A Piece of My Heart

1

In the taxi he had started going over the first day one more time, reproving himself for every instance. He had found a room on Harper Avenue, pried out the dormer, stood up between the gables and let air pour, exchanging atmospheres, circulating around his bags and under the bedstead, while he leaned out, taking the climate, trying to fix on it and be cued to the city. He had satisfied himself before leaving Columbia that Chicago was a rare place to learn the law, mired in the middle of the country. The air smelled like piled newspapers and the city felt low-spirited and musty like an uncle. Next morning he had stumped down in the dark fog across Jackson Park to the long cement strand and calculated the midwestern sun bulking up beyond the buoys, baking the sky maize and copper and magenta, until the day was full up. And at the end, the time had seemed incantational, and the air had smelled like cooling bread circulating down the city lines, pressed into the fog. And he had gone back to bed feeling exalted, ready to begin. Which goes to show, he thought, the cab shooting down the Midway in the rain, that nothing good lasts very long.

At the depot the rain had begun to bump off the cobbles in sparklets. He went inside, bought his ticket, set his suitcase at the end of a row of benches, and walked outside under the marquee to stand in the air. A taxi slid in under, discharged a passenger, and shot out into the avenue. He walked the sidewalk in the shelter of the station until he could make out the chain of lights up Michigan, brightening above Randolph Street into the luminance of the Wrigley Building. He felt the old exhilaration that he wished he could devise some smart way of sustaining so as to make it unnecessary to go off into the night on a lunatic trip he couldn’t even understand the good sense of. The whole prospect darkened on his mind, and he had an urge to call Beebe, and have her taxi to pick him up, which he knew would thrill her.

The wind listed back. The train was called, and he walked back through the foyer into the arcade to get his bag. A group of well-dressed Negroes was standing at the swinging doors to the trains, talking noisily and stacking packages onto a fat woman who was taking a trip. The men all wore red carnations. He came to the end of the last row of benches and found the bag was gone. A little boy with drooping eyelids, the child of one of the Negroes, was left on the bench where the bag had been, patting his hands idly.

The Negroes began talking more loudly and one man abruptly shouted something that sounded like “bakery goods” and they all began hugging the woman with the packages. The little boy rose and looked casually over his shoulder and pursed his lips and turned back, as if he had seen what he had expected. The Negroes began shuffling out the doors, their voices softened, then silenced, leaving the sound of a teletype clicking at the end of the arcade.

He came back around to where the child was and looked at him. “Where’s the bag?” He glared up the long aisle. The boy regarded him as though he were invisible and repursed his lips. “Who took it?” he said, glowering over into the boy’s face until he could see the little amber tincture in his sleepy eyes.

The little boy smiled and produced a strand of pink gum from between his teeth and let it dangle between them like the clapper of an invisible bell. “Po-lice done got it,” he said.

He scanned the wide nave for some guilty sparkle of police shield in the shadows, but no one was visible except a redcap smoking a cigarette by the doors to the outside. A radio began playing at the end of the waiting room, and he looked back down to where he could see through the glass the rainy headlights of the taxis cruising underneath the awning, scouting fares. He felt desperate.

“Didn’t you see where the fuck he went?”

“Naw,” the boy said, and rolled the gum between his palms and returned it to his mouth.

He lurched off through the empty arcade, leaving the child, bursting out the swinging doors empty-handed. The Negroes were all getting wet, bawling and waving handkerchiefs at the steaming train. He avoided them, hustling down the platform and leaping up the silver steps into the vestibule. He shot an accusing look at the Negroes, standing in the rain crying. None of them was holding his bag. They slowly began milling back into the depot and he watched them grow smaller in the station until they were absorbed.

2

He sat gloomily in the recliner and watched the city slide in the rain, down the old wards he saw each commuter ride uptown to see Beebe. The car swayed smartly by 65th, gathering speed. He could make out a strip of timbers stenciled in the foreground, and farther back the dark Midway, headlights swimming into the rain on Hyde Park.

The train stopped at 103rd for no one to get off or on, and hissed and heaved out of the salmon lights, leaving the city in the underwater darkness.

“The city is put here to solve our problems,” Beebe had said, letting her fingers play in the thread of sunlight.

“My father would’ve agreed with you,” he said.

“Of course.” She smiled and ran her finger back along the icy line of shadow and light. “It brought us back together nicely. I’m sure he would’ve approved of that.”

He eased into the dark half of the bed, peering through the window into the alley, thinking about nothing.

“I’d like you better today if you weren’t so churlish,” Beebe said.

“I know the law,” he said. “I don’t have time for the Committee for Social Thought or whatever you patronize.”

“You might go,” she said, breathing mist indifferently against the cold pane. “I heard Jane Jacobs. She thinks we’d all do well to live in the cities.”

“You should try it on the south side before you make up your mind,” he said.

“I’m here quite a lot,” she said, scoring her fingernail through the mist. “I get along with the boogies just fine.”

He was silent.

“What was it your father did?” she said.

“Sold starch.”

“Were there a lot of jokes about starch salesmen having firm erections?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was changing the subject to something more amusing.” She was quiet a moment, then said, “A man exposed himself to me at the airport this morning.”

“What for?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. It was a cabdriver in the queue at Pan Am. I leaned to tell him I wanted to go downtown and there was his lingam lying on his leg.”

“Did he take you?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you say anything to him?”

“I said, That looks a lot like a penis, only smaller.’ He was reading Time magazine and covered himself and drove away. I’m sure it embarrassed him.”

“The city just hasn’t solved his problems yet. Or does it only lavish its attention on you?”

“You’re certainly cynical, aren’t you?” She looked annoyed. “Why did you start limping today? It was very strange. Who did you see?”

“Nobody.” He watched up the alley, pressing his nose to the glass until the skin numbed.

“Then why did you start limping?”

“It provokes compassion from some people.”

She craned her neck and tried to see what he was looking at in the failing light. “I’m afraid I don’t believe that,” she said.

“All right, goddamn it,” he said, exasperated. “When I walked out of the A & P I saw a man who looked exactly like me, carrying his goddamned AWOL bag to the laundromat.”

“So?”

“It scared me. He looked a hell of a lot better off than I do, a lot firmer in the belly. His eyes weren’t murky, either. I made a point to look at that.”

“Did you speak?”

“Hell, no. What am I supposed to say? What if he doesn’t think he looks like me?”

“I don’t know why you felt you had to start limping.”

“I don’t like goddamned Doppelgängers.” He stalked across the floor and slapped the radiator rung, making it gong. “This goddamn thing isn’t worth a shit for a shoeshine.”

She reclined her head to the window ledge, the light silhouetting her face at the horizon of the frame. “You have a poor tolerance for ambiguity,” she said, rubbing her nose softly with her finger and watching him skulk in the shadows.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“To continue what you’re doing when nothing is very clearly defined,” she said. “It’s a source of spiritual stamina for scientists. I think it has pretty uses for other people, such as you, for instance.”

“What the hell do I do?” he said.

“You make things terrible when they’re only slightly confusing.” She smiled at him cheerfully.

“Like what?” he said.

“Like whatever you’ve decided is so dreadful you suddenly have to start limping to signal your decline.”

“Well, goddamn it, look at me.” He waved his arms perpendicular to his shoulders, displaying his torso in the poor light. “I look Promethean,” he said, and peered at his chest, wondering if she would agree to what he saw.

“I can see you well enough,” she said.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“What is it I supposedly lack again?”

“This tolerance for ambiguity.” She smiled.

He kept his arms outward like a giant bird soaring in the gloom. “Everything I think I know is ambiguous,” he said. “I’m flying apart a mile a millisecond for that very reason, which you’d notice if your attention span were long enough.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “You do have dandruff things in your eyebrows.” She gave him a disapproving look and began examining her cuticle.

He moved out of the dark and back in again, making the floor squeeze.

“You must be cold with no clothes on,” she said. “Why don’t you get in with me? I’ll make you nice and toasty.” She smiled and raised an arm, opening the spot he could occupy.

He frowned out of the shadows. “So what am I supposed to do with the stuff I can’t tolerate?”

“Let things work themselves out,” she said quietly.

“Like you,” he said.

“I have some things put away,” she said, turning on her back and letting her breasts subside. “If it were so wonderful down there I’d live there, wouldn’t I?”

“If what were?”

“Mississippi, all that foolishness.”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Of course I would,” she said. “I love to live where it’s wonderful. I’m whimsical and fey. I don’t like to think ugly thoughts. You’re very proud to live here, that’s perfectly apparent.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ve been waiting my entire life to live in this goddamn lazaret. It’s wonderful here with the whores and the geeks and the murders and the filth.”

“Does it ever seem to you that fucking me lets you get back sneakily at your past?”

“It crossed my mind,” he said. “Except it’s not good enough.”

“I was only teasing,” she said. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”

“Passions have to come in from someplace,” he said.

“Then where do mine all come from?”

“I couldn’t say,” he said.

“I bid an Amsterdam flight tonight. Would you like it if I bought you a graduation suit? I can buy linen very cheaply.”

“I’m not attending,” he said.

“But you need a suit. Isn’t your behind frozen?”

“Yes.”

“Then come get warm.” She spread the horse blanket until he could see her thighs in the shadows.

“I’m testing myself,” he said.

“Against what, dear?”

“Against ambiguity. I’m testing my tolerance.”

“Fine.” She was silent. “But how will you know if you passed?” She put her hands behind her head and lay so that the ellipses of her underarms shone in the darkness.

“That’s a good question, too.”

“I really don’t think it matters, though, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t. I couldn’t care less. You’re such a serious boy, Newel, and you’re only twenty-eight.” She reached her fingers back until they touched the chill window glass and her body shone luminously in the vacant moonlight.

3

In 1947 they had had a black Mercury and his father had a heart attack and couldn’t call on his accounts alone in the summer months. So his mother drove them. And in the black hot summer they had gone into Louisiana and spent a July day across the river in Vidalia, the first day. And when they had worked as far as Ville Platte the Mercury broke down and they had stayed in the Menges Hotel that had ceiling fans and snake doctors in the rooms. He remembered walking out of the hotel into the still street at noon and going with his father to the agency building, and a woman behind the glass cashier’s in a beaded dress and red lips and short hair, and then back to the room holding his father’s hand. The ceiling had covered over with grease that came out of the still air, and over that a covering of fluffy dust like a sycamore leaf. And the whole time the nine days they were in Ville Platte, he was afraid of the snake doctors and believed they would sting him and kill him though his mother told him again and again that they wouldn’t.

4

She lay against the window wall, moistening the hairs of his belly with her lips.

“You’re very happy with yourself,” he said.

“Of course,” she hummed. “Aren’t you pleased?” She turned on her stomach and smiled at him.

He was quiet.

“That’s good enough,” she said softly, examining his stomach more closely, as if she had discovered something unnatural. “It wouldn’t damage you to be pleased. I don’t punish myself with things I can’t remember.”

“What do you do?”

“I don’t let myself become bothered.” She smiled again over the horizon of his stomach. “You have a stevedore’s chest, Newel. How did you make it so big? I admired it from afar when we were children.” She piloted her finger along his ribs until his flesh drew.

“I’m cold,” he said irritably.

“Of course you are.” She laughed out loud. “You don’t have any dirt on you. Get under the covers.”

“I want to tell you a story.”

“If you’ll get warm. You need some dirt on you. I’m sorry, I don’t tell jokes very well.”

“Do you want to hear it?”

“Of course.”

He sat up straighter and rolled his head against the invisible window. “I went out one time, when I was seventeen, rabbit hunting with Edgar Boynton, out the other side of Edwards, Mississippi, in a silage field he knew about. And we’d been out for about an hour and hadn’t seen a rabbit, and I went off by myself walking down the back of a hedge fence, and just kept walking until I heard somebody shoot. And quick as I heard it, I ran back up and around the hedge fence to where he was. And he was standing there looking at something I couldn’t see until I got close up to him. He wasn’t saying anything, just standing gaping. And when I got to where he was, I looked down in the grass and there was a big barn owl, pushed back up in the silage weeds staring at me and Edgar with his big heart-shaped face and some kind of awful fear in his eyes, and his talons bared and his beak stretched open like he was about to claw us to bits. And Edgar never said a word, he just stared at the owl like the owl had a grip on him, though he had shot one wing off completely and it was lying on the ground between us and him, all white on the bottom without any blood showing. And he had such an awful look, I just stared at him and couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I was being terrified and attracted at the same time. And I just couldn’t move. And right then Edgar’s dog came sniffing up and got a look at the owl and made a lunge at him and Edgar grabbed him by the ear and yanked him back, because the owl would’ve killed the dog if he hadn’t, one wing or not. And I couldn’t help, I was so dumbstruck. The dog was barking and Edgar was yelling at him, jerking him, and the owl began to shove back an inch or two in the silage and his eyes got big and dark, like he was gathering himself for a last burst. And all of a sudden Edgar just shot him full in the face with his shotgun and the owl disappeared, or at least anything that might’ve made you think it was an owl there, just went away in half a second and left a big mess of blood and feathers all matted and stuck together in a clump. And I just sort of got faint, I think, because one second I was looking at the owl, and one second I was looking straight down at something else that was different. Neither one of us knew what was coming until it was over, cause Edgar was behind me and was having a bad time with his dog, and just figured the owl was the easiest thing to get rid of since he’d already blown his wing off, and it was hopeless. But it all happened too fast for me and I guess I fainted, though I never did fall down. He just obliterated him. The owl lost everything in one instant.”

He slid below the window glass.

“That’s an awful story,” she said in a bad temper. “I’m sorry you told it to me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What difference does it make?” she said.

