The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

MAY — JUNE

It was more summer than spring now. Still, the evenings were cool, and the heavens at night had a wintry clarity that sometimes made him cry.

He was a citizen of a country north of Mexico that made no sense; he was an inmate of romance and a denizen of that terrainless geography, a lot more real than the geography on maps, that drifted down from these dark blue oceans to the Keys, passing over the Eastern megalopolis like a cloud over a desert but catching on the invisible peaks of Atlantic City and Cape May and Ocean City and the Southern beach resorts, a geography of heated sand and greased-back hair and surf glowing under a full moon. It was the off-season, but the off-season had no jurisdiction — the place was like a closed carnival — nothing counted but the thrilled ghosts.

It was no secret at the radio station that English was going nuts. Twice he appealed directly to Leanna over the airwaves, though he was aware she never listened to the radio. In the middle of reading the Arts Calendar he switched the mike off to scream and curse. He couldn’t eat; he’d be ravenous and then suddenly nauseated after one bite of a sandwich. It got clear how a person could die for love just by going undernourished for too long. Also he was the victim of bizarre thoughts. He considered hiring a billboard or a hot-air balloon or a blimp and imagined depicting the extremity of his love in other ways, getting on TV somehow, perhaps by crawling on his hands and knees to the Vatican or impersonating the President. He wanted to do something melodramatic and endearing, but how could he be charming to somebody whose face he wanted to smash? He dreamed of shooting her — Didn’t think I’d do it, did you, didn’t know I loved you enough to kill you, no, baby, don’t do it, yes, yes, I have to — he prayed, God save me from being angry, and he prayed, God help me track down an unregistered gun. Some helpful person left in his WPRD message slot a lapel button for him to wear that said I’m a Mess.

In less unreasonable moments he was disgusted with this mooning over Leanna. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t just left town by now. He feared he might be living out some myth of seeking the goddess beyond the pale, entering the realm, being changed into one of its denizens, every footstep forward changing the shape of his soul, and every form of her dissolving as he approached.

He hadn’t left town, but he’d left Bradford Street. Down by the water the rents had gone up as the landlords and shopowners readied their nets for another kind of fish. English had taken himself up the hill to a duplex next door to Shirley Manor, the old folks’ home, which was situated, possibly with the ease of access in mind, just across the road from the town’s biggest cemetery.

He hadn’t liked it anyway, living in sight of the sea. He’d felt implicated somehow in the ruthlessness of its tides.

He liked the cemetery better. Although generally the light was kind to this place, sometimes giving to the grass and stones the hardy colors of a Surrey countryside, and making the markets blush sometimes in the sunset, it was not unknown for the fog to roll over the whole business swiftly, canceling everything, even the hope of anything, beyond the few nearest blurred gravesites and the brown bones under them. English had no trouble feeling, really feeling, the presence of those whaling families with their arms straight down at their sides, only a bit more rigid in death than they’d been beforehand. He’d been reading Reflections on the Psalms lately, and he began to see in the defeated stoicism of these Pilgrim descendants the other side, the dark side, of the prissy smugness with which C. S. Lewis had been managing to nauseate him. For these people, as for Lewis, God had probably been an Englishman, but a less and less familiar one, passing beyond dotty eccentricity into madness and vomiting up whales and storms. On some nights English saw them trolling the fog for forgiveness and seeking for Jesus among the dewy stones. Little truths continually came into his mind. Whispers from the center of his heart. All are martyred. Kill the Bishop.

He knew that something big was going to happen, that he was at the slurring start of some grand opportunity or injury, like a person who’s just lost control of the car on an empty street and entered the dreamy beginnings of an accident.

A rainy day calmed him, the tears of God dripping down the markers and trickling through the names of the dead. The next day was windy and sunny, and he stood around in the kitchen while his radio talked like a skull — a theological discussion on WPRD. He couldn’t help listening to such things.

He walked into the living room, holding a cup of tea, to find Grace Sands standing just inside his home, and the open door shaking in the wind behind her.

Although she wore a pink robe and matching house slippers with fuzzy blue balls on the toes, she’d managed to get away from Shirley Manor with a tiny black pillbox hat and a veil sprinkled with black diamond shapes, from behind which she gazed with the cynical look of a mistreated child, saying, “The floors. The carpet. Look.” She stooped over. “Use your eyes.” Stooping must have hurt her back; her voice was full of pain. She stood up holding a piece of something between thumb and finger. “Wood!”

He didn’t want this. He had things to do. Besides, he was waiting for this big thing, this opportunity to be snatched, this yes-no point dividing his wasted life from a future that was going to make sense. He wanted to wait in solitude.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted to her.

“Whatever happened to clean? Remember clean?”

“My vacuum cleaner’s broken,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Broken,” Grace said. “Vacuum cleaners were broken before they made the first one. You bend, that’s how.” She stooped over. “You pick up, that’s what.” She started picking bits of lint from the carpet. “Time passes,” she said. Her face went dull with torment. She was eight feet into the living room. “It takes time. It takes effort.” She stood up straight, wiped at her face and seemed alarmed to find it veiled. She flicked the lint from her hand and it fell to the carpet.

English set his tea down on the windowsill. Grace let out a long, shaking sigh.

“I’d better find whoever’s supposed to be taking care of you,” English told her. Grabbing the phone book, he leafed through, looking for the number of the nursing home. He was glad to have a chance to use the telephone. It was new in his life, and nobody ever called him except the station.

Grace wandered toward the back room while he dialed. “I’m about twenty yards down the road here,” he told the receptionist when she answered. “Grace Sands is lost over here — do you know Grace?”

“Oh, my goodness. I’ll send somebody right over. Which house?”

He told her and went back to steer Grace away from harm. She was standing in his bedroom looking down at his mussed sheets. The blankets had gotten onto the floor in the night.

“So this is the bed,” Grace said sadly.

“I guess I’d have to agree, all right.”

“The famous bed,” Grace said.

“The what?”

She raised her gaze to him, lifting her veil carefully with both hands. “What?” she said. Then she lowered her veil.

English went to the living-room window and looked out. The cemetery and the world itself held still, burning in the sunlight. Then a young fellow with a beard came pushing a wheelchair up the walk, leaving the contraption by the door, where English now stood, looking at him.

“Grace here?” he asked.

English pointed inside.

Good health and good cheer emanated from the young man as he came inside saying, “Grace. We don’t want you off the grounds. That’s a rule.”

His happiness seemed to make her suspicious. “My leg is broken.” She lifted her veil with both hands and looked out the window.

“Then it’s a good thing I have a wheelchair,” the man said. When speaking, he looked only at English.

“I used to work for her husband,” English said, “before he died.”

“The Catholic cemetery in Hyannis is where they buried him,” Grace said brightly.

“Grace: in the wheelchair,” the man said, not unkindly.

She seemed in perfect possession of her mind as she told them,

“They threw a shovel of dirt right down onto him with a”—she clapped her hands while looking for a word—“noise. Like that.”

The man helped her by her elbow out the door, and then together he and Grace lowered her bulk down into the seat of the wheelchair. “Where are we going?” English heard her asking in the sunlight as the man pushed her down the walk.

He heard somebody on the radio referring to God as “the infinite accent falling on the self.” Infinite, yes. The accent — the stress — the falling, yes, English felt he felt that.

He thought, They’ll all know me when it’s over; and he thought, Who will find me when it’s over?

He thought, You start to know these things. You make out just the shape of it, the incredible size, on the horizon.

Zealots. Martyrs. These guys are right. Nothing but faith makes it so.

In this state he walked out of the house, got in his Volkswagen, and took up the search for Gerald Twinbrook again, heading up the Cape toward the missing artist’s abandoned office, going as fast as the car would go, which wasn’t quite fast enough to get him even a warning ticket. It eased him tremendously to be doing something. He took the back roads through Truro, South Truro, Wellfleet, through the sparse shade of new leaves and the shadows of large hills. On the maps of the Cape these hills were named individually and called “islands,” owing, perhaps, to the mapmakers’ premonition — whose accuracy English trusted, if vaguely — of a great flood that would someday submerge almost everything.

When he reached Twinbrook’s office, he found that somebody had been at work there. The door had been repaired. He broke it again.

Inside, too, the place had changed. The chair and wastebasket were stacked on the desk, the electrician’s cord was coiled neatly between them, the knee-deep litter of papers and books had been arranged in two large stacks beside the chair. Someone had mopped the floor. The telephone was gone. A manila envelope was taped to the front of the desk: GERALD TWINBROOK. Inside was a handwritten note lamenting Twinbrook’s disregard for previous letters and informing him that his property would be tossed or sold as soon as a new renter was found. It wasn’t signed.

Also in the envelope were a communication from a dry cleaners, which turned out to be a bill, and a letter from Blue Cross. In all-caps, telegrammatic format, the letter asked Gerald Twinbrook to provide information about the amount paid for prescription drugs following his emergency treatment on the second of January.

Twinbrook had been missing since before Christmas, if English remembered right. This was the first evidence that he’d been alive and functioning since then. And if he’d been treated, if he was ill — he might be incapacitated somewhere, in a rest home, for instance, with amnesia, or in a coma in a strange city, with a tag reading JOHN DOE taped to his bedrail.

English’s fingers trembled as he folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t jump up and run from the room, that he’d peruse these stacks of paper, that he’d stay calm and analytical. On top of the nearest one was the carbon copy of a letter Twinbrook had addressed to “The Secret President of the United States.” Dear Sir or Madam, he raved, Under the Freedom of Information Act I demand that you comply with my request of August 13, which I have repeated twice monthly since then. I am asking for all the records on the corporations listed below. I will be satisfied with nothing less than all the records in the world.

English dropped the page onto the floor and walked immediately out of the office without looking back. It had suddenly occurred to him where he might turn up some information about Twinbrook’s Blue Cross record. English wanted all the records in the world on Twinbrook.

In the antiseptic corridors of the Cape Cod Hospital, English felt a soothing influence. He was an institutional man. He knew the hospitals, the cops, the universities. On a daily basis English had lived this scene, the waiting room with the glacier of afternoon light crashing mutely through the windows and the clerk yawning wide and the pregnant orderly knitting a small stocking. It was four-thirty. There was nothing much to do in the emergency room, because all the minor injuries and sudden headaches could be taken to family doctors’ offices. Soon things would get lively, when the offices closed and the children, exhausted by an afternoon of play, would tend to fall from the trees or split each other’s heads open with baseballs. Making their way home from the public parks, the children would be struck down by automobiles. At home their mothers would lay their thumbs bare to the bone while slicing up salads before supper, and then after supper they’d lacerate their wrists on broken wineglasses in the cloudy dishwater while Father, tinkering with the car, would be getting the bib of his overalls caught in the fan belt and destroying his manhood out in the garage …

“I’m off duty. I was just passing by,” English said. “Do you remember me?”

The clerk glanced up.

“Detective English. You’re Frank, right?”

“Oh. Hey. Hi,” Frank said.

“I suddenly thought of stopping in and asking you about something. I wanted your help, maybe.”

“Oh.”

“Nothing urgent. It has to do with an old case.”

Frank looked unsure. “Sure.”

“I was wondering about insurance records, and suddenly I thought, Hey, Frank, at the hospital.”

“That’s me,” Frank said.

“You deal a little with insurance records, don’t you?”

“Sometimes. My job mainly consists of writing down the information necessary to have somebody billed. Anybody. Usually an insurance company.”

“So, after a patient’s been dealt with here, somebody sends a report to the insurance company, right?”

“Yeah, for some of the larger companies. Blue Cross, Travelers, State Farm. Not exactly a report,” Frank said. “Just a series of code numbers.”

“Who does that job?”

“The overnight clerk puts the codes and account numbers on file cards. Then a programmer puts all that in the computer and transmits it to the company.”

“What do they do? The programmer, I mean, does the programmer just access — what do they access? Where do they put the information?”

“They access the insured’s account number.”

“Do they have access to all the data in that file?”

“Yeah. It’s just a series of code numbers. I mean, you know, it goes back to the first of the year.”

“Date of incident, hospital code, doctor code, injury or diagnosis code, that stuff, right?” English said.

The clerk showed signs of backing off. To an official person, English had long ago learned, a citizen gave four successive answers and then required an interlude. English examined the cover of a book, a psychiatric nursing text, lying on Frank’s desk. In a minute he said, “Can I talk to you out here?”

Frank joined him by the water cooler in the waiting room. “Is this — a big crime thing you’re working on, or something?”

“It’s an unclosed case. You know — can’t let it go. What I’m thinking, see — if I give you the account number, can you get the data on a Blue Cross subscriber and decode it for me?”

“Wow,” Frank said, “I don’t know, I wouldn’t think the hospital—”

“A missing person,” English said. “If I could track him down to a hospital somewhere, oh, man, what a wonderful thing, to find him and ease his family’s worries — Give us a hand, huh?”

“Well, but Blue Cross. You could—”

“Yeah, we did. They’re going to give us the information, but it just keeps getting snarled up in paperwork. This is the account number.” English handed him the letter from Blue Cross. “Can you talk to the data clerk?”

“The programmer? Yeah. Okay,” Frank said. “I can.”

“Now? Take a break?”

