A Flash of Green

Thirteen

On that Sunday, Borklund put a heavy load on Brian Haas, and hovered so close Jimmy Wing could not help him with it. Whenever Jimmy tried to take a piece of it, J.J. would appear and put him onto something else. At two-thirty, when Jimmy went out to lunch, he phoned the newsroom and got hold of Brian.

“How are you doing, Bri?”

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The points are dirty and there’s water in the gas. I keep cutting out, and the son of a bitch keeps running me uphill. I’d say he’s got a strong suspicion.”

“Will you make it?”

“I’m not even going to think about guessing. I’m taking the day in ten-minute chunks, and getting through one at a time. Thanks for what you’ve been trying to do.”

“I’ll be back in a little while to try some more.”

“Bring me a big coffee, black.”

“You should eat.”

“I better not try. A quart container if you can manage it.”

“Two pints if I can’t. Okay.”

As soon as Wing returned with the coffee, Borklund sent him to cover a call on a drowning. It had just come in. The photographer was there when he got there. The resuscitator people had just given up, and the young mother had been given a shot but it hadn’t taken effect yet. The crowd could hear her shrieking in the small house. Wing got the facts from the neighbors. It seemed slightly grotesque to use a whole ambulance for such a small body.

On his way back into town from Lakeview Village he thought how this could be simplified by the use of a mimeographed form. “The (two-, three-, four-) year-old child was playing in the back yard of (his, her) home and apparently wandered away from (his, her) (mother, father, sister, brother, playmates) and fell unnoticed into a nearby (drainage ditch, pond, lake, stream, swimming pool) and was discovered approximately — minutes later, floating face down. Efforts to revive the child were not successful and (he, she) was pronounced dead at — o’clock by Dr.—”

The purposeless death of a child is a horrible thing, he thought. If I unlock the little box labeled Empathy, I can even manage to squeeze a little water out of my eyes. But I have to work at it. We run about eight a year, and I have covered a lot of them, and somehow it has come to be the same child being drowned over and over, and I keep the little box closed. We could take one master picture, and always run it. When the small bodies are covered, they always look alike. It is always the same stricken mother, the same ambulance, the same pointless horror. Grief for a child is always mixed up with speculation about what it might have become. Yet, according to the odds, its life would most probably have been dull, discontented and unsung. Once it is dead, nothing can be proven. All glorious speculation is valid. Had I drowned at age two, Sister Laura might sometimes look at the ruin of her own life and think of the small brother, thirty years gone, and say, “If he had only lived, life might have been different for all of us.” But I lived and nothing is different, and nothing is proven or disproven.

It was after five before he was able to give any attention to the problem of Mrs. Doris Rowell, she of the white Dutch bob, the academic baritone, the tennis shoes, the faded cotton dresses on the fat soft sexless body.

He reviewed what he knew about her. She had lived on Sandy Key, down near Turk’s Pass for at least twenty years. She’d bought an ugly old stucco house down there when houses and land were very cheap. She lived alone, had owned a succession of very old cars, was an amateur naturalist, a savage conservationist. When the paper had some special research problem involving marine animals or plant life, bird life, indigenous trees and plants, Doris Rowell was the logical one to ask. If she did not have the information, she knew where and how to find it. Usually she had the information.

He drove down to see her. When he parked beside the house she came to the entrance to the shed in the side yard and stared at him as he walked toward her. She wore vast faded khaki trousers, a man’s shirt, a baseball cap.

“From the paper,” she said. “What is it this time? I’m busy. You’ll have to talk while I’m finishing something, Mr. Wing.”

He followed her into the shed. It was stiflingly hot. Lights hung over two large fish tanks in the back end of the shed. The water exchange system was bubbling. There were fingerling sheepshead in both tanks, about twenty in each. She was mixing some kind of fluid on a work bench near the tanks.

“What are you doing, Mrs. Rowell?”

“Are you making polite sounds with your mouth or do you want to know?”

