles; and Benbow collapsed underwater. Even Mona Sue chuckled deep in her throat. Until Benbow jerked her off the side of the pool. Then she choked. The poor girl had never learned to swim.

Before either the old man or his bodyguards could move, though, the dark figure in the hooded sweatshirt burst through the bar door in a quick, limping dash and dove into the pool, then lifted the struggling girl onto the deck and knelt beside her while enormous amounts of steaming water poured from her nose and mouth before she began breathing. Then the figure swept the hood from the flaming red hair and held Mona Sue close to his chest.

“Holy shit, boy,” the old man asked unnecessarily as Bald Bill helped liim out of the pool. “What the fuck you doin’ here?”

“Goddammit, baby, lemme go,” Mona Sue screamed. “It’s a-comin!”

Which roused the doctor from his sleepy rest. And the wrangler from his work. Both of them covered the wide wooden bench with dry towels, upon which Little R. L. gently placed Mona Sue’s racked body. Curly scrambled out of the pool, warning Benbow to stay put, and joined the crowd of men around her sudden and violent contractions. Bald Bill helped the old man into his overalls and the pistol’s thong as Little R. L. helped the doctor hold Mona Sue’s body, arched with sudden pain, on the bench.

“Oh, Lordy me!” she screamed. “It’s tearin’ me up!”

“Do somethin’, you pissant,” the old man said to the wiry doctor, then slapped him soundly.

Benbow slapped to the side of the pool, holding on to the edge with one hand as he dug frantically at the cast with the other. Bits of plaster of Paris and swirls of blood rose through the hot water. Then it was off, and the skewer in his hand. He planned to roll out of the pool, drive the sliver of metal through the old man’s kidney, then grab the Webley. After that, he’d call the shots.

But life should have taught him not to plan.

As Bald Bill helped his boss into the coat, he noticed Benbow at the edge of the pool and stepped over to him. Bald Bill saw the bloody cast floating at Benbow’s chest. “What the fuck?” he said, kneeling down to reach for him.

Benbow drove the thin shaft of metal with the strength of a lifetime of disappointment and rage into the bottom of Bald Bill’s jaw, up through the root of his tongue, then up through his soft palate, horny brainpan, mushy gray matter, and the thick bones of his skull. Three inches of the skewer poked like a steel finger bone out of the center of his bald head.

Bald Bill didn’t make a sound. Just blinked once dreamily, smiled, then stood up. After a moment, swaying, he began to walk in small airless circles at the edge of the deck until Curly noticed his odd behavior.

“Bubba?” he said as he stepped over to his brother.

Benbow leaped out of the water; one hand grabbed an ankle and the other dove up the leg of Curly’s trunks to grab his nut sack and jerk the giant toward the pool. Curly’s grunt and the soft clunk of his head against the concrete pool edge was lost as Mona Sue delivered the child with a deep sigh, and the old man shouted boldly, “Goddamn, it’s a girl! A black-headed girl!”

Benbow had slithered out of the pool and limped halfway to the old man’s back as he watched the doctor lay the baby on Mona Sue’s heaving chest. “Shit fire and save the matches,” the old man said, panting deeply as if the labor had been his.

Little R. L. turned and jerked his father toward him by the front of his coat, hissing, “Shut the fuck up, old man.” Then he shoved him violently away, smashing the old man’s frail body into Benbow’s shoulder. Something cracked inside the old man’s body, and he sank to his knees, snapping at the cold air with his bloody beak like a gut-shot turtle. Benbow grabbed the pistol’s thong off his neck before the old man tumbled dead into the water.

Benbow cocked the huge pistol with a soft metallic click, then his sharp bark of laughter cut through the snowy air like a gunshot. Everything slowed to a stop. The doctor finished cutting the cord. The wrangler’s hands held a folded towel under Mona Sue’s head. Little R. L. held his gristled body halfway into a mad charge. Bald Bill stopped his aimless circling long enough to fall into the pool. Even Mona Sue’s cooing sighs died. Only the cold wind moved, whipping the steamy fog across the pool as the snowfall thickened.

Then Mona Sue screamed, “No!” and broke the frozen moment

The bad knee gave Benbow time to get off a round. The heavy slug took Little R. L. in the top of his shoulder, tumbled through his chest, and exited just above his kidney in a shower of blood, bone splinters, and lung tissue, and dropped him like a side of beef on the deck. But the round had already gone on its merry way through the sternum of the doctor as if he weren’t there. Which, in moments, he wasn’t.

Benbow threw the pistol joyfully behind him, heard it splash in the pool, and hurried to Mona Sue’s side. As he kissed her blood-spattered face, she moaned softly. He leaned closer, but only mistook her moans for passion until he understood what she was saying. Over and over. The way she once called his name. And Little R. L.’s. Maybe even the old mans. “Cowboy, Cowboy, Cowboy,” she whispered.

Benbow wasn’t even mildly surprised when he felt the arm at his throat or the blade tickle his short ribs. “I took you for a backstabber,” he said, “the first time I laid eyes on your sorry ass.”

“Just tell me where the money is, old man,” the wrangler whispered, “and you can die easy.”

“You can have the money,” Benbow sobbed, trying for one final break, “just leave me the woman.” But the flash of scorn in Mona Sue’s eyes was the only answer he needed. “Fuck it,” Benbow said, almost laughing, “let’s do it the hard way.”

Then he fell backward onto the hunting knife, driving the blade to the hilt above his short ribs before the wrangler could release the handle. He stepped back in horror as Benbow stumbled toward the hot waters of the pool.

At first, the blade felt cold in Benbow’s flesh, but the flowing blood quickly warmed it. Then he eased himself into the hot water and lay back against its compassionate weight like the old man the wrangler had called him. The wrangler stood over Benbow, his eyes like coals glowing through the fog and thick snow. Mona Sue stepped up beside the wrangler, Benbow’s baby whimpering at her chest, snow melting on her shoulders.

“Fuck it,” Benbow whispered, drifting now, “it’s in the air conditioner.”

“Thanks, old man,” Mona Sue said, smiling.

“Take care,” Benbow whispered, thinking, This is the easy part, then leaned farther back into the water, sailing on the pool’s wind-riffled, snow-shot surface, eyes closed, happy in the hot, heavy water, moving his hands slightly to stay afloat, his fingers tangled in dark, bloody streams, the wind pushing him toward the cool water at the far end of the pool, blinking against the soft cold snow, until his tired body slipped, unwatched, beneath the hot water to rest.

I looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see any lights, but I knew they were after us and it was only a matter of time till I’d see the cops. Toth started to talk, but I told him to shut up and got the Buick up to eighty. The road was empty, nothing but pine trees for miles around.

“Oh brother,” Toth muttered. I felt his eyes on me, but I didn’t even want to look at him, I was so mad.

They were never easy, drugstores.

Because, just watch sometime, when cops make their rounds they cruise drugstores more often than anyplace else. Because of the prescription drugs.

You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke, and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really knows it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the Fast Cash button gives you twenty bucks. Which tells you something. So why even bother?

No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, farther west into the mountains. Liggett Falls is a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why—because like everywhere else people there need medicine and hairspray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney s. So they pay cash.

“Oh brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”

And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout, Look at what, you son of a bitch? But then I could see what he was talking about, and I didn’t say anything. Up ahead. It was like just before dawn, light on the horizon. Only this was red, and the light wasn’t steady. It was like it was pulsing, and I knew that they’d got the roadblock up already. This was the only road to the interstate from Liggett Falls. So I should’ve guessed.

“I got an idea,” Toth said. Which I didn’t want to hear but I also wasn’t going to go through another shootout. Sure not at a roadblock where they was ready for us.

“What?” I snapped.

“There’s a town over there. See those lights? I know a road’ll take us there.”

Toth’s a big guy, and he looks calm. Only he isn’t really. He gets shook easy, and he now kept turning around, skittish, looking in the back seat. I wanted to slap him and tell him to chill.

“Where’s it?” I asked. “This town?”

“About four, five miles. The turnoff, it ain’t marked. But I know it.”

This was that lousy upstate area where everything’s green. But dirty green, you know. And all the buildings’re gray. These gross little shacks, pickups on blocks. Little towns without even a 7-Eleven. And full of hills they call mountains but aren’t.

Toth cranked down the window and let this cold air in and looked up at the sky. “They can find us with those, you know, satellite things.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know, they can see you from miles up. I saw it in a movie.”

“You think the state cops do that? Are you nuts?”

This guy, I don’t know why I work with him. And after what happened at the drugstore, I won’t again.

He pointed out where to turn, and I did. He said the town was at the base of the Lookout. Well, I remembered passing that on the way to Liggett Falls that afternoon. It was this huge rock a couple of hundred feet high. Which if you looked at it right looked like a man’s head, like a profile, squinting. ltd been some kind of big deal to the Indians around here. Blah, blah, blah. He told me, but I didn’t pay no attention. It was spooky, that weird face, and I looked once and kept on driving. I didn’t like it. I’m not really superstitious, but sometimes I am.

“Winchester,” he said now, meaning what the name of the town was. Five, six thousand people. We could find an empty house, stash the car in a garage, and just wait out the search. Wait till tomorrow afternoon — Sunday—when all the weekenders were driving back to Boston and New York and we’d be lost in the crowd.

I could see the Lookout up ahead, not really a shape, mostly this blackness where the stars weren’t. And then the guy on the floor in the back started to moan all of a sudden and just about give me a heart attack.

“You. Shut up back there.” I slapped the seat, and the guy in the back went quiet.

What a night.

We’d got to the drugstore fifteen minutes before it closed. Like you ought to do. ‘Cause mosta the customers’re gone and a lot’ve the clerks’ve left and people’re tired, and when you push a Glock or Smitty into their faces, they’ll do just about anything you ask.

Except tonight.

We had our masks down and walked in slow. Toth getting the manager out of his little office, a fat guy started crying and that made me mad, a grown man doing that. He kept a gun on the customers and the clerks, and I was telling the cashier, this kid, to open the tills and, Jesus, lie had an attitude. Like he’d seen all of those Steven Seagal movies or something. A little kiss on the cheek with the Smitty and he changed his mind and started moving. Cussing me out, but he was moving. I was counting the bucks as we were going along from one till to the next, and sure enough, we were up to about three thousand when I heard this noise and turned around and what it was, Toth was knocking a rack of chips over. I mean, Jesus. He’s getting Doritos!

I look away from the kid for just a second, and what’s he do? He pitches this bottle. Only not at me. Out the window. Bang, it breaks. There’s no alarm I can hear, but half of them are silent anyway and I ‘m really pissed. I could’ve killed him. Right there. Only I didn’t. Toth did.

He shoots the kid, blam, blam, blam. And everybody else is scattering and he turns around and shoots another one of the clerks and a customer, just bang, not thinking or nothing. Just for no reason. Hit this girl clerk in the leg, but this guy, this customer, well, he was dead. You could see. And I’m going, What’re you doing, what’re you doing? And he’s going, Shut up, shut up, shut up …And we’re like we’re swearing at each other when we figured out we hadta get outa there.

So we left. Only what happens is, there’s a cop outside. That’s why the kid threw the bottle. And he’s outa his car. So we grab another customer, this guy by the door, and we use him like a shield and get outside. And there’s the cop, he’s holding his gun up, looking at the customer we’ve got, and the cop, he’s saying, It’s OK, it’s OK, just take it easy.

And I couldn’t believe it, Toth shot him, too. I don’t know whether he killed him, but there was blood so he wasn’t wearing a vest it didn’t look like, and I could’ve killed Toth there on the spot. Because why’d he do that? He didn’t have to.

We threw the guy, the customer, into the back seat and tied him up with tape. I kicked out the taillights and burned rubber outa there. We made it out of Liggett Falls.

That was all just a half hour ago, but it seems like weeks.

And now we were driving down this highway through a million pine trees. Heading right for the Lookout.

Winchester was dark.

I don’t get why weekenders come to places like this. I mean, my old man took me hunting a long time ago. A couple of times, and I liked it. But coming to places like this just to look at leaves and buy furniture they call antiques but’s really just busted-up crap …I don’t know.

We found a house a block off Main Street with a bunch of newspapers in front, and I pulled into the drive and put the Buick behind it just in time. Two state police cars went shooting by. They’d been behind us not more than a half mile, without the lightbars going. Only they hadn’t seen us causa the broke taillights, and they went by in a flash and were gone, going into town.

Toth got into the house, and he wasn’t very clean about it, breaking a window in the back. It was a vacation place, pretty empty and the refrigerator shut off and the phone, too, which was a good sign — there wasn’t anybody coming back soon. Also, it smelled pretty musty and had stacks of old books and magazines from the summer.

We took the guy inside, and Toth started to take the hood off this guy’s head and I said, “What the hell’re you doing?”

“He hasn’t said anything. Maybe he can’t breathe.”

This was a man talking who’d just laid a cap on three people back there, and he was worried about this guy breathing? Man. I just laughed. Disgusted, I mean. “Like maybe we don’t want him to see us?” I said. “You think of that?” See, we weren’t wearing our ski masks anymore.

It’s scary when you have to remind people of stuff like that. I was thinking Toth knew better. But you never know.

I went to the window and saw another squad car go past. They were going slower now. They do that. After like the first shock, after the rush, they get smart and start cruising slow, really looking for what’s funny — what’s different, you know? That’s why I didn’t take the papers up from the front yard. Which would’ve been different from how the yard looked that morning. Cops really do that Columbo stuff. I could write a book about cops.

“Why’d you do it?”

It was the guy we took.

“Why?” he whispered again.

The customer. He had a low voice, and it sounded pretty calm, I mean considering. I’ll tell you, the first time I was in a shootout I was totally freaked for a day afterwards. And I had a gun.

I looked him over. He was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. But he wasn’t a local. I could tell because of the shoes. They were rich-boy shoes, the kind you see all the yuppies wear in TV shows about Connecticut. I couldn’t see his face because of the mask, but I pretty much remembered it. He wasn’t young. Maybe in his forties. Kind of wrinkled skin. And he was skinny, too. Skinnier’n me, and I’m one of those people can eat what I want and I don’t get fat. I don’t know why. It just works that way.

“Quiet,” I said. There was another car going by.

He laughed. Soft. Like he was saying, What? So they can hear me all the way outside?

Kind of laughing at me, you know? I didn’t like that at all. And sure, I guess you couldn’t hear anything out there, but I didn’t like him giving me any crap so I said, “Just shut up. I don’t want to hear your voice.”

He did for a minute and just sat back in the chair where Toth put him. But then he said again, “Why’d you shoot them? You didn’t have to.”

“Quiet!”

“Just tell me why.”

I took out my knife and snapped that sucker open, then threw it down so it stuck in a tabletop. Sort of a thunk sound. “You hear that? That was a eight-inch Buck knife. Carbon tempered. With a locking blade. It’d cut clean through a metal bolt. So you be quiet. Or I’ll use it on you.”

And he gave this laugh again. Maybe. Or it was just a snort of air. But I was thinking it was a laugh. I wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but I didn’t.

“You got any money on you?” Toth asked, and took the wallet out of the guy’s back pocket. “Lookit,” Toth said, and pulled out what must’ve been five or six hundred. Man.

Another squad car went past, moving slow. It had a spotlight and the cop turned it on the driveway, but he just kept going. I heard a siren across town. And another one, too. It was a weird feeling, knowing those people were out there looking for us.

I took the wallet from Toth and went through it.

Randall C. Weller Jr. He lived in Boston. A weekender. Just like I thought. He had a bunch of business cards that said he was vice president of this big computer company. One that was in the news, trying to take over IBM or something. All of a sudden I had this thought. We could hold him for ransom. I mean, why not? Make a half million. Maybe more.

“My wife and kids’ll be sick worrying,” Weller said. It spooked me, hearing that. First, ‘cause you don’t expect somebody with a hood over his head to say anything. But mostly ‘cause there I was, looking right at a picture in his wallet. And what was it of? His wife and kids.

“I ain’t letting you go. Now, just shut up. I may need you.”

“Like a hostage, you mean? That’s only in the movies. They’ll shoot you when you walk out, and they’ll shoot me, too, if they have to. That’s the way they do it. Just give yourself up. At least you’ll save your life.”

“Shut up!” I shouted.

“Let me go and I’ll tell them you treated me fine. That the shooting was a mistake. It wasn’t your fault.”

I leaned forward and pushed the knife against his throat, not the blade ‘cause that’s real sharp, but the blunt edge, and I told him to be quiet.

Another car went past, no light this time but it was going slower, and all of a sudden I got to thinking what if they do a door-to-door search?

“Why did he do it? Why’d he kill them?”

And funny, the way he said he made me feel a little better ‘cause it was like he didn’t blame me for it. I mean, it was Toth’s fault. Not mine.

Weller kept going. “I don’t get it. That man by the counter? The tall one. He was just standing there. He didn’t do anything. He just shot him down.”

But neither of us said nothing. Probably Toth because he didn’t know why he’d shot them. And me because I didn’t owe this guy any answers. I had him in my hand. Completely, and I had to let him know that. I didn’t have to talk to him.

But the guy, Weller, he didn’t say anything else. And I got this weird sense. Like this pressure building up. You know, because nobody was answering his damn stupid question. I felt this urge to say something. Anything. And that was the last thing I wanted to do. So I said, “I’m gonna move the car into the garage.” And I went outside to do it.

I was a little spooked after the shootout. And I went through the garage pretty good. Just to make sure. But there wasn’t nothing inside except tools and an old Snapper lawnmower. So I drove the Buick inside and closed the door. And went back into the house.

And then I couldn’t believe what happened. I mean, Jesus …

When I walked into the living room, the first thing I heard was Toth saying, “No way, man. I’m not snitching on Jack Prescot.”

I just stood there. And you should’ve seen the look on his face. He knew he’d blown it big.

Now this Weller guy knew my name.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. Toth started talking real fast and nervous. “He said he’d pay me some big bucks to let him go.” Trying to turn it around, make it Weller’s fault. “I mean, I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t even thinking ‘bout it, man. I told him forget it.”

“I figured that,” I said. “So? What’s that got to do with tellin’ him my name?”

“I don’t know, man. He confused me. I wasn’t thinking.”

I’ll say he wasn’t. He hadn’t been thinking all night.

I sighed to let him know I wasn’t happy, but I just clapped him on the shoulder. “OK,” I said. “S’been a long night. These things happen.”

“I’m sorry, man. Really.”

“Yeah. Maybe you better go spend the night in the garage or something. Or upstairs. I don’t want to see you around for a while.”

“Sure.”

And the funny thing was, it was that Weller gave this little snicker or something. Like he knew what was coming. How’d he know that? I wondered.

Toth went to pick up a couple of magazines and the knapsack with his gun in it and extra rounds.

Normally, killing somebody with a knife is a hard thing to do. I say normally even though I’ve only done it one other time. But I remember it, and it was messy and hard work. But tonight, I don’t know, I was all filled up with this …feeling from the drugstore. Mad. I mean, really. Crazy, too, a little. And as soon as Toth turned his back, I went to work, and it wasn’t three minutes later it was over. I drug his body behind the couch and then — why not — I pulled Weller’s hood off. He already knew my name. He might as well see my face.

He was a dead man. We both knew it.

“You were thinking of holding me for ransom, right?”

I stood at the window and looked out. Another cop car went past, and there were more flashing lights bouncing off the low clouds and off the face of the Lookout, right over our heads. Weller had a thin face and short hair, cut real neat. He looked like every ass-kissing businessman I’d ever met. His eyes were dark and calm, and it made me even madder he wasn’t shook up looking at that big bloodstain on the rug and floor.

“No,” I told him.

He looked at the pile of stuff I’d taken from his wallet and kept going like I hadn’t said anything. “It won’t work. A kidnapping. I don’t have a lot of money, and if you saw my business card and’re thinking I’m an executive at the company, they have about five hundred vice presidents. They won’t pay diddly for me. And you see those kids in the picture? It was taken twelve years ago. They’re both in college now.”

“Where,” I asked, sneering. “Harvard?”

“One’s at Harvard,” he said, like he was snapping at me. “And one’s at Northwestern. So the house’s mortgaged to the hilt. Besides, kidnapping somebody by yourself? No, you couldn’t bring that off.”

He saw the way I looked at him, and he said, “I don’t mean you personally. I mean somebody by himself. You’d need partners.”

And I figured he was right. The ransom thing was looking, I don’t know, tricky.

That silence again. Nobody saying nothing and it was like the room was filling up with cold water. I walked to the window and the floors creaked under my feet, and that only made things worse. I remember one time my dad said that a house had a voice of its own, and some houses were laughing houses and some were forlorn. Well, this was a forlorn house. Yeah, it was modern and clean and the National Geographies were all in order, but it was still forlorn.

Just when I felt like shouting because of the tension, Weller said, “I don’t want you to kill me.”

“Who said I was going to kill you?”

He gave me this funny little smile. “I’ve been a salesman for twenty-five years. I’ve sold pets and Cadillacs and typesetters, and lately I’ve been selling mainframe computers. I know when I’m being handed a line. You’re going to kill me. It was the first thing you thought of when you heard him” — nodding toward Toth — “say your name.”

I just laughed at him. “Well, that’s a damn handy thing to be, sorta a walking lie detector,” I said, and I was being sarcastic.

But he just said, “Damn handy,” like he was agreeing with me.

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“Oh, I know you don’t want to. You didn’t want your friend to kill anybody back there at the drugstore either. I could see that. But people got killed, and that ups the stakes. Right?”

And those eyes of his, they just dug into me, and I couldn’t say anything.

“But,” he said, “I’m going to talk you out of it.”

He sounded real certain and that made me feel better. ‘Cause I’d rather kill a cocky son of a bitch than a pathetic one. And so I laughed. “Talk me out of it?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Yeah? How you gonna do that?”

Weller cleared his throat a little. “First, let’s get everything on the table. I’ve seen your face, and I know your name. Jack Prescot. Right? You’re, what? about five-nine, 150 pounds, black hair. So you’ve got to assume I can identify you. I’m not going to play any games and say I didn’t see you clearly or hear who you were. Or anything like that. We all squared away on that, Jack?”

I nodded, rolling my eyes like this was all a load of crap. But I gotta admit I was kinda curious what he had to say.

“My promise,” he said, “is that I won’t turn you in. Not under any circumstances. The police’ll never learn your name from me. Or your description. I’ll never testify against you.”

Sounding honest as a priest. Real slick delivery. Well, he was a salesman, and I wasn’t going to buy it. But he didn’t know I was onto him. Let him give me his pitch, let him think I was going along. When it came down to it, after we’d got away and were somewhere in the woods upstate, I’d want him relaxed. Thinking he was going to get away. No screaming, no hassles. Just two fast cuts and that’d be it.

“You understand what I’m saying?”

I tried to look serious and said, “Sure. You’re thinking you can talk me out of killing you. Which I’m not inclined to do anyway. Kill you, I mean.”

And there was that weird little smile again.

I said, “You think you can talk me out of it. You’ve got reasons?”

“Oh, I’ve got reasons, you bet. One in particular. One that you can’t argue with.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“I’ll get to it in a minute. Let me tell you some of the practical reasons you should let me go. First, you think you’ve got to kill me because I know who you are, right? Well, how long you think your identity’s going to be a secret? Your buddy shot a cop back there. I don’t know police stuff except what I see in the movies. But they’re going to be looking at tire tracks and witnesses who saw plates and makes of cars and gas stations you might’ve stopped at on the way here.”

He was just blowing smoke. The Buick was stolen. I mean, I’m not stupid.

But he went on, looking at me real coy. “Even if your car was stolen, they’re going to check down every lead. Every shoeprint around where you or your friend found it, talk to everybody in the area around the time it vanished.”

I kept smiling like it was nuts what he was saying. But this was true, shooting the cop part. You do that and you’re in big trouble. Trouble that sticks with you. They don’t stop looking till they find you.

“And when they identify your buddy” — he nodded toward the couch where Toth’s body was lying — “they’re going to make some connection to you.”

“I don’t know him that good. We just hung around together the past few months.”

Weller jumped on this. “Where? A bar? A restaurant? Anybody ever see you in public?”

I got mad, and I shouted, “So? What’re you saying? They gonna bust me anyway, then I’ll just take you out with me. How’s that for an argument?”

Calm as could be he said, “I’m simply telling you that one of the reasons you want to kill me doesn’t make sense. And think about this — the shooting at the drugstore? It wasn’t premeditated. It was, what do they call it? Heat of passion. But you kill me, that’ll be first degree. You’ll get the death penalty when they find you.”

When they find you. Right. I laughed to myself. Oh, what he said made sense, but the fact is, killing isn’t a making-sense kind of thing. Hell, it never makes sense, but sometimes you just have to do it. But I was kind of having fun now. I wanted to argue back. “Yeah, well, I killed Toth. That wasn’t heat of passion. I’m going to get the needle anyway for that.”

“But nobody gives a damn about him,” he came right back. “They don’t care if he killed himself or got hit by a car accidentally. You can take that piece of garbage out of the equation altogether. They care if you kill me. I’m the ‘Innocent Bystander’ in the headlines. I’m the ‘Father of Two.’ You kill me, you’re as good as dead.”

I started to say something, but he kept going.

“Now, here’s another reason I’m not going to say anything about you. Because you know my name, and you know where I live. You know I have a family, and you know how important they are to me. If I turn you in, you could come after us. I’d never jeopardize my family that way. Now let me ask you something. What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”

“Keep listening to you spout on and on.”

Weller laughed hard at that. I could see he was surprised I had a sense of humor. After a minute he said, “Seriously. The worst thing.”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Lose a leg? Go deaf? Lose all your money? Go blind …Hey, that looked like it hit a nerve. Going blind?”

“Yeah, I guess. That’d be the worst thing I could think of.”

That was a pretty damn scary thing, and I’d thought on it before. ‘Cause that was what happened to my old man. And it wasn’t not seeing anymore that got to me. No, it was that I’d have to depend on somebody else for, Christ, for everything, I guess.

“OK, think about this,” he said. “The way you feel about going blind’s the way my family’d feel if they lost me. It’d be that bad for them. You don’t want to ‘cause them that kind of pain, do you?”

I didn’t want to, no. But I knew I had to. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I asked him, “So what’s this last reason you’re telling me about?”

“The last reason,” he said, kind of whispering. But he didn’t go on. He looked around the room, you know, like his mind was wandering.

“Yeah?” I asked. I was pretty curious. “Tell me.”

But he just asked, “You think these people, they have a bar?”

And I’d just been thinking I could use a drink, too. I went into the kitchen, and of course they didn’t have any beer in the fridge on account of the house being all closed up and the power off. But they did have scotch, and that’d be my first choice anyway.

I got a couple of glasses and took the bottle back to the living room. Thinking this was a good idea. When it came time to do it, it’d be easier for him and for me both if we were kinda tanked. I shoved my Smitty into his neck and cut the tape his hands were tied with, then taped them in front of him. I sat back and kept my knife near, ready to go, in case he tried something. But it didn’t look like he was going to be a hero or anything. He read over the scotch bottle, kind of disappointed it was cheap. And I agreed with him there. One thing I learned a long time ago, you going to rob, rob rich.

I sat back where I could keep an eye on him.

“The last reason. OK, I’ll tell you. I’m going to prove to you that you should let me go.”

“You are?”

“All those other reasons — the practical ones, the humanitarian ones …I’ll concede you don’t care much about those —you don’t look very convinced. All right? Then let’s look at the one reason you should let me go.”

I figured this was going to be more crap. But what he said was something I never would’ve expected, and it made me laugh.

“For your own sake.”

“For me? What’re you talking about?”

“See, Jack, I don’t think you’re lost.”

“Whatta you mean, lost?”

“I don’t think your souls beyond redemption.”

I laughed at this, laughed out loud, because I just had to. I expected a hell of a lot better from a hotshot vice president salesman like him. “Soul? You think I got a soul?”

“Well, everybody has a soul,” he said, and what was crazy was, he said it like he was surprised that I didn’t think so. It was like I’d said, Wait a minute, you mean the earth ain’t flat? or something.

“Well, if I got a soul it’s taken the fast lane to hell.” Which was this line I heard in this movie and I tried to laugh, but it sounded flat. Like Weller was saying something deep and I was just kidding around. It made me feel cheap. I stopped smiling and looked down at Toth, lying there in the corner, those dead eyes of his just staring, staring, and I wanted to stab him again I was so mad.

“We’re talking about your soul.”

I snickered and sipped the liquor. “Oh yeah, I’ll bet you you’re the sort that reads those angel books they got all over the place now.”

“I go to church, but no, I’m not talking about all that silly stuff. I don’t mean magic. I mean your conscience. What Jack Prescot’s all about.”

I could tell him about social workers and youth counselors and all those guys who don’t know nothing about the way life works. They think they do. But it’s the words they use. You can tell they don’t know a thing. Some counselors or somebody’ll talk to me and they say, Oh, you’re maladjusted, you’re denying your anger, things like that. When I hear that, I know they don’t know nothing about souls or spirits.

“Not the afterlife,” Weller was going on. “Not mortality. I’m talking about life here on earth that’s important. Oh sure, you look skeptical. But listen to me. I really believe if you have a connection with somebody, if you trust them, if you have faith in them, then there’s hope for you.”

“Hope? What does that mean? Hope for what?”

“That you’ll become a real human being. Lead a real life.”

Real…I didn’t know what he meant, but he said it like what he was saying was so clear that I’d have to be an idiot to miss it. So I didn’t say nothing.

He kept going. “Oh, there’re reasons to steal, and there’re reasons to kill. But on the whole, don’t you really think it’s better not to? Just think about it: why do we put people in jail if it’s all right for them to murder? Not just us but all societies.”

“So, what? I’m gonna give up my evil ways?” I laughed at him.

And he just lifted his eyebrow and said, “Maybe. Tell me, Jack, how’d you feel when your buddy—what’s his name?”

“Joe Roy Toth.”

“Toth, when he shot that guy by the counter? How’d you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“He just turned around and shot him. For no reason. You knew that wasn’t right, didn’t you?” And I started to say something. But he said, “No, don’t answer me. You’d be inclined to lie. And that’s all right. It’s an instinct in your line of work. But I don’t want you believing any lies you tell me. OK? I want you to look into your heart and tell me if you didn’t think something was real wrong about what Toth did. Think about that, Jack. You knew something wasn’t right.”

All right, I did. But who wouldn’t? Toth screwed everything up. Everything went sour. And it was all his fault.

“It dug at you, right, Jack? You wished he hadn’t done it.”

I didn’t say nothing but just drank some more scotch and looked out the window and watched the flashing lights around the town. Sometimes they seemed close, and sometimes they seemed far away.

“If I let you go, you’ll tell ‘em.”

Like everybody else. They all betrayed me. My father — even after he went blind, the son of a bitch turned me in. My first PO, the judges. Sandra …My boss, the one I knifed.

“No, I won’t,” Weller said. “We’re talking about an agreement. I don’t break deals. I promised I won’t tell a soul about you, Jack. Not even my wife.” He leaned forward, cupping the booze between his hands. “You let me go, it’ll mean all the difference in the world to you. It’ll mean that you’re not hopeless. I guarantee your life’ll be different. That one act — letting me go — it’ll change you forever. Oh, maybe not this year. Or for five years. But you’ll come around. You’ll give up all this, everything that happened back there in Liggett Falls. All the crime, the killing. You’ll come around. I know you will.”

“You just expect me to believe you won’t tell anybody?”

“Ah,” Weller said, and lifted his taped-up hands to drink more scotch. “Now we get down to the big issue.”

Again that silence, and finally I said, “And what’s that?”‘

“Faith.”

There was this burst of siren outside, and I told him to shut up and pushed the gun against his head. His hands were shaking, but he didn’t do anything stupid and a few minutes later, after I sat back, he started talking again. “Faith. That’s what I’m talking about. A man who has faith is somebody who can be saved.”

“Well, I don’t have any goddamn faith,” I told him.

But he kept right on talking. “If you believe in another human being, you have faith.”

“Why the hell do you care whether I’m saved or not?”

“Because life’s hard, and people’re cruel. I told you I’m a churchgoer. A lot of the Bible’s crazy. But some of it I believe. And one of the things I believe is that sometimes we’re put in these situations to make a difference. I think that’s what happened tonight. That’s why you and I both happened to be at the drugstore at the same time. You’ve felt that, haven’t you? Like an omen? Like something happens and is telling you you ought do this or shouldn’t do that.”

Which was weird ‘cause the whole time we were driving up to Liggett Falls I kept thinking, something funny’s going on. I don’t know what it is, but this job’s gonna be different.

“What if,” he said, “everything tonight happened for a purpose? My wife had a cold, so I went to buy NyQuil. I went to that drugstore instead of 7-Eleven to save a buck or two. You happened to hit that store at just that time. You happened to have your buddy” — he nodded toward Toth’s body—”with you. The cop car just happened by at that particular moment. And the clerk behind the counter just happened to see him. That’s a lot of coincidences. Don’t you think?”

And then — this sent a damn chill right down my spine — he said, “Here we are in the shadow of that big rock, that face.”

Which is 100 percent what I was thinking. Exactly the same — about the Lookout, I mean. I don’t know why I was. But I happened to be looking out the window and thinking about it at that exact same instant. I tossed back the scotch and had another and, oh man, I was pretty freaked out.

“Like he’s looking at us, waiting for you to make a decision. Oh, don’t think it was just you, though. Maybe the purpose was to affect everybody’s life there. That customer at the counter Toth shot. Maybe it was just his time to go — fast, you know, before he got cancer or had a stroke. Maybe that girl, the clerk, had to get shot in the leg so she’d get her life together, maybe get off drugs or give up drinking.”

“And you? What about you?”

“Well, I’ll tell you about me. Maybe you’re the good deed in my life. I’ve spent years thinking only about making money. Take a look at my wallet. There. In the back.”

I pulled it open. There were a half-dozen of these little cards, like certificates, randall weller — salesman of the year, exceeded target two years straight, best salesman of 1992.

Weller kept going. “There are plenty of others back in my office. And trophies, too. And in order for me to win those, I’ve had to neglect people. My family and friends. People who could maybe use my help. And that’s not right. Maybe you kidnapping me, it’s one of those signs to make me turn my life around.”

The funny thing was this made sense. Oh, it was hard to imagine not doing heists. And I couldn’t see myself, if it came down to a fight, not going for my Buck or my Smitty to take the other guy out. That turning the other cheek stuff, that’s only for cowards. But maybe I could see a day when my life’d be just straight time. Living with some woman, maybe a wife, living in a house. Doing what my father and mother, whatever she was like, never did.

“If I was to let you go,” I said, “you’d have to tell ‘em something.”

He shrugged. “I’ll say you locked me in the trunk and then tossed me out somewhere near here. I wandered around, looking for a house or something, and got lost. It could take me a day to find somebody. That’s believable.”

“Or you could flag down a car in an hour.”

“I could. But I won’t.”

“You keep saying that. But how do I know?”

“That’s the faith part. You don’t know. No guarantees.”

“Well, I guess I don’t have any faith.”

“Then I’m dead. And your life’s never gonna change. End of story.” He sat back, and it was crazy but he looked calm, smiling a little.