Frank sighed uncomfortably.

“How long would it take? A few minutes?”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Frank told the orderly.

The orderly was policing the waiting room now. She looked to be eight or nine months along, straightening slowly with a hand on her hip and standing that way a minute. She held a rolled-up copy of something like Good Housekeeping. She shook it at him like a warning finger. “I hate it when they tear the stuff out of our magazines.”

Two janitors came down the hall, one with a mop and one with a running vacuum cleaner, talking under its noise:

“Hah?”

“Hah?”

“Hah?”

English went into Frank’s cubicle and poured himself a cup of coffee. He picked up the psychiatric nursing text and started reading all about himself.

In a few minutes an obstetrician came downstairs from Ob-Gyn and wanted to show them the premature baby — no more than a foetus, at twenty weeks — he had just delivered.

The orderly paid him no mind. She was balancing her checkbook.

“This thing hasn’t drawn a breath,” he told English, “but the heart’s still beating. Forty-eight minutes. That old heart’s just ticking away.” The obstetrician’s hands and lips trembled, and tiny drops of blood flecked the front of his green surgical gown. His hair had been shellacked by sweat under his sterile cap, which he now used to wipe his nose. His eyes were large and morose, like a cow’s. “I’ve been a practicing physician for eleven years,” he said, staring at the foetus he was holding. It was in a plastic ice-cream cup.

Frank came in. He was holding the printout.

The obstetrician put the foetus down on the counter in front of him. “Dessert?” he said.

Frank peered into the cup as over the edge of a cliff.

“Is it alive?” English asked him.

“Are you kidding?” the obstetrician said. “Would you call it living if you looked like that?”

“But you said the heart was still beating.”

“Well, you know, the heart’s a strange muscle. You can keep it going practically forever with a little electricity.”

The orderly got up and left.

“Where did you get those shoes, man?” English asked the doctor suddenly.

“These are golfing shoes,” the doctor said. “I got them at a pro shop. I’m just waiting for this thing to die, okay?”

Frank went over and sat down on the orderly’s stool. “Here you go,” he said, handing English the printout.

English studied it but didn’t know how to read such a thing.

“What is it now,” the obstetrician said, looking at the clock and sobbing and wiping the snot from his nose with his green surgical cap, “about fifty-three minutes?”

“It’s dead,” English told him.

“How do you know from way over there?” the doctor said. But he knew, too.

Frank crossed his arms over his chest and looked at English. “The codes mean this person had a skin rash, sudden onset. The diagnosis code is for Chinese Restaurant Angioedema. Treated with Benadryl and released. Littleton Hospital, Littleton, New Hampshire.”

“Where’s Littleton, New Hampshire?”

“I wouldn’t know. Somewhere in New Hampshire, obviously.”

The obstetrician stood up tall and opened his arms out wide. “All I can tell you is, I’m going to go the distance, and the sons of bitches can fight over my footprints.”

“Everybody’s tired,” Frank agreed.

“Chinese Restaurant Angioedema,” English said.

“It’s an allergic reaction to that meat tenderizer,” Frank said, “that flavoring agent.” He slumped forward as a sigh went out of him, and ended with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “MSG,” he said sadly. “Chinese restaurants use a lot of that stuff.”

On his way out of the building English used a pay phone to call the hospital in Littleton. He identified himself as a detective, and explained he was looking for a missing person who might have been a patient there. “Are you near Franconia, by any chance?”

“About ten miles, yessir,” the admissions clerk said.

“Well, that adds up, that adds up,” English said. “It all adds up, and it’s been adding up and adding up.”

“Pardon me?”

“His name was Gerald Twinbrook, came in on January 2. I need to know the address he gave when he was treated. His local, his Franconia address. Goddamn, I knew he was in Franconia,” English said.

“But wait a minute,” the clerk said, “I can’t give that information out over the phone.”

“Can you look that up for me, please? Immediately.”

“What department did you say you worked for again? What was your department and badge number?”

“Aaah, fuck you,” English said, hanging up.

He considered calling the Notch Lodge in Franconia, whose number he’d dialed so many times he’d memorized it inadvertently. But he’d always gotten the same recorded insistence that the lodge wouldn’t open till June 1; he didn’t need to hear it again. He’d made up his mind to see them all personally up there anyway one of these days. Maybe, in fact, tomorrow.

People seemed to be staying at Leanna’s hotel now; English saw lights in a couple of cabins as he cruised to a stop out in the street. Leanna’s living-room window, too, was bright. He often stopped here and looked up at her windows.

He reached for the key to turn on the ignition, but the car was still running. He turned it off.

Now was the time. Time to clear the air, to ease his mind about a few things, maybe — he saw in one lighted cabin a young woman with a bucket and a mop — maybe patch things up.

He rang the front doorbell and Leanna raised the window above him. “Is it you?” she said.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Are you going to sing to me?”

It seemed to imply he shouldn’t invite himself in. He turned and looked down the drive, between the two rows of cabins, at his little car. “I think I’m heading off to New Hampshire tomorrow.”

“Are you moving?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said.

“You want to go for a drive? The night’s beautiful.”

“Sure, okay,” she said. “I’m glad you finally came by.”

They drove to Herring Cove, a beach on the Cape’s east side, and sat in his car looking out over the Atlantic in the general direction of France. He liked being next to her; he felt all the possibilities returning when he touched her cheek with his finger. He felt the Atlantic tide going out, washing the hair of souls. “Would you mind if we spent some time together tonight?” he said.

“We’re doing the last-minute cleanup till all hours,” she said. “We always open the first weekend in June. A lot of folks come up for the Blessing of the Fleet.”

“Is that a major festival?”

“Not really. But it’s fun if you have a boat.”

“I’ll get one,” English said.

“Really?”

“No,” he said, surprised she’d taken him at all seriously. “I’m just bullshitting.”

“Are you bullshitting about wanting to see me tonight?”

“Definitely not.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing you,” she said.

“What if I come over later?”

“Sure. Real late. After midnight, like 2 a.m. maybe.”

She took his hand, and they sat in the car kissing for a while, until the clouds thinned out and the sea took on a slanting strangeness under the moon, and in a spirit of reconciliation, English tried to explain himself. “Last March,” he began, “I got kidnapped.” She was quiet while he told her about Gerald Twinbrook, about the look of Twinbrook’s paintings, the light he laid on the canvas, the unidentified mania that had taken him away missing. English told her about the men who’d come to his room and pistol-whipped him in the middle of the night, and he mentioned Ray Sands’s friendship with Bishop Andrew in a way that he felt sure communicated the suspicious nature of that relationship. But a sadness grew in him as he realized that there was a thin, obscene sediment between his tongue and the truth. He wasn’t telling her that Ray Sands had been an investigator, that he’d sent English to look for Gerald Twinbrook in the capacity of a hired detective — that he, English, had eavesdropped on Leanna and Marla Baker’s conversations, that he himself was the person who’d frightened Marla out of town. Talking around the facts made him feel deaf after a while. He stopped speaking and looked out at an ocean that seemed incapable of sound, though all around them the surf acted. Nothing was clean under the spiritless hygiene of the moon. “Look,” he finished as he’d started, “I got kidnapped.”

“Hm” was all Leanna said.

Immediately he felt like defending all this, felt like coming right out and saying what he suspected, although he hadn’t even come right out yet and said it to himself. Many times these last few days he’d told himself, This isn’t a hunch, it’s a psychotic delusion. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell anyone because — Joan of Arc, Simone Weil, they spoke of their delusions and were believed. And then? … martyred. It was big. It felt very big to him. “These guys were part of this Truth Infantry. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Those men aren’t part of a conspiracy. They probably really thought you stole some stuff,” Leanna said.

“But the guy, their boss, he had a professional air about him.”

“He was a nut, Lenny. A bizarre man in a bizarre hat doing strange stuff on chemicals. Same with his friends. They’re just too stupid-sounding for anybody to trust them in any kind of commando organization, or whatever you think it is. Which it probably isn’t. And Ray Sands wasn’t a fascist guerrilla. Everybody knew Ray Sands, more or less.”

“Less, I think. Much less,” English insisted.

“Lenny, Lenny,” she said, “Lenny.”

Her tone irritated him now. “Don’t you see what happened? These guys kidnapped Gerald Twinbrook. Nobody would know about it if he hadn’t needed medical treatment at the nearest hospital to their headquarters in Franconia. Probably,” he said, “they still have the guy.”

“And what was it you said he needed treatment for?”

“Chinese Restaurant Angioedema,” English said.

She blew a fart of laughter through pursed lips.

“Damn,” English said, “sometimes you have no grace. None. You fry my blood.”

“You’re kind of funny, is all. I’m sorry,” she said, still laughing.

His chief hope had been that she’d debunk his ideas. He was surprised to find that now he wanted to defend them at all costs.

“He’s still there! They have him. And Ray Sands ordered it.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t know why. He was following orders.”

“Orders? From who?”

“There’s a web — a nest, man, with tentacles reaching out of it — and I swear to you, at the center of it is Andrew, our Bishop.”

“Wo, wo, wo,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

“It is scary.”

“Not it. You. You’re going beyond all sense. Really. Please,” she begged, “don’t think that kind of stuff.”

“I’m just trying to go with what I feel,” he said. “Follow out my instincts.”

“Yeah, and next thing you know, you’ll turn into an animal and they’ll lock you up.” She began doodling geometrical figures on the fogged front window with her finger.

“Animals don’t make mistakes with their lives,” English told her, and began trying his hand at a few designs on the window himself. A hexagon, a cube; here comes a parallelogram. She did, he thought, seem a little frightened.

“It isn’t like you think it is,” she said.

“But everything is like we think it is, don’t you get it? Out of the million little things happening on this beach, you can only be aware of seven things at once, seven things at any given time. I heard that on a tape.”

“A tape.”

“Yeah, a tape, a cassette series on salesmanship.”

“I can’t believe you were ever a salesman,” she said.

“If I can only pick out seven things to be aware of, then I’m selecting just a tiny sliver of reality as my experience. We never really get the whole picture. Not even a microscopic part of it.”

“So? So what? We have to go on it anyway.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations. And we have to go on them.”

“You’re defending a delusion, and calling it just that,” she said. “Are you aware of that?” She started laughing. “Is that one of the seven things you choose to be aware of?”

“The Bishop is behind all this,” he said in order to shut her up.

But she only laughed again, in a different manner. “Well anyway, I’ve got to go supervise the cleanup,” she said.

“I wrote you a note. The day I came over and Marla was there, that night I—” He broke off, searching in the glove compartment for his notebook. “Here it is, listen. ‘Dear Leanna. Many of the feelings I’ve been having lately, breaking down crying when alone, the sense of a cloud between me and God, the intuition that now, behind the cloud, is the time of faith …’”

“Go on,” she said.

“That’s all. But I mean—”

“Lenny. I asked you before not to go off following your faith too far.” She gripped his arm tightly with both hands. He liked it. “Just drop all this, okay? Don’t think about it anymore. Stay with us. Stay with me.”

“I want to see you tonight,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I want to sleep with you.”

“We’re going to,” she said.

“I feel like I’m willing to try. I mean, with you.”

“I’m glad.”

“Even, you know, with Marla in the picture and all.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

English drove home and got his jacket and then walked, shivering, through the Provincetown night. People were saying that a cold spring meant an early heat wave in summer. Off the hill and nearer the water it was windless, and warm in a way that was accentuated by the many newly opened restaurants spilling their light into the street. There were plenty of people in town, with the bulk of them to come in the next two days to enjoy the first weekend of the season, the bargain gift shopping and the annual Blessing of the Fleet, when fishermen and pleasure boaters would glide past the town wharf under the slowly waving scepter of some clergyman or other. It was almost eleven now. Couples walked home from late dinners. Two women in high heels sounded just like a horse clip-clopping by. From down an alley came the sorrows of a trumpet letting out soft jazz. A man passed him walking an invisible dog — a novelty item, a stiffened leash and collar that bobbed along ahead of him, empty. English crossed the street to avoid a gang of meaty lesbians and screaming queens who bore down on him with their arms locked around each other’s shoulders, singing, “Faggots and fairies and dykes, oh my! Faggots and fairies and dykes, oh my!” He liked the look of things. The town was getting a woozy, criminal feeling that rather matched his own.

He went into a basement tavern on Commercial. He remembered drinking here with Berryman and Smith, the overanxious Portuguese disc jockey. He didn’t much care for basements, but he thought it might be a place the tourists hadn’t yet located and filled.

He heard Phil, the cabdriver, speaking loudly inside before he was halfway down the stairs. The jukebox was playing “Misty Blue.”

Phil sat at the bar between a thin gay man with the arching posture of a heavy-headed blossom and Nguyen Minh, the Vietnamese factory worker. Somebody was laughing at the words of a blond and cute but quite butch-voiced transvestite whom English had noticed on the streets several times this winter. English couldn’t hear what she was saying.

Phil was telling Nguyen Minh: “And I asked myself: The way you are now, would your eight-year-old self approve of you? Would your eight-year-old self — that totally innocent child, with those ideals that are real, man, and human — would he approve?”

The tall thin man got up and headed out the door.

