Panama

1

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’ve worked without a net. I want to tell the truth. At the same time, I don’t want to start a feeding frenzy. You stick your neck out and you know what happens. It’s obvious.

The newspaper said that the arrests were made by thirty agents in coordinated raids “early in the a.m.” and that when the suspects were booked, a crowd of three hundred gathered at the Monroe County Courthouse and applauded. The rest of the page had to do with the charges against the men, which were neither here nor there. Most people I heard talking thought it was just too Cuban for words.

I stepped out onto the patio as the city commissioner was taken to the unmarked car in handcuffs. He was in his bathrobe and lottery tickets were blowing all over the place. Last week they picked up my dog and it cost me a five. The phone number was on her collar and they could have called. I knew how badly they had wanted to use the gas. But then, they’re tired of everything. The wind blows all winter and gets on your nerves. It just does. They have nothing but their uniforms and the hopes of using the gas.

Out on the patio, I could see the horizon. The dog slept in the wedge of sun. There were no boats, the sea was flat, and from here, there was not a bit of evidence of the coordinated raids, the unmarked cars. The lottery — the bolita — was silent; it was always silent. And behind the wooden shutters, there was as much cocaine as ever. I had a pile of scandal magazines to see what had hit friends and loved ones. There was not one boat between me and an unemphatic horizon. I was home from the field of agony or whatever you want to call it; I was home from it. I was dead.

* * *

I went up to the Casa Marina to see my stepmother. The cats were on the screen above the enclosed pool and the grapefruits were rotting in the little grove. Ruiz the gardener was crawfishing on the Cay Sal bank and the bent grass was thick and spongy and neglected. I was there five minutes when she said, “You were an overnight sensation.” And I said, “Gotta hit it, I left the motor running.” And she said, “You left the motor running?” and I said, “That’s it for me, I’m going.” And she tottered after me with the palmetto bugs scattering in the foyer and screamed at me as I pulled out: “You left the motor running! You don’t have a car!” I actually don’t know how smart she is. What could she have meant by that? I believe that she was attacking my memory.

She is a special case, Roxy; she is related to me three different ways and in some sense collects all that is dreary, sinister, or in any way glorious about my family. Roxy is one of those who have technically died; was in fact pronounced dead, then accidentally discovered still living by an alert nurse. She makes the most of this terrible event. She sometimes has need of tranquilizers half the size of Easter eggs. She drinks brandy and soda with them; and her face hollows out everywhere, her eyes sink, and you think of her earlier death. Sometimes she raises her hand to her face thinking the drink is in it. Roxy can behave with great charm. But then, just at the wrong time, pulls up her dress or throws something. I time my visits with extreme caution. I watch the house or see if her car has been properly parked. I used to spy but then I saw things which I perhaps never should have; and so I stopped that. When she thinks of me as an overnight sensation, she can be quite ruthless, flinging food at me or, without justification, calling the police and making false reports. I tolerate that because, under certain circumstances, I myself will stop at nothing. Fundamentally though, my stepmother is a problem because she is disgusting.

I guess it came to me, or maybe I just knew, that I have not been remembering things as clearly as I could have. For instance, Roxy is right, I don’t have a car. I have a memory problem. The first question — look, you can ask me this — is exactly how much evasive editing is part of my loss of memory. I’ve been up against that one before. My position with respect to anyone else’s claims for actuality has always been: it’s you against me and may the best man win.

I’m not as stupid as I look. Are you? For instance, I’m no golfer. I did have a burst, and this is the ghastly thing which awaits each of us, of creating the world in my own image. I removed all resistance until I floated in my own invention. I creamed the opposition. Who in the history of ideas has prepared us for creaming the opposition? This has to be understood because otherwise … well, there is no otherwise; it really doesn’t matter.

* * *

The first time I ran into Catherine, coming from the new wing of the county library, I watched from across the street noting that her Rhonda Fleming, shall we say, grandeur had not diminished. It seemed a little early in the present voyage to reveal myself. I sat on the wall under the beauty parlor, just a tenant in my self, or a bystander, eyes flooded, pushing my fingers into my sleeves like a nun. I thought, When I find the right crooked doctor, I’m going to laugh in your face.

I followed her for two blocks and watched her turn up the blind lane off Caroline where the sapodilla tree towers up from the interior of the block as though a piece of the original forest were imprisoned there. This spring they dug up the parking lot behind some clip joint on lower Duval and found an Indian grave, the huge skull of a Calusa seagoing Indian staring up through four inches of blacktop at the whores, junkies, and Southern lawyers.