That silence again, but it was like it was really this roar all around us, and it kept going till the whole room was filled up with the sound of a siren.

“You just want…what do you want?”

He drank more scotch. “Here’s a proposal. Let me walk outside.”

“Oh, right. Just let you stroll out for some fresh air or something?”

“Let me walk outside and I promise you I’ll walk right back again.”

“Like a test?”

He thought about this for a second. “Yeah. A test.”

“Where’s this faith you’re talking about? You walk outside, you try to run and I’d shoot you in the back.”

“No, what you do is you put the gun someplace in the house. The kitchen or someplace. Somewhere you couldn’t get it if I ran. You stand at the window, where we can see each other. And I’ll tell you up front. I can run like the wind. I was lettered track and field in college, and I still jog every day of the year.”

“You know if you run and bring the cops back everything’s gonna get bloody. I’ll kill the first five troopers come through that door. Nothing’ll slop me, and that blood’ll be on your hands.”

“Of course I know that,” he said. “But if this’s going to work, you can’t think that way. You’ve got to assume the worst is going to happen. That if I run I’ll tell the cops everything. Where you are and that there’re no hostages here and that you’ve only got one or two guns. And they’re going to come in and blow you to hell. And you’re not going to take a single one down with you. You’re going to die and die painfully ‘cause of a few lousy hundred bucks…But, but, but…” He held up his hands and stopped me from saying anything. “You gotta understand, faith means risk.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I think it’s just the opposite. It’d be the smartest thing you ever did in your life.”

“What’ll it prove?” I asked. But I was just stalling. And he knew it. He said patiently, “That I’m a man of my word. That you can trust me.”

“And what do I get out of it?”

And then this son of a bitch smiled that weird little smile of his. “I think you’ll be surprised.”

I tossed back another scotch and had to think about this.

Weller said, “I can see it there already. Some of that faith. It’s there. Not a lot. But some.”

And yeah, maybe there was a little. ‘Cause I was thinking about how mad I got at Toth and the way he ruined everything. I didn’t want anybody to get killed tonight. I was sick of it. Sick of the way my life had gone. Sometimes it was good, being alone and all. Not answering to anybody. But sometimes it was real bad. And this guy, Weller, it was like he was showing me something different.

“So,” I said. “You just want me to put the gun down?”

He looked around. “Put it in the kitchen. You stand in the doorway or window. All I’m gonna do is walk down to the street and walk back.”

I looked out the window. It was maybe fifty feet down the driveway. There were these bushes on either side of it. He could just take off, and I’d never find him.

All through the sky I could see lights flickering.

“Naw, I ain’t gonna. You’re nuts.”

And I expected begging or something. Or getting pissed off, more likely—which is what happens to me when people don’t do what I tell them. Or don’t do it fast enough. But, naw, he just nodded. “OK, Jack. You thought about it. That’s a good thing. You’re not ready yet. I respect that.” He sipped a little more scotch, looking at the glass. And that was the end of it.

Then all of a sudden these searchlights started up. They was some ways away, but I still got spooked and backed away from the window. Pulled my gun out. Only then I saw that it wasn’t nothing to do with the robbery. It was just a couple of big spotlights shining on the Lookout. They must’ve gone on every night, this time.

I looked up at it. From here it didn’t look like a face at all. It was just a rock. Gray and brown and these funny pine trees growing sideways out of cracks.

Watching it for a minute or two. Looking out over the town, and something that guy was saying went into my head. Not the words, really, lust the thought. And I was thinking about everybody in that town. Leading normal lives. There was a church steeple and the roofs of small houses. A lot of little yellow lights in town. You could just make out the hills in the distance. And I wished for a minute I was in one of them houses. Sitting there. Watching TV with a wife next to me. Like Sandy or somebody.

I turned back from the window and I said, “You’d just walk down to the road and back? That’s it?”

“That’s all. I won’t run off, you don’t go get your gun. We trust each other. What could be simpler?”

Listening to the wind. Not strong but a steady hiss that was comforting in a funny way even though any other time I’da thought it sounded cold and raw. It was like I heard a voice. I don’t know from where. Something in me said I ought to do this.

I didn’t say nothing else ‘cause I was right on the edge and I was afraid he’d say something that’d make me change my mind. I just took the Smith & Wesson and looked at it for a minute, then put it on the kitchen (able. I came back with the Buck and cut his feet free. Then I figured if I was going to do it I ought go all the way. So I cut his hands free, too. Weller seemed surprised I did that. But he smiled like he knew I was playing the game. I pulled him to his feet and held the blade to his neck and took him to the door.

“You’re doing a good thing,” he said.

I was thinking, Oh man, I can’t believe this. It’s crazy.

I opened the door and smelled cold fall air and woodsmoke and pine, and I heard the wind in the rocks and trees above our heads.

“Go on,” I told him.

Weller didn’t look back to check up on me …Faith, I guess. He kept walking real slow down toward the road.

I felt funny, I’ll tell you, and a couple of times when he went past some real shadowy places in the driveway and could disappear I was like, oh man, this is all messed up. I’m crazy.

I almost panicked a few times and bolted for the Smitty but I didn’t. When Weller got down near the sidewalk, I was actually holding my breath. I expected him to go, I really did. I was looking for that moment— when people tense up, when they’re gonna swing or draw down on you or bolt. It’s like their bodies’re shouting what they’re going to be doing before they do it. Only Weller wasn’t doing none of that. He walked down to the sidewalk real casual. And he turned and looked up at the face of the Lookout, like he was just another weekender. Then he turned around. He nodded at me. Which is when the car came by. It was a state trooper. Those’re the dark cars, and he didn’t have the lightbar going. So he was almost on us before I knew it. I guess I was looking at Weller so hard I didn’t see nothing else.

There it was, two doors away, and Weller saw it the same time I did.

And I thought, That’s it. Oh, hell.

But when I was turning to get the gun, I saw this like flash of motion down by the road. And I stopped cold.

Could you believe it? Weller’d dropped onto the ground and rolled underneath a tree. I closed the door real fast and watched from the window. The trooper stopped and turned his light on the driveway. The beam — it was real bright — it moved up and down and hit all the bushes and the front of the house, then back to the road. But it was like Weller was digging down into the pine needles to keep from being seen. I mean, he was hiding from those sons of bitches. Doing whatever he could to stay out of the way of the light.

Then the car moved on, and I saw the lights checking out the house next door and then it was gone. I kept my eyes on Weller the whole time, and he didn’t do nothing stupid. I seen him climb out from under the trees and dust himself off. Then he came walking back to the house. Easy, like he was walking to a bar to meet some buddies.

He came inside and shook his head. Gave this little sigh, like relief. And laughed. Then he held his hands out. I didn’t even ask him to.

I taped ‘em up again with adhesive tape, and he sat down in the chair, picked up his scotch, and sipped it.

And damn, I’ll tell you something. The God’s truth. I felt good. Naw, naw, it wasn’t like I’d seen the light or anything like that. But I was thinking that of all the people in my life — my dad or Sandy or Toth or anybody else — I never did really trust them. I’d never let myself go all the way. And here, tonight, I did. With a stranger and somebody who had the power to do me some harm. It was a pretty scary feeling, but it was also a good feeling.

It was a little thing, real little. But maybe that’s where stuff like this starts. I realized then that I’d been wrong. I could let him go. Oh, I’d keep him tied up here. Gagged. It’d be a day or so before he’d get out. But he’d agree to that. I knew he would. And I’d write his name and address down, let him know I knew where him and his family lived. But that was only part of why I was thinking I’d let him go. I wasn’t sure what the rest of it was. But it was something about what’d just happened, something between me and him.

“How you feel?” he asked.

I wasn’t going to give too much away. No, sir. But I couldn’t help saying, “I thought I was gone then. But you did right by me.”

“And you did right, too, Jack.” And then he said, “Pour us another round.”

I filled the glasses to the top. We tapped ‘em.

“Here’s to you, Jack. And to faith.”

“To faith.”

I tossed back the whiskey, and when I lowered my head, sniffing air through my nose to clear my head, well, that was when he got me. Right in the face.

He was good, that son of a bitch. Tossed the glass low so that even when I ducked, automatically, the booze caught me in the eyes, and man, that stung like nobody’s business. I couldn’t believe it. I was howling in pain and going for the knife. But it was too late. He had it all planned out, exactly what I was going to do. How I was gonna move. He brought his knee up into my chin and knocked a couple of teeth out, and I went over onto my back before I could get the knife out my pocket. Then he dropped down on my belly with his knee —I remembered I’d never bothered to tape his feet up again — and he knocked the wind out, and there I was lying, like I was paralyzed, trying to breathe and all. Only I couldn’t. And the pain was incredible, but what was worse was the feeling that he didn’t trust me.

I was whispering, “No, no, no. I was going to, man. You don’t understand. I was going to let you go.”

I couldn’t see nothing and couldn’t really hear nothing either, my ears were roaring so much. I was gasping, “You don’t understand you don’t understand.”

Man, the pain was so bad. So bad …

Weller must’ve got the tape off his hands, chewed through it, I guess, ‘cause he was rolling me over. I felt him tape my hands together, then grab me and drag me over to a chair, tape my feet to the legs. He got some water and threw it in my face to wash the whiskey out of my eyes.

He sat down in a chair in front of me. And he just stared at me for a long time while I caught my breath. He picked up his glass, poured more scotch. I shied away, thinking he was going to throw it in my face again, but he just sat there, sipping it and staring at me.

“You…I was going to let you go. I was.”

“I know,” he said. Still calm.

“You know?”

“I could see it in your face. I’ve been a salesman for twenty-five years, remember? I know when I’ve closed a deal.”

I’m a pretty strong guy, specially when I’m mad, and I tried real hard to break through that tape but there was no doing it. “Goddamn you!” I shouted. “You said you weren’t going to turn me in. You, all your goddamn talk about faith…”

“Shhhh,” Weller whispered. And he sat back, crossing his legs. Easy as could be. Looking me up and down. “That fellow your friend shot back at the drugstore. The customer at the counter?”

I nodded slowly.

“He was my friend. It’s his place my wife and I are staying at this weekend. With all our kids.”

I just stared at him. His friend? What was he saying?

“I didn’t know—”

“Be quiet,” he said, real soft. “I’ve known him for years. Gerry was one of my best friends.”

“I didn’t want nobody to die. I —”

“But somebody did die. And it was your fault.”

“Toth…”

He whispered, “It was your fault.”

“All right, you tricked me. Call the cops. Get it over with, you goddamn liar.”

“You really don’t understand, do you?” He shook his head. Why was he so calm? His hands weren’t shaking. He wasn’t looking around, nervous and all. Nothing like that. He said, “If I’d wanted to turn you in, I would just’ve flagged down that squad car a few minutes ago. But I said I wouldn’t do that. And I won’t. I gave you my word I wouldn’t tell the cops a thing about you. And I won’t.”

“Then what do you want?” I shouted. “Tell me.” Trying to bust through that tape. And as he unfolded my Buck knife with a click, I was thinking of something I told him.

Oh man, no …Oh, no.

“Yeah, being blind, I guess. That’d be the worst thing I could think of.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“What’m I going to do, Jack?” Weller said. He cut the last bit of tape off his wrists with the Buck, then looked up at me. “Well, I’ll tell you. I spent a good bit of time tonight proving to you that you shouldn’t kill me. And now…”

“What, man? What?”

“Now I’m going to spend a good bit of time proving to you that you should’ve.”

Then, real slow, Weller finished his scotch and stood up. And he walked toward me, that weird little smile on his face.

Throughout the trial Paul Dandridge did the same thing every day. He wore a suit and tie, and he occupied a seat toward the front of the courtroom, and his eyes, time and time again, returned to the man who had killed his sister.

He was never called upon to testify. The facts were virtually undisputed, the evidence overwhelming. The defendant, William Charles Croydon, had abducted Dandridge’s sister at knifepoint as she walked from the college library to her off-campus apartment. He had taken her to an isolated and rather primitive cabin in the woods, where he had subjected her to repeated sexual assaults over a period of three days, at the conclusion of which he had caused her death-by manual strangulation.

Croydon took the stand in his own defence. He was a handsome young man who’d spent his thirtieth birthday in a jail cell awaiting trial, and his preppy good looks had already brought him letters and photographs and even a few marriage proposals from women of all ages. (Paul Dandridge was twenty-seven at the time. His sister, Karen, had been twenty when she died. The trial ended just weeks before her twenty-first birthday.)

On the stand, William Croydon claimed that he had no recollection of choking the life out of Karen Dandridge, but allowed as how he had no choice but to believe he’d done it. According to his testimony, the young woman had willingly accompanied him to the remote cabin, and had been an enthusiastic sexual partner with a penchant for rough sex. She had also supplied some particularly strong marijuana with hallucinogenic properties and had insisted that he smoke it with her. At one point, after indulging heavily in the unfamiliar drug, he had lost consciousness and awakened later to find his partner beside him, dead.

His first thought, he’d told the court, was that someone had broken into the cabin while he was sleeping, had killed Karen, and might return to kill him. Accordingly he’d panicked and rushed out of there, abandoning Karen’s corpse. Now, faced with all the evidence arrayed against him, he was compelled to believe he had somehow committed this awful crime, although he had no recollection of it whatsoever, and although it was utterly foreign to his nature.

The district attorney, prosecuting this case himself, tore Croydon apart on cross-examination. He cited the bite marks on the victim’s breasts, the rope burns indicating prolonged restraint, the steps Croydon had taken in an attempt to conceal his presence in the cabin. “You must be right,” Croydon would admit, with a shrug and a sad smile. “All I can say is that I don’t remember any of it.”

The jury was eleven to one for conviction right from the jump, but it took six hours to make it unanimous. Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict? We have, Your Honor. On the sole count of the indictment, murder in the first degree, how do you find? We find the defendant, William Charles Croydon, guilty.

When I first saw the slit of light coming through the wall, I halted abruptly on the stairway, and instantly my heart began to thrash with a giddy blend of dread and craving.

At the time, I was living in Spain, a section named Puerto Viejo, or the Old Port, in the small village of Algorta just outside the industrial city of Bilbao. It was a filthy town, a dirty region, with a taste in the air of old pennies and a patina of grime dulling every bright surface. The sunlight strained through perpetual clouds that had the density and monotonous luster of lead. It was to have been my year of flamenco y sol, but instead I was picked to be the Fulbright fellow of a dour Jesuit university in Bilbao on the northern coast where the umbrellas were pocked by ceaseless acid rain and the customary dress was black—shawls, dresses, berets, raincoats, shirts, and trousers. It was as if the entire Basque nation was in perpetual mourning.

The night I first saw the light I was drunk. All afternoon I had been swilling Rioja on the balcony overlooking the harbor, celebrating the first sunny day in a month. It was October and despite the brightness and clarity of the light, my wife had been darkly unhappy all day, even unhappier than usual. At nine o’clock she was already in bed paging aimlessly through month-old magazines and sipping her sherry. I finished with the dishes and double-checked all the locks and began to stumble up the stairs of our 250-year-old stone house that only a few weeks before our arrival in Spain had been subdivided into three apartments.

I was midway up the stairs to the second floor when I saw the slim line of the light shining through a chink in the new mortar. There was no debate, not even a millisecond of equivocation about the propriety of my actions. In most matters I considered myself a scrupulously moral man. I had always been one who could be trusted with other people’s money or their most damning secrets. But like so many of my fellow puritans I long ago had discovered that when it came to certain libidinous temptations I was all too easily swept off my safe moorings into the raging currents of erotic gluttony.

I immediately pressed my eye to the crack.

It took me a moment to get my bearings, to find the focus. And when I did, my knees softened and my breath deserted me. The view was beyond anything I might have hoped for. The small slit provided a full panorama of my neighbors’ second story. At knee-high level I could see their master bathroom and a few feet to the left their king-size brass bed.

That first night the young daughter was in the bathroom with the door swung open. If the lights had been off in their apartment or the bathroom door had been closed I might never have given the peephole another look. But that girl was standing before the full-length mirror and she was lifting her fifteen-year-old breasts that had already developed quite satisfactorily, lifting them both at once and reshaping them with her hands to meet some standard that only she could see. After a while she released them from her grip, then lifted them on her flat palms as though offering them to her image in the mirror. They were beautiful breasts, with small nipples that protruded nearly an inch from the aureole, and she handled them beautifully, in a fashion that was far more mature and knowing than one would expect from any ordinary fifteen-year-old.

I did not know her name. I still don’t, though certainly she is the most important female who ever crossed my path. Far more crucial in my life’s trajectory than my mother or either of my wives. Yet it seems appropriate that I should remain unaware of her name. That I should not personalize her in any way. That she should remain simply an abstraction — simply the girl who destroyed me.

In the vernacular of that year in Spain, she was known as a niña pera, or pear girl. One of hundreds of shapely and succulent creatures who cruised about the narrow, serpentine roads of Algorta and Bilbao on loud mopeds, their hair streaming in their wake. She was as juicy as any of them. More succulent than most, as I had already noticed from several brief encounters as we exited from adjacent doors onto the narrow alley-streets of the Old Port. On these two or three occasions, I remember fumbling through my Spanish greetings and taking a stab at small talk while she, with a patient but faintly disdainful smile, suffered my clumsy attempts at courtesy. Although she wore the white blouse and green plaid skirts of all the other Catholic schoolgirls, such prosaic dress failed to disguise her pearness. She was achingly succulent, blindingly juicy. At the time I was twice her age. Double the fool and half the man I believed I was.

That first night, after a long, hungering look, I pulled away from the crack of light and with equal measures of reluctance and urgency, I marched back down the stairs and went immediately to the kitchen and found the longest and flattest knife in the drawer and brought it back to the stairway, and with surgical precision I inserted the blade into the soft mortar and as my pulse throbbed, I painstakingly doubled the size of my peephole.

When I withdrew the blade and applied my eye again to the slit, I now could see my niña pera from her thick black waist-length hair to her bright pink toenails. While at the same time I calculated that if my neighbors ever detected the lighted slit from their side and dared to press an eye to the breach, they would be rewarded with nothing more than a static view of the 250-year-old stones of my rented stairwell.

I knew little about my neighbors except that the father of my pear girl was a vice consul for that South American country whose major role in international affairs seemed to be to supply America with her daily dose of granulated ecstasy.

He didn’t look like a gangster. He was tall and elegant, with wavy black hair that touched his shoulders and an exquisitely precise beard. He might have been a maestro of a European symphony or a painter of romantic landscapes. And his young wife could easily have been a slightly older sister to my succulent one. She was in her middle thirties and had the wide and graceful hips, the bold, uplifting breasts, the gypsy features and black unfathomable eyes that seemed to spring directly from the archetypal pool of my carnality. In the Jungian parlance of my age, the wife was my anima, while the daughter was the anima of my adolescent self. They were perfect echoes of the dark secret female who glowed like uranium in the bowels of my psyche.

That first night when the bedsprings squeaked behind me, and my wife padded across the bedroom floor for her final visit to the bathroom, I allowed myself one last draft of the amazing sight before me. The niña was now stooped forward and was holding a small hand mirror to her thicket of pubic hair, poking and searching with her free hand through the dense snarl as if she were seeking that tender part of herself she had discovered by touch but not yet by sight.

Trembling and breathless, I pressed my two hands flat against the stone wall and shoved myself away and with my heart in utter disarray, I carried my lechery up the stairs to bed.

The next day I set about learning my neighbors’ schedule and altering mine accordingly. My wife had taken a job as an English teacher in a nearby instituto and was occupied every afternoon and through the early evening. My duties at the university occupied me Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was expected to offer office hours before and after my classes on those days. However, I immediately began to curtail these sessions because I discovered that my niña pera returned from school around three o’clock, and on many days she showered and changed into casual clothes, leaving her school garb in a heap on the bathroom floor as she fled the apartment for an afternoon of boy-watching in the Algorta pubs.

To my department chairman’s dismay, I began to absent myself from the university hallways immediately after my last class of the day, hurrying with my umbrella along the five blocks to the train station so I could be home by 2:55. In the silence of my apartment, hunched breathless at my hole, I watched her undress. I watched the steam rise from her shower, and I watched her towel herself dry. I watched her on the toilet and I watched her using the sanitary products she preferred. I watched her touch the flawless skin of her face with her fingertips, applying makeup or wiping it away. On many afternoons I watched her examine herself in the full-length mirror. Running her hands over that seamless flesh, trying out various seductive poses while an expression played on her face that was equal parts exultation and shame — that peculiar adolescent emotion I so vividly recalled.

These were the times when I would have touched myself were I going to do so. But these moments at the peephole, while they were intensely sexual, were not the least masturbatory. Instead, they had an almost spiritual component. As though I were worshiping at the shrine of hidden mysteries, allowed by divine privilege to see beyond the walls of my own paltry life. In exchange for this gift I was cursed to suffer a brand of reverential horniness I had not imagined possible. I lusted for a vision that was forever intangible, a girl I could not touch, nor smell, nor taste. A girl who was no more than a scattering of light across my retina.

Although I never managed to establish a definite pattern to her mother’s schedule, I did my best to watch her as well. At odd unpredictable hours, she appeared in my viewfinder and I watched the elder niña pera bathe in a tub of bubbles, and even when her house was empty, I watched her chastely close the bathroom door whenever she performed her toilette. I watched her nap on the large brass bed. And three times that fall in the late afternoons, I watched her slide her hand inside her green silk robe and touch herself between the legs, hardly moving the hand at all, giving herself the subtlest of touches until she rocked her head back into the pillow and wept.

I kept my eye to the wall during the hours when I should have been preparing for my classes and grading my students’ papers and writing up their weekly exams. Instead, I stationed myself at the peephole, propping myself up with pillows, finding the best alignment for nose and cheek against the rough cool rock. I breathed in the sweet grit of mortar, trained my good right eye on the bathroom door and the bed, scanning the floor for shadows, primed for any flick of movement, always dreadfully alert for the sound of my wife’s key in the front door.

After careful study, I had memorized her homecoming ritual. Whenever she entered our apartment, it took her two steps to reach the foyer and put down her bag. She could then choose to turn right into the kitchen or take another step toward the stairway. If she chose the latter, almost instantly she would be able to witness me perched at the peephole, and my clandestine life would be exposed. In my leisure, I clocked a normal entry and found that on average I had almost a full twenty seconds from the moment her key turned the tumblers till she reached the bottom of the stairs, twenty seconds to toss the pillows back into the bedroom and absent myself from the hole.

I briefly toyed with the idea of revealing the peephole to her. But I knew her sense of the perverse was far short of my own. She was constitutionally gloomy, probably a clinical depressive. Certainly a passive-aggressive, who reveled in bitter nonresponse, bland effect, withdrawing into maddening hours of silence whenever I blundered across another invisible foul line she had drawn.

I watched the father too, the vice consul. On many occasions I saw him strip off his underwear and climb into the shower, and I saw him dry himself and urinate and brush his teeth. Once I saw him reach down and retrieve a pair of discarded briefs and bring the crotch to his nose before deciding they were indeed fresh enough to wear again. He had the slender and muscular build of a long-distance runner. Even in its slackened state his penis was formidable.

On one particular Sunday morning, I watched with grim fascination as he worked his organ to an erection, all the while gazing at the reflection of his face. And a few moments later as the spasms of his pleasure shook him and he was bending forward to ejaculate into the sink, the niña pera appeared at the doorway of the bathroom. She paused briefly to watch the vice consul’s last strokes, then passed behind him and stepped into the shower with a nonchalance that I found more shocking than anything I had witnessed to that point.

Late in November, the chairman of my department called me into his office and asked me if I was happy in Spain, and I assured him that I most certainly was. He smiled uncomfortably and offered me a glass of scotch and as we sipped, he told me that the students had been complaining that I was not making myself sufficiently available to them. I feigned shock, but he simply shook his head and waved off my pretense. Not only had I taken to missing office hours, I had failed to return a single set of papers or tests. The students were directionless and confused and in a unified uproar. And because of their protests, much to his regret, the chairman was going to have to insist that I begin holding my regular office hours immediately. If I failed to comply, he would have no choice but to act in his students’ best interest by calling the Fulbright offices in Madrid and having my visiting professorship withdrawn for the second semester. I would be shipped home in disgrace.

I assured him that I would not disappoint him again.

Two days later after my last class of the day as I walked back to my office, all I could think of was my niña pera stripping away her Catholic uniform and stepping into the shower, then stepping out again wet and naked and perfectly succulent. I turned from my office door and the five scowling students waiting there and hurried out of the building. I caught the train just in time and was home only seconds before she arrived.

And this was the day it happened.

Breathless from my jog from the train station, I clambered up the stairs and quickly assumed my position at the slit, but was startled to see that it was not my niha pera beyond the wall, but her father, the diplomat in his dark suit, home at that unaccustomed hour. He was pacing back and forth in front of the bathroom, where a much shorter and much less elegant man was holding the head of a teenage boy over the open toilet bowl. The young man had long stringy hair and was dressed in a black T-shirt and blue jeans. The thug who was gripping him by the ears above the bowl was also dressed in black, a bulky black sweatshirt with the sleeves torn away and dark jeans and a black Basque beret. His arms were as gnarled as oak limbs, and the boy he held was unable to manage even a squirm.

The vice consul stopped his pacing and spat out a quick, indecent bit of Spanish. Even though the wall muffled most conversation, I heard and recognized the phrase. While my conversational skills were limited, I had mastered a dozen or so of the more useful and colorful Spanish curses. The vice consul had chosen to brand the boy as a pig’s bastard child. Furthermore, a pig covered in its own excrement.

Though my disappointment at missing my daily appointment with the niña pera deflated my spirits, witnessing such violence and drama was almost fair compensation. My assumption was that my neighbor was disciplining the young man for some botched assignment — the most natural guess being that he was a courier who transported certain highly valued pharmaceutical products that happened also to be the leading export of the vice consul’s country. The other possibility, of course, and one that gave me a particularly nasty thrill, was that the boy was guilty of some impropriety with the diplomat’s daughter, my own niña pera, and now was suffering the dire consequences of his effrontery.

I watched as the vice consul came close to the boy and bent to whisper something to him, then tipped his head up by the chin and gave some command to the thug. The squat man let go of the boys right ear, and with a gesture so quick I only caught the end of it, he produced a knife and slashed the boy’s right ear away from his head.

I reeled back from the slit in the wall and pressed my back against the banister and tried to force the air into my lungs.

At that moment I should have rushed downstairs, gotten on the phone, and called the militia to report the outrage beyond my wall. And I honestly considered doing so. For surely it would have been the moral, virtuous path. But I could not move. And as I considered my paralysis, the utter selfishness of my inaction filled me with acid self-contempt. I reviled myself even as I kept my place. I could not call for help because I did not dare to upset the delicate equipoise of my neighbors’ lives. The thought of losing my niña pera to the judicial process, or even worse to extradition, left me lifeless on the stairway. Almost as terrifying was the possibility that if I called for the militia, a further investigation would expose the slit in the wall and I would be hauled out into the streets for a public thrashing.

For a very long while I did not move.

Finally, when I found the courage to bring my eye back to the crack in the wall, I saw that the thug had lifted the boy to a standing position before the toilet, and the vice consul had unzipped him and was gripping the tip of his penis, holding it out above the bloody porcelain bowl, a long steak knife poised a few inches above the pale finger of flesh.

The vice consul’s arm quivered and began its downward slash.

“No!” I cried out, then louder, “No!”

My neighbor aborted his savage swipe and spun around. I watched him take a hesitant step my way, then another. His patent-leather shoes glowed in the eerie light beyond the wall. Then in an unerring path he marched directly to the wall where I was perched.

I pulled away, scooted backward up the stairs, and held my breath.

I waited.

I heard nothing but the distant siren wail of another supertanker coming into port.

I was just turning to tiptoe up to the bedroom when the blade appeared. It slid through the wall and glittered in the late-afternoon light, protruding a full five inches into my apartment. He slipped it back and forth as if he, too, were trying to widen the viewing hole, then drew it slowly out of sight. For a second I was in real danger of toppling forward down the flight of stairs, but I found a grip on the handrail and restrained myself on the precarious landing.

Though it was no longer visible, the knife blade continued to vibrate in my inner sight. I realized it was not a steak knife at all, but a very long fillet knife with a venomous tapered blade that shone with the brilliance of a surgical tool. I had seen similar knives many times along the Algorta docks, for this was the sort of cutlery that saw service gutting the abundant local cod.

And while I held my place on the stairs, the point of the knife shot through the wall again and remained there, very still, as eloquent and vile a threat as I had ever experienced. And a moment later in the vice consul’s apartment I heard a wet piercing noise followed by a heavy thunk, as if a sack of cement had been broken open with the point of a shovel.

A second later my wife’s key turned in the front-door lock and she entered the apartment, shook her umbrella, and stripped off her rain gear and took her standard fifteen seconds to reach the bottom of the stairs. She gazed up and saw me frozen on the landing and the knife blade still shimmering through the wall of this house she had come to despise. For it was there in those four walls that I had fatally withdrawn from her as well as my students, where I had begun to match her obdurate silences with my own. In these last few months I had become so devoted to my niña pera that I had established a bond with this unknown juvenile beyond the wall that was more committed and passionate than any feelings I had ever shown my wife.

And when she saw the knife blade protruding from the wall, she knew all this and more. More than I could have told her if I had fallen to my knees and wallowed in confession. Everything was explained to her, my vast guilt, my repellent preoccupation, the death of our life together. Our eyes interlocked, and whatever final molecules of adhesion still existed between us dissolved in those silent seconds.

She turned and strode to the foyer. As I came quickly down the stairs, she picked up her raincoat and umbrella and opened the heavy door of our apartment and stepped out into the narrow alley-street of the Old Port. I hurried after her, calling out her name, pleading with her, but she shut the door behind her with brutal finality.

As I rushed to catch her, pushing open the door, I nearly collided with my succulent young neighbor coming home late from school. She graced me with a two-second smile and entered her door, and I stood on the stoop for a moment looking down the winding, rain-slicked street after my wife. Wretched and elated, I swung around and shut myself in once more with my utter depravity.

I mounted the stairs.

There was nothing in my heart, nothing in my head. Simply the raging current of blood that powered my flesh. I knelt at the wall and felt the magnetic throb of an act committed a thousand times and rewarded almost as often, the Pavlovian allure, a need beyond need, a death-hungering wish to see, to know, to live among that nefarious family who resided only a knife blade away.

I pressed my eye to the hole and she was there, framed in the bathroom doorway wearing her white blouse, her green plaid skirt. Behind her I could see that the toilet bowl had been wiped clean of blood. My niña pera’s hands hung uneasily at her sides and she was staring across the room at the wall we shared, her head canted to the side, her eyes focused on the exact spot where I pressed my face into the stone and drank her in. My pear girl, my succulent child, daughter of the devil.

And though I was certain that the glimmer of my eye was plainly visible to her and anyone else who stood on that side of the wall, I could not pull myself from the crack, for my niña pera had begun to lift her skirt, inch by excruciating inch, exposing those immaculate white thighs. And though there was no doubt she was performing under duress and on instructions from her father, I pressed my face still harder against the wall and drank deep of the vision before me.

Even when my succulent one cringed and averted her face, giving me a second or two of ample warning of what her father was about to do, I could not draw my eye away from the lush expanse of her thighs.

A half second later her body disappeared and a wondrous flash of darkness swelled inside me and exploded. I was launched into utter blankness, riding swiftly out beyond the edges of the visible world, flying headlong into a bright galaxy of pain.

And yet, if I had not passed out on the stairway, bleeding profusely from my ruined eye, if somehow I had managed to stay conscious for only a few seconds more, I am absolutely certain that after I suffered the loss of sight in my right eye, I would have used the last strength I had to reposition myself on the stairway and resume my vigil with my left.

In the following months of recuperation and repair, I came to discover that a man can subsist with one eye as readily as with one hand or leg. For apparently nature anticipated that some of us would commit acts of such extreme folly and self-destructiveness that we would require such anatomical redundancy if we were to survive. And in her wisdom, she created us to be two halves cojoined. So that even with one eye, a man can still see, just as with only a single hand he may still reach out and beckon for his needs. And yes, even halfheartedly, he may once again know love.

This thing with Blue and the dogs and Elgin Bern happened a while back, a few years after some of our boys —like Elgin Bern and Cal Sears — came back from Vietnam, and a lot of others — like Eddie Vorey and Carl Joe Carol, the Stewart cousins — didn’t. We don’t know how it worked in other towns, but that war put something secret in our boys who returned. Something quiet and untouchable. You sensed they knew things they’d never say, did things on the sly you’d never discover. Great card players, those boys, able to bluff with the best, let no joy show in their face no matter what they were holding.

A small town is a hard place to keep a secret, and a small Southern town with all that heat and all those open windows is an even harder place than most. But those boys who came back from overseas, they seemed to have mastered the trick of privacy. And the way it’s always been in this town, you get a sizable crop of young, hard men coming up at the same time, they sort of set the tone.

So, not long after the war, we were a quieter town, a less trusting one (or so some of us seemed to think), and that’s right when tobacco money and textile money reached a sort of critical mass and created construction money and pretty soon there was talk that our small town should maybe get a little bigger, maybe build something that would bring in more tourist dollars than we’d been getting from fireworks and pecans.

That’s when some folks came up with this Eden Falls idea — a big carnival-type park with roller coasters and water slides and such. Why should all those Yankees spend all their money in Florida? South Carolina had sun too. Had golf courses and grapefruit and no end of KOA campgrounds.

So now a little town called Eden was going to have Eden Falls. We were going to be on the map, people said. We were going to be in all the brochures. We were small now, people said, but just you wait. Just you wait.

And that’s how things stood back then, the year Perkin and Jewel Lut’s marriage hit a few bumps and Elgin Bern took up with Shelley Briggs and no one seemed able to hold on to their dogs.

The problem with dogs in Eden, South Carolina, was that the owners who bred them bred a lot of them. Or they allowed them to run free where they met up with other dogs of opposite gender and achieved the same result. This wouldn’t have been so bad if Eden weren’t so close to I-95, and if the dogs weren’t in the habit of bolting into traffic and fucking up the bumpers of potential tourists.

The mayor, Big Bobby Vargas, went to a mayoral conference up in Beaufort, where the governor made a surprise appearance to tell everyone how pissed off he was about this dog thing. Lot of money being poured into Eden these days, the governor said, lot of steps being taken to change her image, and he for one would be goddamned if a bunch of misbehaving canines was going to mess all that up.

“Boys,” he’d said, looking Big Bobby Vargas dead in the eye, “they’re starting to call this state the Devil’s Kennel ‘cause of all them pooch corpses along the interstate. And I don’t know about you all, but I don’t think that’s a real pretty name.”

Big Bobby told Elgin and Blue he’d never heard anyone call it the Devil’s Kennel in his life. Heard a lot worse, sure, but never that. Big Bobby said the governor was full of shit. But, being the governor and all, he was sort of entitled.

