Because they were boys, no one believed them, including the old men who gathered each morning at the Riverside Gas and Grocery. These retirees huddled by the potbellied stove in rain and cold, on clear days sunning out front like reptiles. The store’s middle-aged owner, Cedric Henson, endured the trio’s presence with a resigned equanimity. When he’d bought the store five years earlier, Cedric assumed they were part of the purchase price, in that way no different from the leaky roof and the submerged basement whenever the Tuckaseegee overspilled its banks.

The two boys, who were brothers, had come clattering across the bridge, red-faced and already holding their arms apart as if carrying huge, invisible packages. They stood gasping a few moments, waiting for enough breath to tell what they’d seen.

“This big,” the twelve-year-old said, his arms spread wide apart as he could stretch them.

“No, even bigger,” the younger boy said.

Cedric had been peering through the door screen but now stepped outside.

“What you boys talking about?” he asked.

“A fish,” the older boy said, “in the pool below the bridge.”

Rudisell, the oldest of the three at eighty-nine, expertly delivered a squirt of tobacco between himself and the boys. Creech and Campbell simply nodded at each other knowingly. Time had banished them to the role of spectators in the world’s affairs, and from their perspective the world both near and far was now controlled by fools. The causes of this devolution dominated their daily conversations. The octogenarians Rudisell and Campbell blamed Franklin Roosevelt and fluoridated water. Creech, a mere seventy-six, leaned toward Elvis Presley and television.

“The biggest fish ever come out of the Tuckaseegee was a thirty-one-inch brown trout caught in nineteen and forty-eight,” Rudisell announced to all present. “I seen it weighed in this very store. Fifteen pounds and two ounces.”

The other men nodded in confirmation.

“This fish was twice bigger than that,” the younger boy challenged.

The boy’s impudence elicited another spray of tobacco juice from Rudisell.

“Must be a whale what swum up from the ocean,” Creech said. “Though that’s a long haul. It’d have to come up the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi, for the water this side of the mountain flows west.”

“Could be one of them log fish,” Campbell offered. “They get that big. Them rascals will grab your bait and then turn into a big chunk of wood afore you can set the hook.”

“They’s snakes all over that pool, even some copperheads,” Rudisell warned. “You younguns best go somewhere else to make up your tall tales.”

The smaller boy pooched out his lower lip as if about to cry.

“Come on,” his brother said. “They ain’t going to believe us.”

The boys walked back across the road to the bridge. The old men watched as the youths leaned over the railing, took a last look before climbing atop their bicycles and riding away.

“Fluoridated water,” Rudisell wheezed. “Makes them see things.”

The spring my father spent three weeks at Broughton Hospital, he came back to my mother and me pale and disoriented, two pill bottles clutched in his right hand as we made our awkward reunion in the hospital lobby. A portly, gray-haired man wearing a tie and tweed jacket soon joined us. Dr. Morris pronounced my father “greatly improved, well on his way to recovery,” but even in those first few minutes my mother and I were less sure. My father seemed to be in a holding pattern, not the humorous, confident man he had been before his life swerved to some bleak reckoning, but also not the man who’d lain in bed those April mornings when my mother called the high school to arrange for a substitute. He now seemed like a shipwreck survivor, treading water but unable to swim.

“All he needs is a hobby,” Dr. Morris said, patting my father’s back as if they were old friends, “to keep his mind off his mind.” The doctor laughed and straightened his tie, added as if an afterthought, “and the medicine, of course.” Dr. Morris patted my father’s back again. “A chemistry teacher knows how important that is.”

My father took half of Dr. Morris’s advice. As soon as we got home, he brought the steel oxygen tank clanging down from the attic and gathered the wet suit, mask, and flippers he hadn’t worn since his navy days. He put it all on to check for leaks and rips, his webbed feet flapping as he moved around the living room like some half-evolved creature.

“I’m not sure this was the kind of hobby Dr. Morris had in mind,” my mother said, trying to catch the eyes behind the mask. “It seems dangerous.”

My father did not reply. He was testing the mouthpiece while adjusting the straps that held the air tanks. That done, he made swimming motions with his arms as he raised his knees toward his chest like a drum major.

“I’ve got some repairs to make,” he said, and flapped on out to the garage. While my mother cooked a homecoming supper of pork chops and rice, he prepared himself to enter the deep gloaming of channels and drop-offs with thirty minutes of breath strapped to his back.

My father still wore his wet suit and fins when he sat down at the supper table that evening. He ate everything on his plate, which heartened my mother and me, and drank glass after glass of iced tea as if possessed by an unquenchable thirst. But when he lay his napkin on the table, he did not refill his glass with more tea and reach for the pill bottles my mother had placed beside his plate.

“You’ve got to take the medicine,” my mother urged. “It’s going to heal you.”

“Heal me,” my father mused. “You sound like Dr. Morris. He said the same thing right before they did the shock treatments.”

My mother looked at her plate.

“Can’t you see that’s exactly why you need to take the pills? So you won’t ever have to do that again.” She raised her napkin to blot a tear from her cheek, her voice a mere whisper now. “This is not something to be ashamed of, Paul. It’s no different from taking penicillin for an infection.”

But my father was adamant. He pushed the tinted bottles to the center of the table one at a time as if they were chess pieces.

“How can I teach chemistry if I’m so muddled I can’t find the classroom?” he said.

That spring my allegiances were with my mother, who anchored our family in ways I had not appreciated until my father lost his moorings. The following Monday my father resumed teaching, and I was her confederate at school. Between bells I peeked into a classroom filled with Styrofoam carbons and atoms wired together like fragile solar systems. In March Mr. Keller, the vice principal, had found my father crouched and sobbing in the chemical storage room, a molecular model of oxygen clutched in his hands, so it was with relief in those last weeks of my junior year that I found my father manning his desk between breaks, braced and ready for the next wave of students.

One morning he was looking up when my halved face appeared at his door. He saluted me sharply.

“Petty Officer Hampton reports no men overboard, sir,” he said to me.

“Well, at least he’s got his sense of humor back,” my mother said when I reported the incident.

When the sheriff stepped onto her porch, he carried his hat in his hands, so she knew Elijah was dead. The sheriff told how drovers had found her son’s body beside a spring just off the trail between Boone and Mountain City, a bullet hole in the back of his head, his pockets turned inside out. He told her of the charred piece of fatback in the skillet, the warm ashes underneath, the empty haversack with the name Elijah Hampton stitched into it. The drovers had nailed the skillet in a big beech tree as a marker and then buried him beside it.

“Murdered,” Sarah said, speaking the word the sheriff had avoided. “For a few pieces of silver in his pocket.”

It wasn’t a question but the sheriff answered as if it were.

“That’s what I reckon.”

“And you don’t know who done it.”

“No, ma’am,” the sheriff said. “And I’ll not lie to you. We’ll likely never know.”

The sheriff held the haversack out to her.

“Your daughter-in law didn’t want this. She said she couldn’t bear the sight of his blood on it. You may not want it either.”

Sarah took the haversack and laid it beside the door.

“So you’ve already been to see Laura,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. I thought it best, her being the wife.”

The sheriff reached into his shirt pocket.

“Here’s the death certificate. I thought you might want to see it.”

“Just a minute,” Sarah said. She stepped into the front room and took the Bible and pen from the mantel. She sat in her porch chair, the Bible open on her lap, the piece of paper in her hand.

“It don’t say where he died,” Sarah said.

“No, ma’am. That gap where they found him, it’s the back of beyond. Nobody lives down there, ever has far as I know.”

The sheriff looked down at her, his pale blue eyes shadowed by the hat he now wore.

“Mrs. Hampton,” he said, “they don’t even know what state that place is in, much less what county.”

Sarah closed the Bible, the last line unfilled.

On those August nights when no late-afternoon thunderstorm rinsed the heat and humidity from the air, no breeze stirred the cattails and willow oak leaves, Jamie and Matt sometimes made love surrounded by water. Tonight might be such a night, Jamie thought. She rolled down the window and let air blast away some of the cigarette smoke that clung to her uniform and hair. She was exhausted from eight hours of navigating tables with hardly a pause to stand still, much less sit down, from the effort it took to lift the sides of her mouth into an unwavering smile. Exhausted too from the work she’d done at the house before her shift at the restaurant. The radio in the decade-old Ford Escort didn’t work, so she hummed a Dixie Chicks song about chains being loosened. That’s what she wanted, to be unchained in the weightlessness of water. She wanted to feel Matt lift and hold her so close their hearts were only inches apart.

In a few minutes the road fell sharply. At the bottom of the hill she turned off the blacktop onto what was, at least for now, more red-clay washout than road. The Escort bumped and jarred as it made its way down to the lake house. Their house, hers and Matt’s. Barely a year married, hardly out of their teens, and they had a place they owned, not rented. It was a miracle Jamie still had trouble believing. And this night, like every night as she turned in to the drive, a part of her felt surprise the house was really there.

But it was, and already looking so much better than in June when she and Matt had signed the papers at the bank. What had been a tangle of kudzu and briars a yard and garden. Broken windows, rotted boards, and rust-rotten screens replaced. Now Jamie spent her mornings washing years of grime off walls and blinds. When that was done she could start caulking the cracks and gashes on the walls and ceilings. Matt reshingled the roof evenings after he got off, working until he could no longer see to nail. As he must have this night, because the ladder lay against the side of the house. In another month, when the shingles had been paid for, they would drive down to Seneca and buy paint. If things went well, in a year they’d have enough saved to replace the plumbing and wiring.

Matt waited on the screened-in porch. The light wasn’t on but Jamie knew he was there. As she came up the steps his form emerged from the dark like something summoned out of air. He sat in the porch swing, stripped to his jeans. His work boots, shirt, and socks lay in a heap near the door. The swing creaked and swayed as she curled into his lap, her head against his chest. Her lips tasted the salty sweat on his skin as his arms pulled her closer. She felt the hardness of Matt’s arms, muscled by two months of ten- to twelve-hour days cutting pulpwood. She wished of those hard muscles a kind of armor to protect him while he logged with her brother, Charlton, on the ridges where the Chauga River ran through Big Laurel Valley.