“I’m naturally nosy. It helps when you’re a reporter.”

“I suppose so. These are Archosargus probatocephalus. I’m checking the relation of salinity to growth rate. That’s the control tank on the right. I’ve got a control pen in the bay too. Proctor, of the University of Southern California, published a paper on the same experiment, using a somewhat similar fish, but a labroid fish, the Primelometopon pulchrum. I didn’t like his conclusions. This is in the second month, but now I see perhaps he was correct.”

“Will you publish your results?”

She turned and stared at him stonily. “Where? How? I’m a layman.”

“Then why bother?”

“Are you trying to irritate me? I bother because it is knowledge. I bother because I am curious and I want to know. Why did you come here?”

“Just for a little general conversation about Grassy Bay.”

“I have no time for general conversations.”

“If I’m going to sneak any conservationist propaganda into the paper, which means running contrary to policy, I ought to have a little solid stuff to play with, don’t you think?”

“Will facts have anything to do with what will happen?”

“A lot of people would like to think so.”

She stared at him for a moment. “I can give you fifteen minutes. We will sit on the porch. I’ve been on my feet since six o’clock this morning.”

He followed her to the porch of the house. She sat in a wicker chair and stared at him for a moment. “To start with a general statement, filling the bay would be a criminal act. It will take away forever something which cannot be replaced or restored. Depth, temperature, tide flow, composition of the bottom, all combine to make this bay unique. We have shallow-water species here which are not found anywhere else along this coast.”

“I have to argue the other side of it, Mrs. Rowell, not because I believe it, but just to present the usual arguments on the other side. Isn’t this uniqueness important only to a few marine biologists?”

“It is important to the sum total of human knowledge. We know painfully little about the world we live in. This is a living laboratory. Each new environmental fact is important to mankind, no matter how trivial it might seem to a banker or a newspaper reporter. You are where you are because of science, not in spite of it. A star and a snail are of equal importance.”

“But when snails get in the way of man, they get eliminated. Hasn’t it always been that way?”

“Always?” She stared at him incredulously. “For a million years, Mr. Wing, man shared this planet with other living things. The ecology was in balance. Now we are in a very short time of natural history when we have a plague of men.”

“A plague?”

“I watch the cycles in the bay. For a few years everything will be favorable for certain species. It will become very numerous. It will dwindle the numbers of the other animals who share the same space, eat the same food. Then there will be too many of them. The climatic factors will change. The huge numbers will be reduced. The other species will come back. In this split second of time in which we are living, things have been too favorable for man. With science he has suppressed too many natural enemies. He is too numerous. He is poisoning the air and waters of the earth. He is breeding beyond reason. He is devouring the earth and the other creatures thereon. But it will come to an end, of course. Man has a longer cycle than do the small creatures. Geometric growth is insupportable. During this growth cycle it is the business of thinking people to protect and conserve the other forms of life, so when the cycle is reversed, the ecology will not be too badly distorted. A hundred generations from now, that bay might be supplying food for a mainland village just as it did thirty generations ago.”

“That’s a point of view so... so broad it takes my breath away.”

“It’s a scientific point of view, Mr. Wing.”

“That would mean you anticipate a defeat of... civilization, of everything we stand for?”

“My dear Mr. Wing, the only victory is existence, and the only defeat is extermination. When a species cannot survive, it is defeated. We must keep mankind from making the planet unsuitable for existence without technology. In the criminal campaign against fire ants in this country, the poisoners have slain an estimated five thousand tons of small birds. Tons, Mr. Wing. Thirty to forty million in specific areas. Believe me, I am not snuffling over what happened to the dear, dear little songbirds. This is not a situation where sentimentality is applicable. This was nonselective elimination, taking the healthy and sick, the predators and sapsuckers, destroying not only that generation but all possible subsequent ones from that conglomerate of basic strains. It is a thoughtless ecological abomination, Mr. Wing. It is like rubbing out one factor in a vastly complex equation. Due to the interrelationship of bird life, insect life and plant fertilization, the known characteristics of that area will change. To what? We do not know. We only know it will be different. I recognize a deity of interrelationships, of checks and balances and dependencies. Acts such as this are like spitting in the face of God. It is a dangerous temerity, Mr. Wing. It is, in its essence, stupidity, nonknowing, the most precarious condition of man. Filling this bay is a part of the same pattern of throwing away everything you do not understand.”