She climbed out onto the bare floor.

“But you understand it, don’t you?” he said.

“Of course. But I’m not responsible anymore. Neither are you.”

She stepped out into the moonlight for a second, and disappeared.

5

Out the double window he could see smoke rising against the humped moon, flooding the Illinois sky with the soft luff of corn-plain haze, spreading east in the night, taking the rain off into the Wabash valley, leaving the sky clean and stiffening in the cold.

At four-thirty he woke in the dark. The train passed onto a long trestle. The palings drummed between himself and the distance. He could make out the mauve exhalations of a river, coiling like a ghost of itself in the gloom. The rest was dark.

He had sat on the bed watching her put on her uniform.

“This would be easier to do with the lights,” she said, groping into her overnight case.

“I like you better in the dark,” he said, studying his abdomen lolled between his thighs.

“Why is that, Newel?” she said, hunting another piece of clothing on the floor.

“I don’t like watching women getting dressed,” he said. “I used to watch my mother get dressed, and it embarrassed me. It seemed clinical to me, like talking to her about my penis.”

“Did she let you watch her undress?”

“Did Hollis wiggle his zub in your face when you were teeninecy? I’m sure he didn’t.”

“No,” she said, flicking a comb through her hair, and stepping noisily in the darkness.

He arranged his feet crosswise under his thighs and spread the sheet over his legs.

“Tell me something,” she said, dropping her brush in the bag and tipping the lid with her toe.

“I don’t know anything. You’re the world traveler — you tell me.”

“There’s no need to be boorish. I simply want to know about your father.”

“You asked about him before, remember? When I told you he sold starch, you said you didn’t really care.”

“What happened to him?”

He rested on his elbows and let the sheet shift off his legs.

“He got killed in Bastrop, Louisiana, on his way to New Orleans. He got behind a big flat-haul and I guess he was going to pass, I don’t know. He was a traveling salesman and never drove over sixty, never got close behind cars. But he was behind this truck for some reason, and all of a sudden a load of corrugated steel pipe came loose and slid off down in the front seat with him. Cut his head off. Left him sitting in the front seat. He could’ve kept on driving if he’d had a head. It didn’t even bump the compass on the dash.”

“For God’s sake, Newel. Do you have to dress it up?”

“I have a son’s right to embellish it.”

“So how old were you?”

“You know goddamned well how old I was,” he said, irritated. “What difference does it make how old I was?”

“I’m simply trying to understand what’s got you so exercised. Today you started walking with a limp in front of the A & P and turned pale as a paper, for no apparent reason. I was just wondering.” She picked her blouse up off the floor.

“What do you think of Mississippi now? New York is someplace different. This place is certainly different from most places I’ve been in.” She glanced at the walls and continued buttoning her blouse, pausing after each shiny pearl to reestimate the room’s disposition.

“What is it you want to know?”

“If it’s scared you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Because your father died in that outlandish way.”

“I see,” he said, and stationed his head on the pane and pulled the sheet all the way up over his chest, exposing himself below the waist. “It’s not any more threatening than it is out there.” He pushed his finger at the door. “There’s goddamn whores right in this building, right below us. When they’re around things can get real special, you might say, especially if they’re coons, which these ladies certainly are. There’s plenty of everything right there, if you want to be scared. Some poor Pakistani managed to get his throat cut standing in the middle of Kenwood Avenue. That’s fairly outrageous.” He sank back onto the bed.

“Then what about the other?” she said.

“What other?”

“Your father getting killed.”

“So? Does he need some sort of coda?”

“How do I know?” she said. “I’m just trying to get you out of this dismal place, through law school, and stop your walking circles around this room like sheep. Though you seem dedicated to rotting in pure filth.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting.

“Do you want me to say that happened to him, and I couldn’t cope with my past because it was so awful?”

“Yes.”

He fidgeted his brows. “Jesus. There’s more important things than that. How he died was practically slapstick, for Christ sake, compared to how he lived.”

“So tell me. I have to go.”

“Does it occur to you ever that you fly to Belgium like other people go down the street for a goddamn knockwurst?”

“I like it that way,” she said, and smiled. “It’s the Netherlands. Amsterdam is not in Belgium. Someday I’ll sit down and pay attention to all your theories, but I don’t have time right now.”

He reached his hand in under her shirttail and touched her arm and the curve of her shoulder.

“We don’t have time for this, either,” she said. “If you don’t tell me, I’m leaving. I have to catch a bus at the Windermere, and catch a cab to catch the bus. It’s complicated.” She stood and walked to where her overnight case sat.

“It’s not important,” he said.

“You said it was more important than his dying,” she said, pushing bottles down below the rim. She got on her knees and tried to see inside.

“Only to me,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, picking her jacket off the floor and buttoning it. “Then I’m off.”

“Telling you doesn’t make anything different, goddamn it,” he said. “You’re one of those people who thinks if you can just say something, it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s horse shit.”

“Then I’ll be marching off,” she said pleasantly.

“But it’s nothing,” he said.

“So tell me,” she said softly.

He struggled up and went and stood by the radiator, his body blue in the darkness.

“I’ll just sit right here,” she said, finding the bed.

He could see her silhouetted a moment in the window and then disappear. He could see sodium lights furring the walkways in the park. He tried to imagine how he would feel inside the room, in the first moment when she had gone, and he thought that it would be awful and later much worse.

“Newel,” she said patiently. “Are you going to tell me?”

“Sure.” He rubbed his chest. “I have to think how, though. It’s making sense out of things that don’t make much sense. My father isn’t finally important. He’s just adhesive for everything. I puzzle about him to have somebody to puzzle about. But I still end up thinking about just parts all the time. There’s something easy about them I don’t understand, and I can’t hold them together well enough to figure out what it is. It’s ridiculous.”

“Quit mumbling and tell me what it is you’re going to tell me, for God’s sake.”

He stood against the rungs and watched her shadow.

“He sold starch to wholesalers, I told you that. He’d go into Ville Platte, Louisiana, and I went with him when I was little in the summers to give my mother a rest. We’d drive to some big warehouse and he’d go inside and talk to a man and they’d drink coffee and in a little while he’d get out his order book and write up an order. Then he’d leave. Maybe he wouldn’t sell anything. That was it. Then he’d go someplace else. One hundred fifty miles a day, seven states — Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, part of Texas. Port Arthur.” He shoved up on the radiator and let his heels dangle between the rungs. “He did that twenty-six years. He worked for a company in St. Louis that’s gone bankrupt. And he had scars after all those years doing the same thing. He had piles as big as my thumb that bled in his underwear. He had those for years. He’d have them cut out, and they’d come back. He had a spring cushion, but it didn’t help. He had bad circulation in his legs from having the blood cut off at his waist. And for a long time Mercury made a car with a door that was easy to catch your hand in. The most logical place to grab the door was right where you couldn’t get your hand out of fast enough, and you closed your hand in the door. The company bought Mercuries for the salesmen, and they were all slamming their hands in the doors. My father closed his up three times in one year, and finally had to have the finger nubbed — lost all the feeling in it. Then he got a corn on his foot from the clutch. I don’t know how he did that. It was funny, and I’d see him sitting on the commode in the hotel slicing at his corn with a razor blade, and putting Dr. Scholl’s on it. It always seemed to be funny, cause he was so goddamned big. Bigger than I am. Anyway, the corn got infected and got worse and worse, until he limped, and after a while he had to use a cane because the pain, I guess, was hideous. I think he cried sometimes. And my mother finally made him go have it removed surgically. But then he couldn’t stop limping. It was as if he thought one of his legs was shorter than the other one, though it was just a corn. Does that seem at all funny?”

“No.”

“It began to seem funny again to me for a second. It’s funny because he was gigantic, and all the things that pestered him were little. You’d think he wasn’t smart, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Aren’t you tired of sitting on the radiator without your clothes on?”

“No.”

She sighed.

“He had a heart murmur that kept him out of World War II. I don’t know what would’ve happened to him. Nothing worse, I guess.”

“I agree,” she said.

“That’s the thing, though,” he said. “He loved it so much, I think, it seemed fun to him. And that wasn’t the worst. The worst was sitting in all those goddamned rooms, in Hammond, Louisiana, and Tuscaloosa, with nothing at all in them, for years. Just come in late in the afternoon, have a drink of whiskey, go down and eat your dinner in some greasy fly-speck cafe, smoke a King Edward in the lobby, and go back to the room, and lie in bed listening to the plumbing fart, until it was late enough to go to sleep. And that was all. Five days a week, twenty-six years. Maybe he saw my mother two-sevenths of that time. They were married fifteen years before I was born, and they were friends. They loved each other. But he went off every Monday morning, smiling and whistling like Christmas, like it was fun, or he was just too ignorant to know what it was like.” He thought of it awhile, listening to Beebe breathe.

“How do you know he didn’t have a woman?”

“Don’t say that.” He moved opposite her where he could see her more precisely. “Why do you have to believe that? Why does everything come down to a fast fuck with you?”

“How do you know he didn’t?” she said coolly. “Some little Choctaw up in Tupelo might’ve looked good, something else in Hammond, something else in Tuscaloosa? My father knew a man who worked for Gulf who was married to a woman in Mobile and had a whole other family back home. Something kept him alive. Two-sevenths just isn’t enough. I don’t care how much he loved her. There had to be something, even if he didn’t care about it.”

“That’s wrong,” he said.

“All right. What was it, then?”

He stalked back across the boards. “His pleasures somehow just got grafted on his pains. That’s what happens to you if you don’t look out. They grow together. That’s what worries me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, tapping her fingernails on her overnight case. “It’s just some idea you’ve concocted.”

“What the hell do you think anything is? How the hell are you supposed to understand a fucking thing if you don’t figure it out yourself?”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“Nobody gets laid, that’s what’s the matter. He didn’t know what the hell was going on. It was just something that happened. Who knows what might’ve happened to his brain otherwise. When I was little we had a flat tire right on the bridge at Vicksburg, and my mother grabbed me and held me so tight I couldn’t breathe, until he had fixed the tire. She said she was afraid of something happening.”

“She thought he was already crazy, right?”

“She already knew about those rooms.”

“She was afraid he might decide to kill you all?”

“I don’t think she knew it. But it’s possible to decide some things are just that awful and not be crazy at all. She just knew the limits to things. He never found out because he adapted.”

“That’s very romantic, but what does it have to do with you?”

“It frightens the shit out of me.” He tried to make out a look on her face but couldn’t. “I don’t want everything the same. Your past is supposed to give you some way of judging things. So it has to do with me because I say it does.”

“There’s no need answering you,” she said.

“Shouldn’t I have something besides the assurance that everything will eventually be the same? I ought to marry you, then, or kill myself like your old man. I’d get rid of a lot of worries either way.”

“So?” she said, flipping the handle of her overnight case.

“I’m lonely, that’s what’s so.”

“And what are you doing?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing?”

“To find out what you need to find out, whatever it might be. If it’s so important, I’d think you’d do something about it.”

“I’m worrying about it.”

She lay back, her elbows against the sash, looking at the soft haloing lights. He could hear her breathing, the mist of breath on the pane, tiny circlets widening and withering. He felt his body sag as if his torso were slowly falling toward the floor. He felt like a fixture in the immobile darkness.

She stirred over the sheets, her toes touching the floor, her figure rising into the window frame. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“It’s complicated,” he said, feeling sad.

“Go to the island,” she said cheerfully, as if that had been an acceptable option all along, and she were just rehearsing it for the record.

“And do what?” he said irritably. “Run through the woods screaming while they shoot at me?”

“I don’t know what,” she said. “But there isn’t anyplace left for you to figure out whatever it is you seem jinxed into figuring out, all that dismal mess you were shrieking about. If you aren’t prepared to move into a cleaner place, screw me and be pleasant — this is all I have to offer.” She smiled.

“If you can’t hump it, why bother?”

“It seems to me I’ve bothered,” she said, “and all you’ve done is act insulting and indulge yourself. I’m tired of arguing with you.”

She got up. He stared at her out of the shadows.

“What would I do?” he said.

“It’s a very good place to go to compose yourself, or do whatever you’d like. It’s Mississippi in its most baronial and ridiculous. You can go tonight if you want to; all I have to do is make a call to the boat camp.” She set her case on the bed and snapped the clasps to search for the number.

“Stay off the phone!”

“Are you expecting a call?” she said, bothering through her case.

“Some asshole calls me all the time and asks me if I know where my wife is, then hangs up.”

“I’ll call tomorrow, then. I’ll be back by then. I’ll tell Popo you’re coming but he shouldn’t expect you until he sees you. That’ll be nice.”

“Nice for whom? Why don’t you just say I’m presently in an institution for the morally unsure and won’t be released for some time?”

She closed her case again and refastened the clasps. “You should call Mr. P. H. Gaspareau, in Elaine, Arkansas, and tell him who you are and that you would like him to tell Mr. Lamb you’re coming at my invitation.”

“Then what happens?”

She smiled, letting her case swing down.

“What the fuck do I do down there?” he said.

“Strive to come back in a better humor,” she said. “You’ll have to tell the bus driver to stop at Elaine, otherwise he’ll go right by.”

“Wait a minute!”

“Did you know,” she said, looking abstracted, “in 1911, some poor people went to sleep in Arkansas and woke up in Mississippi. The river changed course at 3 A.M. and everyone was forced to make some adjustments. Popo’s colored man insists he was in the river in a wood boat at the moment of the change, but I don’t believe it.”

“They won’t know who the fuck I am.”

“Of course not. But you should have a nice long talk with Popo and tell him who you are and go for several walks with him in the woods, and they’ll both like you fine.”

