A Piece of My Heart

1

Mr. Lamb sat reconnoitering the sea of bottles as if he had come on them unexpectedly and was perplexed as to how to get to the other side. He elevated the Hadacol so he could read the label against the light, and grunted when he had digested what the bottle had to say, and set it down and reappraised the remainders. He suddenly snaked out his arm, plucked up the box of d-Con, and brought it straight up into his skinny field of vision. He pondered the label, turned the box over, and squinted at the tiny red printing until he slowly began to frown and his entire face contracted into a scowl of grave condemnation.

“What the shit is this here?” the old man said. At that Mrs. Lamb sat back in her chair, bent her chin around to look at Mr. Lamb, and returned to her radio, the PBX wires swooping out her ear directly into the dark back panel of the box. “Somebody’s trying to assassinate me,” Mr. Lamb bellowed. He shoved the box of d-Con out away from his face as if it were a hateful mirror. “What the hell does that say?” the old man said brashly, thrusting the box at him with the crucial panel already rotated. Mr. Lamb’s pink mouth opened as if he planned to receive the important information orally.

He studied the box, then began to read it out loud. “Warning: Do not swallow. May be fatal if taken internally. Keep out of the reach of children. Call a physician at once if ingested.’”

“That’s enough,” the old man said peremptorily, whacking his knuckles on the table so that all the bottles moved a little sideways and the vial of liver pills rollicked and rolled off the edge. “Landroo!” he shouted.

Landrieu hooked his head around the jamb and looked in suspiciously.

Mr. Lamb’s fierceness altered instantly to a tone of obsequious affability. “Are you trying to kill me, son?” He motioned to the box congenially with his thumb.

“No suh,” Landrieu said, as if it were an idea he’d simply never thought of, and disappeared out of the doorframe, his voice trailing off into the kitchen, where he seemed to be assiduously stirring something in a pan. “I ain’t tried to kill you today,” he said.

Mr. Lamb kept talking to the doorway as if Landrieu’s head were still in it. “Well, somebody put this roach powder amongst my nostrums,” he said thoughtfully, eying the box back and forth.

“I don’t know nothin about d-Con,” Landrieu said, invisible to everyone.

Mr. Lamb sighed and carefully reorbited his thumbs, working them slowly until he got the proper cadence, then spinning them at a vigorous pace. “Well, it says there not to in-gest none of it, and somebody musta had a notion I was planning to in-gest one of these cures when he brought them out here to me.”

Landrieu declined an answer.

Mrs. Lamb sat forward, unjacked the headset, and let the radio lash forth a fierce voice speaking Spanish at a terrible rate. She regarded them both boldly as though to indicate she was understanding it as well as any Mexican. The man kept yelling, “E-u-ro-pa in-cre-i’ble! E-u-ro-pa in-cre-í-ble!” and Mrs. Lamb continued promoting it all with a triumphant smile.

“I didn’t ask you to bring me no roach poison,” Mr. Lamb mumbled underneath the sound of the radio, his thumbs filing past each other at a faster and faster pace.

“I just brung what you said,” Landrieu said irritably through the open door. “Whatever’s laying on the window ledge’s what you said. That’s what I brung. I didn’t pay no attention to no roach medicine.”

“That’s two people tried to murder me inside of five minutes,” Mr. Lamb said dolefully.

“I ain’t tried to murder nobody,” Landrieu mumbled.

Mrs. Lamb’s radio began to sound brittle, filling every squinch in the house. The old man suddenly wheeled in his chair and fired a half-vengeful, half-supplicating look at Mrs. Lamb, who was enjoying having everyone listen at top volume. He wondered furtively if Mrs. Lamb might not be of Catalonian lineage.

“Would you turn that down, Fidelia,” Mr. Lamb said patiently, audible to no one but himself. Nevertheless, Mrs. Lamb shoved the jack back in the terminal and the sound disappeared like an invisible curtain snapped across the room, leaving a discomforting quiet. Landrieu was cooking ham in the frying pan, and the hot ham scent tainted the room with a queer nauseating sensation.

Mr. Lamb abstractedly appraised the army of bottles and tablet vials.

“Are you sick?” he said to the old man, wanting to quell the sick feeling in his own stomach.

Mr. Lamb looked up at him queerly and stuffed his hands together so that his thumbs had to stop rotating. “The golden age is gone,” he said morosely, and squeezed his knuckles in a tiny gesture of frustration.

“Maybe you just didn’t sleep well?” he said, smiling and hoping the old man was not about to make him the culprit of another plot.

“There’s never rest for the wicked, Newel,” the old man said, a vague larcenous flame in his eye.

“Why don’t you see a doctor?”

The old man cocked his head to get his ear back into alignment with the sound. “What’s that?” he said.

“See a doctor?” he said, feeling less confident.

Mr. Lamb stared at him keenly as though he’d just received an insult he didn’t intend to ignore. “Because I goddamn don’t want to, that’s why,” he said, his eyes tightening into hard little twigs. “Bastards swarm you like ants on a cupcake,” he said indignantly. “When they’re done sticking and cutting there ain’t nothin left to carry home. That’s why, by God.” The old man clenched his teeth and pressed his fists against the table as if he were intending to levitate himself.

“I agree,” he said.

“What’s that?” Mr. Lamb gave his defective ear a good whack with the heel of his hand.

He shook his head. “I don’t like doctors either.” His stomach felt somewhat better.

The old man glared at him as if he suspected a plot were knitting and he was the intended victim. “You don’t?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you?” The old man inclined his head toward his shoulder at a severe angle as if he thought he could hear a lot better that way.

“All they get to see is disease,” he said, “so that’s all they recognize.” He brought his hands out of his lap and laid them on the table in a way that modeled the old man’s. “When they don’t see it at first, they keep looking. They’re not trained to see health, and I don’t like them.”

The old man’s teeth dangled slightly in his mouth and he slapped them up with his tongue. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Lamb let his eyes drift slowly down onto the army of bottles as if he expected them to say something, and when they didn’t, pushed them all off the table straight onto the floor in one careless sweep of his arm. And the clatter was immense. Landrieu sprang into the room, and Mr. Lamb gave him a victimized look.

“What’d you do that for?” Landrieu shouted.

“What?”

“Push them off and scare me like that?” Landrieu made a jerky motion with the back of his hand to indicate all the bottles and vials newly arrived to the floor.

Mr. Lamb’s innocent expression transformed into a pale malevolence which signified Landrieu had just improvidently overdrawn his account. He swiveled slowly in his chair and let his gaze settle on Mrs. Lamb, who had not responded to the clatter at all. She was seated with her back to everyone, gazing out the window into the dark, still listening, he supposed, to more Mexican travel advertisements.

Mr. Lamb turned his gaze back around as if he had just spoken with Mrs. Lamb and heard Landrieu implicated in a scurrilous falsehood. “She ain’t heard nothin,” he announced scornfully. “I ain’t. This fella here ain’t.” He batted his eyes hotly. “You the only one heard anything.”

Landrieu’s face got significantly harder. “I ain’t pickin up what nobody ain’t heard,” he said, and was gone.

The old man fingered his napkin, twisted one of the corners up into a firm projectile, and rammed it in his good ear, giving the ear a generous reaming. He turned one corner of his mouth up into an idiotic smile and forgot all about Landrieu. “You don’t like them gut plumbers, huh?” he said, twisting vigorously and hoisting his lip higher as if he were trying to hear through the reaming sounds going on inside his head.

“No sir,” he said, feeling vaguely guilty about Landrieu.

“Me neither,” the old man said, withdrawing the napkin and the waxy prong as if it were a nugget. “I feel worse every time I get close to one.”

Mr. Lamb rebalanced himself in his chair, leaned forward, and drew right up in his face. The old man’s feet accidentally disturbed some of the bottles and sent them rolling over the floorboards, and he quickly drew his mouth down into a dark conspiratorial frown, so that his eyebrows hung heavily over his little burnt-out eyes. “I’ll tell you something,” Mr. Lamb said, grabbing his wrist tightly. He could smell a brash antiseptic odor coming from the old man’s mouth. “I wouldn’t want to be a doctor on account of all the death,” he whispered, as if he’d broached an unspeakable subject. “I think when they get old, all the death comes back on ’em, and they can’t think of nothing but dying and bodies rotting and breaking apart the way they’ve seen people do all their lives.” He smiled craftily.

“Yes sir,” he said, wishing he could rescue his wrist. Mr. Lamb’s skull was visible beneath the jointure of two jaws, and from that advantage he looked like an animated skeleton.

“Mrs. Lamb’s nephew, little Ber-trand,” Mr. Lamb said privately, angling so he could eye his wife before going on, “he had him a job in Washington, D.C., examining titties and nothing else, as far as I can make out.” The old man’s eyes got hot, and he drew himself up so as to exhale more antiseptic breath directly in his face. “He worked for the government in the physicals department. Now, that’s a doctorin job I’d take to. Haw haw haw haw.” Mr. Lamb’s face became radish red and the veins in his temples fattened up like roots.

Landrieu paraded into the room, arms paved with dishes, wearing his apron and chef’s hat, but with eyes broadcasting indignation at everything in sight.

Mrs. Lamb spied him, switched off her radio, and made a way in through the bottles just as Landrieu was deploying the entrées out over the table. He swept back to the kitchen, returned with the tea pitcher, stood back reproachfully while Mrs. Lamb certified the table and nodded, then disappeared, letting the pantry door swing closed behind him.

“Me and Newel’s going fishing tomorrow,” Mr. Lamb announced, shoveling cream corn into his mouth as fast as he could work the spoon.

Mrs. Lamb regarded him sternly, as though to mark the fact that something had finally been uncovered for him to do.

“Ain’t that right, Newel?” the old man said, chewing furiously,

“Sounds wonderful,” he said, since it seemed superior to fighting all morning, then spending the rest of the day sulking in the Gin Den out of sight.

“Good,” Mr. Lamb reveled, paring off a piece of ham and dropping it directly into the corn. Mrs. Lamb was having one biscuit with drippings and another one with molasses poured in a big puddle on her plate mixed with butter so the mixture became a thick yellow paste. Mr. Lamb retrieved his ham, and went on smothering whatever was not already covered with cream corn.

“Mrs. Lamb’s a light eater,” the old man said, chewing. “Soon as it gets light, she starts eatin.”

