John's Wife

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Mother love, to be celebrated in Lennox’s forthcoming Sunday sermon, was also what roused Veronica at last from her backyard stupor and sent her out alone into the dark unfriendly night in search of her, well, her son, so to speak, her bad-penny Second John: slimy, hideous, mindless, but pathetic, too, utterly helpless, needing her, his only mom, how could she have wanted to hit him with an ironing board? Everyone at the party had been complaining about the slime trail, most of them blaming it on the monster woman, so even at night it was easy to find and then to follow, not from east to west but from dry to wet. Some streetlamps still burned but most were out and she walked through patches of absolute darkness where the power seemed to have failed with only the slime trail itself, faintly phosphorescent, to show her the way. It led eventually into a noisy bar, one she’d never been in before, a saloon more like, with a big bar made out of railway ties, the only thing vaguely familiar, and sawdust on the wooden floor and gaslamps hanging over wooden tables where loud drinking men played cards and broke into brawls and vulgar songs and laughter. She saw him in a corner, on the floor, still swaddled and hooded loosely in the dirty sheet he’d been wrapped in, the little mendicant with the big head and shriveled limbs, her boy, sort of, her Second John. The men were teasing him, flicking their ash and flinging their beer dregs at him, spitting on him, kicking him, and ridiculing in despicable ways his tendency to suck at anything that neared his hooded face. Veronica braced herself (why did this remind her of some of her most awful moments in high school?), then marched over to stand between them and her son, remembering only after she’d got there and they’d all rudely reminded her with roars of laughter that the borrowed linen dress she was wearing was split up the back. She scolded them in a high-pitched voice she could not quite control for being cruel to a handicapped person who could not defend himself and who wasn’t even a child yet. This sent them all into howls of finger-pointing laughter, spilling their beer and tipping tables over. “You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she shouted, and knelt to give the poor thing, wet and squishy though she knew he was, a motherly hug, feeling herself poke out the back of the dress as she squatted, giving them all something fresh to whoop about. “You’re nothing but a bunch of bullies!” she cried. “That’s tellin’ ‘em, Ma!” Second John exclaimed, suddenly tossing back the cowl, as though peeling off a disguise. He stood before them, just a head above her doubled knees, bald and diapered and smoking a big black cigar. She gasped. “Why, you’re the—!” He spat and laughed and whipped a pistol out of his diapers and shot the hats off three or four of the men, all of whom were now diving for cover, then slapped Veronica on her exposed backside and, waving his pistol about, said: “You’re a real pal, Ma! Whaddaya say we sow a few wild oats here and teach these bums a lesson in family values?” “I–I don’t want any violence—!” she begged. “Who’s talking about violence?” he laughed. The bartender in his white shirt with sleeve garters rose up behind the bar with a twelve-gauge shotgun, Ronnie screamed, her son blew the gun out of his hands and then blasted away a row of bottles over the quaking barkeep’s head. “All I want’s a little tit!” “What—?!” “Ma, I’m your little baby!” “But I–I don’t have any milk!” she gasped. “That’s okay, I’m not hungry, I just need a little comfort,” he said with a sly affectionate grin, tonguing the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. He reached inside her linen dress and popped a bare breast out. “You’ve kept me waiting, Ma! All these years! It wasn’t fair!” “Darling, please—!” She felt sorry for him and what had happened, but much as she loved him, she wished he’d put her breast back. She seemed unable to do it herself or even to rise from her vulnerable squat, it was like she was paralyzed with shame and remorse. “They tell me the old man comes here from time to time on the arm of one floozy or another,” he whispered, “and next time we’ll be waiting for him, right, Ma? Blam, blam, blam!” He popped the other one out. Such a strong-willed child. It was not easy being a mother. In a far corner some men started laughing and singing “The Little Milkmaid” and her son whirled and shot the overhanging lamp off its chain, sending it crashing to their table with a fiery explosion like a fireworks display. “Hey, wow! That’s neat!” Second John exclaimed around his tattered wet cigar and shot another lamp down, and then another, jumping up and down and shouting with childish glee. “This is fun, Ma!” Just a little boy at heart, though he scared her with the games he played. He paused, peered inside his diapers. “Uh-oh. Help, Ma! It’s number two, I think.”

Accustomed to the games Bruce played and prepared for the worst though John (the first one) was, he was still taken aback by the scene that confronted him up at the cabin when he finally arrived. The worst that he’d prepared for? That he’d find them dead. Nevada had suggested that Bruce could be thinking about “checking out,” and might take the kid with him. She’d also held off telling him about Bruce’s departure with Lenny’s child until he’d had a several-hour head start and in his new jet to boot, so whatever John found up there, he figured, would have to be old news. Unless it was all just an elaborate scheme, using a preacher’s daughter as bait, to mock John’s smalltown proprieties and lure him out of secular duty into holy play, a lesson Bruce never tired of trying to teach him. “At heart a religious man,” Bruce called him in his farewell note, “who sometimes lost his way.” Farewell? Yes. No bodies maybe, but John had no reason to suppose they were still alive, and Bruce’s final instructions gave him every reason to suppose that they were not or soon would not be. Why had he come up here then? To try to stop it, to save his friend from himself and so save a friendship he did not want to lose. John had been guilty of few futile gestures in his life, but this was one of them. Bruce’s plane was nowhere to be seen when he flew in, but the cabin, ablaze with florid light in the dark night (his landing beacon), was as though inhabited by a menacing presence, and John entered it with his cocked rifle gripped in both hands, by now supposing that Bruce had the rifle that was missing from his gun case. The cabin had been transformed into a kind of hothouse, brimming with flowers, piles and piles of them, heaped up so high one had to crawl through special wickerwork tunnels to move from place to place. It was like a kid’s back-garden fantasy house, except that there were niches along the way with pornographic photographs mounted in them, lit from behind, some little more than marriage manual posturings, others more exotic and violent. John himself was in one of them, that bastard. How’d he get that shot? Here and there: a shoe, a sock, a ribbon. In a mirrored niche, a pair of panties, a spot of dark blood in a bed of white petals. It was all a bit suffocating and John was glad to leave the flowers behind and emerge at last in the main bedroom, which felt like an amphitheater after the claustrophobic tunnels. He was less glad about what he found there: ropes tied around the bedposts, cuffs, whips, including ragged twists of thorny long-stemmed roses and a horse crop, blood-soaked sheets and towels, here and there other stains, more excremental. A flayed summer dress, once white, lay in grisly shreds on the floor and, in a corner, like a proxy for its former owner, a little overnight bag, lifelessly agape, its contents spilled out and crushed underfoot. On the chest of drawers: a sheaf of documents with Bruce’s personal cover note, anticipating John’s arrival, though perhaps in Nevada’s company and not so soon, for it spoke at length about the revised handwritten will, attached, and accompanying power of attorney forms and notarized instructions to be used as authority while the will, for probable lack of a corpus delicti, was contested. All of which clearly enriched their busy little troubleshooter. There was even an envelope of cash for Nevada which, Bruce suggested, should best be laundered before using. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” he wrote, continuing the religious theme introduced in the opening lines: “As a religious man, dear John, you will appreciate what you see here as a sacramental act of extreme devotion and exaltation, and will accept it as guide and precept on your own irresolute route to sainthood. Many years ago, on the eve of your disappointing compromise with the profane world, in that wayside chapel known as the Country Tavern, you effected my own conversion, doubting Thomas that I was, by announcing that what was about to follow was in reality a church service in a holy sanctuary, and indeed it was, one of many such revelations I’ve been granted in your company. I have ever since been the voice of one crying in the wilderness, calling you back to your true vocation, your existence in nonexistence, your authentic life beyond the edge.” The nihilistic wiseass was insufferable, but the “Goodbye, John” at the end still hurt. John scanned the documents: many of Bruce’s women were rewarded but Jennifer was not, so probably bad news. Not much he could do about it. Nor about this place either. Finished. Should just burn it down, but he was too practical a man for that, he’d have to put it up for sale. Needed a good purging first, though, and John had a lot of tensions to work off, so he built a fire out in the incinerator, starting with the bedding, clothing, photos, overnight bag, and Bruce’s revised will. The flowers and all the rest would follow. He figured he’d be done in time to get home by dawn.

Which was not soon enough for Otis, now gathering his troops together in the lot outside what Bruce called “that wayside chapel.” The chief was into crunch time and could use his old team captain to help call the plays, but he could wait no longer. The town had been stripped out, power and phone lines were down, there’d been killings, and from the attacks along the periphery of Settler’s Woods — the motelkeeper had been shot, for example — he figured Pauline was getting dangerously hungry. The parking lot of the closed-down Country Tavern looked like a goddamned wrecking yard where she’d stumbled through on her last foray. Of course it often looked that way, junkers being the vehicle of no choice among the Tavern regulars, a lost lot mostly, from the wrong side of town. Otis’s side of town. He’d hung out here himself in the old days. The Tavern was popular with the school football team in the off-season, being a place they didn’t ask your age, a good hole for poker nights and stag parties and beery rough-and-tumble. A lot of famous events had happened out here, but they were not the sort of stories that ever made it into The Town Crier. Then came the army, and what furlough time Otis got he spent here, especially after his old man blew his head off. He was wounded in the war, discharged, came home depressed, took a job helping to build the new highway, and the Tavern became more like home than home. Drank too much. Got into too many fights. Might have got into worse, but John changed all that. Talked him into joining the police force. Built him up as a town hero and the promotions came along fast and steady with John behind him. He’d declared his true love out here on a tabletop and now John had helped him find its true expression. So Otis reduced his Tavern time to football afternoons and when he got married that stopped, too, coming out only when called out. Not often. Mostly having to do with what the regulars called tourists. Their own problems, they sorted out themselves. Some of these guys had, unbidden, joined his posse, drunkenly vowing revenge for the loss of Shag and Chester; Otis told them to go on home (they just smiled) and ordered up an ambulance for the victims. “You sure you want an ambulance, Otis?” one of his officers asked. “There’ll have to be an autopsy.” “But they’re—” “Don’t argue with me, goddamn it! Just do as you’re told!” He was very edgy, he knew that, couldn’t help it. He felt betrayed somehow. Otis hadn’t really thought about it until tonight, but the fact was, Pauline had been his best friend, the only real friend he had, and now, though it wasn’t exactly her fault, she was ruining it, threatening to turn his whole life since his Country Tavern days upside down, just by being who she was, forcing him to destroy what he loved to save what he loved. She made him feel like the wickedness he was up against was himself. What was worse, a lot of these other guys out here, he’d discovered, felt much the same way he did, only less guilty about it, and that burned him all the more. He’d heard someone waxing sentimental about knowing Pauline from the old Pioneers Day fairs, and before he could stop himself he’d drawn his revolver. Jesus. If he’d been able to see the prick, he might have greased him. Calm down. Remember the Blessed Virgin. He raised his bullhorn. “Okay, we got no time to lose. This is what we’re gonna do.” Pauline was dangerous, but Otis wanted to resolve the crisis without calling out the National Guard, though he knew he’d have to move fast or the problem would, literally, get too big for them. His tactics were simple: encircle and patrol the periphery with his own boys to try to cut off the escape routes, lead the deputized posse into the center himself, along with the mayor. “What do we do when we find them, Otis?” “Arrest them.” That was the official line. In truth, although he didn’t want to harm her, he didn’t know what he’d do with Pauline if she did surrender. “We gonna rassle them freaks to the ground, are we?” “From what you been sayin’, ain’t that sorta like tryin’ to bring a tree to its knees?” “Nobody said this’d be easy,” Mayor Snuffy yelled out. “Remember, to shoot a takedown, you can always win with a tough ride, but you gotta be aggressive!” “Sure, coach, you take the lady, I’ll take the other one.” “Maybe if we all stood there with our dicks out, she’d just go down—” “Shut up!” Otis barked. Someone asked who the prisoner was, so Otis, in a biting rage, flashed a light on his ugly mug and introduced them all to Pauline’s old man, explaining tersely that he was here because he knew how to track and handle her. Duwayne, his ball-cap on backwards, spat disdainfully through the gaps in his teeth, rattled his chains, and hollered out that the terrible Day of Rupture was upon them and there wouldn’t be no handling to it, just a lot of blood and tears and gnashing of teeth, Otis cutting off his wind with a rifle butt to the solar plexus and warning him he wouldn’t have any teeth to gnash with if he didn’t shut his goddamned trap. “Easy, Otis,” someone said, and he nearly hit him, too. He passed out flashlights and ammunition, asked the young car mechanic who was soberer than most to stay to the rear to cover their ass, ran radio and weapons checks, tossed his jacket in the patrol car: it was a close, sticky night. Must be a storm brewing. “Listen, have you talked this out with old Gordon?” someone asked. “What’s he got to do with it?” he snapped. But then he thought better of it. “Send a car to pick him up,” he muttered glumly. He stared into the ominous darkness of Settler’s Woods. Maybe he should have called out the Guard. Could have used a few choppers with heat-seeking missiles in his arsenal instead of this bunch of bleary-eyed clowns: already a couple of the rifles had gone off accidentally out there in the darkness. For Otis, at times like these, horseplay was a felony. “Okay, men, this is it,” he said through his bullhorn. “Let’s go.” But before they could cross over, the last of his squad cars rolled up with the news that the owner of the Ford-Mercury garage had been shot dead in his own office. “Goddamn it, I don’t have time to deal with that shit now!” Otis cried, feeling like someone had just thrown him an infuriating block out of nowhere. “What did they kill him with?” the mayor wanted to know. “One of those,” said the officer, pointing at the mechanic’s rifle. “Musta happened about the time we was at John’s place.” “That’s the bad news, Otis. The good news is the simpleton’s back home again. Big Pauline’s in there all on her lonesome.”

