Fun With Problems

The Archer

IT WAS SAID OF Duffy that he had threatened his wife and her lover with a crossbow. His own recollection of that celebrated night was scattered, but the heroic archaism of the story, featuring Duffy, his ex-wife Otis, the young novelist Prosser Spearman and Duffy's well-oiled, homemade, hair-trigger mechanical bow and arrow, kept it ever new. Each autumn it was revived, like a solar myth, for a new generation of art students.

"Never happened," Duffy would snarl when some kid worked up the nerve to confront him with the story. The brazen student was almost invariably female, often some wild-eyed, self-destructive, druggy, sexually alluring waif, a girl possessed of an original talent, deficient only in draftsmanship and sense. "Pure invention," he would insist.

But Duffy himself was not so sure. And no one wanted to let the story pass out of currency. It survived as an oral recitation rather than a text, suggestive in its passion and formality of medieval romance, the chanson de geste, the border ballad, irresistible to young troubadours.

One winter night, the story went, the snow lay deeply on the ground. (It was always a winter story; there was always a lot of snow. Why?) Under the blizzard's whirl Duffy sat in the cold and dark of his parked car, bitterly watching his own house, savoring with saturnine irony and rage the jolly fire at his cozy hearth. In the cheery warmth of the living room, he knew, the rat-haired potbellied writer Prosser Spearman was having his way with lithesome Otis, Duffy's wife of some years. In the dancing light and shadow, on his own wolf skins and woven rugs, she was bestowing on Prosser the turns of her perfect derriere, her small round breasts, allowing him the very wands and cups, swords and pentacles of all that was Otis.

Duffy remembered that part of the evening well enough. He remembered also the lush consolation of the expensive single-malt that fueled his tears. His sitting out there — it had all happened. And that he had a crossbow, that he had made it himself as another man, Prosser Spearman for example, might delicately fashion his own harpsichord? True as well.

Next, according to the ballad, Duffy climbed from his car with the kit-assembled crossbow armed and set. He made a grim, unsteady shape under the falling snow, moving across the icy drifts of the road and of his own lawn. There was a glass-paneled door that opened to his studio, adjoining the living room where Otis and the inventive scribbler wantonly lay. He found it open to the turn of his hand. He slipped inside. All that, Duffy realized in a combination of recall and later evidence, had taken place.

Then, they said, in the studio Duffy had taken off all his clothes. Except, they said, for his Jockey shorts — Jockey shorts and the tweed Connemara angler's hat he always wore against winter storms. Then he had charged into the snug warm parlor and aimed his polished oaken crossbow's arrow at the adulterers before his fire.

"All right, motherfuckers," he had screamed dementedly into the night, "Cupid is here."

Well, Duffy thought, maybe so. But it was his house, his crossbow, his Otis. How, he might have challenged anyone — perhaps he had — was he to know what posing, juiced-up, cut-and-paste bastard of a creative-writing creep was on his floor? He might have been defending his home and his wife's health and safety. Duffy knew better in these weak piping times than to speak of honor.

Whatever the circumstances, Otis had been very angry. So angry that she had ended by marrying the talented youth, a scandal since he was ten years her junior. The young writer had divorced his own wife, preempting her elopement with the chairwoman of a women's poetry workshop she had been attending.

Duffy was lucky enough to keep his job at the college, but he lost the faculty house that he and Otis had occupied, the very house where he had confronted his betrayers. This meant that the male tenant of the house was now his enemy and Otis's husband. This circumstance caused him a great deal of regret and rage. He had no choice, however, but to digest the venom of his spleen, since neither Otis nor the college nor the town would be complacent in the face of another of his potentially homicidal assaults.

Things improved slightly. For instance, he was able, catching Otis in one of her wayward moods, to engineer a reconciliation of sorts. The fact was he had missed her unruly companionship, and he felt grateful and meanly satisfied to conduct a ragged liaison with her. Lying beside her on what had once been his living room floor was both exhilarating and distressing. To creep with the stealth of a burglar out of what had been his own natural space was a sordid humiliation. Sometimes he made up his mind to leave the job and the town and the proximity of Otis altogether, but necessity kept him bound. Sitting in ambush on that fateful winter night had nourished his taste for single-malts, which he went on buying and drinking for the length of time he could still afford them. Eventually he found other, less costly stimulants. In the years following his divorce from Otis, his drinking and doping increased, along with his tendency toward anger and melancholy. He occasionally encountered his rival in town and had to endure Prosser's fear and deference, a craven, insolent submission that might well be taken for sympathy. Plainly, Duffy thought, when the boards of Prosser's usurped house creaked in the night he must imagine — whatever the literal facts had been — that Duffy and his crossbow had finally come for him.