So I sent her flowers without a note and two days later a note without flowers; and got this in return, addressed “Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, General Delivery”: “Yes Chet I know you’re home. But don’t call me now, you flop you. — Catherine.” I went into the garden and opened the toolshed, bug life running out among the rake tines. I got the big English stainless-steel pruning shears and came, you take it from me, that close to sending Catherine the finger I’d lost in her darkness so many thousands of times. The palmetto bugs are translucent as spar varnish and run over your feet in the shed. The sea has hollowed the patio into resonant chambers and when the wind has piped up like today you hear its moiling, even standing in the shed with the rakes and rust and bugs.

I felt better and lost all interest in mutilating myself, even for Catherine. Tobacco doves settled in the crown-of-thorns and some remote airplane changed harmonics overhead with a soft pop like champagne, leaving a pure white seam on the sky. I was feeling better and better and better. On stationery from my uncle’s shipyard, I wrote, “There is no call for that. I’m just here with respect of healing certain injuries. Catherine, you only hurt hurt hurt when you lash out like that. I don’t believe you try to picture what harm you do. — Chet.” I traced my finger on the back of the sheet with a dotted line where the shears would have gone through. I said nothing as to the dotted line. It seemed to me with some embarrassment that it might have looked like a request for a ring.

I dialed Information and asked for Catherine Clay. The operator said it was unpublished. I told her it was a matter of life or death; and the operator said, I know who you are, and clicked off. They wouldn’t treat Jesse James like that.

* * *

When they build a shopping center over an old salt marsh, the seabirds sometimes circle the same place for a year or more, coming back to check daily, to see if there isn’t some little chance those department stores and pharmacies and cinemas won’t go as quickly as they’d come. Similarly, I come back and keep looking into myself, and it’s always steel, concrete, fan magazines, machinery, bubble gum; nothing as sweet as the original marsh. Catherine knows this without looking, knows that the loving child who seems lost behind the reflector Ray-Bans, perhaps or probably really is lost. And the teeth that were broken in schoolyards or spoiled with Cuban ice cream have been resurrected and I am in all respects the replica of an effective bright-mouthed coastal omnivore, as happy with spinach salads as human flesh; and who snoozing in the sun of his patio, inert as any rummy, Rolex Oyster Chronometer imbedding slightly in softened flesh, teeth glittering with ocean light like minerals, could be dead; could be the kind of corpse that is sometimes described as “fresh.”

“I am a congestion of storage batteries. I’m wired in series. I’ve left some fundamental components on the beach, and await recharging, bombardment, implanting, something, shall we say, very close to the bone. I do want to go on; but having given up, I can’t be expected to be very sympathetic.”

“That’s all very pretty,” Catherine Clay said. “But I don’t care. Now may I go?”

“There’s more.”

“I don’t care. And above all, I don’t want you stalking me like this in the supermarket. I can’t have you lurking in the aisles.”

“It’s still the same.”

“It’s not, you liar, you flop!”

Slapping me, crying, yelling, oh God, clerks peering. I said, “You’re prettiest like this.” She chunks a good one into my jaw. The groceries were on the floor. Someone was saying, “Ma’am? Ma’am?” My tortoiseshell glasses from Optique Boutique were askew and some blood was in evidence. My lust for escape was complete. Palm fronds beat against the air-conditioned thermopane windows like my own hands.

Two clerks were helping Catherine to the door. I think they knew. Mrs. Fernandez, the store manager, stood by me.

“Can I use the crapper?” I asked.

She stared at me coolly and said, “First aisle past poultry.”

I stood on the toilet and looked out at my nation through the ventilator fan. Any minute now, and Catherine Clay, the beautiful South Carolina wild child, would appear shortcutting her way home with her groceries.

I heard her before I could see her. She wasn’t breathing right. That scene in the aisles had been too much for her and her esophagus was constricted. She came into my view and in a very deep and penetrating voice I told her that I still loved her, terrifying myself that it might not be a sham, that quite apart from my ability to abandon myself to any given moment, I might in fact still be in love with this crafty, amazing woman who looked up in astonishment. I let her catch no more than a glimpse of me in the ventilator hole before pulling the bead chain so that I vanished behind the dusty accelerating blades, a very effective slow dissolve.