She came toward where he was standing and kissed him softly on the cheek. “I’m not trying to get you to screw me this time.” She smiled. “I’m relying on other resources. I think they’re not as good as my others, but I like to believe I’m adaptable. I would never have thought you would grow up to be so serious when we were children. Nothing is that serious. You should learn that, sooner or later, then everything will be wonderful.”

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because,” she said, confidently. “Everything is always splendid for me.”

“What’s the purpose of all this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“To bring a little frivolousness into your life. It’s too gloomy in there now. Look at this room — it’s awfully morbid in here.”

“I like it,” he said.

“Fine, but you must go to the island and act frivolously. Though I think sometimes, Sam, that if you were any more frivolous you’d be lost.”

“To whom?”

“To me, of course,” she said. “Who else is there?”

“Nobody.”

“There’s the answer,” she said sweetly. “There’s the answer right there.”

The train shot through a country station, rattling the doors, and passing the vacant red flasher where there were no cars waiting. He tried, peering down into the lighted streets, to get a reading on the place, estimate if they were out of Kentucky now and into Tennessee, or only leaving Illinois with the hill country yet to go before daylight. But it was no use.

6

In Thibodaux there had been a man named Gallitoix who owned a wholesale warehouse for food. And his mother had parked the Mercury in the sun while his father walked up on the loading platform, his back bent, and into the man’s office to sell a boxcar of starch. In the car he sat with his mother and watched the tractor trailers pull away from the high dock in the heat. The seat covers were blue and white and felt and smelled like old straw. She opened the windows and there was no cool breeze, except for the sweet smell of feed riding the hot air out of the warehouse and over the tiny bleached sea shells that covered the lot like gravel so that everything was white. His mother drew a pencil diagram of where the gears were on the steering column, and there, while they were suffocating, he learned to drive.

7

The train got to Memphis early with new light hung behind the capitals of the brokerage sheds. Two people got off and scurried down into the station. He looked the length of the platform for a phone, but the one booth at the end of the shelter was in use, and he decided to make his call later.

He walked down into the vestibule, and found the bus station in the converted depot transept that had been roped off and fitted with plastic chairs. He bought a ticket to Elaine and walked past a Trailways huffing at the depot doors and down Adams Avenue toward the river. The street passed for a time under the Arkansas bridge, and he could hear trucks slapping the girders, and see, across the thick, gravy-colored water, east Arkansas profiled at the bottom of the sky.

He crossed the boulevard and walked out on the brick apron that paved the riverbank. He went down and squatted and let his hand dangle and felt the water draw through his fingers, and it occurred to him that for all the times he had crossed the river, riding in his father’s old rattling Mercuries off into the opposite delta, and out of the little levee towns, he had never felt the river, never had it in his hand and let the water comb through his fingers to find out just what it was. It seemed now like a vast and imponderable disadvantage, and made him feel like he needed to know.

He took off his coat and surveyed up the boulevard in both directions. Two men were standing by a long tar-colored barge hove to the bank a hundred yards away, talking, the river panning out in an open Y behind them. Trucks were pounding across the bridge, but no one inside was able to see except whatever was far up the open river. He sat on the bricks, took off his tennis shoes, and stripped his shirt, exposing his belly to the light. He stared at the bridge, expecting to see someone peering over the railing observing him, but there was no one, only the pigeons wheeling out of the girders along the defiles of steel struts. With his pants at knee level, he made a brief inspection of his legs. They were white and billowy and speckled with tiny sores like ant bites. He shuddered and felt unpleasant, and the sudden prospect of going to physical ruin made him agitated. He hugged himself and hunched forward in the breeze. He took a step and tied his brows, and stared at the surface, looking for a reflection of himself and seeing only his shadow frozen on the current.

He recognized that he was now, for all purposes, risking self-annihilation without even willing it so, and that by all probability armies of people in the grip of doing away with themselves thought simply that they were taking an innocent swim in the river or the bay, or had merely concluded a window ledge was the only place to find necessary peace and quiet. It is only, he thought, afterward when the realities begin to percolate. He felt his toes wiggling. He looked downriver and saw the two men standing beside the barge were no longer talking but were staring at him. Somewhere he could hear a loud honking and turned and saw the Trailways that had been at the terminal come to a halt at the foot of Adams Street. The door swung open and the driver, a short man in a khaki uniform and a campaign cap, jumped out and yelled something that sounded like “woncha-woncha-woncha.” And he immediately dived in.

The impact took his breath away and he felt himself going uncontrolled and limp while his heart began whumping and his stomach burned like flames. He sensed he had hit the surface too severely.

The water was colder than he had expected, and below the surface an almost immediate numbing started in his feet, sending dull signals to the tips of his fingers, which were busy flittering to maintain his head above water.

Simultaneously he was confronted with two very unsettling facts. One was that in the time it had taken to get righted and regain a minimum amount of breath, he had moved a surprising distance from his clothes, which he could just see strewn in a circle twenty-five yards upstream. The other fact was that his shorts were now gone and he was floating with his privates adangle in the cold current, prey to any browsing fish.

The bargemen had begun walking up the gangplank, from all appearances in no hurry. The bus driver was standing at the curb, pointing out for the benefit of his passengers a man’s head floating with the current.

Water trickled on his neck and he sensed he was becoming colder while maintaining a constant distance of ten feet from the bank, unable to touch any part of the bottom and unwilling to turn and look at the river, sensing the utter vastness would shock him and cause him to panic.

Though what surprised him was that on once claiming a breath, he felt relatively little fear while he faced the bank, and was suffering none of the gulping hysteria he feared he might It was not difficult to stay afloat, the current buoying him as it moved him steadily, and he felt unusually relaxed, though cold and still strange that his parts had become potential forage for the fish.

He could see the bargemen bringing a long wooden boom from the invisible rear of the barge, dragging it in the water as if they were trying to pole against the current. He looked back up to where the bus was standing. Several children had begun running along the bank, though most of the other passengers were straggling back up to the bus.

The bargemen took up a position at the bow of the boat with the boom trailing in the water and stood watching him with idle interest. He estimated that to avoid slamming into the front of the barge and being dragged below by the current, he would need to orbit several feet out into the river, yet not orbit too far so as to be unreachable. The barge began to get larger, and he squirmed to get beyond its girth, kicking away from the bank with some vigor. He kicked until he saw where a true course would just miss the lead edge of the barge and bring him into line with the boom, and that with modest luck he could catch it as he went by. Though as he reached the forward bulwark of the barge, around which a large tuft of yellow fuzz had collected, the current eddied unnaturally and spun him out from the end of the pole which the bargemen had shoved in his direction, so that he was turned and facing the river, looking at Arkansas in the flat distance. He fished backward, and tried to relocate the pole. The barge was making a thick gurgling sound that he could feel vibrating below the surface. He breathed in a large tuft of the foam. One of the bargemen yelled something, and he felt the sawed end of the long boom scrape his back, causing him to flounce backward, grasping for whatever he could touch, and missing the pole entirely.

Panic occurred all at once. His ears felt as if someone very close by had turned up a radio on which there was nothing but loud static. He flailed in several directions. His head sank a moment, and he felt his feet enter a denser zone of cold water. His skin grabbed, and he stretched to get his nose up and have a look at the barge and the shore and the Memphis skyline before drowning. As he surged to get his head elevated, a heavy weight twisted along his neck, stopping his breath momentarily, so that he gagged and struck with his fist as if he were being assailed. He felt the current binding it into his skin. He accepted another enormous mouthful of water and felt himself sink. The current was pulling, and he tried to raise his head to see, but the current mounted water in his face and he perceived he couldn’t see without allowing gallons of water to run directly up his nose.

He could feel himself beginning to be maneuvered sidewise to the current instead of simply dragging against it, and he got rigid, eyes shut, hoping for better treatment. And then the current all but ceased. He raised his head an inch above the water line and saw that he had been hawsered into the slack behind the barge. The surface was being boiled by the barge’s diesel, and the water was slimy and thick and tasted metallic, but there was no more pull to the rope.

He let himself be hauled to the bank and gave up the rope and lulled in the gurgling wake, trying to get a whole breath. He burped up a portion of water, tried to see, and found that the men who had lassoed him were down off the barge now, watching him impassively. He tried to make them out, but the sun had rotated higher in the sky and was shining almost straight in his eyes.

“No wonder he liked to drowned,” one of the men observed, “he’s so fuckin big.”

The other man began coiling the rope, dragging it across his shoulder. A heavy canvas life preserver bumped his ear and skittered across the bricks toward the man’s feet.

“Whyn’t you grab the ring?” the first man said irritably. “I made my all-time-best chunk and you grabbed the rope.”

He belched up some gamy-tasting water.

“You like to strangled,” the man said, sounding melancholy.

He squinted up into the sun and saw that the two men were twins, and were staring at him as if he were a one-of-a-kind fish they had landed and didn’t know quite what to think.

“Is there a blanket?” he said.

“Loan a towel,” the twin without the rope said, and walked back up to the barge.

He pulled himself a little farther onto the bricks. There was a big scaly burn mark on his shoulder and his ear felt like it had grown larger. Some of the numbness was departing his feet, and he was beginning to feel more of a piece.

He wanted to say something to the man with the life preserver. But the man simply stared at him quizzically, looking disappointed to have wasted a throw in behalf of what he had pulled in.

The twin returned dangling a crusty towel with “Peabody Hotel” stenciled on it. The towel was hardened with axle grease, and it smelled like diesel. The man tossed it and stood beside his brother as if he weren’t sure what he might get to see next. He draped the towel over his abdomen, and tried quickly to outline what he wanted to say in appreciation and not waste too much of anybody’s time. The men were out of their thirties and dressed in oily jeans and oily boots. The twin who had retrieved the towel had on a green cowboy shirt, but his brother wore an aquamarine T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and “UCLA Tennis Team” silk-screened on the front. He lay a few moments trying to think of something to say, letting his toes dangle in the water, and looking alternately at their long immovable faces.

“I’ll bring you back the towel,” he said, and stared down the stone beach. He tried to stand and felt his chest sag and his back begin to burn where the pole had gouged it. He looked at the men hopefully. The brother who had gone to get the towel smiled, but the other seemed to be scowling, holding the life buoy with one hand as if thought had abandoned him but he hadn’t noticed the absence yet.

“Thanks for saving me,” he said.

“I wouldn’t do it again,” the unsmiling brother said.

He tried to feel the point of the threat, then gave up and limped back across the bricks, holding the towel around his belly, the sun starting to draw on his shoulders.

Several muddy footprints were stamped into his pants, and one of his socks was kicked to the edge of the water. He scanned the beach and up the drive, where a few cars were visible. The bus was gone. A number of drivers stared at him and made inaudible remarks, and he began picking up his clothes.

A station wagon stopped at the curb, a blue Chevrolet with a plastic screen in front of the radiator. The passengers stared down at him behind sunglasses, making remarks and pointing politely. Suddenly the door swung open and a tiny girl with long red hair and a pink Sunday school dress popped out holding a tiny camera pressed against her stomach and took his picture and disappeared back inside the car. The passengers smiled and nodded, and sat a minute watching him dress, as if they were expecting some singular gesture in recognition. And when none was given they seemed satisfied and drove slowly back into the traffic.

He walked back up the hill to the bus station, feeling worn out. The ticket agent acknowledged him with a greasy smile and looked back over his shoulder at the Trailways clock and pointed to it meaningfully.

He settled his head against the back of the chair and stared at the old milk-colored skylight, trying to empty his brain. Somewhere at the train station a voice came on the loudspeaker and said something unintelligible, and in a minute he heard a train vibrate into the upstairs platform, stop for several minutes while he listened to the brake cylinders bleed off, then start again slowly and fade into the daylight sounds.

“I was in school,” Beebe said, “with a girl from Belzoni. She married a Phi Delt from Meridian. She was a precious sweet thing with her mother’s complexion and lovely breasts. She married this boy whose name was Morris Spaulding. And Morris took her to Meridian and graduated to his daddy’s Dodge agency, and the first thing any of us knew, he had her doing some ghastly tent show across in Alabama while he was in the audience doing who knows what to himself. All because she was such a sweet little thing and let him make all the decisions for her. I’m afraid that’s a little out of my line, Newel, though maybe not for you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Who asked you that — who cares?”

8

In 1951 in the summer, they had driven in his father’s Mercury from fackson to Memphis, and on the first day he had sat with his mother in the Chief Chisca Hotel and looked out on Union Avenue and sighed, while his father went off in the heat to call on his accounts. And in the evening they went in the car as far on Union Avenue as there was a street to drive on and stopped at a white house with blue shutters where his father knew a man named Hershel Hoytt, who sold raisins. In the house, the man was there and wore golfing shorts and carried a golf club and wore thick black-rimmed glasses and had a face like a stork. They sat down at the round table in the kitchen and drank whiskey and laughed and sang and ate spaghetti with Vienna sausages, and he was shown to the bedroom, where there was a wide bed with a white chenille cover, and told that he could go to sleep. At two o’clock he was asleep with the light on in the ceiling, when the door opened and his mother and father came and stood beside the bed and looked at him and said he was pretty (though he was awake by then) and gently moved him onto the pillows and lay across the bed themselves and went to sleep. And he lay in the bed, the three of them lying crosswise in the tiny room with the fruit-salad globe in the light, still shining over them, and he smelled their breath and listened to them breathing and remembered their singing, and listened to the strange house become quiet until he began to cry, and left the house.