As time passed, Duffy increasingly took up the academic craft lecture circuit to escape the heart of the dark New England winter. Winter was hardest for him, the season of his sorrows, and it was especially hard when he passed what had been his own house, swathed in its warm hibernal glow. At the beginning of one winter break, with homely winter celebrations of goodwill thickening the air, Duffy drove to the airport by a route avoiding the house he had shared with Otis.

He was headed for Pahoochee State University on the Gulf of Mexico, via a change of planes in Atlanta. Years before, Duffy had looked forward to these escapes to what had been, then, almost exotic parts of the country. Lately, and on this trip in particular, he became increasingly distressed. He drank Scotch from his concealed flask in the lavatory, coming and going under the toad-eyed inspection of the chief flight attendant. Wary, he gave her no more provocation than a cheery countenance.

"Is everything all right, sir?" she asked him on his fourth trip. Hoping, he supposed, that in answer he would roll in the crumb-speckled aisle and foam at the mouth, curse God and die.

"Outstanding," Duffy told her.

As the aircraft, jammed to within a single breathing expanse of claustrophobia, swooped low over alligator-infested pastel swamp, Duffy was already thinking with loathing of the subject of his Pahoochee lecture. Contemporary American painting, more or less, and how it had got that way. What flashed through his mind unbidden was the late works, the fulsome tropical mannerism, of Joseph Stella — the poison-colored palmettos, the mercury-colored syphilitic sunsets. The interior of the plane on landing seemed so impacted with flesh that it would have required only one neurasthenic's psychic break to be transformed into a thrashing tube of terror, a panic-driven, southbound rat king of tourists headed for the offshore ooze.

By the time Duffy arrived at his hotel, a swollen country fatboy of a sun was sliding under soupy ripples into the Gulf. All along the shore, lights were coming on in the conglomeration of entertainments that had piled onto the reeking mudflat between the interstate highway and the beach. Squat paddlewheeled casinos were fast to what remained of piers and fish houses — faux bateaux, they might say — in keeping with the phony Cajun ambience where the good times rolled and roiled. Lap-dance joints and triple-X fuckbook stores abutted ten-story hotels jimmied into one of the four-story barracks buildings left behind by the Navy. Layers of stuccoed box bungalows leaned on thin concrete walls lit by tiki torches, enclosing tin pastel swimming pools. As far as the point at the end of Atocha Bay, this swirl of notional construction followed the curve of the coast and the highway. It was all as polymorphous and promiscuous as the contents of a shopping cart, as tightly packed and equally replete with bright plastic. There were all sorts of illuminations — beguiling digital billboards, flashing bulbs and bright fifties neon. In the trailer parks people had wound strings of Christmas lights.

Duffy leaned on the railing of his room's jerry-built balcony, risking death, defying it. This particular expedition, he thought, had perhaps been a mistake.

To provide an exoticism to match the tiki torches, palm trees had been planted along the noxious interstate — new ones every year, he happened to know, to replace the ones poisoned by fumes and salt. Their fronds hung despairingly in nets of Spanish moss or stiffened in the slack wind. The doomed palms with their spiky crowns reminded Duffy of a crucifixion. Insolent posters were affixed to their suffering trunks with cruel nails the size of industrial staples, threatening passersby with the judgment of Christ. Artificial palms stood at intervals among the others like Judas goats at a slaughterhouse to encourage and betray the doomed natural ones. The tiki-torch fuel, together with road stench and beach barbecue pits, gave it all the aroma of a day-old plane crash.

It was all too much for Duffy. He considered climbing over the rail and splattering himself on the hotel marquee or at least vomiting into the parking lot. Instead he wept. There was nothing he hated so much as to be where he was among the dirty-smelling rivulets of the Gulf of Mexico.

Very shortly, as he knew, the phone would ring and they would come for him. He was dining that evening before his reading with a professor from the university. And also, it seemed, with the professor's entire overextended family, wife, children, in-laws, all visiting from Mrs. Professor's homeland, wherever that was, a land of healthy palm trees and subsisting folk. The professor had proposed to bring them all. Would it be all right? Sure, Professor, Duffy had assured him. A pleasure!