Of the many famous but unreported events that had taken place in Otis’s old stamping ground over the years, not least was the legendary stag party on the eve of John’s wedding, the night Bruce was first introduced to this “wayside chapel”—as were all of John’s other fraternity brothers, down from the uninursery (as Brains would say) for the grand occasion, among them doleful Brother Beans, he of the inimical wit, contest-winning wind instrument, and Swiss Army knife. Which he was still gripping in his fist when he awoke from a thumping nightmare, a gift no doubt of his thumping hangover, his face in sticky spilled beer and bladder ready to erupt. He’d been out hunting somewhere. In the nightmare, that is. Something gross. He’d had the uncomfortable feeling, he remembered, that he was around spooks of some kind. The Freudian content was inescapable, but Beans escaped it, a knack he had: nothing that entered his head stayed there for long, it was hello and goodbye. Time now, having helloed himself shitfaced, to say goodbye to the moribund Country Tavern. There were a few bodies around, but none Beans knew. Lights, music, movies, bar, all shut down. Beans considered giving the cymbals a crack, just to see if these dead might rise again, but decided his raw brain, which seemed to have got outside his skull somehow, couldn’t take it, nor did he relish commerce with any he might thus return, no doubt embittered, to the living. He staggered through the butts and bottles and other detritus of the prenuptial joys to the door and on out into the moonlight, worrying about the long sick walk to town and the critical decision he would have to make ere he set off: to wit, which fucking direction was it? First, though, weewee time. Beans was often deemed an impractical man, but not true. Now, for instance, he used his pee to hose down the dust-caked windows of the Country Tavern, yet another of his good deeds that history would fail to record, wondering as he did so about the peculiar feeling of déjà vu that came over him. Something to do with the absent Brains, his old pal, now greener pastured: faint recall no doubt of one of many such early-morning makings of water (not made really, just, like all of life, borrowed and passed on) they had, after immemorial nocturnal adventures, shared. Out on the lonely road, cranking the throbbing blob on his neck to one side, then the other, he discovered through his pain, just down the way a piece, an old battered pickup parked aslant on the shoulder, and he thought he could make out voices in the woods. He was not alone in the world after all! He picked his way over into the trees where, yes, he could hear heavy thrashing about and grunts and curses, the tenor of which led the ever-rash Beans to a rare exercise of caution before declaring himself: he watched from behind a tree as two men struggled toward a ravine with, what? a body? Yes, a body. Well. The walk to town — run, rather — would probably do him good. But now he worried that they might hear him as he made his characteristically graceless exit and marry the witness’s fate to that of their victim, now tossed rudely in the ditch, so he crouched down and, seriously ill but sobering up fast, waited for them to finish their business and take their leave. Their business included pummeling and kicking the body and then pissing on it. “Clean the whore up,” one of them tittered: Beans recognized him as Brother John’s scowly cousin, the other one being the sullen fat boy who’d organized the stag party. They both looked blitzed out of their skulls. The fat boy asked the other one how much he’d put in, and he said about thirty, forty dollars. “Here, you’ve just doubled your money,” said the fat boy. He tossed something down on the body, a single bill perhaps, pocketed the rest, and the two of them staggered out of there, hooting and snorting and singing “Roll Your Leg Over.” Beans waited until he’d heard the doors slam and the old truck grind and rattle away, then crept over into the ravine to examine the body. Naked but for a few wet tangled rags, ghostly white and motionless, but still warm. He put an ear to her breast and heard a beat: so, still alive. In a manner of speaking, for, though her eyes were open, she clearly couldn’t see him and she was limp as a rag doll. Just a little kid in dirty school socks with a five-dollar bill resting on her damp tum like a fallen leaf or a sale price tag. Familiar in some odd way, though he was sure he’d never seen her before. Somebody in the movies maybe. He was equally sure he’d never seen the old gent in the leather jacket and ballcap standing beside him with a shotgun either, though he was also weirdly familiar. Like somebody you might meet in a nightmare. “What you been doin’ to my little girl, you iniquitous transgressin’ sonuvabitch?” From his knees, Beans whispered: “I, uh, I heard noises and came over. Sir.” “Great Gawdamighty, Behold my accusséd affliction!” roared his interlocutor and poked the gun up Beans’s tender nose. He could feel the puke rising. “Her defilement’s in her putrid skirts, her temple’s been desecrated all to frickin’ hell!” Beans held up his hand asking to be excused, wishing badly he could have the old dream back. He’d been too hasty about waking up. “This unholy shit-soaked abombination has gotta be smited, Lord! Amen! It’s time to bring down the final reckonin’!”

She could hear his nasal squawk in the darkness, calling down eternal hellfire and dangnation on all around him, a voice that belonged to her old life though she could not name it, knew only that she feared and hated it, yet loved it, too, in some sad painful way. There were other voices and a distant flickering of lights in the trees like insects in grass. They had passed close by, gone on, were coming back again. Her little friend who’d been helping her all day had vanished into the night and she was alone and hungry and afraid. There was more food somewhere but she couldn’t find it, she’d torn up the forest looking for it, until the men arrived and sent her scurrying for shelter. Now she squatted there in the scratchy darkness, trembling, waiting for she knew not what, nor knowing just what she’d do when the waiting ended. As his voice drew near, she remembered that he used to tie her up and yell at her and do bad things to her, though what he did exactly was less clear than how much it hurt and where, and how she couldn’t get away no matter how she tried. And he was kind to her sometimes, too, if she did the things he liked, and sometimes he cried and hugged her and called her his little baby, though this was bad because he always got angry afterwards and hurt her all the more. She closed her eyes and sniffed the air and picked up the odor of his old leather jacket, worn and often wet, which smelled like just-turned cider, and there were other smells as well, those of tobacco and body lotions and breaths soured by drinking, and the acrid smells of the sweat of men she might have known (she could almost taste them on her tongue), others strange to her, and the smells, too, of fear and excitement and confused desire, and when she opened her eyes they were standing all together down in the trees, shining their little lights on her, hushed it seemed by what they saw. Most of them had weapons, pointed at her, and bunched together like that, they looked like a single glittering animal with quills erect. A burly little fellow who was familiar to her stepped forward and shouted up at her through a thing in front of his face: “Pauline! We don’t aim to harm you none! It ain’t your fault, but you been seriously outa line here and you got the whole town shook up!” When he said her name, it brought back something about who she was, and she looked down between her legs and scratched herself there. This got the other voices going again and focused all the lights. “Now stop that, Pauline! Listen to me! You come along peaceful-like and we’ll figure out some way to take care of you and get you covered up proper and find you something to eat!” She was still afraid but his voice through that thing soothed her like something on the radio and she thought he might help her like her other friend did and she reached down toward him. He yelped and fell backwards, trying to get away, and there was a bang and then another one and something pinched her in the arm and suddenly there were more bangs and pinches and light beams flying in all directions and all those little men falling and scurrying away like they had wasps in their pants. The burly one jumped up and cried out: “No! Don’t shoot, goddamn it! Hold your fire!” Several of them had run off, but those who’d stayed picked themselves up and chittered and laughed nervously and hid behind trees to watch. There was a very funky smell all around her now and she knew they were afraid and there was nothing she could do to make them less afraid. It was then that the one whose squawky voice she had first recognized hopped forward with his hands and feet stuck together and came right up and stood by her knee with a rifle he’d picked up off the ground and shouted out that was enough, he’d send any sinner here to hell and beyond who tried to hurt his little girl. “We ain’t fixing to hurt anyone, Duwayne,” said the burly one, coming forward. “You done your bit. Now get your ass back here before it gets shot off!” She picked the chubby little fellow up and put him in her lap so the one with the rifle wouldn’t shoot him. All the others went scrambling away again and there were more bangs and shouts: “You okay, Otis—?!” “Christ-amighty, what do we do now—?!” “Nothing!” he yelled back, hanging onto her tummy wrinkles. “Don’t shoot! It’s all right! Just gimme a minute to think!” “It ain’t all right, you miserable hind tit of the goddang Prince of Darkness! The time of the tribulation is at hand!” Ah. She remembered that. And the wide gate and the narrow gate, and the rod of wrath that always got stuck into both of them. And something else: that this was the one who’d done something bad to her mother and sister. She’d nearly forgotten that, but it came back to her now clear as a picture in a storybook when everything else in her head was slipping away. She lifted him up to have a better look. “No, I never,” he protested. “I done a lotta sinful shit in my time, Pauline, mostly on accounta demon drink, but I never done that.” He was wriggling around in her fist, so she squeezed a little harder, while cuddling the other one close against her tummy. “Now hold on, Pauline! Your momma killt your sister with her kitchen shears, and she was gonna git you, too, that whorish old gash had the devil in her, so I, you know, brought an end to her persecutions before she could do her wickedest.” An end? “Well, we got company here, Pauline. Let’s say I chased her diabolical hellhole off the premises and she ain’t been beholden since. Hey! Wait a minute! The wicked hosts is them down there! Smite them, not me! Not your own daddy! Pauline—?! Stop!”

