O.P.

Would the good Dr. Johnson’s words echo so resoundingly in my soul, I have often wondered, had he picked some other word? A dimwit, say, or a palpable ass, or a clod or a clown or a numbskull? “No man but a witling, sir, wrote but for money.” It has, I submit, every bit as good a ring to it, and it leaves my own innocent surname well out of it.

Ah, well. It has always seemed to me that the precise meaning of Johnson’s utterance is subject to interpretation. Perhaps he is saying that the person who writes in the happy anticipation of anything beyond financial reward is playing the fool. If you expect to make a name for yourself, or achieve literary immortality, or change the world, or pile up brownie points in heaven, then surely you’re a blockhead — because money’s all you can truly hope to gain for your efforts.

Because, certainly, Johnson himself was nowhere near as mercenary as the quoted sentence makes him appear. He wrote for money, unquestionably, and he might well have stopped writing had they stopped paying him, but he wrote also with the clear intent of adding to the world’s store of knowledge and enhancing English literature. Indeed, his dictum works every bit as well, and sounds just as likely to have been uttered by him, if we take it and turn it on its head, to wit: “No man but a blockhead wrote solely for money.”

And who can argue with that? There are easier ways to make a living — almost all of them, come to think of it — and few less likely ways to amass a fortune.

If I were a painter this is how I would paint the Napa Valley: not like those gallery scenes of mustard in bloom or harvest-ripe fruit, but this ghostly silver secret landscape, the vines dormant and white with frost, the moon full, jackrabbits scattering across the roadway before me like mercury beads. Once I was a police officer for a very short time in Saint Amelia, an exclusive postage stamp of a town, and acquired an intimate knowledge of this landscape, four miles square, in the darkness of graveyard shift. Our uniform patches were comical — not authoritarian stars or eagles but orchid-hued grapes set against streaks of orange and green vineyard, glossy and enameled in appearance, which is how I thought of the town. I ached for sleep, longed to hold my sleeping husband’s body, drove the same streets over and over, turned at the same boundaries, waited for something to happen. Like a pinball moving constantly, bouncing against its limitations.

When my shift ended, I would hurry to my home in the city of Napa, thirty minutes south. My husband and I couldn’t afford to live in Saint Amelia; none of the cops who patrolled there could, except a couple of old-timers who’d bought property way back when. I’d race daybreak to my bedroom with tinfoil-lined windows, where I could preserve the illusion of night and sleep. Desires — for sleep, for my husband, for something unnameable — converged. My husband, a young assistant winemaker, smelled of bleach, wet cement floors, the brackish tip of a wine-soaked cork, wet stainless steel, sweat, oak, sun. When he’d been working in the limestone wine caves, which bloom with multicolored fungi and mold, his hair and skin would be infused with a heightened artificial scent of roses. When he slept, his skin was so warm, like chocolate left in the sun just as it reaches melting point, beaded with moisture. I wanted to press as many of the planes of my cold body against his as possible, quadriceps to hamstring, stomach to back, jaw to jaw. I’d undress and place my gun on my nightstand under an open book, and then, just as I’d fold back a corner of the blankets, dancing with joy inside like someone about to enter a hot bath, his alarm would go off, the third or fourth snooze alarm, the one that meant he was late.

In our twenties we were broke and blue, and my police job was important to us for the health insurance. The Napa Valley had lost its bucolic charm, and in moments of desperation I tried to talk my husband into moving to Czech Republic, Argentina, South Africa, any other winemaking region in the world where opportunities might exist for a young, ambitious American with talent but no connections. Napa Valley winemaking was a kind of Hollywood, which ironically is where my husband first worked; he had a film degree. Idealistically, he insisted that the job could be learned only by hands-on experience, that winemaking degrees were worthless. So we were outsiders from the start in a closed, incestuous industry where the demarcation between insider and outsider felt absolute. Then, at about the same time Saint Amelia hired me, he was hired as the assistant to a “cult” winemaker who had waiting lists to buy his mythic, perfect cab. We were still broke — but with a difference. We were on a path to the inner circle, my husband assured me, if we played things right. He’d spontaneously belt out, “I’ve got a golden ticket!” and then worry that if he appeared too happy, the gods might snatch it away.

Our primary form of entertainment when we were alone was telling each other stories that demystified the Valley. He’d tell me about tanks of white accidentally pumped into tanks of red and then say, “This is a small valley. Talking ruins careers.” He’d warn me that people might try to milk me for information. “Oh, please,” I’d say. “You didn’t have to sign a confidentiality agreement like I did.” I’d tell him about the mystery of the naked dead man, found face-down in front of a winery chateau. It was assumed at first that he’d leaped — or been pushed — from the third-story window. (In fact, as near as anyone could tell, he’d woken from a drunken sleep and mistaken the French doors, which opened on a thirty-foot drop, for the guest bathroom.) And I’d tell him the whole collection of pervert-in-the-vineyard stories the other cops liked to tell me on uneventful shifts. At first I thought they were teasing me, but I learned that every city, large or small, always has one crime, the sex crime. In the month before I’d been hired, two women — both lived in exclusive homes backing onto vineyards — reported waking in the night to find a strange man in their beds, touching them. At the first sign of struggle he disappeared into the darkness like some malevolent vineyard spirit, leaving them to wonder if they’d only dreamed.

Stacy didn’t mean to tell Noonan that when she was seventeen she was struck by lightning. She rarely told anyone, and never a man she was attracted to or hoped soon to be sleeping with. Always, at the last second, an alarm in the center of her brain went off, and she changed the subject, asked a question like, “How’s your wife?” or “You ready for another?” She was a summertime bartender at Noonan’s, a sprawling log building with the main entrance and kitchen door facing the road and three large plate-glass dining room windows in back and a wide redwood deck cantilevered above the yard for taking in the great sunset views of the Adirondack Mountains. The sign said, NOONAN’S FAMILY RESTAURANT, but in fact it was a roadhouse, a bar that — except in ski season and on summer weekends when drive-by tourists with kids mistakenly pulled in for lunch or supper — catered mostly to heavy drinkers from the several nearby hamlets.

The night that Stacy told Noonan about the lightning was also the night she shot and killed him. She had rented an A-frame at off-season rates in one of the hamlets and was working for Noonan only till the winter snows blew in from Quebec and Ontario. From May to November, she usually waited tables or tended bar in one or another of the area restaurants, and the rest of the year she taught alpine skiing at Whiteface Mountain. That was her real job, her profession. Stacy had the healthy, ash-blond good looks of a poster girl for women’s Nordic sports: tall, broad shouldered, flat muscled, with a square jaw and high cheekbones. But despite appearances, she viewed herself as a plain-faced twenty-eight-year-old exathlete, with the emphasis on ex. Eight years ago, she was captain of the nationally ranked St. Regis University downhill ski team, only a sophomore and already a star. Then in the eastern regionals she pushed her luck, took a spectacular, cartwheeling spill in the giant slalom, and shattered her left thigh. The video of her fall was still being shown at the front of the sports segment on the evening news from Plattsburgh.

A year of physical therapy and she returned to college and the slopes, but she’d lost her fearlessness and, with it, her interest in college, and dropped out before fall break. Her parents had long since swapped their house for an RV and retired to a semipermanent campground outside Phoenix; her three older brothers had drifted downstate to Albany for work in construction; but Stacy came back to where she’d grown up. She had friends from high school there, mostly women, who still thought of her as a star: “Stace was headed for the Olympics, y’know,” they told strangers. Over time, she lived briefly and serially with three local men in their early thirties, men she called losers even when she was living with them — slow-talking guys with beards and ponytails, rusted-out pickup trucks, and large dogs with bandannas tied around their necks. Otherwise and most of the time, she lived alone.

Stacy had never tended bar for Noonan before this, and the place was a little rougher than she was used to. But she was experienced and had cultivated a set of open-faced, wiseguy ways and a laid-back manner that protected her from her male customers’ presumptions. Which, in spite of her ways and manner, she needed: She was a shy, north-country girl who, when it came to personal matters, volunteered very little about herself, not because she had secrets but because there was so much about herself that she did not yet understand. She did understand, however, that the last thing she wanted or needed was a love affair with a man like Noonan — married, twenty years older than she, and her boss. She was seriously attracted to him, though. And not just sexually. Which was why she got caught off guard.

Shelly Wolansky’s desk faced a wall, and to the right, over the in-basket, was the only window in the prison kitchen. It was a small window, no bigger than a cutting board, with a view Shelly could live without: razor-wire and grim concrete walls, beyond that acres of dead weeds bordered by cyclone fence and more razor wire, and in the distance Route 5 and the doughnut shop where corrections officers could buy Bavarian crème and chocolate frosted at a 20 percent discount. When Shelly had seen it all once, she’d seen it too many times.

Her head ached. Her desk was a mess. She untucked her shirt, undid the top button of her pants — the waistband pinched when she sat, the price she paid for having quit smoking — and reread the warden’s memo. He needed her to work Thursday night — the night of the execution — to make the last meal.

The warden promised Friday off — Thursday, too, except the few hours that night. Fine with her. Not working Friday meant she could make Chuck’s hockey tournament in New Haven, keep an eye on him. Lord knows he needed watching, especially after the bit two months back with that other boy’s car. That was the worst, but she didn’t like the way he’d been drawing penalties on the ice, either. Chuck’s coach had said it was part of the game, that hockey players need an attitude. “Yeah, well, he needs his attitude adjusted,” she had said.

If Hank were still alive…

Ah, quit it, Shelly told herself. Maybe, if, maybe, if. You can’t play that game anymore. Four years is too long.

The banging pans and rattling blowers of the kitchen didn’t help her headache, and when Danny, the trusty, dropped a soup pot he was washing, she yelled at him. “Sorry, Julia Child!” he shouted back. She smiled, despite herself. She liked it when people in the prison called her Julia Child. She liked what it said about how she ran the kitchen.

Shelly rolled back in her chair — inventory reports could wait — and glanced out the window. It was snowing. Somehow that made the view even harder to bear. In the distance, out past the fence, she could see little stick people waving signs. Protesters already, and the execution still two days away. All those people standing in the cold — good news for the doughnut shop.

The kitchen’s fluorescent bulbs stuttered. The stainless steel shone dull in the flickering light. She needed her hands in food, needed to chop something. So she buttoned her pants, pulled on latex gloves, and stopped near a cutting board to put zucchini under the knife. She wondered what the guy would order for his last meal. Though she’d worked at the prison three years, the state hadn’t killed anyone since she started. A new governor now changed all that. She figured this late-night supper would be the first of many, and that thought turned her stomach queasy.

“What’s up, Julia Child?”