Before going out, he cut himself on the cord that secured the lock of the minibar, scattering small gouts of blood on the carpet and his television screen. He tried to ease the flow with cold water from the bathroom tap, but the tiny wound kept bleeding. He bent to drink from the faucet; the water tasted of baitfish and the Confederate dead. In desperation he wrapped a wad of toilet paper over his finger. Finally, as he knew it must, his telephone rang. He cringed. In desperation he took a sip from his liter of booze. Nothing good came of it, neither comfort nor light.

"Hi, Jim," the voice on the phone said. "Hank Rind down here. Got the folks with me."

At first Duffy could make no sense of it. But of course, Professor Rind was the man from Pahoochee State University, where he had come to lecture. He had signed his letter "Henry Rind, Head."

"Hello there," Duffy said.

"We're all here!" Rind said. "Can we come up?"

"Up?"

"Up to your room, Jim. The boys would love to see the water. They like to ride the elevator too."

Duffy was silent.

"No, really," Rind said. "They like to look out the window."

"Maybe they'd like it," Duffy said, "if I threw them out the fucking window. How many are there?"

There was no answer for a moment. Then Rind said in a merry voice, "Only two, ha ha."

Duffy was frightened by the force and vividness of his imaginings. He envisioned the professor's children, although he had never seen them. He saw himself pitching them over the balcony to descend into the hellish night, like bales of tea into Boston harbor. The image was so congenial it seized his troubled mind with a maniac's grip. He realized he had spoken inappropriately.

"Just a bad joke, Hank. A dumb gag. Trying to be funny again, you know?"

"Oh, I do, Jim. So what floor is it again?"

The place was of Moloch, Duffy thought, and deserved a rain of screaming children to incarnadine the tin pool.

"Don't move," Duffy said. "I'm not dressed. Stay where you are." He hung up and hurried to the bathroom, splashed some polluted tap water on his face and wrapped more toilet paper around his bleeding finger.

The narrow hallway outside was lined with trays of spoiling food that rested in front of many of the room doors. Duffy struggled with claustrophobia in the mirrored elevator. To accompany passengers on its funereal descent, it played them the Pahoochee State fight song.

At the lobby, the elevator doors opened with a plink on the Rinds. The professor was tall, pale and sneaky-looking. His wife, like his Otis another professor, was outrageously beautiful, silken-haired, almond-eyed, ivory-skinned. He had heard she came from an ex-Soviet autonomous zone beyond the Artaxes, where Nestorians and Yezidis worshiped Gnostic angels. Her name was Eudoxia; her smile was polite but disappointing. With the couple were Eudoxia's parents, a sharp-faced, eager old man and his lady, withered and fatigued. The two boys who enjoyed vistas were round-faced and lustrous-eyed, and Duffy thought one was making insolent faces at him.

"Say hi to our guest, guys," the children's father said. The children said nothing.

"Hello, everyone," Duffy told them.

They all went into the Petrel's Perch, which was the name of the hotel's nautically themed restaurant. The two young Rinds fought silently but viciously over chairs, each one landing masked tae kwon do strikes. The professor and his wife took seats at opposite ends of a rectangular table. Duffy eased himself in between their parents. The old pair conversed past him in French, which they seemed to be certain he would not understand. It was so.

"A pleasant trip?" the professor's wife asked Duffy. "One hopes?"

"Very nice," Duffy said, sniffing Eudoxia's sandalwood scent. Only ex-Soviets were so haughty and serene.

"Tell Mr. Duffy where you saw his work, Tanko," Rind urged his elder son.

"In Copenhagen, I think." The boy smirked. "It was hot. Like deliberately nutso," he added, glancing mischievously at his mother. Her disapproving frown half concealed delight in his insolence.

"It reminded us all of the German expressionists," Hank Rind hastened to say. "Like Otto Dix, maybe."

Duffy stared at him.

"Otto Dix?" He dutifully tried to remember the painting that had been to the Louisiana Gallery in Copenhagen. "Otto fucking Dix?"

"Sort of," Rind said uneasily. "Expressionist paratroopers attacking a woman. Blue sky, clouds. Soldiers in green cammies. Nude woman."

Antiwar period, Duffy thought. Ghastly stuff, if he said so himself.

"Of its time. Great stuff."

Duffy thanked him as courteously as he could manage.

"To leave a mark in history is good," said the senior Rind, the dignified arrogant old man.

"Damn right," Hank Rind said.

The children stopped shoving each other under their mother's gaze. Duffy ordered whiskey, and the thin waitress told them no alcohol could be ordered. Sunday in Pahoochee. Duffy was upset. Regardless, he had brought his flask from the plane. When the waitress's back was turned he took a slug from it, ignoring the Rinds. Although he was not quite aware of it, he had passed an undetectable line between inebriation and riot.