You best get a good look at your husband’s pretty face right now, Charlton had said the first morning he came to pick up Matt. Feel the smooth of his skin too, little sister, because a man who cuts pulpwood don’t stay pretty long.

Charlton had spoken in a joking manner, but she’d seen the certain truth of it in her brother’s face, the broken nose and gapped smile, the raised, purple ridges on his arms and legs where flesh had been knitted back together. Jamie had watched Charlton as he and Matt walked to the log truck with its busted headlights and crumpled fender and cracked windshield. A truck no more beat-up and battered than its owner, Jamie had realized in that moment. Charlton was thirty years old, but he moved with the stiffness of an old man. Dr. Wesley in Seneca said he needed back surgery, but Charlton would hear nothing of it. Her sister-in-law, Linda, had told Jamie of nights Charlton drank half a bottle of whiskey to kill the pain. And sometimes, as Matt had witnessed, Charlton didn’t wait until night.

The porch swing creaked as Jamie pressed her head closer to Matt’s chest, close enough so she could not just hear but feel the strong, sure beat of his heart. First get the house fixed up, Jamie thought. Then when that was done she and Matt would start taking night classes again at the technical college. In a year they’d have their degrees. Then good jobs and children. It was a mantra she recited every night before falling asleep.

“Want to get in the lake?” Matt asked, softly kissing the top of her head.

“Yes,” Jamie said, though she felt, to use her mother’s words, tired to the bone. In some ways that was what made their lovemaking so good, especially on Saturday nights — finding in each other’s bodies that last ounce of strength left from their long day, their long week, and sharing it.

They walked down the grassy slope to where a half-sunk pier leaned into the lake. On the bank they took off their clothes and stepped onto the pier, the boards trembling beneath them. At the pier’s end the boards became slick with algae and water rose to their ankles. They felt for the drop-off with their feet, entered the water with a splash.

Then Jamie was weightless, the water up to her breasts, her feet lifting from the silt as she wrapped her arms around Matt. The sway of water eased away the weariness of eight hours of standing, eased as well the dim ache behind her eyes caused by hurry and noise and cigarette smoke. Water sloshed softly against the pier legs. The moon mirrored itself in the water, and Matt’s head and shoulders shimmered in a yellow glow as Jamie raised her mouth to his.

Across the room a woman holds her front teeth in the palm of her hand. She stares at them as if they were a bad throw of the dice. The man who brought her through the emergency room door leans his cheek against her swollen face. “You know I love you,” he whispers. Her hand tightens around the teeth. A red drool is all she can get out before clamping her mouth shut, leaning her head back against the wall. The man yanks a soiled handkerchief from his back pocket. He wets the cloth with his spit and wipes blood from her mouth and chin.

I turn to see if Mary is watching, but her eyes are closed, her lips moving. For a moment I think she is praying, but she is doing what we learned at our Lamaze classes, counting to ten, then exhaling, slow and steady. Her hand presses her belly, as if the spread fingers might somehow hold inside what’s been there four months. I place my hand over hers, wanting to believe the weight of another hand might make a difference to the baby, to Mary. She takes away my hand, and I remember what she said as we sped here, the road coiling around the black silence of Lake Jocassee where this night began one afternoon four months ago.

“It’s our baby, not just yours,” I’d said when she wouldn’t answer my questions.

“Not yet,” Mary had said. “Not until it’s born. Only then is it ours.”

A big man dressed in jeans and a black, long-sleeved dress shirt shoulders through the door. His right hand is swollen like a snakebite, the knuckles scraped raw. The receptionist, a gray-haired woman in a white nursing uniform, has disappeared. When she comes back she shoves a clipboard through a hole in the bottom of the glass that separates her from the circle of metal folding-back chairs filled with varying degrees of misfortune. The man clutches the wrist below the damaged hand and raises it.

“Can’t, ma’am. It’s broken.”

The gray-haired woman pulls the clipboard back to her side, places her pencil on the first line.

“Name,” she says, not even looking at him.

I don’t hear his name. I’m thinking eleven months back to another night, July, not June, but a night like this, muggy, loud with tree frogs and crickets. I’m thinking about how I’d woke in the dark and Mary was crying. A nightmare, I thought, and pulled her to me and felt what was too sticky to be sweat staining her skin. I touched a damp finger to my tongue and tasted blood.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“The baby,” she said.

So we dressed and came here and sat in maybe these same two chairs and waited to be told what we already knew. The doctor said Mary should stay overnight and they gave her a blue pill, and when the pill had done its work I drove home and pulled the sheets off the bed only to find the blood had soaked onto the mattress pad. So I pulled it off too and saw on the mattress a black spot like a water stain. Maybe it was lack of sleep, but for a moment I was convinced it had gone through the mattress and would cover the whole room if I didn’t contain it. I jerked the mattress off. Through the box springs I saw there was no blood on the floor.

I bundled up the sheets and mattress pad and carried them into the backyard. I dragged the mattress out there too, then soaked everything with lighter fluid and listened to the crackle of the fire, the tree frogs and crickets and a far-off owl. I was back at the hospital by first light.

Mary didn’t speak on the drive home. I let her wrap herself in silence. I pulled around to the back so she wouldn’t have but a few steps. She saw the charred mattress, the wisps of smoke that rose toward a sky that promised a day without rain.

“You think it’s that simple,” she said.

The man with the broken hand sits down next to the entrance. I look at my watch — seventeen minutes since we came in. I step up to the window, bend to speak through the hole in the glass, but the woman is gone. The door at the back of her office is half open. I see that it leads to the other emergency room, the one where they carry you in on a stretcher. The receptionist finally comes back, leaves the door cracked behind her.

“We have to see the doctor now,” I tell her. “My wife may be having a miscarriage. Please,” I say.

“Just a few minutes more and the doctor will be free,” she says. “There’s two boys next door.” The woman nods toward the room she has just come from. “They’ve been in a car wreck. Those boys are in bad shape.”

“My wife’s in bad shape too,” I say. “The baby is.”

“I understand,” she says.

I sit back down.

“Just a few more minutes,” I tell Mary. “It won’t be long.”

Mary looks at me but says nothing.

“She’s a cold bitch, ain’t she?” the man next to the door says tome.

“What?” I say, hoping I heard wrong, because if I didn’t I know this conversation will end with an exchange of fists.

He nods toward the receptionist’s glassed-in cubicle.

“I say she’s a cold one.”

I look up to see if the receptionist has heard, but she’s gone. The phone rings.

“They give them enough breaks,” the man next to the door says. “Damn if I don’t think I’ll put me in a application here. Where I work they won’t let you go to the bathroom but once a shift.”

“Where you work?” asks the man with the woman holding the teeth.

“Hamrick Mill.”

The man nods at the woman beside him.

“Her brother worked there a few months. He said they’d treat you like a dog if you’d let them. He wouldn’t put up with that so they fired him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Billy Goins.”

“Don’t remember him.”

“Like I said, he wasn’t there but a couple of months.”

The woman stares at the teeth in her hand.

“Is that your wife?”

“Yes.”

The woman doesn’t look up. It’s as if she’s deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she’s like the Cambodian women I’ve read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that’s what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off a part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope.

“What happened to her?” The moment he speaks the man with the hurt hand seems to realize the answer. “I mean she’s going to be okay, isn’t she?”

“Accident,” the husband answers. He places his arm around his wife’s hunched shoulders. “She’s going to be fine.”

The door that leads into the examining rooms opens halfway. An intern, probably not even thirty, grips the door’s edge with both hands and leans his head in as if afraid to come among us. He glances at the couple across the room and then at Mary and me.

“Mrs. Triplett?” he asks, looking at Mary.

Mary keeps her hand on her belly as I ease her to her feet. I walk her to where the doctor holds the door open.

“You stay here,” she says. “I don’t want you with me. Not until I know.”

I start to speak.

“No,” Mary says, her voice rising. “You stay here.”

So I do. The others have been listening. When I sit back down, the man by the door picks up a tattered Sports Afield with his good hand and stares at the cover. The man with the woman takes a jackknife from his pocket and pares his nails. His wife is the only one who looks at me.

I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes, think about the day four months back that brought Mary and me to this place, one of those late February days you get around here, a kind of miracle when the sky opens up deep and blue and the temperature rises into the seventies. It’s more than weather a couple of weeks ahead of schedule. There’s no wind like there is in March or early April. It’s like you’ve leapfrogged two months. All that’s missing are the dogwood blossoms.

Mary said we should fix a picnic lunch and go to Lake Jocassee, take the boat out and eat our lunch on the far shore, where the Horsepasture River enters the lake. I was glad she wanted to leave the house, gladder still she wanted to do something with me. Since the second miscarriage she hadn’t wanted to do much of anything but sit at home on weekends and stare at the television. We’d been more like roommates than husband and wife.

I hadn’t taken the boat out since September, so I checked it good before I hitched the boat trailer onto the car. Mary stayed inside and made our lunch.

We were on the water by ten. Since there was no wind, I cut the motor halfway across and we drifted. We looked down into mountain water so clear it was like peering through a window. After a few minutes we saw what we were looking for. Eighty feet down were farmhouses Duke Power hadn’t bothered to raze when they’d built the dam, and not just houses but barns, woodsheds, even mailboxes. Everything was there but the people.

“It’s like if you watched long enough somebody would walk out of one of those houses and look up and wave at us the same way we’d look up and wave at a plane,” Mary said, and her saying that spooked me, because I’d been thinking the same thing, not the part about the plane but that there were still people down there, people who didn’t know they were buried under eighty feet of water.

I’d moored the boat in the cove where the Horsepasture slowed and lost itself in the lake. We walked a quarter mile through woods that still had patches of snow and spread a quilt in a meadow we’d found years back right after we’d gotten married. It had been cool on the water and in the woods, but here the noon sun poured down on us. The surrounding oaks and poplars seemed to wedge all the sun’s heat into the meadow. A few wildflowers opened their petals. I took off my sweatshirt.