Danny nudged her, shoulder-to-shoulder as if they were dancing. “You’re staring into space land,” he said, bending around to see her face. He smiled his soda-pop smile, the smile of a con man, which he had been until an old couple turned him in. The file Shelly read had told how Danny, out on bail before the trial, stopped by the couple’s house and hospitalized them for six weeks each. That tantrum earned him his spot in maximum security. Good behavior, and likely that smile, had freed him for the kitchen. That and the fact the warden liked to make the white guys trusties.

“You’re not supposed to touch the staff,” she said.

He ignored her and pointed at the knife. “You don’t focus, you might lose a finger. What’s on your mind?”

Shelly put down the knife. It was easy to see how he could bilk people — his gentle laugh, his sincere and curious face — Shelly had overheard kitchen workers confess deep anxieties to Danny. But he was scary, too, because of what he’d done. Because he was maximum. Because when Shelly looked close enough, she noticed parallel scars at his wrist and the earlobe that was missing, and when she paid attention to his voice she heard that dialect white men only speak when they’ve been inside the walls a long time.

“I’m cooking that guy’s meal Thursday night.”

“Doyle?” He laughed. “He’s a mean bastard, that one.”

“I don’t want to know. I’m sure it was a long, long time ago.”

“Hell no, Julia Child. Not long back, they let Doyle in the yard with the rest of us, and he said something to piss off some Latin Kings. You don’t piss off the Kings. They stabbed him. That son of a bitch just pressed a sock over the hole in his belly so he wouldn’t look weak. Later, he’s walking some hall with guards on both sides, his hands and legs cuffed, and they pass the dude who stabbed him. Doyle bites off the dude’s nose. And now Julia Child’s making him dinner.”

“Don’t you have trays to wash?”

“About five years’ worth, with good behavior.”

Back at the sink, he worked the high-pressure hose, spraying until steam swallowed him. Having Danny around was as bad as having that window over her desk, reminders she didn’t need. When she saw him, she couldn’t help but see the baseball bat that broke the ribcage of the old man, smashed the old woman’s arthritic hands. No matter how Danny laughed or winked, he couldn’t hide his history. He wore it as plainly as he wore his blue prison shirt, untucked and buttoned to the collar, just like all the inmates.

Sometimes Chuck dressed for school the same way. “It’s a style,” he argued. “No big deal.”

I told Manny the whole story. We were staying in on a Saturday morning while everyone else went to the movie. Sat up at the front table, playing double sol and eating Keebler’s Chocolate Chips and smoking tightrolls, Camels. Doing the prison day-off thing.

“I was hung up on her, bro,” I said, trying to explain it to him. “She owned my ass.”

“I been there,” he said, and the way he said it I knew it was true.

“We were broke up and I was taking out some other ladies,” I went on. “One weekend, a Sunday, I must have had four different babes come over, different times, got laid each time. I was having a ball, but it was crazy. No matter how much fun I was having, I still couldn’t get Donna out of my mind. I was fucked up, man.

“Anyway, the last chick left about eleven that night, and I went to bed. To sleep.”

Manny cracked up, leaned back in his chair and laughed with his head tilted back and his mouth wide open.

“I guess you weren’t gonna pound your trouser worm,” he said.

“I guess not. I was just getting asleep when the doorbell rang, and I got up and it was Donna. ‘I got to talk to you,’ she said.

“ ‘Fuck, Donna,’ I said. ‘I’m just about asleep. We’re over, sugar. Why don’t you just leave me alone.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve really got to talk to you.’

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m just about asleep, and if I don’t go right back to bed I won’t be able to. I oversleep and lose this job, my P.O.’ll violate me.’

“ ‘Okay,’ she said, pushing her way in. ‘You go back to bed. I’ll come with you and we’ll talk in the morning. It’s really important.’ ”

I looked over at Manny. “You know how it is when you’re just about asleep? I told her, ‘All right, come on in, but we’re not doing anything, Donna. I just want to go to sleep.’

“Well, she came in and I went back and climbed in bed and she came in a minute later and crawled in with me, buck naked. I meant what I said, though — I wasn’t going to fuck her. I turned over and closed my eyes, tried to get to sleep again. About five minutes later the doorbell rang again.

“It was a girl I’d seen a couple of times that week. Patsy. ‘Patsy,’ I said, ‘I’ve got company.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, that’s cool, I guess. I’ll see you tomorrow then.’ And she left.

“When I came back into the bedroom, Donna jumped up and asked me who that was. ‘Nobody,’ I said, ‘just a friend. She’s gone.’ Donna ran to the front door and must have seen her walking away. She came back, and she was hot.

“ ‘You fucking that girl,’ she said. I said, ‘No, I’m not, but that’s none of your business anyway. We’re broke up,’ I said.

“ ‘That’s it,’ she said, slamming around and throwing her clothes on. ‘I’m outta here.’ ‘That was the original idea,’ I said back to her, and she went out, just about busting the door.

“That’s it, I’m thinking, and went back and lay down. But then I thought I heard voices and got up and opened the door, and sure enough, there’s Patsy sitting in a chair by the pool and Donna’s giving her the business, screaming at her.

“ ‘Donna!’ I yelled down. ‘Get your ass out of here right now or I’m calling the cops.’ I didn’t say anything to Patsy even though I knew she didn’t have a clue what was going on, but I knew Patsy was cool. I figured if I said anything to her that’d fire Donna up again and I’d just tell Patsy the next day what went down and she’d understand. Well, they both get up and head for their cars. Patsy always parked on one side of the complex. I watched for a minute, saw Donna was heading in a different direction, and went back inside. I layback down, but then I got to thinking — I know this bitch — Donna — I better be sure she’s left.

“I went to the front door again, and sure enough, Donna’s dogging Patsy, walking right behind her, yapping at her. I ran out of the apartment along the catwalk. All I had on were my jockeys. There’s a little space where you can look out at the parking lot, and I ran to that. Patsy’s up against a car and Donna’s got her face right up in Patsy’s. I ran downstairs and around the corner and just as I came around the corner, I see Donna’s fist come back and she smacked Patsy. She smacked her hard, dude. I never seen a guy hit another guy the way that broad hit her. I ran over to them and just as I got there Donna’s raising her hand to smack Patsy again. Only she wasn’t hitting her. She was stabbing her. It really didn’t register, though. I got there just as she was coming down with the knife and I grabbed her arm with one hand and Patsy with the other and shoved them apart. Donna went down on her knees and then started coming up, trying to cut me. I ducked my stomach back and at the same time she missed I grabbed the hand with the knife and hit it against my knee. This all happened fast, man. Really fast.

“She lost the knife when her hand hit my knee and my first thought is… find the knife. I know if I get the knife first she can’t hurt me. We’re both scrabbling around looking for it — it was dark in that parking lot — and I find it first. It was this big-ass switchblade — in fact, I gave it to her a long time ago as a present — and I find it and pick it up and she sees I’ve got it and she takes off running. I’m standing there with this switchblade and I tried to close it and couldn’t ‘cause it’s bent in two-three places. I just stand there until I see the reflection of her lights go on in the other parking lot and hear her tires burn out, and then I walk over to Patsy, who’s standing up against a car.

“Well, this sounds weird, but it’s the truth, Manny. I’ve got this knife in my hand and everything but it still doesn’t dawn on me that Patsy’s been stabbed. It just happened so fast. Patsy didn’t know she’d been cut either.

“I walk up to her and say, ‘Are you all right?’ She’s got this white silk blouse on and chinos and I see little tiny sprinkles of blood on the blouse, looked like somebody’d sprinkled red salt out of a shaker, or tabasco sauce… yeah… more like tabasco sauce. ‘You been hit,’ I said. ‘You got a nosebleed.’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘she missed me. I ducked and she hit me in the back.’

“She turned around, and man! Her whole back was solid red and blood was running down her pants like she was peeing herself. ‘You been stabbed,’ I said, what had happened finally dawning on me. ‘I have?’ she said. She didn’t even know it herself.”

Just then the dorm hack came by, motioned at us to come over. He was taking the count. Even though he knew us, he made us tell him our names and he read the numbers off our shirts, made check marks on his clipboard, and then left, probably to take a nap downstairs where his desk was.

We went back and sat down at the table.

“You sure you want to hear the rest of this?” I asked Manny.

“Fuck, yes,” he said, grinning. “This is some wild bitch!”

I went ahead with the story.

“Well, I wanted to take her over to Charity Hospital, but she said no. She wanted us to go up to my apartment and get a better look at where she’d been stuck. We climbed up the stairs, and I’m thinking she’s not that bad, being as how she can go up stairs and all. When we get to my apartment I took off her blouse and all I can see is an entry wound about this big [I held up my fingers to show about an inch and a half or so], so my mind says the knife only went in a couple inches and hit a bone. That’s what bent the blade, I’m thinking. Anybody knows you can bleed a lot from even a small cut. The blood’s not running anymore, it’s kind of just bubbling a little. I bandage her up with a bath towel and some electrician’s tape I had, and then she says maybe I ought to take her over to the hospital as she’s feeling a little woozy. That’s smart, I tell her, and we go downstairs.

“I drive her over to Charity and pull up to the emergency room entrance and the rent-a-cop comes out and they get a wheelchair after I tell them the score and wheel her in.

“I tell the rent-a-cop what’s gone down, and he calls the real deal, and when that guy gets there, a uniform, I tell him the same story and give him the knife. I tell him where he can probably find Donna. ‘Look over at the Godfather in Metairie,’ I say. ‘How’s the girl got stabbed?’ he asks, and I tell him I don’t know, I don’t think it’s that bad, and give him my reasoning about hitting the bone and all. ‘But check with the doctor,’ I said.

“Well, he doesn’t check with the doctor, just leaves, and they pick up Donna the next morning and all she gets charged with is simple assault, not assault with a deadly weapon or attempted murder or any of that, only I don’t know none of this until the next day.

“About an hour after I bring Patsy in, I’m sitting by my lonesome in the waiting area and in comes this lady and man. The man looks exactly like that guy used to be on Miami Vice, the TV show? You know, the captain? The one with all the acne scars? Remember? Anyway, this lady comes over to me, no howdy-do, nothing, and she says, ‘If my little girl dies, you die, and this guy will kill you.’ She means the scarface with her. It must be Patsy’s mom, I guess, which it is, and I try to explain how it isn’t my fault — that if it wasn’t for me Patsy probably would be dead as Donna was fixing to stab her again when I broke it up.