Mrs. Lamb bent one elbow on the table and watched the old man while she chewed, as if he were an old clown that no longer amused her. Which caused the old man to waltz around in his chair and roam his eyes all over the walls.

He thought he might just change subjects and give the old man a relief. “What caused that burnt spot out behind the house?” He peered at them both at once.

“Haw!” the old man brayed, and looked supremely pleased to hear this particular subject brought up.

Mrs. Lamb gave her husband a poisonous look and rared forward over her plate as if he were about to utter a perfidy she was deadly set on suppressing.

He thought right away of renouncing the subject and going on to something less controversial, except he had somehow lost control of everything and simply had to sit while whoever did have control decided how to exercise it. There was something queer, he saw, about the old man whinnying the very moment the burnt patch was mentioned, as if the subject were a scandal to Mrs. Lamb and therefore absolutely risible to him.

Mr. Lamb squeezed tightly back in his chair, scuttled his shoes noisily against the table feet, and stiffed his arms on the apron of the table as if he meant to catapult himself onto the tabletop by means of an invisible spring attached to his seat. “That burnt spot,” he snorted, “was a house.” He eyed Mrs. Lamb cagily, his eyes sharpened. He relaxed his arms and sank back in his seat.

“My cousin used to live there,” Mrs. Lamb said loftily, as though she’d been bullied into the admission. She very carefully set down her fork, situated both hands behind her plate, and regarded Mr. Lamb coldly.

“Her cousin, John,” Mr. Lamb announced, smiling villainously, “was a comical old prune, to say the least.” He snuffed his nose like a man trying to work back a sneeze. “He had some queer habits.”

He wished someone would bring out another subject.

Mrs. Lamb was in the process of staring a hole in Mr. Lamb’s forehead, but the old man seemed to be steadily freeing himself of all outside influences, and smiling and working his teeth up and down against his gums.

“Ol John used to have him a little wood boat out on the lee hip — The devil lived here forty-five years,” the old man interrupted himself. “And before there was all the nigger trouble, when the water got down he used to get in his boat and putt-putt over to Mississippi and go to the baseball. The niggers had ’em a sandlot over at Stovall. In fact, T.V.A. Landrieu was one of their famous stars till he got too damn old.” The old man let his eyes roam to the pantry, gave Mrs. Lamb another taunting look, and curled his upper lip a little more, his eyelashes a-flutter. “Anyway, he’d go over in the evening and sit up in the grandstand and yell the awfulest nastiest blasphemies he could think of, at anybody that was on the field. He’d just give ’em all a terrible time and be drunker’n Cooter Brown by the middle of the first inning. And every time one of them devils would go to throw the ball, he’d yell, ‘Peee-uuuuuu, you stink,’ and start fanning the air with his little umpire’s cap like there was something smelled bad where he was. And sometimes they’d just have to quit, because John was up there making such a ruckus. He had a wood leg, you see, and whenever they’d send some big powerful bluegum up there to shush him, he’d pull out his old pig bleeder and stob it right in that leg and grin like he was so unmindful of stobbing things that he’d just stob himself, and the niggers all went shy of him after that. And I can’t say as I blame them, either. They didn’t feel too good about nobody that went around stobbing theirselves. They didn’t figure that was quite natural.” Mr. Lamb beamed and right away started drumming his fingers as if he was hoping somebody would ask him another question so he could give another enthralling answer.

Mrs. Lamb rose quietly and walked back into the kitchen and began speaking mutedly to Landrieu about going to Helena the next day.

“See now, I’ll tell you,” the old man whispered, grinning at him evilly as soon as Mrs. Lamb had let the door swing to, craning over the table in a craven conspirator’s posture and grasping at some part of his available anatomy and getting hold of a wrist before he could snake it away. “Johnny Carter was a half-wit,” Mr. Lamb said in a stage whisper he knew Mrs. Lamb could hear through twenty doors, which made him get itchy in his seat. The old man got a faster hold on his wrist. “Another one of his nitwit tricks was to walk in somebody’s store, pull a little bullfrog out of his pocket, and eat it. Right in front of ladies and little girls, just pop it in his mouth like a charm and chew it up, then bust out laughing. And of course,” the old man said, becoming magisterial, “all them women delivered their what-fors to me, cause they knew he was Fidelia’s kin and knew he lived out here, though that’s all they knew. But it wasn’t nothing I could do about, cause he wasn’t crazy enough to send to Whitfield, and I think if I’da ever tried, he would’ve killed me and everybody else he could of got his hands on, the same way he killed them Choctaws.” The old man relaxed his wrist and sank into a sober expression, as if at the bottom of all the foolery there lay still something altogether enigmatic and hard. Mr. Lamb’s mouth gapped open a quarter inch and his eyes got momentarily abstracted.

“How come he stayed so long?” he said, hoping the old man would say something about the Choctaws without his having to ask it directly.

The old man’s eyes stayed gazing at some point on the white pantry door as if he were envisioning something he absolutely could not reason with.

“Well,” the old man said lamentably. “He had him some difficulties. He married a little Choctaw gal up in Pontotoc County in 1925, and the wench died giving birth. And before he could do anything, a bunch of her people come and run off with the baby, which was healthy, and took it to where they was living in Rough Edge, Mississippi, amongst a bunch of lowlifes, and let it be said they wasn’t going to give it up, cause they didn’t care too much for John and blamed him for the gal’s dying. So he went up there to where they were, right in the town of Rough Edge, and stood on the front step, and said he’d come to get his baby, since it was his. And they said for him to go jump in the pond, that he wasn’t even going to get to see the baby. And I guess”—Mr. Lamb’s eyes seemed to be trying to see the past—“he must have just sheered a bolt, cause he went back down to Pontotoc and got his shotgun and come back and shot four of them dead as a Indian could ever expect to be, right out on the porch, took that baby and delivered it back to his daddy’s house in Pontotoc, and the next thing I knew he was out on this porch. And I just let him stay on, cause there wasn’t nothing else he could do. I figured he wasn’t too dangerous as long as he wasn’t around no Indians. And he stayed forty-five years, right there in that little house.”

“What about the law?” he said, not seeing any way he could be accused of soliciting if old John was already dead. “Didn’t anybody come and look for him?”

Mr. Lamb looked at him curiously as if he’d never thought about that. He pushed his little hands together in front of him, shoving his plate back, and seemed to get lost in his thoughts again. “Well,” he said, bemused, “I don’t know. Didn’t nobody ever come looking. He told me what happened right off, and I thought, ‘Shit, I’da done the same damn thing,’ and he seemed satisfied to stay out here and help around. He built that cabin, and I just didn’t never ask about no law. I expect they was after him up in Pontotoc, but I never did get private with him on the subject.”

“He did kill four people, though,” he said, trying to argue in whispers without drawing Mrs. Lamb back out of the kitchen. “Didn’t he admit it?”

“Yes,” the old man said indignantly.

“He could have got his baby some other way,” he said. “A Mississippi court wouldn’t give a half-white baby to a bunch of Choctaws.”

“We didn’t worry about no courts,” the old man said, trying to rein in his temper, his cheeks coloring a little pink.

He had a fast-failing mental picture of Hollis hitting the concrete. “Why the hell not?” he said. “Four people get blown up because some psychopath cousin wants his old man to take care of his baby, and you deprive the law the chance to settle with him.”

“All right,” the old man said patiently. “But wouldn’t you of put up your own wife’s cousin if he’d done it and it didn’t put you out any?”

“No!” he said.

“Well, goddamn it, Newel,” the old man whispered furiously. “You ought to. It’s family!” Mr. Lamb glared at him, his nubby little fists pressed on the tabletop as if he’d decided to attempt a handstand.

“But it’s against the law,” he said.

“Fuck the law, goddamn it.” The old man almost strangled himself keeping his voice inside the foot of space that separated them. His spectacles slid down onto the soft skin of his nose, and he gave the table a good shaking that made the whole room vibrate. “I didn’t like the son-of-a-bitch no better than you did. He poisoned three of my pups with thermometer mercury and stole every bottle of whore water I ever kept out here and filtered it through a biscuit so he could get hooched. He was nuttier’n a pet coon, but I didn’t law him, by God. He was Mrs. Lamb’s cousin.”

Mrs. Lamb’s face appeared unexpectedly in the gap of the pantry door, casting ominous looks over both of them, her upper lip drawn into a tight little pucker of disdain. She let the door shut abruptly and the old man got caught between his rage and his guilt.

“Fidelia,” the old man bellowed, whacking his fists on the tabletop.

No sound came from the kitchen. He pictured Mrs. Lamb and Landrieu sitting in the cooling darkness, silent, while the two of them floundered in their own conspiratorial baseness.

The old man snapped toward him, ready for another affront. “What would you have done?” he demanded, abandoning whispering altogether.

He sighed, realizing he just wasn’t up to the old man’s ferocity. Whatever the old man had stored in never-ceasing abundance was exactly what he lacked. And he wondered when his had been siphoned off, or if he ever even had it, and if he had, where it had gone. It occurred to him that if he did indeed have it, it was certainly all directed inward now, while all the old man’s fury was pointed out like ordnance at the armies of contravention and deceit that had him under constant siege. “I’d have gotten him a good lawyer, if there was one,” he said soberly, “had him plead dementia praecox, put him on the stand, and told him to act crazy.”

“What the hell’s the difference in that and what I did?” the old man said. “I saved a lie by telling one.” The old man looked at him as if it were as clear as anything he’d ever said in his life and he should see the wisdom in it and give in. “You got to have a lawyer before you can fart, don’t you, Newel?”

“Four people got killed,” he said wearily.

“Choctaws,” the old man said contemptuously. “They absconded with his baby and run him off when he come to claim it.”

“I know,” he said.

“The hell,” Mr. Lamb said. “You’re a fish, Newel, by God. You belong back up in Lake Michigan where it’s cold and wet, not down here where people’s got blood.” He thrust himself backward into his chair as if someone had smacked him on the chin.

“What happened to him?” he said.

Mr. Lamb squinted as if he were surprised he was still able to speak. “Who?” he said.

“John.”

“He died, that’s what happened to him.”

“Did the house just burn down by itself?”

The old man pinched the edge of the table between his thumb and his index finger as if he were trying to crack off a piece. “I burnt it down,” he said loudly. “I went in and I piled up all his old shit in the middle of the floor, including his umpire’s hat, and set the torch to it, by God. And that’s what’s the cause of that skint spot.” His eyes quit snapping and he seemed to lose his energy all at once, as if the recollection of the house going up had burnt off all his anger. “You know what?” the old man said, glassy-eyed.