9

On Union Avenue he walked back to town, walked back until he came to the chalky red bricks that sloped straight toward the river, and when he walked farther down toward where the water was, there was a terrible stink like oil and old cabbage, and he went back up the levee and over into town, and walked to the Peabody Hotel, where his father had said the rich people stayed when they came to Memphis. And in the upper lobby he went to sleep behind the notary public’s desk.

In the morning at seven o’clock he waked up and looked down on the wide lobby from the mezzanine and saw people were standing at the circular fish pond in the middle of the wide room, holding tiny boxes of crackers and staring at the bank of elevators built into the wall with gilt mirrors for doors. And in a while the elevator door opened and a Negro wearing a white waiter’s jacket came off followed by six mallard ducks, walking in a line behind him. And when the Negro had walked to the pond and stood beside it, the ducks all walked into the pond and began to float and quack and eat the crackers the people were holding for them, until the people were gone and there were small red and white cracker boxes floating on the water with the ducks, which the Negro later took away.

When he had found them again in the Chief Chisca waiting, his father said that they would never drink again, and that each day the Negro brought the ducks down precisely at seven o’clock, and precisely at five o’clock he came again and stood beside the pond and the ducks simply walked out and got on the elevator and rode it to the roof and got off and sat in their nests of straw and waited until he came again. Once, he said, a man from Arkansas came and fed one duck one tiny crystal of cyanide. And when the duck died, which wasn’t very long, the others would not come down for a month. The Negro would ride the elevator to the roof and stand beside their nests and wait for them, but they wouldn’t come. They simply quacked and quacked at him, as if he were the man who had betrayed them. Though after a month of quacking at the Negro and sitting on their nests all day getting fatter and fatter, when the Negro came with a different-colored coat and stood beside their cages, they came along the way they always had. And before long, his father told him, sitting looking out the window of the Chief Chisca down on Union Avenue, the man went back to wearing his white jacket and the ducks could not remember they had thought he had betrayed them.

10

“You remind me of somebody,” Robard said, spitting out the window.

“Who?”

“I don’t know, a movie star, somebody like that.”

They drove up the levee and turned and went a hundred yards along the top on another tractor path to where the road bent over the other side. A red combine was bogged down in the field below the levee. Someone had attached a cable to it and tried to pull it out with a heavy Fordall tractor, but the tractor had foundered in the same row and both machines were sitting in the sun. The plants around them were all blackened and bent in broken rows with dried fibers clinging to the bolls. Someone had laid a plank walk over the mud and there were signs on the planks that people had been going to the levee and back. But neither machine seemed to have ever moved, and all the sticks and cardboard sheets and logs and blankets had finally been left under the wheels and the business abandoned.

“Why do they take machines in a field that muddy?” he said.

Robard let the truck wobble down the river side of the levee. “I guess they intended pickin it.”

“They could just look at it, though. Why didn’t they just say fuck it?”

“They might’ve strained their imaginations,” Robard said thoughtfully. “They ain’t got too much of that.”

The road widened and cleaved back along the inner coast of the levee, then bent north across another cotton lot that was tilled and dry and waiting for planting. It struck into a grove of maples and sycamores behind which he could see the sheen of the lake and the first low buildings of the camp. The road straightened and passed under a banner plank that had DINKLE LAKE CAMP painted in red, beneath which were the cheesy remains of a hound, and sixty yards on, the camp, which was a bight of five cracker-box cottages with low, green-pitched roofs, the first looking like two of the smaller ones bradded together, with the rest left in a half coil reaching toward the lake, the last cabin up to its joists in backwater. Someone had put up a pipe bracket in front of the first cabin and hung a World War II whistle bomb off two chains and painted the whole architecture white. Back of the smaller cabins in the maples was a litter of turned-up sawbuck tables, two snail-back house trailers with curling roofs, and the husk of a yellow school bus set off its axles in the grass with burlap curtains strung along the glassless windows. The lake was a dark silver-black ankle lying to the north and south, with the island five hundred yards away, a dense revetment of shumards and willows reaching as far as he could see in either direction. It looked to him like a reproach, and he felt that he ought to turn around and try to put the whole business behind him. “It isn’t much,” he said, looking at the lake.

“We ain’t there yet,” Robard said, letting the wheels straddle the remains of the dead dog.

Six more black-and-tan deerhounds fetched out from underneath the first cabin and took up barking, and creating a lot of noise. Robard drove up into the grass and honked the horn, which made the hounds bark louder.

“Eat you alive,” Robard said, staring expressionlessly at the hounds.

“Honk the horn again,” he said. The boat dock was down the bank, a raft built out of oil drums and car tires with planks roped over the tops, floating behind the last swamped cottage. An aluminum boat was moored to the dock, motionless in the water.

An old man appeared outside the corrugated-roof porch, carrying a double-barrel shotgun and a swivel ash cane. The dogs managed not to see him and kept barking and kicking dirt until he got behind them, looking put out by the noise, and gave the nearest dog a stripe across the ribs that dropped it off its feet. The others immediately clammed up and trotted back around the house while the wounded dog tried to crawl away without taking his eyes off the stick, though the old man managed to catch him again across the hind leg, sending him springing off into the sycamores.

The old man set his cane back on the ground, renewed his hold on the shotgun, and limped to the truck, looking in the bed first, then narrowly into the cab. The old man was bald and wore loose clean khakis, and had a thin chain around his neck fastened to a silver disk with a hole in the middle which was buried inside a plug in his throat. When he had satisfied himself with the contents of the truck, he set the cane against his hip and put his finger on the disk. “You boys?” he said, cradling the shotgun higher up in the crook of his elbow. His voice made a squeaky sound.

“I’m to see P. H. Gaspareau,” Robard said.

“That’s me, what about?” the man said, jabbing his finger on the disk so it picked up a flicker of light.

Robard held a newspaper to the window for the man to see where he was pointing.

The old man perused the paper, then stared up over it. “What’s he want?” His eyes grew smaller as if the sun were on them.

“Have to ask him,” Robard said. “I brought him from the store.” He folded the paper back carefully.

“I want to go on the island,” he said. “Beebe Henley was supposed to call you. My name’s Newel.”

“A goddamned month ago,” Gaspareau croaked, and kept on glaring at him.

“I got detained.”

“I told him you was coming, but that was four weeks ago.”

“I’ll pay you,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll jump in that goddamn lake and swim across.”

Robard looked at him uncomfortably.

“Mr. Mark Lamb pays me, you don’t.” Gaspareau wheeled the barrel end of the shotgun in the general direction of the island. “You won’t be doing no swimmin.”

“What about the job?” Robard said, sucking his tooth.

“What’s your name?”

“Hewes.”

“Where you from? Them ain’t no Arkansas tags, is they?” The old man bent back slightly as if he were trying to see around to the back of the truck without moving off the spot.

“California,” Robard said, and settled his eyes at a point in front of the headlights. “I was raised up in Helena.”

“You know anybody up there?” the old man said.

“Nope.”

“Then why you want to come back?” Gaspareau said, his voice blowing and wheezing out the top of his throat.

“I used to switch on the Missouri Pacific.”

“That’s a goddamn good job,” the old man said sourly. “How come you to quit that?”

Robard contemplated the steering wheel. “My wife liked California.”

“She wants back, is that right?”

“Not exactly.”

A smile cracked the old man’s wet mouth so that his big busy tongue came into view. “Niggers is took over everywhere else,” Gaspareau said.

He looked past Robard at Gaspareau’s mouth and at the metal disk, where the skin was all pinched and eroded and looked like the foot of a volcano.

“I need that job,” Robard said.

“She come with you?” Gaspareau said.

“No.”

Gaspareau tightened his grip on the shotgun. “I’da left her ass sittin, too.”

Robard put his eye on Gaspareau and smiled. “I come about your job,” he said.

The old man lost his humor. “But you don’t know nobody in town, do you?”

“I’ll give you a man’s name in Hazen,” Robard said. “If that ain’t enough, you can give it to Newel here.”

Gaspareau looked deviled. “What’s his name?”

“Rudolph,” Robard said.

“You know how to use a pistol?” The old man put the shotgun against the side of the truck and grabbed his cane off his hip.

“Point it and pull the trigger,” Robard said.

Gaspareau looked insulted. “Shoot your dick off that way,” he said. “I ain’t hiring you, though. He is. I know where to get somebody to shoot.”

“Where’s that?” he said, leaning across Robard and sticking his face in the window to annoy the old man.

Gaspareau smiled and shoved his finger to his throat. “Did you see them tow-headed boys sitting up at that big icebox?”

He couldn’t remember seeing anybody at all, though Robard seemed to nod that he did.

The old man looked craftily at both of them and uncovered a few mahogany teeth. “That biggest boy there killed a man a year ago. A bastard broke loose of a road gang in Mississippi and tried to break in one of my cabins.” The old man looked around at the cabin as if he wanted to be certain it was still there. “Shot him deader’n a toadstool with a twenty-two rifle. I sent him over with a letter pinned to his shirt, but the old man sent him back.”

“Aren’t you going to pick up your dead dog?” he said, trying to see around Robard’s head.

Gaspareau quit grinning and picked up the shotgun and cradled it back in the crook of his arm.

“I ain’t,” he said slowly. “Been a month. If I was to go down and start shoveling him up, he’d just come to pieces. I’ll let you borrow my shovel, if you got an interest in him.”

“I don’t like dogs,” he said, and removed from the window.

“That one ain’t going to bite you,” Gaspareau snorted, then thought about something else. “Park back by the last cabin, and go on down.” He jerked the barrel of the gun at the boat dock and went stumping off to his house.

Robard backed the truck under the willows between the last cabin and a maroon Continental with Mississippi plates.

“You still think I want your job?”

Robard looked at him gravely. “That mouth of yours about tore your ass,” he said, reaching across and fumbling into the glove box. “Ought not to mouth a man like that. Bastard’ll shoot you or put one of them boys up to it, and wouldn’t nobody be the smarter.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?” he said.

Robard laid his hands on a big flat-bitted screwdriver with a transparent orange grip, climbed out, and went about unscrewing the license tag. “I’ll tell you,” he said, holding one screw in his hand and commencing the other one. “It suits me to stay out of the way of things. Bullets, anything like that, I’m glad to be out of the way.” Robard looked up significantly.

“I’d like to go in something and never come out,” he said, staring at the rusted holes in the bracket. “You know what I mean?”

“I don’t,” Robard said. “I always want to get out. It makes me itchy, like something was about to happen I didn’t know about.”

He watched Robard wrap the plate in a newspaper and lay it up under the seat.

“If you’re smart you’ll figure out the same thing.” Robard smiled and walked off to the boat dock.

11

He stood listening to the clatter of maple leaves. He could just make out the imprint of a deer standing motionless outside the barrier of shumards and cypress spires across the lake. He moved his eyes up the bank for some clear break where Gaspareau could make the boat in, but the trees seemed to grow in a compact wall down the long twist of lake, and he couldn’t fashion how a boat could penetrate and break back into the bank.

Robard sat on his heels by the painter cleat smoking and tapping ashes in his pants cuff.

The screen slammed and Gaspareau came rolling across the yard without his shotgun, but with a little silver revolver strapped to his belt in a walnut holster. He was wearing a big straw hat with a wide green plastic brim in the front, pulled down so his face was visible only from the nose down. Robard gave a significant look, passed his eyes over Gaspareau’s pistol, and gazed expressionlessly back on the lake.

Gaspareau stumped out onto the dock, stepped down in the boat, and started jabbing intensely at the gas bulb with his toe. “Anybody need to piss?” he said, his face contorting and a peculiar scraping sound originating somewhere below his throat.

“You ready for me to untie it?” Robard said, standing at the cleat.

“Quick as this other gentleman gets in.”

“Get in, Newel,” Robard snapped.

“Where?” he said, staring at the boat blankly.

Gaspareau shoved his entire fist up to his neck and his voice seemed almost able to come out his mouth. “Just get your ass in!” he said, glaring furiously.

“Going or staying?” Robard said, and pulled the burnt end of the painter until the boat listed away from the dock, the old man sunk in the stern.

“Leave the son-of-a-bitch!” Gaspareau hollered, stropping the starter and setting the water boiling. Gaspareau fumbled into his pocket, dragged out a pair of old rubber aviator’s goggles, fitted them on his head, and set his hat back on top of them.

“Newel!” Robard yelled.

“Going.” He stepped off into the sun-warm water and squirmed over the gunwale directly in front of Gaspareau, who was revving the noise as loud as he could.

“Turn me loose, Hewes!” Gaspareau’s voice was barely distinguishable over the whine of the motor. “Turn me loose, goddamn it!”

Robard towed the boat alongside the dock and jumped in, and they took off furiously into the lake toward the wall of motionless trees.

12

Robard sat bent in the front of the boat, hunched toward the gunwale protecting his cigarette. Gaspareau twisted open the throttle and let himself slump against the motor, the pistol situated in front of his stomach, the barrel pointed between his legs. He sat gloomily in the middle, watching the deer he had seen browsing outside the trees. When the motor had begun to whine, the deer had stared a moment, then disappeared up into the timber. But when the boat departed and succeeded into the lake, the deer had reappeared, nose poised toward the boat, and trotted out into the lake, its head barely clearing the surface, striking for the other side. He watched the deer make way through the water with difficulty, keeping its head firmly up, rising and sinking regularly as if it was trying to leap toward safety. Gaspareau gave him a kick in the back and pointed at the head with his cane, gurgling something through the hole in his neck. He thought for a moment the old man was proposing they have a run at the deer, and he turned and shook his head, which only made Gaspareau repoint his cane and frown as if he wasn’t being understood. Gaspareau conned the boat closer toward the opposite bank into the corridor of water between the deer and the trees, and he decided the old man had not been intending to have after the deer, but just to point it out to the both of them. He gave Gaspareau a conciliatory look and peered back at the deer. It had swum almost to the middle of the lake, its rises and descents more regular and articulated, as if it had begun to feel out of reach of whatever had driven it off the shore. Robard pointed his flat finger at the deer, and for a time they watched it silently while the boat buzzed and buffeted, closing toward the bank well back of the deer. Until suddenly the deer disappeared. At the height of one regular ascent the deer seemed to be jerked off the surface, as if whatever had found it had moved with such awful force there hadn’t been time to breathe before going under, or as though the force had been so irresistible it had given up without a spasm, leaving the surface where it had been glistening and almost tranquil but for the soft weals of water traveling backward across the lake.