“ ‘Don’t matter none,’ she says. ‘If she hadn’t been at your place, she wouldn’t have got stabbed to begin with.’ I guess she’d already talked to the cops or the hospital or somebody, got the lowdown on what happened. You couldn’t reason with her. This guy she was with, later I find out he’s connected, would’ve done what she said, terminated my ass. Him I never talked to. In fact the whole time, the four hours we sat there the only ones in the waiting room, he never said a word to me or her. Just sat there mugging on me with no expression on his face. It was creepy.

“I went to the john a couple of times and each time I’m thinking, Should I just take off now, go to California or something? See, I was convinced that if Patsy died her mom meant business. There was no doubt in my mind. The only thing kept me there was I still thought Patsy wasn’t hurt all that much.

“Shit. It was serious all right. Along about daybreak this doctor comes out to talk to us. ‘We think she’s gonna make it,’ he says to Patsy’s mom, ‘but it’s still a little shaky.’ Turns out the knife went all the way in, almost came through the other side. It did hit a bone, and that’s what saved her. ‘We were looking to see if the blade hit the lung,’ he said. ‘If it had even nicked it, we couldn’t have saved her. Her lungs would have filled up with blood and she would have basically drowned.’ As it was, they ended up giving her six units of whole blood and the doc said she died on them twice and they had to bring her back from the dead. They had to wait until the blood clotted and moved away from the lung to get a clear picture. The x-ray showed it had missed, but how he didn’t know. It was a miracle.

“For her and me. Once we found out she was out of the woods, we all left. Before we did, her mom turned to me and said, ‘You’re still on the hook, Mayes. She might still die. If she does, you’re dead, Mister.’

“Way it turned out, Patsy came through fine, although she was a little sore.”

“So why’d you try to kill yourself? I don’t get it.”

“Wait a minute. I’m getting to it.” I saw Manny was getting antsy now that the bloody part was all over, so I speeded up a couple of the in-between details and cut to the grand finale. “Patsy gets out of the hospital, sore but OK, and we even started dating kinda heavy, although we had to fuck real easy or else open up her wound again. Her mom decides she likes me, and she tells me what she told me in the hospital was for true — I’d’a been dead meat if her darlin’ daughter’d croaked. She says she’s glad she didn’t ‘cause now she likes me, but somehow that didn’t make me feel a whole lot better. She’s an okay enough gal, but every time I see her I still get a little nervous.

“Anyhoo, a couple weeks go by and then I start getting phone calls at work from Donna. She don’t say hello, kiss my ass or nothing when I pick up the phone, just starts talking like we hadn’t ever stopped. ‘I drive by your work every day when I get off,’ she says, ‘and I point my gun at you while I’m going by. One of these days I’m pulling the trigger, motherfucker.’ The first time or so she pulls this I just sort of laugh it off, but after a solid week of these kinds of conversations I had enough and called the district attorney. ‘Nothing we can do,’ he says, ‘until she does something, but I made a note of this and if she ever actually shoots at you or anything like that we’ll pick her up.’ That made me feel about as good and safe as finding out I got blood in my urine. I thought once or twice that maybe I ought to do her before she does me, but when I start scheming about how to carry that off, I realize I’m still fucked up over her.”

“You still fucked up over this crazy bitch after the shit she done?” I didn’t realize Manny’s eyes could get that wide. The way he looked and the way he said it made me think maybe it was me that was crazy. “How can you even want to be on the same planet with her?”

“Because I’m stupid?” I wasn’t a hundred percent joking. I stared at the end of the cigarette I had going. “Yeah. It’s somethin’, huh? Go figure. You want me to lie about it?”

“Naw, man. It’s just… well, I don’t figure you to be pussy-whipped, that’s all.”

“You wait, Manny. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do. I knew she was just about wacko enough to pull some stunt like that — drive by and shoot me — it wouldn’t be hard — I’m working in front of this big plate glass window two feet from the street — and then I get this phone call from her.”

“What’d she say?” He was all ears.

“She said, ‘I just want to tell you why I came over that night.’ ”

“That’s right. You said she said she wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Yeah. What it was, what she said was that she was pregnant and that she murdered it. That’s the words she used.”

“You mean—”

“Abortion. She had an abortion. Man, I’m death on abortions! She knows that, the bitch!” Thinking about it all over again brought on some of the same feelings I’d had then.

“I started thinking about this baby boy — I know it was a boy — and man, I lost it. I started drinking then, went out and bought a bottle of Jack and hit it hard. I’m thinking all kinds of things. You know, ‘what coulda been’ kinds of things. Me and her. Me and her and our baby boy. I just kinda went out of my skull. It probably didn’t help I laid up in this motel room out on Esplanade for three days doing nothing but slugging down Jack and going crazy in the head. That’s when I did it.”

I told him about the Norelco razor cord and it breaking when I tried to hang myself with it. I didn’t know why I was telling Manny all this. Maybe to get it all out, make me feel better. Only it didn’t. Make me feel better, that is. I felt worse. I felt just like I had during those three days, only I didn’t have any whiskey to help take the edge off. I know one thing — if I’d been on the bricks right that minute I wouldn’t be qualifying for any of those white poker chips they give out at AA.

Time I went to bed that night I’d got it back under control somewhat. Only thing is I kept seeing Donna’s fucking face, and I hated the way I felt. Like I still wanted us to be together.

Ain’t that some shit?

The vanishing of the doctor’s wife’s child in broad daylight was an event so cataclysmic that it forever divided time into the then and the now, the before and the after. In later years, fortified with a pitcher of silica-dry vodka martinis, she had cause to replay the events preceding the disappearance. They were tawdry and banal but in retrospect freighted with menace, a foreshadowing of what was to come, like a footman or a fool preceding a king into a room.

She had been quarreling with the paperhanger. Her four-year-old daughter, Zeineb, was standing directly behind the paperhanger where he knelt smoothing air bubbles out with a wide plastic trowel. Zeineb had her fingers in the paperhanger’s hair. The paperhanger’s hair was shoulder length and the color of flax and the child was delighted with it. The paperhanger was accustomed to her doing this and he did not even turn around. He just went on with his work. His arms were smooth and brown and corded with muscle and in the light that fell upon the paper-hanger through stained-glass panels the doctor’s wife could see that they were lightly downed with fine golden hair. She studied these arms bemusedly while she formulated her thoughts.

You tell me so much a roll, she said. The doctor’s wife was from Pakistan and her speech was still heavily accented. I do not know single-bolt rolls and double-bolt rolls. You tell me double-bolt price but you are installing single-bolt rolls. My friend has told me. It is cost me perhaps twice as much.

The paperhanger, still on his knees, turned. He smiled up at her. He had pale blue eyes. I did tell you so much a roll, he said. You bought the rolls. The child, not yet vanished, was watching the paperhanger’s eyes. She was a scaled-down clone of the mother, the mother viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and the paperhanger suspected that as she grew neither her features nor her expression would alter, she would just grow larger, like something being aired up with a hand pump.

And you are leave lumps, the doctor’s wife said, gesturing at the wall. I do not leave lumps, the paperhanger said. You’ve seen my work before. These are not lumps. The paper is wet. The paste is wet. Everything will shrink down and flatten out. He smiled again. He had clean even teeth. And besides, he said, I gave you my special cockteaser rate. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.

Her mouth worked convulsively. She looked for a moment as if he’d slapped her. When words did come they came in a fine spray of spit. You are trash, she said. You are scum.

Hands on knees, he was pushing erect, the girl’s dark fingers trailing out of his hair. Don’t call me trash, he said, as if it were perfectly all right to call him scum, but he was already talking to her back. She had whirled on her heels and went twisting her hips through an arched doorway into the cathedraled living room. The paperhanger looked down at the child. Her face glowed with a strange constrained glee, as if she and the paper-hanger shared some secret the rest of the world hadn’t caught on to yet.

In the living room the builder was supervising the installation of a chandelier that depended from the vaulted ceiling by a long golden chain. The builder was a short bearded man dancing about, showing her the features of the chandelier, smiling obsequiously. She gave him a flat angry look. She waved a dismissive hand toward the ceiling. Whatever, she said.

She went out the front door onto the porch and down a makeshift walkway of two-by-tens into the front yard where her car was parked. The car was a silver-gray Mercedes her husband had given her for their anniversary. When she cranked the engine its idle was scarcely perceptible.

She powered down the window. Zeineb, she called. Across the razed earth of the unlandscaped yard a man in a grease-stained T-shirt was booming down the chains securing a backhoe to a lowboy hooked to a gravel truck. The sun was low in the west and blood-red behind this tableau and man and tractor looked flat and dimensionless as something decorative stamped from tin. She blew the horn. The man turned, raised an arm as if she’d signaled him.

Zeineb, she called again.

She got out of the car and started impatiently up the walkway. Behind her the gravel truck started, and truck and backhoe pulled out of the drive and down toward the road.

The paperhanger was stowing away his T-square and trowels in his wooden toolbox. Where is Zeineb? the doctor’s wife asked. She followed you out, the paperhanger told her. He glanced about, as if the girl might be hiding somewhere. There was nowhere to hide.

Where is my child? she asked the builder. The electrician climbed down from the ladder. The paperhanger came out of the bathroom with his tools. The builder was looking all around. His elfin features were touched with chagrin, as if this missing child were just something else he was going to be held accountable for.

Likely she’s hiding in a closet, the paperhanger said. Playing a trick on you.

Zeineb does not play tricks, the doctor’s wife said. Her eyes kept darting about the huge room, the shadows that lurked in corners. There was already an undercurrent of panic in her voice and all her poise and self-confidence seemed to have vanished with the child.

The paperhanger set down his toolbox and went through the house, opening and closing doors. It was a huge house and there were a lot of closets. There was no child in any of them.

The electrician was searching upstairs. The builder had gone through the French doors that opened onto the unfinished veranda and was peering into the backyard. The backyard was a maze of convoluted ditch excavated for the septic tank field line and beyond that there was just woods. She’s playing in that ditch, the builder said, going down the flagstone steps.

She wasn’t, though. She wasn’t anywhere. They searched the house and grounds. They moved with jerky haste. They kept glancing toward the woods where the day was waning first. The builder kept shaking his head. She’s got to be somewhere, he said.

Call someone, the doctor’s wife said. Call the police.

It’s a little early for the police, the builder said. She’s got to be here.

You call them anyway. I have a phone in my car. I will call my husband.

While she called, the paperhanger and the electrician continued to search. They had looked everywhere and were forced to search places they’d already looked. If this ain’t the goddamnedest thing I ever saw, the electrician said.

The doctor’s wife got out of the Mercedes and slammed the door. Suddenly she stopped and clasped a hand to her forehead. She screamed. The man with the tractor, she cried. Somehow my child is gone with the tractor man.