“No.”

“Him and Mrs. Lamb wrote the state song.” The old man licked his lips and smacked them as if he could appreciate the feat. “Mrs. Lamb wrote the lyrics and John Carter made the tune. They sent it to the contest in Jackson in 1938, and won five hundred dollars and a picture of Senator Bilbo and J. K. Vardaman holding the sheet up in front of the U.S. Capitol. I told them they ought to send back the picture of Bilbo cause that little bastard was a dictator, but he pasted ’em both up on the wall in his house, and said he wondered what old J. K. Vardaman and Bilbo would have thought if they knew he had their picture up on his wall and had been hiding from the law thirteen years. And I said, Them two’s been hiding from the law longer’n that.’ I would ask Mrs. Lamb to come in and sing it for you if you wanted me to.”

“You don’t have to bother,” he said.

“No, no. Fidelia.” The old man spoke softly.

The pantry door swung open and Mrs. Lamb appeared again on the sill, regarding them both with contempt. The kitchen was black. “What, Mark?” she said.

“Newel here would like you to sing The Magnolia State,’ a cappella.” The old man had on his most beatific smile, his body erect in the anticipation that the idea would succeed.

“Well, I will not,” she snapped. “You have a lovely voice — you sing it for him yourself.” She strode around the other side of the table from the bottles and disappeared into the bedroom.

“It’s all right,” he said.

Mr. Lamb’s face sank dismally. “I’d sing it, but I ain’t got the music,” he said.

The floor squeaked in the bedroom. Outside it was dirt dark, and the light from the chandelier shimmered in the flimsy panes.

“What happened to the five hundred dollars?”

“She give it to him. She hoped he’d take it and go off to California and start a life. But the bastard stayed right there in his house, and when I went to pile all his stuff, I found four hundred-dollar bills. I don’t know what he done with the other one. Everything he ate he killed. I never seen him spend a nickel. I sent them four to the Blind Made Brooms in Jackson with his name wrote on it. What the hell. It was a paradise down here for him he wouldn’t of ever had if he hadn’ta killed them Indians. What’s the good of sending him to Parchman?”

“I understand,” he said. He felt as if he wanted to go to sleep, though he didn’t want to strand the old man, sinking lower and lower.

“You know,” Mr. Lamb said softly, his eyes shining, “I used to roam all over this island, all times of the day or night, and it didn’t make any difference where it was I went or when, I’d always see him. He’d be down at the dead lake, or squatting in the road, or I’d see him off in the trees, see his little miner’s light he had on his cap, barging around back in the sumacs doing what, I don’t know. And it used to make me mad as hell that I couldn’t go without seeing his painful presence everyplace. But after a while I got used to seeing the old prune, and sometimes I’d see him standing down at the river looking and looking over at the Mississippi side like he was trying to make out something, and then turn around and go running back off without ever having seen me, just laughing like hell. And by God, when he died”—the old man shook his head as if it were a mystery of unfathomable complexity—“I took a fear of going out in the woods after dark. I know I ain’t going to see him. And I didn’t even like the son-of-a-bitch, and me and Mrs. Lamb sat up nights conniving against him, talking about how crazy he was, eatin them frogs. I must be a fool, ain’t I, Newel, afraid of the dark?” The old man peered at him as if he were hoping to find out he wasn’t a fool at all and could declare as much to Mrs. Lamb and win back her heart before she went to sleep.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Mr. Lamb bolted back across the floor with a loud bracking and stood up. “We going fishing tomorrow?” the old man said, light revived in his eyes.

“Yessir,” he said.

Mr. Lamb began walking out before he answered, moving squat-legged into the gallery doors without turning. “I can fish and you can row,” he said. He clicked off the light in the sitting room, where Mrs. Lamb had left it on, and disappeared as she had back into the darkness.

He sat at the table, the chandelier glossy in the cheap window, showing him back his own features wide and angled, his shoulders concave as if a wind had blown them and bent them around his chest. He could hear the old man scuffling in the bedroom, his voice low and appealing. The dishes were unmoved. He stooped and began to pick up the old man’s bottles and remount them on the table the way they had been. There had been a look in Mr. Lamb’s face as if he just felt the ballast of his life going off, and couldn’t stop it, and an abstraction had come on him for the first time ever and scared him and made him go after cures, which he knew in advance wouldn’t work, since he knew there wasn’t any way in the world to end it now. Since everything you were lonely for was gone, and everytning you were afraid of was all around you.

The old man, he thought, had fifty years jump and was just now tearing apart, warring every inch, a war he felt he lacked the outrage to make, since it didn’t seem the least bit crucial to win it or lose it. He felt like a man wandering in a department store with no money and no attraction to anything under glass, but with a dilettante’s need to acquire. And it scared him. And back in some long night precinct of his mind there was a rising to get out and get on the train fast and get back before his own ballast went off and he was in the fix for good.

2

The year his father died he went in a car to Vicksburg with a boy named Roscoe Sampson, who liked to dance. In Vicksburg they took one quick drive down the red brick streets to the bottom of the hill the Confederates had defended for months, and drove along the riverfront past the bootleggers, and stared in the darkness out across the river into Louisiana, where tiny specks of houseboat lights were bobbing snugly against the other side. And when they had finished driving, Roscoe Sampson said he wanted to dance, and they bought a bottle of whiskey and a Seven-Up and went to dance in a Masonic hall where the lights were high up in the vaulted ceiling set in reflectors with wire mesh across their mouths. Roscoe found a girl and went and danced with her until the collar of his shirt was wringing wet and the red was high in his cheeks and he looked frantic. He came and told him that they would both take the girl for a drive in the car over to Louisiana into the cotton fields and that the girl would do it for both of them, because she was a typical Vicksburg girl and liked nothing better. But when Roscoe asked the girl if that would be fine with her, she said it wouldn’t and made a serious threat against him, and Roscoe came and told him he was ready to leave. In the car they drove back down toward the river, down the dark, murmuring brick streets to the bottom of the hill. And when they had driven around the same block twice, Roscoe rolled the car slowly past one house where there was a Christmas tree in the window that had nothing but tiny blue lights, and whistled out into the night and stopped. In a moment a Negro man came to the screen and whistled, and they parked the car and went in. In the house the air smelled like disinfectant and was hot, though it was cool in the street. Roscoe said that between the two of them they had one dollar and sixty-eight cents and would like to know what that would call to mind for the man. The man gave them a shabby smile and said they were lucky to be alive carrying that much money, and that as far as he was concerned it wouldn’t buy them safe passage out the front door, but that they should take it up with the woman in the room. When they got in the room, there were pictures of Jesus stuck to a vanity mirror and a narrow bed with a chenille counterpane, and it was hot. The woman, who was nice and reminded him of a lot of ladies he had seen waiting for buses on Northwest Street, said that while a dollar sixty-eight was not much, she was not busy, so that she simply pulled up her dress and laid the change on the night table, and first he did, and then he sat in the captain’s chair at the end of the bed while Roscoe Sampson did, Roscoe’s testicles bouncing against the woman like peas in a collander. And at the end the woman got up out of the bed and went to the corner behind the door and squatted over a dishpan and cleaned herself with a strong pine-scented disinfectant and a yellow sponge that smelled like the floors, and said it was the best there was when you got used to the sting and to the funny feeling it gave you way up in your stomach.

3

The morning got exploded by shotgun fire coming five feet from the Gin Den door. Robard had gotten up before light, dressed, and disappeared into the darkness. He had been waked by Robard’s jeep cranking and sputtering, and for an hour the house was still. Then somebody started firing a shotgun outside the door and whooping and making noises like the Fourth of July. He pulled himself up, holding his blanket, and looked out, leaning against the door facing. The sun hurt his eyes. It was working light down through the low limbs, making it painful to see more than a foot. Beyond the trees the airstrip was yellow and burning like wheat. A haze hung a foot over the bear flowers. The bicycle reflectors were twitching and snapping back to the far line of trees, and the whole business made seeing an ordeal.

Mr. Lamb was twenty yards from the door, facing the other direction down in the scrub brush between the larger trees and the airstrip apron, stalking down into the Crosshatch of chokeberries, a shotgun at order arms, wearing his old canvas coat and woodsman’s cap with red flaps tied over the crown. Ahead of Mr. Lamb he could see Elinor’s skinny tail curved up and around, quavering above the clutch of weeds, the rest of her body out of sight. Behind the old man, who was accosting Elinor with an awesome caution as if he expected a Cape buffalo to come swaying out of the thicket, stood Landrieu, apparently reconciled, standing nonchalantly in a pair of overalls smoking a limp cigarette, and balancing a big steel-gray double-barrel so that the barrel end rested on the flat of his foot.

He wondered how the old man and Landrieu had so promptly made up their differences, and decided it was because each one thought the other had picked up all the bottles, but didn’t dare say anything about it.

Mr. Lamb began to croon, “Clooose, clooose, now, El’nr,” as if he were casting a spell over the ground in front of him. Elinor was getting more and more jittery with the old man closing on her with his shotgun, and was probably, he thought, watching whatever she was supposed to be watching and at the same time mapping out a quick place to hole up when the shooting started.

Landrieu took a last drag on his cigarette, snapped the stub in the grass, spit, and all at once everything commenced. Two birds went up out of the chokeberries, wing to wing, directly into a spear of light, and got by the old man’s face with an unimpeded whir. The old man never had a chance and had to swing his gun up just to protect himself from the birds, who split at the very last second and fired by him in different directions, while the old man yelled, “Wuuuup, wuuuup,” at the dog, who had started barking. Six more birds rose then and went fanning through the trees in a line ahead of the old man, and he managed to get the stock to his shoulder and bust off two shots, which didn’t draw a feather. Landrieu carefully got his big two-barrel to his shoulder in case any more of the covey started back toward him, and one promptly did, getting up behind Mr. Lamb’s feet, heading in the opposite direction, and Landrieu let go at the bird head-on and hit it in a way that reminded him of atomic attacks on sturdy brick houses. First the bird was there in flight, brown and black and white and crop-winged and intent on a lucky escape, then its physiognomy got changed and none of the original features were intact. It was as if Landrieu had thrown a mottled dishrag in the air and blown a knot in it.

“Da-umn,” Landrieu said, lowering the barrels and frowning at the welter of feathers that hung in the air without seeming to move.