The dogs in Eden had been a problem going back to the 1920s and a part-time breeder named J. Mallon Ellenburg who, if his arms weren’t up to their elbows in the guts of the tractors and combines he repaired for a living, was usually lashing out at something — his family when they weren’t quick enough, his dogs when the family was. J. Mallon Ellenburg’s dogs were mixed breeds and mongrels and they ran in packs, as did their offspring, and several generations later, those packs still moved through the Eden night like wolves, their bodies stripped to muscle and gristle, tense and angry, growling in the dark at J. Mallon Ellenburg’s ghost.

Big Bobby went to the trouble of measuring exactly how much of 95 crossed through Eden, and he came up with 2.8 miles. Not much really, but still an average of .74 dog a day or 4.9 dogs a week. Big Bobby wanted the rest of the state funds the governor was going to be doling out at year’s end, and if that meant getting rid of five dogs a week, give or take, then that’s what was going to get done.

“On the QT,” he said to Elgin and Blue, “on the QT, what we going to do, boys, is set up in some trees and shoot every canine who gets within barking distance of that interstate.”

Elgin didn’t much like this “we” stuff. First place, Big Bobby’d said “we” that time in Double O’s four years ago. This was before he’d become mayor, when he was nothing more than a county tax assessor who shot pool at Double O’s every other night, same as Elgin and Blue. But one night, after Harlan and Chub Uke had roughed him up over a matter of some pocket change, and knowing that neither Elgin nor Blue was too fond of the Uke family either, Big Bobby’d said, “We going to settle those boys’ asses tonight,” and started running his mouth the minute the brothers entered the bar.

Time the smoke cleared, Blue had a broken hand, Harlan and Chub were curled up on the floor, and Elgin’s lip was busted. Big Bobby, meanwhile, was hiding under the pool table, and Cal Sears was asking who was going to pay for the pool stick Elgin had snapped across the back of Chub’s head.

So Elgin heard Mayor Big Bobby saying “we” and remembered the ten dollars it had cost him for that pool stick, and he said, “No, sir, you can count me out this particular enterprise.”

Big Bobby looked disappointed. Elgin was a veteran of a foreign war, former Marine, a marksman. “Shit,” Big Bobby said, “what good are you, you don’t use the skills Uncle Sam spent good money teaching you?”

Elgin shrugged. “Damn, Bobby. I guess not much.”

But Blue kept his hand in, as both Big Bobby and Elgin knew he would. All the job required was a guy didn’t mind sitting in a tree who liked to shoot things. Hell, Blue was home.

Elgin didn’t have the time to be sitting up in a tree anyway. The past few months, he’d been working like crazy after they’d broke ground at Eden Falls — mixing cement, digging postholes, draining swamp water to shore up the foundation — with the real work still to come. There’d be several more months of drilling and bilging, spreading cement like cake icing, and erecting scaffolding to erect walls to erect facades. There’d be the hump-and-grind of rolling along in the dump trucks and drill trucks, the forklifts and cranes and industrial diggers, until the constant heave and jerk of them drove up his spine or into his kidneys like a corkscrew.

Time to sit up in a tree shooting dogs? Shit. Elgin didn’t have time to take a piss some days.

And then on top of all the work, he’d been seeing Drew Briggs’s ex-wife, Shelley, lately. Shelley was the receptionist at Perkin Lut’s Auto Emporium, and one day Elgin had brought his Impala in for a tire rotation and they’d got to talking. She’d been divorced from Drew over a year, and they waited a couple of months to show respect, but after a while they began showing up at Double O’s and down at the IHOP together.

Once they drove clear to Myrtle Beach together for the weekend. People asked them what it was like, and they said, “Just like the postcards.” Since the postcards never mentioned the price of a room at the Hilton, Elgin and Shelley didn’t mention that all they’d done was drive up and down the beach twice before settling in a motel a bit west in Conway. Nice, though; had a color TV and one of those switches turned the bathroom into a sauna if you let the shower run. They’d started making love in the sauna, finished up on the bed with the steam coiling out from the bathroom and brushing their heels. Afterward, he pushed her hair back off her forehead and looked in her eyes and told her he could get used to this.

She said, “But wouldn’t it cost a lot to install a sauna in your trailer?” then waited a full thirty seconds before she smiled.

Elgin liked that about her, the way she let him know he was still just a man after all, always would take himself too seriously, part of his nature. Letting him know she might be around to keep him apprised of that fact every time he did. Keep him from pushing a bullet into the breech of a .30-06, slamming the bolt home, firing into the flank of some wild dog.

Sometimes, when they’d shut down the site early for the day — if it had rained real heavy and the soil loosened near a foundation, or if supplies were running late — he’d drop by Lut’s to see her. She’d smile as if he’d brought her flowers, say, “Caught boozing on the job again?” or some other smart-ass thing, but it made him feel good, as if something in his chest suddenly realized it was free to breathe.

Before Shelley, Elgin had spent a long time without a woman he could publicly acknowledge as his. He’d gone with Mae Shiller from fifteen to nineteen, but she’d gotten lonely while he was overseas, and he’d returned to find her gone from Eden, married to a boy up in South of the Border, the two of them working a corn-dog concession stand, making a tidy profit, folks said. Elgin dated some, but it took him a while to get over Mae, to get over the loss of something he’d always expected to have, the sound of her laugh and an image of her stepping naked from Cooper’s Lake, her pale flesh beaded with water, having been the things that got Elgin through the jungle, through the heat, through the ticking of his own death he’d heard in his ears every night he’d been over there.

About a year after he’d come home, Jewel Lut had come to visit her mother, who still lived in the trailer park where Jewel had grown up with Elgin and Blue, where Elgin still lived. On her way out, she’d dropped by Elgin’s and they’d sat out front of his trailer in some folding chairs, had a few drinks, talked about old times. He told her a bit about Vietnam, and she told him a bit about marriage. How it wasn’t what you expected, how Perkin Lut might know a lot of things but he didn’t know a damn sight about having fun.

There was something about Jewel Lut that sank into men’s flesh the way heat did. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, had a beautiful body, moved in a loose, languid way that made you picture her naked no matter what she was wearing. No, there was more to it. Jewel, never the brightest girl in town and not even the most charming, had something in her eyes that none of the women Elgin had ever met had; it was a capacity for living, for taking moments — no matter how small or inconsequential— and squeezing every last thing you could out of them. Jewel gobbled up life, dove into it like it was a cool pond cut in the shade of a mountain on the hottest day of the year.

That look in her eyes — the one that never left — said, Let’s have fun, goddammit. Let’s eat. Now.

She and Elgin hadn’t been stupid enough to do anything that night, not even after Elgin caught that look in her eyes, saw it was directed at him, saw she wanted to eat.

Elgin knew how small Eden was, how its people loved to insinuate and pry and talk. So he and Jewel worked it out, a once-a-week thing mostly that happened down in Carlyle, at a small cabin had been in Elgin’s family since before the War Between the States. There, Elgin and Jewel were free to partake of each other, squeeze and bite and swallow and inhale each other, to make love in the lake, on the porch, in the tiny kitchen.

They hardly ever talked, and when they did it was about nothing at all, really — the decline in quality of the meat at Billy’s Butcher Shop, rumors that parking meters were going to be installed in front of the courthouse, if McGarrett and the rest of Five-O would ever put the cuffs on Wo Fat.

There was an unspoken understanding that he was free to date any woman he chose and that she’d never leave Perkin Lut. And that was just fine. This wasn’t about love; it was about appetite.

Sometimes, Elgin would see her in town or hear Blue speak about her in that puppy-dog-love way he’d been speaking about her since high school, and he’d find himself surprised by the realization that he slept with this woman. That no one knew. That it could go on forever, if both of them remained careful, vigilant against the wrong look, the wrong tone in their voices when they spoke in public.

He couldn’t entirely put his finger on what need she satisfied, only that he needed her in that lakefront cabin once a week, that it had something to do with walking out of the jungle alive, with the ticking of his own death he’d heard for a full year. Jewel was somehow reward for that, a fringe benefit. To be naked and spent with her lying atop him and seeing that look in her eyes that said she was ready to go again, ready to gobble him up like oxygen. He’d earned that by shooting at shapes in the night, pressed against those damp foxhole walls that never stayed shored up for long, only to come home to a woman who couldn’t wait, who’d discarded him as easily as she would a once-favored doll she’d grown beyond, looked back upon with a wistful mix of nostalgia and disdain.

He’d always told himself that when he found the right woman, his passion for Jewel, his need for those nights at the lake, would disappear. And, truth was, since he’d been with Shelley Briggs, he and Jewel had cooled it. Shelley wasn’t Perkin, he told Jewel; she’d figure it out soon enough if he left town once a week, came back with bite marks on his abdomen.

Jewel said, “Fine. We’ll get back to it whenever you’re ready.”

Knowing there’d be a next time, even if Elgin wouldn’t admit it to himself.

So Elgin, who’d been so lonely in the year after his discharge, now had two women. Sometimes, he didn’t know what to think of that. When you were alone, the happiness of others boiled your insides. Beauty seemed ugly. Laughter seemed evil. The casual grazing of one lover’s hand into another was enough to make you want to cut them off at the wrist. I will never be loved, you said. I will never know joy.

He wondered sometimes how Blue made it through. Blue, who’d never had a girlfriend he hadn’t rented by the half hour. Who was too ugly and small and just plain weird to evoke anything in women but fear or pity. Blue, who’d been carrying a torch for Jewel Lut since long before she married Perkin and kept carrying it with a quiet fever Elgin could only occasionally identify with. Blue, he knew, saw Jewel Lut as a queen, as the only woman who existed for him in Eden, South Carolina. All because she’d been nice to him, pals with him and Elgin, back about a thousand years ago, before sex, before breasts, before Elgin or Blue had even the smallest clue what that thing between their legs was for, before Perkin Lut had come along with his daddy’s money and his nice smile and his bullshit stories about how many men he’d have killed in the war if only the draft board had seen fit to let him go.

Blue figured if he was nice enough, kind enough, waited long enough — then one day Jewel would see his decency, need to cling to it.

Elgin never bothered telling Blue that some women didn’t want decency. Some women didn’t want a nice guy. Some women, and some men too, wanted to get into a bed, turn out the lights, and feast on each other like animals until it hurt to move.

Blue would never guess that Jewel was that kind of woman, because she was always so sweet to him, treated him like a child really, and with every friendly hello she gave him, every pat on the shoulder, every “What you been up to, old bud?” Blue pushed her further and further up the pedestal he’d built in his mind.

“I seen him at the Emporium one time,” Shelley told Elgin. “He just come in for no reason anyone understood and sat reading magazines until Jewel came in to see Perkin about something. And Blue, he just stared at her. Just stared at her talking to Perkin in the showroom. When she finally looked back, he stood up and left.”

Elgin hated hearing about, talking about, or thinking about Jewel when he was with Shelley. It made him feel unclean and unworthy.

“Crazy love,” he said to end the subject.

“Crazy something, babe.”

Nights sometimes, Elgin would sit with Shelley in front of his trailer, listen to the cicadas hum through the scrawny pine, smell the night and the rock salt mixed with gravel; the piña colada shampoo Shelley used made him think of Hawaii though he’d never been, and he’d think how their love wasn’t crazy love, wasn’t burning so fast and furious it’d burn itself out they weren’t careful. And that was fine with him. If he could just get his head around this Jewel Lut thing, stop seeing her naked and waiting and looking back over her shoulder at him in the cabin, then he could make something with Shelley. She was worth it. She might not be able to fuck like Jewel, and, truth be told, he didn’t laugh as much with her, but Shelley was what you aspired to. A good woman, who’d be a good mother, who’d stick by you when times got tough. Sometimes he’d take her hand in his and hold it for no other reason but the doing of it. She caught him one night, some look in his eyes, maybe the way he tilted his head to look at her small white hand in his big brown one.

She said, “Damn, Elgin, if you ain’t simple sometimes.” Then she came out of her chair in a rush and straddled him, kissed him as if she were trying to take a piece of him back with her. She said, “Baby, we ain’t getting any younger. You know?”

And he knew, somehow, at that moment why some men build families and others shoot dogs. He just wasn’t sure where he fit in the equation.

He said, “We ain’t, are we?”

Blue had been Elgin’s best buddy since either of them could remember, but Elgin had been wondering about it lately. Blue’d always been a little different, something Elgin liked, sure, but there was more to it now. Blue was the kind of guy you never knew if he was quiet because he didn’t have anything to say or, because what he had to say was so horrible, he knew enough not to send it out into the atmosphere.

When they’d been kids, growing up in the trailer park, Blue used to be out at all hours because his mother was either entertaining a man or had gone out and forgotten to leave him the key. Back then, Blue had this thing for cockroaches. He’d collect them in a jar, then drop bricks on them to test their resiliency. He told Elgin once, “That’s what they are — resilient. Every generation, we have to come up with new ways to kill ‘em because they get immune to the poisons we had before.” After a while, Blue took to dousing them in gasoline, lighting them up, seeing how resilient they were then.

Elgin’s folks told him to stay away from the strange, dirty kid with the white-trash mother, but Elgin felt sorry for Blue. He was half Elgin’s size even though they were the same age; you could place your thumb and forefinger around Blue’s biceps and meet them on the other side. Elgin hated how Blue seemed to have only two pairs of clothes, both usually dirty, and how sometimes they’d pass his trailer together and hear the animal sounds coming from inside, the grunts and moans, the slapping of flesh. Half the time you couldn’t tell if Blue’s old lady was in there fucking or fighting. And always the sound of country music mingled in with all that animal noise, Blue’s mother and her man of the moment listening to it on the transistor radio she’d given Blue one Christmas.

“My fucking radio,” Blue said once and shook his small head, the only time Elgin ever saw him react to what went on in that trailer.

Blue was a reader — knew more about science and ecology, about anatomy and blue whales and conversion tables than anyone Elgin knew. Most everyone figured the kid for a mute — hell, he’d been held back twice in fourth grade — but with Elgin he’d sometimes chat up a storm while they puffed smokes together down at the drainage ditch behind the park. He’d talk about whales, how they bore only one child, who they were fiercely protective of, but how if another child was orphaned, a mother whale would take it as her own, protect it as fiercely as she did the one she gave birth to. He told Elgin how sharks never slept, how electrical currents worked, what a depth charge was. Elgin, never much of a talker, just sat and listened, ate it up, and waited for more.

The older they got, the more Elgin became Blue’s protector, till finally, the year Blue’s face exploded with acne, Elgin got in about two fights a day until there was no one left to fight. Everyone knew—they were brothers. And if Elgin didn’t get you from the front, Blue was sure to take care of you from behind, like that time a can of acid fell on Roy Hubrist’s arm in shop, or the time someone hit Carnell Lewis from behind with a brick, then cut his Achilles tendon with a razor while he lay out cold. Everyone knew it was Blue, even if no one actually saw him do it.

Elgin figured with Roy and Carnell, they’d had it coming. No great loss. It was since Elgin’d come back from Vietnam, though, that he’d noticed some things and kept them to himself, wondered what he was going to do the day he’d know he had to do something.

There was the owl someone had set afire and hung upside down from a telephone wire, the cats who turned up missing in the blocks that surrounded Blue’s shack off Route 11. There were the small pink panties Elgin had seen sticking out from under Blue’s bed one morning when he’d come to get him for some cleanup work at a site. He’d checked the missing-persons reports for days, but it hadn’t come to anything, so he’d just decided Blue had picked them up himself, fed a fantasy or two. He didn’t forget, though, couldn’t shake the way those panties had curled upward out of the brown dust under Blue’s bed, seemed to be pleading for something.

He’d never bothered asking Blue about any of this. That never worked. Blue just shut down at times like that, stared off somewhere as if something you couldn’t hear was drowning out your words, something you couldn’t see was taking up his line of vision. Blue, floating away on you, until you stopped cluttering up his mind with useless talk.

One Saturday, Elgin went into town with Shelley so she could get her hair done at Martha’s Unisex on Main. In Martha’s, as Dottie Leeds gave Shelley a shampoo and rinse, Elgin felt like he’d stumbled into a chapel of womanhood. There was Jim Hayder’s teenage daughter, Sonny, getting one of those feathered cuts was growing popular these days and several older women who still wore beehives, getting them reset or plastered or whatever they did to keep them up like that. There was Joylene Covens and Lila Sims having their nails done while their husbands golfed and the black maids watched their kids, and Martha and Dottie and Esther and Gertrude and Hayley dancing and flitting, laughing and chattering among the chairs, calling everyone “Honey,” and all of them — the young, the old, the rich, and Shelley — kicking back like they did this every day, knew each other more intimately than they did their husbands or children or boyfriends.

When Dottie Leeds looked up from Shelley’s head and said, “Elgin, honey, can we get you a sports page or something?” the whole place burst out laughing, Shelley included. Elgin smiled though he didn’t feel like it and gave them all a sheepish wave that got a bigger laugh, and he told Shelley he’d be back in a bit and left.

He headed up Main toward the town square, wondering what it was those women seemed to know so effortlessly that completely escaped him, and saw Perkin Lut walking in a circle outside Dexter Isley’s Five & Dime. It was one of those days when the wet, white heat was so overpowering that unless you were in Martha’s, the one place in town with central air-conditioning, most people stayed inside with their shades down and tried not to move much.

And there was Perkin Lut walking the soles of his shoes into the ground, turning in circles like a little kid trying to make himself dizzy.

Perkin and Elgin had known each other since kindergarten, but Elgin could never remember liking the man much. Perkins old man, Mance Lut, had pretty much built Eden, and he’d spent a lot of money keeping Perkin out of the war, hid his son up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for so many semesters even Perkin couldn’t remember what he’d majored in. A lot of men who’d gone overseas and come back hated Perkin for that, as did the families of most of the men who hadn’t come back, but that wasn’t Elgin’s problem with Perkin. Hell, if Elgin’d had the money, he’d have stayed out of that shitty war too.

What Elgin couldn’t abide was that there was something in Perkin that protected him from consequence. Something that made him look down on people who paid for their sins, who fell without a safety net to catch them.

It had happened more than once that Elgin had found himself thrusting in and out of Perkins wife and thinking, Take that, Perkin. Take that.

But this afternoon, Perkin didn’t have his salesman’s smile or aloof glance. When Elgin stopped by him and said, “Hey, Perkin, how you?” Perkin looked up at him with eyes so wild they seemed about to jump out of their sockets.

“I’m not good, Elgin. Not good.”

“What’s the matter?”

Perkin nodded to himself several times, looked over Elgin’s shoulder. “I’m fixing to do something about that.”

“About what?”

“About that.” Perkins jaw gestured over Elgin’s shoulder.

Elgin turned around, looked across Main and through the windows of Miller’s Laundromat, saw Jewel Lut pulling her clothes from the dryer, saw Blue standing beside her, taking a pair of jeans from the pile and starting to fold. If either of them had looked up and over, they’d have seen Elgin and Perkin Lut easily enough, but Elgin knew they wouldn’t. There was an air to the two of them that seemed to block out the rest of the world in that bright Laundromat as easily as it would in a dark bedroom. Blue’s lips moved and Jewel laughed, flipped a T-shirt on his head.

“I’m fixing to do something right now,” Perkin said.

Elgin looked at him, could see that was a lie, something Perkin was repeating to himself in hopes it would come true. Perkin was successful in business, and for more reasons than just his daddy’s money, but he wasn’t the kind of man who did things; he was the kind of man who had things done.

Elgin looked across the street again. Blue still had the T-shirt sitting atop his head. He said something else and Jewel covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed.

“Don’t you have a washer and dryer at your house, Perkin?”

Perkin rocked back on his heels. “Washer broke. Jewel decides to come in town.” He looked at Elgin. “We ain’t getting along so well these days. She keeps reading those magazines, Elgin. You know the ones? Talking about liberation, leaving your bra at home, shit like that.” He pointed across the street. “Your friend’s a problem.”

Your friend.

Elgin looked at Perkin, felt a sudden anger he couldn’t completely understand, and with it a desire to say, That’s my friend and he’s talking to my fuck-buddy. Get it, Perkin?

Instead, he just shook his head and left Perkin there, walked across the street to the Laundromat.

Blue took the T-shirt off his head when he saw Elgin enter. A smile, half frozen on his pitted face, died as he blinked into the sunlight blaring through the windows.

Jewel said, “Hey, we got another helper!” She tossed a pair of men’s briefs over Blue’s head, hit Elgin in the chest with them.

“Hey, Jewel.”

“Hey, Elgin. Long time.” Her eyes dropped from his, settled on a towel.

Didn’t seem like it at the moment to Elgin. Seemed almost as if he’d been out at the lake with her as recently as last night. He could taste her in his mouth, smell her skin damp with a light sweat.

And standing there with Blue, it also seemed like they were all three back in that trailer park, and Jewel hadn’t aged a bit. Still wore her red hair long and messy, still dressed in clothes seemed to have been picked up, wrinkled, off her closet floor and nothing fancy about them in the first place, but draped over her body, they were sexier than clothes other rich women bought in New York once a year.

This afternoon, she wore a crinkly, paisley dress that might have been on the pink side once but had faded to a pasty newspaper color after years of washing. Nothing special about it, not too high up her thigh or down her chest, and loose — but something about her body made it appear like she might just ripen right out of it any second.

Elgin handed the briefs to Blue as he joined them at the folding table. For a while, none of them said anything. They picked clothes from the large pile and folded, and the only sound was Jewel whistling.

Then Jewel laughed.

“What?” Blue said.

“Aw, nothing.” She shook her head. “Seems like we’re just one happy family here, though, don’t it?”

Blue looked stunned. He looked at Elgin. He looked at Jewel. He looked at the pair of small, light blue socks he held in his hands, the monogram JL stitched in the cotton. He looked at Jewel again.

“Yeah,” he said eventually, and Elgin heard a tremor in his voice he’d never heard before. “Yeah, it does.”

Elgin looked up at one of the upper dryer doors. It had been swung out at eye level when the dryer had been emptied. The center of the door was a circle of glass, and Elgin could see Main Street reflected in it, the white posts that supported the wood awning over the Five & Dime, Perkin Lut walking in circles, his head down, heat shimmering in waves up and down Main.

The dog was green.

Blue had used some of the money Big Bobby’d paid him over the past few weeks to upgrade his target scope. The new scope was huge, twice the width of the rifle barrel, and because the days were getting shorter, it was outfitted with a light-amplification device. Elgin had used similar scopes in the jungle, and he’d never liked them, even when they’d saved his life and those of his platoon, picked up Charlie coming through the dense flora like icy gray ghosts. Night scopes — or LADs as they’d called them over there — were just plain unnatural, and Elgin always felt like he was looking through a telescope from the bottom of a lake. He had no idea where Blue would have gotten one, but hunters in Eden had been showing up with all sorts of weird Marine or Army surplus shit these last few years; Elgin had even heard of a hunting party using grenades to scare up fish — blowing ‘em up into the boat already half-cooked, all you had to do was scale ‘em.

The dog was green, the highway was beige, the top of the tree line was yellow, and the trunks were the color of Army fatigues.

Blue said, “What you think?”

They were up in the tree house Blue’d built. Nice wood, two lawn chairs, a tarp hanging from the branch overhead, a cooler filled with Coors. Blued built a railing across the front, perfect for resting your elbows when you took aim. Along the tree trunk, he’d mounted a huge klieg light plugged to a portable generator, because while it was illegal to “shine” deer, nobody’d ever said anything about shining wild dogs. Blue was definitely home.

Elgin shrugged. Just like in the jungle, he wasn’t sure he was meant to see the world this way—faded to the shades and textures of old photographs. The dog, too, seemed to sense that it had stepped out of time somehow, into this seaweed circle punched through the landscape. It sniffed the air with a misshapen snout, but the rest of its body was tensed into one tight muscle, leaning forward as if it smelled prey.

Blue said, “You wanna do it?”

The stock felt hard against Elgin’s shoulder. The trigger, curled under his index finger, was cold and thick, something about it that itched his finger and the back of his head simultaneously, a voice back there with the itch in his head saying, “Fire.”

What you could never talk about down at the bar to people who hadn’t been there, to people who wanted to know, was what it had been like firing on human beings, on those icy gray ghosts in the dark jungle. Elgin had been in fourteen battles over the course of his twelve-month tour, and he couldn’t say with certainty that he’d ever killed anyone. He’d shot some of those shapes, seen them go down, but never the blood, never their eyes when the bullets hit. It had all been a cluster-fuck of swift and sudden noise and color, an explosion of white lights and tracers, green bush, red fire, screams in the night. And afterward, if it was clear, you walked into the jungle and saw the corpses, wondered if you’d hit this body or that one or any at all.

And the only thing you were sure of was that you were too fucking hot and still —this was the terrible thing, but oddly exhilarating too — deeply afraid.

Elgin lowered Blue’s rifle, stared across the interstate, now the color of seashell, at the dark mint tree line. The dog was barely noticeable, a soft dark shape amid other soft dark shapes.

He said, “No, Blue, thanks,” and handed him the rifle.

Blue said, “Suit yourself, buddy.” He reached behind them and pulled the beaded string on the klieg light. As the white light erupted across the highway and the dog froze, blinking in the brightness, Elgin found himself wondering what the fucking point of a LAD scope was when you were just going to shine the animal anyway.

Blue swung the rifle around, leaned into the railing, and put a round in the center of the animal, right by its rib cage. The dog jerked inward, as if someone had whacked it with a bat, and as it teetered on wobbly legs, Blue pulled back on the bolt, drove it home again, and shot the dog in the head. The dog flipped over on its side, most of its skull gone, back leg kicking at the road like it was trying to ride a bicycle.

“You think Jewel Lut might, I dunno, like me?” Blue said.

Elgin cleared his throat. “Sure. She’s always liked you.”

“But I mean …” Blue shrugged, seemed embarrassed suddenly. “How about this: You think a girl like that could take to Australia?”

“Australia?”

Blue smiled at Elgin. “Australia.”

“Australia?” he said again.

Blue reached back and shut off the light. “Australia. They got some wild dingoes there, buddy. Could make some real money. Jewel told me the other day how they got real nice beaches. But dingoes too. Big Bobby said people’re starting to bitch about what’s happening here, asking where Rover is and such, and anyway, ain’t too many dogs left dumb enough to come this way anymore. Australia,” he said, “they never run out of dog. Sooner or later, here, I’m gonna run out of dog.”

Elgin nodded. Sooner or later, Blue would run out of dog. He wondered if Big Bobby’d thought that one through, if he had a contingency plan, if he had access to the National Guard.

“The boy’s just, what you call it, zealous,” Big Bobby told Elgin.

They were sitting in Phil’s Barbershop on Main. Phil had gone to lunch, and Big Bobby’d drawn the shades so peopled think he was making some important decision of state.

Elgin said, “He ain’t zealous, Big Bobby. He’s losing it. Thinks he’s in love with Jewel Lut.”

“He’s always thought that.”

“Yeah, but now maybe he’s thinking she might like him a bit too.”

Big Bobby said, “How come you never call me Mayor?”

Elgin sighed.

“All right, all right. Look,” Big Bobby said, picking up one of the hair-tonic bottles on Phil’s counter and sniffing it, “so Blue likes his job a little bit.”

Elgin said, “There’s more to it and you know it.”

Playing with combs now. “I do?”

“Bobby, he’s got a taste for shooting things now.”

“Wait.” He held up a pair of fat, stubby hands. “Blue always liked to shoot things. Everyone knows that. Shit, if he wasn’t so short and didn’t have six or seven million little health problems, he’d a been the first guy in this town to go to the ‘Nam. ‘Stead, he had to sit back here while you boys had all the fun.”

Calling it the ‘Nam. Like Big Bobby had any idea. Calling it fun. Shit.

“Dingoes,” Elgin said.

“Dingoes?”

“Dingoes. He’s saying he’s going to Australia to shoot dingoes.”

“Do him a world of good too.” Big Bobby sat back down in the barber’s chair beside Elgin. “He can see the sights, that sort of thing.”

“Bobby, he ain’t going to Australia and you know it. Hell, Blue ain’t never stepped over the county line in his life.”

Big Bobby polished his belt buckle with the cuff of his sleeve. “Well, what you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t know. I’m just telling you. Next time you see him, Bobby, you look in his fucking eyes.”

“Yeah. What’ll I see?”

Elgin turned his head, looked at him. “Nothing.”

Bobby said, “He’s your buddy.”

Elgin thought of the small panties curling out of the dust under Blue’s bed. “Yeah, but he’s your problem.”

Big Bobby put his hands behind his head, stretched in the chair. “Well, people getting suspicious about all the dogs disappearing, so I’m going to have to shut this operation down immediately anyway.”

He wasn’t getting it. “Bobby, you shut this operation down, someone’s gonna get a world’s worth of that nothing in Blue’s eyes.”

Big Bobby shrugged, a man who’d made a career out of knowing what was beyond him.

The first time Perkin Lut struck Jewel in public was at Chuck’s Diner.

Elgin and Shelley were sitting just three booths away when they heard a racket of falling glasses and plates, and by the time they came out of their booth, Jewel was lying on the tile floor with shattered glass and chunks of bone china by her elbows and Perkin standing over her, his arms shaking, a look in his eyes that said he’d surprised himself as much as anyone else.

Elgin looked at Jewel, on her knees, the hem of her dress getting stained by the spilled food, and he looked away before she caught his eye, because if that happened he just might do something stupid, fuck Perkin up a couple-three ways.

“Aw, Perkin,” Chuck Blade said, coming from behind the counter to help Jewel up, wiping gravy off his hands against his apron.

“We don’t respect that kind of behavior ‘round here, Mr. Lut,” Clara Blade said. “Won’t have it neither.”

Chuck Blade helped Jewel to her feet, his eyes cast down at his broken plates, the half a steak lying in a soup of beans by his shoe. Jewel had a welt growing on her right cheek, turning a bright red as she placed her hand on the table for support.

“I didn’t mean it,” Perkin said.

Clara Blade snorted and pulled the pen from behind her ear, began itemizing the damage on a cocktail napkin.

“I didn’t.” Perkin noticed Elgin and Shelley. He locked eyes with Elgin, held out his hands. “I swear.”

Elgin turned away and that’s when he saw Blue coming through the door. He had no idea where he’d come from, though it ran through his head that Blue could have just been standing outside looking in, could have been standing there for an hour.

Like a lot of small guys, Blue had speed, and he never seemed to walk in a straight line. He moved as if he were constantly sidestepping tackles or land mines — with sudden, unpredictable pivots that left you watching the space where he’d been, instead of the place he’d ended up.

Blue didn’t say anything, but Elgin could see the determination for homicide in his eyes and Perkin saw it too, backed up, and slipped on the mess on the floor and stumbled back, trying to regain his balance as Blue came past Shelley and tried to lunge past Elgin.

Elgin caught him at the waist, lifted him off the ground, and held on tight because he knew how slippery Blue could be in these situations. You’d think you had him and he’d just squirm away from you, hit somebody with a glass.

Elgin tucked his head down and headed for the door, Blue flopped over his shoulder like a bag of cement mix, Blue screaming, “You see me, Perkin? You see me? I’m a last face you see, Perkin! Real soon.”

Elgin hit the open doorway, felt the night heat on his face as Blue screamed, “Jewel! You all right? Jewel?”

Blue didn’t say much back at Elgin’s trailer.

He tried to explain to Shelley how pure Jewel was, how hitting something that innocent was like spitting on the Bible.

Shelley didn’t say anything, and after a while Blue shut up too.

Elgin just kept plying him with Beam, knowing Blue’s lack of tolerance for it, and pretty soon Blue passed out on the couch, his pitted face still red with rage.

“He’s never been exactly right in the head, has he?” Shelley said.

Elgin ran his hand down her bare arm, pulled her shoulder in tighter against his chest, heard Blue snoring from the front of the trailer. “No, ma’am.”

She rose above him, her dark hair falling to his face, tickling the corners of his eyes. “But you’ve been his friend.”

Elgin nodded.

She touched his cheek with her hand. “Why?”

Elgin thought about it a bit, started talking to her about the little, dirty kid and his cockroach flambés, of the animal sounds that came from his mother’s trailer. The way Blue used to sit by the drainage ditch, all pulled into himself, his body tight. Elgin thought of all those roaches and cats and rabbits and dogs, and he told Shelley that he’d always thought Blue was dying, ever since he’d met him, leaking away in front of his eyes.

“Everyone dies,” she said.

“Yeah.” He rose up on his elbow, rested his free hand on her warm hip. “Yeah, but with most of us it’s like we’re growing toward something and then we die. But with Blue, it’s like he ain’t never grown toward nothing. He’s just been dying real slowly since he was born.”

She shook her head. “I’m not getting you.”

He thought of the mildew that used to soak the walls in Blue’s mother’s trailer, of the mold and dust in Blue’s shack off Route 11, of the rotting smell that had grown out of the drainage ditch when they were kids. The way Blue looked at it all — seemed to be at one with it — as if he felt a bond.

Shelley said, “Babe, what do you think about getting out of here?”

“Where?”

“I dunno. Florida. Georgia. Someplace else.”

“I got a job. You too.”

“You can always get construction jobs other places. Receptionist jobs too.”

“We grew up here.”

She nodded. “But maybe it’s time to start our life somewhere else.”

He said, “Let me think about it.”

She tilted his chin so she was looking in his eyes. “You’ve been thinking about it.”

He nodded. “Maybe I want to think about it some more.”

In the morning, when they woke up, Blue was gone.

Shelley looked at the rumpled couch, over at Elgin. For a good minute they just stood there, looking from the couch to each other, the couch to each other.

An hour later, Shelley called from work, told Elgin that Perkin Lut was in his office as always, no signs of physical damage.

Elgin said, “If you see Blue …”

“Yeah?”

Elgin thought about it. “I dunno. Call the cops. Tell Perkin to bail out a back door. That sound right?”

“Sure.”

Big Bobby came to the site later that morning, said, “I go over to Blue’s place to tell him we got to end this dog thing and —”

“Did you tell him it was over?” Elgin asked.

“Let me finish. Let me explain.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Let me finish.” Bobby wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I was gonna tell him, but—”

“You didn’t tell him.”

“But Jewel Lut was there.”

“What?”

Big Bobby put his hand on Elgin’s elbow, led him away from the other workers. “I said Jewel was there. The two of them sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast.”

“In Blue’s place?”

Big Bobby nodded. “Biggest dump I ever seen. Smells like something I-don’t-know-what. But bad. And there’s Jewel, pretty as can be in her summer dress and soft skin and makeup, eating Eggos and grits with Blue, big brown shiner under her eye. She smiles at me, says, ‘Hey, Big Bobby,’ and goes back to eating.”

“And that was it?”

“How come no one ever calls me Mayor?”

“And that was it?” Elgin repeated.

“Yeah. Blue asks me to take a seat, I say I got business. He says him too.”

“What’s that mean?” Elgin heard his own voice, hard and sharp.

Big Bobby took a step back from it. “Hell do I know? Could mean he’s going out to shoot more dog.”

“So you never told him you were shutting down the operation.”

Big Bobby’s eyes were wide and confused. “You hear what I told you? He was in there with Jewel. Her all doll-pretty and him looking, well, ugly as usual. Whole situation was too weird. I got out.”

“Blue said he had business too.”

“He said he had business too,” Bobby said, and walked away.