Rex, though invited to the party, missed all this, his odor not among those that Pauline sniffed out, nor would she have recognized it had it been, for he was not of this place. He of those mighty pecs, traps, and dorsals that Nevada so admired was at the moment jogging toward the road out to his motel, mission accomplished (not of this place, not yet, but soon), not exactly as he’d scored it, but close enough that the original tune could still be heard. He’d been surprised when the scrawny dweeb who’d stolen the truck turned up in old Stu’s office out of nowhere like that, but he’d struck him a quick blow with the rifle butt that had caved his wispy-haired conk in like an overripe melon. Okay, so forget the old vendetta against John, my man, play the changes, improvise: put the rifle in the dingaling’s hands and let Stu shoot him with the pistol, the perfect crime. He’d pulled the door closed, arranged both bodies, turned to load Stu’s handgun, and when he’d turned back the door was still closed but the dingaling was gone. The next thing he’d heard: a van driving away. Hey, more to think about, but no sweat, back to the main theme. The head. Get John. He’d been tempted to speed things up with a car off the lot, why not, the place was half his now, he could take a new Connie for a spin, for example, but, no, play it like it’s written, man, save the joyrides for your fat tomorrows. More problems at the airport where he’d intended to return the murder weapon to John’s gun cabinet, but this time found the office door locked. He was just resolving that when the police showed up with some drunken tourists, and he thought for a bad moment he might have to waste all these people, few of whom seemed armed, but none friendly. Not a pretty thought, but life was like that sometimes. When the ancient bumpkin with the long snout reached for his rifle, he figured he’d have to be the first to go, but then it leaked through to his hyped-up nut that these yoyos thought he was on their side. So he was. Cool, man. What’s your story? They had to go shoot a woman. Sounded like a dead moose hunt to Rex, not his scene, but he went along with them until he could find a chance to break away. The redneck copper made it easy for him by posting him as a rearguard tailgunner, the only witnesses to his stealthy withdrawal being the preacher’s kid and some buddy, sitting by themselves in a ditch he was cutting through on his way out of the woods. He recognized the little dumbfuck more by his sudden panic than by his plastered-up face, which looked like a hockey mask glowing faintly in the dark. By now he’d shed the ax, so Rex just grinned as he loped past and chanted out an “Our Father,” his retreat marred only by the shit he had to slop through at the bottom of the ditch. Speaking of slopping in shit, he had a score to settle with old Daph next time he saw her: the bitch had lost her nerve, her tip-off meaning the body’d been found much too soon to suit him. But not tonight, she could sweat this one out on her own. Tonight, after this long run: a good shower, a joint, some jazz, and then, never know, Nevada might drop by, they could celebrate their latest business successes together. A pair of real tycoons, they were. A Porsche came bombing up from behind, roared past, making his sweats flap, then screeched to a spitting fishtailing halt a few hundred yards ahead. Rex knew this wet dream machine. He’d had to bathe and pamper it for John when he worked out at the airport, and had had a run or two in it himself at times when John was up balling some bird in the sky, being careful to set the speedometer back and top up from the airport tanks afterwards, John being touchy about people playing with his toys. So what did the abusive shit want now? Too late to switch tracks; Rex trotted up to the car, ready to punch him out if it came to that, and John’s barebreasted daughter opened the door and stepped out and asked him, leaning back and stroking her crotch, if he wanted a ride. It was like Christmas: his alibi, his shot at John, and a hot lick or two to top off the night, all handed to him gift-wrapped. The kid was fried to a crisp, her eyes like stones: her pinpoint-nippled tits showed more expression. Sure, baby, he said. What kind of ride can you give me? Get ready to fly, mister, she said. But, first, off with the sweats. Off—? Take them off! They stink, I don’t want them in the car! Come on! Is there nothing but blushing wimps around here? She whipped off her own shorts as a challenge and flung them over the hood into the weeds beyond, glared at him for a moment while he took in the lightning-illuminated sights, then she popped back in the driver’s seat and slammed the door. You coming or not, ace? Wouldn’t miss it for anything. He kicked off his shit-stained runners, peeled his socks away, stripped off the sweats, the jockstrap. Took his time about it. She watched him all the while but he wasn’t sure she could actually see anything, so ripped was she. He wasn’t hard but didn’t want to be. That’s pretty good, she said. You do that in front of a mirror every day? The little ball-buster. Every day, all day, he said, just waiting for you to come along. He dropped his bare ass onto the soft leather. You blow a pretty mean horn for such a scrawny little snotnose. Let’s see if you know shit about driving this mother. She hit the floorboard and they spun out of there, popping gravel, hit fifty at the first crossing, were doing better than eighty when she ran the first light. She had a lean adolescent shape with a prominent ass, a little slack, sinewy thighs, breasts like small muffins, was probably still a cherry; should be fun, he figured, in a fragile kiddiefuck sort of way. She stayed on the back roads, not all paved, doing over a hundred on straights and not much less on turns, took intersections without a slowdown, left the ground more than once, then hit rock bottom, never taking her bare foot off the pedal. Okay, mister, she said. Eat me. Sure thing, doll, but that wheel cramps my table manners. I got a—Now! she demanded, lifting her left foot off the brake pedal and up on the seat, knee against the door. Get to it, asshole, or get out! He figured this was not the moment to slap the little mink and so instead worked his fingers into her pussy, trying to open up a groove, but it was tight as a green walnut down there. This was going to be like blowing a stoppered sweet potato. As he leaned down to search out a mouthpiece with his tongue, he glimpsed something looming up ahead of them in the road. It was that old humpback bridge out by the selfsame woods he’d just departed, coming at them out of the heavy night at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. “Now! “ she yelled, and jammed his head down under the wheel between her trembling thighs.

When the murderer came jogging through the ditch in Settler’s Woods, Fish — or Philip, rather — was just telling Turtle that he’d finally grown out of being hung up on Clarissa and that now that his sister had taken off, he’d soon be leaving, too, which Turtle was sorry to hear. “Why can’t you at least stay until I finish school, so I can go, too?” The breaking up of an old friendship was a hard thing. Though maybe it was already over. Fish, who didn’t want to be called Fish anymore, wouldn’t even talk to Turtle at the barbecue at first and said he was disgusting and stank like something dead and made him sick. Fish had finally got over his crummy mood and apologized, saying mostly he was just upset about the new baby, but every time Turtle tried to tell him about the amazing things he’d seen, about all the fornicators and the splitting movie screen and the beautiful colors and what happened when his weenie exploded, Fish told him to shut up, he really didn’t want to hear about it, and anyway it was stupid and boring, and asked him instead: “What made your old man so mad? Why did he hit you?” “He said it was all my fault, I’d made him lose something.” “Lose what?” “He wouldn’t say.” The police had come to Clarissa’s house then and asked for volunteers to hunt a monster lady and Fish had volunteered and then so had Turtle, but the police told them they were too young, go home and go to bed, which got Fish mad again. “I’ve done more stuff today than those dickheads have done in a lifetime,” he said mysteriously, scowling around the bandage in the middle of his face. “Let’s go out there anyhow.” That suited Turtle. His old man had promised him a good tanning, so he was in no hurry to go home. On the way out, passing under a streetlamp, Fish showed him the hickey on his neck that an older woman had given him that day and told him then all about what had happened in his father’s library. “You mean you fornicated her?” “I didn’t fornicate her, man, I fucked her! Lots of times!” “Yeah, really? Is that different?” “Sure. It’s not what you do, but how you feel about it while you’re doing it.” He told him about the game the woman had played with him, seeing who could think of the most names for the things she pointed to in the pictures in his father’s books. “She said talking dirty made her hot. Proper words like fornication and penis and vagina didn’t even count. She always won, of course. But, boy, I really learned a lot!” “Yeah, me too. One thing I saw—” “I said shut up about all that!” “Yeah, sorry, Fish, I keep forgetting.” “And don’t call me Fish!” “Right.” “You know what else she said? She said I had a prong like a Tex-Mex chilidog! She said fucking with me was like dipping a jalapeño pepper in a pot of hot sauce!” “Wow! That’s great! Was it?” “Sort of. Better even.” They’d reached the meeting place just in time and had hovered at the edge while the police chief gave all the orders and then led everybody into the woods, bellowing through his bullhorn: “We’ll all stay together now!” But they didn’t. He and Fish peeled off at the ravine because Fish said he saw a man with a gun who was a murderer and who might want to kill him. “Why?” “Because I know he’s a murderer. And I fucked his old lady.” Fish was full of surprises. Turtle had missed a lot while he was gone. It was nice and quiet in the ravine, and Fish was in the middle of explaining about wet thighs (“I don’t know, they just sweat or something, it’s messy but it’s great!”), he was full of conversation now, so they stayed there to talk awhile. “It was the first time my athlete’s feet didn’t itch.” Turtle sat down on a round stone and, while trying to make himself comfortable, found a sort of wristband and put it on. “Kind of frilly, isn’t it? Looks more like something a girl would wear.” “I don’t care.” It was weird talking to Fish in the dark because the white bandage around his nose was like his whole face, only a midget face, it even had little dents and shadows that looked like eyes and a mouth, so Turtle kept talking to the bandage eyes instead of the real ones. “Do you smell something funny here?” Turtle asked. “You know, something like a toilet?” “Are you kidding? I can’t smell anything!” Turtle asked him why Clarissa’s father had hit him, and Fish said he didn’t have the foggiest idea, it was the biggest surprise he ever got, but it had sort of cured him of ever being interested in Clarissa again. Which was when that man came running past and Fish jumped up like he was going to run away and whispered that was the one, that was the murderer, even though he was reciting the Lord’s Prayer and cried out to Jesus Christ from the bottom of the ditch. When he was gone, Fish sat down again and said that praying didn’t mean he was religious, in fact just the opposite, that scum was really an atheist and a blasphemer. Turtle tried to get Fish to talk about doing it to the man’s wife, but Fish suddenly didn’t want to talk about sex anymore. So instead they talked about religion, Turtle asking him what blasphemy was. “It’s like swearing, or when you make fun of religion.” “You mean, like when we say, ‘Our Father which fart in heaven, hollow by Thy name?’” “Like that.” “What happens if you do blasphemy?” “You go to hell forever and ever.” “Wow, maybe we better stop.” “But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe there is a hell.” “You don’t?” “I don’t know what I believe anymore. I don’t think I believe anything. Nevada said religion was for wimps.” “Nevada?” “The woman I was telling you about. She made me read the Bible out loud, putting dirty words in place of the ordinary ones while she gave me head. It was maybe the most religious experience I ever had.” “While she what?” But before Fish could answer, they heard yelling and gunshots and then people running their way, so they jumped up and started to run, too. When they reached the road into town, they stayed at the edge of the woods so they wouldn’t be seen, though Turtle didn’t know exactly what the secret was about. He heard the crackle of fireworks and then a spooky noise like a far-off howl and he glanced up in the sky and saw a surprising thing. “Wow! Look!” How did he do that?! “Shut up! Here comes a car!” “No, look! Up there!” He had his hands together and his feet and he was pumping wildly like he was riding a pogo stick. Was that the trick? “There’s a guy flying!” There was a far-off ripple of lightning just as his ballcap flew off. “Yeah, sure, but come on, duck down before they see you!” “No, really!” But the flying man was already gone and Fish was dragging him down into the bushes as a car shot past on the road. “What are we hiding for? Why can’t we just ask them for a ride?” “Don’t be such a dumb jerk! Those old farts are completely out of control! They’ll shoot at anything that moves!”