Mary unpacked cheese, apples, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine from the picnic basket. I’d been expecting turkey sandwiches and Cokes. Neither one of us had ever been much of a wine drinker, and I almost said something about that but I didn’t. Mary seemed happy, and she hadn’t been happy for a long time.

“Here,” she said, handing me the wine, paper cups, and corkscrew, “make yourself useful.”

In the distance I could hear the last waterfall before the river entered the lake, but I heard nothing else. No boat motors, no squirrels or birds. You could almost have believed there was no world beyond the meadow’s tree line. I handed Mary a cup of wine.

“To the future,” she said and tapped her cup against mine. She took a sip, then placed the cup on the grass and did not drink from it again.

Our appetites were keen. We ate all the bread and cheese and halved an apple. When we finished we put everything back in the basket and lay down on the quilt, drowsy from the food and warmth. I was almost asleep when Mary sat up and unlaced her hiking boots. She took off her sweatshirt. There was nothing, not even a bra, underneath. Mary lay down beside me and took off her jeans and then unbuttoned my shirt. I was surprised because I knew that it was the time of month she was most fertile. Since the second miscarriage she hadn’t let me touch her during this time, even with her diaphragm in. I felt the goose bumps on her arms, so I folded the quilt over us.

“What about your diaphragm?” I asked.

“I want us to try again,” she said and pulled me to her.

We slept afterward. I woke before Mary and listened to her breath merge with the sound of the waterfall. I lay there knowing our future together would come down to this last gamble, because our marriage had barely survived the last miscarriage. If it had survived. I wasn’t sure.

Something happens to a couple after a miscarriage, or at least it had happened to us. You cry together, you talk to the counselor and preacher, you hear the same stupid and callous remarks from friends and kin who should know better, but there’s still a part of the pain you can’t share, even with the person who went through it with you. You carry that pain inside like a tumor, and though it may shrink with time, it never disappears, and it’s malignant.

Shadows had covered us by the time Mary waked. She’d pressed against me and we’d made love again, then walked back into the woods, leaving behind the last rays of sunshine filtering through the trees, the wildflowers that would die in a few days, when the frost returned.

I open my eyes, try to believe Mary’s going to come through the door, smile, and say everything is okay. The woman across the room is still looking at me. She opens her mouth, slow like a rusty hinge. Her forehead creases. She speaks, a mumble of blood and words that I can’t understand.

“No, darling,” her husband says, placing his arm around her. “Don’t try to talk.”

Up the highway toward Westminster I hear an ambulance, the wail increasing as it nears, then silenced as it turns in to the emergency entrance, red light drenching all of us as it passes the glass door Mary and I hurried through an hour ago.

The phone at the reception desk rings.

“Mr. Triplett.” The receptionist motions for me.

I walk over to the window.

“Dr. Walton needs to talk with you. He’s down the corridor, second room on the right.”

Her voice is muffled by the glass. She points at the door as if we are in a place where we can communicate only in gestures.

I look back at the woman with the battered face. Her brown eyes hold mine for a moment. She nods, and I want to believe that both our lives might somehow turn out better than either of us can believe at this moment. Not tomorrow or next week, just sometime. I take a deep breath and walk through the door that says DO NOT ENTER and down the corridor. I walk slow as the dead might walk across the cold and silent floor of Lake Jocassee.

Luther comes up to me right before quitting time. He wants to go over to Holly Oak Park in Shelby and play some ball. I’m thinking how dog tired I am now and how much tireder I’ll be tomorrow if I play. But it is Thursday. You can always get through Friday, no matter how tired, sick, or hungover you are. It’s like getting to the fourth quarter and knowing you just got to gut it out a little longer.

“What time you want me to pick you up?” I ask. His old lady works the suicide shift at the 7-Eleven, so she’ll have the car.

“Seven,” he says. “I’ll get us a six-pack for after.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I say, but I know he does. He’s too proud to just bum a ride, especially from a white guy.

We walk to the trailer to clock out, moving slow to make sure it’s not a second before five o’clock when we get there. Luther gets his card and punches it. His hands and arms are no more black than mine are white. Since we mix mortar all day, we’re mostly gray from the shirtsleeves down, like a new race of people.

Luther walks on out to where the hourly workers park, and I follow him. Even from the back you can tell he’s still in shape. No spare tire. Still wiry strong. When he played safety in high school, he was only five-eight and 135 pounds, but man could he hit. In the Burns game my senior year, their fullback ran right by me and everybody else on the line. Our linebackers were blitzing, so it was just Luther and this two-hundred-pound fullback who wasn’t even going to try to run around Luther, just plow right through him. They had to carry that son of a bitch off the field on a stretcher. Luther cracked three of his ribs. That guy spent the rest of the game on the bench, moaning and spitting up blood.

She did not dream about him. Anna dreamed about the others, the ones who died. They came at night and lay beside her, crowding the bed, pressing their cold bodies against her. She’d wake trembling, turn her face toward the night-light that lit the lower wall. She would lie there, her eyes open, and this was when she’d think of Josh Triplett.

They had brought him in on a heavy day of fighting, the helicopter descending slow as a vulture each time it delivered a fresh supply of torn flesh and shattered bones. He was so slick with blood they used their fingers as much as their eyes to find the wounds. It was early in her tour of duty, early enough that she could still be amazed at how much blood a body held. She and the doctor found four wounds, one that mangled his arm, one in the neck, two lesser ones in his chest. They stanched the wounds, but his blood pressure still dropped.

Anna had been the one who unlaced his boots, the right one pouring blood when she pulled it off and found the fifth wound, a slashed artery above the ankle.

“This lady saved your life, soldier,” the doctor told him the next day as they stopped at his bed during their rounds. Private Triplett looked up from the cot and raised his hand and she held it. He squeezed her fingers, tears welling in his eyes. The throat wound kept him from speaking, but his mouth formed a thank you.

“I can write your family, let them know you’re okay. Do you want me to do that?” she asked.

Triplett nodded, freed his hand, and pointed to the pen in the doctor’s shirt pocket. Across the doctor’s pad he scrawled,

I met Lee Ann McIntyre on a date suggested by my wife. Kelly always read the personals as she drank her morning coffee. “Better than the comics,” she said and would read aloud the ads she found most amusing.

“Why not an article about what it’s like to meet your soul partner through a newspaper ad,” she said one June morning as we sat at the kitchen table. “You go out on the date and write about it. That could be amusing.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

I looked out the wide bay window where our cat stalked a chipmunk.

“I think it’s a very good idea,” Kelly said, and trailing her words like a shadow was the fact that my book The Myth of Robert Frost was stillborn at thirty-eight pages. I looked at her, dressed administratively in her dark blue blazer and skirt while I was barefoot, clothed in jeans and a T-shirt. Unlike me, she had somewhere to go, something to do.

“I’ve even got a woman picked out for you,” she said, holding up the paper between us. “Let’s deconstruct this, darling. ‘Hopelessly Lonely.’ Now would that be the signifier or the signified? No matter. ‘DWF, 32, brown/green, 5–6, 140.’ No mention of whether she still has any teeth. ‘Likes mountains, quiet evenings, and reading.’ See, you all are a perfect match, though you better bone up on Harlequin romances. ‘Seeks WM, 25–40.’ What did I tell you? That’s you exactly, it’s fate. ‘A knight in shining armor.’ We’ll have to work on that. ‘Who likes children.’ You like children, don’t you? How about three or four. This woman probably has them. ‘And understands the hardships of life.’ You understand the hardships of life, don’t you?”

Kelly took a pen from her briefcase.

“Here,” she said, circling the ad. “Call Carolina Tempo. I guarantee they’ll go for this idea. Then call Hopelessly Lonely. Leave a message that you want to take her to dinner at the Grey Pheasant. Tell her knights in shining armor don’t take their dates to Wendy’s or the Waffle House. That will put you ahead of the rest of the guys who call.”

“You’re not worried I might fall in love and leave you?” I said.

“No,” Kelly said, her smile much larger than mine. “I’m not worried about that at all.”

After Kelly left I took the newspaper into the den, what Kelly called my “writing room.” Like taking a year’s leave from teaching to write full-time, the room had been her idea. She’d been the one who picked out the bookcases, the huge oak desk, the new computer and printer. I sat down where I sat every morning, sipping coffee, sharpening pencils, looking out the window, doing everything a writer does but write.

I reread the first chapter of my book, thirty-eight pages of jargon and endnotes, just as tedious and silly as they were nine months earlier, when I wrote them. I pushed the manuscript to the table’s far edge as if it were some dead creature beginning to smell. I looked at a notebook page filled with ideas for articles, trying to find one that Larry Kendrick might like better than Kelly’s.

“I like the newspaper date idea,” Larry said when I called him an hour later.

“What about the old poverty in the New South article?”

“Look,” Larry said. “This isn’t The Daily Worker.”

“Okay,” I said.

A year earlier I wouldn’t have done it, but I had only three more months to come up with something to justify my year off. At least the article would be some sort of publication, even if in a magazine no one outside North Carolina had ever heard of.

By now I knew Kelly expected me to fail, had set up the room, the free time as a way of showing me that I was nothing more than what she’d known me to be all along, an actor who mouthed the clichés and jargon of others because he had no words of his own. That was the way she saw me, and that was the way she wanted me to see myself, stripped bare of props and pretense.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number in the newspaper, then the four digits after the circled ad. I heard the same message Kelly had read, but this time g’s left off endings, words stretched into extra syllables. I left my first name and phone number and said that I hadn’t ridden a horse in years, but I’d try to be a knight in shining armor. I told her I’d like to take her to the Grey Pheasant, a restaurant worthy of a princess. I played my role well.

I sat back down at the desk with no idea when, or if, my message would be returned. In the distance the college’s clock tower rose stern and gray above late May green. Three more months and I’d be back there, disabused of any notions of what I had to offer the world.

Kelly was home when Lee Ann McIntyre called.

“You get it,” Kelly said. “It might be your princess.”

“Is this Richard?” a woman asked, her voice doubtful, though whether about the number or about this whole venture was unclear. Kelly was in the other room, but I knew she listened.

“Yes,” I said.

“I liked your message,” Lee Ann McIntyre said. “I liked what you said, how you said it.”