Mr. Lamb gave him a pathetic look and went back to scrutinizing Elinor, who clearly believed there were more quail in the brush and hadn’t much moved from where she’d been, though she had barked several times while the first birds were starting up and displeased Mr. Lamb considerably. He began crooning again and frowning at Elinor as if he thought she was stubbing at the birds and encouraging them to take flight before he was ready for them. He got behind her again, and almost even with her head, then began thrashing the brush with his foot and holding his gun up with the barrel pointed out from his waist in the direction he intended the birds should go when they went. All at once a single came up out of the cover and beat out toward the airstrip, its neck stretched and its wings reaching as far into the empty air as they could. The bird had chosen the ideal direction, and with incalculable calm the old man raised the muzzle in one smooth, articulated motion, sighted down the single barrel, paused a second while some ideal distance was attained, then squeezed off a shot that overtook the bird without seeming to displace a feather, dropping him on the skin edge of the airfield. The old man never bothered to see if Landrieu had observed the shot. He moved forward in a fell, workmanlike stride toward where the bird had hit, calling “Dead” to Elinor, who bounded out ahead of him, head high in the weeds, until she reached the short grass and pounced on the quail with her forepaws and began rending it wing from neck, anchoring it with her feet and drawing the flesh away with her strong puppy’s teeth. The old man hastened a step, arriving at the bird two seconds after Elinor, and delivered her an immense kick in the ribs that sent her head over forepaws back into the grass, losing all grip on the bird, and trying to force out a yelp at the same time she was trying to win enough air back into her lungs to keep from suffocating.

“Shitass!” the old man grumbled, inspecting the sagging bird briefly before stuffing it in his coat and starting back. “Tried to savage my bird,” he said up through the trees, making his way to where Landrieu was standing, balefully fingering what was left of the bird he’d mangled.

“Yassuh,” Landrieu said glumly. “This’un a little tore up his-self.”

“You use that goddamned Peter Stuyvesant gun,” the old man complained, coming and standing beside Landrieu as if they were waiting to have their pictures taken. The light had become more generalized, and the yard took on a waxy appearance. Elinor crept blackly up from the bushes, made a berth of the hunters, and slunk back to her loll under the steps. She paid the old man a sorry look and disappeared out of his sight, “If you’d get you a little twenty like this here gun,” Mr. Lamb continued in a fatherly manner, looking at Landrieu’s bird, then hefting his little Remington and giving it a commanding look, “you wouldn’t blow your birds apart like you do, and you wouldn’t wear yourself out portaging it around.” Landrieu’s gun was lying on the ground in front of the two, and Mr. Lamb gave it a tap with his toe as if it were a serpent he had personally scourged.

“Yassuh,” Landrieu agreed, still looking lamentably at the bung of feathers in his hand.

Mr. Lamb stared down at the devastated bird another moment, then started back to the house, talking to Landrieu as if he were still beside him.

He walked back inside the Gin Den and relaxed on the edge of the cot and listened to the two men stamping up the stairs into the house, talking loudly. The door shut and he was left in the cool of the shed, staring at his toes and thinking how to work the day. It was the day to leave, without doubt. Get the bus to Memphis and be on the late train, and sometime tomorrow find a place to stay, since Beebe wouldn’t be home and he didn’t have a key. And later he could take the IC down to school and get signed up for the cram course, and get started in the way he felt fated, if for no other reason than that was the only way left. There was a squeamish serenity in that, of choosing the only thing left, when everything else was eliminated and not by any act, but just by the time and place. It was the compromise satisfaction a person got, he thought, when he is washed up on the beach of some country after spending weeks floating around on a tree limb, too far from home ever to hope to be deposited there, and satisfied to be on land, no matter really which land it happened to be.

The only impediment to leaving was going fishing. He felt obligated to cater to Mr. Lamb, except the idea of hazarding a boat with him seemed treacherous, since the old man liked to launch around and jump to his feet the moment things didn’t go to suit him and would probably be just as given to it in a boat as elsewhere.

He dressed and slipped out in the direction of the closest woods, keeping so that the hulk of the Gin Den stayed between him and the porch.

At the boundary of the trees he stepped in two dozen yards, so that the house was visible to him, but he was not visible from the house. He watched Landrieu come to the edge of the porch, sling off a pan of water, and disappear inside. He thought maybe the old man had decided on a nap and would forget fishing, and after a while he could just come in and say goodbye, and have himself ferried back across to the bus.

He walked parallel to the road, staying in the denser woods to the end of the airfield, where he switched back to the road out of sight of the house, and struck toward the lake. The sun had moved beneath some blotchy, dark-bellied clouds, and the imprints slid over the road, disclosing the sun directly, but quickly secluding it again. Beyond the woods was another open croft hemmed by trees, the coarse grass crowded by purple thistles that sprouted the tops of the weeds and swayed noisily, though there seemed to be no breeze. He thought he heard Robard’s jeep and listened, but the sound died, and he could only hear a faint windless sibilance in the woods. He looked toward the house, saw nothing on the road, and went ahead. In the next trace of timber a block of pink salt was roped to a wood feeder crib. The area was trampled and bark was scabbed off the trees, and the low branches nipped and munched at, though there were no animals to be seen.

He walked until he could smell the warm fishy smell of the lake, and reached the hump of overlook where the jeep had been, found a sandy patch and sat, prepared to stay as long as he could stand it.

He mooned across the lake at the camp five hundred yards away behind another tier of willows, identical to where he sat watching, though sparser. He could see movement in the lot, two figures unrecognizable, three-quarters of the way between the dock and Gaspareau’s business cottage. One of them he supposed was Gaspareau, and he made a guess which it was, having it be the broader figure in the light shirt who seemed to be pointing the other man in the direction of the island, more or less to where he was sitting, which produced a prickly feeling in him as though both the figures were talking over what they were going to do if they could ever get their hands on him. He thought about Gaspareau’s little red-crust speaking hole burping out sounds when he mashed on the little metal life preserver, and wondered what he was saying and to whom, and wondered if old man Lamb’s company had finally arrived a day late. The two figures came down onto the dock and walked out as if they were going to get in one of the boats. He made out that the man he had guessed to be Gaspareau was Gaspareau. He was pointing in the direction of the mud landing, waving his cane as a pointer, indicating for the other figure, who was taller and slightly slumped, precisely where he would have to go if he was going to the island. He wondered, then, if Gaspareau wasn’t directing a poacher to the island as the old man suspicioned all along, and in arrogance of all his specific proscriptions and threats. And it was comical to think of the old man having to employ one man to watch over another who was getting paid better. After a few moments, both figures walked back off the dock and disappeared toward Gaspareau’s cottage, where he lost them in the willow mesh.

In a while he saw a dark-colored car go back over the levee ahead of a funnel of dust, and disappear into the fields. In the camp activity halted. The bight of cottages and scatter of beached rowboats lay in the sun and in the creases of dingy shade looking defunct, the possibility of new movement remote. He wondered what sorts of squalid enterprises Gaspareau could master from the boat camp, stumping around with a big nickel pistol strapped to his belly and some sinister adolescent on his payroll.

Two mallards scooted up and out of the flats below the camp, winging smartly out over the reach of open water, scanning the lambent surface as they flew, each a vigil on his own quadrant of flight. As they angled up the corridor of the lake they seemed to lose lower and lower, as though they were searching for something specific that lay along the perimeter of the willows. As they reached even with the landing cut, they suddenly veered sharply in formation, as if they had spotted where they were going and intended to bend back and drop straight in onto the stobs and cleared timber. But at the unsuspected sight of his face alone and still, gazing up white and enthralled, they wheeled and broke up and to the right, backdrafting as if they were seeking to outdistance his very sight, tripling the space between them in a matter of microseconds, and scatting in opposite directions back up the open water, the steely pinging of their wings barely breaking the silence, making him feel like shrinking back into the woods and hiding.

Robard bumped down the road from the direction of the house with a cigarette sunk in his mouth, looking wizened. He steered the jeep out of the rut, up over the willow roots, and stopped, letting the motor idle.

“I just watched Gaspareau point us out to some guy,” he said. Robard looked at the dock, a stitch at the water line. “One of them football coaches,” he said, looking at his cigarette to see if it was burning. “What’d he look like?”

“Taller than Gaspareau,” he said.

“That wouldn’t be too hard.”

“Whoever it was went back over the levee,” he said, taking a look at the long levee revetment.

The jeep motor choked out and Robard watched the lake stippling light up through the willows. “I got something I want to ask you, Newel,” he said. He snapped his cigarette in the grass, produced another one, packed it against the steering wheel, and laid it on the side of his mouth. “What is it you’re doing down here?” Robard pushed his thumb knuckle in his eye socket and gave his eye a good kneading.

“I’m forgetting all about that,” he said, and got up and stood around to the front of the jeep, feeling ready to go back.

“Life ain’t that difficult.” Robard took a match from behind his ear and scratched it off his zipper.

“I just have to adopt a plainer view of things,” he said.

“That’s me.” Robard puffed luxuriously.

“I had all these ideas I couldn’t make sense of.” He came and slid over onto the back bench of the jeep and let his feet dangle. “People’s names, a lot of things at random.”

“But ain’t that just your memory?” Robard said.

“Yeah, but it started giving me the creeps! I couldn’t remember anything else, except what had happened the day before, and some little bits of law school. Didn’t that ever happen to you?”

“No,” Robard said, touching the ash with the nail of his little finger. “I ain’t been to law school.”

He frowned at Robard, who was admiring his cigarette. “Anyway, goddamn it, I got obsessed with what the hell I knew, and all I knew was just those things — bits of time, pictures of people in my mind, little places, my old man. You can’t attach yourself to a bunch of crap like that. I sat in my apartment a solid month trying to stitch it together into some reasonable train of thought, and none of it worked.”

“How come?” Robard said, turning around as if he really wanted to know the answer.

“I don’t know.”

“How come you to leave in the first place?” Robard twisted his legs so they stretched out across the seat next to him. The air off the lake turned a vaguely fishy smell that seemed to come from the boat camp.

“It was boring as shit in Mississippi. I would’ve stayed otherwise.”

“Wasn’t your mother there?”

“I didn’t think about that,” he said, and stared off. “She died one day. That’s the only time I’ve been there.”

Robard sighed as if he were looking at everything philosophically. “All right,” he said.

“I was just going nuts up there trying to figure out if that jumble amounted to enough to say I ought to go back and pick it up again.”