When Big Pauline shifted her hips, taking out a grove of trees, and pitched her old man out into the night like a football, all hell broke loose inside Settler’s Woods. Otis slithered down out of her crotch and dove for cover as the entire posse, what was left of it, opened fire, shooting wildly but probably hitting more often than not a target hard to miss. Kevin did not even take aim, firing haphazardly over his shoulder as he scrambled away, but he was sure he drilled her more than once, hearing the bullets go thuck, thuck, thuck into the soft wall of her flesh. All together they must have hit her with hundreds of rounds, but she hardly changed position except for lifting an arm in front of her face and swiveling a few degrees to take the low-flying bullets in her butt. Most of the flashlights had been abandoned and lay in the weeds now like glowworms, but even in the darkness Big Pauline was easy to see, a huge lowering silhouette, bigger than the trees, faintly illuminated from time to time by distant sheet lightning. In one such flickering, Kevin, reloading, saw that one of her eyes was bleeding like she was crying black tears and her flank appeared to be peppered with zits. She seemed more puzzled and hurt than angry and reminded Kevin of some deer he’d shot before they’d died, and of his own mortality. Well, he shuddered, life, death, it was a great fucking mystery, probably never to be fathomed; he aimed at her wounded eye. It had not been a good day for Kevin, if a day was all it had been, starting with Pauline and her partner cleaning out the clubhouse kitchen after she took that monumental dump in the rough at the fifteenth. She was big then, bigger now. John had lightened his heart with the offer to let him hire a new salesperson for the club shop, but after he’d unexpectedly found the perfect chick, who’d turned up like out of the blue, she’d been snatched away from under his nose while he was, in gratitude, boy-scouting at John’s barbecue grill. And then he’d realized, too late, that John wasn’t even around to appreciate his good deeds. He’d done a lot of drinking after that, maybe before as well, and now, in these dark damp woods, he was paying the price, his mind blistered and belly churning, kept on his feet and continent by a medicinal hip flask filled with twenty-year-old malt from John’s party, an emergency measure he hoped would serve him until he could get back to his rooms at the club and let it all blow. The gunfire had died down a bit: maybe she was dead but just hadn’t toppled. But then she let out a pathetic wail, oddly soft and girlish, and they all started firing away again. She swept her hand and took out the tops of half a dozen trees overhead as though swatting at bees, and that prompted a deeper retreat for most. Kevin felt too miserable to move, remaining huddled behind his topped tree and wishing somewhere behind his awesome nausea he were wearing something less luminous than yellow golf pants. Someone yelled at him, Otis maybe, to pull back, he was in the line of fire, so he got up on his hands and knees and began to crawl woozily to the rear, when he felt himself embraced all round by something soft and rubbery and warm and lifted through the air. “Don’t shoot!” he could hear someone shout. “She’s got Kevin!” “Holy shit!” “Look out!” “She’s going to eat him!” It was like being on a fast elevator: his stomach got left behind as the rest of him rose above the trees. His yellow pants had probably had it. With one finger she flicked the rifle out of his hand and he figured that hand wouldn’t be worth much for a good while. Up close he could see that her near eye was pretty much gone and her cheek on that side was pocked and bloody. The occasional glimmerings of lightning lit up her white teeth, clenched in a grimace, and the ghostly white of her good eye. She opened her mouth and there was a distant rumble of thunder and more shots were fired. Kevin ducked and she shielded him with her body, turning him upside down, and up came the barbecue. Down, rather. Woof! Out it came! From both ends! Gross! With her free hand she uprooted a tree and swung it like a club through the woods below. There were screams and shouts and someone yelled: “Pull back! Pull back!” Beyond his retching and gut explosions, he could hear them scuttering away, some groaning and shouting for help. He was being held up again in front of her face. He was all alone now and all cleaned out. Felt a little better, not much. More appreciative of his present fix, which made him feel worse. Hand hurt like hell. He could see through his tears that there was a sad inquisitive look on her face, but he was at a loss for words. What could he say to such a woman? “You’ve got a good natural swing,” was what came out. “Really.” This made no sense. But what did? It was always his best line and at least it gave her pause. Her grimace faded and her full lips spread into something like a melancholy smile. She licked her lips with a tongue that looked like the backside of a walrus. Her teeth lit up, her eye, there was more thunder: not just summer heat lightning, a storm was on the way. Would that he might live to weather it. If she was going to take a bite, he wasn’t sure which end he’d rather she started with. Either way, it was probably the end of his golfing career. Her smile faded. She lifted her nose, sniffed, and a frown crossed her broad brow: yes, no doubt about it, Kevin noticed it, too, there was the smell beyond his own smells of woodsmoke in the air.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and Clarissa, soaring aloft into unknown realms, could see below a great burning ring of fire, and could feel it, too, the car red-hot beneath her seat, the scorching heat searing her, but as though from inside out, and between her legs a hammer blow, bone crunching bone, that popped the wheel from out her grasp and sent her father’s splendid machine bouncing up, as if undriven, from the road, yawing and rolling like an unruddered ship as it rose up into the black night. Take it easy, Clarissa, slow and steady, she seemed to hear her father say, giving her her driving lessons. Foot off the clutch, both hands on the wheel, and ease up on the gas, don’t try to set the world on fire, a car’s a tool, goddamn it, not a trip. Keep your wits about you! Real power is power you’ve not yet unleashed, so feel it all but use only what you need. Oh Daddy! I’m sorry! I won’t do it again! But it was too late for that, she could not turn back, could not get off the dreadful trajectory that, rashly, ruinously, she’d launched herself upon, and in the grip of blinding panic she rose and spun, while the forest burst into flames below as though ignited by her own wild fury’s folly. She’d hit the bridge with bare foot to the floor, thinking what? to rise where Bruce and Jen had gone? Some foolishness in her mind-blown rage, meant to avenge the insult of their snub, and that was when, as the axle bounced and the frame struck sparks and the steep ascent began, the hammer blow was struck and she lost her grip on the suddenly treacherous wheel, the car careening madly as it left the road. And as she overturned and the night sky reeled and the woodland burned below her, she felt a fire blaze up within as though a lightning bolt had struck her where she sat — and suddenly, spinning, she was thrown free (and, hey, buckle up, her father always said, because you never know) and for a moment hung in space, the wild whirl stilled, then down she plummeted, headlong, like a shooting star, falling and falling, landing at last in the little creek below the bridge which received her fall and cooled her burning body as pain engulfed her and her breath left her and her eyes went dark.

As Clarissa in mad careen rose and plummeted, so Waldo, too, riding high, bounced and reared and soared and plunged, but was not thrown, belted in by thighs of steel, and having passed, as love’s brave adventurer, from curiosity and carnal desire through wonderment and awe and deep alarm to mortal funk and finally sheer exhaustion, he slept now even as he pitched and rolled, his stentorian snores chorusing those of his wildly bucking mount, this the raucous concert that greeted Lorraine and Trevor upon their arrival at the seventeenth hole, drowning out the remote rumble of threatening thunder, and that left them, for the moment, standing there at the edge of the torn-up green in stupefied amaze. Just before the lights went out in the motel bathroom, Lorraine had picked up on Trevor’s anguish and, dressed by darkness, asked: “Who did you think was in here, Trevor?” He hadn’t answered, but the impression she’d got looked a lot like Sweet Abandon, and the mystery of the switched pants no longer was one. She’d knotted the bath towel around her waist and led her erstwhile best friend’s half-blind husband out to his car (“You see, it’s all right, Trevor, just a local power failure …”), asking that he drive her to the place where he’d picked up the girl, he muttering, “What girl?” but meekly taking her there just the same, the choral snore then bringing them the rest of the way to the edge of the shaved green whereon these sleeping beauties tirelessly jounced and tumbled. “They’re like some kind of perpetual-motion machine,” Lorraine said at last, breaking the spellbound silence between her and Trevor, and loosening the towel, sat down on the bench next to the ball-washing pump and the tee to the final hole, her mind less on revenge (certain justifiable cruelties did occur to her) than on trying to find a language adequate to describe the performance being played out before her. But dimly lit: that helped, no squalid detail, please, the broader strokes will do. One such stroke now lifted the entwined duet beyond the cusp of green and down they rolled, losing not a beat as, snoring on, they rose and fell beneath each other, landing in that undulant turf below where Lorraine commonly fluffed her shots, her rakehell hubby back on top once more, flapping loosely in Marge’s tenacious clasp, the milky pallor of his broad rump phosphorescing rhythmically in the steady pulsing from the sky. A storm was brewing, and just over the horizon, it seemed to her: something was on fire. She flexed her shoulder, still sore from the shotgun recoil. “You wish to know delight and here you’ve been sleeping beside it all these years,” she said, and Trevor started: “What—?! How — how did you know?” he gasped. “I guessed,” she lied. “Should we wake them up?” he asked. “If,” she said, knowing full well he didn’t think so, “you think you can.” The accountant, weighing up the options, sighed ruefully, came over to sit on the bench beside her, his black-patched eye the one she saw. “Why do we even get married?” he asked, a rhetorical question, she knew, but she answered it just the same: “It’s an art form, making something out of nothing.” The bouncing lovers had fallen into a sand-trap and were now kicking up a sandstorm that partially concealed them from view, carrying the turbulence around with them as they shifted, motors roaring, about the pit. “There is something fast and furious and beautiful about the sudden casual encounter, you know, like yours with Sweet Abandon. There’s the feeling of—” “Who?” “That girl from the barbecue.” “Oh. But I didn’t—” “I know.” But it was beautiful, he was thinking, or nearly was, or might have been. “Yes, there’s a feeling of being free from story, or at least of your own sad hopeless tale — if there’s a story at all in the one-off quickie, it is cosmic and essentially electrochemical and you are not a ‘character,’ only an action.” “Yes, I see that,” he said, and she saw that he did. It’s like a waking wet dream. Did she think that or did he? It was hard to tell, for his thoughts, she saw, were interlaced with hers now with the same sort of rhythmic intimacy that conjoined their more athletic mates, now out of the sandpit and noisily churning up the water-trap nearby; she didn’t even need to tell him that prolonged affairs and marriages were forms of storytelling and thus of human artifice, tender but droll attempts to impose meaning on the lonely, empty, and all but intolerable cosmos. She laid her hand on his lap. “Your pants are wet.” “I — it was—!” “I understand.” She did and knew he knew she did, her hand still where she’d laid it. In the watertrap the froth was rising like ferment around the pounding bodies, all tinted now with the ocherous tones of a wet sky burnished by the distant fire. Something big was burning over there. The broken rhythms of the snoring couple convulsing at the water’s edge told Lorraine that the break of dawn, however stormy, was not far off, the night, not yet, but soon, would end, the shades disperse, a thought her one-eyed companion on the bench was having, too. She squeezed. “Why don’t you take them off and hang them over a limb to dry?” Because, she started to say but heard his own like thought penetrate hers: “Accountants can be artists, too,” he added. “I’m sure. Here. You can put my towel under them if you like.”