"Ah, fuck me," said Duffy the artist.

The children stared at him. The adults studied their kidney-shaped menus. The waitress, apparently a hard-living old salt, waited.

"Do you serve crystal on Sunday?" Duffy asked her. She seemed amused; it was a pretty tough town. "Sure," she said. "No alcohol, though." She turned and walked away.

"What is crystal?" the grandmother asked.

"It's what we use instead of betel nut," Duffy told her. "A related substance."

The émigré Rinds looked blank but were sensitive enough to know they had received a deeply wrong answer. Duffy, distracted, was picturing Eudoxia Rind nude and crushed by roses for her beliefs. Something about her name.

A new waitress appeared, a virtual child, wearing a little blue badge that said "Staci." Duffy noticed that the menu made much of crab. Crab salad merely, but there were happy crab caricatures with antennae and puns about crabs and claws and Claude and on and on. He began pouring whiskey from the flask into his water glass, holding them under the table. Staci came back and caught him but stayed gamely cool. Thinking somehow to reward her discretion, Duffy ordered the advertised crab salad. The Rinds ordered the soup. When the child returned she carried a tray lined with cups of thin, gruelish gumbo and a heaping serving dish full of iceberg lettuce and pale tomatoes and red-veined crablike stuff.

"Oh, wow," Professor Rind exclaimed. "What a lot of food."

Duffy grunted and tasted his.

"Looks mighty good, though," Rind said. His in- laws only watched him. One of the kids sounded a raspberry.

Duffy sipped his whiskey and looked down at the stuff on his plate. "This isn't crab," he said softly.

"Oh, sure it is," said Professor Rind.

"The fuck it is." He looked around for Staci. The place was fairly crowded. When he had spotted her, he motioned with a crook of his finger.

"This isn't crab."

Staci's neck was very long, the painterly Duffy saw. A duckling, though not a dreadfully ugly one. Something of a ducky, in fact. But confused.

"Oh, sir," she said, inspecting his plate. "Yessir, it's all crab." Staci smiled cautiously. "Like real fresh."

"It may be real fresh," Duffy said. "It may be fucking alive. But by Christ it ain't crab."

"Oh," Staci said.

"Let me tell you what it is, sweet thing." He had risen to his feet and raised his voice. Among the Rinds, only Hank looked at him. People at the adjoining tables looked also.

"It's some rotten thing out of a tube. Made by people who hate us and think we're stupid."

He looked around and gave the room a hateful glare.

"Because we are stupid! They've invented this red crap, oozes out when they squirt it. So it's red, see. Because Americans are moronic cupcakes who could be induced to eat their own shoelaces. So this shit makes it."

Mrs. Rind rose majestically, nudged her plate aside and spoke an order in Indo-European to her children. The three marched away and Duffy looked sadly after them. His favorite Rind had bailed. He turned his disappointment on poor Staci.

"Especially on Sunday in Pahoochee. Where I'm sure it's a favorite."

Staci's nestling's neck reddened. The older Mrs. Rind stood and hurried the way her daughter had gone. Hank Rind and his father-in-law kept their chairs.

"You go in there, pumpkin," Duffy told the girl, "and you tell the thief that employs you that he's a liar. Tell him that if he keeps on selling painted fish guts, I'm going to put him in jail." The young waitress started to flee, but Duffy called her up short. "And you're going up with him, Staci, Magnolia, whatever you call yourself professionally. Unless you stand up in court and rat him out. I mean only to frighten the child," Duffy explained to the other people in the restaurant. "She's not the one to blame."

There was a disturbance in the kitchen. Shrieks and incredulous roars emerged from it. No one in the dining room was eating. Security men in blazers had gathered at the door leading to the hotel lobby, awaiting orders. Shortly, from the kitchen came a fat perspiring man. He wore a black-brimmed sea captain's hat with red stains on the white part. There was a blue-and-white sailor-style neckerchief around his rubbery neck. Duffy thought he looked like neither a chef nor a mariner. He looked at Duffy, shaking with fury. Duffy stood his ground.

"Were you off somewhere?" he asked the cook, looking with contempt at the man's attire. "Was your riverboat about to catch the evening tide? Keeping steam up, right? Then, when the health department shows up, you disappear into the bayous. Mammal on the menu, folks!" Duffy shouted at the top of his voice. "Chef Boyardee here is a-gonna skin us some muskrats. When he runs out of fish-flavored toothpaste and red dye."