The next week, they showed up in town together a couple of times, buying some groceries, toiletries for Jewel, boxes of shells for Blue.

They never held hands or kissed or did anything romantic, but they were together, and people talked. Said, Well, of all things. And I never thought I’d see the day. How do you like that? I guess this is the day the cows actually come home.

Blue called and invited Shelley and Elgin to join them one Sunday afternoon for a late breakfast at the IHOP. Shelley begged off, said something about coming down with the flu, but Elgin went. He was curious to see where this was going, what Jewel was thinking, how she thought her hanging around Blue was going to come to anything but bad.

He could feel the eyes of the whole place on them as they ate.

“See where he hit me?” Jewel tilted her head, tucked her beautiful red hair back behind her ear. The mark on her cheekbone, in the shape of a small rain puddle, was faded yellow now, its edges roped by a sallow beige.

Elgin nodded.

“Still can’t believe the son of a bitch hit me,” she said, but there was no rage in her voice anymore, just a mild sense of drama, as if she’d pushed the words out of her mouth the way she believed she should say them. But the emotion she must have felt when Perkins hand hit her face, when she fell to the floor in front of people she’d known all her life — that seemed to have faded with the mark on her cheekbone.

“Perkin Lut,” she said with a snort, then laughed.

Elgin looked at Blue. He’d never seemed so …fluid in all the time Elgin had known him. The way he cut into his pancakes, swept them off his plate with a smooth dip of the fork tines; the swift dab of the napkin against his lips after every bite; the attentive swivel of his head whenever Jewel spoke, usually in tandem with the lifting of his coffee mug to his mouth.

This was not a Blue Elgin recognized. Except when he was handling weapons, Blue moved in jerks and spasms. Tremors rippled through his limbs and caused his fingers to drop things, his elbows and knees to move too fast, crack against solid objects. Blues blood seemed to move too quickly through his veins, made his muscles obey his brain after a quarter-second delay and then too rapidly, as if to catch up on lost time.

But now he moved in concert, like an athlete or a jungle cat.

That’s what you do to men, Jewel: you give them a confidence so total it finds their limbs.

“Perkin,” Blue said, and rolled his eyes at Jewel and they both laughed.

She not as hard as he did, though.

Elgin could see the root of doubt in her eyes, could feel her loneliness in the way she fiddled with the menu, touched her cheekbone, spoke too loudly, as if she wasn’t just telling Elgin and Blue how Perkin had mistreated her, but the whole IHOP as well, so people could get it straight that she wasn’t the villain, and if after she returned to Perkin she had to leave him again, they’d know why.

Of course she was going back to Perkin.

Elgin could tell by the glances she gave Blue — unsure, slightly embarrassed, maybe a bit repulsed. What had begun as a nighttime ride into the unknown had turned cold and stale during the hard yellow lurch into morning.

Blue wiped his mouth, said, “Be right back,” and walked to the bathroom with surer strides than Elgin had ever seen on the man.

Elgin looked at Jewel.

She gripped the handle of her coffee cup between the tips of her thumb and index finger and turned the cup in slow revolutions around the saucer, made a soft scraping noise that climbed up Elgin’s spine like a termite trapped under the skin.

“You ain’t sleeping with him, are you?” Elgin said quietly.

Jewel’s head jerked up and she looked over her shoulder, then back at Elgin. “What? God, no. We’re just…He’s my pal. That’s all. Like when we were kids.”

“We ain’t kids.”

“I know. Don’t you know I know?” She fingered the coffee cup again. “I miss you,” she said softly. “I miss you. When you coming back?”

Elgin kept his voice low. “Me and Shelley, we’re getting pretty serious.”

She gave him a small smile that he instantly hated. It seemed to know him; it seemed like everything he was and everything he wasn’t was caught in the curl of her lips. “You miss the lake, Elgin. Don’t lie.”

He shrugged.

“You ain’t ever going to marry Shelley Briggs, have babies, be an upstanding citizen.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because you got too many demons in you, boy. And they need me. They need the lake. They need to cry out every now and then.”

Elgin looked down at his own coffee cup. “You going back to Perkin?”

She shook her head hard. “No way. Uh-uh. No way.”

Elgin nodded, even though he knew she was lying. If Elgin’s demons needed the lake, needed to be unbridled, Jewel’s needed Perkin. They needed security. They needed to know the money’d never run out, that she’d never go two full days without a solid meal, like she had so many times as a child in the trailer park.

Perkin was what she saw when she looked down at her empty coffee cup, when she touched her cheek. Perkin was at their nice home with his feet up, watching a game, petting the dog, and she was in the IHOP in the middle of a Sunday when the food was at its oldest and coldest, with one guy who loved her and one who fucked her, wondering how she got there.

Blue came back to the table, moving with that new sure stride, a broad smile in the wide swing of his arms.

“How we doing?” Blue said. “Huh? How we doing?” And his lips burst into a grin so huge Elgin expected it to keep going right off the sides of his face.

Jewel left Blue’s place two days later, walked into Perkin Lut’s Auto Emporium and into Perkins office, and by the time anyone went to check, they’d left through the back door, gone home for the day.

Elgin tried to get a hold of Blue for three days — called constantly, went by his shack and knocked on the door, even staked out the tree house along I-95 where he fired on the dogs.

He’d decided to break into Blue’s place, was fixing to do just that, when he tried one last call from his trailer that third night and Blue answered with a strangled “Hello.”

“It’s me. How you doing?”

“Can’t talk now.”

“Come on, Blue. It’s me. You OK?”

“All alone,” Blue said.

“I know. I’ll come by.”

“You do, I’ll leave.”

“Blue.”

“Leave me alone for a spell, Elgin. OK?”

That night Elgin sat alone in his trailer, smoking cigarettes, staring at the walls.

Blue’d never had much of anything his whole life— not a job he enjoyed, not a woman he could consider his — and then between the dogs and Jewel Lut he’d probably thought he’d got it all at once. Hit pay dirt.

Elgin remembered the dirty little kid sitting down by the drainage ditch, hugging himself. Six, maybe seven years old, waiting to die.

You had to wonder sometimes why some people were even born. You had to wonder what kind of creature threw bodies into the world, expected them to get along when they’d been given no tools, no capacity to get any either.

In Vietnam, this fat boy, name of Woodson from South Dakota, had been the least popular guy in the platoon. He wasn’t smart, he wasn’t athletic, he wasn’t funny, he wasn’t even personable. He just was. Elgin had been running beside him one day through a sea of rice paddies, their boots making sucking sounds every step they took, and someone fired a hell of a round from the other side of the paddies, ripped Woodson’s head in half so completely all Elgin saw running beside him for a few seconds was the lower half of Woodson’s face. No hair, no forehead, no eyes. Just half the nose, a mouth, a chin.

Thing was, Woodson kept running, kept plunging his feet in and out of the water, making those sucking sounds, M-15 hugged to his chest, for a good eight or ten steps. Kid was dead, he’s still running. Kid had no reason to hold on, but he don’t know it, he keeps running.

What spark of memory, hope, or dream had kept him going?

You had to wonder.

In Elgin’s dream that night, a platoon of ice-gray Vietcong rose in a straight line from the center of Coopers Lake while Elgin was inside the cabin with Shelley and Jewel. He penetrated them both somehow, their separate torsos branching out from the same pair of hips, their four legs clamping at the small of his back, this Shelley-Jewel creature crying out for more, more, more.

And Elgin could see the VC platoon drifting in formation toward the shore, their guns pointed, their faces hidden behind thin wisps of green fog.

The Shelley-Jewel creature arched her backs on the bed below him, and Woodson and Blue stood in the corner of the room watching as their dogs padded across the floor, letting out low growls and drooling.

Shelley dissolved into Jewel as the VC platoon reached the porch steps and released their safeties all at once, the sound like the ratcheting of a thousand shotguns. Sweat exploded in Elgin’s hair, poured down his body like warm rain, and the VC fired in concert, the bullets shearing the walls of the cabin, lifting the roof off into the night. Elgin looked above him at the naked night sky, the stars zipping by like tracers, the yellow moon full and mean, the shivering branches of birch trees. Jewel rose and straddled him, bit his lip, and dug her nails into his back, and the bullets danced through his hair, and then Jewel was gone, her writhing flesh having dissolved into his own.

Elgin sat naked on the bed, his arms stretched wide, waiting for the bullets to find his back, to shear his head from his body the way they’d sheared the roof from the cabin, and the yellow moon burned above him as the dogs howled and Blue and Woodson held each other in the corner of the room and wept like children as the bullets drilled holes in their faces.

Big Bobby came by the trailer late the next morning, a Sunday, and said, “Blue’s a bit put out about losing his job.”

“What?” Elgin sat on the edge of his bed, pulled on his socks. “You picked now —now, Bobby —to fire him?”

“It’s in his eyes,” Big Bobby said. “Like you said. You can see it.”

Elgin had seen Big Bobby scared before, plenty of times, but now the man was trembling.

Elgin said, “Where is he?”

Blue’s front door was open, hanging half down the steps from a busted hinge. Elgin said, “Blue.”

“Kitchen.”

He sat in his Jockeys at the table, cleaning his rifle, each shiny black piece spread in front of him on the table. Elgin’s eyes watered a bit because there was a stench coming from the back of the house that he felt might strip his nostrils bare. He realized then that he’d never asked Big Bobby or Blue what they’d done with all those dead dogs.

Blue said, “Have a seat, bud. Beer in the fridge if you’re thirsty.”

Elgin wasn’t looking in that fridge. “Lost your job, huh?”

Blue wiped the bolt with a shammy cloth. “Happens.” He looked at Elgin. “Where you been lately?”

“I called you last night.”

“I mean in general.”

“Working.”

“No, I mean at night.”

“Blue, you been” — he almost said “playing house with Jewel Lut” but caught himself— “up in a fucking tree, how do you know where I been at night?”

“I don’t,” Blue said. “Why I’m asking.”

Elgin said, “I’ve been at my trailer or down at Doubles, same as usual.”

“With Shelley Briggs, right?”

Slowly, Elgin said, “Yeah.”

“I’m just asking, buddy. I mean, when we all going to go out? You, me, your new girl.”

The pits that covered Blue’s face like a layer of bad meat had faded some from all those nights in the tree.

Elgin said, “Anytime you want.”

Blue put down the bolt. “How ‘bout right now?” He stood and walked into the bedroom just off the kitchen. “Let me just throw on some duds.”

“She’s working now, Blue.”

“At Perkin Lut’s? Hell, it’s almost noon. I’ll talk to Perkin about that Dodge he sold me last year, and when she’s ready we’ll take her out someplace nice.” He came back into the kitchen wearing a soiled brown T-shirt and jeans.

“Hell,” Elgin said, “I don’t want the girl thinking I’ve got some serious love for her or something. We come by for lunch, next thing she’ll expect me to drop her off in the mornings, pick her up at night.”

Blue was reassembling the rifle, snapping all those shiny pieces together so fast, Elgin figured he could do it blind. He said, “Elgin, you got to show them some affection sometimes. I mean, Jesus.” He pulled a thin brass bullet from his T-shirt pocket and slipped it in the breech, followed it with four more, then slid the bolt home.

“Yeah, but you know what I’m saying, bud?” Elgin watched Blue nestle the stock in the space between his left hip and ribs, let the barrel point out into the kitchen.

“I know what you’re saying,” Blue said. “I know. But I got to talk to Perkin about my Dodge.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Blue turned to look at him, and the barrel swung level with Elgin’s belt buckle. “What’s wrong with it, it’s a piece of shit, what’s wrong with it, Elgin. Hell, you know that. Perkin sold me a lemon. This is the situation.” He blinked. “Beer for the ride?”

Elgin had a pistol in his glove compartment. A .32. He considered it.

“Elgin?”

“Yeah?”

“Why you looking at me funny?”

“You got a rifle pointed at me, Blue. You realize that?”

Blue looked at the rifle, and its presence seemed to surprise him. He dipped it toward the floor. “Shit, man, I’m sorry. I wasn’t even thinking. It feels like my arm sometimes. I forget. Man, I am sorry.” He held his arms out wide, the rifle rising with them.

“Lotta things deserve to die, don’t they?”

Blue smiled. “Well, I wasn’t quite thinking along those lines, but now you bring it up …”

Elgin said, “Who deserves to die, buddy?”

Blue laughed. “You got something on your mind, don’t you?” He hoisted himself up on the table, cradled the rifle in his lap. “Hell, boy, who you got? Let’s start with people who take two parking spaces.”

“OK.” Elgin moved the chair by the table to a position slightly behind Blue, sat in it. “Let’s.”

“Then there’s DJs talk through the first minute of a song. Fucking Guatos coming down here these days to pick tobacco, showing no respect. Women wearing all those tight clothes, look at you like you’re a pervert when you stare at what they’re advertising.” He wiped his forehead with his arm. “Shit.”

“Who else?” Elgin said quietly.

“OK. OK. You got people like the ones let their dogs run wild into the highway, get themselves killed. And you got dishonest people, people who lie and sell insurance and cars and bad food. You got a lot of things. Jane Fonda.”

“Sure.” Elgin nodded.

Blue’s face was drawn, gray. He crossed his legs over each other like he used to down at the drainage ditch. “It’s all out there.” He nodded and his eyelids drooped.

“Perkin Lut?” Elgin said. “He deserve to die?”

“Not just Perkin,” Blue said. “Not just. Lots of people. I mean, how many you kill over in the war?”

Elgin shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“But some. Some. Right? Had to. I mean, that’s war — someone gets on your bad side, you kill them and all their friends till they stop bothering you.” His eyelids drooped again, and he yawned so deeply he shuddered when he finished.

“Maybe you should get some sleep.”

Blue looked over his shoulder at him. “You think? It’s been a while.”

A breeze rattled the thin walls at the back of the house, pushed that thick dank smell into the kitchen again, a rotting stench that found the back of Elgin’s throat and stuck there. He said, “When’s the last time?”

“I slept? Hell, a while. Days maybe.” Blue twisted his body so he was facing Elgin. “You ever feel like you spend your whole life waiting for it to get going?”

Elgin nodded, not positive what Blue was saying, but knowing he should agree with him. “Sure.”

“It’s hard,” Blue said. “Hard.” He leaned back on the table, stared at the brown water marks in his ceiling.

Elgin took in a long stream of that stench through his nostrils. He kept his eyes open, felt that air entering his nostrils creep past into his corneas, tear at them. The urge to close his eyes and wish it all away was as strong an urge as he’d ever felt, but he knew now was that time he’d always known was coming.

He leaned in toward Blue, reached across him, and pulled the rifle off his lap.

Blue turned his head, looked at him.

“Go to sleep,” Elgin said. “I’ll take care of this a while. We’ll go see Shelley tomorrow. Perkin Lut too.”

Blue blinked. “What if I can’t sleep? Huh? I’ve been having that problem, you know. I put my head on the pillow and I try to sleep and it won’t come and soon I’m just bawling like a fucking child till I got to get up and do something.”

Elgin looked at the tears that had just then sprung into Blue’s eyes, the red veins split across the whites, the desperate, savage need in his face that had always been there if anyone had looked close enough, and would never, Elgin knew, be satisfied.

“I’ll stick right here, buddy. I’ll sit here in the kitchen and you go in and sleep.”

Blue turned his head and stared up at the ceiling again. Then he slid off the table, peeled off his T-shirt, and tossed it on top of the fridge. “All right. All right. I’m gonna try.” He stopped at the bedroom doorway. “‘Member — there’s beer in the fridge. You be here when I wake up?”

Elgin looked at him. He was still so small, probably so thin you could still wrap your hand around his biceps, meet the fingers on the other side. He was still ugly and stupid-looking, still dying right in front of Elgin’s eyes.

“I’ll be here, Blue. Don’t you worry.”

“Good enough. Yes, sir.”

Blue shut the door and Elgin heard the bedsprings grind, the rustle of pillows being arranged. He sat in the chair, with the smell of whatever decayed in the back of the house swirling around his head. The sun had hit the cheap tin roof now, heating the small house, and after a while he realized the buzzing he’d thought was in his head came from somewhere back in the house too.

He wondered if he had the strength to open the fridge. He wondered if he should call Perkin Lut’s and tell Perkin to get the hell out of Eden for a bit. Maybe he’d just ask for Shelley, tell her to meet him tonight with her suitcases. They’d drive down 95 where the dogs wouldn’t disturb them, drive clear to Jacksonville, Florida, before the sun came up again. See if they could outrun Blue and his tiny, dangerous wants, his dog corpses, and his smell; outrun people who took two parking spaces and telephone solicitors and Jane Fonda.

Jewel flashed through his mind then, an image of her sitting atop him, arching her back and shaking that long red hair, a look in her green eyes that said this was it, this was why we live.

He could stand up right now with this rifle in his hands, scratch the itch in the back of his head, and fire straight through the door, end what should never have been started.

He sat there staring at the door for quite a while, until he knew the exact number of places the paint had peeled in teardrop spots, and eventually he stood, went to the phone on the wall by the fridge, and dialed Perkin Lut’s.

“Auto Emporium,” Shelley said, and Elgin thanked God that in his present mood he hadn’t gotten Glynnis Verdon, who snapped her gum and always placed him on hold, left him listening to Muzak versions of the Shirelles.

“Shelley?”

“People gonna talk, you keep calling me at work, boy.”

He smiled, cradled the rifle like a baby, leaned against the wall. “How you doing?”

“Just fine, handsome. How ‘bout yourself?”

Elgin turned his head, looked at the bedroom door. “I’m OK.”

“Still like me?”

Elgin heard the springs creak in the bedroom, heard weight drop on the old floorboards. “Still like you.”

“Well, then, it’s all fine then, isn’t it?”

Blue’s footfalls crossed toward the bedroom door, and Elgin used his hip to push himself off the wall.

“It’s all fine,” he said. “I gotta go. I’ll talk to you soon.”

He hung up and stepped away from the wall.

“Elgin,” Blue said from the other side of the door.

“Yeah, Blue?”

“I can’t sleep. I just can’t.”

Elgin saw Woodson sloshing through the paddy, the top of his head gone. He saw the pink panties curling up from underneath Blue’s bed and a shaft of sunlight hitting Shelley’s face as she looked up from behind her desk at Perkin Lut’s and smiled. He saw Jewel Lut dancing in the night rain by the lake and that dog lying dead on the shoulder of the interstate, kicking its leg like it was trying to ride a bicycle.

“Elgin,” Blue said. “I just can’t sleep. I got to do something.”

“Try,” Elgin said and cleared his throat.

“I just can’t. I got to …do something. I got to go…” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “I can’t sleep.”

The doorknob turned and Elgin raised the rifle, stared down the barrel.

“Sure, you can, Blue.” He curled his finger around the trigger as the door opened. “Sure you can,” he repeated and took a breath, held it in.

The skeleton of Eden Falls still sits on twenty-two acres of land just east of Brimmer’s Point, covered in rust thick as flesh. Some say it was the levels of iodine an environmental inspector found in the groundwater that scared off the original investors. Others said it was the downswing of the state economy or the governor’s failed reelection bid. Some say Eden Falls was just plain a dumb name, too biblical. And then, of course, there were plenty who claimed it was Jewel Lut’s ghost scared off all the workers.

They found her body hanging from the scaffolding they’d erected by the shell of the roller coaster. She was naked and hung upside down from a rope tied around her ankles. Her throat had been cut so deep the coroner said it was a miracle her head was still attached when they found her. The coroner’s assistant, man by the name of Chris Gleason, would claim when he was in his cups that the head had fallen off in the hearse as they drove down Main toward the morgue. Said he heard it cry out.

This was the same day Elgin Bern called the sheriff’s office, told them he’d shot his buddy Blue, fired two rounds into him at close range, the little guy dead before he hit his kitchen floor. Elgin told the deputy he was still sitting in the kitchen, right where he’d done it a few hours before. Said to send the hearse.

Due to the fact that Perkin Lut had no real alibi for his whereabouts when Jewel passed on and owing even more to the fact there’d been some very recent and very public discord in their marriage, Perkin was arrested and brought before a grand jury, but that jury decided not to indict. Perkin and Jewel had been patching things up, after all; he’d bought her a car (at cost, but still…).

Besides, we all knew it was Blue had killed Jewel. Hell, the Simmons boy, a retard ate paint and tree bark, could have told you that. Once all that stuff came out about what Blue and Big Bobby’d been doing with the dogs around here, well, that just sealed it. And everyone remembered how that week she’d been separated from Perkin, you could see the dream come alive in Blue’s eyes, see him allow hope into his heart for the first time in his sorry life.

And when hope comes late to a man, it’s quite a dangerous thing. Hope is for the young, the children. Hope in a full-grown man —particularly one with as little acquaintanceship with it or prospect for it as Blue — well, that kind of hope burns as it dies, boils blood white, and leaves something mean behind when it’s done-

Blue killed Jewel Lut.

And Elgin Bern killed Blue. And ended up doing time. Not much, due to his war record and the circumstances of who Blue was, but time just the same. Everyone knew Blue probably had it coming, was probably on his way back into town to do to Perkin or some other poor soul what he’d done to Jewel. Once a man gets that look in his eyes — that boiled look, like a dog searching out a bone who’s not going to stop until he finds it —well, sometimes he has to be put down like a dog. Don’t he?

And it was sad how Elgin came out of prison to find Shelley Briggs gone, moved up North with Perkin Lut of all people, who’d lost his heart for the car business after Jewel died, took to selling home electronics imported from Japan and Germany, made himself a fortune. Not long after he got out of prison, Elgin left too, no one knows where, just gone, drifting.

See, the thing is — no one wanted to convict Elgin. We all understood. We did. Blue had to go. But he’d had no weapon in his hand when Elgin, standing just nine feet away, pulled that trigger. Twice. Once we might been able to overlook, but twice, that’s something else again. Elgin offered no defense, even refused a fancy lawyer’s attempt to get him to claim he’d suffered something called posttraumatic stress disorder, which we’re hearing a lot more about these days.

“I don’t have that” Elgin said. “I shot a defenseless man. That’s the long and the short of it, and that’s a sin”

The vanishing of the doctor’s wife’s child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after. In later years, fortified with a pitcher of silica-dry vodka martinis, she had ‘cause to replay the events preceding the disappearance. They were tawdry and banal but in retrospect freighted with menace, a foreshadowing of what was to come, like a footman or a fool preceding a king into a room.

She had been quarreling with the paperhanger. Her four-year-old daughter, Zeineb, was standing directly behind the paperhanger where he knelt smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel. Zeineb had her fingers in the paperhanger’s hair. The paperhanger’s hair was shoulder length and the color of flax and the child was delighted with it. The paperhanger was accustomed to her doing this and he did not even turn around. He just went on with his work. His arms were smooth and brown and corded with muscle and in the light that fell upon the paper-hanger through stained-glass panels the doctor’s wife could see that they were lightly downed with fine golden hair. She studied these arms bemusedly while she formulated her thoughts.

You tell me so much a roll, she said. The doctor’s wife was from Pakistan and her speech was still heavily accented. I do not know single-bolt rolls and double-bolt rolls. You tell me double-bolt price but you are installing single-bolt rolls. My friend has told me. It is cost me perhaps twice as much.

The paperhanger, still on his knees, turned. He smiled up at her. He had pale blue eyes. I did tell you so much a roll, he said. You bought the rolls. The child, not yet vanished, was watching the paperhanger’s eyes. She was a scaled-down clone of the mother, the mother viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and the paperhanger suspected that as she grew neither her features nor her expression would alter, she would just grow larger, like something being aired up with a hand pump.

And you are leave lumps, the doctor’s wife said, gesturing at the wall. I do not leave lumps, the paperhanger said. You’ve seen my work before. These are not lumps. The paper is wet. The paste is wet. Everything will shrink down and flatten out. He smiled again. He had clean even teeth. And besides, he said, I gave you my special cockteaser rate. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.

Her mouth worked convulsively. She looked for a moment as if he’d slapped her. When words did come they came in a fine spray of spit. You are trash, she said. You are scum.

Hands on knees, he was pushing erect, the girl’s dark fingers trailing out of his hair. Don’t call me trash, he said, as if it were perfectly all right to call him scum, but he was already talking to her back. She had whirled on her heels and went twisting her hips through an arched doorway into the cathedraled living room. The paperhanger looked down at the child. Her face glowed with a strange constrained glee, as if she and the paper-hanger shared some secret the rest of the world hadn’t caught on to yet.

In the living room the builder was supervising the installation of a chandelier that depended from the vaulted ceiling by a long golden chain. The builder was a short bearded man dancing about, showing her the features of the chandelier, smiling obsequiously. She gave him a flat angry look. She waved a dismissive hand toward the ceiling. Whatever, she said.

She went out the front door onto the porch and down a makeshift walkway of two-by-tens into the front yard where her car was parked. The car was a silver-gray Mercedes her husband had given her for their anniversary. When she cranked the engine its idle was scarcely perceptible.

She powered down the window. Zeineb, she called. Across the razed earth of the unlandscaped yard a man in a grease-stained T-shirt was booming down the chains securing a backhoe to a lowboy hooked to a gravel truck. The sun was low in the west and blood-red behind this tableau and man and tractor looked flat and dimensionless as something decorative stamped from tin. She blew the horn. The man turned, raised an arm as if she’d signaled him.

Zeineb, she called again.

She got out of the car and started impatiently up the walkway. Behind her the gravel truck started, and truck and backhoe pulled out of the drive and down toward the road.

The paperhanger was stowing away his T-square and trowels in his wooden toolbox. Where is Zeineb? the doctor’s wife asked. She followed you out, the paperhanger told her. He glanced about, as if the girl might be hiding somewhere. There was nowhere to hide.

Where is my child? she asked the builder. The electrician climbed down from the ladder. The paperhanger came out of the bathroom with his tools. The builder was looking all around. His elfin features were touched with chagrin, as if this missing child were just something else he was going to be held accountable for.

Likely she’s hiding in a closet, the paperhanger said. Playing a trick on you.

Zeineb does not play tricks, the doctor’s wife said. Her eyes kept darting about the huge room, the shadows that lurked in corners. There was already an undercurrent of panic in her voice and all her poise and self-confidence seemed to have vanished with the child.

The paperhanger set down his toolbox and went through the house, opening and closing doors. It was a huge house and there were a lot of closets. There was no child in any of them.

The electrician was searching upstairs. The builder had gone through the French doors that opened onto the unfinished veranda and was peering into the backyard. The backyard was a maze of convoluted ditch excavated for the septic tank field line and beyond that there was just woods. She’s playing in that ditch, the builder said, going down the flagstone steps.

She wasn’t, though. She wasn’t anywhere. They searched the house and grounds. They moved with jerky haste. They kept glancing toward the woods where the day was waning first. The builder kept shaking his head. She’s got to be somewhere, he said.

Call someone, the doctor’s wife said. Call the police.

It’s a little early for the police, the builder said. She’s got to be here.

You call them anyway. I have a phone in my car. I will call my husband.

While she called, the paperhanger and the electrician continued to search. They had looked everywhere and were forced to search places they’d already looked. If this ain’t the goddamnedest thing I ever saw, the electrician said.

The doctor’s wife got out of the Mercedes and slammed the door. Suddenly she stopped and clasped a hand to her forehead. She screamed. The man with the tractor, she cried. Somehow my child is gone with the tractor man.

Oh Jesus, the builder said. What have we got ourselves into here?

The high sheriff that year was a ruminative man named Bellwether. He stood beside the county cruiser talking to the paperhanger while deputies ranged the grounds. Other men were inside looking in places that had already been searched numberless times. Bellwether had been in the woods and he was picking cockleburs off his khakis and out of his socks. He was watching the woods, where dark was gathering and seeping across the field like a stain.

I’ve got to get men out here, Bellwether said. A lot of men and a lot of lights. We’re going to have to search every inch of these woods.

You’ll play hell doing it, the paperhanger said. These woods stretch all the way to Lawrence County. This is the edge of the Harrikan. Down in there’s where all those old mines used to be. Aliens Creek.

I don’t give a shit if they stretch all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska, Bellwether said. They’ve got to be searched. It’ll just take a lot of men.

The raw earth yard was full of cars. Doctor Jamahl had come in a sleek black Lexus. He berated his wife. Why weren’t you watching her? he asked. Unlike his wife’s, the doctor’s speech was impeccable. She covered her face with her palms and wept. The doctor still wore his green surgeon’s smock and it was flecked with bright dots of blood as a butcher’s smock might be.

I need to feed a few cows, the paperhanger said. I’ll feed my stock pretty quick and come back and help hunt.

You don’t mind if I look in your truck, do you?

Do what?

I’ve got to cover my ass. If that little girl don’t turn up damn quick this is going to be over my head. TBI, FBI, network news. I’ve got to eliminate everything.

Eliminate away, the paperhanger said.

The sheriff searched the floorboard of the paperhanger’s pickup truck. He shined his huge flashlight under the seat and felt behind it with his hands.

I had to look, he said apologetically.

Of course you did, the paperhanger said.

Full dark had fallen before he returned. He had fed his cattle and stowed away his tools and picked up a six-pack of San Miguel beer and he sat in the back of the pickup truck drinking it. The paperhanger had been in the Navy and stationed in the Philippines and San Miguel was the only beer he could drink. He had to go out of town to buy it, but he figured it was worth it. He liked the exotic labels, the dark bitter taste on the back of his tongue, the way the chilled bottles felt held against his forehead.

A motley crowd of curiosity seekers and searchers thronged the yard. There was a vaguely festive air. He watched all this with a dispassionate eye, as if he were charged with grading the participants, comparing this with other spectacles he’d seen. Coffee urns had been brought in and set up on tables, sandwiches prepared and handed out to the weary searchers. A crane had been hauled in and the septic tank reclaimed from the ground. It swayed from a taut cable while men with lights searched the impacted earth beneath it for a child, for the very trace of a child. Through the far dark woods lights crossed and recrossed, darted to and fro like fireflies. The doctor and the doctor’s wife sat in folding camp chairs looking drained, stunned, waiting for their child to be delivered into their arms.

The doctor was a short portly man with a benevolent expression. He had a moon-shaped face, with light and dark areas of skin that looked swirled, as if the pigment coloring him had not been properly mixed. He had been educated at Princeton. When he had established his practice he had returned to Pakistan to find a wife befitting his station. The woman he had selected had been chosen on the basis of her beauty. In retrospect, perhaps more consideration should have been given to other qualities. She was still beautiful but he was thinking that certain faults might outweigh this. She seemed to have trouble keeping up with her children. She could lose a four-year-old child in a room no larger than six hundred square feet and she could not find it again.

The paperhanger drained his bottle and set it by his foot in the bed of the truck. He studied the doctor’s wife’s ravaged face through the deep blue light. The first time he had seen her she had hired him to paint a bedroom in the house they were living in while the doctor’s mansion was being built. There was an arrogance about her that cried out to be taken down a notch or two. She flirted with him, backed away, flirted again. She would treat him as if he were a stain on the bathroom rug and then stand close by him while he worked until he was dizzy with the smell of her, with the heat that seemed to radiate off her body. She stood by him while he knelt painting baseboards and after an infinite moment leaned carefully the weight of a thigh against his shoulder. You’d better move it, he thought. She didn’t. He laughed and turned his face into her groin. She gave a strangled cry and slapped him hard. The paintbrush flew away and speckled the dark rose walls with antique white. You filthy beast, she said. You are some kind of monster. She stormed out of the room and he could hear her slamming doors behind her.

Well, I was looking for a job when I found this one. He smiled philosophically to himself.

But he had not been fired. In fact now he had been hired again. Perhaps there was something here to ponder.

At midnight he gave up his vigil. Some souls more hardy than his kept up the watch. The earth here was worn smooth by the useless traffic of the searchers. Driving out, he met a line of pickup trucks with civil-defense tags. Grim-faced men sat aligned in their beds. Some clutched rifles loosely by their barrels, as if they would lay waste whatever monster, man or beast, would snatch up a child in its slaverous jaws and vanish, prey and predator, in the space between two heartbeats.

Even more dubious reminders of civilization as these fell away. He drove into the Harrikan, where he lived. A world so dark and forlorn light itself seemed at a premium. Whippoorwills swept red-eyed up from the roadside. Old abandoned foundries and furnaces rolled past, grim and dark as forsaken prisons. Down a ridge here was an abandoned graveyard, if you knew where to look. The paperhanger did. He had dug up a few of the graves, examined with curiosity what remained, buttons, belt buckles, a cameo brooch. The bones he laid out like a child with a Tinkertoy, arranging them the way they went in jury-rigged resurrection.

He braked hard on a curve, the truck slewing in the gravel. A bobcat had crossed the road, graceful as a wraith, fierce and lantern-eyed in the headlights, gone so swiftly it might have been a stage prop swung across the road on wires.

Bellwether and a deputy drove to the backhoe operators house. He lived up a gravel road that wound through a great stand of cedars. He lived in a board-and-batten house with a tin roof rusted to a warm umber. They parked before it and got out, adjusting their gun belts.

Bellwether had a search warrant with the ink scarcely dry. The operator was outraged.

Look at it this way, Bellwether explained patiently. I’ve got to cover my ass. Everything has got to be considered. You know how kids are. Never thinking. What if she run under the wheels of your truck when you was backing out? What if quicklike you put the body in your truck to get rid of somewhere?

What if quicklike you get the hell off my property, the operator said.

Everything has to be considered, the sheriff said again. Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything just yet.

The operator’s wife stood glowering at them. To have something to do with his hands, the operator began to construct a cigarette. He had huge red hands thickly sown with brown freckles. They trembled. I ain’t got a thing in this round world to hide, he said.

Bellwether and his men searched everywhere they could think of to look. Finally they stood uncertainly in the operator’s yard, out of place in their neat khakis, their polished leather.

Now get the hell off my land, the operator said. If all you think of me is that I could run over a little kid and then throw it off in the bushes like a dead cat or something then I don’t even want to see your goddamn face. I want you gone and I want you by God gone now.

Everything had to be considered, the sheriff said.

Then maybe you need to consider that paperhanger.

What about him?

That paperhanger is one sick puppy.

He was still there when I got there, the sheriff said. Three witnesses swore nobody ever left, not even for a minute, and one of them was the child’s mother. I searched his truck myself.

Then he’s a sick puppy with a damn good alibi, the operator said.

That was all. There was no ransom note, no child that turned up two counties over with amnesia. She was a page turned, a door closed, a lost ball in the high weeds. She was a child no larger than a doll, but the void she left behind her was unreckonable. Yet there was no end to it. No finality. There was no moment when someone could say, turning from a mounded grave, Well, this has been unbearable, but you’ve got to go on with your life. Life did not go on.

At the doctor’s wife’s insistence an intensive investigation was focused on the backhoe operator. Forensic experts from the FBI examined every millimeter of the gravel truck, paying special attention to its wheels, They were examined with every modern crime-fighting device the government possessed, and there was not a microscopic particle of tissue or blood, no telltale chip of fingernail, no hair ribbon.