“No fucking way. I was betraying that kid,” Phil said, “my childhood self. I’m talking about the real feeling of like if you stuck a bayonet in your buddy’s back, not just ripping off a friend or something like that, but killing, death. You know what I’m saying, man?” Phil’s face was crushed under the pressure of his pain. “I don’t think you know the kind of treachery I’m talking about.”

“Whatever’s on tap,” English said, and the bartender drew him a glass of beer.

Phil’s troubled scrutiny had floated over and snagged on the cross-dresser. “You never tasted that kind of treachery, man.”

The cross-dresser smiled and shrugged. Her eyes were very red.

“But then, and then it was like,” Phil said, holding his hand out before him, gazing cross-eyed into his open palm as if this memory rested right there in it, “the ghost of John Lennon appeared to me. And he said, Fuck that, he can’t judge you, because an eight-year-old doesn’t have the knowledge, man. Those ideals of yesterday, even everything you believed two hours ago, man — fuck that. We don’t need to apologize to our past selves. They were the ones who turned into us. We are just who we are. You know?” he asked the cross-dresser.

She sat in splendid isolation, putting her very red lips around the cherry from her Manhattan.

“Mister Hey There,” Phil said, noticing English. “What the fuck. Right?”

“Hi,” English said.

“How’s progress?”

English raised his glass and shrugged.

“A little better every minute, huh?”

“You got it,” English said.

“No, but — do you get my drift? Hey, brother, one thing: I remember I said a couple of things about our mutual friend. Ell Ess would be the initials. May she remain nameless.”

“Nameless, okay.”

“I hear you’re still going with her.”

“Going with who?” the transvestite said.

“Somebody nameless,” said English.

“So I’m sorry if I stepped on anybody’s toes,” Phil said.

“Aah,” English said. “It’s nothing, man.”

“I hardly even know her, except we grew up in the same town, for whatever that’s worth, okay? She’s a good person,” Phil said. “She’s a good person.” He flexed his hands. “She’s a good person, but she’s mentally ill. I don’t know.”

Nguyen Minh wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand and entered the conversation. “I’m very quite drunk now,” he said to Phil.

“We were there, man,” Phil reminded him. “You in the air and me on the ground. We kicked their asses.”

Nguyen lifted his glass to the cross-dresser. “I am a gook,” he said.

English toasted him with a double Scotch rocks, the first swallow of which changed his smile because it went down like poison. “What’s your name?” he asked the blond-wigged man.

“Tanny,” the transvestite said, and started singing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” in a taught, professional baritone.

“MA-AH-AY WARE! HOUSE! EYES,” Phil screeched, joining in, “MY ARAY-BEEYUN DRUMS. SHOULD I LEAVE THEM BY YO GATE?”

He broke off, letting Tanny sing, “Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?” all by herself.

Sitting here with the tavern glow shining softly on the blond bar, the light touching the self-described gook’s somewhat greasy cheeks in a way he could never touch back, filling the glasses with something nobody could drink, English felt his heart tearing on loneliness like a diamond. “I want to apologize to you both,” he said, “for dodging the draft.” He drank down his drink. “I could have gone in. My asthma wasn’t that bad.”

Phil only stared at him. Nguyen smiled as if aping a photo of a smiling man.

“Okay,” English said, “there.”

“Anything else?” Phil asked.

“Yes,” English said. “I may need a gun.”

“They’re everywhere, everywhere, everywhere,” Phil assured him.

“Ah. The violence,” Nguyen said, shaking his head.

“It’s not that,” English said.

“Yes, it is,” Nguyen said.

Phil raised his glass. “To the ghost of John Lennon, dead these several months.”

Something lurking in English’s mind now stepped into the light, the shadow became a shade — not by any means the ghost of a dead rock idol, but a question to haunt him: the mystical message Phil had been describing, the greetings from John Lennon, what if a person heeded all such inner rebop, would he be damned or saved? How quickly would a person’s life progress along its lines if he followed every impulse as if it started from God? How much more quickly would he be healed? Or how much faster destroyed? Saints had done that. Also mass killers, and wreakers of a more secret mayhem, witches and cultists and vampires and so on. I’m your God, come here. But you’re standing in a storm, God. Yes, and I’m calling you to come here. But how do I know you’re God? Because I’m all that’s in front of you, and all that was behind you is gone: choose the storm or you get nothing.

English saw himself standing up in a movie theater with a grenade, crying, God told me to do this. Simone Weil wasting down into death on orders from her conscience in God, extinguishing, for herself, the whole world. Deranged men climbing onto tall structures to snipe down people they’ve never met, at God’s behest. Headlines: MOM ROASTS BABY TO DRIVE OUT DEMONS.

Right and left of him he heard the drinks swirling in their glasses. The bartender’s rag was dropped just this way on the metal sink with its corner lapping into the water. That was all he knew.

If he gave up all the hearsay, the whispers of the past and the hints from the future, he didn’t know anything beyond the cross-dresser clearing her throat deeply and Nguyen Minh squeaking his hand in the little pool of sweat under his cold drink. But he didn’t know for certain even that it was cold. “I’m going to put my finger in your drink,” he said. Nguyen watched him do it. “It’s cold,” he told Nguyen. “That’s good.”

“It’s good,” Minh said, “but you shouldn’t put your finger.”

Phil belched loudly without any consciousness in his red eyes.

English said to Tanny without shame, “I find myself thinking of you as a woman.”

“I’m more man than you’ll ever be,” Tanny said. “And more woman than you’ll ever have.”

By the time the bar closed it was raining outside and it was cold. Phil and Nguyen Minh and English climbed the hill to forage for breakfast in English’s kitchen. “What’s this?” Phil demanded of English, who set three bowls on the chipped Formica table. “What are you, a vegetarian?”

“It’s cereal. I don’t have enough chairs. Eat standing up,” English said. He poured bran flakes into his bowl. “How about handing me the milk,” he said to Minh, pointing at the refrigerator.

“Hey, we’re not cows, man. We eat meat,” Phil said.

“Maybe Nguyen eats cereal,” English said.

“He’s not a cow. He’s a man.”

“And Nguyen. What does Nguyen say?”

“I like eggs and bacon,” Nguyen said shyly. “It’s good.”

“We fought a war, motherfucker. We eat meat,” Phil repeated.

“It’s very cold inside your house,” Nguyen pointed out.

They had to drive in English’s car to Orleans, twenty-six miles away, to find an all-night restaurant that would serve them warriors’ fare, which English, the draft dodger, also liked better than cold cereal. But by the time the three of them were facing one another around a table, spilling their water, dropping their spoons on the floor, losing their napkins in the process of retrieving their spoons, English felt lousy and wished he’d stayed home and gone to bed. He seemed to be drifting in and out of the universe, meeting with fuzzy dreams and then arriving back at the table to realize he’d already ordered, while Phil was just finishing: “ … and some OJ.”

“What?”

“Uh,” he said, “orange juice?”

The waitress nodded.

English rapped his fork on the table for Phil’s attention. “Aren’t you married? Don’t you have a family? Where’s your home?”

“Everybody’s happier if I don’t show up there all the time,” Phil said.

Evidently they’d all three ordered the breakfast special. Nguyen didn’t say a word the whole time they ate. There were pancakes, sausages, and two eggs each. For a while English didn’t talk either, and didn’t even eat, but Phil held forth incoherently — and still, inside of three minutes, his fork was ringing against the china and then he was shoving his empty plate aside. “Do you want my breakfast?” English asked Phil.

“I just ate. I’m telling you something. Do me the favor of listening. Hey, hey, hey.” He slapped the tabletop, jutting his chin.

“I’m listening,” English said. “Fuck it, we’re in session.”

“Well, man, you were like hanging out with her for weeks, man, right?”

“Right. Okay.”

“And she was trying to get a taste of regular life and you weren’t giving it to her. I mean, I don’t know all the details, she didn’t say too much.”

“Say too much? Who?”

“I mean, she wasn’t putting you down behind your back. Definitely not, okay?”

“Who? Definitely who?”

“I’m trying to explain this to you. Okay?”

“Explain about who?”

“Her. And me. The dyke, your girlfriend, or whatever.”

“Her and you? Do you even know her?”

“Since the first grade. I mean, I don’t know her. This wasn’t a hugely personal thing. It was one night, about an hour. Haven’t spoken to her since.”

“What are you saying?”

“And I really didn’t know you at all, brother. I mean, I knew you a lot less than I’ve gotten to know you the last few hours.”

Somehow this disclaimer put everything into place. English’s hands suddenly felt numb. “What happened?” he said.

Phil looked at Nguyen as if he expected his comrade to take over the telling. Nguyen looked back and forth between his companions. Then he sipped his coffee.

Phil said, “What happened was, I met her coming out of her aerobics class, and she started talking to me, and she just picked me up. We went over to her hot tub, and then … that was that. We did the deed. Then I left.”

English stared at him. He tried a little of his orange juice.

“That dance center is just two blocks from her house. You know, the Martial Arts Center. It was just — a short walk,” Phil said. He shrugged with embarrassment.

English felt as if this orange juice were something he’d just vomited up. There was no chance of drinking this stuff. A short walk? “I know it is,” he said. He shoved his OJ over in front of Phil. “Here, goddamnit.”

“Listen. Don’t get me wrong.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, hey. Yeah.”

“Don’t get you wrong what?”

“What.”

“Don’t get you wrong what? You didn’t say anything.”

“Well, I mean, I fucked her.”

“We know that. We know that. We know that.”

“That’s been well established, you’re saying.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so you’re saying — what?”

“I’m saying I’m pissed off. I’m completely pissed off, man.”

Phil winced and made half a gesture with his hand.

“What.”

“Maybe — I don’t know—” Phil said.

“Fuck.”

“Fuck is right. Fuck it.”

“Fucking-A.”

“Okay. Fuck you, then.”

“Fuck you, you mean.”

Phil got up and left the diner. What English felt good about was that he knew Phil would go on in his anger, would hitchhike back to Provincetown in the chilly rain without a jacket, suffering every step of the way in his pride. And English, in his pride, would pass him by on the road and for that would suffer guilt. English paid for everybody’s meal, including Nguyen’s.

He could see that Leanna had been up all night, too, cleaning rooms and taking care of paperwork. She was sitting at her desk in the living room, fiddling with a pencil and drinking from a bottle of beer. He just opened the door without knocking. She didn’t mind.

“Hi, baby,” she said, and turned toward him.

The pain he was feeling was sexy. She really was a beautiful woman.

Now wasn’t yet the time. He needed to touch her first. He wanted her to feel the anger inhabiting his skin.

She kissed him, clutching him around the neck. The bottle in her hand rubbed against his ear. He liked the taste of beer on her tongue.

“Make love to me,” she said.

And so he held her in his arms. She took hold of his shirt at the back, pulling on it, and he let his arms fall from her while she removed his shirt for him and unbuttoned his jeans but did not touch inside his fly. They lay down and floated on her water bed. He kissed her seriously and deeply. He kissed her breasts and then her stomach and thighs all over, and then between her legs: saliva on the crotch of her sleazy little panties. Leanna started breathing rapidly. He removed her panties and kissed her vagina for a long time. She spread her legs wide apart, legs thin and unshaved and somewhat muscular and lovely, as he put his tongue far inside her, and she liked it a lot. But what good was any of this? An ancient discouragement welled up in his chest, the feeling of a loveless moment. She had lots of hair on her legs. He felt his isolation, his inability to connect — it was stronger, essential, cosmic. Right. It was now. “I’ll tell you what I feel like, kissing you,” he said to her. “I feel like somebody’s writing swear words on my balls.”

Yes, now was the time. He sat up and lit a cigarette, wiping his mouth first with the pillowcase. “What you need is a goddamn operation,” he said. “What you need is to get your head on first so you can learn to fuck.”

Leanna sat up, too. She looked at him, opened her mouth, couldn’t speak. She regained herself quickly, her scattered forces recollecting in her eyes. Then she didn’t have to speak.

“You think I’m a goddamn lunatic?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“What about you? What about your attitude, what about being a lesbo one day and a regular person another day, and — shit,” he said, running out of words. “It’s all a bunch of shit. — Wait a minute,” he said as she started to say something, “wait a minute. What about it, the way you treat people you supposedly love?”

She was quiet now. He felt her trying to calm him by her silence.

He went ahead more slowly. “And what about Phil?”

“Phil,” she said.

“Yeah. Scuzzy local fucker? Drives a cab? Kind of spent the night with you?”

“Phil?”

“Yeah.”

“What about him?”

“Excuse me. Isn’t that the question I just asked?”

“Well, I met him at the Martial Arts Center. Outside, coming from aerobics.”

“It doesn’t take all night to meet somebody. Meeting is like a short thing, right?”

“Lenny—”

“So it wasn’t meet. It was more like you spent the night, huh? Got laid? Or eaten out, or whatever the fuck, if you tried to make him into a dyke. Fuck you. Dyke cunt.”

In a gesture he found both graceless and heartbreaking, she took a long pull off her beer and exhaled with a gasp. “I feel all right about it.”

“Hey, shit, I don’t give a fuck, if you want to know the truth.”

“Okay, then. I’m not going to pretend I feel guilty.”

She got up off the water bed. He watched it quiver and grow calm, thinking, We did, we hated each other in another life.