“I can see that you have some very... strong opinions.”

“I concern myself with facts, not opinions.”

“You seem to be able to get some very noted scientists to come down here and speak out in favor of leaving the bay alone.”

She shrugged. “They understand these things. I conduct a large correspondence. I help field crews when I can. They give me little research tasks. There is a little money sometimes. It helps.”

“Where did you get your training, Mrs. Rowell?”

“I read. I study. I work. I think. I observe.”

“You call yourself a layman. I assume that means you have no formal training in these fields of knowledge.”

“That is the definition of the term, is it not?”

“That bothers me a little, how a layman can acquire such an objective viewpoint. Maybe some of your basic premises are wrong. How could you be able to tell?”

Her thick brown face turned pale, particularly around the mouth. “You are insolent, Mr. Wing. You should have more respect!”

“For what? Because you dabble in science?”

“Dabble! I had my doctorate before you...”

“You have a degree?”

Her agitation disappeared quickly. “Forgive me. It is just a manner of speaking. I have awarded myself various degrees, as a game, a joke.”

“I see. I’ve often wondered about that slight accent you have, Mrs. Rowell.”

“I have given you three minutes more than I promised. Please telephone me the next time to find out if I am busy.”

“But you are always busy, aren’t you?”

“Extremely.”

She glanced back to the shed and disappeared into it without a backward glance or word of parting. He got into the car and headed thoughtfully back toward the city. There was something invincibly professorial about Mrs. Doris Rowell, something of the attitude of the professional lecturer, plus the austere philosophy of the trained scientist. He had heard no gossip about her, no rumors. She was thought of as merely a very strange and rather difficult woman. For the first time he had begun to wonder where she had come from.

When he had done a series of features on Palm County history, one of his more reliable sources for the Sandy Key area had been Aunt Middy Britt. She lived with one of her sons, a man of sixty, next door to the old Britt fishhouse on the mainland just below the Hoyt Marina. It was still the finest place in the area to buy smoked mullet.

Aunt Middy was dozing in her rocking chair on the shady old screened porch. He looked through the screen at her and coughed. Her eyes opened quickly and she began to rock. “Blessed Jesus, I tole you every last thing I know, and some that I didn’t. But come in anyway, Jimmy, and set. Pretty sunset coming acrosst the bay now, isn’t it?”

He sat with her and talked for a little while and finally said, “What about that Mrs. Doris Rowell, Aunt Middy?”

“Oh, her in the Faskett place way down the key? It set empty eight year ’fore she bought it. No history in her, boy. She’s a come-lately. Nineteen and forty it was. These sorry teeth are getting loose on me again.”

“Where did she come from?”

“Someplace north, where they all come from. Way it looks around here, it must be getting mighty empty up there. I wouldn’t have no idea what special place it was she come from.”

“Didn’t people wonder about her when she first came down, a woman all alone?”

“Guess they did. Let me take myself back now. She wasn’t too bad of a looking woman when she came down. There was talk she was a widow woman. Wasn’t friendly. Nobody seen much of her the first year. Stayed in that house. Must have spent her time eating. Every time you’d see her, she was bigger. End of a year she was the size of a house. Then she was busying herself with plants and bugs and fishes, and the first hell she started to raise was on account of the size mesh in the nets around here, and she’s been raising hell about all that kind of stuff ever since.”

“But you’ve no idea why she came here, or what she used to do?”