I put my sunglasses back on and stood in front of the sink, staring at my blank reflection, scrutinizing it futilely for any expression at all and committing self-abuse. The sunglasses looked silvery and pure in the mirror, showing twins of me, and I watched them until everything was silvery and I turned off the fan, tidied up with a paper towel, and went back out through poultry toward the electric doors. Mrs. Fernandez, the store manager, smiled weakly and I said, “Bigger even than I had feared.” The heat hit me in the street and I started … I think I started home. It was to feed the dog but I was thinking of Catherine and I had heartaches by the million.

* * *

My father was a store detective who was killed in the Boston subway fire, having gone to that city in connection with the Bicentennial. He had just left Boston Common, where we have kin buried. Everything I say about my father is disputed by everyone. My family have been shipwrights and ship’s chandlers, except for him and me. I have been as you know in the Svengali business; I saw a few things and raved for money. I had a very successful show called The Dog Ate The Part We Didn’t Like. I have from time to time scared myself. Even at the height of my powers, I was not in good health. But a furious metabolism preserves my physique and I am considered a tribute to evil living.

Those who have cared for me, friends, uncles, lovers, think I’m a lost soul or a lost cause. When I’m tired and harmless, I pack a gun, a five-shot Smith and Wesson.38. It’s the only.38 not in a six-shot configuration I know of. How the sacrifice of that one last shot makes the gun so flat and concealable, so deadlier than the others. Just by giving up a little!

As to my mother, she was a flash act of the early fifties, a bankrolled B-girl who caught cancer like a bug that was going around; and died at fifty-six pounds. There you have it. The long and the short of it. And I had a brother Jim.

The money began in a modest way in the 1840’s. A grandfather of minor social bearing, who had fought a successful duel, married a beautiful girl from the Canary Islands with two brothers who were ship’s carpenters. They built coasters, trading smacks, sharpie mailboats, and a pioneer lightship for the St. Lucie inlet. The Civil War came and they built two blockade runners for the rebellion, the Red Dog and the Rattlesnake; went broke, jumped the line to Key West again while Stephen Mallory left town to become Secretary of the Confederate Navy. At what is now the foot of Ann Street, they built a series of deadly blockade boats, light, fast, and armed. They were rich by then, had houses with pecan wood dining-room tables, crazy chandeliers, and dogwood joists pinned like the ribs of ships. Soon they were all dead; but the next gang were solid and functional and some of them I remember. Before our shipyard went broke in the Depression, they had built every kind of seagoing conveyance that could run to Cuba and home; the prettiest, a turtle schooner, the Hillary B. Cates, was seen last winter off Cap Haitien with a black crew, no masts, and a tractor engine for power, afloat for a century. She had been a yacht and a blockade runner, and her first master, a child Confederate officer from the Virginia Military Institute, was stabbed to death by her engineer, Noah Card, who defected to the North and raised oranges at Zephyrhills, Florida, until 1931. He owed my grandfather money; but I forget why.

My grandfather was a dull, stupid drunk; and the white oak and cedar and longleaf pine rotted and the floor fell out of the mold loft while he filed patents on automobiles and comic cigarette utensils. I recall only his rheumy stupor and his routine adoration of children.

Let me try Catherine again.

“One more and I go to the police for a restraining order.”

No sense pursuing that for the moment.

* * *

My stepmother had a suitor. He was an attorney-at-law and affected argyle socks and low blue automobiles. He screamed when he laughed. What I think he knew was that the shipyard was a world of waterfront property and that when the Holiday Inn moved in where the blockade boats and coasters had been built, Roxy got all the money. His name was Curtis Peavey and he was on her case like a man possessed, running at the house morning noon and night with clouds of cheap flowers. Roxy had been known to fuck anything; and I couldn’t say she ever so much as formed an opinion of Peavey. I noticed though that she didn’t throw the flowers away, she pushed them into the trash, blossoms forward, as if they’d been involved in an accident. In this, I pretended to see disgust. I myself didn’t like Peavey. His eyes were full of clocks, machinery, and numbers. The curly head of hair tightened around his scalp when he talked to me and his lips stuck on his teeth. But he had a devoted practice. He represented Catherine. No sense concealing that. If Peavey could, he’d throw the book at me. He said I was depraved and licentious; he said that to Roxy. Whenever I saw him, he was always about to motivate in one of the low blue cars. Certain people thought of him as a higher type; he donated Sandburg’s life of Lincoln to the county library with his cornball bookplate in every volume, a horrific woodcut of a sturdy New England tree; with those dismal words: Curtis G. Peavey. As disgusting as Roxy was, I didn’t like to see her gypped; which is what Peavey clearly meant to do. I didn’t care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over.