“So you want to go out?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice soft, still a little doubtful. “I think that would be nice.”

“So what did you arrange?” Kelly asked when I hung up.

“She works Friday and Saturday, so we’re going out Sunday night.”

“What else?” Kelly asked.

“Her name is Lee Ann McIntyre.”

“And she lives where?”

“Out on Highway Eight.”

“In a trailer, of course. No one named Lee Ann lives in a house.”

“Yes,” I said. “What of it?”

“The knight defends his princess,” Kelly said.

“This is a bad idea,” I said. “It could be cruel too.”

“You have an exaggerated sense of your charisma,” Kelly said. “She’ll be just as bored with you as you are with her. You’re giving her a free meal at a restaurant where they wouldn’t even let her waitress. That’s a good deal if you ask me.”

“This woman’s got enough problems without my adding to them,” I said.

“You mean ‘the hard considerations of the poor,’” Kelly said. “Though of course you argued Wharton was upholding the power structure even as she made that statement.” Kelly smiled. “See, I remember something from your class.”

I got up to go into my office.

“Why is it writers sentimentalize the poor?” Kelly asked. “And I mean a real answer, not some Marxist cliché.”

“Maybe because a lot of them didn’t grow up as privileged as you.”

“Or you, Mr. Prep School,” Kelly said. “It’s funny, isn’t it, how people used to be ashamed of being born poor and now they’re ashamed of coming from wealth.”

“I don’t sense it ever bothered you,” I said.

“Why should it? I’m glad my parents were wealthy. I’m glad I am too.”

I met her eyes.

“Why did you marry me?”

“Because you needed me, silly,” Kelly said and smiled the same tight smile I remembered from the evening three years earlier when she’d sat in on my class.

The college had instituted a “Knowing Each Other Better” program that year for faculty and administration, an effort, as our president put it, to narrow the divide between the two. There had been several receptions as well as visits of administrators to faculty classes. Kelly, who was associate dean of academic affairs, had attended my American literature class.

She was ten minutes late, her plaid skirt and black blazer a sharp contrast to the proletariat uniform of jeans and work shirts I and most of the class wore. She sat on the front row, a supercilious smile on her face. I continued with my lecture, trying not to be distracted by the presence of a woman who might be involved in deciding which faculty were let go during the college’s next budget crisis.

I was talking about Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” explaining how the poem’s seeming sympathy for the downtrodden ultimately reinforced the hegemonic structure of society. The students had been responsive, good questions and comments. Kelly said nothing, her lips pursed in a tight smile I found more and more disconcerting as the period passed.

She did not leave her seat until the rest of the class had gone.

“Did I pass the audition?” I asked, an ironic smile on my face to match hers.

“Maybe,” she said. “That’s not the kind of thing we discussed in my lit classes at Bennington. There it was all scanning lines and looking for archetypes.”

“That’s the problem with small liberal arts colleges,” I said. “It wasn’t until grad school at Duke that I saw literature had some connection to the real world.”

I’d realize later Kelly sensed I was about to launch into a lengthy anecdote about my conversion at Duke, so she cut me off in midsentence.

“Do you have plans for the evening, Professor?” she asked.

“Just a few student essays to grade.”

“Well, how about I buy you a drink at the Grey Pheasant? Let the essays wait a while.”

“That would be nice,” I said.

I followed her taillights to the restaurant. We parked and then walked into the bar the college’s employees shared with the town’s other professionals.

“I picked your class to attend for a reason,” Kelly said, handing me my drink. “We met at the dean’s party last fall. You don’t remember me there, of course.”

I didn’t. Kelly is an attractive woman but there’s not that one feature — lush lips, high cheekbones — that makes an immediate impression.

“You were holding forth about the rigors of academic life. It sounded pretty pretentious, especially to someone who sees how empty the faculty parking lot is by midafternoon. But I could see you had potential. Nice eyes too.”

Kelly placed her hand on top of mine and I did not withdraw it. She was, after all, my superior. I wasn’t tenured and didn’t need any enemies in administration. But it was more than that. I liked her cynicism, the mockery in her voice and eyes, how she viewed everything the way I viewed literature. I wanted to match her cynicism, and I did. I matched it enough to marry her.

ON SUNDAY EVENING I bumped up the washed-out driveway to Lee Ann McIntyre’s trailer, parking behind a decade-old Ford Escort with a smashed rear fender. A couple of leafless saplings wilted in the front yard, no more alive than sticks jabbed in the ground. An orange and blue plastic tricycle was wedged under the trailer, a saggy beach ball beside the concrete steps.

I knocked on the screen door, and the voice I’d heard on the phone told me to come in.

“I’ll be out in a second,” Lee Ann McIntyre said. “Have a seat.”

I sat on the couch. Across from me a playpen bulged with bright, cheap toys, above it a picture of three kids sitting at a picnic table, in the corner a TV and a plastic bookshelf filled with paperbacks, books with “Desire” and “Passion” in their titles.

“I’m ready,” she said, and I looked away from the books.

Lee Ann McIntyre stood in the doorway that led to the rest of her trailer. She wore black high heels, a dark blue dress, probably what she’d worn that morning if she’d gone to church. Her hair was blond, too long for a face that had aged quickly — maybe from too much sun, maybe from too many kids too soon. But there had been a time when she was pretty, I could see that.

“Where are your kids?” I asked. “I’d like to meet them.”

She blushed, as if they’d been a secret she’d hoped to keep from me.

“They’re at my sister’s.”

I waited a few seconds, but she offered no drink, no small talk. She had her pocketbook in her hand as if she couldn’t wait to get out of the trailer.

We didn’t say much in the car. I asked about her children, but she didn’t warm to the subject. Maybe she thought I was prying, or maybe she was so exhausted from raising three kids alone she wanted a few minutes without having to think about them. I asked who she liked to read and that got us to town without too many more long pauses.

Inside the Grey Pheasant, the maître d’ led us past the bar where Kelly and I had come three years ago after my class. He seated us in the corner opposite the bar, and it made me a little nervous, because sometimes faculty members came in for an evening drink. I sat facing away from the bar and the mirror that filled the wall behind it.

I ordered a gin and tonic and Lee Ann said she’d take the same. I drank mine and ordered another, while she stirred her drink with the red straw as if searching for something in it, only occasionally taking a sip. She was nervous and seemed suspicious as well.

We both ordered filet mignon, and when she’d finished her drink she opened up a little more, telling me about the upper part of the county where’d she had grown up, where I went trout fishing some days when I tired of pretending to be a writer. She knew the places I fished, and that seemed to make me more credible. Our salads came and she ate with more relish than I did. She asked if I had kids, and when I said no she seemed to assume that meant I’d never been married. She talked more about her children, how the oldest, who was only ten, was already boy crazy and how that bothered her.

“I married at eighteen,” she said. “I don’t want her making the same mistake.”

“How long have you been divorced?” I asked.

“Two years.”

“Does your ex-husband help with the children?”

Lee Ann laughed humorlessly.

“No.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“He’s in prison.”

She didn’t look down at her drink when she said it or act embarrassed. Her tone was matter-of-fact.

“He’s in prison?” I said. “Prison?”

“At least until next February.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

Lee Ann hesitated. “He tried to kill me.”

She must have thought I didn’t believe that either, because she pulled back her hair. A welt long and thick as a cigarette purpled her neck. But it wasn’t a welt. It was a scar, a scar that hadn’t healed right, or maybe covered a wound so deep and ragged it could never heal right. As I stared at the scar the restaurant became bright and strange, as if, until that moment, I had been someplace else, someplace far away. I was the one looking at my drink now.

“That’s why I need a knight in shining armor,” she said, her laugh brittle. “To get me away from here, away from North Carolina, someplace where he can’t find me when he’s out.”

Lee Ann paused. Her right hand lay beside the silverware. She moved her thumb and index finger so they touched the knife’s handle.

“He swore he’d kill me when he got out,” she said, looking right at me.

“People say all sorts of things,” I said. “They’re just words.”

I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince.

Lee Ann just shook her head.

“You don’t know him.”

She started to say something more, then decided not to speak. A man wearing a jacket and tie passed our table, but it wasn’t anyone I knew.

“What is it?” I asked. “You can tell me.”

“You know what I pray?” she said, and I shook my head. “I pray he doesn’t do it in front of the children.”

She didn’t say anything else and I didn’t either. In a couple of minutes the waiter brought our main course. He placed two stemmed glasses next to our silverware, then lifted an ice bucket from the cart, in it a bottle of champagne.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t order this.”

“Compliments of the lady,” the waiter said, nodding toward the entrance. “The whole meal is.”

Kelly sat at the far end of the bar. I had no idea how long she’d been there, but I could see her wineglass was almost empty as she raised it in a toast to me, to Lee Ann.

I looked in the bar’s mirror and saw the back of Kelly’s head, saw what she saw — two people who needed a lesson in reality, and she was willing to foot the bill to make that lesson possible.

“Who is she?” Lee Ann asked, suspicion in her voice.

“My wife,” I said.

“I should have known this wasn’t right,” Lee Ann said. Her voice was as soft as when she told me she expected to be killed.

I thought she would start crying. She looked like she might, but she didn’t. She’d probably learned long ago how useless tears were.

Kelly was still at the bar, watching us.

“I want to go home,” Lee Ann said, and I didn’t argue.

I didn’t look Kelly’s way as we went out, and we were almost back to Lee Ann’s trailer before I tried to apologize.

“Was my ad so stupid you thought you could do this to me?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Was it some kind of joke?”

I shook my head.

“Why then?”

“Because I was unhappy with my marriage. I wanted to be with someone else awhile,” I said, and that was a lie, and I didn’t care. I’d had enough truth for a while, and I believed Lee Ann had as well.

She looked out the window at the yards flashing past, some with children playing in the last light.

“He sends me pictures he draws,” she said. “Pictures of me with just my head, no body. My eyes are open in those pictures. My mouth too. I’m screaming. He calls them Valentines.”

She closed her eyes and I said nothing. I didn’t want to know what she was thinking.

When we got back to the trailer Lee Ann unbuckled her seat belt but didn’t get out. I reached for my door handle but she touched my arm.