Oh Jesus, the builder said. What have we got ourselves into here?

The Irish-American heritage center was located in a red-brick building three blocks off East Broadway in South Boston. Growing up in the neighborhood, I remembered the structure as a public elementary school, but when the city fell on hard times in the seventies, the mayor and council sold a number of municipal properties to keep real-estate taxes from rocketing skyward. As I parked my old Honda at the curb, I got the impression that the Center was doing a lot better by the building than the school department ever had.

The main entrance consisted of three separate doors, the one to the left having a sign in gold calligraphy, reading TRY THIS ONE FIRST, which I thought was a nice touch. Inside the lobby area, the same ornate lettering adorned the walls, including a mural with the homily MAY YOUR TROUBLES BE LESS/YOUR BLESSINGS BE MORE/AND NOTHING BUT HAPPINESS/COME THROUGH YOUR DOOR.

On my right was an office complex, probably where the principal used to hold court. A woman sitting behind a reception counter rose when she saw me.

“John Cuddy,” I said, “here to see Hugh McGlachlin.”

“Oh, yes.” Her expression shifted from concerned to relieved. “Please come in.”

A buzzer sounded. She opened the door nearest her counter and showed me through a second inner door. “Hugh, Mr. Cuddy,” she said.

A voice with just a lick of the brogue said, “Thank you, Grace. And hold any calls, if you would, please.”

Grace nodded and closed the inner door behind me.

The man rising from the other side of the carved teak desk was about five-nine and slight of build, wearing a long-sleeved dress shirt and a tie. His hair was gray and short, combed a little forward like a Roman emperor’s. Despite the gray hair, his face was unlined around the blue eyes, and his smile shone brightly enough for a toothpaste commercial.

A woman occupied one of the chairs in front of McGlachlin’s desk, but instead of standing as well, she turned toward me while twisting a lace handkerchief in her lap. I pegged her as middle forties, with florid skin and a rat’s nest of red hair. She wore the drab, baggy clothes of someone catching up on her housework, a canvas tote bag that had seen better days at her feet.

The man came around his desk and extended his right hand. “Hugh McGlachlin, executive director of the Center here. Thanks so much for coming so quickly.”

I shook hands with him, and McGlachlin turned to the seated woman. “This is Mrs. Nora Clooney.”

She swallowed and shook hands with me as well, hers trembling in mine.

“Well,” said McGlachlin, tapping the back of the other chair in front of his desk, “I’m not sure of the protocol, but I think I’d be most comfortable using first names.”

“Fine with me.”

He and I sat down at the same time, and McGlachlin studied me briefly. “I didn’t tell Michael O’Dell why we needed a private investigator,” he said.

O’Dell was a lawyer in Back Bay who’d fed me a lot of cases over the years. “Probably why he didn’t tell me.”

The toothpaste smile again. “Michael is a member of our advisory board. And he assured me you were the soul of discretion and someone to be trusted.”

“I’ll be sure to thank him.”

McGlachlin leaned back in his chair. “I think you may be just the man for the job, John.”

“Which is?”

He pursed his lips. “How much do you know about the Heritage Center?”

“Only what I’ve seen so far this morning.”

Hugh McGlachlin rose again, picking up a manila envelope from the corner of his desk. “In that event, I think a brief tour might prove instructive. Nora?”

Clooney preceded us out the inner door.

“We incorporated as a nonprofit institution in ‘seventy-five,” said McGlachlin, “and moved into this building four years later. I don’t mind telling you, John, the city left it quite the mess.” He made a sweeping gesture with the envelope. “But thanks to some Irish-American tradesmen generously donating their time and talents, we’ve been able to renovate the interior a bit at a time and rejuvenate the community we serve.”

I sensed that the operative word for me was donating.

The three of us were moving down a hallway festooned with the various crests of the thirty-two counties of Ireland, that signature gold calligraphy naming each. On the left, double doors opened onto a large and beautifully rendered country-house room, sporting an exposed-beam ceiling, slate floor, and massive fieldstone fireplace on the shorter wall. In the hearth was a cauldron suspended by metal bars over an unlit fire, an iron milk jug bigger than a beer keg to the side.

I said, “Hugh, what exactly is the Center’s problem?”

McGlachlin just stopped, but Clooney seemed to freeze in her tracks. He looked up at the crests over our heads. “Would you know where your forebears hailed from, John?”

“County Kerry on my father’s side, Cork on my mother’s.”

“Ah.” McGlachlin pointed first to a shield with a white castle and gold harp. “Kerry…” and then to a crest with a galleon sailing between two red towers “… Cork.”

He took a step into the room. “In both places, John, they would have broken their backs hoisting jugs like that one onto a pony cart to carry their cows’ milk to town.” He fixed me with those blue eyes. “ ’Tis a marvelous thing that we who emigrated are more fortunate, don’t you think?”

“Hugh,” I said, “until I know why you called Michael O’Dell — and probably why Mrs. Clooney seems nervous as a wet cat — I won’t be able to tell you whether I can help the Center for free.”

McGlachlin grinned this time, but without showing any teeth, and I had the feeling that despite being six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier, I’d hate to meet him in an alley. He said, “Yes, I do believe you’re the man for our job. This way, please.”

We took an elevator to the second floor. As I followed McGlachlin down the hallway, I tried to stay abreast of Clooney. No matter how I adjusted my stride, though, she always stayed a step behind me.

McGlachlin stopped again, this time outside a large classroom where the chairs and tables were shoved against the walls. Perhaps a dozen girls and young women were moving in a circle, their hands joined but held high. “We have step-dancing classes in here,” he said, “though we also host Lithuanian folk dancing for our neighbors of that extraction. The Nimble Thimbles teach needlework over there, and every Wednesday we have instruction in Gaelic.”

I nodded.

Another toothy smile. “All right, then. The next floor is one that concerns us most at the moment.”

7:00 A.M.:

The radio alarm by Larry Erie’s queen-size bed turned itself on. A deep-voiced announcer began telling Erie about the morning’s top stories. Erie didn’t really care what the morning’s top stories might be, but he lay there for a while and let the announcer ramble. There was nobody there to give him a playful kick and tell him to shut that noise off. There was nobody there to make breakfast for. There was nobody there to fetch pills for. It was just him and the announcer.

Frank Dell walked into the Three Corners Club shortly after five, as he usually did every day, and took a seat at the end of the bar. The bartender, seeing him, put together, without being told, a double Tanqueray over two ice cubes with two large olives, and set it in front of him on a cork coaster. Down at the middle of the bar, Dell saw two minor stickup men he remembered from somewhere and began staring at them without touching his drink. Frank Dell’s stare was glacial and unblinking. After three disconcerting minutes of it, the two stickup men paid for their drinks and left. Only then did Dell lift his own glass.

Tim Callan, the club owner, came over and sat opposite Dell. “Well, I see you just cost me a couple more customers, Frankie,” he said wryly.

“Hoodlums,” Dell replied. “I’m just helping you keep the place respectable, Timmy.”

“Bring some of your policemen buddies in to drink,” Callan suggested. “That’ll keep me respectable and profitable.”

“You’re not hurting for profits,” Dell said. “Not with that after-hours poker game you run in the apartment upstairs.”

Callan laughed. “Ah, Frankie, Frankie. Been quick with the answers all your life. You should’ve been a lawyer. Even my old dad, rest his soul, used to say that.”

“I’m not crooked enough to be a lawyer,” Dell said, sipping his drink.

“Not crooked enough! Hell, you’re not crooked at all, Frankie. You’re probably the straightest cop in Chicago.” Callan leaned forward on one elbow. “How long we known each other, Frank?”

“What’s on your mind, Tim?” Dell asked knowingly. Reminiscing, he had learned, frequently led to other things.

“We go back thirty years, do you realize that, Frank?” Callan replied, ignoring Dell’s suspicion. “First grade at St. Mel’s school out on the West Side.”

“What’s on your mind, Tim?” Dell’s expression hardened just a hint. He hated asking the same question twice.

“Remember my baby sister, Francie?” Callan asked, lowering his voice.

“Sure. Cute little kid. Carrot-red hair. Freckles. Eight or ten years younger than us.”

“Nine. She’s twenty-seven now. She married this Guinea a few years ago, name of Nicky Santore. They moved up to Milwaukee where the guy’s uncle got him a job in a brewery. Well, they started having problems. You know the greaseballs, they’re all Don Juans, chasing broads all the time—”

“Get to the point, Tim,” said Dell. He hated embellishment.

“OK. Francie left him and came back to live with my brother, Dennis — you know him, the fireman. Anyhow, after she got back, she found out she’s expecting. Then Nicky finds out, and he comes back too. Guy begs Francie to take him back, and she does. Now, the only job he can get down here is pumping gas at a Texaco station, which only pays minimum wage. He’s worried about doctor bills and everything with the baby coming, so he agrees, for a cut, to let a cousin of his use the station storeroom to stash hot goods. It works OK for a while, but then the cousin gets busted and leads the cops to the station. They find a load of laptop computers. Nick gets charged with receiving stolen property. He comes up for a preliminary hearing in three weeks.”

“Tough break,” Dell allowed, sipping again. “But he should get probation if he’s got no priors.”

“He’s got a prior,” Callan said, looking down at the bar.

“What is it?”

“Burglary. Him and that same cousin robbed some hotel rooms down at the Hilton when they was working as bellmen. Years ago. Both of them got probation on that.”

“Then he’s looking at one-to-four on this fall,” Dell said.

Callan swallowed. “Can you help me out on this, Frankie?”

Dell gave him the stare. “You don’t mean help you, Tim. You mean help Nicky Santore. What do you think I can do?”

“Give your personal voucher for him.”

“Are you serious? You want me to go to an assistant state’s attorney handling an RSP case and personally vouch for some Guinea with a prior that I don’t even know?”

“Frank, it’s for Francie—”

“No, it isn’t. If Francie was charged, I’d get her off in a heartbeat. But it’s not Francie; it’s some two-bit loser she married.”

“Frank, please, listen—”

“No. Forget it.”

There was a soft buzzing signal from the pager clipped to Dell’s belt. Reaching under his coat, he got it out and looked at it. It was a 911 page from the Lakeside station house out on the South Side, where he was assigned.

“I have to answer this,” he told Callan. Taking a cellular phone from his coat pocket, he opened it and dialed one of the station house’s unlisted numbers. When someone answered, he said, “This is Dell. I got a nine-one-one page.”

“Yeah, it’s Captain Larne. Hold on.”

A moment later, an older, huskier voice spoke. “Dell? Mike Larne. Where’s Dan?” He was asking about Dan Malone, Dell’s partner, a widower in his fifties.