“You like Chicago better now, do you?”

“I don’t care,” he said.

“You come all the way down here and you’re going back without having done nothin?”

He tapped his heels, watching the dust settle on the grass. “I figured one thing out,” he said.

“And who’s that — me?” Robard said.

“I don’t give a shit anymore,” he said precisely, listening to the air wash up through the willows. “The old man cares more than I do. It’s right up in his face all the time “

“And he’s got both feet in the grave,” Robard said, and let his chin rest on his knuckles. A strippet of the wind raised his hair against the part. “What did you think you was doing down here in the first place?” His eyes seemed to get wider.

“It feels like I remember the South being,” he said. “It seemed like a good place.”

“But ain’t you the same up there as you are right here?”

“Yeah, but I was at the end of the fuckin rope with it.” He felt morose. “I thought if I could come down here and be part of something happening, not something I remembered, that would help.”

Robard stared at him as if he had crossed over a line beyond sanity. “What’d you have in mind?”

“Anything! Shit! I thought the old man would tell me something, except he’s crazy. I thought I might know if I could just get it all into the world.”

“And what happened?” Robard said.

“I’m sick of it,” he said gloomily. “And I’m getting the hell out. Every day I think of something new that’s exactly the same. If I could fly across that water right now, I would.”

Robard cleared his throat as if he were beginning to speak, then looked at the lake.

“I thought you might be in the same kind of fix,” he said.

Robard rocked his head slowly side to side. “I ain’t in no kind of fix at all,” he said slowly, “though if I was to try to pin together my past and make something intelligent out of it I’d damn sure be in one then. I’d either get bored to tears or scared to death.” He looked up significantly, as if he considered he’d said something worth repeating. He pinched his mouth. “Except as far as I’m concerned, things just happen. One minute don’t learn the next one nothin.”

“I don’t like that,” he said, beginning to be sulky.

“Shit! If the only thing you can bear is just coming back to this little cut-off tit of nothing, somebody ought to tell you something, then.” Robard raised his eyebrows to signify he was going to be the one to do it. “If you did really want to come down here to live, somewhere, you wouldn’t choose this place, cause everything’s trapped right here, and I’m positive you wouldn’t recognize nothin else. Down in Jackson there ain’t nothing but a bunch of empty lots and people flying around in Piper Comanches looking for some way to make theirselves rich. It wouldn’t feel like nothin at all anymore, to you. Just cause you think up some question don’t mean there’s an answer.”

“I heard that before,” he said, trying to prise himself out of the jeep.

“You ought to have paid better attention, then,” Robard said, and grabbed his arm and pushed him up and out.

“The old man’s granddaughter says I ought to get in bed with her and fuck everything else.” He walked a few feet down toward the lake.

“I ain’t got no delusions about that myself,” Robard said, and sucked his tooth. “You might just get accustomed to it. I never did think it was so bad, though.”

“Don’t you take some loss, then?”

“I don’t know,” Robard said. “I agree to cull what ain’t possible and take what’s left.” He fingered a match out from behind his ear and, snapping off the head, gave him a quizzical look.

“So are you taking your own advice?” he said.

Robard pulled on his ear and pushed around in it with the match and threw the stump away. “I always do that,” he said, and smiled. “I got somebody to kick then when it all turns to shit on me.” Robard pushed the snake pedal and let the jeep jerk and kick over with a grunt and motioned him to crawl back in.

4

In the summer they were in Lake Charles, and in the lobby of the Bentley Hotel his mother took him to the fish pond and told him that in 1923 General Pershing had come and given a speech standing on the gold mosaic border of the pond, with men teeming in the lobby, smoking dark cigars. And in the street, troopers from Camp Polk had formed up in their lines to listen and be led by him back down the highway to the camp limits. The general spoke for a long time, his words being carried outside by loudspeakers, and when he walked out under the porte-cochere to assume his command, the men were mostly passed out from the heat, and some were sitting on the hot asphalt crying because they had let him down, and because they were sick to be at home.

5

On the sea wall at New Orleans there was a picture that his father took of him sitting with his mother on the white concrete wall, with Lake Pontchartrain behind them. And when the picture was taken his father came up, and they all sat on the wall facing the water and ate pralines. He had worn his brown tennis shoes and when he began to take them off to wade in the water, one of them fell in and went out of sight immediately. And his mother got him and held him so tight in the hot sun that he thought he would stop breathing.

6

When they got to the house Landrieu was just before setting foot onto the seat of an old wire-back drugstore chair planted below one of the concrete pillars that held the house up. He was clutching a spindled Commercial Appeal in one hand and what looked like a silver cigarette lighter in the other. Mr. Lamb was taking in the entire enterprise from a considerable distance, standing behind the hood of the little Willys, so that there was plenty of metal and space between him and whatever Landrieu was doing.

When he noticed Robard’s jeep, the old man started waving his hands frantically. Robard cut it off and they got out and walked around until they could see Landrieu’s face rising into the air with a look of profound uncertainty forging big clefts into the middle of his forehead. Mr. Lamb, ramparted behind the little Willys, was focusing his intensest interest on Landrieu, murmuring something unintelligible for being practically inaudible. Elinor was sitting in the seat of the Willys watching Landrieu silently.

Suddenly Landrieu achieved his full height on the chair seat, gave the lighter wheel a nervous flick, producing a large yellow flame which he aimed into the spindle of newspapers, and promptly rammed the quick-catching torch into the crux between the house and the pylon that held it up.

And all at once a great flurry of activity got centered on the area of the torch. In foisting his baton so ruthlessly into the hole, which no one could precisely see, Landrieu managed to disrupt his balance and propel himself backward off the chair, directly onto the ground, making an ugly whump sound like a bundle of newspapers dropped off the gate of a truck. And just as quickly the air around the joining got thick with flying insects, dropping out of various secondary holes and buzzing angrily, looking for the cause of all the heat. Mr. Lamb started yelling for Landrieu to clear out before the insects connected him with the fire and lit on him with a vengeance, but Landrieu was momentarily incapacitated. He had hit square on his tail bone and was lying with his arms stretched palms down, staring straight at the sky as if he were waiting for someone to ask him how he felt. Almost as many wasps were tumbling out of the area of the flames as were zizzing the air, and it seemed like considerable clumps were falling directly on Landrieu’s stomach. One fat rust-colored wasp took a low pass by his face, but Landrieu seemed not to see him and the wasp flew back into the higher atmosphere.

Mr. Lamb had begun yelling, shouting profanities and threats at Landrieu as if he thought that could devil Landrieu into recovering faster. Above him, the burning paper torch was still creviced between the house and the piling. A small feather of flame had blossomed on the wood facing, and several small curls of gray smoke began to cloud through the worm holes, making more wasps fall out.

Landrieu apparently discovered the wasps on his stomach at the very moment of partially reclaiming his senses, and scrambled up and began slapping his chest, grabbing his neck, and punching in his hair as if he had discovered stinging wasps everywhere and couldn’t get in touch with any of them.

“Looka there, son,” Mr. Lamb said, removing his attention from Landrieu and pointing out the little scroll of smoke. “You done set my house afire.”

Landrieu stopped slapping himself and stared upward at the involved portion of the house, as if he knew it was impossible for the house to be burning.

Mr. Lamb, however, was satisfied. He leaned against the fender of the Willys, twiddling with the latch on the hood, taking in the progress of the fire.

Robard suddenly appeared, sprinting down the steps of the house hauling Landrieu’s metal pail, slopping water in fat gouts. He rushed past, eyes intent on the smoke, arrived at the bottom of the piling, drew back the bucket, and threw it in the middle of the flames, engrossing everything in a great sizzling expenditure of green smoke. Water began trickling back immediately and raining drops off the bottom of the house, and Robard stood back and scrutinized the nexus of smoke for any flames that might survive, and for a moment everyone was held in thrall.

All at once all attention was drawn irresistibly upward from the segment of blacked siding to the square window just above it, where Mrs. Lamb stood, frowning. She watched them all a moment, her PBX set clamped to her head like a medieval caliper compass, focusing immense private displeasure squarely on Mr. Lamb, who was utterly stunned. And then she was gone, as unpredictably as she’d appeared, and the window was returned to the dull, murky green color that showed a fragile, watery reflection of the trees.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Mr. Lamb observed, a childish smile broadening his face. “We almost burnt up Mrs. Lamb.”

Robard started around the house looking disagreeable. He set the bucket on the bottom step and started to the Gin Den. Landrieu commenced dragging his chair toward his little house, walking in a broken side-thrown limp understood to be the result of the fall. Mr. Lamb stood beside the jeep, observing everything, his little hands nested on the fender, the same witless smile on his lips as though there was something funny happening but he couldn’t tell what it was.

Mr. Lamb turned the little smile around, and he knew the old man was just before bringing up the fishing trip. He took a fast look at the Gin Den, but Robard had disappeared, and the old man had him trapped. He wanted to let the moment slip away. He walked over beside Elinor, seated in the passenger’s seat, gave her a tap on the head, and looked up at the still-smoking facet of outside wallboard.

“Landroo, you know,” Mr. Lamb said thoughtfully, gazing at the ruined hoardings and sighing, “Landroo’s the kind of man’d stand in a storm with a teaspoon to get a drink of water.”

“I don’t much like wasps myself,” he said, keeping his eyes someplace else.

“Hell, no,” the old man argued. “Nobody does in their right brain. But most of us can keep from getting stung without rupturing ourselves.”

Mr. Lamb was counting Landrieu’s misfortune as an incalculable pleasure, fostering a real withered admiration for Landrieu, who in all the years of slandering and threats had been tricky enough to stay put. It was a measure of his intelligence that he was still there to accept the abuse, since it wasn’t so much abuse as an inverted form of sympathy, which Landrieu was savvy enough to recognize. And he himself didn’t feel at all sure that he owned an intelligence half equal to it.

“Look here,” Mr. Lamb said, very businesslike. “Ain’t you and me supposed to go fishin?” His face was very alert, and full of purposes all having to do with the business of fishing.

It caught him off guard. The old man knew very well he didn’t want to go and had tricked him and sprung it on him just at the moment he was thinking he wouldn’t have to.

“I guess so,” he said, turning back to the Willys.

“Then get your big ass in. If you can’t go huntin turkeys, then you might as well catch a fish.”

The old man started working the snake pedal with his toe until the motor concussed and the jeep broke forward abruptly without ever seeming to actually start, but just to be in motion spontaneously.