Gaspareau never stopped. He turned toward the unbroken line of trees and screwed his hat closer to his goggles and looked away.

He stared back past Gaspareau to where the deer had been swimming, as if he expected it to thrash up out of the tentacles of some beast and be dragged back, its head stretched toward the sky. But there was nothing, and as he scanned the water he began to feel uncertain where the deer had been in relation to the dock, which was now downlake and only a stitch against the bank. He worked his eyes regularly backward from the place he thought he recognized to someplace beyond it, compensating for the speed of the boat, but he could see nothing or recognize nothing about the lake. He turned and stared past Robard, who seemed unmoved, huddled in the anchor well striking a match against his belt buckle out of the wind.

Gaspareau killed the throttle and swung the bow straight toward the trees and let the wake boost the boat through the outstobs and cypress points until Robard could manage one of the tree trunks and arm the boat in. Gaspareau shut down the motor and jacked it out of the water, took a paddle off the floor, and began poling the boat one-handed. He could just detect a vaguely marked passage through the trees and farther could see the transom of another Arkansas Traveler marooned on the bank, chained to a tree stump painted red. The bank had been hacked out of the trees and extended ten yards to the foot of a low bluff, on top of which he could just see the windshield of an open jeep, backed by the woods.

Gaspareau poled the boat and Robard guided until the stern began trawling sand and Gaspareau jabbed him in the ribs with the paddle blade. “Tow us in there, Newman — you’re wet anyway. It won’t kill you.”

He climbed into the water, which was colder and deeper than it had been the other side, and led the boat forward until it caught the shoal.

“That’s enough!” Gaspareau squalled. “I’ve got to get out of here.” The old man skinned off his goggles and leered at him. “What happened to that deer?” Gaspareau said. “That was some-thin, wasn’t it?” He kneaded his eyes with his knuckles.

“What did happen?”

Gaspareau smiled. “Gar,” he said. “Alligator gar come along and sucked him. I’ve seen it before.”

“Not in his mouth,” he said incredulously. “He didn’t get him in his mouth, did he?”

“No, not in his mouth, with his mouth!” Gaspareau said. “His mouth ain’t that big. He just grabbed him by a forepaw and went to the bottom, like a bass and a tadpole. That’s why them deer don’t like to swim in there.”

He tried to think about a fish big enough to drag down a 150-pound buck like he was a tadpole, and couldn’t do it.

“When the river switched,” Gaspareau said, still grinding at his eyes, “left all them fish stranded, and the big ’uns got bigger than they ought to. People quit putting out trotlines and none of the gars got caught, and they went to eating catfish, and pretty soon they was some goddamned big gars.”

“But a deer?” he said, unable to see it at all.

“I’ve seen ’em turn over boats and do all kinds of plunder,” Gaspareau snorted. “A deer ain’t nothin.”

He stared at Gaspareau, trying to read his face for the truth.

“See that there jeep?” Gaspareau said, directing his cane up the bluff.

He looked skeptically around toward the jeep.

“That’s the old man’s. The key’s in it. If you can start it, you can drive it to the house. If you can’t, you can walk three miles. Hewes, you tell Mr. Lamb you’re the last man I’m sending. He can just as well take you.” Robard nodded. “I don’t know what you’re going to tell him, Newman,” Gaspareau said distastefully.

“Newel,” he said.

“Whatever the shit. He’s particular who comes on the place and when they come.”

“If he doesn’t like me he can run my ass off,” he said, feeling like he’d be happy to kick Gaspareau in the mouth. “Why don’t you sputter on across your pond?”

Gaspareau let his hand fall on the handle of the pistol and grinned.

He started walking up toward the jeep away from the old man.

“Get me out of here, Hewes,” Gaspareau yelled.

Robard pushed the boat free with his foot and sent the old man sliding backward, rearranging his goggles under his hat brim. The motor fired and Gaspareau backed the boat out past the last stobs and whipped it a loop and plunged out into the lake facing the sun.

From the jeep, he watched the boat’s bow pop out of the water with the old man’s weight settled in the stern.

Robard sat down and looked at him, rubbing his hand back through his hair. “I’ll tell you,” Robard said wearily, setting his sack of clothes in the boot. “You get an old fart like that mad at you, and he’ll kill you.”

He glared at the old man skating off like a bug, the motor whining out in the distance. “He acted like I was a goddamned parvenu.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Robard said, tampering with the ignition and waggling at the starter pedal at the same time. “When the shooting starts, though, I’d as soon be some distance from where you’re at. I wouldn’t act quite right if I was dead.”

“So stay away. I don’t give a fuck,” he said.

“I’ll do it,” Robard said. “I’ll do that very thing.”

13

The jeep path followed out of the willows into a saw-grass pasture, the other side of which was another belt of softwoods. The road had been wet-rutted and the tires skidded the sides and pitched the jeep sideways. The haze had burned off and the sky was white and watery, loose clouds crowding and the sun diminished and telescoped behind the trees.

Robard draped his arms over the wheel and stared across the straw field toward the woods. “I seen a thing like that deer once,” he said. “I was stood out by a lake in Lee Vining watching the fish, just standing there holding my pole, me and this other fellow. And we stood there for a while trying to figure whether to fish or not and not seeing anything working. And there wasn’t any reason in the world for the fish not to be tearing up. So old Ralph reached in his sack and took out a slice of Wonder Bread and sailed it out there and let it float. And pretty soon you could see some little fish rise to it and nibble the crust, just enough to perturb the water. And we just sat there watching because them little fish wasn’t big enough to hook, and we were waiting on a big fish. Little ones get interested before the big ones do, that’s why so many little ones get caught and so few big ones. The big ones are smarter. We stood there and watched and watched. And pretty soon an osprey come over and made a little pass on the bread, just looking at it. Then he flew around again and looked at it again. Then he flew way up and just dropped with his claws all stuck out in front of him headed right for that bread. And just the second he got there, whoosh! here was this great big rainbow struck up and took that slice out of sight in one gulp. And the osprey hit him with everything he had and got both his claws in his back and got a good hold, and that bird just went right out of sight. Cause that was a big fish.”

“You ever get anybody to believe that story?”

“Well,” Robard said, watching the woods. “I seen it. That’s about as much satisfaction as I need. Though I wouldn’t call it really satisfaction; it’s just a recollection I feel satisfied with. The situations aren’t really equal anyway. That osprey just chose more than he could chew. That little buck didn’t look to me like he had much to choose. You might say he was a victim.”

“Of what?” he muttered, grabbing onto the frame of the windshield to steady himself.

“Hisself” Robard smiled.

“What kind of sense can you make out of a story like that?”

Robard took his arms from around the steering wheel and shoved back until they were stretched straight in front of him. “I don’t know,” he said deliberately. “It was something that happened, so I suppose I made sense out of it already.”

He turned around so as to be face to face. “Does that help you?”

“Do what?” Robard said unhappily.

“Make your mind up about anything.”

“Like what?” Robard said, steering the jeep into the field to avoid a chuck hole. “I have a hard time remembering what it was exactly I did yesterday,” he said, trying to see up over the hood and get back in the gauge.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “You let on you’re not smart so you can get the edge on people. But I know better.”

“Newel, I think we done talked enough today.”

“I don’t know,” he said, facing front again, feeling exhilarated. “You’re crafty.”

“Well, let’s just put it to you in these terms, then,” Robard said. “If I’m so goddamned smart, why am I chauffeuring you around in this jeep in the middle of someplace I hadn’t got any business being?”

“I could ask the same question,” he said.

“Then why don’t you,” Robard said, “and leave me to peace?”

“Because,” he said, “you might be my chance.”

“There’s lots of people in the world would run jump in the river if they thought I was their chance at anything. Sometimes I think I’m one of them.”

14

The road slipped out of the little grass prairie into bush poplars and pine yearlings, back into another pasture. The sun was low, sparkling through the poplars, turning the weeds gold and splintering the shadows through the woods. North of the road, a section of grass had been mowed and a trapezoid lined out in surveyor’s sticks and red bicycle reflectors. On the near side an iron stanchion was holding a gray windsock that twitched in the breeze, and at the end of the strip a lean-to shed had been built and the grass allowed to grow up around it. Crows began making a racket when the jeep broke out of the woods, and one by one they flapped out of the tall grass into the trees.

Back of the airstrip the woods opened to a more important oak break in the back shade of which was a long green-plank barracks house with a shake roof and square windows run end to end. The house was raised a man’s height off the ground on pyramided concrete spilings, with wood steps leading off either end. Three outbuildings were set off from the house; one he could make out easily as an outhouse, by itself twenty yards from the north steps. The other two were less distinguishable, though he surmised one to be a living quarters with a small breeze porch and propane tank, and the other, a corrugated metal enclosure with a lean-to ceiling, looked like a toolshed.

The road split, with one arm making a hemisphere to the left, and the other keeping straight then switching back so that both arms met beside the south steps of the house. Robard took the way that allowed him to go straight, then braked as the path turned toward the house, and let the motor idle as quietly as possible.

The sun had almost died. The pale light showed olive through the woods, with only a final narrow filament catching the house in its salient and turning the planks bright green. He felt an almost insufferable calm, as though the sun passing off had stranded the house and everything else in lush neutrality in which nothing could move until dark.

Robard shut off the jeep and filled his cheeks. “I’ll let you announce us,” he said, expelling the air.

“I’m a fucking month late,” he said. “You think that’s a good credit letter? You’ve got business. I’m just a goddamn parvenu.”

“Go on, for Jesus’ sake. You act like a fool.”

He gave Robard a grieved look and climbed out. A voice, bent on expressing extreme displeasure, came all at once from somewhere back of the house. Several waxwings began taunting a blue jay up in the sycamores and went fluttering out behind the house.

“No, T.V.A.,” the voice cried imploringly. “Goddamn it, son, don’t turn the thing that way. Turn it the way I say.”

He looked over at Robard reproachfully and waited to hear a reply from whoever was doing the turning.

“Go on around there and see,” Robard said crossly, lighting a cigarette and flipping the match on the floor.

He nosed past the foot of the stairs and stopped beneath the piling and looked back into the dooryard.

A small turkey-necked old man wearing duck trousers and a yellow pajama top was standing hands on his sides beside a Negro in overalls, who was bent on all fours over a thick iron pipe protruding several inches out of the ground. Beside them, an orange and white pointer puppy was watching. The colored man had an enormous black pipe wrench he was applying to the pipe at ground level, taking it off each time he turned it half a rotation, refitting it, and twisting it again, while the old man stood supervising the whole operation. He could see that each of them was dedicating a terrific quotient of concentration to the winding process, so that each time the colored man removed the wrench to reapply it, the white man insensibly muttered “Good,” and crowded a quarter inch closer.

The dog was the first to ratify anyone else’s presence. He picked his head up and stared momentarily, flogged his tail once, then went back to observing the operations on the pipe.

He felt that he’d like to disappear altogether, but continued standing by soundlessly as the colored man grappled with the enormous wrench and the white man redeployed himself to the other side as though he wanted to beat the Negro to seeing down the hole as soon as it was opened. When the wrench was finally brought off with the entire four-foot length of pipe fastened to it like a magnet, the old man quickly dipped to his knees, pushed his face right into the hole, and held it there for several seconds while the Negro backed away a few feet and gave the goings-on a grave look.

“Goddamn it,” the old man bellowed, lifting his head and wiping his nose with his sleeve and pushing his face back down to the hole for another test. He seemed to want to get part of his head inside the hole, but the hole was apparently too stingy. He sat back on his haunches abruptly, wiped his face again, and shook his head piteously.

“What do it smell like?” the colored man said. He was standing over the old man now with the entire pipe-and-wrench conjunction dangling in one hand like a watch fob and delving the other hand into his thick hair.

“Shit,” the old man said. “There’s shit in my well water, by God. Mrs. Lamb knows what she’s talking about.”

The colored man shook his head ruefully and stood over the hole, staring at it as if it were a grave.

“I bragged on it,” the old man said, still levered back on his haunches.

“Yes suh,” the colored man said.

“Don’t ever brag on nothin you own, son.”

“Yes suh,” the colored man agreed.

“It queers everything. I told Gaspareau a month ago what a goddamn good well I had, been good since 1922, and the first thing I know the privy goes and infects it. That was a jinx, and I’m to cause.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the colored man admitted.

“Well, I know, by God,” he said. “It’s like feeling piss down your pants leg. You know you done acted hasty.”

The colored man turned and glanced at the house and saw him standing there and gave him an anguished look that suggested that if he looked again he didn’t want to see anybody still there. He flicked his eyes at Mr. Lamb, then back at the house, then fixed him with a purely baleful look.

“We got somebody,” the colored man said.

“What?” the old man snapped.

“Somebody done come on. . ”

“Mr. Lamb,” he shouted, propelling himself away from the house, regretting to have to speak at all.