“Probably at home,” Dell told the captain. “I dropped him off there less than an hour ago. What’s up, Cap?”

“Edie Malone was found dead in her apartment a little while ago. It looks like she’s been strangled.”

Dell said nothing. He froze, absolutely still, the little phone at his ear. Edie was Dan’s only child.

“Dell? Did you hear me?”

“Yessir, I heard you. Captain, I can’t tell him—”

“You won’t have to. The department chaplain and Dan’s parish priest get that dirty job. What I want you to do is help me keep Dan from going off the deep end over this. You know how he is. We can’t have him going wild thinking he’ll solve this himself.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’m going to assign you temporary duty to the homicide team working the case. If Dan knows you’re on it, he might stay calm. Understand where I’m coming from?”

“Yessir.” Dell was still frozen, motionless.

“Take down this address,” Larne said. Dell animated, taking a small spiral notebook and ballpoint from his shirt pocket. He wrote down the address Larne gave him. “The homicide boys have only been there a little while. Kenmare and Garvan. Know them?”

“Yeah, Kenmare, slightly. They know I’m coming?”

“Absolutely. This has all been cleared with headquarters.” Larne paused a beat, then said, “You knew the girl, did you?”

“Yessir.”

“Well,” Larne sighed heavily, “I hate to do this to you, Frank—”

“It’s all right, Cap. I understand.”

“Call me at home later.”

“Right.”

Dell closed the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. He walked away from the bar and out of the club without another word to Tim Callan.

The girl was Mary Alice Bunt and they found her by the river. My brother Wade and I thought we’d see the print her body made but rain came and the river jumped its banks before we could find the spot. It’s a good thing the search party found her when they did. She’s liable to have been washed away and lost because everything came rushing in that brown flood: flat tires, TV antennas, a doll carriage like one I used to push.

The dead girl before she was dead lived in Tobo. In wagon train days there used to be a Tobo Hotel. That’s how the place got its name. It was a layover for travelers, someplace for them to steal a breather, get a drink, maybe spend the night. But the hotel’s gone now and it’s nothing but cheap trailers — one lived-in box after the other — lined up along Tobo Road.

Mary Alice Bunt was pretty. I know this for two reasons. Reason number one is because her picture was front-page in both morning and evening Dispatches. Next day they put her picture in the obituary section, too, except smaller. Reason number two I know Mary Alice Bunt was pretty is because Mom said so. Wade and I’d just come home from school and there Mom was bawling her eyes out.

Her makeup wasn’t smeared so I figured she hadn’t been crying long. “Always the pretty ones that die” she was saying over and over and didn’t have to say anything else because I know she was thinking I was safe as could be. Plain Jane she liked to call me, teasing me to get me shouting my lungs that my name was Connie not stupid Jane. She got a big kick out of it and laughed like it was the joke of the century. Even when she’d let me sit down beside her at the vanity she’d start comparing our faces, hers with mine, and she’d always throw in “You can thank your father for that nose.” The way she said it I knew I didn’t need to be thanking anybody.

When Mom was crying over Mary Alice, Wade and I tried to give her a hug because that’s what I thought she was expecting but she pushed us out of the way and started walking around the kitchen — her head bent a little bit to the side — moving like a statue would move if it could. I don’t need to tell you that Mom was an actress at the community theater. She taught me and Wade from the very start about drama, which she said translated into English as meaning “larger than life.” Thanks to her, Wade and I were drama experts. We’d have to be, the way she changed moods like clothing. We all remember Mom’s Mary Alice act as one of her final performances because ten days later she left us for Hollywood. It’s strange how those two things happened, boom-boom, one right after the other, that girl dying and my mother going away.

My brother’s house would look like all the other houses in that part of the state: one of those prefabricated “snap-together jobbers,” he called it. White. Small. Last one on the left after the road turns to gravel, before it ends in a T.

“Dave,” I said, “are you sure you don’t mind seeing me?”

“You’re my brother,” he said.

There was a pause. I moved the phone from my one ear to the other. “Thank you,” I said.

He gave me permission to go on in; the back door would be open. “I get home from work around six,” he said. “If you get there before then…” There was another pause, a longer one, which made me think he was really thinking about it. “There’re leftovers in the fridge,” he said. “Clean towels in the bathroom closet. Movies, music… Make yourself at home.”

He didn’t say anything about a girlfriend, though, and I caught her entirely off-guard in the bathtub. No bubbles.

“Don’t hurt me,” she screamed, crossing her arms and kicking her legs up in front of her. Water splashed over the edge of the tub.

I jumped back into the hallway and reeled around the corner, out of sight, almost pissing and shitting myself at once.

“Don’t hurt me don’t hurt me don’t hurt me. Money in my purse on the table in there. Oh my god.” I could hear her reaching for a towel, water dripping. “Anything you want. Anything. No need to hurt me.”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. My knees were clacking against each other like bowling pins, the road still rolling under me, thunder in my ears.

“Purse on the table. Just take it and go. No sense in hurting me. I won’t call the cops. Just get it and go, OK?” She never stopped talking, not even to breathe, which made me consider the possibility that she was planning an ambush, keeping me occupied with her blah blah blah and then, thwack, a toilet plunger through the heart — so I figured I’d better rally the troops and say something.

“Dave’s brother,” I blurted. “Sorry.”

“On the kitchen table. I’ll cooperate,” she said. “Anything you want. What? What did you say?” she said.

“I’m Dave’s brother. I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, between breaths. “I’m sorry I walked in on you. He said I could let myself in. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m really sorry,” I said, hands on knees, thinking: I’ll kill my brother for this.

She was catching her breath too. After a while she said, “I’m drying off.”

“I’m not looking.” I closed my eyes. “I’m not a creep or a criminal. I’m just a guy. Just Dave’s brother,” I said.

“I’ve met all his brothers,” she said. “He didn’t tell me he had any more.”

“I can explain that,” I said. “I’ll show you identification if you want. We’re brothers. I just fell out with the whole family a long time ago. Years. Before I called, we hadn’t spoken to each other in ten years. How long have you—?”

She stepped out of the bathroom in a short-cut bathrobe with her hands in the pockets, a sheepish half smile on her lips. “My god, I’m so embarrassed,” she said. Her wet, brown hair clung to her forehead in girlish curls. I could smell her cleanness and I could feel the warmth of her bath radiating off of her.

“My name’s Thomas,” I said.

“I’m Ellen.” She made a vague motion with her right hand — a wave, I realized too late. My hand was already out there, awkward. We shook hands. It didn’t last long, but it was the first human touch I’d felt in at least a week, and the electricity of it stayed with me afterward. “So,” she said, “I guess Dave didn’t mention me to you any more than vice versa.”

I shrugged. “Ten years,” I said. “I called from a phone booth in Wyoming. We didn’t have much time to talk.”

“That’s OK,” she said, “Are you hungry?”

“More than anything,” I said, “I need to use the bathroom. I’ve been driving for a long time.”

“Go ahead.” She stepped aside, smiling all the way now. “Careful,” she said. “The floor’s wet.”

She was still wearing the bathrobe when I came out. Instead of getting dressed, she was standing at the counter in the kitchen, making chip-chopped ham sandwiches.

“You like mustard?” she said.

“Sure, but you don’t have to feed me.”

“I’m hungry too. Sit down,” she said.

I walked past her and sat at the kitchen table. There was the purse.

“There’s the purse,” she said.

“Ah. Where your money is, if I’m not mistaken.”

She laughed. It was a sexy laugh. It was a sexy bathrobe. I could see what my brother saw in her. Over sandwiches, with the sinking December sunlight slanting in through the kitchen window, I got a better look at her face. Her cheeks were freckled at the cheekbones, but other than that her complexion was clear as cellophane. She could have been looking out at me from the cover of a magazine on the rack at a gas station, except that one front tooth was chipped and her nose was crooked. She was real and beautiful. There was mustard on her chin.

“So tell me,” I said. “How long have you known my brother?”

“Long enough.”

“Long enough. What?”

“To know him,” she said. “He doesn’t tell me stuff. He’s Mister Mysterious. So tell me yourself. I won’t judge you.”

“Tell you what?”

“Why don’t I know you? Why your brother — why your whole family would erase you like that. I’m not judgmental.”

“Then why do you want to know?”

“To understand,” she said. “I feel like we’ve… well, the way we met, I mean.” She paused, flashing the same sheepish half smile, and then continued more quickly. “Like we’ve been through something together I guess. Which gives us a bond, which makes me curious. That’s all.”

I set my sandwich down and looked out the window. It was a picture window, facing west onto a down-sloping weed yard, a scummy pond, and a stubbled cornfield. If we sat there for long enough, I’d be able to witness my first straight-on, non-rearview-mirrored sunset in days. “Do you live here?” I said.

“We’re married,” she said.

I looked at her, but I couldn’t tell from her look if she was kidding or not.

“Are you kidding?” I said.

She showed me her wedding band, which was sandwiched on the same finger between two prettier, fancier rings.

I didn’t know what to say. “Congratulations,” I said.

“Thank you. You know what the best thing about getting married is?” She said, standing up and walking toward the sink.

“No,” I said.

She picked up a marble rolling pin out of the dish rack and held it up before her like a torch or trophy. “Presents,” she said.

“How long,” I said, “have you been married?”

“Long enough.”

“Uh-oh.”

“No. That’s not how I meant it.” She set the rolling pin down, picked a couple of mugs out of the rack, and took them to the refrigerator. Because of the incoming sunlight, I could see every individual particle of dust in the kitchen air between us. “Do you want some purple Kool-Aid?” she said.

I couldn’t believe my brother hadn’t told me he was married.

“You guys drink Kool-Aid?” I said.

“Mostly Dave,” she said. “Do you want some? Or can I get you something else? Water? Juice? Beer?” It was one of those vertically split refrigerator-freezers, and she was speaking into the refrigerator half of it. “Well?” she said.

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking,” I said.

She closed the refrigerator door and opened the freezer. Steam poured out and around her bare feet and all the way up while she was getting ice cubes.

Wine, I thought. Red wine and candles and classical music. But I was afraid to say so because what kind of wine, if any, would purple Kool-Aid drinkers be likely to have on hand?

“Tell you what,” I said. “I brought you a bottle of my favorite wine from California. What say we crack it open?”

“You brought Dave a bottle,” she corrected.

“And you,” I said. “Only I didn’t know about you yet is all.” I pushed back my chair and stood up just as she was sitting back down. “I’ll go out to my van and get it,” I said. “And when I come back, I want to hear how you and Dave met each other.”

“It’s not much of a story,” she said.