“Jimmy, it’s hard to keep up any interest in somebody strictly minds her own business most of the time. Smart woman, I guess. When the snooks got sick in the creeks that time, all rusty red around the gills and hundreds of big ones dying, she was the one traced it down. The Florida State folks took the credit, but Miz Rowell was the one actual found out. Forty-six, it was, back when snooks was a good money fish before the damn fools named it a game fish.”

“Would anybody know any more about her than you do?”

“There’s people know more about everything in the world than I do. I kept telling you that when you were writing up all the old settlers. Let me think, now. There was somebody around here knowed her before she came down. Or knew about her or something. Used to go visit with her, I think. Now who was that? Memory’s as loose as my sorry teeth, boy. Hmmm. Wait now! Ernie Willihan, it was. He was fresh out of college, teaching in the high school. Ernie would be in his forties now. Aida Willihan’s boy. She’s dead now, God rest her sweet soul. She raised that boy single-handed, and did her best by him. Sent him to school way up north someplace, Minnesota, I think it was. Of course he got a scholarship and he worked too, but Aida had to do a lot of scratching, then didn’t live long enough to see him hardly started in life. Never saw a grandchild. And a wicked old woman like me gets to see a full dozen of her grandchildren’s children so far and’ll probably see more. You must know Ernie Willihan, Jimmy.”

“I remember him all right. Where’d he go?”

“Oh, he’s doing just fine. He got out of teaching, and he’s up in St. Pete in some kind of scientific company he’s a partner in. He was a science teacher in the high school. Now, if a person had to find out more about Miz Rowell, I guess that would be where he’d have to go. Why you so interested in her, boy?”

“Oh, Borklund wants to run a series of features on Palm County characters. He made up a list. I’m starting with the tough ones. She won’t talk about herself. You’re on the list too.”

“Who else is on it?”

“You just wait and read the paper.”

“Maybe she won’t talk because she’s hiding something.”

“If I find that out, I’ll have to take her off the list.”

“Look how red that sun is going down, will you? Maybe we’ll get to make a wish.”

“You mean a flash of green? That’s tourist talk, Aunt Middy.”

“I seen it once, boy.”

“You what?”

“Now, don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you a true thing, boy. I’ll even tell you the year. Eighteen and ninety-eight, and I was a twenty-one-year-old girl, feeling older than I do right this minute. My daddy brought us kids on down to this piece of wild coast when I was ten. We were Foleys, you know, and that’s how the crick got named. We put up the homestead on a knoll just a quarter mile south of where we’re setting. But I told you all that before, how I lost a brother to the fever and a sister to a cotton-mouth snake. So I was twenty-one, married since fifteen to Josh Britt, and he’s dead now since nineteen and twenty-two, May ninth, hard to believe it’s so long. It was an August evening, and we were in the fever time again, when folks died. I had only two young then. I’d had three and lost the first to fever the year before. There wasn’t fifty of us in the whole settlement. Josh’s brother was down sick, and he was the one worked the boat with Josh. I had to leave my two with my sister and help Josh on the boat. We were food-fishing that day. My two were both fevered, and I was sick in my heart with worry, wondering if I was put on earth just to carry my young and watch them burn with the fever and die. I was two month along with my fourth, and I did a man’s work that day, helping pole that heavy old skiff and help Josh work the net until my back was broke in half and my hands like raw meat. We were poling back along the shore, coming home with less fish than was needed, and we could see the sun going down red like that, right out through Turk’s Pass. I was as low down in my spirits as a woman can get, and the night bugs were beginning to gather like a cloud around us. We rested from poling to brush away the bugs, and we watched that last crumb of sun go, and the whole west sky lit up with terrible great sheets of the brightest green you ever could see. ‘Make a wish!’ Josh yelled at me from the stern of the skiff. I wished, all right. There couldn’t ever be enough green for the wishes I had, boy. It didn’t last over ten or fifteen seconds. It was dark when we moored the skiff. The fever had eased for my young ones. Life worked better for me from then on, somehow. I raised six young out of twelve, four still living, and that was better than most in that time and place. I’ve seen children die and men killed and women broke, but I never got so low again in all my life as that one day on the net. So don’t say it’s tourist talk, Jimmy. I prayed to God my whole life, and in fairness I got to credit Him with doing good by me. But a flash of green is something you see. We didn’t see one tonight. You act like you need one, Jimmy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t set easy. You set like you got a knotted belly. You’re a man thinking of yourself too much and not liking it much. I had one son like that. He lived a mean small life because he wouldn’t do what I told him.”