“Who is it?” the old man grunted, twisting his face around so he could see.

“This here him,” the colored man said, pointing down at the old man, who was still on his knees in the grass, looking up with his entire forehead enraveled behind his glasses.

“I’m him,” the old man said loudly, batting his eyes and struggling to get on his feet. “That’s me right here.”

“I’m Sam Newel.” His voice stopped inexplicably.

“Who is it?” the old man said, staring at the colored man with the same bewilderment he’d centered on the pump.

“Newel,” he said with greater difficulty. “Beebe Henley called you, I believe.”

“The sound’s out of this ear,” the old man said, batting his right ear as though he were swatting a mosquito. “What did he say, T.V.A.?”

“He say he a friend of Miss Beebe’s,” the colored man shouted directly into the old man’s good ear.

“He is?” the old man said irascibly. “Newel?”

“Yes sir?”

“You sure are a big pile of shit,” he said, finally hoisting himself with the colored man’s help, and taking a great handful of his trousers and staring at him with a hot intensity, as though he were only going along with a joke that was about to come quickly to an end, at which point he intended to claim the last laugh. “We thought you was coming a month ago.” His eyes flicked up and down. “You’re the lawyer, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir,” he said, trying to clear up the trouble with his voice.

“Well, everybody needs a goddamn lawyer sometime. My will’s made, though.” The old man peeped up under the house, and saw Robard sitting smoking placidly in the jeep. “Who in the hell’d you bring with you?”

“That’s a Mr. Hewes,” he said, trying to aim his answer directly into the old man’s working ear.

“It is, aye? Well, who the hell is he? Not another goddamned lawyer, I hope.” The old man took a faster grip on his duck trousers and jerked them up until the cuffs were several inches above the lasts of his bedroom slippers.

“No,” he said uneasily, trying to look under the house again and finding he couldn’t see underneath as easily as the old man could. “He’s here about some job, I think.”

“Let’s see the bastard, then,” the old man said, lurching off hoisting his trousers with both hands.

He stood looking hopefully at the colored man for some sign of affiliation, but the colored man avoided his eyes and went trailing behind Mr. Lamb.

When they started to the jeep, Robard jostled out, mashed his cigarette in the grass, and started muttering something inaudible.

“Look here,” the old man said, batting his eyes in several directions for emphasis, as if he’d already given Robard fair warning. “If you expect to talk to me today, you’re going to have to talk at that ear, or you might as well not talk.”

“Gaspareau sent me,” Robard shouted, staring at him behind the old man as if he suspected he’d been betrayed on the other side of the house.

“What the hell about?” Mr. Lamb said.

“About the guard job you had in the paper,” Robard yelled.

The old man looked at him accusingly. “You ain’t no murderer, are you?”

Robard grimaced. “No, I ain’t.”

“Gaspareau sent a murderer over here last week, and I run the son-of-a-bitch off. He killed some poor con-vict over there last year without the bastard even looking around.”

Mr. Lamb suddenly took all his teeth out of his mouth and worked them together, as if he were trying to iron out an irritating defect. “I don’t want no goddamn murderers shooting up my island,” Mr. Lamb gummed, giving his teeth close inspection. “That boy won’t live to be twenty-one, I’ll guarantee that, the little shitass.”

Robard said nothing and stared back at him painfully over the old man’s bony shoulder.

The colored man went sneaking off toward the house, set the pipe and the wrench against one of the pilings, then leaned against it himself, lit a cigarette, and took up watching the proceedings from a more comfortable distance. He scowled at the Negro and waited for the old man to finish examining his teeth.

“These things,” he said ruefully, referring to the pink and porcelain teeth. “I wouldn’t give a nickel for a hundred of ’em. Used to, when I had my teeth, I could get WRBC on my second molar after 10 P.M. at night.” Mr. Lamb’s eyes flashed by Robard and quickly found the colored man, who turned his face and cackled.

Robard smiled weakly.

“What’s your name?” the old man said.

Robard pronounced his name as if he hated to hear it.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Hewes,” the old man said, finally reinstating his teeth in his mouth and smacking them up and down fiercely. “The job I got pays twelve dollars a day just for one week of turkey season starting tomorrow and going till Thursday, plus your food and your place to stay. It ain’t but a week’s work, and I want you on the job six to six unless you and me arrange different.” The old man gave Robard an odd look as if he were trying to talk him out of it. “I’ll give you a cap gun I got in there, but I don’t want you even to take it out. I want you to have it cause some of those farmers over there like to get funny with you sometimes if they think they can get away with it. Gaspareau lets ’em come in here. There ain’t nothing I can do about it.” He stopped suddenly and stared at Robard. “You ain’t no kin to Gaspareau, are you?”

“I hadn’t ever seen him before a hour ago,” Robard said, and looked away.

“You sure about that?” Mr. Lamb said, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth across Robard’s face, examining every feature thoroughly.

“That’s what I said,” Robard snapped.

“All right, then,” Mr. Lamb said.

“One thing, though. I got to get to Helena some nights.”

“What the hell for?” the old man shouted, cocking his usable ear so as to hear the excuse free from interference.

Robard looked out at the woods, which were almost dark. “Some business,” he said quietly.

“Is that so?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, Hewes. I’m going to call you Hewes. That’s what I call my employees. You tend to your business. But when the sun ups, you tend to mine.”

“All right.”

“Use the boat, but don’t let it get empty of gasoline. People are going to come in here to hunt turkeys, and I don’t want you poopin out the gas with your business trips.”

“All right,” Robard said, and started to walk away.

The puppy came twisting up behind the old man from where he’d been lounging in the grass, and sat down at his foot and stared at Robard.

“This here’s my huntin dog,” the old man said, admiring the dog and giving its ear a friendly jerk. “She’s my long-casted pointer. I need me a long-casted dog since I can’t walk anymore from the bed to the pisspot.”

The colored man began chuckling again and disappeared around the house with the pipe and wrench in his hand.

“You see my huntin dog, Newel?”

“Yes sir,” he said, moving forward a little, thinking about the hound flattened out in Gaspareau’s road.

“Say, ‘My name’s Elinor,’” the old man instructed the dog, bending down and picking up a fat patch of flesh behind its head and grinning. The veins in his face fattened up dangerously as he bent, monkeying with the dog’s skull. “You got any gear?” the old man said to Robard, glancing at the back of the jeep.

“What’s in my sack,” Robard said.

“What about you, Newel?”

“No sir,” he said, thinking dismally about his suitcase strewn open like debris in a train wreck. It made him feel like he needed a bath.

“You’re just a couple of goddamned derelicts,” the old man shouted, standing straight up and hoisting his pants a little higher. “Beebe Henley didn’t say you were a goddamned derelict.”

“Somebody stole my bag in Chicago,” he muttered.

“The hell they did?” the old man said. “You oughtn’t never live in a place like that. The bastards’ll steal everything you got.”

“A policeman took it,” he said.

The old man looked at him, temporarily astounded.

“Well, put yourselfs in the Gin Den there. That’s where the men sleep, except me. Me and the ladies all sleep in the house, so there won’t be any unauthorized screwin go on.” The old man’s eyes brightened considerably. “Hewes, you’ll start tomorrow.”

“Yes sir,” Robard said, turning toward the jeep again.

“We’ll eat supper in a little while and I’ll tell you what I want you to do. Newel, what the hell are you going to do?” The old man frowned at him through the tops of his spectacles. “You haven’t come to hunt turkeys, have you? You don’t look like much of a hunter to me.”

“No,” he said, trying to think up something believable.

“I didn’t think so,” the old man said crisply. “I’ll tell you, though, Newel.” And he paused. “I don’t care what you do. Beebe says to let you do what you want, and I will so long as you don’t get me shot. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Yes sir,” he said, happy not to have to say anything else,

“Good,” the old man said. “I don’t like people around here who aren’t satisfied, except me, and I can be any goddamned thing I please. The bathroom’s over there.” He pointed down under the house to where he alone could see the bottom few boards of the outhouse. “You’ll just have to walk a little if you have to piss, or else use God’s privy.” The old man leaned forward and peered up under the house. “Did you ever hear the story about the two farmers sittin on the two-holer?” the old man said, pleased with the thought of another joke.

Robard shook his head somberly and stopped what he was doing in the jeep.

The old man looked at them both cautiously. “Well,” he said, “there’s these two old farmers sittin side by side in the privy, and one old farmer stands up and starts to grab his braces and all his change falls out down the hole. And right quick he reaches down in his pocket, pulls out his wallet, and throws a twenty-dollar bill right in there after it. And the other old farmer says, ‘Why, Walter, what in the world did you do that for?’ And the first old farmer says, ‘Wilbur, if you think I’m going down in that hole for thirty-five cents, you’re crazy as hell.’ Haw haw haw haw.” The old man bellied over so hard the puppy backed off several feet.

He did the best he could to ignite a smile, but Robard seemed to think the joke was funny and laughed.

The old man took off his glasses, wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and looked up at him thoughtfully, holding his pants loose around his waist. “You know,” the old man said, “you don’t look so good. Could be you need a purgative. Mrs. Lamb’s got some Black-Draught. You look like you could use a good reamin.”

“I couldn’t say,” he said, feeling embarrassed to be there.

“Well, I could!” the old man shouted. “Just be careful you don’t wake Hewes up trotting across the yard. That man’s got to work tomorrow.”

He wondered if there wasn’t right then some convenient way to get back over the lake before another bus ran. He looked back across the field. The olive light had completely died, and hanging up over the horizon were leaded clouds, and through the woods gloom was massing up. He tried to imagine the air at Meigs Field at that very moment. Far out on the lake, beyond the reflection, you could see the tiny pinchpoint running lights of the ore boats farther up into the darkness than you were, at some moment when the air was a sweet liquid enveloping you and making you feel like walking on the polished lakefront before coming in out of the dark. He felt raw now. And he had never thought until this very moment that he could long for it, want whatever erroneous comfort it had, making him invisible. And for a moment, in the natural order of things, he felt large and frail and brought down out of place into a painful light that made him want to hulk away back in the dark.

The old man stared at him with an odd solicitude.

“I believe we done exercised Newel,” Mr. Lamb said to Robard. “Don’t get peeved, Newel. We don’t take ourselves serious down here like you do up there, do we, Hewes?”

“I guess,” Robard said, looking at him a moment, then turning toward the metal shed the old man had designated.

“I’ve got to cap off that goddamned well before it gets pitch dark or Mrs. Lamb will step in it and break her leg. Did you hear that, Hewes? The privy queered my well. I got to sink a new one.”

“I heard it,” Robard said, starting to the tin house.

“T. V. A. Landrieu’ll ring dinner in a little bit, and we’ll all eat and try to cheer up old sourpuss here. Or we’ll throw his fat ass in the river.”

The old man straggled up toward the house, clutching a fistful of his pants and hollering for the colored man to come after him.

From the door of the metal house, Robard watched him come down from the jeep. “You heard it,” Robard said, letting the screen wag back between his fingers.

“The old turd,” he said. “I’ll go out in his asshole woods in the morning and yank a few trees up by the roots and drive every rational animal right in the lake. Let them take their chances with the gars or whatever that was out there.”

Robard looked amused and stood in the doorway watching the killed light, while he sank back on the bed. “If I see you I’ll run the other way.”

“Tell me something.” He hung his feet over the cot latch.

“It ain’t some more what I make my memories out of, or whatever that was you said, is it?”

“No,” he said, arranging his arms in back of his head.

Robard lit a cigarette and let the smoke feather through his nose and get drawn through the screen. He lifted his cheeks toward his eye sockets as if someone were shining a light in his face. “Don’t you ever get tired and want to think just whatever comes in your head?”

“I’ve got to ask somebody besides me,” he said. “You’ve probably got better answers anyway.” He watched Robard, trying to calculate the sense he was making out of it.

“I don’t know shit from a shoeshine,” Robard mumbled, looking away again.

“Just tell me about your family,” he said.

Robard picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and looked around in the gloom as if he were considering walking outside. “My daddy’s dead,” he said abruptly. “He got drowned, and my mother married an Indian in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. They live down at Anadarko. What else?” He sucked his tooth.

“Why’d she marry an Indian?”

“She’s a half,” Robard said. “Her daddy was one of them oil-well Osages. Bought him a big Maxwell automobile, and they had to drive it in the woods one day clear to Arkansas to get it away from the Oklahoma creditors.”

Katydids were zuzzing out in the yard. He tried to think of something to say but couldn’t.

“I got an old picture of them,” Robard said, “set up in a wagon with a mule, after they had sold the car. She stayed up in north Arkansas after that, up till the time my own father died, till I hired out on the railroad, as a matter of fact. She worked in a brassiere plant in Fort Smith. And quick as I left she married this Indian that had a dry-cleaning business in Anadarko.” Robard looked at his toes as though he could see what he was saying in the darkness separating him from the ground.

“Your father wasn’t Indian, was he?”

“He was a German,” Robard said, letting his heels grind the cigarette butt. “In fact, they wanted to stick him in prison up in Cane Hill during the war, put him with a bunch of Japs they had at Fort Chaffee.”

“And don’t you keep in touch with your mother at all?”

“I’ll tell you,” Robard said, looking at his heels awhile. He had become a silhouette in the open screen. “She had her little piece of business to attend to, and I had my little bit. She’s sweet.” He smacked his lips. “I think it would make her nervous if I showed up, cause I couldn’t fit in nothin. It might make me unhappy, and I don’t need that. I like to keep my business manageable.” Robard turned around and walked back into the shed. “How come I get to answer the questions?”