“I’m no critic,” I said.

The back door opened from the kitchen onto a homemade wooden porch with two barbecue grills, a couple of slat-backed plastic chairs, and a cat. On my way down the stairs the cat, timing its steps perfectly, walked from the railing onto my shoulder, then curled around my neck. I wore it like a scarf across the yard and around the corner of the house to where my van was parked. The cat wanted in, of course, but enough was enough; I shook him off at the sliding side door. There was too much trouble in there for a cat to get into.

As for me, the trouble was everywhere else. Going into the van, with all its smells and other oddities, was like snuggling back under the covers and into a good dream after a midnight run through the cold, hard facts of life in the bathroom. I was tempted to slip into the driver’s seat and go, call my brother from Indiana, maybe try again to see him on the way back across.

But it was a passing thought. When you’re on the road, if you’re me, you’re not on the interstate, first of all, so you’ll occasionally catch a fleeting glimpse of some little domestic scene, such as two brothers playing driveway basketball, or a man and a woman sitting at a table in the window, drinking coffee and talking. If you’ve been traveling for any amount of time, like me, you might even be inclined to envy them. But if that man and woman are as typical as the next man and woman, at least one of them is noticing your car whiz by, wistfully, envying you.

The train whistle is always blowing, in other words, and so is the tea kettle.

Or, for our purposes, the van, all my things in it, my music, my mess, the mattress on the loft in back, the card table, the travel mugs and bags of sunflower seeds… it was mighty inviting, all of it; but so was a bottle of wine and dinner and a good night’s sleep on my brother’s couch. Hot shower, thermos of coffee, a couple of hugs, and I’d be off bright and early in the morning… catching fleeting glimpses into other people’s homes, no doubt — no doubt wishing I was still in bed somewhere, or enjoying a leisurely home-cooked breakfast, or playing basketball with my brother in our driveway.

Is that life, or what?

Most times the remembrance was triggered by color — that primary red of valentines or Coca-Cola ads — the color of her toenails, girlish and perfectly polished. He remembered her body, tiny and lifeless and sickeningly still as she lay opened and autopsied on the prep room table. He could still bring to mind, these many years since, the curl of the knot in the viscera bag the pathologist had tied, with all of her organs examined inside, and the raw edge of the exit wound in her right leg and the horrible precision of the hole in her breast where the man who murdered her put the muzzle of the gun.

And he remembered the dull inventory of detail, the hollow in her mother’s voice the morning she called him at the funeral home.

“Elena’s been shot, Martin. Up in Baldwin. She’s at the Lake County Morgue. Go and get her, Martin. Bring her home.”

The carnie rose slowly, a ragged display that no one seemed to notice until it was completely up; at least his daughter didn’t notice it until, passing on the way home from school (John picked her up most days when he was working the night shift buying and selling power for the local utility), she spotted the Ferris wheel and begged him to take her, to let her go. You’d have thought it was the first time she’d seen a Ferris wheel, the way she went on about it, he told his wife later. Carnivals were risky affairs, with their inept machinery, assembled in haste, and above all the hawkers and roadies, half-wits and assorted drunks, riffraff who had traveled to the ends of the earth and were worse for wear. He saw them come through town when he was growing up in Illinois: souls lost to the tedium of taking tickets and standing hours in the hot sun helping people on and off rides. Deep inside (it is safe to say) John had a healthy respect for them, a high regard for the silence which roadies were seemingly able to put up with. He loved the dusty, half-mown fields where they usually set up, the way late-afternoon light drove through the tangle of equipment.

But his respect wasn’t enough to put his fears aside.

On a late afternoon in May, sun angles across the Intracoastal Waterway to the island and through the open doorway and high windows of the marina lounge. I maybe should have gone home, but I’d settled a case in Charleston that afternoon, and Edie and the children weren’t expecting me yet, so I stop in to see Billy and Purvis. My eyes adjust to the separating light and shadow, but in one corner it’s all sunlight where Billy Prioleau and Pope Gailliard are playing cribbage and drinking rum and Coke. Purvis looks on, silhouetted against the masts of sailboats beyond the open doorway. Pope and Billy are sixty-something, gray haired. Purvis is in his late forties now, though he stands old — askew and on one foot, his left hand always in his pocket. I’ve known them since I was a kid, from the early days of the island when my father was still alive.

Four crabbers with pitchers of beer eye the two women in shorts drinking margaritas at the bar. One of the women is brunette, maybe thirty, chewing gum a mile a minute. The other’s a curly blonde with wide eyes, halfway pretty. The way Donna, the bartender, is huddled with them, I assume they’re all friends.

I sit down a couple of stools away, between the women and the cribbage game.

“All I know is I don’t feel safe anywhere,” the brunette says.

“They haven’t caught the bastard, either,” Donna says. She comes over, but doesn’t say hello.

“Sam Adams draft,” I say.

“Hey, Scotty,” Pope says.

Purvis waves, and I wave back. Billy doesn’t look up from his cards.

Donna squints through her cigarette smoke as she tilts the enamel handle of the tap. “You hear anything about that shooting?” she asks.

“People are talking about it,” I say. “The family was from Illinois. I heard the boy was drawing a picture when he died.”

“You think it was a colored man did it?” Pope asks.

“You mean, do I think it was racial?”

“’Course it was racial,” Donna says. She sets my beer down and writes on my tab. “You saying it was an accident?”

“It could have been a stray bullet — someone hunting.”

“It ain’t hunting season,” Donna says.

“Nothing is an accident,” Billy says to Pope, “except your mother’s having you. It’s your goddamn crib.”

Pope turns over the crib cards and counts, “Fifteen two, fifteen four, and trips is ten.” He moves his peg, and Billy gathers the deck and shuffles.

Light shimmers across the water, and toward the city the sky yellows through sea haze and city smog. Just about ten years ago, after I finished law school, Edie and I rented a house here on the backside marsh. She was from Atlanta, and at first she thought the island too isolated, but once the children were born — Carla is eight now, and Blair is six — she liked it. She could walk them to the playground, and there were other young mothers with whom she traded babysitting. Of course I was from here, and when my practice took hold as expected, we bought a house on the beach — four bedrooms, a kitchen that looks out to the ocean, and a wraparound deck. Now she wouldn’t live anywhere else.

A noise draws our attention to the front of the lounge. The Rupert brothers, Shem and Marvin, jostle each other coming through the door. Marvin’s heavyset, jowly, gray-brown hair in a ponytail. Shem’s thinner and taller and has a gold chain around his neck. “Pour us two shots, Donna. Make it Jack Daniel’s. And give everyone a round, especially the pretty ladies.”

The Ruperts stride to the bar as if they own the place.

“And give Scotty two,” Marvin says. “Damn right.”

“Absolutely,” Shem says. “Two for Scott. Without Scotty we’d have been up shit creek without a paddle.”

“I just did my job,” I say, more to Billy than to the Ruperts.

Billy doesn’t look over.

“You saved us all that money on taxes,” Shem says. He looks at the brunette chewing gum. “Scotty’s the best lawyer in Charleston.”

Donna sets up two shot glasses on the bar and pours Jack Daniel’s.

The Ruperts are old-timers, too — odd-jobbers and boat painters. My father never liked them much — too pushy even then — but when they came to me, what was I supposed to do? Lawyers give advice.

Donna sets the shots in front of them and fills a pitcher for the crabbers.

“I don’t want a rum and Coke from them,” Billy says.

Shem nudges Marvin. “I told you he saw us,” he says.

Marvin nods. “He was awfully slow closing the bridge for us.”

Then Shem turns to me. “Hey, Scotty, you see our new Lincoln?”

“We got the Town Car,” Marvin says. “It’s out front next to Billy’s little bug.”

Donna tops off the pitcher and carries it around the bar. “What are y’all going to do with a Lincoln Town Car?” she asks. “Ride around like the Mafia?”

“We’re going to travel,” Shem says.

“Like where?” asks the curly blonde. “Maybe Janine and me’ll go with you.”

“Miami. Maybe the Bahamas. Where do you girls want to go?”

“How’re you going to drive to the Bahamas?” Janine asks.

“We’ll buy a boat.”

“Did you boys win the lottery or something?” the blonde asks.

“If it was the lottery,” Pope says, “Billy wouldn’t have a problem with that.”

Donna pours two glasses of Sam Adams and sets them in front of me.

The Ruperts slouch down with the women, one on either side, and Marvin swivels his stool toward Billy. “Your wife still taking the bus to town?” he asks. “She still ride with the colored maids and gardeners?”

There’s silence. Pope stops dealing the cards. Purvis looks over at me. I should step in, but instead I watch Billy as he turns slowly toward Marvin. Then he jumps up, and the cards and cribbage board go flying. Chairs clatter. He rushes Marvin like a mad dog. Purvis intercepts him, but only succeeds in throwing him off-target. Billy careens into the two women, who fly sideways and backward onto the floor with Billy on top of them.

Shem and Marvin laugh as Billy untangles himself and gets up swinging his fists.

It isn’t a fight, really, just that one lunge. Donna comes around the bar with a baseball bat, and I get hold of Billy and wrestle him out onto the terrace. I’m twice as big and half his age.

Outside, Billy shakes himself free of my grip. “You can’t solve anything by fighting,” I say, “especially not at your age.”

“What’s my age got to do with it?” Billy glares at me, his eyes sharp blue, his grizzled jaw shaking.

“What’ll Arlene say?”

“She isn’t going to know.”

“I could tell her.”

“You won’t,” he says. “You haven’t got it in you.”

“If I helped the Ruperts, I might do almost anything.”

“Bullshit,” Billy says.

“Calm down now, Billy. Just calm down.”

Purvis comes to the door as if to ask what we’re going to do. Billy turns away toward the marina. He doesn’t want to go in and see the Ruperts again.

“Why don’t we go out in the boat,” I say. “Let’s go see the fish camp.”

This black eye I had, once! Like a clown’s eye painted on. Both my eyes were bruised and ugly but the right eye was swollen almost shut, people must’ve seen me and I wonder what they were thinking, I mean you have to wonder. Nobody said a word — didn’t want to get involved, I guess. You have to wonder what went through their minds, though.

Sometimes now I see myself in a mirror, like in the middle of the night getting up to use the bathroom, I see a blurred face, a woman’s face I don’t recognize. And I see that eye. Twenty-seven years. In America, that’s a lifetime.

I laid a red queen on a black king, glanced up at Jay Cohalan through the open door of his office. He was pacing again, back and forth in front of his desk, his hands in constant restless motion at his sides. The office was carpeted: his footfalls made no sound. There was no discernible sound anywhere except for the faint snap and slap when I turned over a card and put it down. An office building at night is one of the quietest places there is. Eerily so, if you spend enough time listening to the silence.