“Who do you think was following Marla all last winter?”

Leanna was putting a leg into her panties and didn’t answer.

“Marla Baker, your little bisexual honey. Do you know that Ray Sands was a detective?”

“Ray Sands?” she said.

“And do you realize I was his assistant?” He leaned right down in her face. “Who do you think was listening while you guys cried in her bedroom all night? Guess who.” The anger tasted good in his throat. “I’m the eavesdropper. It was me.”

Leanna surprised him by shoving him backward, quite hard. He had to put his hand behind him to keep from hitting the wall. He was embarrassed.

“You’re not eavesdropping anymore. You’re right in the middle. Burglar,” she said, and started to cry. She moved, practically lunged, to her desk. “Burglar, burglar!”

She pulled an enormous revolver from the drawer and pointed it at him, using both her hands to lift it.

“Oh,” he said. “Huh.”

“Goddamn right,” she said.

“Are you,” he said, and stopped. “You’re kidding, right?”

“It’s my old Magnum.44,” she told him. “Eddie lent it back to me.”

When he stayed speechless, she said, “Eddie, the cop. You met him.”

“Eddie,” he said, “the cop. Did you fuck Eddie, too?”

“What?” She shook the gun in his face with such vigor his mouth dried instantly. “Did I what? Did I fuck him?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m dead, right?”

“You’re an infant, you’re a psychotic baby.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Your libido is like a tiny child’s.”

She put the gun back down on the desk.

English shuddered down the length of him, like a wet dog. “I oughta pick that up and shoot your face off.”

“It isn’t loaded,” she said.

“So what? You could’ve killed me with it anyway. I could die of fright.”

“Get out of here,” she said.

“No.”

She lifted the receiver off the phone and smiled at him in an almost truly friendly way. “I’m gonna have you locked up, Lenny,” she said. She dialed once. “The police, please,” she told the operator. “It’s urgent, no kidding.” She waited with the receiver at her ear.

“So,” she said to him, “you were the one. The spy.”

He made for the door. “I just wanted to find out what you’d say about my theories. Then I go with the opposite, because you’re a liar.”

Suddenly she looked hurt. Or was it pity in her eyes? “Get out of here,” she said.

He slammed the door behind him and stood at the top of her stairs, putting on his shirt. “I know what you did,” he shouted in the empty stairwell. “I know what they did. And I know what I’m doing.”

In ten minutes he stood in front of the bank, having withdrawn all his money, less than eighty dollars. A slow-eyed dyke with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth drove past. A cloud followed her, and rain fell down all over the street. The raindrops were big this year.

English headed north, driving recklessly. The Cape highway was crowded with cars, most of them coming toward him. The boards had been pried off the roadside drive-thrus, and the crowds loitered around them eating frozen custard in the rain. English felt sorry for them, their small lives made cheap, their cheap lives made sad, by the failures of the weather.

Well north of Boston he stopped at Jerry’s Seafood Diner to get something to eat. It was just a little joint, next to another one called the Alaska Bar, in the emptiness between two towns on Route 1. Maybe he was in New Hampshire by now, he didn’t know.

He was parked and standing outside the car before he realized the neon sign above Jerry’s was cold. Their dinner hour, according to the notice by the door, began in forty-five minutes or so.

Right now it was that time of the day known as Happy Hour. English went into the Alaska Bar.

When he opened the door, they all swung their heads up as the afternoon light cut into their dreams.

“Oh, just the thought of you,” the jukebox was singing, “turns my heart misty blue.”

Everyone was quiet.

“It’s been such a long, long time,” it sang, “but still, just the thought of you.”

Including English, there were four of them drinking in the Alaska Bar, all men. The middle-aged woman mixing the drinks was called Madeline. The bottles of liquor hung upside down behind the bar within Madeline’s reach, with metal teats on them that automatically delivered a shot and an eighth. Scenes of Alaska in old frames were nailed up around the mirror. People had been blowing cigarette smoke onto them for years. The glass was so tarnished they could hardly be deciphered. Madeline hummed along with the jukebox. To English it was amazing how a song will take a whole confused epoch in your life, and fashion it into something sharp and elegant with which to pierce your neck.

“Is there anybody in this bar who actually has anything to do with Alaska?” he asked eventually.

“The owner,” Madeline said.

“Is he from there, or is he going there?”

“Kind of both. He visits back and forth,” she said.

A man two seats down said, “I went to Alaska once. I wouldn’t go back.”

“I’ve been there. I used to live in Seattle,” another of the four of them said.

“Ralph worked for Boeing in Seattle for twenty years, and they fucked you in the ass, didn’t they, Ralph?” his companion, the fourth man, said.

Ralph said, “When they canned thousands of us, there was a joke — Last one leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights.”

“I’m in computers,” the man two seats down said. “I’ve only lived here about ten months.”

“Excuse me?” Ralph’s friend said. “You’re kind of far away, I didn’t hear.”

They all moved over to a table, the four of them, and continued talking about Seattle and Boeing and anything at all. They took turns buying rounds. English skipped his turn. He drank only coffee.

Ralph didn’t seem bitter about having put in two decades at Boeing before the big layoff. “I sell boats now,” he said.

“Can you get by all right doing that?” English asked.

“It’s touch and go. Feast or famine. My kids are gone now. My wife works.”

“But you can really score — when you score — right?”

“My second wife,” Ralph corrected himself, taking a drink from Madeline’s tray before she could even set it down. “I lost my first wife right after Boeing cut back.”

“Better bring another round almost right away,” the man in computers suggested to Madeline.

“I just went crazy,” Ralph said of that other time.

Madeline said to Ralph, “I heard about that.”

But her manner of saying it was like this: She paused, looked at him, laid down her bar rag gently on the tray, and said I heard about that, as if she’d always wanted to get the whole story. But Ralph didn’t seem to want to tell it.

The man who worked in computers revealed that his name was Elvis. “I was born in ’42,” he said. “I wasn’t named after Elvis Presley. My folks just picked it out of the air.”

“That must’ve been kind of strange, having a name like that in the fifties.”

“Other kids looked up to me,” he said. “It gave me a whole kind of mystique. I was sad when he faded out. But I was never too big on his sound, to tell you the truth.”

Elvis described something that had been going on at his office for a while, a series of events that had resulted in one of the other workers getting fired for sex discrimination. “Or rather it was sexual harassment, is the proper term,” he said.

“This guy was unbelievable,” Elvis went on. “He’s married, got three kids, or maybe four, I don’t know, and he just kind of started in on this woman who works right at the next desk. But she was like lower down on the scale — not working under him, but he had rank on her. She was just a secretary, more or less, and he was management. One day he puts this Personals ad on her desk. You know The Midnite Shopper?”

“What a stupid rag.”

“Yeah, it is. And especially the ads, the Personals. Did you ever read those?”

None of them admitted to such a vice.

“Well, after this started happening, we all started reading The Midnite Shopper at the office. Those ads are pretty straight out. They’re all about sex. Well, this guy, Remarque — he’s Canadian — he circled one of the ads, and put it on her desk with a note on the office memo paper — a memo right? He says, Dear Louise, why don’t you answer this ad?”

“So did she?”

“Fuck no. He answered it for her.”

“Yeah? Jesus.”

“But not exactly, not really — because he was the guy who took out the ad in the first place.”

“What did it say?”

“It said like: ‘I like them bouncy. Soft. Heavy. If you’re a female between thirty-five and forty, over 150 pounds, brown hair, reply to Box So-and-so.’ She fit the description — she’s over one-fifty for sure. In fact, I’d say she’s more like over two hundred pounds.”

“Two hundred?” Ralph’s companion said.

“Over two hundred. Anyway, Remarque, he just answered her like he would’ve if she had answered his ad. He writes her this long letter, saying he admired the photo she sent him, let’s get away for a weekend in two weeks, please phone me at this number — it’s the guy’s work number. I mean, the phone is right on the desk next to hers. This guy really made a geek out of himself.”

Madeline, coming to the table with drinks, had been overhearing them. “He made it pretty obvious,” she said, “using his office phone number and everything.”

“Sure,” Elvis said. “But it was even more obvious than that. It didn’t start there, with the advertisement. It was like an ongoing thing. First of all, before any of this other jazz, he was always making remarks to her. Real quiet, so nobody could hear. But you could stand across the room and get the idea just by looking at how close he was standing. He’d be trembling. You could see it. I mean, he was overboard. He kept changing his image. First he started — he wore these like checkered, sort of plaid pants, really loud clothing for an office. And he’d look down at his pants every so often, and then he’d look over to see if she was noticing his new look. The whole office, we just observed this stuff as it was happening, day after day. I mean, it was all that was happening. He dyed his hair three or four times, different colors. That’s not an exaggeration. He wore a wig one time, too, like a Beatles haircut. I wonder what his wife must’ve thought …”

Elvis paused. He pinched the last quarter inch of his cigarette tightly, and sucked on it so hard it squeaked.

Ralph, meanwhile, turned his drink around and around on the table, as if the other side of it was going to show him something different.

They waited for the rest.

According to Elvis, what happened was that the woman, Louise, showed the letter to two or three of her girl friends in the department. The letter wasn’t signed, but they all had a fair idea who’d sent it, and within days it was being quoted, and even photocopied and sent, all around the company. On the advice of her friends, Louise sent the original to the personnel office, who forwarded it to people even higher up and more central in the corporation.

In a couple of weeks, a team of investigators came through the office doors. They were three men. In front of everyone they walked straight over to the Canadian’s desk and showed him the letter.

“We need your assistance in this matter,” one of them said.

“All right,” he said.

“Did you write this letter?”

The man refused to speak. He looked over at Louise, who was sitting as usual at the desk right next to his.

“Is this your letter? Did you send this?” another asked him.

He said, “Why don’t you just have Louise ask me?”

“Because,” the investigator said, “we’re the ones asking you.”

“Maybe Louise should ask me,” the man said. He put his hands together on the desk and stared down at them. “His face,” according to Elvis, “was as red as blood.”

“It’s a simple matter to trace this letter,” the investigator said. “You can make things easy by telling us you wrote it, if in fact you did.”

The man, his face red as blood, wouldn’t look anywhere but at his hands gripping each other before him on his desk.

“Tell Louise to ask me,” he suggested.

All the investigators looked at Louise. Everyone else in the place did, too.

She was wiping at her eyes and sniffling. She finally said to him, “Well?”

Silence.

She said, “Did you write this letter to me?”

He said, “Yes. I did.”

Nobody in the office said a word.

And here in the Alaska Bar they were also silent. From the one narrow window the daylight was draining away. Jerry’s Diner was open, its red electric sign applying to the evergreens a taint so subtle, so tantalizing, that English ached to drink it.

Elvis drained his double and chewed up an ice cube, saying, “So — he’s losing his job. Lost it already. He cleaned out his desk yesterday, and it was just sitting there empty all day today.

“And the thing is that it was just crazy! It was absurd! I mean, this woman is kind of a … pig—I’m sorry, but I have to say it. She’s fat, she’s married, she’s homely as hell. There’s nothing there. He wrecked his whole career, probably completely shredded his marriage. And she’s just, I mean this woman is just …” He lifted his hands helplessly. Words wouldn’t come.

“Jesus!” A couple of the others laughed.

As for Ralph, English noticed he wasn’t laughing. Ralph was staring at the three of them with loud, blind eyes, smoothing his mustache with a finger.

When Happy Hour was over, English stepped out into the blue dark, and wouldn’t you know he’d be coming down the road at that moment?

English had seen him dead by the side of the street. He’d seen him lighting a cigarette at the bottom of an alley, zipping himself up in a urinal, passing out and going down and being trampled at a riot.

It was the guy, the geek, the one who’d dressed in loud checkered pants and worn a wig to work and made a fool of himself and lost everything.

He was bent over nearly double and dragging his shadow behind him. It scraped enormously over the road, turning a deep furrow in his life. He got closer and closer. Then he was right on top of English, he was going to crush English to death. And suddenly English couldn’t find him anywhere.

He slept in the car by the side of the road and woke up he didn’t know when. The world was dark and moonless. The night was upside down. He turned on his headlights and engaged the engine, and a series of images began dissolving toward him, faded white lines snaking down the window in a frame of evergreen boughs. Far ahead one other light bobbed slowly on the waters of the darkness. Then the light grew into a symbol, the symbol into a word, and the word was MARY, blinking in the window of a diner. The counter stretched across the window, and a woman stood behind the counter brushing a rag across the surface with one long, sorrowful gesture. English wasn’t hungry, but he went inside anyway. He didn’t know where he was.

Inside, the neon sign — the word MARY with its apostrophe and s extinguished — buzzed loudly.

“Good morning,” English said.

“Can I get you some coffee?” the woman said. Her uniform was sky-blue. Her hair was as short as a boy’s, and she was thin, no less so than a carnival freak. Her skin, stretched over tendons and bones, had the delicacy of rice paper. It looked as if all you had to do was apply a lighted match to make her ready for the grave. She gave him coffee though he hadn’t answered her. She laid a menu on the counter.

“I was going to Franconia, on 93,” he said, “but I think maybe I’m all turned around.”

“You’re on Route 1,” she said.