He flung his arm at Elinor, who climbed out, and he wedged himself in the skimpy little iron seat while the jeep was moving, and got his legs stuffed inside the well.

“What about poles?” he said, looking wretchedly toward the underside of the house, where the poles were strung.

“The what?” the old man bellowed, the motor whanging intensely.

“Poles!”

“Shit on poles,” the old man shouted, careening off toward the outhouse, getting both hands on either side of the wheel and seeming to lose control.

He grabbed onto the frame of the windshield to keep from being jarred loose.

“I like to telephone the fish,” the old man said craftily, and motioned with his thumb to the back of the jeep at a little black metal box with a smooth wood-handled crank and two long half-stripped copper leads fastened to gold thumbscrews at either end.

“What is that?” he said. The road had reached the line of ashes and was quickly diving off the bank over a series of long narrow rain defiles that reached down a short bluff into a bottom. The jeep was pitching violently and the old man’s eyes were intent.

“That there’s my telephone,” the old man yelled, and broke out in a raucous laugh, and the jeep almost went over on its side and he could actually feel the wheels leave the ground. The old man looked at him wide-eyed and laughed again.

The jeep ducked below the rim of the bank, and he looked back disconsolately at the house and saw Robard kneeling out in the dooryard to the Gin Den, changed into his green whipcord pants and his silk shirt with the arrow pockets, nuzzling Elinor’s head and holding her collar to prevent her from running after the jeep. He had a feeling that when he got back from wherever he was going, some inexplicable place where you caught fish by telephone, Robard would be long gone, and it made him feel queer and almost angry. And he had the sudden insignificant urge to signal him somehow, to wave his hand up, but the jeep straggled down beneath the flat marly rim of the bluff, and he was gone, and there was no time even to get his hand off the frame of the glass and into the air.

At the foot of the bluff the road commenced out through a tall shadowy bottom where most of the big trees were dead or in a state of corruption, except for sprigs of green isolated in the barren crowns where the sunlight kept them alive. The roots had elbowed through the oaty ground, and the trunks had a pale brownish veneer banding the bark three feet off the ground, and there were no limbs on the larger trees nearer than thirty feet from the ground.

There was, too, an unanticipated air change in the bottom, a cool insularity and practically a solemnity, he felt, the high interlock of dead branches and higher foliage tangled and interwoven and causing the underneath to be protected and sequestered from the island proper.

The road the old man took was a road only in the sense that several other sets of cleated tires had passed on the ground and worked triangular gauge troughs in the mud, bearing straight off through the woods out farther than he could see at any one place.

The jeep was producing a lot of smoke and terrible strangling sounds that filled the bottom, and Mr. Lamb had retreated into the clamor and begun to look a little debilitated. In the mossy light his skin was pale and the blood pounded the artery in his forehead, percolating hotly back into his brain. His frame was bent over the wheel and his suspenders had luffed forward away from his chest as if nothing were inside them to hold on to.

All at once the old man hacked up a pocket of phlegm and spat it and gave him a tricky look as if something were tempting him to speak but he was intent on keeping it a secret until precisely the right moment when he’d spring it and startle everybody.

A woodpecker swooped out on one of the oaks and went walloping down the glimmer of trail, having a difficult time keeping its fat body aloft. Mr. Lamb watched the bird keenly as if he were making a mental note of it, then glanced at him again craftily as though there had been some import to the bird’s flying the way it had that shouldn’t have been missed. He went back to staring at the tracks when he got no response.

“Did you ever hear the story of the slaughterhouse goat?” Mr. Lamb said, as if he were tired of his own moodiness and wanted to supplant it with some sort of scurrility.

“No,” he said, wondering if there was some indignity waiting to be sprung on him in the old man’s upcoming account.

The old man looked at him suspiciously to see if he could detect a trace of insincerity in his attitude toward the story he proposed to unfurl. He smiled back with as much earnestness as he could, and the old man lolled forward and seemed satisfied.

“This is true,” the old man assured him over the gurgling of the jeep. He brought up another freightload of spit and loosed it out the side. “There was this here goat, you see, a handsome big billy with a fat white chinny beard.” The old man motioned toward his own chin. “And they kept this old goat, you see, at the abattoir, to lead the sheeps and cows down the chutes to where they had stationed a big burly nigger with a sledge to hit ’em on the head and knock the shit out of them.” He regarded him again keenly, his old wet eyes glistening in the flicker of sunlight, to see if he was appreciating everything the way it should be appreciated. “Sometimes, you see,” he said, “one old sheep would commence to be suspicious when he started down the chute and take a notion he wasn’t going. Maybe he had an inkling what was waiting for him. So right away the whole damn chute would pig up with a lot of noisy sheep or Hereford cows, and everything would be topsy-turvy, and somebody’d have to wade down in there amongst them to get ’em straightened out and flowing again. But if they had that goat there a-leading them, then everything just went out smooth as shit through a tin funnel, and sheep commenced dropping like ducks at a shooting gallery, and everybody was happy, including the goat, cause just before he got to the spot where the nigger did the braining, a little Houdini gate opened up on the side and the goat trotted off one direction, and the gate closed back real quick, and the sheep just went on another couple steps, and boom! the lights went out all over town. And the goat went back around to the garbage and had him a couple of soup cans before he had to be to work again. And you see, he was a feisty goat,” the old man said. “He’d hike up on his hind legs and eat the phone directory right off the stock manager’s desk, eat up his fountain pens and his Dictaphone wires, paper clips, and everything. And then he’d turn right around and go lead another bunch of sheep down the chute to get poleaxed.”

The character of the woods had gradually begun to shift lower, allowing some speckles of undiverted light to accumulate, The dead trees had begun to disappear and shumard saplings were clustered together, tightening the trail. He smelled the aroma of stagnation from no one place, though out ahead, where he couldn’t see among the mesh of branches.

“So,” the old man said, “it got to where there was some at the abattoir didn’t particularly care for the goat, whose name was Newel, coincidentally.” Mr. Lamb stole a mutinous look at him and quickly returned his eyes to the road. “Some thought that ole Newel was considerably too big for his britches by the way he acted, eating and chewing everything his eye fell on, then turning right around as calm as you please, and leading a whole passel of friendly sheep — who was, in some ways, kin to him in God’s eye — to their eventual doom at the hands of that unerring nigger. So they gave some thought to letting him go on through the chute one day and having that colored gentleman poleax him along with the rest of the disposable livestock, figuring it would teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget. Except they couldn’t get around the fact that they sorely needed the old bastard and didn’t want to have to go to the pain of training up another goat to do what this goat already did just fine — if he hadn’t been so disagreeable.” Two tiny wads of spit had begun waging a war for space in the corners of the old man’s mouth, and had begun to interfere some with the way he opened his mouth. “So,” he said, “they decided they’d play a trick on old Newel, thinking that that would cure him of being so uppity. So they went and got him and set him down in the chute in front of a whole big drove of sheep and opened the gate, and there, of course, old Newel went, with them sheep took in following him, like Moses leading the Jews. Except that when they all got to the little Houdini gate that usually opened up so old Newel could weasel out at the last minute, the little gate didn’t open, and the force of them sheep coming down the incline shoved old Newel right into the face of that big sweaty nigger holding the bleeding sledge hammer. And quick as a flash he raised up that hammer and made like he was going to poleax Newel the same as he was any other sheep, and what do you think happened?” The old man’s voice was hoarse from shouting and he peered out with his lips everted and his eyes illuminated while the jeep wallowed on out into the full sunlight.

“I don’t know,” he said, trying not to think about it at all, since he already knew it would have him as the brunt of it.

The old man looked at him intently, suds forming two prominent white anchors in the wedges of his mouth. “He had a heart attack and died,” he shouted, a great sweeping grin overcoming his face and showcasing his teeth, waggling precariously out of his gums like a cracked porch beam. “Haw haw haw haw.” The old man couldn’t restrain himself any longer.

The jeep had suddenly lumbered out of the shumard saplings into the clear, and the old man had to stand straight up on the brake pedal to keep them from driving right on out into the water that opened all at once in either direction for a quarter of a mile, and stretched two hundred yards across into a plain of dead timber where the water simply phased out into the woods and spatterdocks, rather than coming to an end at the edge of an identifiable dirt bank.

Mr. Lamb looked completely bewildered. He was breathing forcefully and staring over the heeled nose of the Willys, his skinny brows clamped together, trying to factor out how it was he had almost run his jeep right into his own water and drowned himself in the process. For some reason, when he had started to drive, Mr. Lamb had removed his spectacles, and his eyes now looked flat and watery, and the little blisters where the pincers had fastened on his nose looked vile and scarlet as if he’d finally had to remove the glasses at the behest of a gigantic pain.

He looked and could see the old man’s mind backtracking systematically toward whatever it was he had been involved in recounting before both of them were almost pitched off in the water for good.

“Oh, yeah,” the old man said, the smile reviving. “So what do you think the morale of that story is about the goat named Newel?”

“I don’t know,” he said gloomily, resenting the old man for the whole story.

“The morale is,” Mr. Lamb said, transforming his eyes into tiny peepholes of unrivaled significance, “a smart goat will always outrun a dead one.” The old man’s eyes suddenly snapped wide open, in imitation of the response he expected to see but didn’t get. He just gazed at the old man expressionlessly to record his disapproval, and Mr. Lamb began to look suspicious and flare his nostrils hotly, irritated at not being congratulated for having brought his story to an instructive end.

“Grab the box,” the old man snapped suddenly, clambering out the side of the jeep and marching off down the shingle toward where a green Traveler was beached on the baked dirt, harnessed to another red stump up from the edge of the water.

The sun, which was just sinking below a thick cusp of cloud, banked the surface of the lake and caught light in the fine spiderwebs hung on the water beyond where the old man was headed. The lake smelled hot and sweet, and there was no movement at all on the water, only the sound of a woodpecker back up the path, an empty plock that carried over the lake and dissipated into the floating woods beyond it.

He got down and lifted the black box which Mr. Lamb somehow planned to use as his telephone, and found it was very heavy, as though it contained unalloyed lead. He set it down, bound the loose copper leads around it once, grabbed it up, and shuffled toward the boat, which Mr. Lamb had managed to seesaw onto its side, letting the water slag off into the lake. The smell of the water seemed intensest when the wind was low, and each time the sun moved from behind the cloud and burned on the surface. The lake was long and cigar-shaped, and the water was the color of liver and looked thick and creamy. It was making him feel lightheaded just to be there.