“What did you tell him, Aunt Middy?”

“I kept telling him until he was past forty to go find himself a healthy young girl and get as many young off her as she was able to bring into the world.”

“I’m married.”

“To what? A sorry piece of flesh that’ll never know you again in this world, that they keep breathing just to prove they can do it when it would be God’s mercy to let her go. Any lawyer would know what to do about crossing that kind of marriage off the legal books. But it pleasures you more to go around acting tragical.”

He shook his head. “How can you sit on this porch and know everything about everybody?”

“People stop by and set and talk about things. You want a good young wife? You couldn’t get her right off, but in six months she’d be ready. Judy Barnsong, down to Everset, widow of Claude that just got hisself killed without a dime of insurance money. She’s twenty-three and got three young, bright as buttons. She’s pretty and healthy and even-tempered, and built good for having babies. She’s a good cook and she keeps a clean house. She’s got three years of high school, and she’d make you a proud wife, if you got sense enough to go after her.”

“Aunt Middy, you are an astonishing woman.”

“There’s been fine marriages arranged right here on this porch. You think about Judy Barnsong. You go sneak a look at her. She’s a worker and she’ll keep her looks. A ready-made family with more to come will keep you out of devilment.”

“What do you mean?”

“A man snaps at an old lady that way over a little thing like I said has got a bad conscience. You doing something you shouldn’t be doing, boy?”

“I drink and smoke and stay out late.”

“Never knew a whole man who didn’t. It’s in the breed.”

He stood up to go and said, “What do you think about them filling up the bay?”

“I’m eighty-four years old, and I’ve been watching the bay of an evening for seventy-four years. I’m not tired of looking at it. I just don’t know how I’ll be at looking at houses. I’ve got the feeling they won’t hold my interest.”

He went down off the porch, walking slowly to his car. A bay boat was at the old fishhouse dock, and two men were shoveling mullet into hampers to carry them up to the fishhouse scales. The fish seemed to catch the silvery dusk light and gleam more brightly than anything else in the scene. The old coquina-rock smokehouse was in operation, and there was a drift of burning oak in the evening air, flavored with the slight pungency of the barbecue sauce which had been rubbed into the white meat of the hanging fish. Somewhere nearby a girl laughed and a saw whined through a board.

Blessings on you, Mrs. Judy Barnsong, he thought. On your tidy house and fertile hips. I saw a little bit of what that marine engine did to your Claude when it slid forward into the front seat of the panel truck, and it was not anything I cared to look more closely at. But it left the face unimpaired, so you may safely have a viewing of the body. You’ll never know how a dry and dreary man considered you almost seriously for half of one moment. Perhaps you would have said yes quite readily, because you sound like a person who would sense the kind of need I have. But the lust is for a more complex widow, and it is a little past the time when I could have escaped gently into you, into your tidy house, amid your busy button-bright children, to mist your memories of Claude and cushion my awareness of many dark things.

As he drove slowly toward town he remembered the sailor. Gloria had been missing for five days. They’d found her at that motel in Clewiston. They stopped the sailor as he was walking back there with a sack of hamburgs and a bottle of bourbon. The three of them had talked to the sailor out under the bright driveway lights. He was young, and at first he was defiant. He did not know how to handle being confronted by a deputy, a doctor and a husband. He thought it was some kind of a raid.

“Listen,” he said, “all I did was I picked the broad up in Palm City. Okay? I was bumming to Montgomery, Alabama. I’m stationed in Key West and I got ten days. She has a car, this broad, and I changed my mind about going home. Okay?”