“I’ve been going north.”

She shook her head slowly. “Go south.”

“It feels wrong to turn around now,” he said.

“It’s the only way I know of. You’ll never get where you’re going by just going on and on north. You’ll never get there.”

She was leaning on the counter with both hands. It was all he could do to keep from touching those hands, those fingers of an ivory sadness, outspread on either side of his heavy white mug.

“Simone,” he said.

He believed he’d never seen anyone stand so still. He had to cover his face with his hands to keep his eyes from beholding her.

“Franconia, you said, didn’t you? Simone … I can’t tell you. I don’t know.” She laid one finger on the menu and moved it toward him an inch. “Eat.”

He reached Franconia well before noon. It was just a string of motels, a big white church, and a field of wet yellow grass in a valley a little way off Interstate 93. The clouds moved behind the white steeple. He’d seen that very thing in a lot of movies. It made him dizzy when it happened in the movies and it made him dizzy now.

He stopped the car and rubbed his eyes.

Before he did anything further he was going to collect himself. He went into the large white church, Our Lady of the Snows, overlooking the yellow field. It was unreasonably dark inside, and he just sat for a few minutes amid the stale whiff of censers and the little musk of the ranks of votive candles, his arms wrapped around himself, until he had to admit that it was just no use — he was only sitting here hugging himself in still another of his faith’s innumerable churches named for saints and ladies. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness he began to feel dominated by the blank stares of the plaster martyrs. Our Lady was no longer a nurturing mother but an enchantress — a shimmering goddess — no more a present comfort but a tantalizing absence. What ark would he sail, what chariot, with what wings, how could he reach her?

No use. Cold silence for his morning prayer.

He found the Notch Lodge at the far end of town — five cabins surrounded by a carpet of pine needles, right on the main road. It was still closed, and English couldn’t tell which cabin served as office, but a man chopping wood beside the house next door, an immense, hairy person in overalls, called to him, “Can I help you out, there?”

English approached him carefully; meanwhile, the man sundered a huge round into seven pieces of firewood with six blows of his maul. The sound of it echoed off the mountain about a half a mile across the field. After each swing he said uh, or shit, or motherfucker.

“I wanted to talk to whoever runs the motel there. Do you know them?”

“Sure,” the big man said. “Mrs. Vance runs it.” He split the last of the round: Bitch.

“Do you know her?”

“Yeah. I’m Mr. Vance.”

“Oh,” English said. “How do you do?”

“Well, I do great. But I don’t do much. I have nothing to do with the motel. I mostly chop wood.”

He demonstrated by shattering another round, causing English to step backward in alarm. “I’m an investigator,” English told him, nearly pleading. “Leonard English. It’s a missing-persons case.”

“Nobody missing around here, I wouldn’t guess.” Breathing heavily, Vance wiped a forearm across his face and set his maul aside.

“I guess a lot of people come and go. Lot of tourists and so on around here.”

“In the summer, yeah. The skiers go over by North Conway in the winter.”

“What about people who aren’t exactly tourists? Other groups, like.”

“Other groups,” Vance said.

“Well, have you ever heard of the Truth Infantry? It’s supposed to be kind of a secret paramilitary group,” English said, embarrassed by his own lack of tact, “located somewhere around here.”

“What’s secret about the Truth Infantry? I’m a member myself.”

“Oh,” English said, finding no other words.

“We just get together in the summer and shoot at targets, mostly.”

Vance sighted down the length of an invisible weapon.

“I’d been given the idea,” English said, “that it was much more serious.”

“We have barbecues and get seriously wasted.”

“That it was sort of a radical underground thing,” English insisted.

“We don’t drink and shoot,” Vance assured him. “We shoot in the morning, then we drink.”

“That’s fine, that’s a sensible way to approach,” English said dizzily, “the whole endeavor.”

“Folks who have a little Vietnam in our background.”

“Yes. Right.”

“We need the fellowship. It’s kind of healing.”

“Right. Right.” English sighed. Had he been brought here as some kind of practical joke? I played it on myself, he thought. “And what about a headquarters. Do you have a building or something?”

“We use this old forestry camp up the mountain. As long as we police it up afterward, everybody’s happy.”

“And there’s nothing secret about it.”

“You knew about it, didn’t you? If it was secret, would you know about it?”

On the left was a massive pile of what appeared to be birch rounds. To the right was a pile of split birch, its meat green and wet, and between the two piles stood the woodcutter Vance with his several heavy tools and the unattainable simplicity of his task. “I suppose I better tell you the investigator I work for is a friend of yours,” English said at last, “Ray Sands. You knew he was dead, I guess.”

“If he was dead,” Vance said, “then he’s probably still dead to this day. I’ve got a lot of friends like that, and it works out to an identifiable cosmic rule: once dead, always dead — but I gotta tell you, English, I don’t feel trusting toward a person who has as many nervous gestures as you, shifting around and whapping on your pockets like a fucking mechanical man. Could you stop that shit?”

“I was just looking for a cigarette, I think,” English said, but he wasn’t completely sure.

“—Many dead friends, I was saying, but no dead friends named Ray Sands.”

“Ray Sands, Sands — Raymond Sands of Provincetown. The head of the Truth Infantry.”

“We have a guy who puts together a newsletter once a year and sends it out. There’s no leader. No Ray Sands. You and I have no common acquaintances.”

English looked out over the field toward the wall of the mountain. A sense of his own idiocy dominated the area behind his eyebrows, and started to grow rapidly into a headache.

“Is Mrs. Vance around?”

“She’s in St. Johnsbury trying to hire some maids. The local girls all want to work in restaurants in the summer.”

“The man I’m looking for had the motel’s phone number in his office. He might have called here or stayed here. Do you ever have winter guests?”

Vance shook his head. “Summers only. The only guy who stayed here this winter was a friend of mine, this guy who’s an artist,” Vance said.

“An artist. Not Gerald Twinbrook?”

“Yeah. Jerry Twinbrook.”

English’s blood sang so loud he couldn’t hear his own voice saying, “We do have a common acquaintance.” His excitement nearly blinded him. “He’s friend of yours?”

Vance seemed uncertain of the fact now. “I know Twinbrook, yeah. He’s one of the guys. He was up last summer for drill, and he came up last December — I don’t know, right around Christmas, or earlier, the beginning of the month. I don’t remember.”

“He’s in the Truth Infantry? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“As far as I know,” Vance said. “Listen, you know what? Should I be talking to you?”

“I thought you said there was nothing secret about it.”

“What’s your purpose here? Is he in a lawsuit or something?”

“His parents miss him.”

“And that’s the extent of it,” Vance said.

“He’s gone missing,” English said.

“Well, he cleared out of here last January, man, and I never knew him very well. He was just up about two weeks in the summer, and a couple weeks last winter.”

“Where’d he go? Did he say?”

“I never even talked to him once,” Vance said. “I wasn’t really his friend.”

“Come on. He’s not in trouble. Nobody’s in any trouble,” English assured him desperately.

“I just knew him, he knew I had this place, he gave us a call, he came up and hung around and kept to himself. Hiking and such.”

“In the winter?”

“I told him not to do that,” Vance said.

“Where did he go when he went hiking?”

“Man, I don’t know. He wanted to go up to the summer camp, but I talked him out of that bullshit. The snow is four feet deep by New Year’s. You’d have to be insane to go a hundred yards up one of those trails. He must’ve just walked the roads.”

“Well, he was a little strange, wasn’t he?”

“You know who’s strange, man, is you. Your eyeballs are sort of quivering, and I don’t like the way you keep chewing on your tongue, or whatever you’re doing.”

“I gotta get some rest,” English said.

“Get lots and lots” was Vance’s counsel.

“But, you know — Twinbrook,” English prompted him.

“No idea. None. One day he was just gone. He took all his stuff.”

“But if he went into the woods,” English said, “he could still be up there, lost.”

“He’d be a hell of a lot more than lost by now,” Vance pointed out. “But I think he would’ve left something in his room, don’t you? A toothbrush, couple of dirty socks — he didn’t leave a thing. No, he split town.”

“He took his car and all,” English said.

“He didn’t have a car. Just a knapsack and sketch pad and such. He probably took the bus out of town.”

“If I want to go up to the forestry camp, what do I do?”

“Don’t,” Vance said. “The road’s a mess. It’s officially open, but nobody goes on it till well after the spring breakup.”

“I’ve got to get up that mountain,” English said.

Vance disagreed. “If there’s anybody up there, he’s a corpse subject to our simple cosmic law of deadness, which states that he’s going to just keep on getting deader. You’re not in a hurry.”

“Is it right on the road? The camp?”

“Look, figure it out,” Vance told him now. “I advise one person not to go up there, awhile later you turn up and say he’s missing. Now I tell you to wait till the road’s passable — can I expect somebody to show up in a couple weeks looking for you, too?”

“I see,” English said. “That’s a threat, isn’t it?”

Vance closed his eyes and shook his head, regretting English’s folly. “Take a break, dude. You’re very wired.”

“Which road?”

“Number 18, straight out here eleven miles; take a left and then straight up that motherfucking mountain. Very muddy, very slushy. You’d need a boat this time of year.”

But English found his transportation just across the street, parked almost next to his Volkswagen, within earshot of Vance’s thunderous labors.

As English walked across the parking lot, a man in a softball uniform accosted him, saying, “If you park your car here for very long, somebody’s liable to buy it. This isn’t a parking lot. It’s a used-car dealership.” The man was carrying a fur-collared suede coat on a hanger, draped with a dry cleaners’ plastic bag. He touched English’s shoulder and then gripped English’s hand. “I’m Howardsen: owner, salesman, et cetera.”

“Sorry,” English said.

“No, you didn’t see the sign.”

“I still don’t,” English said.

“It’s being painted. Vandals changed the other one from SPUD AUTOS to PUD AUTOS. The new sign’s just going to say AUTOS, real large.”

“Oh well,” English said, meaning to sound unhappy for the man, though he couldn’t have cared less.

“I know who it was. They’re good boys. You couldn’t expect them to resist that kind of a lure, though, could you?”

“Who were they,” English said, diving through the meagerest opening, “guys in the Truth Infantry or something?”

“Truth what? No, they were from the high school, I’d guess.”

“No,” English said, “I just said that because I was talking to Vance over there about his group, the Truth Infantry. They meet up on road 18 in the summer, I guess, huh?”

“Oh, that bunch, yeah, they train up there or conduct exercises or some such fuck-all. Nobody ever got hurt, I don’t believe.”

“I was thinking of taking a drive up road 18, is how the subject came up.”

“Which one is that, now?” Howardsen gazed off in either direction as if the world were a map.

“Up here about eleven miles?”

“Oh, Jesus God, you’d need a four-wheel drive.”

“Is it real muddy?”

“Nope, that’s on the north side of things. Up another couple thousand feet there’d be more snow than mud.”

“Oh.”

“But plenty of mud before that.”

“It’s very important that I make the trip.”

“And you’d need a gun. For the Sasquatch.”

“A gun?”

“Kidding. Kidding. Kidding,” the man said. “I’m just kidding you.”

“I’ll rent a jeep.” English had a thought now. “How about that car right there? Would you want to buy that car?” He pointed to his Volkswagen.

“I’d buy anything, if the price was right. I’ve bought more horrible things than that. And sold them again.”

“What do you mean, horrible? It gets me everywhere.”

Howardsen let English hold his suede coat while he walked a circle around the vehicle in a kind of half crouch. He took back the coat and stood still and regarded the car for another few seconds, managing to seem both meditative and astonished. Then he spoke: “I mean, starting from the ground up, the tires have about four hundred miles of tread left. If that. These old VWs, the heater’s not powerful enough for our winters. That’s okay, I’ll sell it in the summer.” He stepped to the rear to raise the hood on English’s horrible engine. “These things start to run kind of dirty after a while. You get a kind of chugging action, sort of? Quits chugging after you get her on the open highway for a while? That’s the valves burning off the crud after you get the rpms up. Crud collects,” he said, “driving at low rpms around town. If you’re hysterically desperate for cash, like two hundred and fifty dollars, I could give you that much.” He dropped the hood. “Hood don’t fall right,” he said, shutting it a second time. “Did you have a little wreck maybe?” One last time he lifted and dropped the bonnet, letting that put a period to the sad catalogue.

“I’m kind of insulted.”

“But fairly desperate.”

“Three-fifty?” English said.

Howardsen plucked a roll of money from under his baseball cap and peeled off three one-hundred-dollar bills. “I have some papers for you to sign,” he said. “Also, I’ve got a four-wheel drive you can rent.”

As English was driving out of the place in an open jeep, he stopped and called Howardsen over to try, one last time, to get the man to let him keep a little of his money. “You could live without one of those hundreds, I’d think.”

“What would you spend it on in the woods?” Howardsen asked. “It’s better all around if I keep it till we have the jeep back. If you had a major credit card it’d be another matter.”

English saluted and engaged the clutch, and as he did so Howardsen raised a warning finger: “Beware the Sasquatch.”

English now recognized this man as a messenger.

“You’ll know the Sasquatch. He looks kind of like Señor Mister Vance over there across the street, who you were talking to.”