"You damned drunk," the enraged man screamed. "What the hell are you calling me?"

Duffy's rage increased.

"I'm a-saying you a warlocky witch, motherfucker. Bad man wizard. I'm a-saying you bad food poison man. I'm a-saying they gonna send you back to the swamp to be drowned in shit."

Duffy managed to sidestep the fat man's expertly executed kick, intended to painfully disable him. Two waiters caught their boss and only with great difficulty held him back. The small waitress looked on in tears.

"You no-good bastard," the cook cried, indicating Staci. "You bastard, you made her cry!" Altogether beside himself, he paused for breath.

Duffy drew himself up to his full height, which was about five foot nine.

"That's because her time to weep has come," he said viciously. He pointed his finger in the cook's face. "Yes, M'sieu Escoffier." Duffy turned to look over his shoulder, feeling, incorrectly, that a wave of support was gathering behind him. "The time has come when we must all weep. Because, goddamn you, you filthy poisoned rat, whatever you've done in there to that poor young girl — a child half your age, you scum — there shall be no more of it, I promise you." Blind to the chaos around him, Duffy carried on upbraiding the chef as a security man, aided by volunteers from among the male customers, wrestled him toward the door. At this point, in custody, he broke down and wept himself. "Christ's blood! Crab? Don't make me laugh. The only crabs you people got is in your pubic hair!"

It was all he remembered of the evening. Next day, the Rind boys found their way back to the Petrel's Perch in hopes of seeing more of Duffy.

Of course he had missed the lecture. At Pahoochee State College — or University, as it had been lately designated — colleagues rallied round Hank Rind to console and embrace him. Secretly, though, ill-wishers chortled and claimed never to have had any regard for him or for Duffy or his work.

Enormity descended. He was awakened by a policeman — in his experience always a bad sign. An African proverb he had learned in the Peace Corps went something like, "The morning policeman shoots the mice to frighten the monkeys." The maddened policeman, morning's minion. Despite the early hour, a man who said he was the manager of the hotel appeared, another who claimed to be an assistant district attorney, and several of the hotel's security stooges. One of the stooges was charging Duffy with assault, the felony compounded by his brandishing of a ballpoint pen. Brought before the town justice, Duffy had no choice but to call his estranged wife for bail.

When his turn at the phone came, he called collect, in violation of the instructions on the sign over the phone. To his relief it was Otis herself who answered. Otis who must know that it was him she really loved. Otis, descendant of an insane signer of the Declaration of Independence. But when he recounted his story, she was bad Otis.

"I'm so sorry," Otis said weepily. A false voice, Duffy knew. "My purse was stolen in the supermarket. I've canceled all my credit cards. Each and every one."

"You gotta be shitting me," Duffy suggested.

"Alas not."

"Well, how about a check?"

"My checkbook is with it, Jim. I've stopped all payments."

Duffy swore so foully that even his fellow inmates at the county jail were dismayed.

"Honestly," said Otis, "I am sorry, darl. But I'm not sure I can cover what you need. Frankly, you've been in the drunk tank before. All things pass, big guy."

"This is no drunk tank," Duffy pleaded. It was, finally, a lie. "Do you know where I am?"

"Yes, I think so. How funny! Because I was just reading about the state prison there. The book is called Worse Than Slavery."

Duffy paused to gain control of himself.

"Otis, sweetheart, I need your help badly."

"I know, my dear. My help isn't what it was."

"Please, baby." Duffy's fellow inmates, a generally semiviolent lot of drunks and panhandlers, laughed openly. It was impossible to converse discreetly. "What about your boy toy there? He's got bread."

"Bread? Aren't you quaint. Do you mean Prosser? Yes, he has 'bread,' I suppose. His latest novel is pretty successful for a literary book."

"Isn't that nice?" Duffy said. "So get three grand off him. I'm good for it."

"I'm surprised at your lack of — what shall I call it? — pride?"

"You tell that illiterate pinhead he better cough it up. Otherwise his ladylove's rightful spouse will — in the fullness of time — go up there and make him eat a hardcover copy of his successful literary book."

"He's not afraid of you, Jim."

"Really? Then he's made real progress in fear management. How's his ex, by the by? Still cochair of Lesbian Gardening?"

Otis tittered wickedly. Once, to hear Otis titter was to possess her.

"You may not be ashamed to ask for Prosser's help, Jim. To tell you the truth, I'm ashamed to ask on your behalf."

"Oh, bullshit, Otis. Stop fucking around! Is he there?"