When he began to comprehend what they were telling him, the surliness and the defiance disappeared and he began to look younger, earnest and alarmed. “You mean she’s nuts? You telling me she’s a crazy? Honest to God, how would I know that? She doesn’t talk much. She laughs a lot. We’ve been drinking some. Mostly, I never seen anything like it, all she wants to do is scr... Geez, I’m sorry, sir. You being her husband, I shouldn’t say stuff like that. But how the hell would I know she was a nut?”

They told the boy what they wanted him to do. He agreed to get out of the way until they’d taken her away. He turned over the key. They said they would leave it unlocked, and he could come back for his gear after she was gone.

He went in with the doctor. She was asleep. A lamp was burning on the bedside table. Her face was puffy. She woke when he touched her shoulder. She looked at him without surprise and sat up and looked at the doctor. “Hello, Jimmy,” she said. “Hello, Dr. Sloan.”

“Better get dressed, honey. We’re taking you home.”

“Sure,” she said, showing neither gladness nor regret, only a childlike obedience. She dressed quickly, used the sailor’s comb on her hair, made up her mouth and came out to the car and they took her home.

That was back in the days when the doctors had thought it was psychological, when they were trying, with drugs and patience and depth analysis, to reach down into her darknesses and find the cause of this destructive behavior. Those were the days when they questioned him at great length, dredging up every detail of the sexual relationship between them, finding nothing of significance. Most of the time, under treatment, she was as mild and dutiful as a child, but when they would reach her with an awareness of what she had done, she would be torn by grief and guilt.

Then it was Sloan who had made the significant discovery about her, detecting the deterioration of intelligence and memory, then proceeding to other tests and pinpointing the parallel decay of manual dexterity. (She said her fingers felt thick.) They looked eagerly for the expected tumor and found none. Elmo helped get her into the special setup at Oklawaha.

“It would be God’s mercy to let her go,” Aunt Middy had said.

But she was gone. She was beyond torment. Dr. Freese at Oklawaha had explained the prognosis. “From her history we know there have been periods of progressive degeneration alternating with periods of stasis. She is in a period of stasis now, and if there are no other physical complications she might live a long time. The next period of degeneration, if we have one, could easily affect the motor centers of the brain, and death would follow, very much like the sort of death which occurs when the motor centers are gravely depressed through, say, the use of a heavy dosage of barbiturates.”

“Why was the first symptom the sex thing, Doctor? I didn’t know she was sick. I’m ashamed of what I did to her, the way I acted toward her when that started.”

Freese had turned back to the first pages in the file. “But the sexual incontinence was not the first symptom, Mr. Wing. It was the first to come forcibly to your attention. There was a parallel deterioration in her eating habits, her personal cleanliness, her attire, her speech. To attempt layman terms in this thing, you thought she was becoming crude and sluttish out of choice. Actually it was a deterioration of the ability to make choices. She was slowly retrogressing to an animal level of awareness. Animals, my dear fellow, have no table manners and no codes of morality. They sleep when they are sleepy, eat when they are hungry and copulate when there is an opportunity to do so. Many primitive peoples are on this level of existence too. Don’t blame yourself for your inability to detect a condition which baffled several competent professionals for a relatively long period of time. Actually, Sloan caught the scent when he began to realize how closely her condition resembled that which we can expect after a successful prefrontal lobotomy, if that procedure can ever logically be called a success. In her case, of course, it has progressed far beyond that aspect.”

When he arrived at the paper he was alarmed to see that Brian Haas was not in the newsroom. But they said he had gone down the hall for a moment. Borklund had left, saying he would be back about ten-thirty. Haas looked gray and his eyes were dull, but he had kept up with the duties assigned him. Jimmy Wing stepped into the situation and halved Brian’s work load, giving the scarred man a chance to breathe between tasks.

“It’s like housework,” Brian said dolefully. “You try to keep it cleaned up, but all the muddy kids keep galloping through.”