Settler’s Woods was burning. The fire, roaring its hollow inanimate roar as it licked at the black sky, seemed to stroke the lightning out of the night as it stormed inward from all sides toward the center, where a deep darkness also reigned. A great conflagration, unlike any this place had known since Barnaby’s lumberyard went up just after the war. The glow of it could be seen all the way across town, as far as the golf club and no doubt beyond. Indeed, on a night so dark and overcast, with the power out, the whole town seemed gilded by it, and many of those not asleep were soon drawn to the source of so eerie a spectacle, some dressed only in raincoats pulled on over pajamas, these gathering sightseers adding to the worries of the beleaguered police chief and mayor and the forces of law and order they’d assembled there, all of whom were now encircling the blazing woods, weapons poised to shoot whatever might come raging out through the billowing smoke and flames. That big thing was in there somewhere, ringed about now by a circle of fire, that was what might come out, that was what people were waiting to see: Big Pauline. The word was, she was wounded and dangerous. People should clear the area. Of course, they pressed closer. How big was she? There were rumbles of thunder in the air, and some of the armed men said that might be her, walking around in there. She could kick a car like a football, they said. There were rumors she had eaten people alive. “She picked her own father up and threw him so far outa here he ain’t been seen since!” She was once a woman, known to many in the crowd, intimately to more than a few, and as a woman, was wed to the town photographer, surely soon to be a widower and so to be pitied, and indeed he was pitiable, standing there at the fire’s edge in a fat gap-mouthed stupor, his bulging lashless eyes blankly reflecting the flames, looking, without his familiar camera and bagful of lenses, as though he’d left his wits somewhere as well. He seemed to be the only person present who did not know why he was here. The police chief wished, frankly, he’d not had the man brought out, dazed and clumsy and unreliable as he was, useless to him and a likely casualty if things got worse, and they showed no signs of getting better. The tossing of his prisoner, for whose well-being he was responsible (how was he going to explain all this to Bert and the boys upstate?), was the act of terror that had convinced him finally that this creature who was once his friend had to be destroyed. Before that, he’d been clinging, while clinging to the soft ridge of flesh just below her navel, to the hope that they might somehow find a peaceful resolution to a public crisis that had, increasingly, become a personal crisis of his own: not just that as a prisoner of sorts, he was in the line of fire and could get killed (he was not afraid, he had been through all that in his days as an expendable grunt in a deeper, darker woods, and what was a football lineman but a body in the line of fire?), but more that he was being forced to choose, loving both, between order and the embodiment, not to put too fine a word on it, of its contrary. Forcibly snuggled up against her warm rumbling belly during her interrogation of her father, he’d gazed up at the tender monument of her overhanging breast, rimmed with a pale radiance whenever lightning rippled, and felt himself at the edge of some fundamental revelation and some fundamental change, as though … as though he might… But then she’d cocked her arm and spread her legs to pitch the old goat, and his brief visionary moment over almost before it had begun, he’d fallen out of her relaxed grip and slithered down through her dense jungly bush, barely escaping being flattened as, hurling herself forward to complete her throw, she’d slapped her thighs together just as he’d dropped between them. The mayor and the deputized posse had opened fire to cover his escape as he scrambled out from beneath the beetling mass of her squatting haunches, limping from his fall, and she’d groaned and lashed out at her tormentors, tearing up the space around her and sending them all scattering in frantic retreat. All but the young golf club manager who, slow to react, had got snatched up by her, whether as hostage or provender, it was hard to tell from down in the trees. His capture had restricted them to shooting at her bottom half only, which only added to her rage without bringing her down, her savage counterblows forcing them into ever deeper withdrawal, dragging their wounded with them. It was the mayor who had finally suggested they burn her out. “No choice,” he’d said, and most had agreed. The police chief had objected, but he’d lost his bullhorn, and could be heard by only a few and those few had little sympathy with his dithering. They were all frightened and exhausted and nothing else had worked. “But what about the guy in the banana pants?” “He’s dead, man. She ate him.” And so they’d spread out and encircled Settler’s Woods with gas cans and torches and, on a signal passed by honking horns, had set the fire that now raged, sending flames soaring into the sky and drawing townsfolk to its edges by the hundreds, more arriving every minute with blankets and coffee thermoses and instant cameras in spite of ominous signs of an approaching thunderstorm and repeated police warnings that everyone should return home immediately or face possible arrest. Some scoffed at the extravagant accounts and said they doubted any such creature was in there, but others said she was in there all right, they’d seen her, plucking trees like Brussels sprouts and eating people whole, chucking them into her jaws like breakfast sausages. There was a sudden clap of thunder, and the skeptics in the crowd wisecracked about that (“I suppose she just let one!”), but an old boy from the Country Tavern, showing them his fresh scratches and bruises and torn shirt, said it was no joke, that was one mean fucking mother in there, and he gave them all a chilling account of what had happened to poor old Shag and Chester earlier in the evening. “Damned right, flat as a doormat, I shit you not!” A woman in a checkered nightshirt and anorak, sipping coffee, wondered aloud where John was, wasn’t this the night of his Pioneers Day barbecue, and someone said hadn’t he been killed in that terrible accident at the humpback bridge they’d passed coming out here, and, no, argued another, that must have been someone else, John had flown upstate to call out the National Guard. Others said they’d heard his daughter had been abducted and possibly his wife as well, and there were reports that the motel at the edge of the Woods was on fire and its owner shot, that babies had been stolen from their cribs to feed the monster lady and that churches had been desecrated, and that the owner of the Ford-Mercury garage and his wife had been brutally murdered in their own home or else in an ambush out at the car lot. “They say the manager of the hardware store might have done it.” “I’d heard it was the simpleton who was helping Big Pauline.” Thus, at the edge of the burning forest, the wild rumors spread like the fire itself, now closing in on the dark center of the woods and setting the air in there madly awhirl. Suddenly, there was a blinding light and a terrific explosion as a thunderbolt came smashing down as though sucked into the woods’ core and people were knocked to the ground or fell over one another and everyone pulled back, even the police and their deputies. They’d all heard it: something like a haunting baleful wail, or maybe it was just the whine of the whirlwind at the center of the great ring of fire, but now the storm began in earnest and the lightning crashed about them and the sudden hurricane-force gales whipped up the forest flames, and sparks flew in all directions. “It’s gonna get outa hand!” someone shouted, and indeed little wildfires were starting up everywhere and people’s clothes and hair were getting singed as they tried to escape the burning shower and there were fears the sudden violent winds might drive the fire into town. “Oh my God! I left my kids home sleeping!” “Damn it, Otis! I told you this was a bad idea!” But then the rain began to fall, great lashing torrents of it, upending people as they ran toward their cars, turning the ground underfoot almost instantly into a river of mud through which they slipped and splashed and crawled on all fours, the incessant flashes of lightning cracking around them like celestial whips, herding them, soaked and terrorized, homeward to their dark empty beds.

Outside the saloon a storm was raging, echoing the turbulence within as Veronica, changing Second John’s dirty diapers on a wooden cardtable, got set upon by all the barroom rowdies offended by her little boy’s childish antics with his pistol. They were both sprayed with beer and pelted with cigar butts and peanut shells and candy wrappers and lashed with a thunderous barrage of uncouth insults, mostly having to do with the contents of his diaper but some calling his origins into question and others deriding her exposed backside, which she couldn’t help. It wasn’t fair. “If I had an ass like that, I’d sell advertising space!” “The last time I saw an ass like that, it was pulling a plow!” That didn’t stop them from attacking it, she could feel them crowding up behind to make painful use of it as Maynard so often did, and she certainly didn’t like it, but what could she do, she had both hands full and open safety pins in her mouth and her baby was crying: “I been caught with my diapers down, Ma! You gotta hold them off any way you can!” The few gas lamps he hadn’t shot down were swinging on their chains as though buffeted within by the storm without, sending shadows flying about like wheeling bats, and tables and chairs were crashing as the men clambered forward, their vile threats and humorless laughter like a hot beery breath on the back of her neck. Though she shielded her son from the worst of it, they were both being drenched in buckets of beer, her backside their last line of defense, all too easily breached. There was nothing to do finally but pick the baby up, dirty bottom or no, and make a run for it. But she could find no way out. All the exits were blocked. The men surrounded them, brandishing hard penises and baring their tobacco-stained teeth as they closed in. The saloon seemed on fire from the dancing light of the swinging lamps. “We’re done for, Ma!” Second John cried, clinging painfully to her breasts. “Do something!” He was slippery and getting heavy, she almost couldn’t hold him, and the smoke from his cigar was making her nose sting and her eyes water. Then, just as she was about to collapse from exhaustion and despair, First John’s wife came in with a fresh diaper, made the men put their penises back and return to their tables, settled the lamps down, took the baby’s cigar away and threw it into a cuspidor, cleaned his bottom, gave him a change, and wrapped him up in a towel the barman gave her. “Come on, now, let’s send him back where he came from,” she smiled, and led Veronica out the door to a windy railway platform, where a train was just pulling in through the thunderstorm. “I didn’t know the train still came through here,” Ronnie said, putting her breasts back inside. “You have to know where to find it.” Her friend handed the baby to the conductor, who tossed it behind him, and the train pulled out, seeming to pull the storm away with it as it went, and Ronnie started to cry. “It’s all right now,” her old classmate said gently, helping her up out of the lawnchair. “It’s letting up. You can go home now.” “I’m sorry,” she sniffled. “I’m afraid I split the seat …” “It’s not your fault. It’s been left out too many times in the rain.” “No, I meant—” “Here, you’re completely soaked, poor thing. I’ve brought you your nightgown, which is dry at least.” She took off the ruined linen dress and dried herself with the towel offered her and pulled on the nightgown and thanked her hostess for the lovely party, begging her pardon for having stayed so late, then stumbled out by way of the darkened driveway and headed wearily home through the wet streets in the lightless early dawn.

Though there was no sign in the sky that the black stormy night had ended, Barnaby, sitting alone by his window watching the wet orange glow that had taken his daughter away get swallowed up in the darkness, knew by his own knowing that dawn had arrived. All night, she’d been at his bedside, listening to his bitter tale of duplicity and betrayal, but then the glow had appeared which, even in his crackbrain confusions, he knew to be a fire, though he’d thought it was his own house burning, the one they’d all lived in when she was a little girl and Audrey was young and beautiful. He’d worried aloud about Audrey’s safety, her life might be in danger, and his daughter had said, yes, she’d better go see, but not to worry, she’d be back soon, get some rest. “Be careful!” he’d rasped as she left, though he couldn’t be sure she’d heard him. “I love you!” Had it really been his daughter? Maybe, maybe not. In retrospect, she’d looked a little like the resident nurse, at least when she departed, if not when she arrived. He’d staggered to his chair by the rain-lashed window to watch the lightning explode and the rain whip past like crashing tides and the fire slowly die and to wait for his daughter’s return, though now he no longer expected her. What a night. He was a crazy old buzzard, like the lady said. Thought he could change what could not be changed, a delusion he shared with builders the world over. He’d found the gun he’d intended for saner purposes and shot up the place, lucky not to have killed someone. Or unlucky. Though he now knew that the woman who had left with Mitch last night was not Audrey, he still felt deceived, certain now that the heart of the woman whose hand he’d won had never been won at all. That silly woman who’d pretended to be her knew more than she knew. Audrey, too, had only pretended to be Audrey, or at least the Audrey who’d lived with him. The knowledge saddened him and added to the sorrow and emptiness that engulfed him in these rare dawn moments of lucidity, but he knew it was more his fault than hers. He the builder who had not built well. That house deserved to burn. The only light on the horizon, now gone, too. He imagined the charred ruins: his hopes. His daughter wandering through them, grieving: his legacy. He wandered there, too — tottered and shambled, rather, all grace vanished — and he tried to speak to her but could not. Though he could almost reach out and touch her, there was a distance between them that could not be bridged, as between past and present, or between part and whole. He shuffled through a door, thinking about his burning lumberyard. The waste, the waste! He looked at his image in a mirror and was not surprised to find it broken up into ill-fitting fragments. He had more than two eyes, which accounted for his lack of focus, a mouth whose parts did not all join up. Of course, it was the mirror that was broken, though it cast back a truer image than when it was whole. He leaned forward, bracing himself on the sink. It was crunched in the middle with cracks radiating outwards like a spiderweb. Had he tried to drive a nail in it? Or had Audrey?