"I'll ask him to call you, dear," she said delicately.

Duffy stopped to consider his options. It would not do to have her hang up. All at once it occurred to him that Otis, in her abysmal deviousness, was helping him out after a fashion. Only by knowing her as well as he did could he realize that she was distantly suggesting a strategy: that he lean on the husband himself, man to man, as it were. As to whether she had really lost her bag? Unknowable.

When the call came, it was Prosser phoning from his office. As if, Duffy thought, he felt he would be safer there.

"Hey, Prosser! Oho, man!"

The response was a charged silence.

"Hey, how's everything, Pross? How's the wife?"

Prosser did not ask which.

"Ah," he replied without much inflection. "How are you, Jim?"

"Prosser?"

More anxious silence. Good, thought Duffy.

"Prosser, I'm where the prisoners rest together. They hear not the voice of their oppressor."

"Really?" the novelist asked uneasily. "Where's that?"

"It is hell," Duffy said. "Your old friend is in hell." He was moved to pity at his own condition. "Honest, can you help me?"

"I don't know, Jim. How?"

"Listen, can I tell you something? May I presume? I know our relationship is awkward."

A sniff of distaste. "Yeah, sure."

"The thing is, Pross, I thought I had found Jesus Christ. He was my personal savior. Honestly! I know you'll scoff."

Prosser did not scoff. He seemed to be listening quietly.

"But the individual I mistook for Jesus Christ was not. He wasn't Jesus at all. Can you guess who he was? Can you, Prosser?"

"No," said Spearman. After a moment he asked, "Who?"

Duffy looked over his shoulder to see whether the duty deputy might be eavesdropping on his plaints. But the man was occupied with the color ads for phone sex in his copy of Penthouse.

"He was Satan!" Duffy cleared his throat for resonance. "Yes. The Prince of Darkness himself. Horrible," Duffy moaned spookily. "Satan," he whispered thickly. He tried not to overdo it. But Prosser had a craven's imagination.

"Jim, you ought to seek… You know."

"Seek! Seek! Their name is legion, Spearman. They are many!"

"You probably need help," Prosser said.

"Oh, shit, man," Duffy said. "I do."

"Medication." Prosser suggested.

"Poisoners!" Duffy told him in a breathy stage whisper. "Listen, Prosser, I'm beside myself with terror. Satanic voices are telling me I require closure."

"Closure?"

Duffy did what he could to make the word sound truly terminal.

"A dreadful closure, Prosser. They say if I can leave here today I can get into treatment." He looked around to make sure no one was watching too closely. "But if I can't, Satan says I must seek closure where the most wrong was done. He says I must" — Duffy inhaled to aspirate his words most portentously—"return to my long home. For closure."

"Why?" Prosser croaked.

"They won't tell me until I get there. I hear insect laughter. I'm so afraid."

"If you tell me where you are," Prosser said, "maybe I can call someone."

Oh, tricky, thought Duffy, but he would have to know.

"Here's the deal," Duffy said, trying to fend off madness while pretending it. "They'll let me out if I agree to go into therapy."

"Therapy where?" Spearman asked in a small voice. He was afraid, Duffy knew, that it might take place at the same establishment in western New England where he had been purged of drink before. It was not far from the house Prosser shared with Otis. Whether Prosser liked it or not, it was where he was likely to end up.

"I think it's Alaska," Duffy told him. "They'll release me in care of my mother."

"Your mother?"

"Her estate," Duffy hastened to add. "It's absurdly complicated. I'll need some money to get there too, Prosser. Congratulations on your new book, by the way."

A short time later Duffy heard the police dispatcher taking down the numbers and expiration date of Prosser's credit card.

"Bacon tells us," he said to the deputy as he packed his soiled belongings to leave, "the coward is loyal only to fear."

"I need you to shut up," the young deputy said.

The locals were vindictive, especially the hotel people. For three days Duffy was forbidden to leave town, and he was threatened with deformed bounty hunters if he did so. The first day he was homeless, which, in Pahoochee, was itself illegal. His overnight bag contained a single change of clothes, and the venal bubbas who ruled the town owned all the hotels, all the soap and all the potable water. Earning a little more of Otis's mocking solicitude, he was finally able to buy two nights in advance at a washboard-sided welfare motel on a fetid canal a few blocks from the Gulf. The university, for its own reasons he presumed, fixed things with the city. The motel chain hand-delivered some letters to him and to his lawyer in Boston threatening action for damages, though nothing came of it in the end. They also produced a form requiring his signature on which he agreed never again to seek hospitality at their establishments.