Trey. Nine of diamonds. Deuce. Jack of spades. I was marrying the jack to the red queen when Cohalan quit pacing and came over to stand in the doorway. He watched me for a time, his hands still doing scoop-shovel maneuvers — a big man in his late thirties, handsome except for a weak chin, a little sweaty and disheveled now.

“How can you just sit there playing cards?” he said.

There were several answers to that. Years of stakeouts and dull routine. We’d been waiting only about two hours. The money, fifty thousand in fifties and hundreds, didn’t belong to me. I wasn’t worried, upset, or afraid that something might go wrong. I passed on all of those and settled instead for a neutral response: “Solitaire’s good for waiting. Keeps your mind off the clock.”

“It’s after seven. Why the hell doesn’t he call?”

“You know the answer to that. He wants you to sweat.”

“Sadistic bastard.”

“Blackmail’s that kind of game,” I said. “Torture the victim, bend his will to yours.”

“Game. My God.” Cohalan came out into the anteroom and began to pace in front of his secretary’s desk, where I was sitting. “It’s driving me crazy, trying to figure out who he is, how he found out about my past. Not a hint, any of the times I talked to him. But he knows everything, every damn detail.”

“You’ll have the answers before long.”

“Yeah.” He stopped abruptly, leaned toward me.

“Listen, this has to be the end of it. You’ve got to stay with him, see to it he’s arrested. I can’t take any more.”

“I’ll do my job. Mr. Cohalan, don’t worry.”

“Fifty thousand dollars. I almost had a heart attack when he told me that was how much he wanted this time. The last payment, he said. What a crock. He’ll come back for more someday. I know it, Carolyn knows it, you know it.” Pacing again. “Poor Carolyn. High-strung, emotional… it’s been even harder on her. She wanted me to go to the police this time, did I tell you that?”

“You told me.”

“I should have, I guess. Now I’ve got to pay a middleman for what I could’ve had for nothing… no offense.”

“None taken.”

“I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, walk into the Hall of Justice and confess everything to a cop. It was hard enough letting Carolyn talk me into hiring a private detective. That trouble when I was a kid… it’s a criminal offense, I could still be prosecuted for it. And it’s liable to cost me my job if it comes out. I went through hell telling Carolyn in the beginning, and I didn’t go into all the sordid details. With you, either. The police… no. I know that bastard will probably spill the whole story when he’s arrested, try to drag me down with him, but still… I keep hoping he won’t. You understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

“I shouldn’t’ve paid him when he crawled out of the woodwork eight months ago. I know that now. But back then it seemed like the only way to keep from ruining my life. Carolyn thought so, too. If I hadn’t started paying him, half of her inheritance wouldn’t already be gone…” He let the rest of it trail off, paced in bitter silence for a time, and started up again. “I hated taking money from her — hated it, no matter how much she insisted it belongs to both of us. And I hate myself for doing it, almost as much as I hate him. Blackmail’s the worst goddamn crime there is short of murder.”

“Not the worst,” I said, “but bad enough.”

“This has to be the end of it. The fifty thousand in there… it’s the last of her inheritance, our savings. If that son of a bitch gets away with it, we’ll be wiped out. You can’t let that happen.”

I didn’t say anything. We’d been through all this before, more than once.

Cohalan let the silence resettle. Then, as I shuffled the cards for a new hand, “This job of mine, you’d think it pays pretty well, wouldn’t you? My own office, secretary, executive title, expense account… looks good and sounds good, but it’s a frigging dead end. Junior account executive stuck in corporate middle management — that’s all I am or ever will be. Sixty thousand a year gross. And Carolyn makes twenty-five teaching. Eighty-five thousand for two people, no kids, that seems like plenty but it’s not, not these days. Taxes, high cost of living, you have to scrimp to put anything away. And then some stupid mistake you made when you were a kid comes back to haunt you, drains your future along with your bank account, preys on your mind so you can’t sleep, can barely do your work… you see what I mean? But I didn’t think I had a choice at first, I was afraid of losing this crappy job, going to prison. Caught between a rock and a hard place. I still feel that way, but now I don’t care, I just want that scum to get what’s coming to him…”

Repetitious babbling caused by his anxiety. His mouth had a wet look and his eyes kept jumping from me to other points in the room.

I said, “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I can’t sit. My nerves are shot.”

“Take a few deep breaths before you start to hyperventilate.”

“Listen, don’t tell me what—”

The telephone on his desk went off.

The sudden clamor jerked him half around, as if with an electric shock. In the quiet that followed the first ring I could hear the harsh rasp of his breathing. He looked back at me as the bell sounded again. I was on my feet, too, by then.

I said, “Go ahead, answer it. Keep your head.”

He went into his office, picked up just after the third ring. I timed the lifting of the extension to coincide so there wouldn’t be a second click on the open line.

“Yes,” he said, “Cohalan.”

“You know who this is.” The voice was harsh, muffled, indistinctively male. “You got the fifty thousand?”

“I told you I would. The last payment, you promised me…”

“Yeah, the last one.”

“Where this time?”

“Golden Gate Park. Kennedy Drive, in front of the buffalo pen. Put it in the trash barrel beside the bench there.”

Cohalan was watching me through the open doorway. I shook my head at him. He said into the phone, “Can’t we make it someplace else? There might be people around…”

“Not at nine P.M.”

“Nine? But it’s only a little after seven now—”

“Nine sharp. Be there with the cash.”

The line went dead.

I cradled the extension. Cohalan was still standing alongside his desk, hanging onto the receiver the way a drowning man might hang onto a lifeline, when I went into his office. I said, “Put it down, Mr. Cohalan.”

“What? Oh, yes…” He lowered the receiver. “Christ,” he said then.

“You all right?”

His head bobbed up and down a couple of times. He ran a hand over his face and then swung away to where his briefcase lay. The fifty thousand was in there; he’d shown it to me when I first arrived. He picked the case up, set it down again. Rubbed his face another time.

“Maybe I shouldn’t risk the money,” he said.

He wasn’t talking to me so I didn’t answer.

“I could leave it right here where it’ll be safe. Put a phone book or something in for weight.” He sank into his desk chair, popped up again like a jack-in-the-box. He was wired so tight I could almost hear him humming. “No, what’s the matter with me? That won’t work. I’m not thinking straight. He might open the case in the park. There’s no telling what he’d do if the money’s not there. And he’s got to have it in his possession when the police come.”

“That’s why I insisted we mark some of the bills.”

“Yes, right, I remember. Proof of extortion. All right, but for God’s sake don’t let him get away with it.”

“He won’t get away with it.”

Another jerky nod. “When’re you leaving?”

“Right now. You stay put until at least eight-thirty. It won’t take you more than twenty minutes to get out to the park.”

“I’m not sure I can get through another hour of waiting around here.”

“Keep telling yourself it’ll be over soon. Calm down. The state you’re in now, you shouldn’t even be behind the wheel.”

“I’ll be OK.”

“Come straight back here after you make the drop. You’ll hear from me as soon as I have anything to report.”

“Just don’t make me wait too long,” Cohalan said. And then, again and to himself, “I’ll be OK.”

People go missing all the time in war, of course, but not usually nine-year-old boys. Besides, the war had hardly begun. It was only the twentieth of September, 1939, when Mary Critchley came hammering on my door at about three o’clock, interrupting my afternoon nap.

It was a Wednesday, and normally I would have been teaching the fifth-formers Shakespeare at Silverhill Grammar School (a thankless task if ever there was one), but the Ministry had just got around to constructing air-raid shelters there, so the school was closed for the week. We didn’t even know if it was going to reopen, because the idea was to evacuate all the children to safer areas in the countryside. Now, I would be among the first to admit that a teacher’s highest aspiration is a school without pupils, but in the meantime the government, in its eternal wisdom, put us redundant teachers to such complex, intellectual tasks as preparing ration cards for the Ministry of Food. (After all, they knew what was coming.)

All this was just a small part of the chaos that seemed to reign at that time. Not the chaos of war, the kind I remembered from the trenches at Ypres in 1917, but the chaos of government bureaucracies trying to organize the country for war.

Anyway, I was fortunate enough to become Special Constable, which is a rather grandiose title for a sort of part-time dogsbody, and that was why Mary Critchley came running to me. That and what little reputation I had for solving people’s problems.

“Mr. Bashcombe! Mr. Bashcombe!” she cried. “It’s our Johnny. He’s gone missing. You must help.”

My name is actually Bascombe, Frank Bascombe, but Mary Critchley has a slight speech impediment, so I forgave her the mispronunciation. Still, with half the city’s children running wild in the streets and the other half standing on crowded station platforms clutching their Mickey Mouse gas masks in little cardboard boxes, ready to be herded into trains bound for such nearby country havens as Graythorpe, Kilsden, and Acksham, I thought perhaps she was overreacting a tad, and I can’t say I welcomed her arrival after only about twenty of my allotted forty winks.

“He’s probably out playing with his mates,” I told her.

“Not my Johnny,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Not since… you know…”

I knew. Mr. Critchley, Ted to his friends, had been a Royal Navy man since well before the war. He had also been unfortunate enough to serve on the fleet carrier Courageous, which had been sunk by a German U-boat off the southwest coast of Ireland just three days ago. Over 500 men had been lost, including Ted Critchley. Of course, no body had been found, and probably never would be, so he was only officially “missing in action.”

I also knew young Johnny Critchley, and thought him to be a serious boy, a bit too imaginative and innocent for his own good. (Well, many are at that age, aren’t they, before the world grabs them by the balls and shakes some reality into them.) Johnny trusted everyone, even strangers.

“Johnny’s not been in much of a mood for playing with his mates since we got the news about Ted’s ship,” Mary Critchley went on.

I could understand that well enough — young Johnny was an only child, and he always did worship his father — but I still didn’t see what I could do about it. “Have you asked around?”

“What do you think I’ve been doing since he didn’t come home at twelve o’clock like he was supposed to? I’ve asked everyone in the street. Last time he was seen he was down by the canal at about eleven o’clock. Maurice Richards saw him. What can I do, Mr. Bashcombe? First Ted, and now… now my Johnny!” She burst into tears.

After I had managed to calm her down, I sighed and told her I would look for Johnny myself. There certainly wasn’t much hope of my getting the other twenty winks now.

This happened in San Salvador, not long ago. My friend Cristina was coming back from lunch at a restaurant downtown with her mother, Elvira, and her mother’s friend, Consuela. They were in Cristina’s big car, and all three sat in the back. The driver was alone in the front seat.