Work ceased on the mansion. Some subcontractors were discharged outright, while others simply drifted away. There was no one to care if the work was done, no one to pay them. The half-finished veranda’s raw wood grayed in the fall, then winter, rains. The ditches were left fallow and uncovered and half-filled with water. Kudzu crept from the woods. The hollyhocks and oleanders the doctor’s wife had planted grew entangled and rampant. The imported windows were stoned by double-dared boys who whirled and fled. Already this house where a child had vanished was acquiring an unhealthy, diseased reputation.

The doctor and his wife sat entombed in separate prisons replaying real and imagined grievances. The doctor felt that his wife’s neglect had sent his child into the abstract. The doctor’s wife drank vodka martinis and watched talk shows where passed an endless procession of vengeful people who had not had children vanish, and felt, perhaps rightly, that the fates had dealt her from the bottom of the deck, and she prayed with intensity for a miracle.

Then one day she was just gone. The Mercedes and part of her clothing and personal possessions were gone too. He idly wondered where she was, but he did not search for her.

Sitting in his armchair cradling a great marmalade cat and a bottle of J&B and observing with bemused detachment the gradations of light at the window, the doctor remembered studying literature at Princeton. He had particular ‘cause to reconsider the poetry of William Butler Yeats. For how surely things fell apart, how surely the center did not hold.

His practice fell into a ruin. His colleagues made sympathetic allowances for him at first, but there are limits to these things. He made erroneous diagnoses, prescribed the wrong medicines not once or twice but as a matter of course.

Just as there is a deepening progression to misfortune, so too there is a point beyond which things can only get worse. They did. A middle-aged woman he was operating on died.

He had made an incision to remove a ruptured appendix and the incised flesh was clamped aside while he made ready to slice it out. It was not there. He stared in drunken disbelief. He began to search under things, organs, intestines, a rising tide of blood. The appendix was not there. It had gone into the abstract, atrophied, been removed twenty-five years before, he had sliced through the selfsame scar. He was rummaging through her abdominal cavity like an irritated man fumbling through a drawer for a clean pair of socks, finally bellowing in rage and wringing his hands in bloody vexation while nurses began to cry out, another surgeon was brought on the run as a closer, and he was carried from the operating room.

Came then days of sitting in the armchair while he was besieged by contingency lawyers, action news teams, a long line of process servers. There was nothing he could do. It was out of his hands and into the hands of the people who are paid to do these things. He sat cradling the bottle of J&B with the marmalade cat snuggled against his portly midriff. He would study the window, where the light drained away in a process he no longer had an understanding of, and sip the scotch and every now and then stroke the cat’s head gently. The cat purred against his breast as reassuringly as the hum of an air conditioner.

He left in the middle of the night. He began to load his possessions into the Lexus. At first he chose items with a great degree of consideration. The first thing he loaded was a set of custom-made monogrammed golf clubs. Then his stereo receiver, Denon AC3, $1,750. A copy of This Side of Paradise autographed by Fitzgerald that he had bought as an investment. By the time the Lexus was half full he was just grabbing things at random and stuffing them into the back seat, a half-eaten pizza, half a case of cat food, a single brocade house shoe.

He drove west past the hospital, the country club, the city limit sign. He was thinking no thoughts at all, and all the destination he had was the amount of highway the headlights showed him.

In the slow rains of late fall the doctor’s wife returned to the unfinished mansion. She used to sit in a camp chair on the ruined veranda and drink chilled martinis she poured from the pitcher she carried in a foam ice chest. Dark fell early these November days. Raincrows husbanding some far cornfield called through the smoky autumn air. The sound was fiercely evocative, reminding her of something but she could not have said what.

She went into the room where she had lost the child. The light was failing. The high corners of the room were in deepening shadow but she could see the nests of dirt daubers clustered on the rich flocked wallpaper, a spider swing from a chandelier on a strand of spun glass. Some animals dried blackened stool curled like a slug against the baseboards. The silence in the room was enormous.

One day she arrived and was surprised to find the paperhanger there. He was sitting on a yellow four-wheeler drinking a bottle of beer. He made to go when he saw her but she waved him back. Stay and talk with me, she said.

The paperhanger was much changed. His pale locks had been shorn away in a makeshift haircut as if scissored in the dark or by a blind barber and his cheeks were covered with a soft curly beard.

You have grow a beard.

Yes.

You are strange with it.

The paperhanger sipped from his San Miguel. He smiled. I was strange without it, he said. He arose from the four-wheeler and came over and sat on the flagstone steps. He stared across the mutilated yard toward the tree line. The yard was like a funhouse maze seen from above, its twistings and turnings bereft of mystery.

You are working somewhere now?

No. I don’t take so many jobs anymore. There’s only me, and I don’t need much. What has become of the doctor?

She shrugged. Many things have change, she said. He has gone. The banks have foreclose. What is that you ride?

An ATV. A four-wheeler.

It goes well in the woods?

It was made for that.

You could take me in the woods. How much would you charge me?

For what?

To go in the woods. You could drive me. I will pay you.

Why?

To search for my child’s body.

I wouldn’t charge anybody anything to search for a child’s body, the paperhanger said. But she’s not in these woods. Nothing could have stayed hidden, the way these woods were searched.

Sometimes I think she just kept walking. Perhaps just walking away from the men looking. Far into the woods.

Into the woods, the paperhanger thought. If she had just kept walking in a straight line with no time out for eating or sleeping, where would she be? Kentucky, Algiers, who knew.

I’ll take you when the rains stop, he said. But we won’t find a child.

The doctor’s wife shook her head. It is a mystery, she said. She drank from her cocktail glass. Where could she have gone? How could she have gone?

There was a man named David Lang, the paperhanger said. Up in Galletin, back in the late 1800s. He was crossing a barn lot in full view of his wife and two children and he just vanished. Went into thin air. There was a judge in a wagon turning into the yard and he saw it too. It was just like he took a step in this world and his foot came down in another one. He was never seen again.

She gave him a sad smile, bitter and one-cornered. You make fun with me.

No. It’s true. I have it in a book. I’ll show you.

I have a book with dragons, fairies. A book where hobbits live in the middle earth. They are lies. I think most books are lies. Perhaps all books. I have prayed for a miracle but I am not worthy of one. I have prayed for her to come from the dead, then just to find her body. That would be a miracle to me. There are no miracles.

She rose unsteadily, swayed slightly, leaning to take up the cooler. The paperhanger watched her. I have to go now, she said. When the rains stop we will search.

Can you drive?

Of course I can drive. I have drive out here.

I mean are you capable of driving now. You seem a little drunk.

I drink to forget but it is not enough, she said. I can drive.

After a while he heard her leave in the Mercedes, the tires spinning in the gravel drive. He lit a cigarette. He sat smoking it, watching the rain string off the roof. He seemed to be waiting for something. Dusk was falling like a shroud, the world going dark and formless the way it had begun. He drank the last of the beer, sat holding the bottle, the foam bitter in the back of his mouth. A chill touched him. He felt something watching him. He turned. From the corner of the ruined veranda a child was watching him. He stood up. He heard the beer bottle break on the flagstones. The child went sprinting past the hollyhocks toward the brush at the edge of the yard, tiny sepia child with an intent sloe-eyed face, real as she had ever been, translucent as winter light through dirty glass.

The doctor’s wife’s hands were laced loosely about his waist as they came down through a thin stand of sassafras, edging over the ridge where the ghost of a road was, a road more sensed than seen that faced into a half acre of tilting stones and fading granite tablets. Other graves marked only by their declivities in the earth, folk so far beyond the pale even the legibility of their identities had been leached away by the weathers.

Leaves drifted, huge poplar leaves veined with amber so golden they might have been coin of the realm for a finer world than this one. He cut the ignition of the four-wheeler and got off. Past the lowering trees the sky was a blue of an improbable intensity, a fierce cobalt blue shot through with dense golden light.

She slid off the rear and steadied herself a moment with a hand on his arm. Where are we? she asked. Why are we here?

The paperhanger had disengaged his arm and was strolling among the gravestones reading such inscriptions as were legible, as if he might find forebear or antecedent in this moldering earth. The doctor’s wife was retrieving her martinis from the luggage carrier of the ATV. She stood looking about uncertainly. A graven angel with broken wings crouched on a truncated marble column like a gargoyle. Its stone eyes regarded her with a blind benignity. Some of these graves have been rob, she said.

You can’t rob the dead, he said. They have nothing left to steal.

It is a sacrilege, she said. It is forbidden to disturb the dead. You have done this.

The paperhanger took a cigarette pack from his pocket and felt it, but it was empty, and he balled it up and threw it away. The line between grave robbing and archaeology has always looked a little blurry to me, he said. I was studying their culture, trying to get a fix on what their lives were like.

She was watching him with a kind of benumbed horror. Standing hip-slung and lost like a parody of her former self. Strange and anomalous in her fashionable but mismatched clothing, as if she’d put on the first garment that fell to hand. Someday, he thought, she might rise and wander out into the daylit world wearing nothing at all, the way she had come into it. With her diamond watch and the cocktail glass she carried like a used-up talisman.

You have break the law, she told him.

I got a government grant, the paperhanger said contemptuously.

Why are we here? We are supposed to be searching for my child.

If you’re looking for a body the first place to look is the graveyard, he said. If you want a book don’t you go to the library?

I am paying you, she said. You are in my employ. I do not want to be here. I want you to do as I say or carry me to my car if you will not.

Actually, the paperhanger said, I had a story to tell you. About my wife.

He paused, as if leaving a space for her comment, but when she made none he went on. I had a wife. My childhood sweetheart. She became a nurse, went to work in one of these drug rehab places. After she was there a while she got a faraway look in her eyes. Look at me without seeing me. She got in tight with her supervisor. They started having meetings to go to. Conferences. Sometimes just the two of them would confer, generally in a motel. The night I watched them walk into the Holiday Inn in Franklin I decided to kill her. No impetuous spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought it all out and it would be the perfect crime.

The doctor’s wife didn’t say anything. She just watched him.

A grave is the best place to dispose of a body, the paperhanger said. The grave is its normal destination anyway. I could dig up a grave and then just keep on digging. Save everything carefully. Put my body there and fill in part of the earth, and then restore everything the way it was. The coffin, if any of it was left. The bones and such. A good settling rain and the fall leaves and you’re home free. Now that’s eternity for you.

Did you kill someone, she breathed. Her voice was barely audible.

Did I or did I not, he said. You decide. You have the powers of a god. You can make me a murderer or just a heartbroke guy whose wife quit him. What do you think? Anyway, I don’t have a wife. I expect she just walked off into the abstract like that Lang guy I told you about.

I want to go, she said. I want to go where my car is.

He was sitting on a gravestone watching her out of his pale eyes. He might not have heard.

I will walk.

Just whatever suits you, the paperhanger said. Abruptly, he was standing in front of her. She had not seen him arise from the headstone or stride across the graves, but like a jerky splice in a film he was before her, a hand cupping each of her breasts, staring down into her face.

Under the merciless weight of the sun her face was stunned and vacuous. He studied it intently, missing no detail. Fine wrinkles crept from the corners of her eyes and mouth like hairline cracks in porcelain. Grime was impacted in her pores, in the crepe flesh of her throat. How surely everything had fallen from her: beauty, wealth, social position, arrogance. Humanity itself, for by now she seemed scarcely human, beleaguered so by the fates that she suffered his hands on her breasts as just one more cross to bear, one more indignity to endure.

How far you’ve come, the paperhanger said in wonder. I believe you’re about down to my level now, don’t you?

It does not matter, the doctor’s wife said. There is no longer one thing that matters.

Slowly and with enormous lassitude her body slumped toward him, and in his exultance it seemed not a motion in itself but simply the completion of one begun long ago with the fateful weight of a thigh, a motion that began in one world and completed itself in another one.

From what seemed a great distance he watched her fall toward him like an angel descending, wings spread, from an infinite height, striking the earth gently, tilting, then righting itself.

The weight of moonlight tracking across the paperhanger’s face awoke him from where he took his rest. Filigrees of light through the gauzy curtains swept across him in stately silence like the translucent ghosts of insects. He stirred, lay still then for a moment getting his bearings, a fix on where he was.

He was in his bed, lying on his back. He could see a huge orange moon poised beyond the bedroom window, ink-sketch tree branches that raked its face like claws. He could see his feet bookending the San Miguel bottle that his hands clasped erect on his abdomen, the amber bottle hard edged and defined against the pale window, dark atavistic monolith reared against a harvest moon.

He could smell her. A musk compounded of stale sweat and alcohol, the rank smell of her sex. Dissolution, ruin, loss. He turned to study her where she lay asleep, her open mouth a dark cavity in her face. She was naked, legs outflung, pale breasts pooled like cooling wax. She stirred restively, groaned in her sleep. He could hear the rasp of her breathing. Her breath was fetid on his face, corrupt, a graveyard smell. He watched her in disgust, in a dull self-loathing.

He drank from the bottle, lowered it. Sometimes, he told her sleeping face, you do things you can’t undo. You break things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. And you were right, there are things only a miracle can set to rights.

He sat clasping the bottle. He touched his miscut hair, the soft down of his beard. He had forgotten what he looked like, he hadn’t seen his reflection in a mirror for so long. Unbidden, Zeineb’s face swam into his memory. He remembered the look on the child’s face when the doctor’s wife had spun on her heel: spite had crossed it like a flicker of heat lightning. She stuck her tongue out at him. His hand snaked out like a serpent and closed on her throat and snapped her neck before he could call it back, sloe eyes wild and wide, pink tongue caught between tiny seed-pearl teeth like a bitten-off rosebud. Her hair swung sidewise, her head lolled onto his clasped hand. The tray of the toolbox was out before he knew it, he was stuffing her into the toolbox like a ragdoll. So small, so small, hardly there at all.

He arose. Silhouetted naked against the moon-drenched window, he drained the bottle. He looked about for a place to set it, leaned and wedged it between the heavy flesh of her upper thighs. He stood in silence, watching her. He seemed philosophical, possessed of some hard-won wisdom. The paperhanger knew so well that while few are deserving of a miracle, fewer still can make one come to pass.

He went out of the room. Doors opened, doors closed. Footsteps softly climbing a staircase, descending. She dreamed on. When he came back into the room he was cradling a plastic-wrapped bundle stiffly in his arms. He placed it gently beside the drunk woman. He folded the plastic sheeting back like a caul.

What had been a child. What the graveyard earth had spared the freezer had preserved. Ice crystals snared in the hair like windy snow-flakes whirled there, in the lashes. A doll from a madhouse assembly line.

He took her arm, laid it across the child. She pulled away from the cold. He firmly brought the arm back, arranging them like mannequins, madonna and child. He studied this tableau, then went out of his house for the last time. The door closed gently behind him on its keeper spring.

The paperhanger left in the Mercedes, heading west into the open country, tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore. Without knowing it, he followed the selfsame route the doctor had taken some eight months earlier, and in a world of infinite possibilities where all journeys share a common end, perhaps they are together, taking the evening air on a ruined veranda among the hollyhocks and oleanders, the doctor sipping his scotch and the paperhanger his San Miguel, gentlemen of leisure discussing the vagaries of life and pondering deep into the night not just the possibility but the inevitability of miracles.

Butcherin’ was done while the deceased was still alive,” Junior said.

See, we was at the gym and I’d been answering a few things. Old Junior’s a cop, and his South Texas twang was wide and flat like mine. ‘Course he was dipping, and he let a stream go into the Coke bottle he was carrying in the hand that wasn’t his gun hand. His blue eyes was paler than a washed-out work shirt.

“Hail,” he said, “one side of the mouth’d been slit all the way to the earring.”

See, when the police find a corpse in Texas, their first question ain’t who done it, it’s what did the dead do to deserve it?

Billy Clancy’d been off the police force a long time before Kenny Coyle come along, but he had worked for the San Antonia Police Department a spell there after boxing. He made some good money for himself on the side — down in dark town, if you know what I’m saying? That’s after I trained him as a heavyweight in the old El Gallo, or Fighting Cock gym off Blanco Road downtown. We worked together maybe six years all told, starting off when he was a amateur. Billy Clancy had all the Irish heart in the world. At six-three and two-twenty-five, he had a fine frame on him, most of his weight upstairs. He had a nice clean style, too, and was quick as a sprinter. But after he was once knocked out for the first time? He had no chin after that. He’d be kicking ass and taking names, but even in a rigged fight with a bum, if he got caught, down he’d go like a longneck at a ice house.

He was a big winner in the amateurs, Billy was, but after twelve pro fights, he had a record of eight and four, with his nose broke once — that’s eight wins by KO, but he lost four times by KO, so that’s when he hung ‘em up. For a long time, he went his way and I went mine. But then Billy Clancy opened Clancy’s Pub with his cop money. That was his big break. There was Irish night with Mick music, corned beef and cabbage, and Caffery’s Ale on tap and Harp Lager from Dundalk. And he had Messkin night with mariachis and folks was dancin’ corridos and the band was whooping out rancheras and they’d get to playing some of that nortena polka music that’d have you laughing and crying at the same time. For shrimp night, all you can eat, Billy trucked in fresh Gulf shrimp sweeter than plum jelly straight up from Matamoros on the border. There was kicker, and hillbilly night, and on weekends there was just about the best jazz and blues you ever did hear. B. B. King did a whole week there one time. It got to be a hell of a deal for Billy, and then he opened up a couple of more joints till he had six in three towns, and soon Billy Clancy was somebody all the way from San Antonia up to Dallas, and down to Houston. Paid all his taxes, obeyed all the laws, treated folks like they was ladies and gentlemen, no matter how dusty the boots, how faded the dress, or if a suit was orange and purple and green.

By then he had him a home in the historic old Monte Vista section oi San Antonia. His wife had one of them home-decorating businesses on her own, and she had that old place looking so shiny that it was like going back a hundred years. His kids was all in private school, all of them geared to go to UT up Austin, even though the dumb young one saw himself as a Aggie.

So one day Billy called me for some “Q” down near the river, knew I was a whore for baby back ribs. Halfway through, he just up and said, “Red, I want back in.”

See, he got to missing the smell of leather and sweat, and the laughter of men — he missed the action, is what, and got himself back into the game the only way he could, managing fighters. He was good at it, too. By then he was better’n forty, and myself I was getting on — old’s when you sit on the crapper and you have to hold your nuts up so they don’t get wet. But what with my rocking-chair money every month, and the money I made off Billy’s fighters, it got to where I was doing pretty good. Even got me some ostrich boots and a El Patron 30x beaver Stetson, yip!

What Billy really wanted was a heavyweight. With most managers, it’s only the money, ‘cause heavies is what brings in them stacks of green fun-tickets. Billy wanted fun-tickets, too, but with Billy it was more like he wanted to get back something what he had lost. ‘Course, finding the right heavyweight’s like finding a cherry at the high school prom.

Figure it, with only twenty, twenty-five good wins, ‘specially if he can crack, a heavy can fight for a titles worth millions. There’s exceptions, but most little guys’ll fight forever and never crack maybe two hundred grand. One of the reason’s ‘cause there’s so many of them. Other reason’s ‘cause they’s small. Fans like seeing heavyweights hit the canvas.

But most of today’s big guys go into the other sports where you don’t get hit the way you do in the fights. It ain’t held against you in boxing if you’re black nowadays, but if you’re a white heavy it makes it easier to pump paydays, and I could tell that it wouldn’t make Billy sad if I could get him a white boy—Irish or Italian would be desired. But working with the big guys takes training to a level that can break your back and your heart, and I wasn’t all that sure a heavy was what I wanted, what with me being the one what’s getting broke up.

See, training’s a hard row to hoe. It ain’t only the physical and mental parts for the fighter what’s hard, but it’s hard for the trainer, too. Fighters can drive you crazy, like maybe right in the middle of a fight they’re winning, when they forget everything what you taught them? And all of a sudden they can’t follow instructions from the corner? Pressure, pain, and being out of gas will make fighters go flat brain-dead on you. Your fighter’s maybe sweated off six or eight pounds in there, his body’s breaking down, and the jungle in him is yelling quick to get him some gone. Trainers come to know how that works, so you got to hang with your boy when he’s all alone out there in the canvas part of the world. He takes heart again, ‘cause he knows with you there he’s still got a fighting chance to go for the titties of the win. ‘Course, that means cutting grommets, Red Ryder.

Everyone working corners knows you’ll more’n likely lose more’n you’ll ever win, that boxing for most is refried beans and burnt tortillas. But winning is what makes your birdie chirp, so you got to always put in your mind that losing ain’t nothing but a hitch in the git-along.

Working with the big guys snarls your task. How do you tell a heavyweight full-up on his maleness to use his mind instead of his sixty-pound dick? How do you teach someone big as a garage that it ain’t the fighter with the biggest brawn what wins, but it’s the one what gets there first with deadly force? How do you make him see that hitting hard ain’t the problem, but that hitting right is? How do you get through to him that you don’t have to be mad at someone to knock him out, same as you don’t have to be in a frenzy to kill with a gun? Heavyweights got that upper-body strength what’s scary, it’s what they’d always use to win fights at school and such, so it’s their way to work from the waist up. That means they throw arm punches, but arm punches ain’t good enough. George Foreman does it, but he’s so strong, and don’t hardly miss, so he most times gets away with punching wrong. ‘Course he didn’t get away with it in Zaire with Mr. Ali.

So the big deal with heavies is getting them to work from the waist down as well as from the waist up. And they got to learn that the last thing that happens is when the punch lands. A thousand things got to happen before that can happen. Those things begin on the floor with balance. But how do you get across that he’s got to work hard, but not so hard that he harms himself? How do you do that in a way what don’t threaten what he already knows and has come to depend on? How do you do it so’s it don’t jar how he has come to see himself and his fighting style? And most of all, how do you do it so when the pressure’s on he don’t go back to his old ways?

After they win a few fights by early knockout, some heavies get to where they try to control workouts, will balk at new stuff what they’ll need as they step up in class. When they pick up a few purses and start driving that new car, lots get lazy and spend their time chasing poon, of which there is a large supply when there is evidence of a quantity of hundred-dollar bills. Some’s hop heads, but maybe they fool you and you don’t find that out till it’s too late. Now you got to squeeze as many paydays out of your doper that you can. Most times, you love your fighter like he’s kin, but with a goddamn doper you get to where you couldn’t give a bent nail.

Why shouldn’t I run things? the heavy’s eyes will glare. His nose is flared, his socks is soggy with sweat, his heart’s banging at his rib cage like it’s trying to bust out of jail. It’s ‘cause he don’t understand that he can’t be the horse and the jockey. How could anyone as big and handsome and powerful and smart as me be wrong about anything? he will press. Under his breath he’s saying, And who’s big enough to tell me I’m wrong?

When that happens, your boy’s attitude is moving him to the streets, and you may have to let him go.

Not many fight fans ever see the inside of fight gyms, so they get to wondering what’s the deal with these big dummies who get all sweaty and grunty and beat on each other. Well, sir, they ain’t big dummies when you think big money. Most big guys in team sports figure there’s more gain and less pain than in fights, even if they have to play a hundred fifty games a year or more, and even if they have to get those leg and back operations that go with them. Some starting-out heavies get to thinking they ought to get the same big payday as major-league pitchers from the day they walk into the gym. Some see themselves as first-round draft picks in the NBA before they ever been hit. What they got to learn is that you got to be a hungry fighter before you can become a championship fighter, a fighter who has learned and survived all the layers of work and hurt the fight game will put on you. Good heavyweights’re about as scarce as black cotton.

There’re less white heavies than black, and the whites can be even goofier than blacks about quick money. Some whites spout off that ‘cause they’re white, as in White Hope, that they should be getting easy fights up to and including the one for the title. If you’re that kind — and there’s black ones same as white — you learn right quick that he don’t have the tit or the brains to be a winner under them bright lights.

Though heavies may have the same look, they’re as different from each other as zebras when it comes to mental desire, chin, heart, and huevos — huevos is eggs, but in Messkin it means “balls.” Getting heavies into shape is another problem, keeping them in shape is a even bigger one, ‘cause they got these bottomless pits for stomachs. So you work to keep them in at least decent shape all the time — but not in punishing top shape, the kind that peaks just before a fight. Fighter’d go wild-pig crazy if he had to live at top shape longer than a few days, his nerves all crawly and hunger eating him alive. And then there’s that blood-clotting wait to the first bell. See, the job of molding flesh and bone into a fighting machine that meets danger instead of hightailing from it is as tricky as the needlework what goes into one of them black, lacy deals what Spanish ladies wear on their heads. Fighting’s easy, cowboy, it’s training what’s hard.

But once a trainer takes a heavy on, there’s all that thump. First of all, when the heavy moves, you got to move with him — up in the ring, on the hardwood, around the big bag. You’re there to guide him like a mama bear, and to stay on his ass so’s he don’t dog it. All fighters’ll dog it after they been in the game a while, but the heavies can be the worst. They got all that weight to transport, and being human, they’ll look for a place to hide. A good piece of change’ll usually goad them. But always there is more training than fighting, and the faith and the fever it takes to be a champ will drop below ninety-eight-point-six real quick unless your boy eats and sleeps fight. ‘Course, no fighter can do that one hundred percent. Besides, there’s the pussy factor. Which is part of where the punch mitts come in. They’ll make him sharp with his punches, but they’re also there to help tire him into submission come bedtime.

The big bag they can fake if you don’t stay on them, but a trainer with mitts, calling for combination after combination, see that’s for the fighter like he’s wearing a wire jock. But for the trainer, the mitts mean you’re catching punches thrown by a six-foot-five longhorn, and the punches carry force enough to drop a horse. And the trainer takes this punishment round after round, day after day, the thump pounding through him like batting practice and he’s the ball. I can’t much work the mitts like I once did, only when I’m working on moves, or getting ready for a set date. But even bantamweights can make your eyes pop.

Part of the payoff for all this is sweeter’n whipped cream on top of strawberry pie. It’s when your fighter comes to see himself from the outside instead of just from the in. It’s when all of a sudden he can see how to use his feet to control that other guy in the short pants. It’s how a fighter’ll smile like a shy little boy when he understands that all his moves’re now offense and defense, and that he suddenly has the know-how to beat the other guy with his mind, that he no longer has to be just some bull at the watering hole looking to gore. And that’s when, Lordy, that you just maybe got yourself a piece of somebody what can change sweat and hurt into gold and glory.

Getting a boy ready for a fight is the toughest time of all for trainers. After a session with the mitts, your fingers’ll curl into the palms of your hands for a hour or so, and driving home in your Jimmy pickup means your hands’ll be claws on the steering wheel. The muscles in the middle of your back squeeze your shoulders up around your ears. Where your chest hooks into your shoulders, you go home feeling there’s something tore down in there. Elbows get sprung, and groin pulls hobble you. In my case, I’ve got piano wire holding my chest and ribs together, so when I leave the gym shock keeps on twanging through me. By the time I’m heading home, I’m thinking hard on a longneck bottle of Lone Star. The only other thing I’m thinking on is time in the prone position underneath Granny’s quilt.

See, what we’re talking about here is signing on to be a cripple, ‘cause when you get down to it, trainers in their way get hit more than fighters, only we do it for nickels and dimes, compared. So what’s the rest of the deal for the trainer? Well, sir, after getting through all the training and hurting, you live with the threat that you could work years with a heavy only to have him quit on you for somebody who’s dangling money at him now that you’ve done the job that changed a lump of fear and doubt into a fighter. But like I say, a good heavy these days only has to win a few fights for a shot at the title. If he wins that, he’s suddenly drinking from solid gold teacups. As the champ, he will defend his title as little as once. But the payoff can be mucho if he can defend a few times. So when the champ gets a ten-million-dollar payday, the trainer gets ten percent off the top — that’s a one-million-dollar bill. That can make you forget crippled backs and hands.

‘Course the downside can be there, too. That’s when your heart goes out to your fighter as you watch helpless sometimes as he takes punches to the head that can hack into his memory forever. And your gut will turn against you when one day you see your boy’s eyes wander all glassy when he tries to find a word that he don’t have in his mouth no more. You feel rotten deep down, but you also love your fighter for having the heart to roll the dice of his life on a dream. And above all, you see clear that no matter how rotten you feel, that your boy never had nothing else but his life to roll, and that you was the lone one who ever cared enough to give him the only shot he would ever have.

Yet the real lure, when you love the fights with everything that’s left of your patched-up old heart, is to be part of the great game — a game where the dues are so high that once paid they take you to the Mount Everest of the Squared Circle, to that highest of places, where fire and ice are one and where only the biggest and best can play, yip!

Trainers know going in that the odds against you are a ton to one. So why do I risk the years, why do I take shots that stun my heart? Why am I part of the spilt blood? Why do I take trips to Leipzig or Johannesburg that take me two weeks to recover from? B. B. King sings my answer for me, backs it up with that big old guitar. “I got a bad case of love.”

Anyway, all I was able to get Billy was what was out there, mostly Messkins, little guys wringing wet at a hundred twenty-four and three quarters, what with us being in San Antonia. But there was some black fighters, too, a welter or a middleweight, now and then. Billy treated all his fighters like they was champs, no matter that they was prelim boys hanging between hope and fear, and praying hard the tornado don’t touch down. If they was to show promise, he’d outright sponsor them good, give them a deuce a week minimum, no paybacks, a free room someplace decent, and eats in one of his pubs, whatever they wanted as long as they kept their weight right. If a boy wasn’t so good, Billy’d give ‘em work, that way if the kid didn’t catch in boxing, leastways he always had a job. People loved Billy Clancy.

See, he’d start boys as a dishwasher, but then he’d move ‘em up, make waiters and bartenders of them. He had Messkin managers what started as busboys. He was godfather to close to two dozen Messkin babies, and he never forgot a birthday or Christmas. His help would invite him to their weddings, sometimes deep into Mexico, and damned if he wouldn’t go. Eyes down there would bug out when this big gringo’d come driving through a dusty pueblo in one of his big old silver Lincoln Town Cars what he ordered made special. Billy’d join right in, yip!, got to where he could talk the lingo passable-good enough to where he could tell jokes and make folks laugh in their own tongue.

Billy Clancy’d be in the middle of it, but he never crossed the line, never messed with any of the gals, though he could have had any or all of ‘em. The priests would always take a shine to him, too, want to talk baseball. He never turned one down who come to him about somebody’s grandma what needed a decent burial, instead of being dropped down a hole in a bag.

One time I asked Billy why he didn’t try on one of them Indian-eyed honeys down there. Respect, is what he said, for the older folks, and specially for the young men, you don’t want to take a man’s pride.

“When you’re invited to a party,” said Billy, “act like you care to be invited back.”

That was Billy Clancy; you don’t shit where you eat.

My deal with Billy was working in the gym with his fighters for ten percent of the purse off the top. No fights, no money. I didn’t see him for days unless it was getting up around fight time. But he’d stop by, not to check up on me, but just to let his boys know he cared about them. Most times he was smoother than gravy on a biscuit, but I could always tell when something was pestering him. ‘Course he wouldn’t talk about it much. Billy didn’t feel the need to talk, or he saw fit not to.

I know there was this one time when the head manager of all Billy’s joints in San Antonia took off with Billy’s cash. Billy come into his private office one Monday expecting to see deposit slips for the money what come in over a big weekend. Well, sir, there was no money, and no keys, and no manager, but that same manager had held a gun on Billy’s little Messkin office gal so’s she’d open the safe. The manager had whipped on the little gal, taped her to a chair with duct tape to where she’d peed herself, and she was near hysteric.

Billy had some of his help make a few phone calls, and damned if the boy what did Billy didn’t head for his hometown on the island of Isla Mujeres way down at the tip of Mexico, where he thought he’d be safe. Billy waited a week, then took a plane to Merida in the Yucatan. He rented him a big car with a good AC and drove on over to the dried-out, palmy little town of Puerto Juárez on the coast that’s just lick across the water from what’s called Women’s Island.

He hung out a day or so in Puerto Juárez, until he got a feel for the place, and so the local police could get a good look at him. Then he just pulled up in front of their peach-colored shack, half its palm-leaf roof hanging loose. He took his time getting out of his rental car, and walked slow inside. Stood a foot taller than most. He talked Spanish and told the captain of the local federates his deal, made it simple. All he wanted was his keys back, and he wanted both the manager’s balls. The captain was to keep what was left of the money.

That night late, the captain brought forty-six keys on three key rings to Billy’s blistered motel. He showed Polaroids of the manager’s corpse what was dumped to cook in the hot water off the island, and he also brought in the manager’s two huevos — his two eggs, each wrapped in a corn tortilla. Billy Clancy fed them to the wild dogs on the other side of the adobe back fence.

Billy checked out some of the Mayan ruins down around those parts, giving local folks time to call the news back to San Antonia. Billy got back, nobody said nothing. Didn’t have no more problems with the help stealing now he’d made clear what was his was his.

There was only one other deal about Billy I ever knew about, this time with one of his ex-fighters, a failed middleweight, a colored boy Billy’d made a cook in one of his places. Nice boy, worked hard, short hair, all the good stuff. First off, he worked as a bar-back. But then the bartenders found out the kid was sneaking their tips. They cornered him in a storeroom. They had him turned upside down, was ready to break his hands for him, but then he started squealing they was only doing it ‘cause he’s black. Billy heard it from upstairs and called off his bartenders, piecing them off with a couple of C-notes each. He listened to the boy’s story, and ‘cause he couldn’t prove the boy was dirty, he moved him to a different joint, and that’s where he made a fry cook out of him. The kid was good at cooking, worked overtime anytime the head cook wanted. But then word come down the kid was dealing drugs outta the kitchen. Billy knew dead bang this time and he had one of his cop friends make a buy on the sly.

See, Billy always tried to take care of his own business, unless when it was something like down in Mexico. Billy said when he took care of things himself, there was nobody could tell a story different from the one he told. So he waited for the boy outside the boy’s mama’s house one night late, slashed two of his tires. Boy comes out and goes shitting mad when he sees his tires cut, starts waving his arms like a crawdad.

Billy comes up with a baseball bat alongside his leg, said, “Boy, I come to buy some of that shit you sell.”

Boy pissed the boy off something awful, but he knew better than to challenge Billy on it. So the boy tried to run. He showed up dead, is what happened, his legs broke, his balls in his mouth. No cop ever knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but drugs didn’t happen in any of Billy’s places after that neither.

It was a couple years after that when Dee-Cee Swans collared me about this heavyweight he’d been working with over at the Brown Bomber Gym in Houston. I said I wasn’t going to no Houston — even if it was to look at the real Brown Bomber himself. Dee-Cee said there wasn’t no need.

Henrilee “Dark Chocolate” Swans was from Louisiana, his family going back to Spanish slave times, the original name was Cisneros. Family’d brought him as a boy to Houston during World War Two, where they’d come to better themself. Henrilee’s fighting days started on the streets of the Fifth Ward. He said things was so tough in his part of town that when a wino died, his dog ate him. Dee-Cee was a pretty good lightweight in his time, now a’course he weighs more. Fight guys got to calling him Dee-Cee instead of Dark Chocolate, to make things short. Dee-Cee said call him anything you want, long as you called him to dinner.