“Would you hold me?” she asked. “Please, just for a few moments.”

I placed my arm around her, awkward as a high school kid on a first date, but that didn’t seem to matter. She laid her cheek against my chest. We didn’t say anything. We just sat there as the dark deepened around us. After a while her sister drove up with the kids, and I walked her to the trailer’s battered door. I drove back home to a life where all that was required of me was that I look in the mirror from time to time.

When Ricky threw his knife and the blade tore my blouse and cut into flesh eight inches from my heart, it was certain as the blood trickling down my arm that something in our relationship had gone wrong.

“Cut the rest of it off,” a townie in a yellow ball cap yelled from the bleachers, thinking ripping my blouse was part of the show.

“Work on that dress some too,” said a man on the front row.

Another townie stepped through the tent entrance and sat down.

“What have I missed?” he asked.

“Near about a execution,” the man behind him said.

Twenty feet in front of me, Ricky stared at his empty right hand like he was holding it out for Lady Socrates to tell his future. But Lady Socrates was three tents down the midway. Ricky would have to figure it out on his own what his hand told him. The folks in the stands started whistling and yelling but Ricky just kept staring at his hand. I wondered if he saw his future in the lifeline that crossed his palm. I wondered if he saw a future that included me.

“Don’t waste your money on such as that,” Momma had said that first night, but it was my dollar bill. I’d earned it waiting on smart alecks and grumps, coming home every night with aching feet and smelling like grease and cigarettes. All that for minimum wage and a few quarters thrown on the counter.

I stared at the painting on the tent, the figure of a gypsy-looking woman with so many knives jutting out around her she looked to be sprouting quills like a porcupine. The knife thrower had his hand behind his ear, ready to hurl another knife. He wore a droopy mustache, his long hair flowing down his back. RICARDO MONT BLANC: WORLD-FAMOUS KNIFE THROWER, the caption said.

“I’m going,” I told Momma and handed the woman at the ticket booth my dollar.

The light was shadowy inside. The air smelled of sawdust and sweat. Five rows of half-filled bleachers filled one side of the tent. At the back a piece of plywood stood like a knobless door. A human outline had been drawn on the wood, like on police shows when somebody’s been killed. I sat down in the first row, the only woman in the audience.

A man opened the flap at the back of the tent, what looked like a wooden suitcase in his left hand. He was blonder than I’d expected from the poster and name, so handsome with his green eyes and long, wavy hair. He wore all black from shirt to boots. Younger than I’d supposed too, his brow unlined and mustache fine as peach fuzz. I reckoned he was about my age, still in his mid-twenties.

The knife thrower opened the carrying case. There was nothing inside but black-handled knives with long, bright blades — beautiful, deadly looking knives. He didn’t say a word, just picked one up and flung it. The knife made a loud whack as it entered the plywood, the blade no more than an inch above the outline’s right wrist. He flung another, hitting the same exact spot, except this time above the left wrist.

“Where’s your damsel in distress?” a pimply-faced young rowdy yelled from the row behind me.

“Don’t have one,” Ricardo Mont Blanc said and threw another knife, which landed between the outline’s legs.

“I figured there to be a pretty woman for you to throw at,” the teenager said.

“It ain’t nothing to throw at a piece of plywood,” an old man on the top row added. “There ain’t no risk to that.”

“Then you get up there,” Ricardo Mont Blanc said. “I’ll throw at you.”

“I’d be more than enough willing, but the doctor says I can’t do nothing that excites me. Bad ticker,” the geezer said, pointing to his chest.

“Anyway, he ain’t pretty enough,” the teenager said. “Why don’t you put her up there?”

I didn’t need to turn around to know who he was talking about.

The man sitting next to me nudged my shoulder. “Get on up there, girl,” he said. “Give us something worth looking at.”

Some of the other men echoed his words and I could feel a blush spreading across my face.

“That girl ain’t got the grit to get up there,” the old man said. “I’m getting my money back.”

I looked at him and I knew exactly the kind of customer he’d be. He’d hog a whole booth instead of sitting on a stool and order just coffee and make sure you ran your legs off to keep it hot and up to the brim. He’d sit there an hour and then grumble when he got the bill that seventy-five cents was too much for coffee. There’d be as much chance of a tip from him as from an alley cat.

“I’ll let him throw at me,” I said, knowing me standing in front of that plywood would keep that geezer from getting his dollar back. But it was more than that. I wanted to show Ricardo Mont Blanc that I did have grit.

The tent got real quiet soon as the words left my mouth.

Ricardo Mont Blanc aimed those cool green eyes right at me. Sizing me up, I reckoned. I mostly expected him to say something such as he couldn’t throw at just anyone or there might be a problem with the carnival’s insurance or some other excuse like that.

All he said was “Okay.”

“We got us a show now,” the young rowdy shouted and high-fived another teenager sitting next to him.

Ricardo Mont Blanc led me over to the plywood. He fitted me inside the outline, raising my arms, positioning my head. His hands were soft, not rough and callused like most men’s hands. I couldn’t help but wonder how they’d feel touching other places on my body. But another part of me was all the while looking for the slightest tremble in them.

“What’s your name?” he asked when he had me like he wanted.

“Ellie Higginbotham,” I said.

“Call me Ricky,” he said and took a step back, looked me over a last time.

“Don’t move, Ellie Higginbotham,” he said and walked to the other side of the tent.

Momma had always said I was bad to do things without thinking them through, like after high school marrying Robert instead of taking a scholarship Brevard College offered me. I closed my eyes. Dear Lord, my mother was so right, I prayed. Forgive my foolishness and let me leave this tent alive. I said a silent amen and looked up. Ricky’s eyes met mine. He gave a little nod. My eyes locked on his as his arm came forward.

One warm December morning forty years ago I stood in a grove of oak trees, the blood on my face confirming what I already knew. At my feet lay what the old deer slayers called a hart — a big male with antlers sprouting like coral from its forehead. My right hand gripped a Browning 30–30, the rifle I’d raised earlier that morning to defend Mrs. Merwin, the projectionist’s wife, a woman who came from a place that did not exist.

“Drink up,” my uncle had said earlier that morning as he handed me a cup of coffee. “You can’t be snoozing when a deer comes your way.”

I nodded, too sleep-dazed to speak. The grandfather clock chimed five o’clock as I sipped the black coffee, ate the gravy and cathead biscuits my uncle made as I dressed. We spoke in whispers, because my mother and aunt still slept in the back rooms. My father had died when I was eight, leaving behind a son and a twenty-nine-year-old widow, who now spent what remained of her early adulthood working inside the town’s paper plant. My uncle, besides giving my mother and me a place to live, served as a surrogate father. He taught me how to use a saw and ax, catch and clean a trout, and hunt — first tin cans scattered on a hillside, then squirrels and rabbits, finally, at age twelve, deer.

Often my first cousin Jeff or my uncle’s neighbor Luke Callahan hunted with us. I liked Jeff but did not care much for Mr. Callahan, a red-nosed, scarecrow-thin man who drank too much and told jokes I did not understand. Unlike Jeff, I hadn’t been blooded yet, my only shot a flash of antler behind trees. I’d watched enviously the previous November as my uncle and Mr. Callahan dipped their hands in the warm blood, reddened Jeff’s face as if the blood was war paint.

“You ain’t a man till you get blooded, boy,” Mr. Callahan had said, looking at me as he tasted the deer blood on his fingers. “I killed my first deer when I was ten.”

“All Russell needs is a decent shot,” my uncle said. “He’s shot targets all summer so he wouldn’t get rusty. He’s been hitting them too. His time will come, Luke, and he’ll be ready.”

And I was ready to be a man. I saw my body’s readiness in the stubble on my chin, the way I’d sprouted four inches over the summer. I felt a readiness inside me as well, not as I waited in that deer stand but in the darkness of the Enlo Cinema.

The theater Mr. and Mrs. Merwin ran was the one exotic place in a town I always remember in shades of gray, in large part because of Carolina Paper Company, whose twin smokestacks sooted the whole valley. Most of Enlo’s adults worked inside that mill. They all seemed to wear an ashy pallor, as if it were papier-mâché instead of flesh wrapped around their bones. But it was more than the paper mill, the grown-ups it swallowed for eight hours each day, or even the highland weather when so many days passed in a monotone of fog and drizzle. It was the surrounding mountains themselves, the way they cast huge daggers of shadow over the valley, blocked any distant gaze as we moved beneath in the gloaming like cave fish.

And this was why stepping into that theater lobby was like stepping into a radiant dream — the multihued coming-attraction posters, shelves of bright-wrapped candy, the popcorn machine’s yellow lambency. Mrs. Merwin was a part of that brightness. She dressed bright as a parrot from head to toe, the cloth tight against her skin, mouth rimmed scarlet with lipstick, a woman literally from nowhere who’d suddenly appeared in Enlo’s midst. It was she who allowed me entrance, sitting in the ticket booth like a fortune-teller, exchanging the coins my mother had reluctantly given me for two hours’ respite from a dreariness that seeped through my skin to my very bones.

Mrs. Merwin was the only person in town I could imagine describing as glamorous, not only how she dressed but how she smelled, her perfume ordered directly from Europe, Mr. Lusk the postmaster said. She spoke a different English as well, faster, sounding out her g and d endings. Even her first name was glamorous, a consonant-thick montage no one in Enlo but her husband could pronounce.

Mrs. Merwin told those who asked that she had been born in a country that no longer existed. Her parents were descended from nobility, but they had lost everything in the war, even their country. Whether what she said was true no one really knew, except perhaps Mr. Merwin, who’d brought her back from Europe as his war bride, but he was a gruff man who said little even to his kinsmen, a man who had no children of his own and little use for those who entered his theater.

Mr. Merwin was a projectionist, a man most comfortable in the hunched darkness of his profession. When the last ticket was sold, he left his wife to attend the concession stand, disappearing through the curtain next to the bathrooms and up the winding metal stairs. There was no balcony, so he sat alone up there, a wizard who brought forth nightly illusions with a weave of his hands as he threaded film through the projector and the movie sputtered to life. But Mr. Merwin seemed to cast a spell on everyone except himself. Perhaps as the source of that mirage, he knew too well that the bright worlds holding his audience transfixed were mere celluloid, easily bottled up in the gray canisters he exchanged in Asheville every Thursday morning. Mr. Merwin appeared immune to the spell his wife cast as well, as terse with her as he was to any child.