“Help me now, son,” the old man said, letting the upended gunwale rock down and starting to give it a stern hoist toward the lake. His face instantly purpled and the artery in his forehead bulged like a snake. He had a panic, right then, that the old man might just explode if something wasn’t put in his way fast.

“Lemme,” he said, setting the box on the mud and quickly giving the gunwale one menacing jerk that wrenched it out of the mud and the old man’s grasp and flung it halfway into the water.

Mr. Lamb simply stood back and looked at the boat and the distance it had cleared in one short flight, and muttered, “You gotta family to raise, son,” and then hustled around and grabbed up the black box and made for the boat. “Now I’ll get in and you push us off,” the old man said, tiptoeing out over the seats and throning himself backward in the bow end so that his pants cuffs gapped six inches above his skinny ankles, while he pondered the effects of his tussle with the boat. “Get in, get in, Newel, goddamn it!” he shouted.

He dropped the painter rope in the well behind the seat, gave the boat another, less conspicuous heave, and the Traveler sagged out through the weeds and stobs of the shallows and coasted serenely into the open water, where the reflection of the sun dulled the surface and seemed to locate the light somewhere in the water itself.

Mr. Lamb straddled around on his seat and began making a meticulous survey of the west arm of the lake, a hand on his black box and another shading his eyes against the sun. He began to worry about just what the old man was going to do once he picked out whatever it was he was hunting for, and he wondered if it was going to be the cause for some more ranting and gyrating. He slumped silently in the weighted end of the boat, fingering the loom of the paddle and waiting for the old man to say what to do.

Mr. Lamb sat another minute in the shade of his hand without speaking and perused the bank as if he were waiting for something to identify itself and deliver up a potent sign.

Ahead, in the dreamy shallows on the north boundary of the lake, he could see a family of mud turtles sunning themselves along the high side of a half-submerged oak log, unperturbed by the commotion on the water. The woodpecker struck another plock back of where the boat had been fastened, and he sat motionless in the sunshine, fingering the warm tongue of the paddle, watching the old man’s face twitching up and down the length of the slough, the boat drifting aimlessly west, pushed by the movement of stale air out of the woods. Mr. Lamb sat another minute, watching, for all he himself could tell, nothing at all. The old man had put on his spectacles and was staring intently along the bosky sides of the lake, until all at once he snapped his head around with a venomous leer and pointed toward where a hummock of mud and sticks had been heaped out of the water to make a fat gluey mound. “Row me right over to there,” he said in a loud whisper.

“Where the mound is?” he said, attempting to point out the mound with the blade of the paddle.

The old man looked at him impatiently. “That there’s a beaver house,” he whispered, and fell into unwinding the copper wires from around the box and pressuring the little gold thumbscrews more securely into their terminals.

He began to try, as he shouldered the boat across toward the beaver mound, to feature what quirk of the cut-off process had caused the formation of the lake, which was probably, he felt, a twelfth the size of the lake they had come across with Gaspareau, and apparently completely stagnant. From the appearance of the water, the slough was kept active entirely by rain and by the floods that eddied up once a year, then receded, leaving the lake replenished with trapped water. He tried to recall if he had seen evidence of a lake on the aerial map, but could only remember the contour of the island, a large blotchy teardrop imprint, bounded by the river, but nothing else. It seemed possible that the picture had been taken when the lake was dry and the ground mossed over, though it seemed equally feasible that the old man had schemed and cajoled and managed to delete the lake from the picture by design, the same way he had scourged the entire island from the official map of the Corps of Engineers.

A few yards above the beaver house, he could make out a number of white plastic jugs of the character used to contain antifreeze, floating bottom-up in a more or less circular pattern around another jug, which appeared to be impaled on a stob a foot and a half out of the water, the whole arrangement situated fifteen yards from the marshy beginnings of the woods.

“Right there,” the old man whispered, pointing at the impaled jug and the four others circling it. “Row me to that boy there.”

Mr. Lamb raised the box and resituated it on the well between his feet and smiled at him over his shoulder.

“What is that?” he said, jiving the paddle until he could feel the bottom seize on the blade.

“Huh?” the old man said, not hearing him right and directing his good ear around into better line with the sound.

“What is all that?” he said.

“That’s Landroo’s fish feeder,” the old man said, snorting as if the idea of a fish feeder were perfectly ludicrous.

“What does it do?” he said, worrying some of the cold marl off the blade with his fingers and getting a potent smell of the bottom, which was foul and smoking and made his stomach heave. He pushed the paddle back quickly and splashed his fingers in the eddies.

“You see,” Mr. Lamb whispered, “Landroo’s a cane-pole fisherman, like any upstanding nigger would be. And back up behind his little house, he’s got him what appears to be a toolbox built, with a hinged door over the top of it. Except it ain’t a toolbox at all.” He stopped and studied the white jugs as they slid toward him, as though he felt he’d explained the feeder as much as it needed explaining.

“But what the hell is it?” he said, hauling up another annoying bolus of blue smoking gunk and slapping it back in the water stoutly.

“What?” the old man said, frowning, having forgotten the conversation entirely and become reengrossed in stealthing up on the jugs.

“The box,” he said, raising his voice. “The hinge box at Landrieu’s house.”

“That thing,” the old man said, as if it were a perennial joke. “That’s his worm farm and his cricket farm and his roach farm, and his everywhateverelse kind of farm.” He snorted. “That’s one reason Landroo never cared much for John Carter, that and all the Cain Johnny raised over there in Stovall at their baseball. John was always getting Landroo’s crickets and throwing them in the fire, and Landroo didn’t like that cause he bought them crickets in Helena and paid money for the buggers, then old Johnny would come along and toss a bunch in the fire and sit there and listen at them pop, and that’d be old Landroo’s money poppin. And it made Landroo mad as hell, don’t think it didn’t.” The old man began tampering with the box as if he were planning to spring it into action momentarily and wanted to have it in a state of absolute readiness. The boat was making a way imperiously, closer in to the bank now than to the jugs or the beaver lodge. “Anyway,” Mr. Lamb said, distracted momentarily by his box, to which he administered a tentative crank with the wooden handle on its side. “Anyway, anyway, Landroo likes to fish with all his worms and roaches and doodads, except he don’t like to spend all day out in the hot sun. So he went out and got him a regular lath peach crate and filled it up with sweet hay and tied it up with baling wire, and took it all and tied him some sash weights to it and hauled it out here and dropped it where that middlest boy is, and rigged him up floats out of them Prestone jugs, and glommed a bunch of worms and roaches and crickets on a treble hook and knotted one to each of them jugs and set ’em out beside his hay bale, and them fish can’t hardly wait to get hooked up. And he’ll come out here every two or three days and paddle over here and check his ‘trotlines’—that’s what he calls them, though they ain’t true trotlines in any sense.”

He began to think that if there were already fish hooked and waiting to be pulled up on Landrieu’s fish trap, why was it necessary to do anything more than get them out and go home, and forget about doing any telephoning, whatever that was. He looked at the back of the old man’s head for a long moment.

“Why can’t we just borrow a couple of Landrieu’s fish?” he said, frowning up at the floating jugs.

“Cause they ain’t ours,” the old man snapped, and bent his head around and looked at him in surprise. “I’ll tell you, though,” he said, smiling strangely, “Landroo’s a comical old coon. When he comes out here, he won’t go right to where them jugs are at. He’ll rig him up a cane pole and take a bunch of whatever he likes that day, worms or roaches or whatever’s he got in his ‘farm,’ and start down there in them dead falls and nigger all the way up to here.” The old man grinned at him in amazement as if Landrieu were a living mystery to match all mysteries, never divining Landrieu might take some considerable pleasure in the leisurely divertissement of fishing, before he got down to the actual business of taking in the fish. “He likes to go down there and just sit a long time, watching them spatterdocks,” the old man said, grinning to prove he faithfully liked Landrieu, but was entitled to exercise his private jurisdiction as Landrieu’s chief critic and adviser. He got himself almost completely turned around, his eyes big and round and his face turned red. “And he says to me, ‘And all at onct then, Mr. Mark, them crappies commences to hist straight up in the air snatching them little skeeters off them pads and making all kinds of noise, ah-sha-sha-sha-ah-sha-sha-sha, boiling that water like two hogs on a mudhole.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, what did you do then, Landroo?’ And he said, real sheepish, ’Oh, Mr. Mark, I just eased on in there real sweet with my boat and laid my little gob of worms on top of one of them pads and one of them big suckers snatched that hook off there like God snatching back a palsied baby.’”The old man was thoroughly regaled by his own story. “But I’ll tell you,” he wheezed, “Landroo might be a real fisherman, but I had to carry him to Helena one evening with a treble hook in his forehead, bout stuck clear to his brain. One of them big crappies took a swipe at his worm on one of them lily pads, and Landroo got excited and jerked the thing back too quick and it hit him in the head like a roofing nail. And the son-of-a-bitch wouldn’t let me touch it. I said, ’Landroo, I’ll get a pair of needle-nose pliers and have it out in two shakes.’ And he said, ’No, suh, take me to the emergency room.’”Mr. Lamb looked at him, gravely questioning Landrieu’s far-reaching concept of an emergency. The old man turned and eyed the beaver house as it slid by the boat.

As soon as the boat slipped past the beaver house, Mr. Lamb held his finger to his lips and waved his other hand to signify he ought to quit paddling now and let the boat propel itself toward the jugs.

He watched the beaver house ease by, wondering if there were beavers sitting around inside or if they had heard the howling and shouting and made a fast exit. He scanned up the vestige of submerged bank, thinking he’d see a big beaver hurrying off into the denser woods, but he saw only a fat sparrow twitting and sputtering in a jungle of dead boxberries, creating a racket with his wings as though he had gotten inside the bush by misadventure and now frantically couldn’t figure how to get out.

Mr. Lamb gave the sparrow a grieved look and swiveled on his seat and drew the black box closer between his legs, holding both lead wires in one hand, and deliberately began cranking the handle. The boat began to sidle slightly, taking more of a broadside approach to the jugs than a nose-first approach. All the turtles lined along the limb of the deadfall began craning their necks to find out what was going on, though none of them seemed to think enough of the commotion to move from where they were. One finally became uneasy and wobbled to the opposite end of the log, but Mr. Lamb didn’t notice and none of the turtles seemed to want to leave for the bottom just yet. He stayed as still as he could in the back of the boat, the sun shining on the crown of his head, and let the paddle lie across his thighs so that it dripped back into the slough

Mr. Lamb gave the box several more rigorous cranks, then separated the twin wires to each hand, holding each by its rubber sleeve that had been stripped ten inches from the tip.