Cristina was dropping her mother and Consuela off at her mother’s house. Her mother lives on a narrow street lined with high stucco walls and solid gates. Everyone in that neighborhood has big heavy gates controlled by electricity. The car drives up to the gate, the chauffeur pushes a remote control button, the gates open inward, the car drives inside, and the gates close after it. The walls in San Salvador have always been high. In the past broken bottles were cemented into the tops of them — a row of glittering teeth to keep people from climbing over. Now electrified wires have replaced the broken bottles. El Salvador has always been like this, but since the revolution security has become more of a problem.

Cristina’s car pulled into Elvira’s clean, quiet street. All the houses there were tidy, all the high stucco walls freshly painted, all the gates tightly closed. They drove slowly down the block toward Elvira’s house. A car, which no one noticed, was parked halfway down the block. At her mother’s house Cristina told the driver to pull over to the sidewalk, to let her mother and Consuela out. They didn’t go in through the big gates because Cristina was continuing on from there. The two women would get out at the little street door, right next to the sidewalk.

“Por aqui, por aqui, por aqui,” Cristina said rapidly to the driver. Cristina says everything rapidly; she moves quickly and talks fast. She is quite beautiful, with thick black-brown hair and large, bright, dark eyes. She has an oval face and a short, straight nose. Her eyelids are slightly droopy, which gives her a drowsy, aristocratic look. She was my roommate in boarding school.

Cristina and I went to the same girls’ school, outside Philadelphia, on the Main Line, but we came from very different worlds. I grew up in the country, in western Pennsylvania. My mother was the librarian at my elementary school, and my father was a doctor. We lived in an old stone farmhouse, rather dark inside, with small windows. I was an only child. Every night the three of us sat down to dinner at the round wooden table in the kitchen. We bowed our heads, and then my mother said grace over the food. After we raised our heads, I poured each of us a glass of water. The pitcher was made of dark blue china. My father spoke very little at meals, and our house was quiet inside. Outside were smooth rolling fields. At night I could feel the three of us in our small lighted house, alone in all that empty land, set among the dark fields.

I was brought up to be good and obey the rules, and I was, and I did. I couldn’t imagine violating those beliefs that grown-ups held: that rules were important, that lies were intolerable, that being good was the correct way to be. At school I was good. I wasn’t good enough to be a star at anything (I was a mediocre student), but I wasn’t bad. The worst thing I ever did was to sneak out on Halloween and go trick-or-treating through the darkened streets of Bryn Mawr, carrying a pillowcase and knocking timidly at front doors. I never lied to teachers or sneaked out to meet boys or cheated on tests or smuggled in alcohol or smoked marijuana or did anything wrong. Those things were beyond me somehow, out of my reach. The rules I’d been given held me within their bounds.

But Cristina came from a large family and a fiery-hot place that was unimaginable to me, and she broke any rule she felt like breaking. She kept vodka in our room at school, right on her bureau. It was in a Phisohex bottle, in full view of the housemother. Cristina looked straight into teachers’ eyes and lied about where she was going for the weekend. She lied about how she was getting there and whom she was seeing. She did all this with a bold and absolute certainty that I admired: she was utterly sure of the rules she wanted to break and of the things she needed to do. She didn’t care about her grades or about honesty or about living up to people’s expectations. All that was immaterial to her. The things she did need to do were things like going off to Princeton for the weekend. The things she didn’t need to do were things like homework.

After we graduated, I went on to college and Cristina went back to El Salvador. In school she had laughed when I asked her about college.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like down there. No one I know goes to college.”

“But what do you do instead?” I asked.

“We do our hair, and then we do our nails.” She looked up at me and laughed again. “What we do is visit each other. We go and stay with friends in their country places; then they come and stay with us at our beach houses. We go to someone’s ranch in Argentina. We go down to Rio sometimes. We’re busy! This takes up all our time.”

“Then we get married,” she added.

While she was telling me this, Cristina was sitting on her bed with no clothes on, a thick maroon towel wrapped around her head. She had a bigger, thicker towel wrapped around her body, tucked in on itself at her left armpit. Her legs were shaved perfectly smooth. She was painting her toenails, very meticulously, and she had tiny puffs of cotton separating her toes. She had a bottle of scarlet nail polish, and undercoat, and overcoat, and bottles of other luxurious things — emollients and oils and lotions. It looked as if a professional had just stepped out of the room for a moment, in the middle of doing a job on Cristina’s toes.

I never did my toenails at school. Even today I’ve never done my toenails. My feet are large and rather homely. Putting scarlet shimmer on my big, square nails would be an error, and I can’t help knowing this. I loved the way Cristina put shimmer on her toes, the way she put shimmer anywhere, everywhere, wherever she wanted.

Although free to walk around, Anna Lee never left the island of brittle grass on which the cabin, barn, and bunkhouse sat. There was no point. She had been told more than once that a high steel fence surrounded the ranch, a fence wired to a series of iron rods planted up and down the spine of the Sierras. Hank had flipped open the encyclopedia and shown her just how often lightning struck the earth. Sometimes, the sky demonstrated this to her, and while she’d never seen the fence, not even through Hank’s spotting scope, during storms she thought she could hear the metal sizzling.

And even without the electricity to worry about, there were cougars beyond the fence, and bears. The ranch was too remote for television signals but there was a big-screen Sony and VCR and a stack of movies that grew every time Hank and his guests came up to hunt and fish. One of the movies was about a huge grizzly that wandered into a summer camp and devoured everyone except a beautiful blind girl and a counselor with bulging muscles not unlike Hank’s. Bullets could not stop the grizzly, as an unfortunate game warden discovered, but the counselor and the blind girl, both excellent swimmers, lured it into the river, into the rapids. The grizzly went over a waterfall and died, although Hank said it would probably turn up again, in a sequel. Bears similar to the one in the movie had been spotted trying to burrow under the fence, Hank added, and they had a preference for eating Indian girls.

So the safest place to be was in her quarters, in the old bunkhouse, with its heavy oak door and massive dead bolt for which only Hank had a key. The windows were small, up near the ceiling, designed more for venting the body heat of sleeping cowboys than adoring the view of the pasture, the dark screen of trees, the mountain peaks. To see out, Anna Lee had to stand on her rocking chair, on two encyclopedias, with her fingers curled over the sill for balance. Still, she was happy she didn’t live in an airy canvas tent, like those in the movie, vulnerable to sharp claws and teeth.

Thumper’s finishing move was called The Thump. It started out like a power slam, but then he would twirl his opponent around so the guy would go face-first into the mat. After each match, Thumper’s victim would just lie there, and they’d get a stretcher and carry him off. Thumper would act real sorry and walk halfway back to the dressing room beside the stretcher, then suddenly run back to the ring, put his rabbit ears back on, and get a big pop from the crowd.

I got mixed Up with Thumper at a TV taping. Each of the jobbers, me included, had at least three matches, so Lou Boone, the promoter, could build up enough tape to keep the fans going for a few weeks. I’d already had my matches, two squashes and one where they let me put on a few martial arts moves before getting my ass kicked.

Thumper’s match was after my last one. His opponent was some new guy whose name I never caught. A jobber. They were still building Thumper up to face some real competition.

After the Thumping I watched on the monitor in the dressing room as they carried the guy off. Then I went to take a leak before driving back to the motel. But I walked the wrong way and ended up near an exit. I saw them carry the jobber out through a door into the parking lot and dump him into a car. They were handling him like a sack of potatoes.

I forgot about going to the john and ran back to the dressing room to see what the hell happened. But when I got there, Tommy Bufone said Lou wanted me to take the Thumped guy’s place in a tag team with Tommy against the Barrister Brothers. The extra money sounded good. I could find out about the guy later.

The Barristers were major heels, so I got to be a good guy for the only time that night. I put on my good-guy tights. No one in the crowd ever noticed I wore a different outfit depending on who I was against, but I didn’t care. It helped me play the part better.

Of course, the payoff was the same. I got beat up and pinned. Tommy got to drag me out of the ring.

After the card was over I started asking around about the wrestler who’d been Thumped. I spotted Joe the Greek Pappas, the heel on the announcing team. “What happened to the new guy?”

Joe caught me with the glare they called the Evil Eye when he was still in the ring. “He’s fine,” he said.

“Where is he?”

Another Evil Eye. “He should be back next week in Springfield.” He pushed open the gray metal exit door and walked out into the rain.

I stared after him for a second, then walked back to get my stuff, and there was Lou holding my duffel bag. He’s shorter than he looks on TV, and skinnier, and paler. He tossed the bag to me.

“Good work tonight,” he said. “I really liked how you sold that double clothesline from the Barristers. The crowd ate it up.”

“Thanks.”

Lou held his glasses up to the light like he was checking if they were clean. “What do you think of Thumper?” he asked.

“He’s pretty big.” I could never think of what to say around Lou.

“The fans like him a lot.” Now he was wiping his glasses on his tie. “He’s the best thing we’ve had in a long time. I wouldn’t want anything to mess that up.”

He put on his glasses and pulled on his raincoat and said, “I was thinking maybe it’s time to give you a push.”

Talk about something coming out of the blue. I was a jobber. I made my living losing. And I knew I didn’t have whatever it was that made some wrestlers go over with the crowd. But that magic word “push” made me forget all that.

“You think so?” I said.

“I just need time to think up a gimmick for you. Probably not by Springfield, but by the taping after that I should have something. Then maybe I’ll put you in with Illegal Alien.” Illegal was a jobber-to-the-stars. He always beat the regular jobbers, but when somebody got a push Illegal was usually the first one who lost to them.

“There’s only one thing,” Lou said.

“Name it.”

“I want you to forget the new guy.” Lou gave me a stare that made Joe’s Evil Eye look wimpy.

I thought about it a second. Then I did what any jobber would have done.

“Sure, Lou,” I said. “Consider him forgot.”

Russell Banks is the author of thirteen books of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Cloudsplitter, and four collections of short stories, most recently The Angel on the Roof: New and Selected Stories. Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, were made into award-winning motion pictures. His work has received numerous awards and has been widely translated and anthologized. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the president of the International Parliament of Writers. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, the poet Chase Twichell.

▪ “Lobster Night” is a fictional transformation of three different stories told to me by three different people, a woman who was struck by lightning, a man who owned a restaurant and one night lost his temper and shot a foraging bear in front of his customers, ruining his business because of it, and another man who, drunk, shot and wounded a bear, which proceeded to tear down the man’s cabin and bury him in it. The three stories would seem to have little in common, except perhaps unexpected violence, but somehow to me they connected in that restaurant kitchen on “Lobster Night,” establishing the causes, if not the motives, of a murder.