“I don’t know why she stays with that old grump,” my aunt said one Sunday. She, my mother, and my uncle lingered at the dinner table as I oiled the Browning in the front room and pretended not to listen. “He should have known better than marry a woman that much younger. I wouldn’t be surprised if she just up and left him.”

“Where would she go?” my uncle asked. “Her country doesn’t exist anymore.”

“So she says,” my mother said. “I have my doubts about that, about a lot of things she’s claimed. We know what that war did to Arthur Merwin. He’s got scars and a Purple Heart to prove it. Besides, he gives her enough money to buy those fancy clothes and French perfume.”

“That could be her money,” my aunt said, “and probably is. I’ve never known a Merwin that was more than one paycheck from the poorhouse.”

“Well, all I know,” said my mother with finality, “is that a woman who dresses like that is looking for trouble, and sooner or later she’ll find it. As a matter of fact, I hear she’s been finding it for a while now. I suspicion Arthur knows what’s going on too.”

At the time it was easy to believe my aunt’s and uncle’s sympathies were more admirable than my mother’s. Those nights as I sat in the darkened theater I sometimes glanced back at the beam of light aimed at the screen. I wondered if Mr. Merwin was watching not the movie but the audience, and that made me feel uneasy. But I could not be sure what he was doing up there, since the light was too bright to look at for more than a moment.

What I do know is that when I was fourteen, his wife was as beautiful as any of the screen goddesses I watched in his theater. On Friday or Saturday nights I sat a few rows behind the girls in my ninth-grade class, girls whose bodies grew more curved and mysterious daily. I anointed myself with my dead father’s Aqua Velva and it wafted over the rows between us like a promise that I too was growing up. What they were becoming, Mrs. Merwin, with her hourglass figure and low, throaty voice, already was.

I waited until the MGM lion roared and IN CINEMASCOPE appeared in five-foot-high letters. Only then did I leave my seat, make my way blindly up the inclining carpet toward the red-glowing exit sign. The lobby was empty now, just me and Mrs. Merwin.

“What will you have, Russell?” she’d ask as I inhaled an odor like a field of flowers, and it was as if the smell rose like vapors into my brain and made me groggy, for inevitably I’d forget what I’d planned to order. Once I finally stammered out a few words, Mrs. Merwin would hand me my drink and whatever I’d chosen to eat. As she leaned forward to place the money in the metal box, I could see the globes of her breasts, the dark V between them. Then I’d sit back down in the dark, dazed by the wide worlds projected on the screen, by the girls who sat with me in the dark, but most of all by Mrs. Merwin.

After the second time his hardware store had been robbed, both times at night, Marshall Vaughn bought a pistol. He kept it under the counter, but unlike his younger brother, Keith, a highway patrolman, Marshall was sixty before he needed to point the pistol at another human being, and it wasn’t in his store but in an apartment 150 miles away.

He had not killed the men, but he knew he could have and would have if they’d not left when he told them to. At the time, it was as if some part of himself left his body, the way people claimed in near-death experiences. He’d seen not only his son and the two black men but himself as well, as though he were watching the whole event from behind a one-way mirror. Later Marshall wondered if somehow his soul had indeed left his body the moment he’d stepped inside that apartment.

What he’d found in there was worse than he had imagined, and what he’d imagined had scared him enough to bring the pistol. The door was unlocked, and inside all the shades were down and the only light came from a TV. The room reeked of unwashed flesh, spoiled food left on plates and in boxes, and whatever had filled the pipes strewn on the floor like toys after a child’s tantrum.

Brad did not turn his face from the TV screen when Marshall spoke his son’s name. Only the black men looked up.

“What the hell do you want?” one of the men demanded.

“He’s going home with me,” Marshall said.

There had been other words after that, and when things got to a point where words were useless, Marshall brought out the gun. The men left, and quick as Marshall loaded up Brad’s possessions in the Camry, he and Brad left also and drove west toward Deep Gap.

“Don’t you even care that you’re killing yourself?” Marshall asked, but his son did not reply. Instead, Brad leaned his head against the passenger-seat window and closed his eyes. As they drove out of the city Marshall remembered weekend fishing trips to Price Lake. They would leave at dawn, Brad sleeping all the way, but soon as Marshall parked the car Brad’s eyes would spring open and the boy would gather his rod and tackle box. They’d fish two hours and return home in time to open the hardware store at nine or, if it was Sunday, to get dressed for church. That was before Linda had come to find the role of mother and wife, in her words, “too confining.” After she left, there never seemed to be time for fishing trips.

I

When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after four months in Boston settling his father’s estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a woman pregnant with Pemberton’s child. She was accompanied by her father, a man named Harmon who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton’s heart.

The conductor shouted “Waynesville” as the train came to a shuddering halt. Pemberton looked out the window and saw his partners on the platform, both dressed in suits to meet his bride of three days, an unexpected bonus from his time in Boston. Buchanan, ever the dandy, had waxed his mustache and oiled his hair. Peabody wore a fedora, as he often did to protect his bald head from the sun. Pemberton took out his gold pocket watch and saw the train was on time to the exact minute. He turned to his bride.

“Not the best place for a honeymoon.”

“It will suit us well enough,” Serena said, leaning into his shoulder. As she did so, he smelled the bright aroma of Ivory soap and remembered tasting that brightness on her skin earlier that morning. A porter came up the aisle, whistling a song Pemberton did not recognize. His gaze returned to the window.

Next to the ticket booth Harmon and his daughter waited, Harmon slouched against the chestnut wall. It struck Pemberton that males in these mountains never stood upright but rather slouched or leaned into some tree or wall whenever possible. If none were available they squatted, buttocks against the backs of their heels. The daughter sat on the bench, her posture upright to better reveal her condition. Pemberton could not recall her first name. He was not surprised to see them. Buchanan had phoned him the night before he left Boston. “Abe Harmon is down here threatening to kill you,” Buchanan had said, “and I suspect you know the reason.”

“Well, my dear,” Pemberton said to his bride. “Our welcoming party includes some of the natives. This will make for a colorful arrival.”

Pemberton took Serena’s hand for a moment, felt the calluses on her upper palm, the simple gold wedding band Serena wore in lieu of a diamond. Then he stood and retrieved two grips from the overhead compartment. He handed them to the porter, who stepped back and followed as Pemberton led his bride down the aisle and the steel steps to the platform. There was a gap of two feet between the metal and wood. Serena did not reach for his hand as she stepped onto the planks. Buchanan gave a stiff formal bow. Peabody nodded and tipped his fedora.

Pemberton knew aspects of her appearance surprised his partners, not just the lack of a cloche hat and dress but her hair, blond and thick, cut short in a bob — distinctly feminine yet also austere.

Serena went to the older man and held out her hand. Pemberton noted that at five-seven his wife stood tall as Peabody.

“Peabody, I assume.”

“Yes, yes, I am,” he stammered.

“Serena Pemberton,” she said, her hand extended so that he had no choice but to take it. She turned to the younger man.

“And Buchanan. Correct?”

“Yes,” Buchanan said. He took her proffered hand and cupped it awkwardly in his.

Serena smiled slightly.

“Don’t you know how to properly shake hands, Mr. Buchanan?”

Pemberton watched as Buchanan blushed and corrected his grip, withdrawing his hand quickly as he could. In the two years Boston Timber Company had been here, Buchanan’s wife had come only once, arriving in a taffeta gown that was soiled before she made it to her husband’s house on the other side of the street. She spent one night and left on the morning train. Now Buchanan and his wife met once a month for a weekend in Richmond, as far south as Mrs. Buchanan would travel. Peabody’s wife had never left Boston.

His partners appeared incapable of speech. Their eyes shifted to peruse the leather chaps Serena wore, the oxford shirt and black jodhpurs. Her British inflection and erect carriage confirmed that, as had their wives, she’d attended private boarding school in the Northeast. But Serena had been born in Colorado, the child of a timberman who taught her to shake hands and look men in the eye as well as to ride and hunt. The porter laid the grips on the platform and went back for the two trunks stored in the back train car.

“Any sighting of my mountain lion?” Pemberton asked.

“No,” Buchanan said. “A worker found tracks on Laurel Creek he thought belonged to one, but they were a bobcat’s.”

Peabody turned to Serena.

“Your husband hopes to kill the last panther in these mountains, but if there is one left, it’s not being very cooperative.”

“We will find it, won’t we, Pemberton?” Serena said.

Pemberton concurred, encircling his bride with an arm.

Serena looked over at the father and daughter, who now sat on the bench together, watchful and silent as actors awaiting their cues.

“I don’t know you,” she said.

The daughter continued to stare at Serena sullenly. It was the father who spoke.

“My business ain’t with you. It’s with him standing there beside you.”

“His business is mine,” Serena said, “just as mine is his.”

“Not this business. It was did before you got here.”

Harmon nodded at his daughter’s belly, then looked back at Serena.

Buchanan and Peabody stared at Pemberton, waiting for him to intervene. The porter set the trunks on the platform. Pemberton gave the man a quarter and dismissed him.

“You’re implying she’s carrying my husband’s child,” Serena said.

“I ain’t implying nothing,” Harmon replied.

“Then you’re a lucky man,” Serena said. “You’ll find no better sire to breed her with.” Serena turned her gaze and words to the daughter on the bench. “But that’s the only one. From now on, what children Pemberton has will be with me.”

Harmon pushed himself fully upright and Pemberton glimpsed the ivory handle of a bowie knife before the coat resettled over it. He wondered how a man like Harmon could possess such a fine weapon. Perhaps it was booty won in a poker game or an heirloom passed down from a more prosperous ancestor. Pemberton leaned and unclasped his calfskin grip, grabbled among its contents for the wedding present Serena had given him. He turned slightly and slipped the elk-bone hunting knife from its sheath. Harmon’s large freckled hand grasped the bench edge. He leaned forward but did not rise.