* * *

I don’t think Peavey was glad to see me hunker next to him on the red stool. The fanaticism with which he slurped down the bargain quantities of ropa vieja, black beans, and yellow rice suggested a speedy exit.

I said, “Hello, Curtis.”

“How long are you back for—”

“Got a bit of it on your chin there, didn’t you.”

“Here, yes, pass me one of those.”

“How’s Roxy holding up?” I asked.

“She’s more than holding up. A regular iron woman.”

“A regular what?”

“Iron woman.”

“You want another napkin?”

“Get out of here you depraved pervert.”

I said, “You’ll never get her money.”

“I’d teach you a lesson,” said Curtis Peavey, rising to his feet and deftly thumbing acrylic pleats from his belt line, “but you’re carrying a gun, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “to perforate your duodenum.”

“You have threatened me,” he said softly. “Did you hear that, shit-for-brains? It won’t do.” Peavey strolled into the heat and wind. I stopped at the cash register and paid for his slop.

I went for a walk.

Something started the night I rode the six-hundred-pound Yorkshire hog into the Oakland auditorium; I was double-billed with four screaming soul monsters and I shut everything down as though I’d burned the building. I had dressed myself in Revolutionary War throwaways and a top hat, much like an Iroquois going to Washington to ask the Great White Father to stop sautéing his babies. When they came over the lights, I pulled a dagger they knew I’d use. I had still not replaced my upper front teeth and I helplessly drooled. I was a hundred and eighty-five pounds of strangely articulate shrieking misfit and I would go too god damn far.

At the foot of Seminary I stopped to look at a Czech marine diesel being lowered into a homemade trap boat on a chain fall. It was stolen from Cuban nationals, who get nice engines from the Reds. The police four-wheel drifted around the corner aiming riot guns my way. Getting decency these days is like pulling teeth. Once the car was under control and stopped, two familiar officers, Nylon Pinder and Platt, put me up against the work shed for search.

“Drive much?” I asked.

“Alla damn time,” said Platt.

“Why work for Peavey?” I asked.

Platt said, “He’s a pillar of our society. When are you gonna learn the ropes?”

Nylon Pinder said, “He don’t have the gun on him.”

Platt wanted to know, “What you want with the.38 Smith?”

“It’s for Peavey’s brain pan. I want him to see the light. He’s a bad man.”

“Never register a gun you mean to use. Get a cold piece. Peavey’s a pillar of our society.”

“Platt said that.”

“Shut up, you. He’s a pillar of our society and you’re a depraved pervert.”

“Peavey said that.”

“Nylon said for you to shut your hole, misfit.”

“I said that, I said ‘misfit.’”

Platt did something sudden to my face. There was blood. I pulled out my bridge so if I got trounced I wouldn’t swallow it. Platt said, “Look at that, will you.”

I worked my way around the Czech diesel. They were going to leave me alone now. “Platt,” I said, “when you off?”

“Saturdays. You can find me at Rest Beach.”

“Depraved pervert,” said Nylon, moving only his lips in that vast face. “Get some teeth,” he said. “You look like an asshole.”

The two of them sauntered away. I toyed with the notion of filling their mouths with a couple of handfuls of bees, splitting their noses, pushing small live barracudas up their asses. The mechanic on the chain fall said, “What did they want with you? Your nose is bleeding.”

“I’m notorious,” I said. “I’m cheating society and many of my teeth are gone. Five minutes ago I was young. You saw me! What is this? I’ve given my all and this is the thanks I get. If Jesse James had been here, he wouldn’t have let them do that.”

The mechanic stared at me and said, “Right.”

I hiked to my stepmother’s, to Roxy’s. I stood like a druid in her doorway and refused to enter. “You and your Peavey,” I said. “I can’t touch my face.”

“Throbs?”

“You and your god damn Peavey.”

“He won’t see me any more. He says you’ve made it impossible. I ought to kill you. But your father will be here soon and he’ll straighten you out.”

“Peavey buckled, did he? I don’t believe that. He’ll be back. — And my father is dead.”

“Won’t see me any more. Peavey meant something and now he’s gone. He called me his tulip.”

“His…?”

“You heard me.”

I gazed at Roxy. She looked like a circus performer who had been shot from the cannon one too many times.