“So we can start off even,” he said. “I’m the only person who’ll take me seriously.

“You’d think that’d teach you something,” Robard said quietly. “Though I’m afraid nobody ever took me serious in their life.”

15

Mr. Lamb sat brooding at the head of a short deal table, scowling at Landrieu through the kitchen door and fingering a glass of whiskey. The screen porch gave directly into a small dark kitchen that smelled like crowder peas boiled in molasses. The colored man was inside frowning at various flickering portholes on a large wood cook stove, exchanging pots and skillets rapidly and keeping an eye on Mr. Lamb, who sat lowering over his whiskey. Farther on the length of the house through a pair of open clear-paned gallery doors was a large pine-floor sitting room with a high hearth fireplace, beside which Mrs. Lamb was seated manipulating the knobs on a big silver radio, staring at the lighted dials as though she were seeing the horizon of a faraway country behind each tiny window.

Mr. Lamb’s eyes snapped up and a smile cracked on his face. He had put on a red flannel shirt with sleeves that came down over his hands and a hand-painted picture of a mallard duck about to land on each collar point. He had buttoned on a pair of red and yellow striped suspenders and combed his straggly hair wet against his head, so that he looked like the guest of honor at a birthday party.

The instant impression the old man gave was that he had shrunk to half the size he had seemed an hour before. His face was sunken at the temples and his eyes looked fragile and sallow.

“Sit down, for God’s sake,” the old man said loudly toward the kitchen. “Bring two more glasses in here, T.V.A.”

Mrs. Lamb frowned up from her radio knobs and gave them both a disapproving look. She was a big woman with scarlet hair, a large expandable mouth, and dusky skin she accentuated with dark lipstick, which made her look Latin and obstinate. He tried to smile at her through the gallery door, Mrs. Lamb was listening to Eddie Arnold sing “Cattle Call,” and a large queenly smile froze over her big mouth as if she were reliving a moment when the tune had expressed some unexpressible felicity. He wondered vaguely if she wasn’t some old doxy Mr. Lamb had corralled someplace and kept out on the island to amuse him, and for whom he had provided the gigantic radio to help her maintain audio contact with the rest of the world.

The colored man, who was now wearing a white porter’s tunic with “Illinois Central Railroad” stitched on the pocket and several gold hatches glorifying each cuff, appeared from the kitchen with two cut-glass tumblers, set them on the table, and removed himself out of sight back to the pantry.

Mr. Lamb picked a quart bottle of Wild Turkey off the floor and set it down decisively in front of Robard. “Mrs. Lamb makes me keep my whiskey under the sink,” he complained, smirking and ducking his head as if anticipating a lick.

“With the other abrasives,” Mrs. Lamb interjected from the opposite end of the house.

“She won’t tolerate having it on the table, either,” the old man said, still smirking.

Robard poured out some whiskey in his glass and set the bottle across the table. He poured a nice line in his own glass and set the bottle on the floor beside Mr. Lamb’s foot.

“That’s good,” Mr. Lamb said, satisfied with everyone’s glass including his own, which was half full. “I think we ought to all of us get drunk.”

The colored man snickered in the kitchen.

“That’s Mark’s only toast,” Mrs. Lamb said. He felt she was aiming her remark directly at him.

“Ma’am?” he said.

She smiled at him regally and turned down the radio. “‘Let’s all get drunk’ is the only toast Mark knows.”

Mr. Lamb’s face brightened. He swiveled around in his chair and gave her the benefit, and took a generous drink of whiskey.

“Mrs. Lamb is a dear, gentle woman,” the old man said to the two of them, his face red and his little eyes humid with the whiskey. He smacked his lips distastefully as though he’d just drunk piss. “I’ve had her for fifty years, and we’ve never had an argument. I wish she’d come in here,” he said, shouting over his own voice.

“I wish you’d let me listen to my program,” she said irritably.

“I’d like you to meet these two gentlemen, Mr. Hewes and Mr. Newel. Mr. Newel is your granddaughter’s spark, ain’t you?” he said.

“Her friend,” he said, letting the whiskey drain through his throat.

“Friend, then. He says he’s her friend. Haw. I wish you’d come to be introduced.”

She glared at her husband and almost simultaneously smiled at him and Robard and turned up her radio to hear the last straining notes of “Cattle Call.”

“I bought Mrs. Lamb that radio ten Christmases ago,” Mr. Lamb said gloomily, bracketing his hands beside his glass. “We don’t have a phone, and she used to get lonesome with just men around, drinking and telling lies. So I bought her that there we’re all listening to, and now I can’t prise her loose. She’ll start listening to the Memphis police calls in a minute. She hears the god-damnedest things. I don’t know what goes on in Memphis — everybody’s raping and killing and robbing everybody else. I used to know it when Crump was mayor, and none of that went on.”

“That’s not true,” he said, his throat becoming anesthetized with the whiskey. “It was just good business to keep quiet about

“The hell it’s not,” Mr. Lamb snapped. “I say it is.” The old man scowled at him and thickened his brows, his spectacles catching light in directions. “What’d you say you was, a lawyer?”

“Yes sir.”

“You talk like a goddamned lawyer, don’t he, Hewes?”

“I don’t know nothing about lawyers,” Robard said, paring his thumb down the ridge of his jaw and staring back coolly.

“Neither does he,” Mr. Lamb said, and smirked. “He just talks like he does. I used to go to the King Cotton Hotel every October for the Ole Miss and Arkansas game, and there was never a bit of unpleasantry took place. Memphis was a wonderful city, and I’ve been in it more times than you’ve pissed your britches.”

“May be,” he said.

“Is he nuts?” the old man said, looking at Robard.

Robard shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“Shit,” the old man said. “I don’t need nobody to tell me nothin.” He drank off the last ounce of whiskey and scrutinized the kitchen door. “What the hell, T.V.A. Have you took up your residence in our dinner?”

“I can’t cook it no faster than the stove,” the Negro replied, and stuck his head around the door sill and gave the old man a hateful look.

Mr. Lamb picked up the bottle, awarded himself another portion of whiskey, and set the bottle on the floor. “A lawyer.” He snorted as though it put him in mind of a dirty joke.

“Almost,” he said.

The old man eyed him belligerently. “Well, almost, what the hell do you know about the law? I’m a stupid old asshole, don’t know nothing about anything. Me and Hewes is just alike. We’re ignorant as two coons.”

He measured some whiskey, took a breath, and looked Mr. Lamb in the face. “I guess the law has always been a good alternative to strangling everybody’s youngest son,” he said.

“Any nitwit knows that,” Mr. Lamb snorted. “That’s not the law. That’s Moses, for goddamned sake. If you want to read the Bible, go sit on the privy. I’ve got a copy on the wall with a piece of twine, so you won’t haul it off. I know the Bible, by God.”

He let another tiny drop of whiskey slide by his tongue and looked placidly into the old man’s face, which seemed to him to have sunk nearer the tabletop, as if the old man were on his knees.

“What else do you know, moron? You ain’t told me nothin I didn’t already know myself,” the old man said.

Mrs. Lamb all at once sat around and gave the antenna on her radio a severe twisting. The radio responded by broadcasting a fine, high-pitched crackling noise that sounded like cellophane being crumpled up in somebody’s fist. Two short bursts of an unintelligible male voice were followed by more crackling, and then another man’s voice, then more static.

“Shit!” the old man boomed, gyrating so he could see backward. “Can’t you find something else than that? Isn’t that just the goddamned Clarksdale taxicab?”

“I’m looking for the police,” she said, unperturbed, frowning at the little lighted dials and twisting a fat chrome knob back and forth without making any noticeable improvement. “They aren’t on the air. I can’t account for it.”

“I can’t either,” he said, “but I want you to turn it off before I come adjust it my own way.”

She snapped the radio off and rocked back in her chair and stared impassively at the unlighted box. All there was to hear now was the sound of whatever was frying on the stove and T.V.A. scuffling his feet.

“All right,” Mr. Lamb said, looming forward again, his eyes red and unsteady. “What else?”

“The law of inches,” he said. “That has to do with the crime of sodomy.”

Mr. Lamb’s face became quickly ashen.

“It states that penile and oral copulation between two men, or between a man and a woman, is absolutely out.” He paid the old man an arrogating look. “But oral copulation between two women is not a crime due to the lack of the penetration of the sexual organ. . ”

“That’s all I care to hear about it,” the old man said, rearing up in his chair and pounding his hard little fist on the table, glaring at everything at once. “That’s against nature, by God.”

“In ancient church law men were stoned to death for doing it,” he said. “But women only got whipped, which is a serious inequity. What’s sauce for the goose, so to say, ought to be good for the gander. I’m sure you agree.”

“The hell,” the old man fumed. “This is my table, I’ll decide what I agree with. T.V.A., bring in the goddamn food or I’ll come out there and put you in the pan and we’ll all eat better.”

Landrieu instantly emerged with a crock platter of braised squirrels, several bowls containing new potatoes, peas, and okra, a gravy boat, and an amber pitcher of tea. Mr. Lamb grimly contemplated the food’s arrival as if he were searching out some petty delinquency he could hold everyone but himself responsible for. Mrs. Lamb arrived and sat at the opposite end of the table, while they all stood. Landrieu came back with four glasses of ice, then watched while Mrs. Lamb scrutinized the table and slowly nodded, whereupon Landrieu disappeared promptly back into the kitchen.

“Where do you come from?” Mrs. Lamb said, redirecting conversation toward Robard.

He watched Robard with pleasure. Robard set down his fork, allowed himself time to swallow, then sat thinking about some possible answer. Mrs. Lamb smelled like spoiled lilacs.

“Hewes ain’t a talker,” Mr. Lamb spurted with his mouth filled up with peas and potatoes. “This one is, though,” motioning with his fork.

“From Cane Hill, Arkansas,” Robard said, and looked around suspiciously.

“What’d he say,” Mr. Lamb shouted. “This side is my bad ear.” He gave his ear a good whack and turned his working ear toward the conversation.

“If you wouldn’t pound your ear like that, Mark, you’d hear better,” Mrs. Lamb said.

“The sound’s out of it,” the old man said, and looked perplexed. “We had a cyclone two years ago, blew off two of Gaspareau’s little shotgun houses. Blowed so hard I had to crawl up under the Willys to keep from blowing away. And when it was over the sound was gone out of this ear.” He pointed at his ear as something he would never fathom.

“I believe,” Mrs. Lamb said authoritatively, loading peas on her plate, “Mark poked things in his ear all his life until he ruined it. There’s no reason a strong wind should make you deaf.”

“Unless it does, goddamn it.” Mr. Lamb frowned and clattered his teeth. “You and Newel ought to sit together in church.”

T.V.A. appeared, collected the whiskey glasses, and carted them away to the kitchen.

“You know what?” Mr. Lamb said, leaning up over his food.

“No,” he said, watching the old man seethe.

“In Arkansas, over there”—Mr. Lamb gestured with his thumb—“to get to be a lawyer, you know what you got to do?”

“No,” he said, spooning sugar into his tea glass, and watching it sift down among the ice cubes.

A grin stole over the old man’s rubbery mouth and he pulled closer to the table, as if to enlist a privacy between the two of them. “They make you spend two days in the in-sane asylum before they let you join. Haw haw haw.” The old man’s mouth split open, his face reddened up until his eyes dampened, and he had to take up the edge of his napkin to dry them. “Didn’t you know that?”

He took a bite of the squirrel and chewed it. “Why do they do that?” he said.

“Shit!” the old man said. “Cause they figure it’ll do ’em good, I reckon. They must think you all need it or they wouldn’t do it.”

Mrs. Lamb looked painfully at Mr. Lamb. “The bar examination is given in the lunatics’ asylum in Little Rock,” she said quietly.

“With all them monkeys outside screamin and ravin like nature intended them to,” Mr. Lamb gloated. “It ought to be a law that every lawyer spends a year in the in-sane asylum before starting, just to be on the safe side. What do you think about that, Newel?”

“I think it’d be a good idea,” he said. “We’d be able to let some of the sane people out then and start putting the crazy ones in there where they belong.”

The old man smiled roguishly. “I think me and Newel have finally reached agreement on somethin,” he said, and scrutinized everyone to see if they agreed. “Where’d you say you was from, Hewes?” he said.

“Arkansas,” Robard said deliberately.

“Hewes is my trespass man,” Mr. Lamb said to Mrs. Lamb, who promptly regarded Robard skeptically. “He ain’t a murderer, either,” he said. “We found that out.”

Robard gave Mr. Lamb a rum look.

“Hewes, now listen here,” Mr. Lamb commenced, leaning back in his chair until the struts popped and the chair gave evidence that it might just fly apart. “All you got to do is get in your jeep and drive the roads that’s on this island. It don’t make no difference which ones you take, or where you start, just so you watch where you’re going and don’t shoot nobody, or let anybody shoot you, or let none of them sons of bitches from over there slip over here and shoot my turkeys. All them roads eventually comes right back here.”

Robard kept his eyes fastened on his plate, watching everyone out the corners as if he didn’t like taking orders in front of people. “All right,” he said.

“Though if you can get a clear shot at old Gaspareau you might ought to take it.” Mr. Lamb’s eyes flashed. “Mrs. Lamb would never stop thanking you enough.”

“That’s fine, Mark,” Mrs. Lamb said. “We all appreciate Mr. Gaspareau’s service.”

“Mrs. Lamb wouldn’t mind having a short season on Gaspareaus, if the Game and Fish would let her do it.” Mr. Lamb quaked silently.