While the paperwork and money changed hands, the law required Duffy to remain in Pahoochee to await the disposition of his case. Duffy spent his first hours in the Spray Motel avoiding the public spaces where crack was sold. His solitary window opened on an alley — that is, it failed to open on the alley. An ancient air conditioner aspirated its prolonged death rattle. Mounted on the spastic springs of his sofa bed, he passed the time doodling on available surfaces and trying to sort hopes and dreams from hallucinations.

By nightfall the darkness gave forth only cries of laughter, pain and distant small-arms fire, along with the emphysemic cooler's soldiering on. Duffy told himself that the machine was deciding his fate, that he could keep going not a moment longer than the air conditioning, that its vital signs were measuring his. Like the unhappy man in the Good Book, he had prayed that eve be sudden. At night he preferred that morn be soon.

After first light he looked down the alley and saw the Spray Motel's contingent of moms and welfare children lined up for the school bus. They were all black except for one bedraggled and overweight pale mom with a speed rack of front teeth, who chattered continually to the other mothers regardless of whether they answered her or not. The Spray was no place for any kid to have to live, Duffy thought. But the kids were clean, carrying books, even if their mothers and grandmothers were dressed for a day on their knees with a brush. Or for a previous night of heavy dates. The high spirits of the children lifted his heart briefly, but he soon found the preschool assembly as dispiriting as everything else. It was not right, he thought; another presentation of how things so often were not. And as so often then, things made him want to have a drink. Also not to have one. The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment. He was getting too old for it, and presently he would be too old to change.

He took what was left of Otis and Prosser's money and bought some art supplies at the college end of the beach. He also bought a new cell phone and a cheap wristwatch. Cell phones and wristwatches were items that cops looked for on the persons of sad old men in crummy beach towns. They were signs of some right to sociopolitical existence, of access to human rights. On the other hand, if someone's gad-getry had gone missing in the mall, for example, elderly loser types like Duffy were one of the favored profiles the cops hassled. To crown his respectability, Duffy treated himself to a haircut and beard trim, which rendered him more or less identical to the male section of his demographic.

With his colors and a good-quality sketchbook Duffy picked out a bench supported on its right flank by a Confederate cannoneer and facing the widest flat space between the paved walkway and the rippling Gulf. There he waited for Pahoochee's Sunday to unfold.

The first spectacle that assembled itself was a volleyball game, played by teams of kids from the university. They were a pretty pack, mostly fair, the girls and some of the boys blonded up beyond nature's providing. There were also dark-haired Hispanic youths and a few Asians and African Americans, lending variety to the flesh tones. In the same cause, there were plenty of tattoos, bright new ones with particularly nice greens. Down in the water, a couple of optimists were trying to invoke sympathetic magic with their surfboards. A few managed to draw enough swell out of the insipid shore to get up and stand and surf the film of oily water over the near sand.

There was lots to look at if you were not in a hurry, if it did not bother you that you had seen it before, if you were observer enough — well, he thought, let's say artist enough! — to look it all over one more time. In the early afternoon a passel of extremely self-conscious punks sauntered along the beach sidewalk, looking about as scared and scornful as adolescents could. They were depressing and also frightening in ways they might not have imagined. Duffy expanded his scene to bring in a grove of suffering palm trees, a memorial plinth, an abandoned sandwich sign advertising a psychic. He kept adding: part of a ruined merry-go-round, faded and stripped, between the public beach and his estranged hotel. A bag lady with a Winn-Dixie cart sat on the edge of it; some of the punks draped themselves across the rusty poles and peeling painted horses. He drew it all in, regardless of scale.

Late in the afternoon people came out of the casinos, some half drunk and cheery, more of them looking as if they had lost money they could not afford. Sniffly women complained to the men they were with and got ignored or yelled at or sometimes smacked in the mouth. Men got smacked too, and children who were trying to be somewhere else. Drivers fought at intersections.

Panhandlers turned up and three-card-monte men whom the cops would sweep away as though with a fire hose, looking so angry at the hustlers that you had to wonder if they weren't taken behind some bleachers and beaten senseless to discourage the others. Or to impress the casino owners that there was scant tolerance for competition. Around twilight, several very young hookers came out, dressed to show more skin than the damp wind made comfortable and to match the neon. Their pimps, Duffy thought, would be just out of sight, laughing in the darkness of the side streets, smoking dope, getting in and out of unlighted cars that took some of the girls away and brought others to replace them.