Several mountaineers watched expressionlessly from the courthouse steps. The only one Pemberton recognized was a crew foreman named Chaney, an older employee who’d spent five years in prison for killing two men in a card game dispute. Chaney shared his stringhouse with his blind mother, a woman given great deference in the camp as an oracle. Pemberton was glad to have him as a witness. The workers already understood Pemberton was as strong as any of them, had learned that last September when he stripped to his waist and helped unload the sawmill’s heaviest machinery. Now he’d give them something besides his strength to respect.

“Let’s go home, Daddy,” the daughter said, and laid her hand on her father’s wrist. Harmon flicked it away as if a bothersome fly and stood up.

“God damn the both of you,” he said.

Harmon opened the frock coat and freed the bowie knife from its leather sheath. The blade caught the late-afternoon sun, and for a moment it appeared the mountaineer held a glistening flame in his hand.

“Go get Sheriff McDowell,” Buchanan yelled toward the courthouse steps, but none of the men moved.

Pemberton unsheathed his knife as well. He felt the elk-bone handle against his palm, its roughness all the better for clasping. For a few moments he relished the knife’s balance and solidity, its blade, hilt, and handle precisely calibrated as the épées he’d fenced with at Princeton.

Buchanan made a move to step between the two men, but Pemberton waved him away with his free hand.

“This is best done now,” Pemberton said to Buchanan. He glanced at Serena. “Better to settle it now, right?”

“Yes,” Serena said. “Settle it now.”

Pemberton took a calculated step toward Harmon. The old man kept the knife head high and pointed toward the sky, and Pemberton knew he had done little fighting with a blade. Pemberton took a step closer and Harmon slashed the air between them. The man’s tobacco-yellowed teeth were clenched, the veins in his neck taut as guy wires. Pemberton kept his knife low and close to his side. He took another step forward and raised his left arm. The bowie knife swept forward but its arc stopped when Harmon’s forearm hit Pemberton’s. Harmon jerked down and the blade sliced Pemberton’s forearm. Pemberton took one final step, the blade flat as he slipped it inside Harmon’s coat and plunged half the blade’s length into the soft flesh above Harmon’s right hip bone. He grabbed Harmon’s shoulder with his free hand for leverage and quickly opened a thin smile across the mountaineer’s stomach. For a second there was no blood.

Harmon’s knife fell clattering onto the platform. The man placed both hands on his stomach and stepped back to the bench, slowly sat down. After a few moments he lifted his hands to see the damage, and his intestines spilled in gray ropes onto his lap. Harmon stared at them, studied the inner workings of his body as if for some further verification of his fate. He raised his head a last time, leaned it back against the depot’s graying boards. Pemberton watched the man’s eyes. The way they clouded over was no different than any other animal he’d watched die.

Serena stood beside him now.

“Your arm,” she said.

Pemberton saw that his poplin shirt was slashed below the elbow, the light blue cloth darkened by blood. Serena unclasped a silver cuff link and rolled up the shirtsleeve, examined the cut across his forearm.

“It won’t need any stitches,” Serena said. “Just a dressing and some iodine.”

Serena picked up the bowie knife and carried it over to Harmon’s daughter, who grasped her father by the shoulders as if the dead man might yet be revived. Tears flowed down the young woman’s face but she made no sound.

“Here,” Serena said, holding the knife by the blade. “By all rights it belongs to my husband. It’s a fine knife, and you can get a good price for it if you demand one. And I would,” she added. “Sell it, I mean, because that money will help when the child is born. It’s all you’ll ever get from my husband or me.”

Harmon’s daughter looked at her now, but she did not raise a hand to take the knife. Serena set it on the bench beside the younger woman and walked across the platform to stand beside her husband.

“Is my car here?” Pemberton asked Buchanan.

“Yes, but you and Mrs. Pemberton can take the train if you want to get there faster. Chaney can drive your car back.”

“No,” Pemberton said. “We’ll take the car.”

Pemberton turned to the baggage boy, who was staring at the blood pooling copiously around Harmon’s feet.

“Take that trunk and put them in my car. We’ll get the grips.”

“Don’t you think you’d better wait for Sheriff McDowell?” Buchanan asked.

“Why?” Pemberton said. “It was self-defense, a half dozen men will verify that.”

The boy followed Pemberton and his bride to the Packard, where they loaded the trunk and grips in the backseat.

Pemberton was turning the key when he saw McDowell coming up the sidewalk. The sheriff wore his Sunday finery, no badge or gun visible. Pemberton pressed the starter button on the floor, then released the hand brake and drove the Packard north into the higher mountains.

Lanny came upon the marijuana plants while fishing Caney Creek. It was a Saturday, and after helping his father sucker tobacco all morning, he’d had the truck and the rest of the afternoon and evening for himself. He’d changed into his fishing clothes and driven the three miles of dirt road to the French Broad. He drove fast, the rod and reel clattering side to side in the truck bed and clouds of red dust rising in his wake. He had the windows down and if the radio worked he’d have had it blasting. The driver’s license in his billfold was six months old but only in the last month had his daddy let him drive the truck by himself.

He parked by the bridge and walked upriver toward where Caney Creek entered. Afternoon sunlight slanted over Brushy Mountain and tinged the water the deep gold of cured tobacco. A big fish leaped in the shallows, but Lanny’s spinning rod was broken down and even if it hadn’t been he would not have bothered to make a cast. There was nothing in the river he could sell, only stocked rainbows and browns, knottyheads, and catfish. The men who fished the river were mostly old men who stayed in one place for hours, motionless as the stumps and rocks they sat on. Lanny liked to keep moving, and he fished where even the younger fishermen wouldn’t go.

In forty minutes he was half a mile up Caney Creek, the spinning rod still broken down. The gorge narrowed to a thirty-foot wall of water and rock, below it the deepest pool on the creek. This was the place where everyone else turned back. Lanny waded through waist-high water to reach the left side of the waterfall. Then he began climbing, using juts and fissures in the rock for leverage and resting places. When he got to the top he put the rod together and tied a gold Panther Martin on the line.

The only fish this far up were what fishing magazines called brook trout, though Lanny had never heard Old Man Jenkins or anyone else call them anything other than speckled trout. Jenkins swore they tasted better than any brown or rainbow and paid Lanny fifty cents apiece no matter how small they were. Old Man Jenkins ate them head and all, like sardines.

Mountain laurel slapped Lanny’s face and arms, and he scraped his hands and elbows climbing straight up rocks there was no other way around. The only path was water now. He thought of his daddy back at the farmhouse and smiled to himself. The old man had told him never to fish a place like this alone, because a broken leg or a rattlesnake bite could get you stone dead before anyone found you. That was near about the only kind of talk he got anymore from the old man, Lanny thought to himself as he tested his knot, always being lectured about something — how fast he drove, who he hung out with — like he was eight years old instead of sixteen, like the old man himself hadn’t raised all sorts of hell when he was young.

The only places with enough water to hold fish were the pools, some no bigger than a wash bucket. Lanny flicked the spinner into these pools and in every third or fourth one a small, orange-finned trout came flopping out onto the bank, the spinner’s treble hook snagged in its mouth. Lanny would slap the speckled’s head against a rock and feel the fish shudder in his hand and die. If he missed a strike, he cast again into the same pool. Unlike browns and rainbows, the speckleds would hit twice, occasionally even three times. Old Man Jenkins had told Lanny when he was a boy most every stream in the county was thick with speckleds, but they’d been too easy caught and soon enough fished out, which was why now you had to go to the back of beyond to find them.

Lanny already had eight fish in his creel when he passed the No Trespassing sign nailed in an oak tree. The sign was scabbed with rust like the ten-year-old car tag on his granddaddy’s barn, and he paid no more attention to the sign than when he’d first seen it a month ago. He knew he was on Toomey land, and he knew the stories. How Linwood Toomey once used his thumb to gouge a man’s eye out in a bar fight and another time opened a man’s face from ear to mouth with a broken beer bottle. Stories about events Lanny’s daddy had witnessed before, as his daddy put it, he’d got straight with the Lord. But Lanny had heard other things. About how Linwood Toomey and his son were too lazy and hard drinking to hold steady jobs. Too lazy and drunk to walk the quarter-mile from their farmhouse to look for trespassers, Lanny figured.

He waded on upstream, going farther than he’d ever been. He caught more speckleds, and soon ten dollars’ worth bulged in his creel. Enough money for gas, maybe even a couple of bootleg beers, he told himself, and though it wasn’t near the money he’d been making at the Pay-Lo bagging groceries, at least he could do this alone and not have to deal with some old bitch of a store manager with nothing better to do than watch his every move, then fire him just because he was late a few times.

He came to where the creek forked and that was where he saw a sudden high greening a few yards above him on the left. He left the water and climbed the bank to make sure it was what he thought it was. The plants were staked like tomatoes and set in rows the same way as tobacco or corn. He knew they were worth money, a lot of money, because Lanny knew how much his friend Shank paid for an ounce of pot and this wasn’t just ounces but maybe pounds.

He heard something behind him and turned, ready to drop the rod and reel and make a run for it. On the other side of the creek, a gray squirrel scrambled up a blackjack oak. Lanny told himself that there was no reason to get all jumpy, that nobody would have seen him coming up the creek.

He let his eyes scan what lay beyond the plants. He didn’t see anything moving, not even a cow or chicken. Nothing but some open ground and then a stand of trees. He rubbed a pot leaf between his finger and thumb, and it felt like money to him, more money than he’d make at the Pay-Lo. He looked around one more time before he took the knife from its sheath and cut down five plants. The stalks had a twiny toughness like rope.

That was the easy part. Dragging the stalks a mile down the creek was a lot harder, especially while trying to keep the leaves and buds from being stripped off. When he got to the river he hid the plants in the underbrush and walked the trail to make sure no one was fishing. Then he carried the plants to the road edge, stashed them in the ditch, and got the truck. He emptied the creel into the ditch, the trout stiff and glaze-eyed. He wouldn’t be delivering Old Man Jenkins any speckleds this evening.