He wore a cap ‘cause he was baldheaded except for the white fringe around his ears and neck. He wore glasses, but one lens had a crack in it. He had a bad back and a slight limp, so he walked with a polished, homemade old mesquite walking stick. It was thick as your wrist and was more like a knobby club than a cane. But old Dee-Cee still had the moves. The time, between now and back when he was still Dark Chocolate, disappeared when Dee-Cee had need to move. Said he never had no trouble on no bus in no part of town, not with that stick between his legs. Dee-Cee had them greeny-blue eyes what some coloreds gets, and when he looked at you square, you was looked at.

Way me and him hooked up was chancy, like everything else in fights. ‘Course we knew each other going way back. Both of us liked stand-up style of fighters, so we always had a lot to talk about, things like moves, slips, and counters. Like me, he knew that a fighter’s feet are his brains — that they’re what tell you what punches to throw and when to do it. Since there was more colored fighters in Dallas and Houston, that’s where Dee-Cee operated out of most. But he had folks in San Antonia, too. He showed up again, him and a white heavyweight, big kid, a Irish boy from L.A. calling himself “KO” Kenny Coyle. What wasn’t chancy was that Dee-Cee knew I was connected with Billy Clancy.

Dee-Cee got together with Coyle, trained him a while in Houston after working the boy’s corner twice as a pickup cutman in a Alabama casino. The way the boy was matched, he was supposed to lose. See, he hadn’t fought in a while. But he won both fights by early KOs, and his record got to be seventeen and one, with fifteen knockouts. Coyle could punch with both hands at six-foot-five, two hundred forty-five pounds, size sixteen shoe. His only loss came a few years back from a bad cut to his left eyelid up Vancouver, Canada.

The boy’d also worked as sparring partner for big-time heavyweights, going to camp sometimes for weeks at a time. That’s a lot of high-level experience, but it’s a lot of punishment, even when you’re bone strong, and sometimes you could tell that Coyle’d lose a word. Except for the bad scar on his eyelid, and his nose being a little flat, he didn’t look much busted up, so that made you think he maybe had some smarts. He was in shape, too. That made you like him right off.

Dee-Cee was slick. He always put one hand up to his mouth when he talked, said he didn’t want spies to read his lips, said some had telescopes. He was known to be a bad man, Dee-Cee, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a sense of right and wrong. Back before he had to use a cane, we got to drinking over Houston after a afternoon fight — it was at a fair where we both lost. Half drunk, we went to a fish shack in dark town for some catfish. Place was jam-packed. The lard-ass owner had one of them muslim-style gold teeth — the slip-on kind with a star cutout that shows white from the white enamel underneath? Wouldn’t you know it, he took one look at my color and flat said they didn’t serve no food. Dee-Cee was fit to be tied — talked nigga, talked common, said Allah was going to send his black ass to the pit along with his four handkerchief-head ho’s. Old muslim slid off the tooth quick as a quail when Dee-Cee tapped his pocket and said he was going to cut that tooth out or break it off.

We headed for a liquor store, bought some jerky, and ended up out at one of them baseball-pitching park deals drinking rock and rye and falling down in the dirt from swinging and missing pitches. People got to laughing like we was Richard Pryor. Special loud was the hustler running a three-card monte game next to the stands, a little round dude with fuzzy-wuzzy hair. He worked off a old lettuce crate and cheated people for nickels and dimes. Not one of them ever broke the code, but old Dee-Cee had broke it from the git. He watched sly from the fence as the monte-guy took even pennies from the raggedy kids what made a few cents chasing down balls in the outfield.

Dee-Cee put on his Louisiana country-boy act, bet a dollar, and pointed to one of the cards after the monte-guy moved the three cards all around. ‘Course Dee-Cee didn’t choose right, couldn’t choose right, so he went head-on and lost another twenty, thirty dollars. Then he bet fifty, like he was trying to get his money back. The dealer did more slick business with his cards, and Dee-Cee chose the one in the middle — only this time, instead of just pointing to it and waiting for the dealer to turn it face-up like before, Dee-Cee held it down hard with two fingers and told monte-man to flip the other two cards over first. Dee-Cee said he’d turn his card over last, said he wanted to eyeball all the cards. See, there was no way for nobody to win. The dealer knew he’d been caught cheating, and tried to slide. Dee-Cee cracked him in the shins a few times with a piece of pipe he carried those days, and pretty soon — wouldn’t you know it? — the monte-man got to begging Dee-Cee to take all his money. Dee-Cee took it all, too. ‘Course he kept his own money, what was natural, but he gave the rest to the ragamuffins in the field — at which juncture the little guys all took the rest of the night off.

Dee-Cee got me off to the side one day, his hand over his mouth, said did I want to work with him and Coyle? He told me Coyle maybe had a ten-round fight coming up at one of the Mississippi casinos, and I figured Dee-Cee wanted me as cutman for the fight, him being the trainer and chief second. I say why not? some extra cash to go along with my rocking chair, right?

But Dee-Cee said, “Naw, Red, not just cutman, I want you wit’ me full-time training Coyle.”

I say to myself, A heavyweight what can crack, a big old white Irish one!

Dee-Cee says he needs hep ‘cause as chief second he can’t hardly get up the ring steps and through the ropes quick enough no more. ‘Course with me working inside the ring, that makes me chief second and cut-man. I’d done that before, hell.

Dee-Cee says he chose me ‘cause he don’t trust none of what he called the niggas and the beaners in the gym. Said he don’t think much of the rednecks neither. See, that’s the way Dee-Cee talked, not the way he acted toward folks. Dee-Cee always had respect.

He said, “See, you’n me knows that a fighter’s feet is his brains. My white boy’s feet ain’t right, and you good wit’ feet. We split the trainer’s ten percent, even.”

Five percent of a heavyweight can mount.

Dee-Cee said, “Yeah, and maybe you could bring in Billy Clancy.”

Like I said, Dee-Cee’s slick. So I ask myself if this is something I want bad enough to kiss a spider for? See, when a fan sees the pros and the amateurs, he sees them as a sport. But the pros is a business, too. It’s maybe more a business than a sport. I liked the business part like everybody else, but heavyweights can hurt you like nobody else. So I’m thinking, do I want to chance sliding down that dark hole a heavyweight can dig? Besides, do I want to risk my good name on KO Kenny Coyle with Billy Clancy? I told Dee-Cee I’d wait a spell before I’d do that.

Dee-Cee said, “No, no, you right, hail yeah!”

See, I’m slick, too.

What it was is, Coyle was quirky. He’d gone into the Navy young and started fighting as a service fighter, started knocking everybody out. He won all of the fleet and other service titles, and most of the civilian amateur tournaments, and people was talking Olympics. But the Olympics was maybe three years away, and he wanted to make some money right now. Couldn’t make no big money or train full-time in the Navy, so one day Coyle up and walks straight into the ship’s captain’s face. Damned if Coyle don’t claim he’s queer as a three-dollar bill. See, the service folks these days ain’t supposed to ask, and you ain’t supposed to tell, but here was Coyle telling what he really wanted was to be a woman and dance the ballet. Captain hit the overhead, was ready to toss him in the brig, but Coyle threatened to suck off all the Marine guards, and to contact the president himself about sexual harassment. Didn’t take more’n a lick, and the captain made Coyle a ex-Navy queer. Coyle laughed his snorty laugh when he told the story, said wasn’t he equal smart as he was big? Guys said he sure was, but all knew Coyle wasn’t smart as Coyle thought he was —’specially when he got to bragging about how he stung some shyster lawyers what had contacted him while he was still a amateur. See, they started funneling him money, and got him to agree to sign with them when he turned pro. He knew up front that nobody was supposed to be buzzing amateurs, and he got them for better’n twenty big ones before he pulled his sissy stunt on the Navy. When they come to him with a pro contract, he told them to stick it, told them no contract with a amateur was valid, verbal or written, and that he had bigger plans. He had them shysters by the ying-yang, he said, and them shysters knew it. Coyle laughed about that one, too.

Too bad I didn’t hear about the lawyer deal until we was already into the far turn with Coyle. By the time I did, I already knew Kenny was too big for his britches, and that he was a liar no different from my cousin Royal. If it was four o’clock, old Royal’d say it was four-thirty. Couldn’t help himself.

Coyle’s problem as a fighter was he’d not been trained right, but he was smart enough to know it. His other trainers depended on his reach and power, and that he could take a shot. The problem with that is that you end up fighting with your face. What I worked on with him was the angles of the game, distance, and how to get in and out of range with the least amount of work. The big fellows got to be careful not to waste gas. But where I started Coyle first was with the bitch. See, the bitch is what I call the jab, that’s the one’ll get a crowd up and cheering, you do it pretty. Bing! Bing! Man, there ain’t nothing like the bitch. And Coyle took to it good, him being fed up with getting hit. With the bitch, you automatic got angles. You got the angle, you got the opening. Bang! Everything comes off the bitch. I got him to moving on the balls of his feet, and soon he was coming off that right toe behind the bitch like he was a great white going for a seal pup. Whooom!

See, when you got the bitch working for you is when you got the other guy blinking, and on his heels going backward, and you can knock a man down with the bitch, even knock him out if you can throw a one-two-one combination right. Coyle picking up the bitch like he did is what got me to think serious on him, ‘specially when I saw how hard he worked day in, day out. On time every day, nary a balk. Dee-Cee and me both started counting fun-tickets in our sleep but both of us agreed to pass on the ten-round Mississippi fight until I could get Coyle’s feet right.

Moving with Coyle, like with the other heavies, is easy for me even now. ‘Cause of their weight, they get their feet tangled when they ain’t trained right, and I know how to back them to the ropes or into a corner. I don’t kid myself, they could knock me out with the bitch alone if we was fighting, but what we’re up to ain’t fighting. What we’re up to is what makes fighting boxing.

Billy Clancy got wind of Coyle and called me in, wanted to know why I was keeping my white boy secret. I told him Coyle wasn’t no secret, said it was too soon.

“Who’s feedin’ him?”

“Me and Dee-Cee”

Billy peeled off some hundreds. I’d later split the six hundred with Dee-Cee.

Billy said, “Tell him to start eatin at one of my joints, as much as he wants. But no drinks and no partyin’ in the place. When’ll Coyle be ready?”

“Gimme six weeks. If he can stand up to what I put on him, then we’ll see.”

“Will he fight?”

“He better.”

Once I got Coyle’s feet slick, damn if he didn’t come along as if he was champion already. When I told Billy, he put a eight-round fight together at one of the Indian reservations on the Mississippi. We went for eight so’s not to put too much pressure on Coyle, what with me being a new trainer to him. We fought for only seventy-five hundred — took the fight just to get Coyle on the card. When I told Coyle about it, he said book it, didn’t even ask who’s the opponent. See, Coyle was broke and living in dark town with Dee-Cee, and hoping to impress Billy ‘cause Dee-Cee’d told him about Billy Clancy having money.

Well, sir, halfway through the fifth round with Marcellus Ellis, Coyle got himself head-butted in the same eye where he’d been cut up in Vancouver. Ellis was a six-foot-seven colored boy weighing two-seventy, but he couldn’t do nothing with Coyle, ‘cause of the bitch. So Ellis hoped to save his big ass with a head-butt. Referee didn’t see the butt, and wouldn’t take our word it was intentional, so the butt wasn’t counted. Cut was so bad I skipped adrenaline and went direct to Thrombin, the ten-thousand-unit bovine coagulant deal. Thrombin stopped the blood quicker’n morphine’ll stop the runs, but the cut was in the eyelid, and the fight shoulda been stopped in truth. But we was in Mississippi and the casino wanted happy gamblers, so the ref let it go on with a warning that he’d stop the fight in the next round if the cut got worse.

Dee-Cee got gray-looking, said he was ready to go over and whip on Ellis’s nappy head with his cane.

I told Coyle the only thing I could tell him. “They’ll stop this fight on us and we could lose, so you got to get into Ellis’s ass with the bitch and then drop your right hand on him and get respect!”

All Coyle did was to nod. He went out there serious as a diamond-back. Six hard jabs busted up Ellis so bad that he couldn’t think nothing but the bitch. That’s when Coyle got the angle and, Bang! he hit Ellis with a straight right that was like the right hand of God. Lordy, Ellis was out for five minutes. He went down stiff like a tree and bounced on his face, and then one leg went all jerk and twitchy. We went to whooping and hugging. That right hand was lightning in human form. But what it was that did it for me wasn’t Coyle’s big right hand, it was the way he stuck the bitch, and the way Coyle listened to me in the corner.

Billy wanted to sign him right then, but I said wait, even though I knew Coyle was antsy to get him a place of his own. Besides, we had to wait a month and more to see if the eye’d heal complete. It took longer than we thought, so Billy started paying the boy three hundred a week walking-around money. Folks at the casino was so wild about that right hand coming outta a white boy that Billy was able to get twenty-five thousand for Coyle’s next fight soon’s a doctor’d clear his eye. And sure enough, Coyle was right back in the gym when the doctor gave him the OK. But he had some kind of funny look to him, so I told him to go home and rest. But no, Coyle kept showing up saying he wanted to get back to that casino. How do you reach the brain of a pure-strain male hormone when he’s eighteen and one, with sixteen KOs? But one morning when me and Dee-Cee was out with him doing his road work, we got a surprise. Coyle started pressing his chest and had to stop running. Damn if he didn’t look half-blue and ready to go down. Me and Dee-Cee walked him back to the car, both holding him by a arm. I thought maybe it was a heart attack. We hauled ass over to Emergency. They checked him all over, hooked him up to all the machines, checked his blood for enzymes. Said it wasn’t no heart attack, said it was maybe some kind of quick virus going around that could knock folks down. Coyle wanted to know when he’d be able to fight again in Mississippi, and I told him to forget Mississippi till he was well. On our way out, the doctor got me to the side to tell me he wasn’t positive Coyle was sick.

I said, “What does that mean?”

Doc said, “I’m not sure. Just thought you might want to know.”

After a couple of days’ rest Coyle was back in the gym, but then he had to stop his road work outta weakness again. He looked like a whipped pup, so I figured he had to have something wrong. He said, “But I can’t fight if I don’t run, you said it yourself.”

I said, “You can’t fight if you ain’t got gas in your tank, that’s what that means. Right now, you got a hole in your tank.”

“I need dough, Red.”

He was a hungry fighter; it’s what you dream about. And there he’d be the next day, even if he coughed till he gagged. You never saw anybody push himself like him. But by then, the fool could hardly punch, much less run. But he still wanted to train, said he didn’t want us to think he didn’t have no heart.

I said, “Hail, boy, I’m worried about your brain, not heart. You got money from the last fight. Rest.”

He said, “I sent all but a thousand to my brother for an operation. He’s a cripple.”

Well, later on I learned he’d pissed all the money away on pussy and pool, and there wasn’t no cripple. But at that time I was so positive Coyle had the heart it takes that I just grabbed the bull by the horns and told Billy it was time. Billy could see the weak state Coyle was in, but on my good word it was a virus, Billy signed Coyle up to a four-year contract. On top of that, he gave Coyle a one-bedroom poolside apartment in one of his units for free. Said he’d give Coyle twenty-five hundred a month, that he’d put it in the contract, no payback, until Coyle started clearing thirty thousand a year. Said he’d give Coyle sixty thousand dollars under the table as a signing bonus soon’s he was well enough to get back in the gym. Coyle wanted a hundred thousand, but settled for sixty.

Billy said, “That’s cash, Kenny. So you don’t have to pay no taxes on it.”

“I’ll get you the title, Mr. Clancy.”

“Billy.”

I looked at Dee-Cee, knew the head of his dick was glowing same as mine. Damned if Coyle wasn’t back in the gym working hard and doing road work in only three days. Billy’s word was good, and I was there when he paid Coyle off in stacks of hundreds. Money smells bad when you get a gang of it all together.

Wouldn’t you know it? Old stinky-head went right out and spent the whole shiteree on one of them new BMW four-wheel-drive deals what goes for better than fifty thousand. Coyle got to bragging about the sports package, the killer sound system, how much horsepower it had. Who gives a rap when you can’t afford tires and battery? Buying them boogers is easy, keeping them up what’s hard.

Besides, it was about that time that Coyle’s knees went to flap like butterfly wings. See, the ladies took one look at Coyle and thought they had the real deal, what with him having that big car and flashing hundreds in the clubs.

Dee-Cee said, “How many times you get you nut this week?”

Coyle said, “That’s personal.”

Dee-Cee said, “So you been gettin’ you nut every night.”

Coyle said, “No, I ain’t.”

Dee-Cee said, “You is, too. If it was one or none, or even two times, you’da said so.”

Coyle looked at me like he’d never heard such talk.

I said, “He’s sayin’ when your legs get to wobblin’, you been doin’ it too much. He’s saying that when your legs’re weak that your brain gets to wonderin’ why’s it so hard to keep itself from fallin’ down. That’s when your brain is so busy keeping you on your feet that it don’t pay attention to fightin’. Son, you got to have your legs right so your mind can work quicker than light, or you end up as a opponent talkin’ through your nose, and the do-gooders wants to blame us trainers. No good, it’s you and your dick what’s doin’ wrong.”

Coyle said, “I’m a fighter livin’ like a fighter.”

Dee-Cee said, “Way you goin’, you won’t be for long.”

I said, “Dee-Cee ain’t wrong, Kenny.”

Dee-Cee said, “Boy, you can fuck you white ass black, but that ain’t never gonna make you champ of nothin’.”

Coyle snorted, said, “I’ll be champ of the bitches.”

Dee-Cee said, “You go out, screw a thousand bitches, you think you somethin’? Sheeuh, you don’t screw no thousand bitches, a thousand bitches screw you — and there go you title shot, fool.”

Coyle said, “Fighters need release.”

Dee-Cee said, “Say what? All you got to do is wait some. You midnight emissions’ll natural take care of you goddamn release!”

I said, “Look, we’re tryin’ to get you around the track and across the finish line first, but you’re headin into the rail on us.”

“Yeah,” said Dee-Cee, “workin wit’ you be like holdin’ water in one hand.”

Coyle thought about that and seemed to nod, but next day when he come in his knees were flapping same as before.

Come to find out, Coyle wasn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell. Billy found out Coyle had been with three gals in the stall of the men’s toilet at one of his hot spots — that they’d been smoking weed hunched around the stool, yip! Billy didn’t jump Coyle. But instead of seeing him as a long-lost White Hope in shining armor, he saw him same as me and Dee-Cee’d come to — like a peach what had gone part bad. So, do you cut out the bad part and keep the good? Or do you shit-can the whole deal? Billy decided to save what he could as long as he could.

Billy told Coyle to flat take his partying somewhere else, like he was first told. If I know Billy, there was more he wanted to say, but didn’t. ‘Course big old Coyle didn’t take it too good, and wanted to dispute with Billy. So Billy said not to mistake kindness for weakness. Coyle got the message looked like, and was back in the gym working hard again — he wanted that twenty-five hundred a month. We figured the bullshit was over, leastways the in-public bullshit. But who could tell about weed? And who knew what else Coyle was messing with? By then, I got to feeling like I was a cat trapped in a sock drawer.

I told Coyle that what he’d pulled on Billy wasn’t the right way to do business.

Coyle said, “He’s makin’ money off me.”

I said, “Not yet he ain’t.”

That’s when things got so squirrelly you’d think Coyle had a tail.

First thing what come up was that stink with the plain-Jane cop’s daughter who said Coyle knocked her up — said Coyle’d gave her some of this GHB stuff that’s floating around that’ll make a gal pass out so deep she’s a corpse. Cop’s daughter said the last thing she remembered was that she was in Coyle’s pool playing kissy face. Next thing she knew she was bare-ass on the floor and Coyle was fixing to do her. She said she jumped up and fled.

Coyle claimed that he’d already done her twice, said she was crying for more.

See, it wasn’t until it come out she was pregnant that she told her daddy, who was a detective sergeant of the San Antonia P.D. She was a only child, and Daddy had them squinty blue eyes set in a face wide in the cheekbones what the Polacks brought into Texas. That good old boy got to rampaging like a rodeo bull, and right about then his neighbors got to thinking about calling Tom Bodette and checking into a Motel 6.

Once Daddy’d killed a half bottle of Jim Beam, he loaded up a old .44 six-gun, put on his boots and hat, and went on over to shoot Coyle dead.

Coyle told Daddy he loved plain-Jane more than his life itself, said that he wanted to marry her.

Cop was one of them fundamentals and figured marrying was better’n killing, so he let Coyle off.

Arrangements was made quick so the girl could wear white to the altar and not show. But then Coyle ups and says he’d have to wait till after the kid was born, that he wanted a blood test to prove he was the real daddy. The cop went to rampaging again and was fixing to hunt Coyle down, but he was took off the scent when his daughter stuck something up herself. Killed the baby, and liked to killed herself. The family was in such grief that Daddy started to drink full-time. The girl was sent off to live with a aunt up Nacogdoches. The cop had to go into one of them anger management deals or get fired from the force. ‘Course Coyle slapped his thigh.

Second deal was about sparring, and was way worse for me’n Dee-Cee than the cop-daughter deal. All of a sudden Coyle started sparring like he never done it before. Everybody was hitting him — middleweights we had in with him to work speed, high school linemen in the gym on a dare, grunts for God’s sake. The eye puffed up again, and we had to take off more time. All of a sudden Coyle’s moving on his heels instead of his toes, and now he can’t jump rope without stumbling into a wall. A amateur light heavy knocked him down hard enough to make him go pie-eyed, and Dee-Cee called the session off. Most times like that, a fighter’s pride will make him want to keep on working, but not Coyle. He was happy to get his ass outta there. Billy heard about it and quick got Coyle that second Mississippi fight for seventy-five thousand. Got Coyle ten rounds with a dead man just to see what was what.

The opponent was six foot tall, three hundred twenty-eight pounds, a big old black country boy from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who couldn’t hardly scrawl his own name. But in the first round, with his damn eyes closed, he hit Coyle high on the head with an overhand right and knocked him on his ass. Me and Dee-Cee couldn’t figure how he didn’t see the punch coming, it was so high and wide. Coyle jumped up, and to his credit, he went right to work.

Bang! Three bitches to the eyes, right hand to the chin, left hook to the body, all the punches quick and pretty. The black boy settled like a dead whale to the bottom, and white folks was dancing in the aisles and waving the Stars and Bars. It was pitiful, but Coyle strutted like he just knocked out Jack Johnson. Me and Dee-Cee was pissed, and our peters had lost their glow. Dressing room afterward was quiet as a gray dawn.

Coyle took time off, not that he needed the rest. He came back for a few days, then it got so he wasn’t coming in at all. If he did, he’d lie around and bullshit instead of work. You could smell weed on him, and his hair got greasy. Now all our fighters started going flaky. Sweat got scarcer and scarcer. There was other times Coyle’d come in so fluffy from screwing you wished he didn’t come in at all. Gym got to be a goddamned social club what looked full of boy whores and Social Security socialites. What with Coyle lying around like a pet poodle, Billy’s other fighters started doing the same. Some begged off fights that were sure wins for them. You never want a fighter to fight if he’s not ready, but when they’re being paid to be in shape, they’re supposed to be in shape, not Butterball goddamn turkeys.

I tried to get Coyle to get serious, but he kept saying, “I’m cool, I’m cool.”

I said, “Tits on a polar bear’s what’s cool.”

That went on for three months, but I wasn’t big enough to choke sense into him. Besides, no trainer worth a damn would want to. Fighters come in on their own, or they don’t come in. Billy wanted a answer, but I didn’t have one. How do you figure it when a ten-round fighter hungry for money pulls out of fights ‘cause of a sore knuckle, or a sprung thumb, or a bad elbow? ‘Course old Coyle didn’t volunteer for no cut in pay.

One day he was lounging in his velour sweatsuit looking at tittie magazines. He said to turn up the lights. I said they was turned up. He said to turn them up again, and I said they was up again. Coyle yelled at me the first and last time.

“Turn ‘em all the goddamn fuck up!”

“Boy,” I said, and then I said it again real quiet. “Boy, lights is all the goddamn fuck up.”

He looked up. “Oh, uh-huh, yeah, Red, thanks.”

About then I figure Kenny don’t know shit from Shinola.

Vegas called Billy for a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fight with some African fighting outta France. He had big German money behind him, and he was a tough sumbitch, but he didn’t have no punch like Kenny Coyle. Coyle said he’d go for the two-hundred-thousand fight in a heartbeat.

I knew there had to be some fun in all this pain. We whip the Afro-Frenchie and win the next couple of fights, and we’re talking three, maybe five hundred thousand a fight. Even if he loses, Billy’s got all his money back and more, and me and Dee-Cee’s doing right good, too. If we win big, we’ll be talking title fight, ‘cause word’ll be out that there’s some big white boy who could be the one to win boxing back from the coloreds. The only coloreds me and Dee-Cee gave a rap about was them colored twenties, and fifties, and hundreds that’d make us proud standing in the bank line instead of meek. Like I say, the amateurs and the pros ain’t alike, and Billy’s figuring to get his money out of Coyle while he can. Me and Dee-Cee’s for that, ‘specially me, since it gets me off the hook.

But neither one of us could figure what had happened with Coyle, so we got Billy to bring in some tough sparring partners for the Frenchie fight to test what Coyle had. Same-oh same-oh, with Coyle getting hit. But when he hit them, damn! they’d go down! A gang of them took off when Coyle threw what that writer guy James Ellroy calls body rockets that tore up short ribs and squashed livers. But it was almost like Coyle was swinging blind. Usual-like, you don’t care about the sparring partners, they’re paid to get hit. But the problem was that Coyle was getting hit, and going down, too. He’d take a shot and his knees would do the old butterfly. We figured he’d been smoking weed, or worse — being up all night in toilets with hoochies.

Dee-Cee said, “Can’t say I didn’t tell him ‘bout midnight emissions, but no, he won’t listen a me.”

But Coyle wasn’t short on wind, and he looked strong. Me’n Dee-Cee’d never seen nothing like it, a top guy gets to be a shot fighter so quick like that, ‘specially with him doing his road work every dawn? Hell, come to find out he wasn’t even smoking weed, just having a beer after a workout so’s he could relax and sleep.

Seeing all our work fall apart, I figured we was Cinderella at midnight. Me and Dee-Cee both knew it, but we still couldn’t make out why. Then Dee-Cee come to me, his hand over his mouth.

Dee-Cee said, “Coyle’s blind in that bad eye.”

I said, “What? Bullshit, the commission doctors passed him.”

“He’s blind, Red, in that hurt eye, I’m tellin’ you. I been wavin’ a white towel next to it two days now, and he don’t blink on the bad-eye side. Watch.”

Between rounds sparring next day, with me greasing and watering Coyle, Dee-Cee kind of waved the tip of the towel next to Coyle’s good eye and Coyle blinked automatic. Between the next round, Dee-Cee was on the other side. He did the same waving deal with the towel. But Coyle’s bad eye didn’t blink ‘cause he never saw the towel. That’s when I understood why he was taking all them shots, that’s when I knew he was moving on his heels ‘cause he couldn’t see the floor clear. And that’s why he was getting rocked like it was the first time he was ever hit, ‘cause shots was surprising him that he couldn’t tell was coming. And it’s when I come to know why he was pulling out of fights — he knew he’d lose ‘cause he couldn’t see. He went for the two-hundred-thousand fight knowing he’d lose, but he took it for the big money. I wanted to shoot the bastard, what with him taking Billy’s money and not saying the eye’d gone bad and making a chump outta me.

The rule is if you can’t see, then you can’t fight. I told Dee-Cee we got to tell Billy. See, Billy’s close to being my own kin, and it’s like I stuck a knife in his back if I don’t come clean.

Dee-Cee said to wait, that it was the commission doctor’s fault, not ours, let them take the heat. He said maybe Vegas won’t find out, and maybe the fight will fuck Coyle up so bad he’ll have to retire anyhow. Billy’ll still get most of his money back, Dee-Cee said, so Billy won’t have ‘cause to be mad with us. That made sense.

But what happened to mess up our deal permanent was that the Vegas Boxing Commission faxed in its forms for the AIDS blood test, said they wanted a current neuro exam, and they sent forms for a eye exam that had to be done by a ophthalmologist, not some regular doctor with a eye chart. Damned if Coyle wasn’t sudden all happy. He couldn’t wait once he heard about the eye test. Me and Dee-Cee was wondering how can he want a eye test, what with what we know about that eye?

Sure enough, when the eye test comes in, it says that Coyle’s close to stone blind in the bad eye, the one what got cut in Canada. The neuro showed Coyle’s balance was off from being hit too much in training camps, which is why he couldn’t jump rope, and why he’d shudder when he got popped. The eye exam proved what me and Dee-Cee already knew, which is why Coyle was taking shots what never shoulda landed. What it come down to was the two-hundred-thousand-dollar fight was off, and Coyle’s fighting days for big money was over. It also come down to Billy taking it in the ass for sixty grand in signing money that was all my fault. And that ain’t saying nothing about all the big purses Coyle coulda won if he had been fit.

Turns out that the fight in Vancouver where Coyle got cut caused his eye to first go bad. The reason why word didn’t get loose on him is ‘cause Coyle didn’t tell the Canadian doctors he was a fighter, and ‘cause it was done on that Canadian free health deal they got up there. The eye doc said the operation was seventy percent successful, but told Coyle to be careful, ‘cause trauma to the eye could mess it up permanent. What with him dropping out of boxing for a couple of years the way fighters’ll do when they lose, people wasn’t thinking on him. And the way Coyle passed the eye test in Alabama and Mississippi was to piece off with a hundred-dollar bill the crooked casino croakers what’s checking his eyes. When later on he told me how he did it, he laughed the same snorty way as when he told how he played his game on the Navy.

That’s when I worked out what was Coyle’s plan. See, he knew right after the Marcellus Ellis fight that the eye had gone bad on him again, but he kept that to himself instead of telling anyone about it, thinking his eye operation in Canada won’t come out. That way, he could steal Billy’s signing money, and pick up the twenty-five hundred a month chasing-pussy money, too. I wondered how long he’d be laughing.

Only now what am I supposed to say to Billy? After all, it was my name on Coyle what clinched the deal. It got to be where my shiny, big old white boy was tarnished as a copper washtub. I talked with Dee-Cee about it.

Dee-Cee said, “You right. That why the schemin’ muhfuh come down South from the front!”

See, we surprised Coyle. He didn’t know the tests had come back, so me and Dee-Cee just sat him down on the ring apron. Starting out, he was all fluffy.

Dee-Cee said, “Why didn’t you tell us about the eye?”

Coyle lied, said, “What eye?”

Dee-Cee said, “Kenny, the first rule’s don’t shit a shitter. The eye what’s fucked up.”

Coyle said, “Ain’t no eye fucked up.”

“You got a fucked-up eye, don’t bullshit,” said Dee-Cee.

“It ain’t bad, it’s just blurry.”

“Just blurry means you ain’t fightin’ Vegas, that’s what’s muthuhfuckin’ blurry,” Dee-Cee said, muscles jumping along his jaw. “I’m quittin’ you right now, hyuh? Don’t want no truck with no punk playin’ me.”

Coyle’s eyes started to bulge and his neck got all swole up and red. “You’re the punk, old man!”

Coyle shoved Dee-Cee hard in the chest. Dee-Cee went down, but he took the fall rolling on his shoulder, and was up like a bounced ball.

Dee-Cee said, “Boy, second rule’s don’t hit a hitter.”

Coyle moved as if to kick Dee-Cee. I reached for my Buck, but before it cleared my back pocket, Dee-Cee quick as a dart used his cane bap! bap! bap! to crack Coyle across one knee and both shins. Coyle hit the floor like a sack full of cats.

“I’ll kill you, old man. I’ll beat your brains out with that stick.”

Dee-Cee said, “Muhfuh, you best don’t be talking no kill shit wit’ Dark Chocolate.”

Coyle yelled, “Watch your back, old man!”

Dee-Cee said, “Boy, you diggin’ you a hole.”

Dee-Cee hobbled off, leaning heavy on his cane. Coyle made to go after Dee-Cee again, but by then I’d long had my one-ten out and open.

I said, “Y’all ever see someone skin a live dog?”

I had to get Coyle outta there, thought to quick get him to the Texas Ice House over on Blanco, where we could have some longnecks like good buds and maybe calm down. Texas Ice House’s open three hundred sixty-five days a year, sign out front says go cowboys.

Coyle said, “Got my own Texas shit beer at home.”

Texas and shit in the same breath ain’t something us Texans cotton to, but I went on over to Coyle’s place later on ‘cause I had to. I knocked, and through the door I heard a shotgun shell being jacked into the chamber.

I said, “It’s me, Red.”

Coyle opened up, then limped out on the porch looking for Dee-Cee.

Coyle said, “I’m gonna kill him, you tell him.”

Inside, there was beer cans all over the floor, and the smell of weed and screwing. Coyle and a half-sleepy tittie-club blond gal was lying around half bare-ass. She never said a word throughout. I got names backing me like Geraghty and O’Kelly, but when I got to know what a sidewinder Coyle was, it made me ashamed of belonging to the same race.

I said, “When did the eye go bad?”

Coyle was still babying his legs. “It was perfect before that Marcellus Ellis butted me at the casino. But with you training me, hey baby, I can still fight down around here.”

“You go back to chump change you fight down around here.”

“My eye is OK, it’s just blurry, that’s all, don’t you start on me, fuck!”

“It’s you’s what’s startin’.”

“This happened time before last in Mississippi, OK? And it was gettin better all by itself, OK?”

I stayed quiet, so did he. Then I said, “Don’t you get it? You fail the eye test, no fights in Vegas, or no place where there’s money. Only trainer you’ll get now’s a blood sucker.”

Coyle shrugged, even laughed a little. That’s when I asked him the one question he didn’t never want to hear, the one that would mean he’d have to give back Billy’s money if he told the truth.

I said, “Why didn’t you tell us about the eye before you signed Billy’s contract?”

Coyle got old. He looked off in a thousand-yard stare for close to a minute. He stuttered twice, and then said, “Everybody knew about my eye.”

I said, “Not many in Vancouver, and for sure none in San Antonia.”

Coyle said, “Vegas coulda checked.”

I said, “We ain’t Vegas.”

Coyle stood up. He thought he wanted to hit me, but he really wanted to hide. Instead, he moved the shotgun so’s it was pointing at my gut.

He said, “I don’t want you to train me no more.”

I said, “Next time you want to fuck somebody, fuck your mama in her casket. She can’t fuck you back.”

That stood him straight up, and I knew it was time to git. As the door closed behind me, I could hear Coyle and the tittie-club blonde start to laugh.

I said to myself, “Keep laughin’, punk cocksucker — point a gun at me and don’t shoot.”

I drove my pickup over to Billy’s office next day, told him the whole thing. It wasn’t far from my place but it was the longest ride I ever took. I was expecting to be told to get my redneck ass out of Texas. He just listened, then lit up a Montecristo contraband Havana robusto with a gold Dunhill. He took his time, poured us both some Hennessy XO.

He could see I felt lowdown and thought I’d killed his friendship.

I said, “I’m sorry, Billy, you know I’d never wrong you on purpose.”

Billy said, “You couldn’t see the future, Red. Only women can, and that’s ‘cause they know when they’re gonna get fucked.”