In family arguments, things are said which are so heated and so immediate as to seem injuries which could never last; but which in fact are never forgotten. Now nothing is left of my family except two uncles and this tattered stepmother who technically died; nevertheless, I can trace myself through her to those ghosts, those soaring, idiot forebears with their accusations, and their steady signal that, whatever I thought I was, I was not the real thing. We had all said terrible things to each other, added insult to injury. My father had very carefully taken me apart and thrown the pieces away. And now his representatives expected me to acknowledge his continued existence.

So, you might ask, why have anything to do with Roxy? I don’t know. It could be that after the anonymity of my fields of glory, coming back had to be something better than a lot of numinous locations, the house, the convent school, Catherine. Maybe not Catherine. Apart from my own compulsions, which have applied to as little as the open road, I don’t know what she has to do with the price of beans … I thought I’d try it anyway. Catherine. Roxy looked inside me.

“Well, you be a good boy and butt out. Somehow, occupy yourself. We can’t endlessly excuse you because you’re recuperating. I died and got less attention. Then, I was never an overnight sensation.”

I went home and fed the dog, this loving speckled friend who after seven trying years in my life has never been named. The dog. She eats very little and stares at the waves. She kills a lizard; then, overcome with remorse, tips over in the palm shadows for a troubled snooze.

* * *

Catherine stuck it out for a while. She stayed with me at the Sherry-Netherland and was in the audience when I crawled out of the ass of a frozen elephant and fought a duel in my underwear with a baseball batting practice machine. She looked after my wounds. She didn’t quit until late. There was no third party in question.

* * *

I could throw a portion of my body under a passing automobile in front of Catherine’s house. A rescue would be necessary. Catherine running toward me resting on my elbows, my crushed legs on the pavement between us. All is forgiven. I’ll be okay. I’ll learn to remember. We’ll be happy together.

* * *

I had a small sharpie sailboat which I built with my own hands in an earlier life and which I kept behind the A&B Lobster House next to the old cable schooner. I did a handsome job on this boat if I do say so; and she has survived both my intermediate career and neglect. I put her together like a fiddle, with longleaf pine and white-oak frames, fastened with bronze. She has a rabbeted chine and I let the centerboard trunk directly into the keel, which was tapered at both ends. Cutting those changing bevels in hard pine and oak took enormous concentration and drugs; not the least problem was in knowing ahead of time that it would be handy to have something I had made still floating when my life fell apart years later.

She had no engine and I had to row her in and out of the basin. When the wind dropped, I’d just let the canvas slat around while I hung over the transom staring down the light shafts into the depths. Then when it piped up, she’d trim herself and I’d slip around to the tiller and take things in hand. Sailboats were never used in the Missouri border fighting.

I went out today because my nose hurt from Peavey’s goons and because I was up against my collapse; and because Catherine wouldn’t see me. My hopes were that the last was the pain of vanity. It would be reassuring to think that my ego was sufficiently intact as to sustain injury; but I couldn’t bank that yet.

The wind was coming right out of the southeast fresh, maybe eight or ten knots, and I rowed just clear of the jetty and ran up the sails, cleated off the jib, sat back next to the tiller, pointed her up as good as I could, and jammed it right in close to the shrimp boats before I came about and tacked out of the basin. I stayed on that tack until I passed two iron wrecks and came about again. The sharpie is so shoal I could take off cross-country toward the Bay Keys without fear of going aground. I trimmed her with the sail, hands off the tiller, cleated the main sheet, and turned on some Cuban radio. I put my feet up and went half asleep and let the faces parade past.

Immediately east of the Pearl Basin, I found a couple shivering on a sailboard they had rented at the beach. He was wearing a football jersey over long nylon surfing trunks; and she wore a homemade bikini knotted on her brown, rectilineal hips. What healthy people! They had formed a couple and rented a sailboard. They had clean shy smiles, and though they may not have known their asses from a hole in the ground in terms of a personal philosophy, they seemed better off for it, happier, even readier for life and death than me with my ceremonious hours of thought and unparalleled acceleration of experience.

I rigged the board so that it could be sailed again, standing expertly to the lee of them with my sail luffing. I told them they were ready to continue their voyage and she said to the boy, “Hal, it’s a bummer, I’m freezing.” And Hal asked me if she could ride back in my boat because it was drier. I told them I’d be sailing for a while, that I had come out to think, that I was bad company, and that my father had died in the subways of Boston. They said that was okay, that she would be quiet and not bother me. I let her come aboard, politely concealing my disappointment; then shoved Hal off astern. He was soon underway, with his plastic sailboard spanking on the chop, the bright cigarette advertisement on his sail rippling against the blue sky.