A sour feeling of dread stroked English under his throat. “Are you saying,” English asked, “that he might follow me out there?”

The man winced. “You’re lacking a sense of humor,” he told English. “Maybe I shouldn’t kid with you.”

“Should I be taking a weapon?” English asked carefully.

“There’s nothing in season now,” Howardsen said, and looked so uncomfortable that English realized, a little too late, that he’d made a sort of crazy mistake. He didn’t know what to do, other than gun the engine and drive off before the man could ask for his jeep back.

Road 18 crossed a railway track, travelled for a few miles alongside it, and then headed up the mountain in a series of narrow switchbacks, crossing a small creek repeatedly. The road wasn’t icy here, but English heard what he thought must be ice thumping, sometimes splashing down into the creek, the water wearing its groove over eons while people built their churches and laid out their railroads in a geological eye blink. For a while the dread dissolved, the feeling that he was launched on a fatal errand left him, and he forgot he was here without any good reason but with complete certainty. It was nice to be out in the country in May, when the rivers were young.

His machine shimmied somewhat in the particularly muddy patches, but even in the steepest places its climb was happy and relentless, and wherever the road forded the creek English plowed into it without bothering the brakes and charged across like Moses, turning great furrows of water on either side of him. He was elated. Whenever the road switched back south in its upward zigzag, the roof of trees opened up and he glimpsed, high above him, a promontory with a slender falls coming down over it like a white cowlick. This gnarled outcropping seemed to form the head of a cliff that had pushed up out of prehistory to block the region from the southern sun; ten miles up the road English came into its shadow.

Here the thaw was late, the mud of the road was firm, and he crossed inexplicable stretches of pure winter, with the lane and the evergreens immersed in a silent whiteness.

The jeep’s big tires travelled the snows without any trouble, but when they found slush beneath them they seemed to forget completely the purpose of their manufacture, and English’s ride began behaving less like an all-terrain vehicle than like a merry-go-round. He was, he had to admit, spinning out of control and leaving the road.

Now he was stopped, facing the direction from which he’d come and tilted leftward to such a degree he had the sickly suspicion that at least two of his wheels might not be on the ground. He put the thing in reverse, engaging also a certain mechanism of the mind by which he found it possible to pretend that he couldn’t by any means have got himself stuck in a rut miles and miles from any human place and at the same time to spin the tires and rock the car and whip the steering from side to side, installing the jeep permanently right where it was. He got out and put his back against the grille and his feet against a tree and pushed until satisfied he was dealing with an inert mass. He turned his back on it and took to the road again. He had to walk, and his shoes, while fine for walking, were no good in the snow; but his elation remained. He was happy to see the empowering things of man flounder sideways into their natural uselessness.

He walked carefully at the margin of the road, seeking the crustier surfaces and only occasionally plunging himself to the knees in old snow that was more like crushed ice. In many places the thaw was complete, and he trudged through mud. The slope gentled. The bluff and the long waterfall down the face of it now took up a good part of the sky. He expected to hit the wall of the cliff somewhere up ahead. The temperature was more than bearable, and in fact in his leather jacket he was far too warm. There was no question however of laying it aside, of shedding his image, his crest, his coat of arms. Even Joan of Arc had had her breastplate, anyway she did in the paintings he’d seen of her, and Simone Well — who knew what she had, beyond her silly delusions. But isn’t it a question of following it out anyway? Isn’t that where faith comes in? Didn’t Joan of Arc admit the voice of God was in her imagination? Isn’t it a matter of faith marching after the delusion? Isn’t that what the saints are proving?

He’d come to a gate and a sign. He couldn’t have walked much more than a mile.

The Forest Service sign informed him that the structures in the encampment were considered antique. Tampering and destruction were barred by federal law and would be punished.

The campground lay beyond the gate — which kept out only vehicles; a footpath went around it — in a large hollow wide enough to be called a meadow. The sun apparently never got to it, and most of the winter’s snow lay around in big patches. Among the antique structures referred to by the sign there was, of all things, an antique feedlot — for what kind of livestock he couldn’t imagine. Maybe farmers had once driven their sheep up here for the summer grasses. There were half a dozen one-room cabins painted white. To English they didn’t look so old. One after another he found them locked and undisturbed. From the roof of one a sheet of snow had slid halfway off, curving down but not breaking, lengthening the eave by nearly three feet, and then melting irregularly like paraffin.

Next to that cabin was a large outhouse of sorts, its door open and the hinges sprung not by an animal or by a person, but only by the snows that had drifted into the cracks and hardened, expanded, and been added to by further drifting.

Gerald Twinbrook hadn’t broken this door open, but he’d entered here. His knapsack and sketch pad and sleeping bag lay on the floor, candy wrappers scattered around them.

English sat down on the concrete floor, on the sleeping bag, and took a look at what he was sure must be Gerald Twinbrook’s last sketches.

The top sketch was a landscape, a study of the outcropping English had seen from farther down the road. He’d seen it from farther down, but it lay above the encampment somewhere. He turned the pages over. The next sketch was one of a gallows. Another of the outcropping, another of a gallows fixed to the outcropping. He knew the style, the stovepipe broken-necked figure hanging from its noose. With a few strokes Twinbrook had managed to give the hanging man a certain heft, an inertia implying movement.

Touching these pages, English’s hands were as steady as the artist’s must have been. All anxiety had left him. He was happy.

There was a sketch of the encampment itself, with a trail of animal tracks leading across the snow. And a sketch of a man laid out with a noose around his neck. He read Twinbrook’s note beneath it: Now we are allowed to take the dead man / and strike him with lightning of our own making / and bring him back to life.

Anything was possible, anything. English looked to the sky for lightning. Three large grey clouds in what he believed was the east; nothing more.

He decided to climb up around behind the distant outcropping and overlook the entire scene. He wished he had binoculars.

The road led nearly to the cliff, and then sidled right; English took a game trail left, a very steep one that eventually curved back right, not quite so steeply, and aimed straight at the head of the falls.

In ten minutes he was higher than the outcropping and somewhat behind it, looking down at the waterfall. The embankment leading down to the edge of the cliff was much steeper than it looked, and there wasn’t any path down that way. He left the path, sat on the earth, and let himself down the bank just a little at a time. But he wasn’t liking this. Even twenty meters from the ledge he felt nothing protecting him from the drop. He thought he might make it hand over hand, hanging on to shrubs and tiny trees, until he got close enough to see almost everything below, but he didn’t need to go even five more meters to be quite sure he’d made a mistake. His courage gave out and he froze, breathing too fast, his heart working in him like a toy. The cold mist from the falls wet his face. All the life in him seemed to have congealed beneath his throat, and he was completely without strength in his hands, arms, and legs. On top of everything, the outstretched vista lent a kind of infinitude to his vertigo, and now he panicked, certain that he’d be stuck right here until he died of exposure or slipped away, still completely paralyzed, over the edge and joined the waterfall. But he was relieved to discover that whatever else happened in his life, his hands were not going to let go of the sapling evergreen they’d attached themselves to like the talons of a hawk. And from the height of hawks he looked down the Franconia Notch out into the New Hampshire lowlands while the spirit leaked back into his extremities.

Well below but closer to him, on what might have been a trail leading out of the encampment’s perimeter, he caught sight of a patch of earth with a blue tint to it unlike the surrounding patches. The area he was looking at lay outside the shade of the mountain, and the green of the pines made it hard to say — he might be looking at a freshly fallen bough, more green than blue. From this distance, some several hundred meters, nothing about it was definite, and in fact the spot of blueness disappeared as he stared at it. He let go of his branch with one hand, as carefully as if he were releasing half his hold on life, and reached behind him toward another very fragile-seeming frond, starting the climb back up to the trail he’d come by.

Going down he felt no safety in the level of the path. As long as the ledge was below him, he felt sure he was about to go over it. On the wide level of the Forestry encampment his feet were firm, yet the meadow itself seemed to drift slightly, ready to submerge in a general precariousness.

There was indeed a trail out of the encampment, but he couldn’t say whether it led to the thing that had caught his eye. He moved down the path for a long time, in many places pushing sideways between the brittle shrubs, but he thought he must not be getting very far. The trail led onto a ridge that widened considerably, until he was well out of the mountain’s shadow. Apparently this ridge didn’t get much more daylight than the encampment, however, because the woods, and particularly the trail, were patched with snow.

Ahead was the bit of blue that had drawn him to this place — clothing; a man’s parka, in fact. The man was still wearing it.

English was dazzled by the golden light coming out of himself as he approached the body. It was the afternoon sun following him down the path. The woods were rotten and wet, like a wound reopened. Patches of old snow were pink in this light, deep blue where shaded. The thaw trickled and dripped nearby, and in the distances it cascaded, echoing.

A frozen man English took to be Jerry Twinbrook lay under a thick limb beneath a sugar pine. It looked as if maybe he’d been strolling along and the branch had broken off and hit him over the head. But his neck was leashed to the branch by a yellow nylon rope that bit deeply into the flesh. The flesh, English couldn’t help reminding himself, that God had made him out of. The branch must have held for a long time and then broken off when a bad freeze had made it particularly brittle. The snow had come and covered Twinbrook up, and then it had melted away. His eyes were gone, and the black sightless sockets made him seem impossibly alienated from his surroundings. He looked like a victim wasted by some horrible addiction that had finally blessed him with this death. Birds had eaten the eyes. It happened to everything that died in the woods. English went over these points as if explaining them to someone else. He took a deep breath. The air flooded him. The life’s blood gurgled in his fingertips. Suddenly his eyes burned, he felt sexy, and he wanted to take off his clothes and dance around, fondling himself and screaming. In a while he did exactly that; he tossed aside his garments, even his shoes and socks, and for a few minutes, until he got too cold, he pirouetted whitely through the woods, like the naked soul of Gerald Twinbrook liberated from the corpse.

English took a Yankee Flyer out of Franconia. As the coach of this obscure bus line dropped down into towns he’d never see but this one glimpse of, his vision dipped into his fatigue, dredging up brief dreams. Nobody sat down in the adjacent seat, not because he was obviously the kind of person nobody would sit beside on a bus, a person who’d slept in a chair and spent most of his money getting a jeep towed down a mountain, but because that seat was occupied by Gerald Twinbrook’s essence, or ghost.

English was in the back with the smokers, in this case a young lady of the hippie-gypsy type and a Georgia boy from an air base farther north; also a bony lad who asked English where he was from and then said, “They read you pretty good in Massachusetts?”

“I don’t exactly place your meaning,” English said.

“They read you deeply there, huh?”

Pretty soon the others were passing a pint bottle and singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” acquiring the luminousness of sleazy angels as the pink dawn struck their faces. The coincidence was appalling to English, but by now he was resigned to the fact that God was on him like a harpy, and was riding him toward his destiny, and wasn’t bothering anymore to veil the workings of His terrible hands. The light of mid-morning woke him and he got a clear look at Gerald Twinbrook, who lounged beside him with an innocent irony glowing out from deep in his excavated eyes. Across the aisle the gypsy girl and the Georgia boy were locked statuesquely in a drunken kiss.

English had acquired a wonderful new sensitivity that disintegrated walls. As the sun rose over the little towns, he heard the chiropractors crying out. He heard the bankers’ feet searching for their slippers, the schoolteachers cursing in their bathrooms. Meanwhile the Georgian had his hand up under the skirt of his new friend. “When did you get out of the Air Force?” she asked him. “The second I went AWOL. I turned Communist,” he said. “I was gonna say I bet you’re political,” she said, and he told her before he kissed her again, “I’m a Trotskyite. I’m gone take to the hills till I overthrow the government.”

The rain had stopped and it was sunny and hot, but it was very wet. Two beautiful, almost silver aluminum tank trucks ahead created a tunnel of plunging evergreens, the dirty mist of standing rainwater exploding behind them, nature stirred by their passage in a way that made it seem man is very powerful indeed.

English showed Jerry Twinbrook one of the drawings from Twinbrook’s own sketch pad.

“Okay, your fish is definitely a fish, right—”

“Yeah—”

“Not a very good fish—”

“No—”

“—but it’s definitely a fish. But what is that behind it? Is that a radio, is that a ghost—”

“It’s a clock—”

“—is that a ghost of a radio?”

“It’s a clock with a cup on it. What do you know? You don’t know anything about paintings—”

“I know something about clocks—”

“—not a fucking thing about paintings—”

“I know about clocks—”

“You know what you like, you—”

“I can recognize a clock, and I look at that and I see a ghost of a radio, because you’re afraid of the clock the way it really is. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it—”

“You’re the one who’s afraid of time.”

“—it’s all about fear.”

“‘Fear’ or ‘feet’?”

“Come on! Don’t back off on me, man, tell me the truth — you’re blurring these things. The reason you don’t paint them the way it really looks is because you’re afraid of it the way it really looks.”

Twinbrook said, “Yeah. I think this is the way they really look, though. Don’t you know the lessons of love? Nothing is what you see.”

“Nothing is what I see,” English said.

“As long as one slave walks the earth, you cannot be free. As long as one prisoner remains, you yourself are in chains. That’s what Jesus was saying — when you visited the imprisoned, when you ministered to the dying, you did it to me. He’s one of them, until the last is free. And so are you. So am I.”