“And somebody keeps shaking the house.”

“Every man does the work of three, and Ben Killian seeks tax shelters. What about this grapefruit release?”

Jimmy scanned it. “Pure flack, but cute. Let’s run it.”

“This is a magazine? A throwaway sheet?”

“Don’t get the impression it’s a newspaper. They don’t have those any more. This is a write-cute outlet for wire services and syndicates, man. Fellow wants the news, he watches his TV and reads Time. If he wants think pieces, he buys Playboy.”

“Grapefruit is good for you,” Brian Haas said.

“Want to go eat?”

“I might not come back.”

At a little after ten most of Monday’s jigsaw was complete. The other departments were finished and gone. Pages one and two were the only ones still loose, with details on a TWA crash in Illinois still to come in, with fillers to piece it out if not enough came over the wire. And the page-one coverage of a meeting in Berlin could be readily truncated to insert a late box if anything came in worth it, wire or local. The press crew had come on, dour skeptical men who believed only in the rich full life of a tight union, despised the printed word and everybody who had anything to do with any other aspect of the business aside from feeding and operating the automatic presses.

Jimmy went to Vera’s and brought back a sandwich and coffee for Haas. Haas said, “I just called Nan. First chance I had. To tell her I think I’ll make it.”

“It’s a joke, isn’t it?” Jimmy said.

Brian looked at him, his expression suddenly cautious. “What does that mean?”

“It’s so jolly and boyish. Like in fraternities. Boy, was I ever hung! But I hit the biology exam for a C.”

“It seems like that to you?”

“Sometimes, Bri. Sometimes.”

“Then why try to help, you superior son of a bitch? So you can feel like an adult?”

“I almost never feel like an adult. I have my own little capsule dramas. Mine just aren’t quite as obvious.”

Haas picked up a pencil and put it down. He picked it up again and broke it, studied the pieces and dropped them into the wastebasket.

“You waited a long long time to give it to me, Jimmy.”

“What am I giving you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to know too much about it. With you, I had to make a guess about what was underneath. Everybody does, with you. There aren’t many clues, you know. I made some bad guesses, maybe. You better get away from me for a while.”

“More drama?”

“Not for me, Jimmy. I lost the drama way back. These days I adjust. To the job, to Nan, to you. That’s all. Now I got to make a new adjustment to you, and it’s easier if you stay away for a while. Just say I’m immune to drama, but not to loss.”

“What have you lost?”

Haas smiled. “An imaginary something, boy. Something I invented. Necessity is the mother of invention? Thanks for getting me over the hump.”

“See you around,” Jimmy said and walked out. He had just gotten into his car when he saw Borklund drive into the parking lot. He did not turn his lights on, because Borklund solved all awkwardness of salutation by giving you something to do.

He sat in his car, feeling naughty. It was the only word which seemed to fit. A childhood word, involved with spanking and tears.

“Listen, Bri. I just had to take a hack at the nearest thing, and I’m sorry it was you...”

“Bri, I don’t feel that way about it at all. I mean I think you’re handling it as well as you can, and I just...”

“Bri, I haven’t got this much left that I can afford to lose...”

Friendships, like marriages, he thought, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable. Sometimes the unforgivable is the way something is said, rather than the words. He told himself he would have gone back in, if Borklund hadn’t arrived just then. He told himself that if he could have gone back in, he could have made things right again. So, in an obscure way, the blame could be divided between Borklund and Haas. Besides, Haas took it all wrong. It wasn’t meant the way he took it. In fact, he seemed very damned eager to take it wrong. That’s the way it goes. You sprain a gut for a friend, and it just makes him anxious to resent you. Do a favor and make an enemy. What did Brian want? An apology, because he’s too sensitive? What kind of a friendship is it, when you’ve got to watch every word you say? What’s this crap about a loss? Is that all the credit he gives me?

Jimmy Wing started the car, jammed it into gear, and yelped the tires as he swerved toward the parking-lot exit.