He tried to feature what style of vileness Gaspareau might have committed to pass him to the dark end of Mrs. Lamb’s affection. It seemed, though, like almost any one of Gaspareau’s private habits might have antagonized her, though it also seemed like Mr. Lamb could probably match Gaspareau habit for habit.

“I’ll acquaint you to whoever comes in here with my permission,” Mr. Lamb continued authoritatively, “so you won’t be running them off. Otherwise, if you hear an outboard, go where you hear it, cause it’ll be some of them shitasses slippin in over here to get ’em a turkey without me knowing it. Do you know where the river is?”

Robard skinnied his eyes until his face looked like a razor. “No,” he said, fingering the haft of his dinner knife.

“That way,” the old man said loudly, jabbing his left arm toward the back of the house and the other side of the island from where they had come in. “If anybody comes, outside of Gaspareau and one of them murderers of his, they’ll come from the river. That’s where I want you to spend half your time.”

“All right,” Robard said.

Mrs. Lamb finished her plate and rang a tiny table bell, and T.V.A. created a fierce racket getting on his feet and out of the kitchen. He appeared in the doorway, a napkin in his collar and his mouth full of squirrel, some of which was still marooned in the corner of his lip. He gave the table a half-vexed look, though neither Mr. Lamb nor Mrs. Lamb noticed. He picked up Mrs. Lamb’s plate and handed it back inside the kitchen.

“See them maps?” the old man said, marshaling everyone’s attention toward the wall behind him and leaning arrogantly back into his chair.

Everyone, excluding Mrs. Lamb, stared dully at two maps nailed to the wall board. One was a grayed-in aerial photo of a giant blurred teardrop mass, with the round lobe of the drop crimped inward. The other was a cartographer’s job, displaying a section of the river opposite the town of Elaine, showing the river running straight as a plumb line past the site of the town, represented by two concentric red circles on the map, but without designating any esker of land or earthwork that might represent the island. The river carried straight by Elaine without a jog one way or the other. The map was drawn by the Army Corps of Engineers, whose little colophon sat at the right-hand lower corner.

“See anything queer?” the old man snorted.

Robard cradled his chin in his hand.

“What about you, smart aleck?” Mr. Lamb said. “You don’t see nothin queer, do you?”

“Nothing except this island doesn’t exist on the map where the aerial picture shows.”

The old man looked at him venomously and went on as if he hadn’t heard. “This island ain’t on the goddamned engineers’ map,” he boasted, a rakish smile organizing his old wrinkled face. Mrs. Lamb rose demurely and went off into the sitting room and took a seat by her radio. She sat a moment staring at the fire in the stone fireplace, then switched on the cold tubes. Mr. Lamb looked at her strangely, changed his expression and went on with what he was dying to say. “Them goddamned Army bastards think they’re so smart going around noodling with everything, building a dam in every ditch with an ounce of water in it till you have to ask the sons of bitches for water to take a bath in. Well, I fixed them, by God.” His eyes snapped wildly back between the two of them, waiting for one to ask the question, but nobody said anything. “I was down there on the river one day must’ve been ten years ago, nosing around down there not doing anything in particular, when I seen this couple of big fat does go up over a little knoll and head for the river, and I went in after them cause I wanted to see what it was they was going to do over there. So I commenced running up over the hill — that’s back when I could plant one foot in front of the other one without falling on my face — and right away real quick I heard this boom-boom-boom out where the deers had run. And I hit the goddamned dirt, because you can’t never tell what might be going on over there. And I laid there for a minute or two, and didn’t hear nothing else, no shooting nor yellin nor nothin. And I just kindly eased up the hill there till I could see down to the river, and here was these two jokers in a motorboat about to touch bank. They had the motor hauled up and was poling in on the slack water. One of them was holding two rifles — two of them stubby little Army guns — and the other was poling the boat with a long-handle paddle. Both of them was Army guys, I could see that, because they had uniform jackets on, the ignorant sons of bitches. And of course right there on the bank was them two does, dead as hammers, shot right through the neck, though they had shot one twict. And I could see just exactly what was going on, and quick as they stepped out of the boat and got ahold of a deer each, I come roaring over the hill with my deer rifle, got them both for trespassing, hunting deer from a boat, hunting deer with an unauthorized gun, hunting without a license, shooting illegal deer, shooting another illegal deer, and hunting out of season. I had them sons of bitches dead to it, too, cause they started shitting pickles as quick as I listed off their offenses. Both of them was majors, had their uniforms on, so it might have been a whole long list of other crimes, too, that could’ve been added on to the ones I knew. So I lawed the bastards. I told them they was on their way to jail, and the shitasses turned white as paste and started looking at one another like they was trying to figure some way to appease me, and one of them said was there anything they could do to get me to let them loose without turning them over to the sheriff? And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ Turns out that they were down there from Memphis, doing the float work for drawing up a new map of the river, cause the Corps of Engineers keeps a check on the river since there ain’t no war to keep ’em busy building. And when they asked me if they couldn’t do me some kind of favor to make up for all them crimes they’d committed right in my presence, I said, ‘Hell, yes. You can erase this island off your damn map, and make it hard to find for anybody who ain’t supposed to be looking.’ And those sorry bastards said sure they’d do it, since it didn’t make no difference to a asshole bunch like the Corps of Engineers what went on the map and what got left off, since they’re all so goddamned crooked they have to wind themselves into bed every evening anyway, and half of them are on the take from the state in the first place. So that’s how come we come to be off that map. And that’s how come it ain’t easy to find this place, cause that’s the way I like it. When I come over here I don’t want a bunch of nitwits running all over the place shooting up the country and killing my deer and turkeys and whatever else I got out here.”

“What happened to the deer?” he said.

“What deer?”

“The deer the majors shot. Did you let them take the deer, since they did you the favor?”

“Hell, no. What the hell do you think I was doing out there at six o’clock in the morning? I wanted them does myself. I had me a salt lick set out there. Where do you think them does was headed when those morons potted them? They was headed to my lick, that’s where.”

“I thought you said it was out of season for deer,” he said.

The old man looked at him malignantly. “It’s my land. It’s open season on anything I take a notion to shoot. Piss on deer season and every other season. I’ll shoot what I want to shoot. I got a covey of pet quail right out between the house and my airfield this very minute.” He stabbed his finger toward the closest window. “I’ll take Elinor and walk right out there and shoot me two quails and eat them for dinner, if I want to. I don’t need nobody to tell me it ain’t quail season, cause it is. Them quails is always in season—my season.”

“Just curious.”

“Well, then, there’s your answer, Curious. This here is my island and I don’t care about nobody but myself, by God, and I don’t care if I do, either. I can’t help it if there ain’t no deer or no quail or nothin else wild around here on these poor bastards’ farms. I protect what I got. I got Hewes hired to keep the assholes off. They done screwed the works on their own land, now they want to screw the same works on mine. But they ain’t. Hewes here’ll see to that, won’t you, son?”

Robard looked up from his plate, sucked his tooth, and declined to participate. The old man leaned back and eyed them both arrogantly. He had worked his way to the edge of his chair telling the story, and now he pushed his fingers under his suspenders and gave both of them a proprietary look, as though he was challenging anyone to contradict one single word he’d uttered.

Mrs. Lamb began adjusting the knobs through a hail of static.

“Get the news, Fidelia,” Mr. Lamb said matter-of-factly, squirming until he could see to the next room.

“I want the weather,” she said, staring at the little shining panels and plugging in a set of ancient wire PBX headphones that shorted the sound and left the house quiet except for the colored man skating around the kitchen.

“Mrs. Lamb goes according to the weather,” Mr. Lamb said, turning back slightly bewildered. “She don’t care what time it is, just so long as she knows what the weather’s doing.”

“At least she doesn’t worry about getting older,” he said.

“Who the hell does?” the old man snapped, pushing backward in his chair and creating a fierce bracking noise on the floor. “You worry about getting old, T.V.A.?”

“No suh,” T.V.A. said invisibly from the kitchen. He could make out the spattered toes of the colored man’s shoes where he had taken a seat around the doorway.

“Why not?” the old man said.

“Suh?” T.V.A. said.

“Why don’t you worry about getting old, son? Newel here is worried about getting old. We ain’t, are we?”

“No suh.”

“Why not?” the old man demanded impatiently, turning his ear up to hear exactly what was to be said.

“Cause if I wasn’t getting no older, I’d be dead.”

“Haw haw haw haw haw.” The old man broke up in more gasps of strangled laughter. T.V.A. never moved from behind the door. Mr. Lamb banged the table with his fist and all the glasses convulsed, and tea frothed both sides of the pitcher. “You’d be dead, Newel, if you didn’t get no older,” the old man wheezed, just able to get a word free. “You, too, Hewes, you’d be dead. We’d all be dead.”

Mr. Lamb once more removed his teeth from his mouth, dipped them in his iced tea glass, wiggled them with his fingers, then let them sink quietly to the bottom. He looked up with his cheeks sucked in over his gums and his mouth flapping like the nozzle of a collapsed pink balloon, making himself look more like an old woman than an old man.

“I’ll tell you something that you don’t know, Newman,” the old man said indistinctly, folding his hands neatly in front of him. “Was used to be,” he mumbled, his teeth idling uselessly at the bottom of his tea glass, “that when a man got put in the penitentiary, the big experts on the subject come in and pulled out all his teeth, cause they had ’em a theory then that bad teeth was to blame for all the crimes. It wasn’t your childhood or whether your mother was scared by a goat, or what kind of neighborhood you lived in, or if your mother dressed you up like a girl — none of that baloney. It was your teeth. If you had bad teeth, you was a criminal. So they went in all the jails and started yanking out prisoners’ teeth, and turning them loose right and left. Now, I think that’s a pretty good idea, don’t you? I bet you didn’t know that.”

He watched the old man’s mouth work unconsciously gum to gum. “Is that where you got all yours pulled out?”

The old man smiled a dark smile, leaving his hands anchored to the table. “No, I got mine pulled out in Memphis,” he said.

“Have you committed any crimes since then?”

“Just one,” the old man said.

“What was that?”

The old man’s eyes darted and he swiped his lips with his sleeve and uncovered a big empty grin. “I had to kick the shit out of a wise-ass one day. But he was the only one I knew and I haven’t had to do it since.” Mr. Lamb’s blue eyes flickered dangerously, and he fixed him in a long intense smile. “Did you ever hear the joke about the nigger caught stealing ax handles that got called up before the judge?” Mr. Lamb stood up from the table and steadied himself on the back of his chair. “The judge looked at the nigger real careful and said, ‘Rufus, have you ever been up before me before?’ And the nigger looked at the judge real serious and said, ‘Well, I don’t rightly know, Judge. What time does you get up?’” The old man’s eyes danced back and forth, waiting for a response. T.V.A. started giggling, banging metal against metal The old man looked at them both a second longer until the smile completely vanished. “You bastards lack one necessary,” he said confoundedly. “A sense of humor. Every goddamned one of you young people don’t know what in the fuck’s funny and what ain’t. I asked some little asshole in Helena last week, just to be a-talking to him, without nothing to gain on it, just bein friendly, I said, ‘Where the hell do all you kids come from?’ And the bastard looked at me like I was a pail of shit and said, ‘You tell me. You’re the ones been having us the last thirty years.’” The old man glowered flatly and stumped away into the other room.

16

He stood looking out the screen at the woods where the moon had ignited a thin sheeny mist through the treetops. He heard the colored man come down the steps, tramp across the dooryard, and enter the other cabin. He could hear the light switch on inside, but couldn’t see the house or the light through the doorway, though he could hear the colored man’s feet on the bare pine floor. Past the haze the sky was clear. A few brief specks of cloud were drawn in against the face of the moon. He could hear Elinor making a final investigation of the perimeter of the yard, snorting in the wet leaves and pawing in the grass before passing on, her leash tinkling lightly.

He breathed through the screen and let his chest empty until he felt himself at ease. He had stood days at the gauzy window and watched the park as the evening floated up like a mist, trying to be at ease. And late in the night the miseries commenced, his eyes smarting, his tendons fibrillating. All of it caused by necessary impulses, like a box of bees whirling to come out.

Robard, who had come down ahead of him and gone immediately to bed, turned in his sleep and exhaled a long sigh, letting his hand scrape the rippled wall.

He stood at the screen, imprinted against the moonglow, hulking in his undershorts, took a deep exhaustive breath and let it out through the matrix wires, allowing the emptiness to inhabit him and for an airy moment release his mind to everything.

17

In the summer, in the tiny tourist cabin in Angola, he had sat with his father and stared out the door toward the prison, a wide barbed-wire compound, visible by day and only a ring of tiny lights at night. The day before, a brown panel truck had come down from Shreveport with the electric chair and driven through the center of town, making everyone stop in the sun and look. The state owned a single electric chair and delivered it wherever it was needed, from courthouse to courthouse all across the state to where there was someone to electrocute. At midnight everyone in the town turned on their lights and stood at their windows and waited, and when the chair was turned on, all the lights in town went dim for a time, and all the glimmering lights at the prison went dim, and in the motel room with his father he lay in the bed and watched the ceiling fan turn slower and slower until it stopped. And in the morning he had gone with his father in his old Mercury to the gate of the prison, and through and along the well-paved macadam to the compound of long white barracks that looked like chicken houses. And in the lot his father had gotten out and gone inside to a man’s office to sell him starch for the prisoners’ laundry, and he had sat still in the car in the moistened heat of early morning and stared down the long rows of chalk barracks and wondered where the dead man was, wondered if he and the dead man, an unforgiving murderer named Walter L. Magee, were locked up there together, or if in the night they had taken him secretly out of the chair and carted him into town and left him in a room overnight to cool.