“That’s what Simone Weil was doing? Starving with the starved?”

“And Christ on the cross with the thieves, and St. Paul languishing in jail.”

“What about Joan of Arc?”

“Joan of Arc,” Twinbrook said, “was a self-signifying slut.”

The others around him had found their stops and cleared out by now. The bus driver must have realized that English was talking to himself, because at the next stop he came back to interrupt.

“I’m perfectly okay,” English said.

“Are you aware you’re raving out loud so everybody can hear?”

“It’s okay. I’m cultivating it.”

“You’re cultivating it?”

“I’m letting it happen. I’m in control. It’s cool.”

“I hope it is. I hope it is.”

“I’m learning things,” English told him.

“Not so loud, huh? Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okeydokey?”

“Okeydokey, all reet, and ten four,” English promised.

He had to change buses in Boston. While he was waiting in the Boston depot, he called the highway patrol and instructed them anonymously how to find Jerry Twinbrook’s corpse. Then he got on the bus heading down the Cape to Provincetown.

Twinbrook wasn’t on this bus. English looked everywhere, but he was gone. That was par, it seemed to English — everybody was backing off on him, even the people who weren’t exactly real.

It took half an hour to get across the Sagamore Bridge. The Cape highway was completely choked with the season’s arrivals. Two hours later, after the stop in Hyannis, the bus swung around a hitchhiker chasing a stopped car and crawled past a rest area where a team of exhausted bicyclists had draped themselves on the picnic tables. They’d all reached the lower Cape, where the four-lane road narrowed down to two, and where a white sign by the road beseeched those who passed and where English was thinking about the woods again, and about Gerald Twinbrook laid out at the end of his own road. That strange naked moment, he thought. That is my slot, my path. Not Success, not Romance. Nothing easy or even anything that can be understood. I saw the goddess: dead, and in the form of a man with his eyes pecked out.

DO NOT

DRIVE IN

BREAKDOWN

LANE

Many of the feelings I’ve been having lately, breaking down crying when alone, the sense of a cloud between me and God, the intuition that now, behind the cloud, is the time of faith—

these could be a madman’s feelings, a maniac’s—

He stood in Leanna’s living room — bedroom, bent over her desk, adding to his note. He was going to finish this thing, he had something to say. But he didn’t like the way he smelled — he was rank with bus station grime and the sweat of fear and pilgrimages. He had a dizzying impulse to slash her water bed with a knife and bathe in the flood. Also, it wasn’t right that his words turned from blue to black after the opening thought.

I’m going through some unspecified change—

I’ve never really known where to find the slot marked LOVE — or at least ROMANCE — it’s not there for me, I realize.

You’d say everything was just a coincidence. There are no coincidences to a faithful person, a person of faith, a knight of faith.

He opened the cash box. A ring of keys, rubber bands, and two bullets of a massive caliber. Tens, twenties, singles, fives — over a hundred bucks. His note wasn’t finished. But he wanted to copy it from the start on one of these good sheets of paper, using just the black pen.

I remember thinking on my last birthday: Thirty-four, and my life hasn’t even started yet. I wasn’t yet born, couldn’t be until — until what? Until someone told me my real name, or something like that.

I’m a private detective and I’m living out a private mystery … Leanna, the mystery is the Mystery.

He rummaged through her drawers for an envelope and came across her.44 revolver. Altogether the weapon was well over a foot long and must have weighed, he judged by hefting it, nearly five pounds. It wasn’t loaded. He added to its weight a little bit by putting the two bullets into the cylinder.

He stood in the room with the gun raised, sighting down the barrel at the water bed.

Now, what if you were home? he asked Leanna.

He’d followed everything out faithfully. He’d been true to every impulse. What was he being asked to do? Immediately he thought of taking this gun and shooting the Bishop, but that was crazy.

On the other hand — would God ask for anything sane? Did He come to Elijah and say, Go, secure a respectable position and wear out your days in the chores of it? Did His strange monstrous finger guide a person toward the round of events that wears us down and evens us out until even the meanest is presentable, if wrinkled and feeble? Or did it point straight to an earthquake and say, Don’t you dare come back until you’ve died.

Leanna had a walk-in closet: into which English walked.

He raised a gentle clatter among the hangers by rifling through her wardrobe. It wasn’t too extensive, just about right, he thought, for a mannish dyke. Dust coated the makeup items on her dresser. English laid the revolver among them next to its own reflection in the mirror. He found a blue purse and emptied his pockets into it.

How have I failed you? Always and everywhere I let you down. And you never let me down.

Give me another chance to betray you, Lord. Let me let you down again.

English took off his shirt and pants.

Nothing around here in the way of footwear would fit him. These, his own black no-nonsense Sears service shoes, marketed for the janitorial crowd, would have to do. He wished Leanna’s pantsuits weren’t so small — in a pantsuit and her brown fedora and this slash of lipstick and these false eyelashes, no one would know if he was a man dressed up as a woman or a woman dressed up as a man.

But it was going to have to be a skirt. This jungle cotton wraparound, with green, red, and yellow orchids flourishing on a black background, very tropical. The olive fedora set off the greens in the skirt. The black shoes were a match. The left eyelash fell off. One would do. And two bullets, he estimated, were enough to kill anybody whose time had come. He put the gun in his purse.

The important thing was to present a good front. But first you had to know how to fasten a bra behind your back. He settled for fastening it first and then pulling it over his shoulders, though this method twisted the straps. And then you had to have something in the cups.

I am going to stuff money in this bra, he announced to an audience of quivering albinos that had suddenly become his image of an all-seeing God. Back in the living room he tipped over the cash box and got on his knees and snatched at the bills on the floor. For my left breast tens and twenties, thirteen singles for my right.

None of the blouses would fit him. He had to tear the sleeves off his shirt and settle for that.

He walked downstairs and out the door and past the cabins and took several tentative steps along the sidewalk. A few people he couldn’t bring himself to look at passed him as he walked toward Commercial, but nobody said anything.

On Commercial Street all the shops were open, broadcasting tears and fragrances and songs delivering their knives, the aromas of spun candy and suntan oil and incense and perfume. He immersed himself in it all for ten seconds, made an alley not half a block east, and ducked into it. Three women passed him on roller skates, wearing headphones and holding hands.

Giving up his forward progress and seeking shelter in this alley had been a mistake. For a few seconds he didn’t think he was going any farther dressed like this. His imposture felt obvious. Anybody could see he was a woman who couldn’t even fasten a bra. But nobody was looking at him.

He stepped onto a street filled with people in short shorts and big roller skates and earphones, a street of headgear and desperation jammed with people walking their invisible dogs, exploding with people wearing huge blue velvet novelty hats. Not even a glance from these citizens. On this avenue he was just another case of the hot-and-lonelies, another attempter working on a firestorm. There were cops on extra corners today directing traffic. They never glanced at him. Cars nudged through the throng that covered the pavement from wall to wall, cars with their tapedecks blazing stereophonically as they passed, but for the most part it seemed to be a parade consisting of children who had to go to the bathroom now, and parents who wished to go in two different directions — like life — and young, electric, vividly sexual men staring at one another through a drugged haze and couples thinking about leaving one another because the sea’s erotic whisper was making them crazy. English could feel what they were thinking. And he could see plainly that this was the real and permanent Provincetown, the mad seaside hamlet that had been here since the day of his arrival, and it hadn’t been disguised or overlaid by the empty winter season, it had simply drained away into the corners, and the people had turned invisible because they, like Gerald Twinbrook, were ghosts. And they, as Twinbrook had, had now turned visible and fleshly again. But only he, Leonard English, was alive. These wraiths couldn’t see him.

He walked among them. He was getting used to this. Exhaust fumes on my pulse points, he thought.

The humanified forest. Nobody familiar around. Where are the people who knew me when I was knowable?

And then he encountered Berryman on the teeming street. Berryman, the drunken reporter English had shared two drinks with, and probably, when he thought about it, one of the very few people who knew him in this world. “Hey, hey, hey,” Berryman said. “Uh — Leonard English?”

Fuck you, he thought. I do not know you. So please stop addressing me and touching me.

“I can give you about three minutes,” he told Berryman. “I don’t want to be late for Mass.”

The reporter took him by the hand and pulled him close to a wall. “It’s good to see a friendly face,” he told English. “I’ve been away.”

English said nothing. Somehow Berryman, by ignoring his appearance, made him feel more uncomfortable than he might have done by shouting out loud about it.

“I just got back from New Hampshire,” Berryman said.

“Oh. I was there, too.”

“Not where I was. I was in Edge Hill.”

“Edge Hill?” English said.

“A treatment center. The paper’s insurance program covered it.”

“You mean — for booze?”

Berryman’s look was direct — not at all sheepish. “I lost the battle and won the war.”

For an awkward moment, English didn’t know what to say. Berryman scratched an arm, pinched his nose vigorously.

“I see you’re in costume today,” Berryman said at last.

“Forget you saw me.”

“I really don’t think I can do that.”

“Okay. I don’t care. Obviously I just say, Fuck it.”

Berryman seemed to be trying to glance down English’s bodice. “I’m familiar with that philosophy.”

English thought of reaching into his purse and taking out his.44. Giving everybody a little jolt.

“You look good,” Berryman said.

“Thanks. Your three minutes is up.”

“You look very, very eighties.”

“Thanks.”

“Take care, Lenny.”

“Forget my name,” English said.

To get to the church he had to double back to Bradford. He cut through the alley where the costumed roughs hung out around the A-House, a notorious leather bar, but nobody even whistled. He made himself out of breath going up the concrete flights cut into the embankment to Bradford. It was nearly ten o’clock of a Sunday morning, and that’s what had him hurrying; he wanted to get to the rectory before the priest was done; he wanted to make his confession.

English heard voices in the sitting room, and so he waited by the door. He’d been in this room on his first day in Provincetown, the day he’d met Leanna. He stepped back for the person coming out, a teenage girl who couldn’t have had anything very interesting to be ashamed of.

The priest, a young, angular man, was about to put on his garment for Mass. As English came in he stopped, and looked at his watch.

Dressed in these clothes and feeling beautiful, English sat down in the chair. “Bless me, Father,” he said, “for I have sinned.”

The priest set the garment aside and looked at English carefully, then at his watch again. “You’re my last confession,” he said.

He sat down next to English and put his slender fingers on the makeshift partition. “Do we need this?”

English shook his head. Father moved it aside.

“Call me,” English said, “May — June.”

“Ah well, I’m Father Michael.” Father put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and seemed to be thinking. “May — June. You are a transvestite?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t that confuse the issue of your sexuality somewhat?”

“How can my sexuality be any more confused than it is? Give me a break.”

“I speak as one who is also gay.”

“I’m not gay.”

“Oh.” Father was surprised. “Of course, it’s not always an expression of a gay attitude.”

“Sometimes it’s just a disguise.”

Father crossed his arms before his chest and looked at English across the chasm of God’s love. “Where on earth,” he said, “did you shop for those shoes?”

English sighed.

Father said, “Are you serious?”

English couldn’t keep back the tears. He choked on them, sobbing. “You mean, are you serious. Telling me you’re gay, for Christ’s sake.”

“A lot of people are gay. I’m sorry if I misjudged, but I thought it would help to share a truth about myself.”

“I came here to confess.”

“All right.”

“Not to hear your confession!”

“Yes.”

“I’m serious!”

“All right. Is it all right if I take your hand?”

“Oh, God,” English said.

“No,” Father said, a little flustered now, “only if it comforts you.”

“This is getting bizarre,” English said.

Openmouthed disbelief stopped the priest’s face for a beat. “Oh, is it?”

“Bless me, Father,” English begged, “for I have sinned.”

“All right, then, let’s do it. How long has it been since your last confession?”

“Like maybe a couple of years, at least,” English said.

“And what have you done to trouble your conscience in that time?”

The room was a typically decorated vestry, or whatever the hell, English thought, you call these places. There were crucifixes all over the walls, and here and there an empty cross inviting the sinner to share in unimaginable sufferings. A long embroidered banner hung over the partition put there to hide the priest while he dressed for the service — just like the partitions they’d had in English’s grade school. LOVE BEFORE ME, the banner said, LOVE BEHIND ME, LOVE ABOVE ME, LOVE BELOW ME, LOVE AROUND ME, LOVE WITHIN ME.

“Two years ago I tried to hang myself to death,” English said.

“I’m listening,” the priest said.

“The thing is — sometimes I think I succeeded. Sometimes I think I really died.”

“Well, of course you did.”

Stunned silence. The room was choked with orchids. At last somebody was telling him the truth. He was dead.

“If you tried sincerely, then you succeeded in canceling your life. It was an act of perfect faithlessness. You’d reached the absolute end,” Father Michael said. “Maybe it was the only thing you could do.”

“Is there absolution for such a thing?”

“Your faith is making you whole,” Father said.

“But if I succeeded?”

“You did succeed. And your faith is making you whole.”

They sat together in silence for a while.

“Anything more?” the priest asked.

English’s sadness moved in his chest when he shrugged.

Father Michael said, “I’m going to give you my strongest absolution. The original Latin.” As he stood up, he said, “Bishop’s doing Mass today, I can’t be late. He’s in town to bless the fleet.”