When the boat finally drifted by the first of the encircling jugs and sliced into the middle water, Mr. Lamb turned and gave an inflamed look and in a loud stage whisper that made the one nervous turtle dive for the bottom, said, “I’m just going to make a local call.” The old man’s eyes squeezed together as if he could barely keep back the heaves, and he promptly jammed both wire ends over the side and into the water like an old picador administering the pic to a motionless bull.

And the total effect was nothing.

Both of them peered at the water, anticipating something unforeseen to happen, but nothing did. He expected the current traversing the plus-to-minus terminals to get shorted through the boat and deal them both a sound shock. But instead he felt nothing, though he experienced a strange thrill when he saw the old man’s eyes and had tightened his ass in case the box was wound up a lot tighter than he thought.

Mr. Lamb, however, had clearly reckoned on something formidable. He glared at the water, the two discharged wires dangling from his hands, searching the surface fiercely as if he expected the surface to get suddenly thick with stunned fish. But the water stayed the same. The turtle came climbing slowly out and strained along the spine of the log and found itself a suitable location and began to take in whatever else was going on.

The old man turned and scowled back at him, as if he were personally responsible for the sabotaging, then jabbed the cords back in the water and waggled them as if he were hoping to attract whatever fish were in the area of the hay crate near the surface so he could spear them. “Shit,” the old man said, again employing the stage whisper and staring at the ends of the wires. “It ain’t a good day to fish.” He turned and gave him another belligerent look and started cranking at the box again, the two inert leads squeezed side by side in his left fist.

This time Mr. Lamb cranked a much longer time, The boat sidled in until it gently tapped the impaled jug, then sat silently in the slack water. He kept his paddle across his thighs and patted his warming crown, and watched the old man get redder behind the ears the longer he cranked the telephone. Mr. Lamb turned and fired back another irritated look while whirring the crank, and he recognized the look then as the face of dead-out desperation, frozen on the old man’s face as a fierce grimace which would not relent. Mr. Lamb looked at him with the expression of a man trying to pump air into a blown-out tire while staring enigmatically into the face of someone holding an ice pick. It was, he thought, the look of unrecognized betrayal.

The boat, with the old man’s increasing gyrations to perturb it, began to waffle precariously and send lap waves heaving under the jugs, causing them to strain against their string anchors, and making him get a grip on the gunwales and begin inspecting the timber for a place to cling when the boat eventually swamped. Waves were licking up into the trees and rising under the deadfall where the turtles were sitting silently, staring back at the boat. He felt now he should do something to save them.

All at once Mr. Lamb stopped cranking, his ears grown scarlet, and sweat thickening the collar of his flannel shirt. The old man turned and gave him a defiant look, then grabbed for the wires in his other hand as if someone else were holding them out to him and had placed them just an inch out of his reach, so that by some miscalculation he grabbed onto both spiky ends at once and discharged the entire stored-up quotient of telephonic electricity directly into his body.

“Oops,” the old man said in an obvious surprise, and threw up both his hands, dropping the cords into the water and pitching straight over backward into the middle of the boat, making a loud whumping sound on the chinky curvature of his spine, his eyes wide open as if he were about to instigate another imitation of Landrieu but had somehow gotten sidetracked. He did not hit his head. The rocker effect of his spinal curve mediated the blow so that his head only lightly touched the slatted bottom of the boat the way an acrobat’s head passingly touches the mat at the start of a somersault. His skinny ankles stayed draped over the front of the forward seat on either side of the box, and his arms flailed out to the sides partially over the gunwales. He stared at the old man for a moment, his paddle still laddered over his thighs, expecting him to jump up and start cursing. But once down, the old man didn’t move again.

He crouched forward on his knees, losing the paddle, and sending the boat into even greater flailing gyrations. He pressed both his hands against the old man’s cheeks, which were warm and sentient, though his eyes were open and unblinking and his chest was relaxed. He stared into the old man’s face, welled in between his thighs, and yelled at him so that a tiny flower of spittle sprouted on the old man’s cheek and began to slide toward his ear.

“Mr. Lamb!” he yelled, his voice careening through the rank woods and disappearing. “Mr. Lamb!” he shouted, as if the old man were at the opposite end of the lake and could not hear him.

The old man’s blurry eyes turned pale and glaucous and his face became famished, the color of the sky. He sat back and stared at the face, shaded in the thick well of his thighs, until the adroitness of the old man’s death refrigerated his own insides and left him with a very businesslike feeling of needing to act efficiently and without excess of energy, and to become as unquestioningly useful as he could to anyone within a hundred miles. He pressed his hands again onto the old man’s cheeks and found that they were warm, but less warm than before, which seemed to him more or less correct. The idea crept into his thinking that perhaps in the fraction of a second between the time the old man had completed the circuit of the telephone and the time his eyes had frozen open staring straight up at the sky, his face becoming white as sugar, then gray, he could have done something, could have sealed his mouth over Mr. Lamb’s and blown for all he was worth and inflated his cavernous old lungs and started his heart to thumping by the simple gale force of all his own lung power concentrated inside the old man. But then, he felt assuredly, there simply hadn’t been the time. A year ago he had sat in Beebe’s apartment on Astor Place and watched a football player die of heart failure, draped over the thirty-five-yard line, and later the announcers declared the player was dead before he hit the ground, maybe even in the locker room hours before. If this was so, he supposed, the boat still teetering under him causing the old man’s face to wag back and forth against his knees, then this old man was dead before he even got in the boat, since nothing could’ve worked such a devastation on him in so short a time, unless it had gotten started some time earlier. And without divine prescience of whatever it was starting, he had been helpless to assist the old man at all.

His back began to tighten and his knees began to strain against the ribs of the boat. He sat back and rubbed the furrow in his forehead for a long time and gauged his own breathing. The old man looked thin as paper, his temples sunken considerably, and absolutely ridiculous lying in the floor with the mallards flying off his collar and his yellow suspenders gapped above his shoulders as if they had been made for a much taller man. He reached down between his legs and mashed his eyelids down and noticed how simple and unspectacular a matter it was to do that, since the lids closed willingly and stayed shut without the slightest effort, as if there were no difference in being closed and open. Though the old man looked unmistakably dead now, and the businesslike impulse rose in him again, and he reached for the stob where Landrieu had impaled the white jug, threw the jug off, and pulled the boat over to where the paddle had floated. With the paddle he piloted the boat over to a patch of quavery ground, got out and towed the boat up partially, took off his shirt and draped it over the old man’s face. He scanned the cluttered end of the lake and saw nothing. The turtles had departed the deadfall, and the lake was empty and somnolent. The sun was forty-five degrees off the top of the woods, shining out from behind a long peninsula of crusted clouds. There was the smell of rain mingled with the rank scent of the water, and with his shirt off he felt the breeze slide against his stomach, causing his flesh to run up into the hollow of his ribs, and he rubbed himself and turned toward the sun and tried to let it warm him, but it wouldn’t.

He pulled the old man’s arms off the gunwales and fixed them at his sides. He lifted his skinny ankles off the bow seat, folded his legs in such a fashion that his knees listed against the sides, and put the black box by his feet for support. He grabbed the bow handle of the boat and pushed off back into the lake, letting the boat scrape through the shallow grasses, perched on the narrow bow on his knees, poling the boat farther and farther into the lake until he could no longer touch the marly bottom with the blade and until the boat, with the old man down in the broad flat end, rose out of the water like a gondola cruising some still and rancid waterway, and he the fat and efficient and shirtless gondolier.

7

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1953, his father brought him downtown and left him in the lobby of the King Edward Hotel while he went away to the mezzanine to talk to a man about selling starch in Alabama. His mother was home in bed and too sick to watch him, so he sat in the lobby and watched the men standing against the fat pillars smoking cigars and shaking hands for minutes at a time. In a little while a midget came into the lobby wearing cowboy boots and a Texas hat, and attracted everyone’s attention as he signed his name to the register and gave the bellboy a tip before he ever touched a bag. When he was ready to go to his room, the midget turned and looked around the pillared lobby into the alcoves and foyers as if he were looking for someone to meet him. And when he saw the boy sitting on the long couch, he came across in his midget — s gait that made him look as if he were wearing diapers, and told the boy that his name was Tex Arkana, and that he was in the movies and had been the midget in Samson and Delilah and had been one of the Philistines that Samson had killed with the jawbone of a mule. He said he had seen the movie and remembered the midget fairly well. The midget said that in his bags he had all his movie photos and a long scrapbook with his newspaper clippings which he would be glad to show him if he cared to see. Most of the men in the lobby were watching the two of them sitting on the couch talking, and the midget kept watching them and talking faster. When the boy said he would care to see the scrapbook and the photos, too, the midget got up and the two of them got on the elevator with the bellboy and went to the midget’s new room, which faced the street When the bellboy had left, the midget took off his shirt and sat on the floor in his undershirt and opened the suitcase and went jerking through the clothes looking for the book while the hoy sat on the chair and watched. In a little while the midget found the broad wooden-sided book and jumped on the bed, his cowboy boots dangling against the skirts, and showed the boy pictures of himself in Samson and Delilah and in Never Too Soon and in a movie with John Garfield and Fred Astaire. There were pictures of the midget in the circus riding elephants and sitting on top of tigers and standing beside tall men under tents and in the laps of several different fat women who were all laughing. When they had looked at all the pictures and all the clippings, the midget said that he was sleepy after a long plane ride from the west coast and that the boy would have to go so he could go to sleep. The boy shook hands with the midget and the midget gave him an autographed picture of himself standing on a jeweled chariot with a long whip, being pulled by a team of normal-sized men. And the boy left.

When he came back to the lobby his father was waiting for him, smoking a cigar, and he showed him the picture of the midget in the chariot, and his father became upset and tore up the picture, and went to the glassed-in office beside the front desk and had a long talk with the manager while the boy waited outside. In a while his father came out and the two of them went home where his mother was sick. And late in the night he could hear his mother and father talking about the picture and about the midget with the cowboy boots on, and he heard his father say that the manager had refused to have the midget thrown out of the hotel, and in a little while he could hear his mother crying.