Actually, the evening was lovely, gathered up as it was in sea and sky. Its transcendent light resisted all the defacements organized Pahoochee could inflict on it. Duffy kept drawing as late as he could. When the beach lights and tiki torches and fluorescents came on, he colored them into the rest.

Back alone with his air conditioner in the unquiet night, Duffy put the sketchbook to the maximum brightness of his lamp and looked over what he had. A chaos, he thought, like old times. Long before, Duffy thought he had given people a few lessons in entropy, how it looked, how you got it down. He felt he badly needed a drink, but securing one was too much work. He went to sleep instead.

The next day he packed his bags and sat beside the motel's laundry lines while the children assembled to await their school bus. To pass the morning he mapped out a sketch with crayon to use for a study if he should want to repeat the work in oil. In daylight, he was well pleased. It seemed to him the piece had turned out properly strong and could be made stronger with the right colors. Over his teaching years, Duffy had developed a regrettable academic eye that led him too readily to comparisons. It was bad for his morale to see other people's earlier sensibilities in the things he did. But in ironic ways his beach scene reminded him of turn-of-the-twentieth-century studies of Coney Island. If all of Stella's good early stuff, all those wild whirling colored lights, was about the teeming overripe possibilities of the coming age, maybe his, Duffy's, was about the exhaustion of those possibilities, the disappearance of that time, the great abridgment of the popular age. The ghost of a century, a show closing down for lack of interest. But, he thought, somebody had to be around to tell that story. It was too easy to mock the tag end of it, to do a burlesque on the failure of public joy. Someone ought to show it with a degree of compassion, he thought. Someone ought to have a heart about it.

Ready, he called a taxi on the hall phone to take him to the airport, to start the long day of jammed flights and wall-to-wall junk-food stands. Pahoochee was a composition of grays at that hour, clay-colored sand, dun skies, tin ocean. An old black man drove the cab, listening to a radio on which a white preacher peddled prayer cloths.

As they passed the parking lot of the hotel from which Duffy had been ejected, he saw a young dark-haired girl with flushed fair skin getting out of a beat-up Corolla. She was wearing a Pahoochee State sweatshirt. Duffy saw that it was young Staci, the waitress who had so innocently and disastrously attempted to bring him bogus crab. He asked the driver to pull over beside the lot and rolled his window down.

"Staci?"

She turned to him, shading her eyes. Duffy told the driver to wait and got out of the cab. On an impulse, he tore the crayon study he had made of the beach from his sketchbook.

Staci, facing the declining sun, looked at him without a flicker of recognition.

"Hi," she said, and smiled.

He wrapped his drawing between two sheets paper and slipped it into a large cardboard envelope.

"I have a drawing I'd like to give you. It's of the beach."

"Oh," she said. "How come?"

"What do you mean," he asked her, "'how come'?"

"Well, like, why?"

"Okay," Duffy said. He sighed at the burden he had inflicted on himself. For all he knew, it might all end with his getting arrested again. "My name is James Duffy. I'm an artist." He had been about to add that she might easily sell it, but he simply handed it over.

"Wow," she said.

"Yes," he told her. "And I was due to lecture at your school on Tuesday. At your university. But unfortunately I was detained."

"Yeah?"

"So, because you're a student at Pahoochee — you are a student, I think?"

"Yes, sir."

"Because you missed out on the lecture, you see…"

She shook her head energetically, interrupting him.

"No! I wasn't gonna go. Even if I heard about it. Which like I didn't anyway. And on top of which I had to work."

Looking past her, he saw that there was a cartoon of a crab pasted over a window on the restaurant side of the hotel. He frowned, and seeing him do so, she frowned as well. But thankfully, from his point of view, she did not turn to follow his gaze.

"Because you missed out on the lecture, Staci, I'd like you to take this."

Staci took it and shook her head fetchingly in some confusion. As it had occurred to Duffy that Staci might profit by selling his drawing, another random inspiration struck him: he might ask her to pose for him in the nude someday. That, he understood, would never do. If he presented such a notion, she might even suffer a ghastly attack of recovered memory.

"Wow," she said. "Okay."

"See, I'm on my way out of town," Duffy told her. He turned and looked over his shoulder, sort of miming "out of town."

"Great!" she said.

He smiled and extended his hand. She switched her awkward grip on the envelope and shook his right hand quite heartily.

"So adios, Staci."

"Right," she said. "So… did you have a great time in Pahoochee… um, James?"

"Thank you, dear," Duffy said. "Yes, I did."

And, leaving, he felt much better than when he had arrived.