Billy put the joke in there to save me from myself, damned if he didn’t. I was ready to track Coyle and gut him right then. But Billy said to calm down, said he’d go over to Coyle’s place later on. I wanted to go, said I’d bring along Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.

“Naw,” said Billy, “there won’t be no shootin.”

When Billy got to Coyle’s, Kenny was smoking weed again, had hold of a big-assed, stainless steel .357 Mag Ruger with a six-inch barrel. Billy didn’t blink, said could he have some iced tea like Coyle was drinking. Coyle said it was Snapple Peach, not diet, but Billy said go on’n hook one up. Things got friendly, but Coyle kept ahold of the Ruger.

Billy said, “Way I see it, you didn’t set out to do it.”

Coyle said, “That’s right. Ellis did it.”

Billy said, “But you still got me for sixty large.”

Coyle said, “Depends on how you look at it.” He laughed at his joke. “Besides, nobody asked about my eye, so I told no lie. Hey, I can rhyme like Ali, that’s me, hoo-ee.”

Billy said, “Coyle, there’s sins of commission and there’s sins of omission. This one’s a sixty-thousand-dollar omission.”

Coyle said, “You got no proof. It was all cash like you wanted, no taxes.”

Billy said, “I want my sixty back. You can forget the free rent and the twenty-five hundred you got off me every month, but I want the bonus money.”

Coyle said, “Ain’t got it to give back.”

Billy said, “You got the BMW free and clear. Sign it over and we’re square.”

Coyle said, “You ain’t gettin my Beamer. Bought that with my signing money.”

Billy said, “You takin’ it knowin’ your eye was shot, that was humbug.”

Coyle said, “I’m stickin’ with the contract and my lawyer says you still owe me twenty-five hundred for this month, and maybe for three years to come. He says you’re the one that caused it all when you put me in with the wrong opponent.”

Billy’d put weight on around the belly and Coyle was saying he wasn’t dick afraid of him.

Billy didn’t press for the pink, and didn’t argue about the twenty-five hundred a month, didn’t say nothing about the lost projected income.

“Then tell me this,” Billy said, “when do you plan on gettin’ out of my building and givin’ back my keys?”

Coyle laughed his laugh. “When you evict me, that’s when, and you can’t do that for a while ‘cause my eye means I’m disabled, I checked.”

Billy laughed with Coyle, and Billy shook Coyle’s left hand with his right before taking off, ‘cause Coyle kept the Ruger in his right hand.

Billy said, “Well, let me know if you change your mind.”

“Not hardly,” said Coyle. “I’m thinkin’ on marrying that cop’s daughter. This here’s our love nest.”

Me and Dee-Cee was cussing Coyle twenty-four hours a day, but Billy never let on he cared. About a week later, he said his wife and kids was heading down to Orlando Disney World for a few days. On Thursday he gave me and Dee-Cee the invite to come on down to Nuevo Laredo with him Friday night for the weekend.

Billy said, “We’ll have a few thousand drinks at the Cadillac Bar to wash the taste of Coyle out of our mouths.”

He sweetened the pot, said how about spending some quality time in the cat houses of Boys Town, all on him? I said my old root’ll still do the job with the right inspiration, so did Dee-Cee. But he said his back was paining him bad since the deal with Coyle, and that he had to go on over Houston where he had this Cuban Santeria woman. She had some kind of mystic rubjuice made with rooster blood he said was the only thing what’d cure him.

Dee-Cee said, “I hate to miss the trip with y’all, but I got to see my Cuban.”

I told Billy he might as well ride with me in my Jimmy down to Nuevo Laredo. See, it’s on the border some three hours south of San Antonia. I had a transmission I been wanting to deliver to my cousin Royal in Dilley, which is some seventy-eighty miles down from San Antonia on Highway 35 right on our way. Billy said he had stuff to do in the morning, but that he’d meet me at the Cadillac Bar at six o’clock next day. That left just me heading south alone and feeling busted up inside for doing the right thing by a skunk.

I left early so’s I could listen to Royal lie, and level out with some of his Jack Daniel’s. When I pulled up in front of the Cadillac Bar at ten of six, I saw Billy’s bugged-up Town Car parked out front. He was inside, a big smile on him. With my new hat and boots, I felt fifty again, and screw Kenny Coyle and the BMW he rode in on. We was laughing like Coyle didn’t matter to us, but underneath, we knew he did.

Billy got us nice rooms in a brand-new motel once we had quail and Dos Equis for dinner, and finished off with fried ice cream in the Messkin style. Best I can recollect, we left our wheels at the motel and took a cab to Boys Town. We hit places like the Honeymoon Hotel, the Dallas Cowboys, and the New York Yankey. Hell, I buried myself in brown titties, even ended up with a little Chink gal I wanted to smuggle home in my hat. Spent two nights with her and didn’t never want to go home.

I ain’t sure, but seems to me I went back to the motel once on Saturday just to check on Billy. His car was gone, and there was a message for me blinking on the phone in my room, and five one-hundred-dollar bills on my pillow. Billy’s message said he had to go on over to Matamoros ‘cause the truck for his shrimps had busted down, and he had to rent another one for shrimp night. So I had me a mess of Messkin scrambled eggs and rice and beans and a few thousand bottles of Negra Modelo. I headed on back for my China doll still shaky, but I hadn’t lost my boots or my El Patrón so I’m thinking I was a tall dog in short grass.

There seems like there were times when I must a blanked out there. But somewhere along the line, I remember wandering the streets over around Boys Town when I come up on a little park that made me stop and watch. It happens in parks all over Mexico. The street lights ain’t nothing but hanging bare bulbs with swarms of bugs and darting bats. Boys and girls of fourteen to eighteen’n more’d make the nightly paseo — that’s like a stroll on the main drag, ‘cause there ain’t no TV or nothing, and the paseo’s what they do to get out from the house to flirt. In some parts, the young folks form circles in the park. The boys’ circled form outside the girls’ circle and each circle moves slow in opposite directions so’s the boys and the girls can be facing each other as they pass. The girls try to squirt cheap perfume on a boy they fancy. The boys try to pitch a pinch of confetti into a special girl’s month. Everybody gets to laughing and spitting and holding their noses but inside their knickers they’re fixing to explode. It’s how folks get married down there.

‘Course, getting married wasn’t on my mind. Something else was, and I did my best to satisfy my mind with some more of that authentic Chinee sweet and sour.

Billy was asleep the next day, Sunday, when I come stumbling back, so I crapped out, too. I remember right, we headed home separate on Sunday night late. Both of us crippled and green but back in Laredo Billy’s car was washed and spanky clean except for a cracked rear window. Billy said some Matamoros drunk had made a failed try to break in. He showed me his raw knuckles to prove it.

Billy said, “I can still punch like you taught me, Reddy.”

Driving myself home alone, I was all bowlegged, and my heart was leaping sideways. But when it’s my time to go to sleep for the last time, I want to die in Boys Town teasing the girls and learning Chinee.

I was still hung over on Monday, and had to lay around all pale and shaky until I could load up on biscuits and gravy, fresh salsa, fried grits, a near pound of bacon, three or four tomatoes, and a few thousand longnecks. I guess I slept most of the time ‘cause I don’t remember no TV.

It wasn’t until when I got to the gym on Tuesday that I found out about Kenny Coyle. Hunters found him dead in the dirt. He was beside his torched BMW in the mesquite on the outside of town. They found him Sunday noon, and word was he’d been dead some twelve hours, which meant he’d been killed near midnight Saturday night. Someone at the gym said the cops had been by to see me. Hell, me’n Billy was in Mexico, and Dee-Cee was in Houston.

The inside skinny was that Coyle’d been hogtied with them plastic cable-tie deals that cops’ll sometimes use instead of handcuffs. One leg’d been knee-capped with his own Ruger someplace else, and later his head was busted in by blunt force with a unknown object. His brains was said to hang free, and looked like a bunch of grapes. His balls was in his mouth, and his mouth had been slit to the ear so’s both balls’d fit. The story I got was that the cops who found him got to laughing, said it was funny seeing a man eating his own mountain oysters. See, police right away knew it was business.

When the cops stopped by the gym Tuesday morning, I was still having coffee and looking out the storefront window. I didn’t have nothing to hide, so I stayed sipping my joe right where I was. I told them the same story I been telling you, starting off with stopping by to see old Royal in Dilley. See, the head cop was old Junior, and old Junior was daddy to that plain-Jane gal.

I told him me and Billy had been down Nuevo Laredo when the tragedy occurred. Told him about the Cadillac Bar, and about drinking tequila and teasing the girls in Boys Town. ‘Course, I left out a few thousand details I didn’t think was any of his business. Old Junior’s eyes got paler still, and his jaw was clenched up to where his lips didn’t hardly move when he talked. He didn’t ask but two or three questions, and looked satisfied with what I answered.

Fixing to leave, Junior said, “Seems like some’s got to learn good sense the hard way.”

Once Junior’d gone, talk started up in the gym again and ropes got jumped. Fight gyms from northern Mexico all up through Texas knew what happened to Coyle. Far as I know, the cops never knocked on Billy Clancy’s door, but I can tell you that none of Billy’s fighters never had trouble working up a sweat no more, or getting up for a fight neither.

I was into my third cup of coffee when I saw old Dee-Cee get off the bus. He was same as always, except this time he had him a knobby new walking stick. It was made of mesquite like the last one. But as he come closer, I could see that the wood on this new one was still green from the tree.

I said, “You hear about Coyle?”

“I jus’ got back,” said Dee-Cee, “what about him?” One of the colored boys working out started to snicker. Dee-Cee gave that boy a look with those greeny-blue eyes. And that was the end of that.

Lourdes became mrs. mahmood’s personal maid when her friend Viviana quit to go to L.A. with her husband. Lourdes and Viviana were both from Cali in Colombia and had come to South Florida as mail-order brides. Lourdes’s husband, Mr. Zimmer, worked for a paving contractor until his death, two years from the time they were married.

She came to the home on Ocean Drive, only a few blocks from Donald Trump’s, expecting to not have a good feeling for a woman named Mrs. Mahmood, wife of Dr. Wasim Mahmood, who altered the faces and breasts of Palm Beach ladies and aspirated their areas of fat. So it surprised Lourdes that the woman didn’t look like a Mrs. Mahmood, and that she opened the door herself: this tall redheaded woman in a little green two-piece swimsuit, sunglasses on her nose, opened the door and said, “Lourdes, as in Our Lady of?”

“No, ma’am, Lourdes, the Spanish way to say it,” and had to ask, “You have no help here to open the door?”

The redheaded Mrs. Mahmood said, “They’re in the laundry room watching soaps.” She said, “Come on in,” and brought Lourdes into this home of marble floors, of statues and paintings that held no meaning, and out to the swimming pool, where they sat at a patio table beneath a yellow and white umbrella.

There were cigarettes, a silver lighter, and a tall glass with only ice left in it on the table. Mrs. Mahmood lit a cigarette, a long Virginia Slim, and pushed the pack toward Lourdes, who was saying, “All I have is this, Mrs. Mahmood,” Lourdes bringing a biographical data sheet, a printout, from her straw bag. She laid it before the redheaded woman showing her breasts as she leaned forward to look at the sheet.

“‘Your future wife is in the mail’?”

“From the Latina introduction list for marriage,” Lourdes said. “The men who are interested see it on their computers. Is three years old, but what it tells of me is still true. Except of course my age. Now it would say thirty-five.”

Mrs. Mahmood, with her wealth, her beauty products, looked no more than thirty. Her red hair was short and reminded Lourdes of the actress who used to be on TV at home, Jill St. John, with the same pale skin. She said, “That’s right, you and Viviana were both mail-order brides,” still looking at the sheet. “Your English is good —that’s true. You don’t smoke or drink.”

“I drink now sometime, socially.”

“You don’t have e-mail.”

“No, so we wrote letters to correspond, before he came to Cali, where I lived. They have parties for the men who come and we get — you know, we dress up for it.”

“Look each other over.”

“Yes, is how I met Mr. Zimmer in person.”

“Is that what you called him?”

“I didn’t call him anything.”

“Mrs. Zimmer,” the redheaded woman said. “How would you like to be Mrs. Mahmood?”

“I wouldn’t think that was your name.”

She was looking at the printout again. “You’re virtuous, sensitive, hardworking, optimistic. Looking for a man who’s a kind, loving person with a good job. Was that Mr. Zimmer?”

“He was OK except when he drank too much. I had to be careful what I said or it would ‘cause him to hit me. He was strong, too, for a guy his age. He was fifty-eight.”

“When you married?”

“When he died.”

“I believe Viviana said he was killed?” The woman sounding like she was trying to recall whatever it was Viviana had told her. “An accident on the job?”

Lourdes believed the woman already knew about it, but said, “He was disappeared for a few days until they find his mix truck out by Hialeah, a pile of concrete by it but no reason for the truck to be here since there’s no job he was pouring. So the police have the concrete broken open and find Mr. Zimmer.”

“Murdered,” the redheaded woman said.

“They believe so, yes, his hands tied behind him.”

“The police talk to you?”

“Of course. He was my husband.”

“I mean did they think you had anything to do with it.”

She knew. Lourdes was sure of it.

“There was a suspicion that friends of mine here from Colombia could be the ones did it. Someone who was their enemy told this to the police.”

“It have anything to do with drugs?”

The woman seeing all Colombians as drug dealers.

“My husband drove a cement truck.”

“But why would anyone want to kill him?”

“Who knows?” Lourdes said. “This person who finked, he told the police I got the Colombian guys to do it because my husband was always beating me. One time he hit me so hard,” Lourdes said, touching the strap of her blue sundress that was faded almost white from washing, “it separated my shoulder, the bones in here, so I couldn’t work.”

“Did you tell the Colombian guys he was beating you?”

“Everyone knew. Sometime Mr. Zimmer was brutal to me in public, when he was drinking.”

“So maybe the Colombian guys did do it.” The woman sounding like she wanted to believe it.

“I don’t know,” Lourdes said, and waited to see if this was the end of it. Her gaze moved out to the sunlight, to the water in the swimming pool lying still, and beyond to red bougainvillea growing against white walls. Gardeners were weeding and trimming, three of them Lourdes thought at first were Latino. No, the color of their skin was different. She said, “Those men …”

“Pakistanis,” Mrs. Mahmood said.

“They don’t seem to work too hard,” Lourdes said. “I always have a garden at home, grow things to eat. Here, when I was married, I worked for Miss Olympia. She call her service Cleaning with Biblical Integrity. I wasn’t sure what it means, but she would say things to us from the Holy Bible. We cleaned offices in buildings in Miami. What I do here Viviana said would be different, personal to you. See to your things, keep your clothes nice?”

Straighten her dresser drawers. Clean her jewelry. Mrs. Mahmood said she kicked her shoes off in the closet, so Lourdes would see they were paired and hung in the shoe racks. Check to see what needed to be dry-cleaned. Lourdes waited as the woman stopped to think of other tasks. See to her makeup drawers in the bathroom. Lourdes would live here, have Sundays off, a half day during the week. Technically she would be an employee of Dr. Mahmood’s.

Oh? Lourdes wasn’t sure what that meant. Before she could ask, Mrs. Mahmood wanted to know if she was a naturalized citizen. Lourdes told her she was a permanent resident, but now had to get the papers to become a citizen.

“I say who I work for I put Dr. Wasim Mahmood?”

The redheaded wife said, “It’s easier that way. You know, to handle what’s taken out. But I’ll see that you clear at least three-fifty a week.”

Lourdes said that was very generous. “But will I be doing things also for Dr. Mahmood?”

The redheaded woman smoking her cigarette said, “What did Viviana tell you about him?”

“She say only that he didn’t speak to her much.”

“Viviana’s a size twelve. Woz likes them young and as lean as snakes. How much do you weigh?”

“Less than one hundred twenty-five pounds.”

“But not much — you may be safe. You cook?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I mean for yourself. We go out or order in from restaurants. I won’t go near that fucking stove and Woz knows it.”

Lourdes said, “Wos?”

“Wasim. He thinks it’s because I don’t know how to cook, which I don’t, really, but that’s not the reason. The two regular maids are Filipina and speak English. In fact, they have less of an accent than you. They won’t give you any trouble, they look at the ground when they talk to anyone. And they leave at four, thank God. Woz always swims nude — don’t ask me why, it might be a Muslim thing — so if they see him in the pool they hide in the laundry room. Or if I put on some southern hip-hop and they happen to walk in while I’m bouncing to Dirty South doing my aerobics, they run for the laundry room.” She said without a pause, “What did Viviana say about me?”

“Oh, how nice you are, what a pleasure to work here.”

“Come on — I know she told you I was a stripper.”

“She say you were a dancer before, yes.”

“I started out in a dump on Federal Highway, got discovered and jumped to Miami Gold on Biscayne, valet parking. I was one of the very first, outside of black chicks, to do southern hip-hop, and I mean Dirty South raw and uncut, while the other girls are doing Limp Bizkit, even some old Bob Seeger and Bad Company — and that’s OK, whatever works for you. But in the meantime I’m making more doing laptops and private gigs than any girl at the Gold and I’m twenty-seven at the time, older than any of them. Woz would come in with his buddies, all suits and ties, trying hard not to look Third World. The first time he waved a fifty at me I gave him some close-up tribal strip-hop. I said, ‘Doctor, you can see better if you put your eyeballs back in your head.’ He loved that kind of talk. About the fourth visit I gave him what’s known as the million-dollar hand job and became Mrs. Mahmood.”

She told this sitting back, relaxed, smoking her Virginia Slim cigarette, Lourdes nodding, wondering at times what she was talking about, Lourdes saying “I see” in a pleasant voice when the woman paused.

Now she was saying, “His first wife stayed in Pakistan while he was here in med school. Right after he finished his residency and opened his practice, she died.” The woman said, “Let’s see …You won’t have to wear a uniform unless Woz wants you to serve drinks. Once in a while he has some of his ragtop buddies over for cocktails. Now you see these guys in their Nehru outfits and hear them chattering away in Urdu. I walk in, ‘Ah, Mrs. Mahmood,’ in that semi-British singsongy way they speak, ‘what a lovely sight you are to my eyes this evening.’ Wondering if I’m the same chick he used to watch strip.”

She took time to light another cigarette, and Lourdes said, “Do I wear my own clothes working here?”

“At first, but I’ll get you some cool outfits. What are you, about an eight?”

“My size? Yes, I believe so.”

“Let’s see — stand up.”

Lourdes rose and moved away from the table in the direction Mrs. Mahmood waved her hand. Now the woman was staring at her. She said, “I told you his first wife died?”

“Yes, ma’am, you did.”

“She burned to death.”

Lourdes said, “Oh?”

But the redheaded woman didn’t tell her how it happened. She smoked her cigarette and said, “Your legs are good, but you’re kinda short-waisted, a bit top-heavy. But don’t worry, I’ll get you fixed up. What’s your favorite color?”

“I always like blue, Mrs. Mahmood.”

She said, “Listen, I don’t want you to call me that anymore. You can say ma’am in front of Woz to get my attention, but when it’s just you and I? I’d rather you called me by my own name.”

“Yes?”

“It’s Ginger. Well, actually it’s Janeen, but all of my friends call me Ginger. The ones I have left.”

Meaning, Lourdes believed, since she was married to the doctor, friends who also danced naked, or maybe even guys.

Lourdes said, “Ginger?”

“Not Yinyor. Gin-ger. Try it again.”

“Gin-gar?”

“That’s close. Work on it.”

But she could not make herself call Mrs. Mahmood Ginger. Not yet. Not during the first few weeks. Not on the shopping trip to Worth Avenue where Mrs. Mahmood knew everyone, all the salesgirls, and some of them did call her Ginger. She picked out for Lourdes casual summer dresses that cost hundreds of dollars each and some things from Resort Wear, saying, “This is cute,” and would hand it to the salesgirl to put aside, never asking Lourdes her opinion, if she liked the clothes or not. She did, but wished some of them were blue. Everything was yellow or yellow and white or white with yellow. She didn’t have to wear a uniform, no, but now she matched the yellow and white patio, the cushions, the umbrellas, feeling herself part of the decor, invisible.

Sitting out here in the evening several times a week when the doctor didn’t come home, Mrs. Mahmood trying hard to make it seem they were friends, Mrs. Mahmood serving daiquiris in round crystal goblets, waiting on her personal maid. It was nice to be treated this way, and it would continue, Lourdes believed, until Mrs. Mahmood finally came out and said what was on her mind, what she wanted Lourdes to do for her.

The work was nothing, keep the woman’s clothes in order, water the houseplants, fix lunch for herself— and the maids, once they came in the kitchen sniffing her spicy seafood dishes. Lourdes had no trouble talking to them. They looked right at her face telling her things. Why they avoided Dr. Mahmood. Because he would ask very personal questions about their sexual lives. Why they thought Mrs. Mahmood was crazy. Because of the way she danced in just her underwear.

And in the evening the woman of the house would tell Lourdes of being bored with her life, not able to invite her friends in because Woz didn’t approve of them.

“What do I do? I hang out. I listen to music. I discuss soap operas with the gook maids. Melda stops me. ‘Oh, missus, come quick.’ They’re in the laundry room watching As the World Turns. She goes, ‘Dick follows Nikki to where she is to meet Ryder, and it look like he was going to hurt her. But Ryder came there in time to save Nikki from a violent Dick.’”

Mrs. Mahmood would tell a story like that and look at her without an expression on her face, waiting for Lourdes to smile or laugh. But what was funny about the story?

“What do I do?” was the question she asked most. “I exist, I have no life.”

“You go shopping.”

“That’s all.”

“You play golf.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“You go out with your husband.”

“To an Indian restaurant and I listen to him talk to the manager. How many times since you’ve been here has he come home in the evening? He has a girlfriend,” the good-looking redheaded woman said. “He’s with her all the time. Her or another one, and doesn’t care that I know. He’s rubbing it in my face. All guys fool around at least once in a while. Woz and his buddies live for it. It’s accepted over there, where they’re from. A guy gets tired of his wife in Pakistan? He burns her to death. Or has it done. I’m not kidding, he tells everyone her dupatta caught fire from the stove.”

Lourdes said, “Ah, that’s why you don’t cook.”

“Among other reasons. Woz’s from Rawalpindi, a town where forty women a month show up at the hospital with terrible burns. If the woman survives …Are you listening to me?”

Lourdes was sipping her daiquiri. “Yes, of course.”

“If she doesn’t die, she lives in shame because her husband, this prick who tried to burn her to death, kicked her out of the fucking house. And he gets away with it. Pakistan, India, thousands of women are burned every year ‘cause their husbands are tired of them, or they didn’t come up with a big enough dowry.”

“You say the first wife was burn to death.”

“Once he could afford white women — like, what would he need her for?”

“You afraid he’s going to burn you?”

“It’s what they do, their custom. And you know what’s ironic? Woz comes here to be a plastic surgeon, but over in Pakistan, where all these women are going around disfigured? There are no plastic surgeons to speak of.” She said, “Some of them get acid thrown in their face.” She said, “I made the biggest mistake of my life marrying a guy from a different culture, a towelhead.”

Lourdes said, “Why did you?”

She gestured. “This …” Meaning the house and all that went with it.

“So you have what you want.”

“I won’t if I leave him.”

“Maybe in the divorce he let you keep the house.”

“It’s in the prenup, I get zip. And at thirty-two I’m back stripping on Federal Highway, or working in one of those topless doughnut places. You have tits, at least you can get a job. Woz’s favorite, I’d come out in a nurse’s uniform, peel everything off but the perky little cap?” The woman’s mind moving to this without pausing. “Woz said the first time he saw the act he wanted to hire me. I’d be the first topless surgical nurse.”

Lourdes imagined this woman dancing naked, men watching her, and thought of Miss Olympia warning the cleaning women with her Biblical Integrity: no singing or dancing around while cleaning the offices, or they might catch the eye of men working late. She made it sound as if they were lying in wait. “Read the Book of Judges,” Miss Olympia said, “the twenty-first verse.” It was about men waiting for women, the daughters of Shiloh, to come out to dance so they could take them, force the women to be their wives. Lourdes knew of cleaning women who sang while they worked, but not ones who danced. She wondered what it would be like to dance naked in front of men.

“You don’t want to be with him,” Lourdes said, “but you want to live in this house.”

“There it is,” the woman who didn’t look at all like a Mrs. Mahmood said.

Lourdes sipped her daiquiri, put the glass down, and reached for the pack of Virginia Slims on the table.

“May I try one of these?”

“Help yourself.”

She lit the cigarette, sucking hard to get a good draw. She said, “I use to smoke. The way you do it made me want to smoke again. Even the way you hold the cigarette.”

Lourdes believed the woman was very close to telling what she was thinking about. Still, it was not something easy to talk about with another person, even for a woman who danced naked. Lourdes decided this evening to help her.

She said, “How would you feel if a load of wet concrete fell on your husband?”

Then wondered, sitting in the silence, not looking at the woman, if she had spoken too soon.

The redheaded woman said, “The way it happened to Mr. Zimmer? How did you feel?”

“I accepted it,” Lourdes said, “with a feeling of relief, knowing I wouldn’t be beaten no more.”

“Were you ever happy with him?”

“Not for one day.”

“You picked him, you must’ve had some idea.”

“He picked me. At the party in Cali? There were seven Colombian girls for each American. I didn’t think I would be chosen. We married …In two years I had my green card and was tired of him hitting me.”

The redheaded Mrs. Mahmood said, “You took a lot of shit, didn’t you?” and paused this time before saying, “How much does a load of concrete cost these days?”

Lourdes, without pausing, said, “Thirty thousand.”

Mrs. Mahmood said, “Jesus Christ,” but was composed, sitting back in her yellow cushions. She said, “You were ready. Viviana told you the situation and you decided to go for it.”

“I think it was you hired me,” Lourdes said, “because of Mr. Zimmer — you so interested in what happen to him. Also I could tell, from the first day we sat here, you don’t care for your husband.”

“You can understand why, can’t you? I’m scared to death of catching on fire. He lights a cigar, I watch him like a fucking hawk.”

Giving herself a reason, an excuse.

“We don’t need to talk about him,” Lourdes said. “You pay the money, all of it before, and we don’t speak of this again. You don’t pay, we still never speak of it.”

“The Colombian guys have to have it all up front?”

“The what guys?”

“The concrete guys.”

“You don’t know what kind of guys they are. What if it looks like an accident and you say oh, they didn’t do nothing, he fell off his boat.”

“Woz doesn’t have a boat.”

“Or his car was hit by a truck. You understand? You not going to know anything before.”

“I suppose they want cash.”

“Of course.”

“I can’t go to the bank and draw that much.”

“Then we forget it.”

Lourdes waited while the woman thought about it smoking her Virginia Slim, both of them smoking, until Mrs. Mahmood said, “If I give you close to twenty thousand in cash, today, right now, you still want to forget it?”

Now Lourdes had to stop and think for a moment.

“You have that much in the house?”

“My getaway money,” Mrs. Mahmood said, “in case I ever have to leave in a hurry. What I socked away in tips getting guys to spot their pants and that’s the deal, twenty grand. You want it or not? You don’t, you might as well leave, I don’t need you anymore.”

So far in the few weeks she was here, Lourdes had met Dr. Mahmood face-to-face with reason to speak to him only twice. The first time, when he came in the kitchen and asked her to prepare his breakfast, the smoked snook, a fish he ate cold with tea and whole wheat toast. He asked her to have some of the snook if she wished, saying it wasn’t as good as kippers but would do. Lourdes tried a piece; it was full of bones but she told him yes, it was good. They spoke of different kinds of fish from the ocean they liked and he seemed to be a pleasant, reasonable man.

The second time Lourdes was with him face-to-face he startled her, coming out of the swimming pool naked as she was watering the plants on the patio. He called to her to bring him his towel from the chair. When she came with it he said, “You were waiting for me?”

“No, sir, I didn’t see you.”

As he dried his face and his head, the hair so short it appeared shaved, she stared at his skin, at his round belly and his strange black penis, Lourdes looking up then as he lowered the towel.

He said, “You are a widow?” She nodded yes and he said, “When you married, you were a virgin?”

She hesitated, but then answered because she was telling a doctor, No, sir.

“It wasn’t important to your husband?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Would you see an advantage in again being a virgin?”

She had to think — it wasn’t something ever in her mind before — but didn’t want to make the doctor wait, so she said, “No, not at my age.”

The doctor said, “I can restore it if you wish.”

“Make me a virgin?”

“Surgically, a few sutures down there in the tender dark. It’s becoming popular in the Orient with girls entering marriage. Also for prostitutes. They can charge much more, often thousands of dollars for that one night.” He said, “I’m thinking of offering the procedure. Should you change your mind, wish me to examine you, I could do it in your room.”

Dr. Mahmood’s manner, and the way he looked at her that time, made Lourdes feel like taking her clothes off.

He didn’t come home the night Lourdes and Mrs. Mahmood got down to business. Or the next night. The morning of the following day, two men from the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office came to the house. They showed Lourdes their identification and asked to see Mrs. Mahmood.

She was upstairs in her bedroom trying on a black dress, looking at herself in the full-length mirror and then at Lourdes’s reflection appearing behind her.

“The police are here,” Lourdes said.

Mrs. Mahmood nodded and said, “What do you think?” turning to pose in the dress, the skirt quite short.

Lourdes read the story in the newspaper that said Dr. Wasim Mahmood, prominent etc., etc., had suffered gunshot wounds during an apparent carjacking on Flagler near Currie Park and was pronounced dead on arrival at Good Samaritan. His Mercedes was found abandoned on the street in Delray Beach.

Mrs. Mahmood left the house in her black dress. Later, she phoned to tell Lourdes she had identified the body, spent time with the police, who had no clues, nothing at all to go on, then stopped by a funeral home and arranged to have Woz cremated without delay. She said, “What do you think?”

“About what?” Lourdes said.

“Having the fucker burned.”

She said she was stopping to see friends and wouldn’t be home until late.

One a.m., following an informal evening of drinks with old friends, Mrs. Mahmood came into the kitchen from the garage and began to lose her glow.

What was going on here?

Rum and mixes on the counter, limes, a bowl of ice. A Latin beat coming from the patio. She followed the sound to a ring of burning candles, to Lourdes in a green swimsuit moving in one place to the beat, hands raised, Lourdes grinding her hips in a subtle way.

The two guys at the table smoking cigarettes saw Mrs. Mahmood, but made no move to get up.

Now Lourdes turned from them and saw her, Lourdes smiling a little as she said, “How you doing? You look like you feeling no pain.”

“You have my suit on,” Mrs. Mahmood said.

“I put on my yellow one,” Lourdes said, still moving in that subtle way, “and took it off. I don’t wear yellow no more, so I borrow one of yours. Is OK, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Mahmood said, “What’s going on?”

“This is cumbia, Colombian music for when you want to celebrate. For a wedding, a funeral, anything you want. The candles are part of it. Cumbia, you should always light candles.”

Mrs. Mahmood said, “Yeah, but what is going on?”

“We having a party for you, Ginger. The Colombian guys come to see you dance.”

It was a bad winter and a worse spring. It was the summer Bill Allen lived and died, the sweltering summer I landed a job cutting trees for Robert Wilson’s scab-logging outfit near Orford, New Hampshire. June boiled itself away into the heavy steam of July. Heat devils rose in waves off the blacktop as timber trucks rolled in. By the end of July, we switched gears and started cutting stove wood. I was cutting eight cords a day while Robert worked the hydraulic splitter. Then we’d deliver it in one of our dump trucks. Some men drove to the woodlot to pick up their own. Some of them had white salt marks on their boots and jackets from sweat — some of them smelled like beer. Most of them smelled like gasoline. They didn’t say much, just paid for their wood and left with it in their pickup trucks. They were either busy working or busy living their lies, which is work in itself. I knew about that. The hard work crushed one empty beer can day after another, adding to my lifetime pile of empties. Summer moved on, gray in spite of the bright sun.

That Friday, I was Bill Allen. I was Bill Allen all that summer. Bill Allen was what caused me to jump every time the phone rang. I was Bill Allen from Glens Falls, New York, and I was taking a summer off from college. I repeated that story as often and as loudly as possible. And each ring of the phone might be someone asking me to prove I was Bill Allen, which was out of the question. Back in December, in the middle of another, different lie, I tried to rob a gas station near Cape May, New Jersey. It was off-season then, nobody around, and I thought it would be easy. It fit the person I’d lied about being. A high school girl was behind the counter. I wore a ski mask and carried a cheap, semiautomatic pistol. I must have touched the trigger, because the gun went off. Maybe she lived. I really couldn’t say. I left fast. My brain was on fire, I hadn’t meant to shoot her. But it was too late for that. I took a roll of bills and ended up at Robert’s. Robert paid cash at the end of the week, didn’t bother with Uncle Sam, didn’t ask for references, and had plenty of backbreaking work that needed doing, without his son around to help him. Bill Allen was just the man for the job, and every day I was Bill Allen to the best of my ability. It didn’t help — my grim yesterdays cast the longest shadows in the Connecticut River Valley. I watched every car, studied every face. Bill Allen never knew a peaceful day. If it hadn’t been for the marathon workload Robert demanded, Bill Allen never would have slept. I’d have probably shot Bill Allen myself if I hadn’t been working so hard to keep him going. Some days, he lives on with different names. Allen Williams, Al Wilson, Bill Roberts. Bill Allen probably died in a fire that summer. Leave it at that, with questions about Bill Allen.

The phone at the woodlot rang around noon that Friday. I heard it, had been hearing it most of August. Roberts son John was in jail in Concord, awaiting trial for murderous assault, so there were a lot of phone calls. Robert had rigged the phone with two speakers — one bolted to the stovepipe that stuck out of the roof of our headquarters shack and the other attached by some baling wire to the sick elm on the end of the lot. The sudden scream of the phone spiked my heart rate at least twice a day. Echoing in the alleys between the giant piles of long logs. The woodlot sat surrounded by low, field-grass hills and trees in a natural bowl, just off the highway north of Hanover. Robert’s house was on the top of the hill, built with its back to the woodlot, facing a farm field. On a still day, the beauty of the Connecticut River drifted the quarter mile over the farm field and quietly framed all the other sounds, the birds, the trees in the breeze. I was never a part of those days.

The phone rang over the diesel roar of my yellow Maxi-lift, the near-dead cherry picker we kept around to police up the yard. I was working, sweating in the sun, busy shifting a full twelve-ton load of New Hampshire rock maple to the very back of the drying mountains of timber, heat against next year’s winter. The phone rang again, not that anyone wanted to talk to me. Most times I’d shut the equipment down, run across the yard, slam into the shed, pick up, and get “Robert there?” and they’d hang up when I said no. Or they wouldn’t say anything, just hang up when they knew I wasn’t Robert. And I could breathe again, because it wasn’t someone looking for me. Just locals, as if I couldn’t take a wood order. Or it would be the mechanical jail operator, would I please accept a collect call from inmate John Wilson at the Merrimack Correctional Facility. Then I’d say yes and have to go get Robert anyway. Nobody wanted to talk to me, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I let it ring. Robert would get it. Or he wouldn’t. They know where to find me, he’d say. Working in the same place for thirty years, if they can’t find me, what the hell would I want to talk to them for, he’d say. Must be stupid if they can’t get hold of me. Robert’s voice was a ton of gravel coming off a truck, years of cigarettes mucking up the inside of his barrel chest. There was no sign at the dirt road entrance to the woodlot. It was Robert Wilson’s woodlot, and everyone knew without asking.