Across town, Audrey — or Opal, rather: that dangerous game was over — had also, as though in mirror image of that broken man, been sitting sleeplessly by the window, watching the glow of the fire fade in the sudden crashing downpour, the downpour itself slowing fading as though dying with the fire. It was dawn, but a dawn that shed no light. The only light shed had been shed within and that in the blackest depths of the night when that old fool, who was her annoying husband and also an old family friend she hardly knew, started shooting at her while she was sitting on the toilet. As Audrey, she knew then that, as Opal, she had been her disappointed husband’s second choice, not merely when he’d married her, but for all the years thereafter while Audrey was still alive. Had she and Mitch consummated their affair? Even as Audrey, whose memories of her past romances were suspiciously dim, she could not be sure, although, as Opal, she was certain they had had a fling of some kind even if nothing came of it, Audrey being, for all her harsh banter, something of a tease and more insecure than Opal had ever supposed. But it didn’t matter what they’d actually done. Audrey had married Barnaby, perhaps to avenge an imagined wrong, or a real wrong, for Mitch had always shamelessly played the field (he had?), and Mitch had replied in kind, their marriages a private dialogue between them, their partners little more than analogues of spite. So shattering had this revelation been, so complex and disturbing her feelings about it, she’d not even been able at first to rise from the stool when Mitch turned up at Barnaby’s door. For, as Audrey, she now loved Mitch in a way that, as Opal, she never could nor ever would, while, as Opal, she resented his intrusion upon this revelatory drama, still unfolding, and at the same time was grateful to him for his timely rescue from a crazed old man. With whom, however, she now felt a deep bond not unlike that of an understanding lover, or at least the best of friends, and for whom she feared more than for her would-be rescuer when the gun went off. Which startled her and made her jump up off the seat, for, as Opal, she was embarrassed to be caught so compromised, even though she somehow felt it was she who was catching Mitch with Audrey, who wished to be caught in dishabille, so to speak, by an impetuous lover whom she would rebuke even as he burst in and laid eyes upon her, refusing his advances in spite of the gallantry for which Opal was so grateful, while gazing directly in his eyes as she slowly pulled her panties on, letting him know clearly what it was she was refusing him, even as Opal pulled them on with modest haste, too flustered even to remember to flush. All of which made her start to cry, whether as Opal or Audrey, she wasn’t sure, and when she opened the bathroom door and saw them both standing there, her husbands, or her lovers, one of them with a gun in his hand, the other one tottering as though he’d been shot, it was all so mixed up that she was suddenly terror-stricken, and all atremble, ran over to embrace one of them, but she didn’t know which until Mitch opened up his arms (“You all right, hon?”) and then, thank goodness, she had no choice. Mitch had wanted to call the police, but she’d dissuaded him, saying, since no one was hurt, they should let John handle it, and she’d begged him to take her home (to Opal’s home), she couldn’t bear to see another soul tonight, if he wanted to go back to the party he could go without her if he liked, and then, looking as though she’d just rebuffed him (who had he thought she was?), he’d done just that, or gone somewhere, at dawn gone still.

Maynard’s fright was of a similar order: confusion, exposure, and imminent danger. When he’d awoken he’d not known where he was. He was in a darkened bedroom, not his own, fully dressed, even to his shoes, and curled up around the backside of a sleeping woman, his hands cupping a soft smooth bottom under a silken nightie’s hem, his face in her loosened hair. His wife’s? No. Then—? This sweetness … His whole body had gone rigid as though suffering a seizure when the truth hit him, and he’d nearly swallowed his tongue stifling the cry that rose to his throat. He’d lain there in a kind of ecstasy of terror, not knowing what to do, but not wanting to let go of the greatest joy he’d ever had in life, had literally in his grasp. That bottom! Hers! The piece of silk between his cheek and pillow, dampened by his tears, had then been freshly dampened, but now by tears of incredulous bliss, his hands suddenly aware of their being in the world in a way no part of him had ever been before. He’d longed to press beyond where now he touched, but had been afraid to break a spell that held him as much as her in thrall. She’d stirred slightly, and Maynard had felt a fury at his chest that it would not stop heaving, and at the noisome breath he breathed and at the scratchy beard that roughed his cheeks, the clothes that walled him off from her, the odors of his unwashed body which rose now to thwart all hopes of declaring, even by the gentlest gesture, the desperate love that so consumed him and made him tremble, head to foot, this trembling angering and frightening him as well. He prayed to let this moment last forever, but it couldn’t, he knew, no moment could, something had to happen and something did: a car pulled into the drive below, startling him so, he jerked his hands away, and then, the damage done, no way to put them back. Nor had he time or liberty: he heard the car door slam and knew he was a dead man if John should catch him here. He slipped out of the bed (she sighed and rolled over, making his stuttering heart race the faster, his stomach turn) and crept from the room, trying desperately not to fart until he reached the hall, and succeeding only so far as the door. “John—?” she murmured sleepily. John was coming in the door downstairs, which one, the back? The side door by the drive? Maynard had forgotten the precious garment soaked by his lovesick tears, but too late now. He heard steps below and ducked into a room where a child with two heads stared at him from under a blanket on the floor. “Nighty-night,” he whispered, terribly confused, and again his gut betrayed him, making the two heads giggle and whisper. This was worrying. He slipped out, listened from the head of the stairs: John was in the kitchen opening the refrigerator door, popping a beercan, shushing the dogs. That’s right, the dogs, he had forgotten about the dogs. What could he do? Crawl out a window and jump from the roof? Hide in a closet with all his gases until John had slept and gone again? Cut his throat? Finally, what in a blind funk he did was take off his shoes and, muffling the stuttering put-put from his treacherous behind as best he could, he’d tiptoed barefoot down the stairs, through the hall, past dining room and living room, and on out the front door into the soggy dawn. It worked! Or nearly. John called out from inside the house just as he reached the front sidewalk and knelt to put his shoes back on: “Call me later on today, Maynard! I’ve got a proposition!”

“John—?” “Yes.” “Something terrible! Clarissa—!” “I know. I saw the woods smoldering when I flew over and stopped off there. They told me.” “I was with her until now. She was so brave—” “So they tell me. She was pretty well sedated by the time I got there.” He set his tumbler of whiskey beside her earrings on the night table, sat down on the edge of the bed to work his boots off. “She’ll be in traction awhile and have a sexy scar or two, but she’ll be okay.” “What-what’s all that?” “Some flowers for you.” “Oh. That’s very nice, John. It was sweet of you to remember.” “I dropped some off at the hospital, too. A lot of people got hurt at the fire. Did you know Dutch got shot?” “I’d heard.” He stripped off his leather vest and jeans, his shorts, tossed aside the panties lying on his pillow, and stretched out beside his sleepy wife to finish off his whiskey. Remember what? Had he missed their anniversary? “When I find out how she got the keys to the Porsche, somebody’s going to eat them.” “There was some man with her.” “I know. A guy who used to work for me.” “They say she was—” “My guess is they both were.” He’d been found in sweats, but the pants were on backwards. “It was just lucky your secretary was driving past.” “Yes, luck or something.” “She pulled Clarissa out of the creek and gave her the kiss of life. The doctor said she would have died.” Flying back, he’d traced out the series of Nevada’s double crosses, of himself, of Bruce, of everyone, Lenny’s boy included. He’d concluded that Clarissa never was a target, not of Bruce anyway, and so he’d probably punched Jennifer’s brother for the wrong reason, though the kid no doubt deserved it for something all the same. And now, it was just too convenient that Nevada was at the wreck at almost the same time it happened. Had Clarissa been a target after all? Was that why he’d been lured out of town? “Is Bruce all right?” his wife murmured. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” “I’m very sorry, dear.” Sleepily, she curled into his outstretched arm. “It was all just a joke to him,” he said, setting his glass down, and rolling over between her thighs. She lifted her knees, adjusting to his weight, hooking one foot atop his butt. “A joke?” “Life. His problem was, he couldn’t wait for the punchline.” Watching his town seem to sink away and vanish into the shadowy earth as he lifted away on his wild Bruce chase, he’d felt that something was being taken away from him, something valuable he could not afford to lose, though he could not quite name it, and the feeling had stayed with him all through the night, even as he labored to cleanse the cabin of all evidence of that ruthless overweening motherfucker’s violations, indeed of his very existence (had the puffed-up asshole greased himself? good riddance!), an inner purging matching the outer one, and that feeling of some impending but ineffable loss had pursued him until his return at dawn when once again his town had risen up out of the misty soil below him, its resurrection signaled by the dying flames and smoke from Settler’s Woods, sent up like a beacon in the disintegrating night as the violent storm which he’d had to skirt sheathed its weapons and withdrew. She kissed his shoulder as he rolled away, picked up his glass again. Loose Bruce was gone, like a joke when it’s been told, and like a joke, once heard, you really didn’t want to hear it again. But. “I feel like some part of me has died,” he admitted. “Oh, that reminds me,” she said with a sleepy yawn. “Stu’s dead.” “Stu?” “He was killed. And they ruined all his old records.” “But wasn’t he here at the barbecue?” “He never turned up. I tried to call Daphne, but her phone was off the hook.” Why did that old jug-head’s death make him think of Marie-Claire? John didn’t know, but now he knew what had been missing up at the cabin, that feeling of unnameable loss that he couldn’t put his finger on. Bruce had taken away with him Marie-Claire’s slashed canvas.