I continued toward the Bay Keys while the girl watched me with cold gray eyes, the shadow of the sail crossing her slowly at each tack. Then she went forward and took the sun with her hands behind her head.

“Your boyfriend a football player?” I asked.

“No, he deals coke.”

“I see.”

“Do you like coke?”

“Yes, quite a lot.”

“Well, Hal has some Bolivian rock you can read your fortune in, I’ll tell you that.”

“Oh, gee, I—”

“Anybody ever tell you the difference between acid and coke?”

“Nobody ever did.”

“Well, with acid you think you see God. With coke you think you are God. I’ll tell you the honest truth, this rock Hal’s got looks like the main exhibit at the Arizona Rock and Gem Show. Did you ever hear a drawl like mine?”

“No, where’s it from?”

“It’s not from anywhere. I made the god damn thing up out of magazines.”

“How much of that rock is left?”

“One o.z. No more, no less. At a grand, it’s the last nickel bargain in Florida.”

“I’ll take it all.”

“We’ll drop it off. Hey, can you tell me one thing, how come you got hospitalized? The papers said exhaustion but I don’t believe everything I read. You don’t look exhausted.”

“It was exhaustion.”

That night, after I had paid them, I asked if the business in the boats that afternoon had been a setup. She said that it had. “Don’t tell him that!” giggled the boyfriend. “You coo-coo brain!”

* * *

My eyes were out on wires and I was grinding my teeth. When I chopped that shit, it fell apart like a dog biscuit. Bolivian rock. I didn’t care. I just made the rails about eight feet and blew myself a daydream with a McDonald’s straw. Let them try and stop me now!

By the time I got to Reynolds Street I was in tears. I went down to the park and crossed over to Astro City. The ground was beaten gray and flat and the tin rocketships were unoccupied. I climbed high enough on the monkey bars that no one could look into my eyes and wept until I choked.

I considered changing my name and cutting my throat. I considered taking measures. I decided to walk to Catherine’s house again and if necessary nail myself to her door. I was up for the whole shooting match.

I walked over to Simonton, past the old cigar factory, around the schoolyard and synagogue, and stopped at the lumber company. I bought a hammer and four nails. Then I continued on my way. On Eaton Street, trying to sneak, I dropped about a gram on the sidewalk. I knelt with my red and white straw and snorted it off the concrete while horrified pedestrians filed around me. “It takes toot to tango,” I explained. Nylon and Platt would love to catch me at this, a real chance to throw the book. I walked on, rubbing a little freeze on my gums and waiting for the drip to start down my throat and signal the advent of white-line fever or renewed confidence.

The wind floated gently into my hair, full of the ocean and maritime sundries from the shipyard. A seagull rocketed all the way from William Street close to the wooden houses, unseen, mind you, by any eyes but mine. A huge old tamarind dropped scented moisture into the evening in trailing veils. Mad fuck-ups running to their newspapers and greasy dinners surged around my cut-rate beneficence. I felt my angel wings unfold. More than that you can’t ask for.

Catherine’s house with her bicycle on the porch was in a row of wooden cigarmakers’ houses grown about with untended vegetation, on a street full of huge mahoganies. I thought to offer her a number of things — silence, love, friendship, departure, a hot beef injection, shining secrets, a tit for a tat, courtesy, a sensible house pet, a raison d’être, or a cup of coffee. And I was open to suggestion, short of “get outa here,” in which case I had the hammer and nails and would nail myself to her door like a summons.

I crossed the street to her house, crept Indian style onto the porch, and looked through the front window. Catherine was asleep on the couch in her shorts and I thought my heart would stop. I studied her from this luxurious point, staring at the wildly curly hair on her bare back; her arm hung down and her fingertips just rested on the floor next to a crammed ashtray. I had the nails in my shirt pocket, the hammer in the top of my pants like Jesse James’s Colt.

“Catherine,” I said, “you let me in.” This handsome woman, whom Peavey had once had the nerve to call my common-law wife, was suddenly on her feet, walking toward me with jiggling breasts, to ram down the front window and bolt the door. Then she went upstairs and out of sight. I called her name a couple of more times, got no answer, and nailed my left hand to the door with Jesse’s Colt.