Robert came out of the shed and waved at me to shut the cherry picker down. I flipped a switch, turned the keys back a click, and cranked the brake on. I walked over to the shed. Robert had his jean coveralls on. He squinted against the sun, nodded, and spoke.

“That was Frank Lord. He wants his wood tomorrow.” Robert took twenty-five dollars out of his pocket and handed it to me. That was our deal — fifty dollars if I had to work on Saturday, twenty-five up front. “You can fix his load today.”

I nodded. “What does he get?”

“Two cord, plus half a cord of kiln-dried.”

Robert had converted an old singlewide trailer into a kiln and most of his customers ordered mixed loads of both air- and kiln-dried. Kiln-dried wood burns hotter than air-dried. Mixing a kiln-dried log in with every fire produces more heat, allows the air-dried wood to burn more efficiently. People with woodstoves got as much heat out of two air-dried cords mixed with half a cord of kiln-dried as people who burned four straight cords. When a single woodstove is the primary heat source for a whole house, each log has to do its job. Robert charged more for the kiln-dried and nobody kicked about the price.

I took my Texaco ball cap off. “If you don’t want it mixed, we’ll have to take two trucks.” Lord’s farm was thirty-five miles north and slightly west, just on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River, near Newbury. The river came straight down through the Northeast Kingdom, and just past Wells River, it made an oxbow, flowing briefly north in a U-shaped collar before returning to its southern course. Lord’s farm encompassed all of the oxbow, stretching from Route 5 all the way east to the river, which was the Vermont-New Hampshire border. It was the most beautiful spot on earth, the most amazing fields and woods and sky that Bill Allen had ever seen. Robert and I had driven past once that summer, on the way to Wells River to pick up a chain saw. Looking out of the truck as we drove up Route 5 and seeing Lord’s white farm buildings and fields, I thought maybe I could make it through Bill Allen and still have a life, somewhere. On the way back, the view of the green fields sweeping out into the bend of the river made everything stop. I didn’t hear the engine of the truck, nor the gears. We floated along the road as my mind took picture after picture, of the farm and the fields and the blue sky with the sun setting. That bend in the river. I came alive for a minute, and as the farm slowly passed by I died again, back into the zombie lie of Bill Allen.

Robert was talking to me, shaking his head. “He’s got some extra work. Stobe can drive the small rig.”

Stobik lived south of the woodlot, in White River Junction, and did odd jobs for Robert. Stobik’s wife was as big as the house they lived in. He didn’t have a phone — if Robert needed him for something, I’d drive down first thing in the morning and pick him up. Just pulled my beat-up Bronco into his dooryard and sat there till he came out. Sometimes, a thin, white hand would appear in the dirty window, waving me away. Too drunk to work. He lived in a culvert on the woodlot for about a month when things got tough with his wife. He was skinny as a rail, hadn’t showered in about a week, month, year. His teeth were broken brown stumps and his fingers were stained from tobacco. But he could cut and stack firewood faster than two men, and at half the price.

“I’ll pick him up in the morning,” I said.

“That’s OK. I’ll get him tonight and let him sleep on the porch,” Robert said. “I want to make sure he can work tomorrow.” He walked back inside the shed. I fixed Frank Lord’s load of wood for the next day and went to the loft of a barn I called home.

Next morning, I was at the woodlot at five-thirty. It was pitch black. Robert was already there, sitting in his pickup truck, drinking coffee and eating a hard-boiled egg. He had the running lights on. I drove slowly over to the open driver’s side window.

“Thought you overslept,” he said.

I climbed out of the Bronco and got into the big white rig. Stobik got behind the wheel of the small one. Robert was driving the big rig.

The floor of the white rig was taken up with logging chains. The last job Robert had used it for was a semicommercial haul, and he’d left the chains in. He had a whole barn full of them up by his house. He’d load them in the truck and then get weighed, toss them out at the job and then leave them there. The customer paid the difference. How many people paid for those chains, only God knows. The fuse box was open on the passenger’s side, so that any metal that jumped up during the ride could ‘cause a spark or worse. It made for a tense ride.

We started the drive up to North Haverhill on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River. It was beautiful. The sun began to shine. The truck could only make thirty-five fully loaded. Stobik was always right behind us, with the flashers on. Robert wrestled the gears up a hill. Then he lit a cigarette and spoke.

“When I was fifteen, I ran away and ended up on Frank Lord’s farm.” He looked over at me.

“I didn’t know that,” I answered.

“Frank Lord worked me so hard I thought I was going to drop. But it straightened me out. Best thing that ever happened to me.”

“What was wrong with you?” I asked.

“Bad temper,” Robert answered. “Bad temper and drinking.” We passed a broken-down barn.

“At fifteen?”

Robert nodded. “Back then, fifteen was like thirty-five. You had a job, a car — they made you live life back then, and if you didn’t like it, get the fuck out.” He took a drag off his cigarette. He was silent, smoking, for the rest of the ride.

Frank Lord was standing in his driveway as we pulled up. He looked as though we’d just been there yesterday He had an oxygen mask on and a green tank marked oxygen in white letters standing next to him. The fields stretched out behind him all the way to the river. The big white farmhouse behind him needed a coat of paint. There were a couple of barns and buildings. They needed paint too. Parked alongside the main house was a brand-new pickup truck. On top of the main house was a black wrought iron weather vane, the silhouette of a big black stallion. The weather vane pointed north.

“What are you going to do, make something out of yourself or what?” His voice was muffled behind the clear plastic mask. His breath made it fill with mist. He pointed over toward the nearest barn. “Put it over there,” he said through the mask. “Don’t mix it together.” He and Robert walked slowly toward the main house and sat on the porch in kitchen chairs. Stobik and I unloaded and stacked the wood. Stobik worked fast. His stacks were the straightest I’ve ever seen. His face seemed frozen in a perpetual grin as we worked in silence. The stacks came out perfectly. We went back over to Robert and Frank on the porch. It was just around noon.

“We’ve got some other work to do,” Frank said. He held out a piece of paper.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Yesterday, in the morning, Judge Harris stopped over here. Unofficially. I’ve known his family for probably, oh, fifty years.” The breeze tossed the tops of the corn. “He told me that the state police got a tip I was growing marijuana. They were trying to get a warrant to search my house and my fields.” He held out the paper. “Harris dropped this off.” I read the paper. It was a one-day special permit for a controlled burn.

“What do you want us to do?” I asked.

“Burn it, all of it. Right back to the river. I don’t want a single thing left alive.” He stared at the porch and then looked straight at Stobik and me. “Just in case there’s a little Mexican hay that got mixed in with my corn somehow.”

Robert came down off the porch to supervise. He and I rigged up a sprayer with some gas and soaked a good portion of the front field. We left a wide strip in the middle completely dry. Then we drove the tractor through a thin line of trees, and there was a huge cornfield that stretched all the way to the river. In the middle of the field, probably six hundred yards away, was a small white shack. Robert spoke up.

“That’s where my first wife and I lived.” He looked at it.

I looked over at him. “I never think about you being married.”

He nodded. “Well I was, for a while.” He pointed his chin at the shack. “People that live in places like that don’t very often stay married.” He stared at the white shack. “I had a bad temper then.”

I nodded. “Should we burn it?”

“Oh yeah.” Robert wiped his forehead with a red kerchief. Sweat had run down from his forehead and got into his eyes and on his chin.

“What if there are people in it?” I looked over at the shack.

“Then fuck ‘em, let ‘em burn. Their name isn’t Lord and they don’t belong on this property.” Robert spit into the field. “Frank said burn it, and that’s what we’re going to do.” He looked across the rows of corn toward the river. “Hotter than Hades.” He looked over at me. “You’ll never be cold again, after this.” He started to drive the tractor toward the white shack with me on the back of his seat. “Here, watch this,” he shouted over the tractor.

We pulled up next to the shack. The windows on the one side had been broken, but the chicken wire in the glass remained, rusted from the weather I heard a faint hum.

“Watch this,” Robert said. He took the nozzle from the gas sprayer and aimed a fine stream at the window. I saw some wasps beginning to fly out of the broken window. Robert pointed his chin at them and talked above the noise of the tractor. “Wasps,” he said. “They’re the worst.” Some moved slowly, clinging to the chicken wire. I could see their insect heads, sectioned bodies, and stingers. They were getting soaked with gas. “Throw a match,” Robert said.

“No,” I said. “It’ll explode.” I pointed at the sprayer and the tank of gas on the tractor.

“Gas doesn’t burn,” Robert said. “It’s wet —nothing that’s wet can burn. It’s the fumes that burn.” He took a wood match out of his pocket and struck it on the tractor, then tossed the small flame into the gas spray.

The air groaned and came alive with fire. The wasps were flying full-bore out of the broken window now, right into the wall of flame and through it. Their wings were on fire, still beating, the air currents lifting them up in the heat even as they burned to nothing. A flaming wasp landed on my work shirt and I smacked it into the corn. Now they were all over, burning and flying. Stinging anything they touched. One lost a wing and kept flying, a coin-sized flaming circle into the corn. I watched one come out of the window whole, coated shiny with gas. It flew over the corn, its wings caught fire and kept beating as the body burned to a cinder, the wings still going until they vanished in tiny ash. Robert smacked some wasps off his arm and backed the tractor up, driving over to the river.

We soaked the corn next to the river and then sprayed it a little thinner up on the bank. “The fire will seek the gas,” Robert said. “That patch we left in the middle will burn slower than the rest. We’ll be all set.”

We decided that the best way to do it would be to have Stobik drive the truck around to the New Hampshire side of the oxbow. Then I’d light the fire from the riverbank too, so that the onrushing flames wouldn’t somehow jump the river. Robert drove the tractor back through the field, leaving me standing right on the bend in the river with a box of matches. I could barely see the white shack over the corn. The river ran behind me, softly laughing its way over the rocks. Everything was still, and my heart almost stopped panting for the first time in a long time. Bill Allen stood on the riverbank and knew he needed to die. He knew he had to go back to the place he was born and answer for the crime that fathered him. I heard the airhorn blow from the big rig, Robert’s signal to me that he was clear of the fields. As I lit the corn on fire, Bill Allen decided to throw himself into the blaze.

The flames grew fast, and I jumped out into the Connecticut River. It must have been cool, but I didn’t feel it. The heat from the fire seemed to reach across the oxbow and right through the water. I climbed up on the bank on the other side just in time to see Robert’s white wedding shack take the flames full force. The walls and roof caught like they were made of rice paper, and in the next instant the shack was gone. The fire was so hot, so intense, I couldn’t look at it. I walked farther up on the bank and Stobik was there with the small truck. I got in and we started to drive back toward Vermont. A black cloud grew in the air of the beautiful blue horizon and we watched it for miles. It seemed as if we’d permanently smudged the sky.

When we got back to Lord’s farm, Robert was busy fending off several local volunteer fire companies, who had arrived with sirens and lights going. He just kept showing them the permit Judge Harris had given to Frank. Stobik and I stayed in the small truck. At one point, I swear the flames in the field were higher than the farmhouse. Stobik backed the truck up so the windshield wouldn’t crack. I finally got out and sat alone in the passenger’s side of the big rig. I fell asleep. It was late that night when Robert climbed in to drive and slammed his door, bringing me straight up in my seat. The fields were still burning and all I could smell was smoke. We drove slowly back to the woodlot and I slept there in my Bronco. The next day — Sunday—I was going to drive all day and turn myself in. Bill Allen was dead.

The screaming echo of the phone over the woodlot woke me. I saw Robert go into the headquarters shack to answer it. He came back out shortly, still in his coveralls, and walked over to the Bronco. I got out. He handed me a styrofoam cup of coffee and pointed his chin at the Bronco.

“Comfy in there last night?” he asked. I nodded and he went on. “That was John on the phone. He’s going to plead out tomorrow and take two years.” Robert shook his head. “Anyway, you’ve got tomorrow off. I’m going up to Concord to be at the sentencing.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He handed it to me.

“What’s this for?” I said.

Robert narrowed his eyes and looked at me. “Do you need it or not?” His voice was the hardest love I’d ever felt. I nodded. He turned around and started walking back to the shed. I watched him close the door. I climbed back in the Bronco and headed out onto the highway. I drove north, and crossed over into Vermont. There was still a huge black cloud in the sky over the oxbow. I drove up Route 5 and looked out over the burnt fields, still smoldering, scorched dead. Lord’s farm looked gray from the smoke. I drove up into the Northeast Kingdom. I never did find the courage to turn myself in, and things got worse. I spent the winter at a logging camp in Quebec.

I called once, when I hit a jam out in North Dakota. I called from a phone booth outside a diner. I recognized John’s voice the second he spoke. I hung up. Later, much later, in another life, with another name, we were driving and someone handed me a road atlas. I flipped through it and found Vermont and New Hampshire were together on the same page. I started tracing their shared border, the Connecticut River, north toward Canada. I dropped the atlas when my finger reached the oxbow. For just that split second, right on the tip of my finger, the surface of the map was scorching hot. I heard the roar of the fire, the little white house burning. The air rushing to be eaten by the flames. I smelled the gasoline. Riding across the top of the fire on a black horse was Bill Allen. Three dark shapes followed swiftly after him, the burning wasps in their long black hair, chasing him. Catching him and dragging him down into the fire, screaming.

Years later, on the security ward at Western State Hospital near Tacoma, I saw a man in a straitjacket, strapped to a gurney. I walked over to him and spoke.

“I didn’t know they used straitjackets anymore.”

He could barely move his head. “Well, they do.” The smell of ether was everywhere. He was quiet as a white-jacketed doctor walked by. “Say, Mac, scratch my shoulder, will you?”

I slowly reached down and began scratching the outside of the thick canvas that bound him. Solid steel mesh covered the ward windows.

“Harder,” he said. “I can barely feel it.” He looked up at me. “I think they’re trying to save on the heat. Aren’t you cold?” I shook my head. “I’m cold all the time,” he said.

I dug my nails into the canvas on his right shoulder. “My name is John Wilson,” I said.

He looked at me, his eyes wide. “That’s my name,” he said softly.

I stopped scratching the straitjacket. “What’s your middle name?” I asked.

He shook his head slightly and closed his eyes. “Same as yours,” he said. He shivered. It was cold. But my paper gown was soaked with dry sweat and my face was hot. I could smell smoke.

Sounds like a dangerous woman,” my friend said. He’d not been with me in the bar the night before, not seen her leave or me follow after her.

I took a sip of vodka and glanced toward the window. Out­side, the afternoon light was no doubt as it had always been, but it didn’t look the same to me anymore. “I guess she was,” I told him.

“So what happened?” my friend asked.

This: I was in the bar. It was two in the morning. The peo­ple around me were like tapes from Mission Impossible, only without the mission, just that self-destruction warning. You could almost hear it playing in their heads, stark and unyield­ing as the Chinese proverb: If you continue down the road you’re on, you will get to where you’re headed.

Where were they headed? As I saw it, mostly toward more of the same. They would finish this drink, this night, this week… and so on. At some point, they would die like animals after a long, exhausting haul, numb with weariness as they fi­nally slumped beneath the burden. Worse still, according to me, this bar was the world, its few dully buzzing flies no more than stand-ins for the rest of us.

I had written about “us” in novel after novel. My tone was always bleak. In my books, there were no happy endings. Peo­ple were lost and helpless, even the smart ones… especially the smart ones. Everything was vain and everything was fleet­ing. The strongest emotions quickly waned. A few things mat­tered, but only because we made them matter by insisting that they should. If we needed evidence of this, we made it up. As far as I could tell, there were basically three kinds of people, the ones who deceived others, the ones who deceived themselves, and the ones who understood that the people in the first two categories were the only ones they were ever like to meet. I put myself firmly in the third category, of course, the only member of my club, the one guy who understood that to see things in full light was the greatest darkness one could know.

And so I walked the streets and haunted the bars, and was, according to me, the only man on earth who had nothing to learn.

Then suddenly, she walked through the door.

To black, she offered one concession. A string of small white pearls. Everything else, the hat, the dress, the stockings, the shoes, the little purse… everything else was black. And so, what she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman, the broad-billed hat that discreetly covers one eye, high heels tapping on rain-slicked streets, foreign currency in the small black purse. She offered the spy, the murderess, the lure of a secret past, and, of course, that little hint of erotic peril.

She knows the way men think, I said to myself as she walked to the end of the bar and took her seat. She knows the way they think… and she’s using it.

“So you thought she was what?” my friend asked.

I shrugged. “Inconsequential.”

And so I watched without interest as the melodramatic touches accumulated. She lit a cigarette and smoked it pen­sively, her eyes opening and closing languidly, with the sort of world-weariness one sees in the heroines of old black-and-white movies.

Yes, that’s it, I told myself. She is noir in the worst possible sense, thin as strips of film, and just as transparent at the edges. I looked at my watch. Time to go, I thought, time to go to my apartment and stretch out on the bed and wallow in my dark superiority, congratulate myself that once again I had not been fooled by the things that fool other men.

But it was only two in the morning, early for me, so I lin­gered in the bar, and wondered, though only vaguely, with no more than passing interest, if she had anything else to offer be­yond this little show of being “dangerous.”

“Then what?” my friend asked.

Then she reached in her purse, drew out a small black pad, flipped it open, wrote something, and passed it down the bar to me.

The paper was folded, of course. I unfolded it and read what she’d written: I know what you know about life.

It was exactly the kind of nonsense I’d expected, so I briskly scrawled a reply on the back of the paper and sent it down the bar to her.

She opened it and read what I’d written: No, you don’t. And you never will. Then, without so much as looking up, she wrote a lightning-fast response and sent it hurtling back up the bar, quickly gathering her things and heading for the door as it went from hand to hand, so that she’d already left the place by the time it reached me.

I opened the note and read her reply: C+.

My anger spiked. C+? How dare she! I whirled around on the stool and rushed out of the bar, where I found her leaning casually against the little wrought-iron fence that surrounded it.

I waved the note in front of her. “What’s this supposed to mean?” I demanded.

She smiled and offered me a cigarette. “I’ve read your books. They’re really dreadful.”

I don’t smoke, but I took the cigarette anyway. “So, you’re a critic?”

She gave no notice to what I’d just said. “The writing is beautiful,” she said as she lit my cigarette with a red plastic lighter. “But the idea is really bad.”

“Which idea is that?”

“You only have one,” she said with total confidence. “That everything ends badly, no matter what we do.” Her face tight­ened. “So, here’s the deal. When I wrote, I know what you know about life, that wasn’t exactly true. I know more.”

I took a long draw on the cigarette. “So,” I asked lightly. “Is this a date?”

She shook her head, and suddenly her eyes grew dark and somber. “No,” she said, “this is a love affair.”

I started to speak, but she lifted her hand and stopped me.

“I could do it with you, you know,” she whispered, her voice now very grave. “Because you know almost as much as I do, and I want to do it with someone who knows that much.”

From the look in her eyes I knew exactly what she wanted to “do” with me. “We’d need a gun,” I told her with a dismiss­ing grin.

She shook her head. “I’d never use a gun. It would have to be pills.” She let her cigarette drop from her fingers. “And we’d need to be in bed together,” she added matter-of-factly. “Naked and in each other’s arms.”

“Why is that?”

Her smile was soft as light. “To show the world that you were wrong.” The smile widened, almost playfully. “That something can end well.”

“Suicide?” I asked. “You call that ending well?”

She laughed and tossed her hair slightly. “It’s the only way to end well,” she said.

And I thought, She’s nuts, but for the first time in years, I wanted to hear more.

“A suicide pact,” my friend whispered.

“That’s what she offered, yes,” I told him. “But not right away. She said that there was something I needed to do first.”

“What?”

“Fall in love with her,” I answered quietly.

“And she knew you would?” my friend asked. “Fall in love with her, I mean?”

“Yes, she did,” I told him.

But she also knew that the usual process was fraught with trial, a road scattered with pits and snares. So she’d decided to forgo courtship, the tedious business of exchanging mounds of trivial biographical information. Physical intimacy would come first, she said. It was the gate through which we would enter each other.

“So, we should go to my place now,” she concluded, after offering her brief explanation of all this. “We need to fuck.”

“Fuck?” I laughed. “You’re not exactly the romantic type, are you?”

“You can undress me if you want to,” she said. “Or, if not, I’ll do it myself.”

“Maybe you should do it,” I said jokingly. “That way I won’t dislocate your shoulder.”

She laughed. “I get suspicious if a man does it really well. It makes me think that he’s a bit too familiar with all those fe­male clasps and snaps and zippers. It makes me wonder if per­haps he’s… worn it all himself.”

“Jesus,” I moaned. “You actually think about things like that?”

Her gaze and tone became deadly serious. “I can’t handle every need,” she said.

There was a question in her eyes, and I knew what the question was. She wanted to know if I had any secret cravings or odd sexual quirks, any “needs” she could not “handle.”

“I’m strictly double-vanilla,” I assured her. “No odd fla­vors.”

She appeared slightly relieved. “My name is Veronica,” she said.

“I was afraid you weren’t going to tell me,” I said. “That it was going to be one of those things where I never know who you are and vice versa. You know, ships that pass in the night.”

“How banal that would be,” she said.

“Yes, it would.”

“Besides,” she added. “I already knew who you were.”

“Yes, of course.”

“My apartment is just down the block,” she said, then of­fered to take me there.

As it turned out, her place was a bit farther than just down the block, but it didn’t matter. It was after two in the morning and the streets were pretty much deserted. Even in New York, cer­tain streets, especially certain Greenwich Village streets, are never all that busy, and once people have gone to and from work, they become little more than country lanes. That night the trees that lined Jane Street swayed gently in the cool au­tumn air, and I let myself accept what I thought she’d offered, which, for all the “dangerous” talk, would probably be no more than a brief erotic episode, maybe breakfast in the morning, a little light conversation over coffee and scones. Then she would go her way and I would go mine because one of us would want it that way and the other wouldn’t care enough to argue the point.

“The vodka’s in the freezer,” she said as she opened the door to her apartment, stepped inside and switched on the light.

I walked into the kitchen while Veronica headed down a nearby corridor. The refrigerator was at the far end of the room, its freezer door festooned with pictures of Veronica and a short, bald little man who looked to be in his late forties.

“That’s Douglas,” Veronica called from somewhere down the hall. “My husband.”

I felt a pinch of apprehension.

“He’s away,” she added.

The apprehension fled.

“I should hope so,” I said as I opened the freezer door.

Veronica’s husband faced me again when I closed it, the ice-encrusted vodka bottle now securely in my right hand. Now I noticed that Douglas was somewhat portly, deep lines around his eyes, graying at the temples. Okay, I thought, maybe midfifties. And yet, for all that, he had a boyish face. In the pictures, Veronica towered over him, his bald head barely reaching her broad shoulders. She was in every photograph, his arm always wrapped affectionately around her waist. And in every photograph Douglas was smiling with such unencumbered joy that I knew that all his happiness came from her, from being with her, being her husband, that when he was with her he felt tall and dark and handsome, witty and smart and perhaps even a bit elegant. That was what she offered him, I supposed, the illusion that he deserved her.

“He was a bartender when I met him,” she said as she swept into the kitchen. “Now he sells software.” She lifted an impos­sibly long and graceful right arm to the cabinet at her side, opened its plain wooden doors and retrieved two decidedly or­dinary glasses, which she placed squarely on the plain Formica counter before turning to face me. “From the beginning, I was always completely comfortable with Douglas,” she said.

She could not have said it more clearly. Douglas was the man she had chosen to marry because he possessed whatever characteristics she required to feel utterly at home when she was at home, utterly herself when she was with him. If there had been some great love in her life, she had chosen Douglas over him because with Douglas she could live without change or alteration, without applying makeup to her soul. Because of that, I suddenly found myself vaguely envious of this squat lit­tle man, of the peace he gave her, the way she could no doubt rest in the crook of his arm, breathing slowly, falling asleep.

“He seems… nice,” I said.

Veronica gave no indication that she’d heard me. “You take it straight,” she said, referring to the way I took my drink, which was clearly something she’d noticed in the bar.

I nodded.

“Me, too.”

She poured our drinks and directed me into the living room. The curtains were drawn tightly together, and looked a bit dusty. The furniture had been chosen for comfort rather than for style. There were a few potted plants, most of them brown at the edges. You could almost hear them begging for water. No dogs. No cats. No goldfish or hamsters or snakes or white mice. When Douglas was away, it appeared, Veronica lived alone.

Except for books, but they were everywhere. They filled shelf after towering shelf, or lay stacked to the point of top­pling along the room’s four walls. The authors ran the gamut, from the oldest classics to the most recent best sellers. Stendahl and Dostoyevsky rested shoulder to shoulder with Anne Rice and Michael Crichton. A few of my own stark titles were lined up between Robert Stone and Patrick O’Brian. There was no history or social science in her collection, and no poetry. It was all fiction, as Veronica herself seemed to be, a character she’d made up and was determined to play to the end. What she of­fered, I believed at that moment, was a well-rounded perfor­mance of a New York eccentric.

She touched her glass to mine, her eyes very still. “To what we’re going to do,” she said.

“Are we still talking about committing suicide together?” I scoffed as I lowered my glass without drinking. “What is this, Veronica? Some kind of Sweet November rewrite?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“You know, that stupid movie where the dying girl takes this guy and lives with him for a month and-”

“I would never live with you,” Veronica interrupted.

“That’s not my point.”

“And I’m not dying,” Veronica added. She took a quick sip of vodka, placed her glass onto the small table beside the sofa, then rose, as if suddenly called by an invisible voice, and of­fered her hand to me. “Time for bed,” she said.

“Just like that?” my friend asked.

“Just like that.”

He looked at me warily. “This is a fantasy, right?” he asked. “This is something you made up.”

“What happened next no one could make up.”

“And what was that?”

She led me to the bedroom. We undressed silently. She crawled beneath the single sheet and patted the mattress. “This side is yours.”

“Until Douglas gets back,” I said as I drew in beside her.

“Douglas isn’t coming back,” she said, then leaned over and kissed me very softly.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s dead,” she answered lightly. “He’s been dead for three years.”

And thus I learned of her husband’s slow decline, the can­cer that began in his intestines and migrated to his liver and pancreas. It had taken six months, and each day Veronica had attended him. She would look in on him on her way to work every morning, then return to him at night, stay at his bedside until she was sure he would not awaken, then, at last, return here, to this very bed, to sleep for an hour or two, three at the most, before beginning the routine again.

“Six months,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

“A dying person is a lot of work,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I told her. “I was with my father while he died. I was exhausted by the time he finally went.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said. “The physical part. The lack of sleep. That wasn’t the hard part when it came to Douglas.”

“What was?”

“Making him believe I loved him.”

“You didn’t?”

“No,” she said, then kissed me again, a kiss that lingered a bit longer than the first, and gave me time to remember that just a few minutes before she’d told me that Douglas was cur­rently selling software.

“Software,” I said, drawing my lips from hers. “You said he sold software now.”

She nodded. “Yes, he does.”

“To other dead people?” I lifted myself up and propped my head in my hand. “I can’t wait for an explanation.”

“There is no explanation,” she said. “Douglas always wanted to sell software. So, instead of saying that he’s in the ground or in heaven, I just say he’s selling software.”

“So you give death a cute name,” I said. “And that way you don’t have to face it.”

“I say he’s selling software because I don’t want the conver­sation that would follow if I told you he was dead,” Veronica said sharply. “I hate consolation.”

“Then why did you tell me at all?”

“Because you need to know that I’m like you,” she an­swered. “Alone. That no one will mourn.”

“So we’re back to suicide again,” I said. “Do you always cir­cle back to death?”

She smiled. “Do you know what La Rouchefoucauld said about death?”

“It’s not on the tip of my tongue, no.”

“He said that it was like the sun. You couldn’t look at it for very long without going blind.” She shrugged. “But I think that if you look at it all the time, measure it against living, then you can choose.”

I drew her into my arms. “You’re a bit quirky, Veronica,” I said playfully.

She shook her head, her voice quite self-assured. “No,” she insisted. “I’m the sanest person you’ve ever met.”

“And she was,” I told my friend.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she offered more than anyone I’d ever known.”

“What did she offer?”

That night she offered the cool, sweet luxury of her flesh, a kiss that so brimmed with feeling I thought her lips would give off sparks.

We made love for a time then, suddenly, she stopped and pulled away. “Time to chat,” she said, then walked to the kitchen and returned with another two glasses of vodka.

“Time to chat?” I asked, still disconcerted with how abruptly she’d drawn away from me.

“I don’t have all night,” she said as she offered me the glass.

I took the drink from her hand. “So we’re not going to toast the dawn together?”

She sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her body sleek and smooth in the blue light. “You’re glib,” she said as she clinked her glass to mine. “So am I.” She leaned forward slightly, her eyes glowing in the dark. “Here’s the deal,” she added. “If you’re glib, you finally get to the end of what you can say. There are no words left for anything important. Just sleek words. Clever. Glib. That’s when you know you’ve gone as far as you can go, that you have nothing left to offer but smooth talk.”

“That’s rather harsh, don’t you think?” I took a sip of vodka. “And besides, what’s the alternative to talking?”

“Silence,” Veronica answered.

I laughed. “Veronica, you are hardly silent.”

“Most of the time, I am,” she said.

“And what does this silence conceal?”

“Anger,” she answered without the slightest hesitation. “Fury.”

Her face grew taut, and I thought the rage I suddenly glimpsed within her would set her hair ablaze.

“Of course you can get to silence in other ways,” she said. She took a quick, brutal drink from her glass. “Douglas got there, but not by being glib.”

“How then?”

“By suffering.”

I looked for her lip to tremble, but it didn’t. I looked for moisture in her eyes, but they were dry and still.

“By being terrified,” she added. She glanced toward the window, let her gaze linger there for a moment, then returned to me. “The last week he didn’t say a word,” she told me. “That’s when I knew it was time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for Douglas to get a new job.”

I felt my heart stop dead. “In… software?” I asked.

She lit a candle, placed it on the narrow shelf above us, then yanked open the top drawer of the small table that sat beside her bed, retrieved a plastic pill case and shook it so that I could hear the pills rattling dryly inside it.

“I’d planned to give him these,” she said, “but there wasn’t time.”

“What do you mean, there wasn’t time?”

“I saw it in his face,” she answered. “He was living like someone already in the ground. Someone buried and waiting for the air to give out. That kind of suffering, terror. I knew that one additional minute would be too long.”

She placed the pills on the table, then grabbed the pillow upon which her head had rested, fluffed it gently, pressed it down upon my face, then lifted it again in a way that made me feel strangely returned to life. “It was all I had left to offer him,” she said quietly, then took a long, slow pull on the vodka. “We have so little to offer.”

And I thought with sudden, devastating clarity, Her dark­ness is real; mine is just a pose.

“What did you do?” my friend asked.

“I touched her face.”

“And what did she do?”

She pulled my hand away almost violently. “This isn’t about me,” she said.

“Right now, everything is about you,” I told her.

She grimaced. “Bullshit.”

“I mean it.”

“Which only makes it worse,” she said sourly. Her eyes rolled upward, then came down again, dark and steely, like the twin barrels of a shotgun. “This is about you,” she said crisply. “And I won’t be cheated out of it.”

I shrugged. “All life is a cheat, Veronica.”

Her eyes tensed. “That isn’t true and you know it,” she said, her voice almost a hiss. “And because of that you’re a liar, and all your books are lies.” Her voice was so firm, so hard and un­relenting, I felt it like a wind. “Here’s the deal,” she said. “If you really felt the way you write, you’d kill yourself. If all that feel­ing was really in you, down deep in you, you wouldn’t be able to live a single day.” She dared me to contradict her, and when I didn’t, she said, “You see everything but yourself. And here’s what you don’t see about yourself, Jack. You don’t see that you’re happy.”

“Happy?” I asked.

“You are happy,” Veronica insisted. “You won’t admit it, but you are. And you should be.”

Then she offered the elements of my happiness, the sheer good fortune I had enjoyed, health, adequate money, work I loved, little dollops of achievement.

“Compared to you, Douglas had nothing,” she said.

“He had you,” I said cautiously.

Her face soured again. “If you make it about me,” she warned, “you’ll have to leave.”

She was serious, and I knew it. So I said, “What do you want from me, Veronica?”

Without hesitation she said, “I want you to stay.”

“Stay?”

“While I take the pills.”

I remembered the line she’d said just outside the bar only a few hours before, I could do it with you, you know.

I had taken this to mean that we would do it together, but now I knew that she had never included me. There was no pact. There was only Veronica.

“Will you do it?” she asked somberly.

“When?” I asked quietly.

She took the pills and poured them into her hand. “Now,” she said.

“No,” I blurted, and started to rise.

She pressed me down hard, her gaze relentlessly deter­mined, so that I knew she would do what she intended, that there was no way to stop her.

“I want out of this noise,” she said, pressing her one empty hand to her right ear. “Everything is so loud.”

In the fierceness of those words I glimpsed the full measure of her torment, all she no longer wished to hear, the clanging daily vanities and thudding repetitions, the catcalls of the inferior, the trumpeting mediocrities, all of which lifted to a soul-searing roar the unbearable clatter of the wheel. She wanted an end to all of that, a silence she would not be denied.

“Will you stay?” she asked quietly.

I knew that any argument would strike her as just more noise she could not bear. It would clang like cymbals, only add lo the mindless cacophony she was so desperate to escape.

And so I said, “All right.”

With no further word, she swallowed the pills two at a time, washing them down with quick sips of vodka.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Veronica,” I told her when she took the last of them and put down the glass.

She curled under my arm. “Say what I said to Douglas,” she told me. “In the end it’s all anyone can offer.”

“What did you say to him?” I asked softly.

“I’m here.”

I drew my arm tightly around her. “I’m here,” I said.

She snuggled in more closely. “Yes.”

“And so you stayed?” my friend asked.

I nodded.

“And she… ?”

“In about an hour,” I told him. “Then I dressed and walked the streets until I finally came here.”

“So right now she’s…”

“Gone,” I said quickly, and suddenly imagined her sitting in the park across from the bar, still and silent.

“You couldn’t stop her?”

“With what?” I asked. “I had nothing to offer.” I glanced out the front window of the bar. “And besides,” I added, “for a truly dangerous woman, a man is never the answer. That’s what makes her dangerous. At least, to us.”

My friend looked at me oddly. “So what are you going to do now?” he asked.

At the far end of the park a young couple was screaming at each other, the woman’s fist in the air, the man shaking his head in violent confusion. I could imagine Veronica turning from them, walking silently away.

“I’m going to keep quiet,” I answered. “For a very long time.”

Then I got to my feet and walked out into the whirling city. The usual dissonance engulfed me, all the chaos and disarray, but I felt no need to add my own inchoate discord to the rest.

It was a strangely sweet feeling, I realized as I turned and headed home, embracing silence.

From deep within her enveloping calm, Veronica offered me her final words.

I know.