Lanny drove back home with the plants hidden under willow branches and potato sacks. He planned to stay only long enough to get a shower and put on some clean clothes, but as he walked through the front room his father looked up from the TV.

“We ain’t ate yet.”

“I’ll get something in town,” Lanny said.

“No, your momma’s fixing supper right now, and she’s set the table for three.”

“I ain’t got time. Shank is expecting me.”

“You can make time, boy. Or I might take a notion to go somewhere in that truck myself this evening.”

It was seven-thirty before Lanny drove into the Hardee’s parking lot and parked beside Shank’s battered Camaro. He got out of the truck and walked over to Shank’s window.

“You ain’t going to believe what I got in back of the truck.”

Shank grinned.

“It ain’t that old prune-faced bitch that fired you, is it?”

“No, this is worth something.”

Shank got out of the Camaro and walked around to the truck bed with Lanny. Lanny looked to see if anyone was watching, then lifted a sack so Shank could see one of the stalks.

“I got five of ’em.”

“Shit fire, boy. Where’d that come from?”

“Found it when I was fishing.”

Shank pulled the sack back farther.

“I need to start doing my fishing with you. It’s clear I been going to the wrong places.”

A car drove up to the drive-through and Shank pulled the sack back over the plants.

“What you planning to do with it?”

“Make some money, if I can figure out who’ll buy it.”

“Leonard will, I bet.”

“He don’t know me, though. I ain’t one of his potheads.”

“Well, I am,” Shank said. “Let me lock my car and we’ll go pay him a visit.”

“How about we go over to Dink’s first and get some beer.”

“Leonard’s got beer. His is cheaper and it ain’t piss-warm like what we got at Dink’s last time.”

They drove out of Marshall, following 221 toward Mars Hill. The carburetor knocked and popped as the pickup struggled up Jenkins Mountain. Soon enough Lanny figured he’d have money for a kit, maybe even enough to buy a whole new carburetor.

“You in for a treat, meeting Leonard,” Shank said. “They ain’t another like him, leastways in this county.”

“I heard tell he was a lawyer once.”

“Naw, he just went to law school a few months. They kicked his ass out because he was stoned all the time.”

After a mile they turned off the blacktop and onto a dirt road. On both sides what had once been pasture was now thick with blackjack oak and briars. They passed a deserted farmhouse and turned onto another road no better than a logging trail.

The woods opened into a small meadow, at the center a battered green and white trailer, its windows painted black. On one side of the trailer a satellite dish sprouted like an enormous mushroom, on the other side a Jeep Cherokee, its back fender crumpled. Two Dobermans scrambled out from under the trailer, barking as they raced toward the truck. They leaped at Lanny’s window, their claws raking the door as he quickly rolled up the window.

The trailer door opened and a man with a gray ponytail and wearing only a pair of khaki shorts stepped onto the cinder-block steps. He yelled at the dogs and when that did no good he came out to the truck and kicked at them until they slunk back from where they had emerged.

Lanny looked at a man who wasn’t any taller than himself and looked to outweigh him only because of a stomach that sagged over the front of his shorts like a half-deflated balloon.

“That’s Leonard?”

“Yeah. The one and only.”

Leonard walked over to Shank’s window.

“I got nothing but beer and a few nickel bags. Supplies are going to be low until people start to harvest.”

“Well, we likely come at a good time then.” Shank turned to Lanny. “Let’s show Leonard what you brought him.”

Lanny got out and pulled back the branches and potato sacks.

“Where’d you get that from?” Leonard asked.

“Found it,” Lanny said.

“Found it, did you. And you figured finders keepers.”

“Yeah,” said Lanny.

Leonard let his fingers brush some of the leaves.

“Looks like you dragged it through every briar patch and laurel slick between here and the county line.”

“There’s plenty of buds left on it,” Shank said.

“What you give me for it?” Lanny asked.

Leonard lifted each stalk, looking at it the same way Lanny had seen buyers look at tobacco.

“Fifty dollars.”

“You trying to cheat me,” Lanny said. “I’ll find somebody else to buy it.”

As soon as he spoke Lanny wished he hadn’t, because he’d heard from more than one person that Leonard Hamby was a man you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of. He was about to say that he reckoned fifty dollars would be fine but Leonard spoke first.

“You may have an exalted view of your entrepreneurial abilities,” Leonard said.

Lanny didn’t understand all the words but he understood the tone. It was smart-ass but it wasn’t angry.

“I’ll give you sixty dollars, and I’ll double that if you bring me some that doesn’t look like it’s been run through a hay baler. Plus I got some cold beers inside. My treat.”

“Okay,” Lanny said, surprised at Leonard but more surprised at himself, how tough he’d sounded. He tried not to smile as he thought how when he got back to Marshall he’d be able to tell his friends he’d called Leonard Hamby a cheater to his face and Leonard hadn’t done a damn thing about it but offer more money and free beer.

Leonard took a money clip from his front pocket and peeled off three twenties and handed them to Lanny. Leonard nodded toward the meadow’s far corner.

“Put them over there next to my tomatoes. Then come inside if you got a notion to.”

Lanny and Shank carried the plants through the knee-high grass and laid them next to the tomatoes. As they approached the trailer, Lanny watched where the Dobermans had vanished under it. He didn’t lift his eyes until he reached the steps.

Inside, Lanny’s vision took a few moments to adjust because the only light came from a TV screen. Strings of unlit Christmas lights ran across the walls and over door eaves like bad wiring. A dusty couch slouched against the back wall. In the corner Leonard sat in a fake-leather recliner patched with black electrician’s tape. Except for a stereo system, the rest of the room was shelves filled with books and CDs. Music was playing, music that didn’t have any guitars or words.

“Have a seat,” Leonard said and nodded at the couch.

A woman stood in the foyer between the living room and kitchen. She was a tall, bony woman, and the cutoff jeans and halter top she wore had little flesh to hold them up. She’d gotten a bad sunburn and there were pink patches on her skin where she’d peeled. To Lanny she mostly looked wormy and mangy, like some stray dog around a garbage dump. Except for her eyes. They were a deep blue, like a jaybird’s feathers. If you could just keep looking into her eyes, she’d be a pretty woman, Lanny told himself.

“How about getting these boys a couple of beers, Wendy,” Leonard said.

“Get them your ownself,” the woman said and disappeared into the back of the trailer.

Leonard shook his head but said nothing as he got up. He brought back two longneck Budweisers and a sandwich bag filled with pot and some rolling papers.

He handed the beers to Shank and Lanny and sat down. Lanny was thirsty, and he drank quickly as he watched Leonard carefully shake some pot out of the Baggie and onto the paper. Leonard licked the paper and twisted both ends, then lit it.

The orange tip brightened as Leonard drew the smoke in. He handed the joint to Shank, who drew on it as well and handed it back.

“What about your buddy?”

“He don’t smoke pot. Scared his daddy would find out and beat the tar out of him.”

“That ain’t so,” Lanny said. “I just like a beer buzz better.”

Lanny lifted the bottle to his lips and drank until the bottle was empty.

“I’d like me another one.”

“Quite the drinker, aren’t you,” Leonard said. “Just make sure you don’t overdo it. I don’t want you passed out and pissing on my couch.”

“I ain’t gonna piss on your couch.”

Leonard took another drag off the joint and passed it back to Shank.

“They’re in the refrigerator,” Leonard said. “You can get one easy as I can.”

Lanny stood up and for a moment felt off plumb, maybe because he’d drunk the beer so fast. When the world steadied he got the beer and sat back down on the couch. He looked at the TV, some kind of western but without the sound on he couldn’t tell what was happening. He drank the second beer quick as the first while Shank and Leonard finished smoking the pot.

Shank had his eyes closed.

“Man, I’m feeling good,” he said.

Lanny studied Leonard who sat in the recliner, trying to figure out what it was that made Leonard Hamby a man you didn’t want to mess with. Leonard looked soft, Lanny thought, white and soft like bread dough. Just because a man had a couple of mean dogs didn’t make him such a badass, he told himself. He thought about his own daddy and Linwood Toomey, big men you could look at and tell right away you’d not want to cross them. Lanny wondered if anyone would ever call him a badass and wished again that he didn’t take after his mother, who was short and thin-boned.

“What’s this shit you’re listening to, Leonard?” Lanny said.

“It’s called Appalachian Spring. It’s by Copland.”

“Ain’t never heard of them.”

Leonard looked amused.

“Are you sure? They used to be the warm-up act for Lynyrd Skynyrd.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“No matter. Copland is an acquired taste, and I don’t anticipate your listening to a classical music station any time in the future.”

Lanny knew Leonard was putting him down, talking over him like he was stupid, and it made him think of his teachers at the high school, teachers who used smart-ass words against him when he gave them trouble because they were too old and scared to try anything else. He got up and made his way to the refrigerator, damned if he was going to ask permission. He got the beer out and opened the top but didn’t go back to the couch. He went down the hallway to find the bathroom.

The bedroom door was open, and he could see the woman sitting on the bed reading a magazine. He pissed and then walked into the bedroom and stood next to her.

The woman laid down the magazine.

“What do you want?”

Lanny grinned.

“What you offering?”

Even buzzed up with beer, he knew it was a stupid thing to say. It seemed to him that ever since he’d got to Leonard’s his mouth had been a faucet he couldn’t shut off.

The woman’s blue eyes stared at him like he was nothing more than a sack of shit.

“I ain’t offering you anything,” she said. “Even if I was, a little peckerhead like you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

The woman looked toward the door.

“Leonard,” she shouted.

Leonard appeared at the doorway.

“It’s past time to get your Cub Scout meeting over.”

Leonard nodded at Lanny.

“I believe you boys have overstayed your welcome.”

“I was getting ready to leave anyhow,” Lanny said. He turned toward the door and the beer slipped from his hand and spilled on the bed.

“Nothing but a little peckerhead,” the woman said.

In a few moments he and Shank were outside. The evening sun glowed in the treetop like a snagged orange balloon. The first lightning bugs rode over the grass as though carried on an invisible current.

“You get more plants, come again,” Leonard said and closed the trailer door.