The funeral for old Stu, held two days later, was a memorable event whereat it was proved that one could indeed enjoy an old joke twice, and twice again. The church lawn, before and after the brief memorial service, was filled with a great congregation of ordinary townsfolk, young and old, all recalling jokes the old car dealer had told them, as well as amusing anecdotes about his life, which in retrospect seemed funnier than when he was alive, and though most had shared in these events, especially the older generation, and so had heard all the stories before, the sudden violent death (“Talk about your punchlines,” someone said, and another added: “It’s like the one he liked to tell about the guy who took a leak at the power plant…”) of the town’s favorite raconteur had, just as suddenly, made them all new again: there was a lot of laughter out on the church lawn that day, sighs and tears, too, and expressions of alarm that such a thing could happen in this town, but even more laughter, and everyone agreed, they don’t build ‘em like ole Stu any more, that old boy was a vintage model. There were a lot of flowers in the church, as though to provoke the corpse into a resuscitative sneezing fit, but the service itself was a soberer affair, mainly out of respect to the widow, who seemed to have lost her sense of humor and was taking it all pretty hard. She’d obviously been hitting the bottle and looked haggard and distraught, and when John brought her into the church during the singing of “Amazing Grace,” she stumbled and nearly fell and those near her heard her hiss: “Stop that, damn you! Go away and leave me alone!” Who was “you”? Most knew. It was what she’d told the police: it didn’t matter who’d pulled the trigger, it was that old ghoul’s fault. The police had their own more mundane theories. No one had as yet been charged, but the manager of the downtown hardware store, who’d skipped town in dramatic fashion after the killing, was the prime suspect. Rumors of a violent past, a prison record, a falling-out with Stu over a lemon he’d been sold, money troubles. The general view in town was that Floyd might have done it, might not have, but nobody liked him anyway. Under the circumstances, it was something of a surprise when the fugitive’s wife turned up at the funeral and timidly took a seat in the back pew. She sat alone, others shying away as though they might catch something if they got too close, until John’s wife came in, no doubt straight from the hospital, and sat down beside her and took her hand in hers for a moment, which startled her at first, but then she calmed down. As always, a healing presence, John’s wife, and the pew soon filled up, people acknowledging that the poor woman was only trying to do the Christian thing and had herself been effectively widowed by the tragedy. As the preacher, whose own daughter was missing and feared dead, reminded them, the point of many of the deceased’s favorite jokes was that things were not always what they seemed and there was often a consoling surprise at the end, and he asked them to pray, in these times that tried the human spirit, for strength and guidance, recalling for many of the mourners, perhaps on purpose for he’d heard it told many times at his own expense, old Stu’s story about the young preacher and the old widow on their wedding night: “You just take care of the strength, Reverend, and leave the rest to me.”

Ellsworth, reporting in the revived Town Crier on the funeral of the popular owner of the Ford-Mercury dealership, whose life had come to such a cruel and senseless end, took note of the minister’s tribute to the dear departed’s renowned sense of humor, which had provided so much strength and consolation for others in the community in the past, adding, in his own words, that death may carry away the person, but the stories, like rocks dropped in a stream, remain. This relative immortality of the stories vis-à-vis their actors and tellers had been much on Ellsworth’s mind of late as he emerged from what he thought of as his “long dark night of the soul” to engage with the human world once more, this world of rock-hard stories and transient lives to which, as chronicler, he’d been so long devoted, but which, in his absence, had passed without report, a delinquency he deeply regretted and said so in the double issue that marked the Crier’s return, promising to fill in all the missing news items by way of “I Remember” columns from his readers, which he solicited in his apology and also in person wherever he went, at the car dealer’s funeral, for example. He reported on that funeral, and on the annual Pioneers Day parade (for which he found few reliable witnesses, but his files were full of suitable archival material), and on the burning of Settler’s Woods, which he’d observed at a distance from his own second-floor window (a shocking moment as light bloomed suddenly in the impenetrable night: where was he—?!), and the casualties ensuing therefrom, including the town photographer’s wife, who was also his professional assistant, a tragedy of immense proportions, which was all he would say about it, and on the deplorable accident at the humpback bridge (in a separate editorial he appealed, once again, for the removal of that perilous structure), and in short, on all the old news that he could gather in, catching up as best he could on all the deaths and births, the marriages and engagements, burglaries, accidents, operations, golden anniversaries, arrests, birthdays, Little League and bowling team scores, church attendance figures. What he couldn’t report on was where he’d been exactly or how long he’d been there, for, returning as though from another dimension as the fire rose and fell on the horizon and the terrible thunderstorm crackled and boomed around him, he did not know himself. Something had passed, but it hadn’t felt like time, and in a place that was more than a place and yet no place at all. After the storm had exhausted itself, he had, as though compelled, gone out to Settler’s Woods to gaze, aghast, upon a charred and misty dreamscape which seemed to have sprung directly from the dark abyss of his own imagination. He’d remembered something Kate the librarian had once said to him about this seeming interplay of art and life: the formal resonances between them, she’d said, suggest that both are organic human enterprises, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they sometimes seem to live inside each other. But he was surprised, and had felt dreadfully empowered and hopelessly vulnerable at the same time, and not just a little disoriented by his recent adventures. He had half expected to find the Stalker wandering there, blind and reproachful, but had discovered instead his old friend Gordon, standing alone in the mud at the edge of the smoldering woods, soaked through and staring blankly into the black wet heart of the devastation. “Are you all right?” he asked. Gordon, unshaven, hands in his pockets, continued to stare straight ahead. “The stillness …,” he said. There was a deep quiet all about. Of course the birds had fled. There were, here and there, a few deep green patches spared by the fire, but most of the treetops and foliage had been burned out, leaving only the blackened trunks and naked branches like scorched arms reaching up out of the earth in anguished horror. Nothing moved except the gray wisps of smoke snaking upward through the dripping branches. “It’s over,” Ellsworth said, with a finality that surprised even himself, and his friend somberly nodded.

It was the stillness that also most struck Columbia when she awoke in the first wet pallor of that dawn, still standing by the glass door of the drugstore, staring out on the empty downtown streets as though she’d never shut her eyes all night. She had, though, had slept at least, eyes open or closed, for she’d dreamt that she’d been caught out in those very streets in the storm with no clothes on (she was hunting for her pajamas, which someone, Corny maybe, had mischievously hidden out there), and was being chased by the doctor with one of Gretchen’s plastic penises and a scalpel, crying: “Nurse! Nurse! It’s time for your pharmaceuticals!” It was still raining when the dream faded and she found herself awake, but the storm was letting up, the thunder rumbling now in the far distance and a pale light rising as though from off the streaming pavement. Her legs, as they’d been in the dream, were like fat lumps of lead, she could hardly move them, so she leaned there a moment, shifting her hips slightly to restore the circulation, and while she was doing that she saw a curious thing which made her think she might still be dreaming: two people in nothing but their shirts staggering barefoot down the slippery street in the rain, holding each other up with hands clapped round on naked hips. A sight to see, even for persons in the medical profession, there was probably even a statute against it, but there was not much they could do about it. They had helped Trevor load log-sawing Marge into his car just before the storm hit, then had dashed away through the whipping gales and lightning flashes to pick up their old stationwagon, parked by the clubhouse, forgetting, having got so used to going about as they were, that they had no pockets — Waldo, yawhawing, slapped his beefy thighs — and thus no keys. They’d had a good laugh about that and, rather than break the car door and sleep under a leaky roof with more problems on the morrow, had decided to walk on home, dressed in the storm. And had had a good time doing it, pausing from time to time to rest their tender feet, and play around a bit like kids in the crashing rain, Waldo having awakened on the edge of the green in Lorraine’s arms, completely mystified, but in a jolly and appreciative mood, saying it was the best he’d ever had and he wanted more of it; it was like the old days, football weekends and beach parties and monkey business in the bushes behind the sorority house. They were met at their front door by the police who said they wanted Waldo to come with them immediately, as soon as he got some trousers on, his purple pair being presently, they reported with a knowing smirk, in police custody. The guy he’d shot, they said, was not expected to pull through, and they had to get Waldo out to the hospital while the fellow was still alive and could identify him. “Haw,” said Waldo in utter amazement. In a way, it was good they were there because they also lacked their house keys and the police helped them break in. Did they really think Waldo had done it? Lorraine couldn’t tell. She couldn’t tell what Waldo was thinking either nor what the cops thought about her bare ass which they were staring at as if it were a major clue to some ghastly crime, or perhaps the crime itself, and that gave her such a tremendous sense of relief that she lay down on the floor while Waldo was still pulling his pants on and fell sound asleep. What Waldo was thinking about was how simple life was but how you could never figure it out, a paradoxical verity underscored by his visit to the hospital bedside of his old bud Dutch who was said to be barely hanging on. “He’s lost a lot of blood. And other things.” They had Waldo’s missing golf pants there and his old shotgun, and when he asked where they’d found them, they said out at the motel before it burned down and had he been in such-and-such a room last night? “I mighta been. But how did the goddamn gun get there?” Dutch, who’d already told these yo-yos when they dragged the sniveling accountant in that he’d shot himself, stirred himself enough to growl: “You loaned it to me.” “Oh yeah, right,” Waldo said. “I did—?” The meathead. “Hey, Dutchie! What’re they talking about, burned down? What the hell happened to you, old man?” Fuck off, Dutch said, or might have said, and as Otis’s cowboys took the boob next door to visit the guy they were now calling Pee Patch (“Haw! Who?”), Dutch sank back into the drugged stupor which, he supposed, was all the rest he’d know of life, and all he wanted to know. It was like he’d told John when he’d dropped by with an armload of flowers not long after his wife had been in: the last picture show was over, he was ready for the fade-out. John and his wife had been out to visit their daughter, also in the hospital for some reason. In intensive care, they told him. Sounded serious. And was. When she woke up, full of a dull leaden pain all through her body, her mother was sitting beside her. “Mom! Where have you been—?!” she cried, and realized there might not be any sound coming out. But her mother heard her somehow: “Right here beside you, sweetheart, all the time.” She thought she heard her go on to say she was a murderous little shit and her dad was thoroughly pissed off at her for what she’d done, but saw that it wasn’t her mother then but Nevada. Or else her dad, it was all a blur, who said, no, he wasn’t angry and told her to hang tough when she broke into dry tears (she could move nothing, nothing at all), adding that he loved her, though by then she’d probably passed out again. When John asked Alf what her chances were, Alf said she was a strong healthy youngster and she should pull through, but it would be painful and would take a while. There wasn’t much she hadn’t mashed or torn or broken, she’d need some repairs, now and later on, and might end up with a permanent brace. Which was what he’d told her mother as well before he sent her home to get some rest, longing for the same prescription. It had been one crisis after another, and Alf was dead tired, but then he was always dead tired at dawn, and he’d been buoyed up through the interminable night by the lifting of a great weight off his shoulders, or, rather, off his finger: that polypous lump, which in his imagination had grown larger than the body which he’d supposed contained it, clumsying him dangerously in the emergency room and making it difficult for him even to do up his fly, had suddenly vanished as lightly as did the night give way to dawn. About that same time, Clarissa’s mother had entered the intensive care center, looking worried but well, a welcome sight, and he had known then that everything would be all right, and confidently told her so, though he had no clear medical reason for saying so. She’d stayed on, watching over her daughter, while he’d attended the succession of traumatized patients who came rolling in on gurneys like floats in a nightmarish parade, and he’d felt watched over as well, more sure of himself than at any time since the war when he had Harriet at his side, and indeed he’d had the sensation that beautiful young nurse was next to him the whole night through, a remarkable experience he intended to tell Oxford about the next time they met for coffee, though he could have told him on his way home, because Oxford was already up, feeding the youngest ones and getting them dressed, coaching the older ones in their breakfast preparations and telling them all about the games they’d play together that day. One of the triplets had been awake all night with a tummyache, so he’d been up when Gretchen proudly brought his errant son home like a trophy from a hunt, and had been able to help her bandage up poor Corny’s head. “He must have taken a wallop from that big home-wrecking jezebel,” she’d explained, blushing happily as she pushed her spectacles up on her nose. “Maybe it will teach him a lesson.” Oxford had slept little, waking ahead of the children, worried about Columbia who’d never in her life stayed out so late, but she came home at dawn, a bit surly, saying she’d got caught out by the storm and had had to spend the night in the drugstore, and had Gretchen come out of her bedroom yet? Oxford said she hadn’t, and indeed, except to attend to basic human necessities, she didn’t come out for a whole week, and Oxford had to fill in for her down at the drugstore and watch the eight grandchildren, too, which in truth he enjoyed, and neither he nor anyone else was surprised when a beaming Gretchen finally came bobbing out into the kitchen one morning and, perched jauntily on her short leg, announced that she was almost surely expecting again. Which depressed Columbia no end, even though she had seen it coming, and made her want to complete her degree and become a registered nurse so that she could take a job up in the city and leave this cruel town forever.