Father made the sign of the cross, and stooped and gave English a little kiss on the forehead. “Te absolvo.”

English left feeling unsure — was he now cleansed, and if so, of what exactly? What crud had the winds of absolution carried off, why did he still feel such grime in the creases of him? An unspiritual explanation was that it was hot. Summer had arrived. Now it was past ten and everybody, even the most debauched, was awake and on the stroll. The crowds were of a size to menace civil authority. Was anybody left in Boston or New York? When you’re this completely naked, he thought, much more naked than you’d be without clothes, when you’re naked of all your signs and your moves, as naked, say, as the minute you were born, then these thousands of lives going by will rake you. Something like the permeable mask a fencer darkens his face with, that’s what his heart needed here.

He put on a casual look: no, not at all, none of this was getting to him; but everything was getting to him — the birds of electricity beating their wings in the wires, the repertoires of ambulances, the thud of defectively muffled engines and the whacking, like rugs being wearily beaten, of stereos through the open windows of cars. The frosty pink was fading from his mouth and the sweat dripped down the inside of his thighs, although occasionally a small breeze reached under and disturbed the leaves and blossoms of his skirt’s tropical motif. Above all he was embarrassed to be wearing men’s Jockey shorts. It seemed an easily appreciated thing, all you had to do, for heaven’s sake, was watch him walk. He had to remind himself with every breath that he was invisible to these wraiths.

At a family grocery they were putting out crates of fruit to tempt the thirsty strollers. What a miracle to see a produce truck, uncoupled, drive out from under the massive husk of its trailer. Let him treat his burdens like that!

From the end of Bradford he headed right, out toward Herring Cove. The sky was open now, he was in the National Seashore, a realm protected from civilization, and the road wasn’t so crowded. Rather than walk right through the parking lot, he left the pavement a quarter mile or so below the cove and cut across the dunes that rose and fell for quite a distance before they lay down in front of the sea. A few minutes and he’d lost sight of the road, of everything but the sand and the sky; it showed him how all things could fall away in an instant; now he crested a dune and came into a crater empty of everything but sand and the intersecting footprints of other people; the notations delved here by their journeys showed him how each life was one breathtakingly extended musical phrase, and he prayed that their crossings were harmonious.

In some former existence he’d been hunted over sand like this, run down and eaten, turned to the predator’s flesh and bones. He felt his life extending backward into the conflagration of all other lives. And it reached out of him like a frond of smoke, touching the tender pink future. This sand presented itself as evidence that he’d someday father children and grandchildren on the earth. He could hear their feet knocking in the rubble as they scavenged in our dregs, stumbling around after some gigantic holocaust.

As he cleared the last dune, he stood for a minute on the brink of the Atlantic and laid claim to it all. Here the Cape faced west, curving into Cape Cod Bay, and the noon sun raked the sand. English felt it piercing him as if he wasn’t here. He had absolutely no protection in this guise. Everything he was — a man, an American, an image patched together out of certain assumptions and beheld mostly by itself — was burned to ash by the fire of this new thing. And something was burned away from before his vision, the veil itself that kept his eyes from the agony of brightness.

He saw a lot of people in bathing suits on the beach. Stripped down to swatches of cloth. Stripped of their disguises, stripped of any protection at all — everything about them and even about the moment itself was naked before his sight.

He walked down among them. These were not ghosts. They were looking at him, many of them, because he was fully dressed and he was moving. And he was looking back at them.

Each one was crucified and completely open, every thought, every desire floating out from their torn hearts.

A springer spaniel came rocking through the surf, tongue out, toward some toy or infant or beckoning, aged hand. And a young woman, some kind of office help or assistant floor manager, reclined toward the sun with the incense of her secrets rising from her into the clear day.

A man squatted, then knelt, before a sand castle, finally vomiting up the teeth of wolves broken off in his flesh in a previous life, and a woman who had insisted on wearing her pearls to the beach sat beneath her silver hair thinking, “I’m guilty, yes, but I deserve a trial.” “Do people,” a little girl ten yards away was thinking, “all see the same color when they call something green?” A white filament of tanning lotion. Her mother’s hand obliterated it on her mother’s skin. “No. Wait. The storm is only in my mind,” a man gripping a tennis shoe was persuading himself—“Anything’s possible. I could come home …” but a breeze woke him and crushed the sponge of grief, and he tasted another drop. A grandfather crouched behind his smile, clapping for a dog. “Others have done worse,” he pleaded inside himself; “is it so bad what I’ve done?” Meanwhile, a young man puffed at a fly on his cheek while congratulating himself. “Just one or two minor details,” he thought, “and then—” … and then the moment granted him a vision of his life dissolving away until there was nothing left in front of him but the sea, going on forever.

The body surfers slid along the torched and crumbling waves. “I’m only human, I’ve only got two hands, I can’t do everything at once,” their souls protested. A woman patted the sweat from under her eyes, whisked the bits of sand from her suit, and lay back trembling under the kisses of a sexual angel …

And the others, their chalky laughter and resonating wounds, and still others with murders swimming in their bellies, and people burned as dark and shiny as beetles, all waited at the edge of this immenseness muttering little truths. “I saw him, I sat right next to him, and you can’t even tell.” “It’s all my fault that memory is dark.” “Thank God, I’m out of that mess.” “I’m fat.” “I’m thirsty.” “When am I going to live?” … As English reached the end of the beach, he found other people ripping mussels loose from the breakwater, and men and women who were going after clams with buckets and rakes and seemed to be stepping on their own faces in the mirrors of the tide pools.

This was the place where the lower Cape started to curl back around on itself in a way that got it generally compared to a scorpion’s tail. The breakwater English was standing on stretched a quarter mile across the harbor, cutting the corner, as it were, between the scorpion’s stinger and a point a few knuckles down the tail. A couple of boats, not much larger than rowboats, appeared to be anchored off the tip of the Cape. English crossed over on the breakwater with the idea of walking out to the very end and perhaps taking a ride in one of those boats. He had to clamber in many places across the casually piled boulders, of which the most were granite, and he got his feet wet coming off onto the beach at the other end. He saw nobody else up here. Two lighthouses warned the sailors of the Cape, one at the tip and one about a mile up, in the area of the tail’s last joint. Poison ivy grew everywhere between them.

He tried walking on the beach at first, past a few car chassis beyond corrosion into decomposition, a ferric variety of putrefaction — a beach made not so much of sand as of the long seaside grass flooded by water and killed by water and heaped by the motion of water onto the shore and abandoned there, like a long, pointless rope, by water. It was slow going in this muck. Before him were the huge green flies and the stink that rose off a dead porpoise a half mile past the breakwater, and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Bits of light on the surge of the breakers took to the air and flew in the corners of his sight. He walked through the hordes of insects, their angry music burning in his head like something trying to wake him up. He skirted piles of garbage that hadn’t quite found their way back from picnics, mostly the rottings of bait and dribbling cans of beer.

He took to the higher, sandier ground, which was covered with poison ivy. Gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the sand. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther down the shore he saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing.

A black wasp dropped a dead spider at his feet. The gulls spoke deeply in voices he thought couldn’t possibly belong to the same creatures he normally heard yodeling, and baby terns flew past above, chirping like crickets.

Seagulls reminded him of coyotes. We like them, he thought, but if we were smaller than they — say sizable as monkeys — we’d be desperate under seagulls. They’d be like land-sea-air coyotes. Gulls: Let’s not forget they’re carnivorous. You know what? They all look like the Pope. Power lines ran between the two lighthouses, poles spaced every twenty yards — a gull, or two or three, perched on the outflung arms of every one like vultures on desert saguaros. As he neared each pole, they jumped off. Couldn’t they guess they were safe twenty feet overhead? He couldn’t think when they’d started getting to him. He’d started out liking gulls like everybody else.

The gun was in his purse. It was getting heavier. He could hardly carry it. The raging molten irons at the center of the planet were dragging it toward themselves. He couldn’t believe that he was actually going to do it, and he couldn’t believe that he actually might not. This was the dilemma, that both ideas were absurd.

He crossed the lighthouse’s fat shadow and checked on the boats. One was a wreck turned upside down, but the other had a motor and two oars and looked ready to sail just about anyplace.

English pulled on the outboard’s starter rope until he was winded. He didn’t know anything about these engines. He didn’t know anything about boats, or the sea — I’m from Kansas, he explained to the sky, I’ll have to row the thing.

Right away he could see he’d be tired by the time he reached the town pier, where Andrew, our Bishop, was blessing the vessels of Provincetown. My craft keeps tacking in a fucked-up way, he told the waters. Keeping her steady as she goes takes practice. Which I am getting.

Thank God the harbor was smooth. Beyond a little slapping to keep his boat awake, it didn’t do anything but carry him. This wasn’t the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the eternally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you — we are more water than dust. It is our origin and destination. The hotels rolled out along the shore, the bed-and-breakfast places, were getting bigger. Between here and there, a few trawlers harassed by gulls.

This is sunstroke, he thought, and what a time for it, just when I’m trying to think about my strategy. I’m trying to think what I’m thinking. What am I thinking? I think this about sums it up: A 1940s-style spike-heeled shoe ripping open a child’s abdomen while, in the background, Marlene Dietrich smokes a cigarette.

He waved. Avast. Ahoy. Yes, I am a sailor. One of the fleet.

There was something decimated and paltry about the Blessing of the Fleet ceremony that year. Leonard English attended, rowing a boat with a dead outboard engine, and he didn’t have any fun.

It was cloudy, but the sun was still a menace. The sea was silver. English felt faint by the time he was in hailing distance of the pier. He could see somebody right at the end of the pier, higher than the rest of the crowd, the Bishop or the mayor. English’s shoulders and neck were completely numb. He made for a pier fifty meters down-cape of the municipal dock, heading for the cool dark beneath it.

Two men were drinking wine under the pier. They were just laughing shadows, he couldn’t make out their words. He smacked an oar against one of the piles, stood up, and grasped one of the tires nailed to the pile. “Avast!”

One of the men came a couple of steps closer and said, “Hey, that’s right; that’s exactly right — avast.” He stepped close enough to get a look at English, said, “What! Hey!” and stepped back before he missed his turn at the jug.

“What is it?” English heard his friend ask.

“Ah, just some kind of bullshit déjà vu,” the man said.

A lot of boats, dozens of them, some as small as English’s and a couple of truly big — white, gleaming yachts — were circling in this part of the harbor. Their captains seemed to be trying to form the vessels into a line. There was plenty of shouting and honking of klaxons.

In order to see the town pier, English had to set himself adrift every minute or so and then row back to his hiding place.

He heard scratchy songs. Saw somebody with a monster face. George Jones was doing “One Is a Lonely Number.”

And at last there he was, Andrew, our Bishop, our sad low-rent Bishop in his copper El Camino and his vending-machine sunglasses.

English, hiding under the pier, gagged on the very fertile, organic smell of the sea, overlaid with a whiff of diesel and rotting rope.

When he’d seen these things in movies, the scenes were thick with bodies and voices you couldn’t see past or hear beyond. But actually attending them, a person was forced to learn how far away the sun is, how great is the sea, how diminished and insignificant our ceremonies in a swallowing silence. The mayor’s thwocking pronouncements over the P.A., folded back on themselves by their echo off the harbormaster’s building, blinked out over the Cape Cod Bay behind him, while the razor of Cape light served up every irrelevant word of spectators threatening their children or appreciating the boats, and the sharp clink of change at the hot-dog stand.

The Bishop had donned the great ceremonial crown of his bishopric, an ostentatious cousin to a chef’s hat. His right hand, empty of anything along the lines of a scepter or wand, was raised in benediction over the fleet.

English rowed out vigorously into the harbor and set his course, thinking, Last-Card-in-the-Deck Street.

The boats were passing now alongside the pier, one at a time. Bishop Andrew leaned out and waved his hand, blessing each one.

English joined the fleet just ahead of a greasy fishing trawler and behind a smaller boat, a novelty item that was manned by a woman, as his own was womanned by a man, and peopled by papier-mâché sculptures of dwarfs and giants, one of them recognizable as Jimmy Carter, another one resembling Elvis Presley.

The crowd laughed and applauded as Bishop Andrew hailed this vessel, and they were still making so much noise, as English came beneath the Bishop, stood up, and aimed his.44 into the Bishop’s face some fifteen feet above, that nobody heard the shot. English hardly heard it himself, because the pulse was roaring so loudly in his head.

Neither did he feel the gun’s recoil — but he experienced the effect of it. It’s not that a.44 magnum has such an awful kick, but a person should be sitting down when he or she fires one in a drifting boat, where the tiniest inertial change counts for a lot. English, however, was standing up when he pulled the trigger. Thanks to the resulting motion of his vessel, he might have plugged anyone present that day. He didn’t shoot himself, which was a blessing, the only blessing his tiny boat received, because Bishop Andrew, in all the excitement, neglected his duty there. And English certainly didn’t end the Bishop’s life that day. Later, he was always led into a severe temptation to claim that he’d at least shot the Bishop’s hat off for him, but as far as English actually knew, the bullet plunked down, like nothing so much as a spent bullet, many leagues out in Cape Cod Bay. And down on his ass the sad assassin sat.