By the time Gretchen emerged with the glad tidings and resumed her oversight of the downtown drugstore, the broken hardware store window around the corner had been replaced, the power had been restored out by Settler’s Woods and the phonelines repaired, most of the storm and fire damage had been assessed and insurance claims submitted, The Town Crier had reappeared, letting everyone know what had been happening recently (John’s wife contributed a touching column on “The Kiss of Life”), work had begun on removing the old humpback bridge, John having generously offered to do it at cost, the city council had met to discuss his proposal for clearing the burned-out woods for residential and commercial development, John’s daughter and the older man who’d hitched a ride with her that night were both out of intensive care and most of the others, like Pee Patch, as they were calling him, for whom Otis had felt personally responsible, were out of the hospital altogether and back to work, the motelkeeper being the most notable exception. It was still touch and go for old Dutch, and, as part of the annual blood drive chaired by John’s wife, all who were of the right blood type had been up to give the old fisherman a transfusion, Otis included, but the unhappy man had shown few signs of improving, or wanting to. The Ford-Mercury garage had not yet reopened, but there were rumors the widow might be considering marriage to the company mechanic injured in the wreck at the humpback bridge, or what was left of him anyway, a move generally perceived, since he was the only one people trusted out there, as both practical and charitable. The murder itself was still officially unsolved, but Otis had launched a nationwide search for the hardware store manager and ex-jailbird who had disappeared the night of the crime, dramatically signing his departure. At first, when they’d discovered the shattered display window, they’d supposed the store had been broken into overnight, but the door had not been forced and little seemed to be missing: a cash register handgun, a couple of tools, maybe some loose change. But then they’d found the bowling ball with the crimson fingerholes which had been thrown through the window with such force it had torn through the display partition behind and ended up down an aisle near the back of the store. When Old Hoot went, he went. The same could be said for Pauline’s old man, who was Otis’s biggest worry. That vicious psycho hadn’t been seen since the night of the fire, and the people upstate wanted to know how he’d got out of Otis’s custody. They didn’t buy the story he told them, which was nevertheless mostly true. It seemed impossible the old ranter could have survived that toss, but though the search was widening, no body had as yet been found. The joke was (Otis didn’t find it funny), he was still in orbit. “I reckon you ain’t seen the last of him,” Bert told him on the phone. “You’re the one who sent him up, ain’t you? Duwayne don’t forget things like that.” Bert, browned off over the loss of his prisoner, might only have been putting the needle in, but he had Otis looking back over his shoulder from time to time, just the same. Otis, whose sense of humor had been badly dented, had got something of a reputation since the fire at Settler’s Woods for being moody and explosively ill-tempered, not the easiest guy to work for. When, on the morning after the fire, the officer charged with ordering up autopsies on the two Country Tavern victims had confessed he’d not followed through on that one, Otis, enraged, had threatened to dock the man a month’s pay and take his badge away from him, managing only a faint unamused smile amidst the general laughter when the officer explained that “Aw, hell, Chief, Shag was just a yeller mongrel dog they kept out there, and I don’t know about Chester, but that was probably the name of that ole three-legged beer-drinkin’ alley cat out back.” Though he was maybe the best lawman the town had ever had, there was talk about his retiring from the force, especially with the threat of official charges being pressed against him for allowing Duwayne to get away and the insurance investigations into the source of the fire that had destroyed the motel and other property, for which Mayor Snuffy had chewed him out, saying, dammit, he’d let the team down. It didn’t help that John, who could usually ease problems like these, was furious with him for giving Clarissa the Porsche keys: “Bad fucking judgment, Otis.” It was, he knew it, he was unable even to think clearly anymore, and he had a permanent limp now and he was no longer certain he knew what “keeping order” meant and, well, he’d lost his best friend, so was it any wonder he’d taken to spending a lot of time locked up in his office or alone in church, and had even, hard man that he was, been seen crying from time to time, especially on his visits out to the new landfill near the airport?

Of course, there were those who insisted that Big Pauline was still alive and running around wild and naked somewhere, that Otis’s claim to have trapped and killed her in the fire and then buried her remains in the recently dug landfill was just a police cover-up of a failed operation, flawed from the outset by exaggeration and incompetence, that more likely she’d just snuck off in the storm with her infamous father (there’d been any number of sightings), or else had peed her way out before the storm even hit, a theory generated by the admittedly delirious account of the country club golf pro, when he was rescued shortly before dawn by what remained of the police posse after the firestorm had chased most of them away. Kevin had been thought dead, possibly eaten alive, so they were surprised to come upon him in a swampy, foul-smelling, but unburnt grove in the depths of Settler’s Woods, overcome by smoke and all but unconscious, but still alive and rambling on incoherently about the way that Big Pauline had saved his heinie, an amazing story that earned him the nickname of Pee Patch for some time thereafter, later shortened to Patch, which was easier to live with once he was behind the bar at the club once more. By that time the story, in all its retellings, had begun to lose its original contours, which he himself did not remember, having to rely entirely on what the police told him he’d said when they’d found him, and had begun to resemble one of old Stu’s shaggy dog jokes, may the old champ of the nineteenth hole rest in peace. When he’d first come around in the hospital, still in a state of shock, his lungs scarred, his bandaged hand known to have at least seventeen fractures, and his head and gut wracked by a hangover of titanic proportions, Kevin had had the impression of an angelic presence at the foot of his bed and he’d thought that maybe he’d died. But then he’d seen it was only John’s wife, and then John himself had come in later with some flowers. After that: a continuous parade of country clubbers, dropping by with booze and food to hear his stories, he was something of a legend, or rather, more like a cartoon character in a dirty comicbook, but never mind, it was fun lying there, recounting his strange adventures on that dark night, as told to him by his rescuers, like old movie reruns. “What a night that must have been!” they’d laugh and slap their knees. His hand healed but he was never again able to take a proper grip on a golf club, which brought an end to his career out on the pro circuit and changed his teaching habits somewhat, though his lessons out at the club when he got back were as popular as ever.

Lessons that Imogen took when she and Garth moved here, weekend golf being de rigueur in this town, where not much else ever happened. Tennis, swimming, bowling, workout gyms with weight machines, even squash courts and a baseball stadium were available, but John’s crowd, the men anyway, were all golfers. Golfers and drinkers. Imogen was convinced that the reason John took Garth out of small arms contracting and distribution and brought him to town to run the racetrack and related enterprises after John’s cousin got sent to prison was because Garth had beat him over eighteen holes one day down in New Orleans and John wanted to get him up here where he could have another shot at him. In fact, her husband hadn’t won a round since, learning something out there on the links about John’s fierce competitiveness, his powers of concentration, his stubborn quiet force, though he’d done well enough to earn John’s respect and friendship. She and Garth had bought a home in a new development called Settler’s Woods across from the playground in Peapatch Park, which was either where the original pioneer, whose statue lorded over the place, had his vegetable garden or else where his wife grew sweetpeas and other flowers; this town was full of hokey stories like that. It was a friendly place, though, easy to settle into and made easier by John’s wife, who was certainly the person to know around here. She threw a big welcoming party for them, introduced them to all their friends and everyone at the church, proposed them for memberships at the country club, took Imogen shopping, helped her enroll her two girls by a previous marriage in the local schools and invited both children to her son’s birthday party, connected them to doctors, dentists, insurance agents, and bank managers, coaxed Imogen into joining the church choir and took her to her first PTA meeting (Imogen was immediately elected treasurer), and had her over for bridge nights when the men were out of town. Which was fairly often. John had inherited from a former partner some swampland in Florida and they often went off there for what they called business meetings and to do a little deep-sea fishing and sailing. Whatever else they did, Garth didn’t say, and Imogen didn’t ask. Garth could sometimes be a bit scary. Instead, whenever he was away, she amused herself as best she could, which included taking golf lessons out at the club from Patch, a middle-aging man with a damaged hand, possibly a war wound, a randy sense of humor, and an intimate teaching style that included cuddling up from the rear and reaching around to help with the grip and backswing, which took Imogen back to her days of dry-humping at high school dances. Patch would plant one foot on the outside of her front foot to hold it in place, then push at her back foot with his other one, his knee between hers, thigh bumping the cheeks of her ass apart, his calloused hands stroking hers around the stiff leathery thing in her grip, proxy for the chunkier one bumping at her butt. Patch was not exactly her type (John was), but was attractive enough in a meaty sort of way, so finally, when he proposed it, she gazed down at their four intertangled feet shuffling in the grass below them and said, Okay, but my husband will kill you if he finds out. Patch just chuckled wickedly in her hair. So what the hell. Can’t say he wasn’t warned.

John‘s suburban development of Settler’s Woods where Garth and Imogen later lived provoked the usual knee-jerk protest from Marge, who accused the mayor and his police of doing John’s work for him by torching the woods on purpose, then clearing it for him at the city’s expense, but most noticed that Mad Marge’s heart no longer seemed in it. John, as Garth was to discover on the golf course, was tenacious and hell to beat, so maybe she’d finally just given up, her strong will worn down at last by a will yet stronger. Which John was famous for, along with his cool daring, his unbending loyalty, his attention to detail, his appetites, his broken nose, his generosity, his killer instincts, his love of the bruising battle. To which list he would add, though others might demur (Maynard, for example, in spite of all that John had done for him to get his sentence reduced and take care of his family in his absence), his compassion. Edna was one who would agree that he was a compassionate man, even though she’d not been directly told who’d paid off her mortgage when Floyd disappeared from town, and Dutch was another, a survivor in spite of himself, who’d been well compensated by John for the loss of his motel and distracted finally from his other deprivations by their codevelopment of Getaway Stadium, a new ballpark and sports facility built on the site of the old motel, originally for summer youth programs and Little League baseball, but large enough that they were eventually able to lure to town a minor league farm club, one that Dutch, owning a piece of it, later helped to run. Nevada, the popular aerobics instructor who took over the new health club at the expanded civic center, would never have described her former boss as a compassionate man (no such thing, she would have said), but she knew him to be flexible in his negotiations and not without feelings: like Otis, John had lost his best friend, and though he never mentioned it, Nevada knew he was hurting. Maybe it was the only serious loss that fortunate man had ever suffered, and as there was nothing he could do about it, his grief, like hers, could be ignored but never wholly assuaged, though his basic principle—“Caring too much for another is a bad investment”—helped. “Everyone and everything’s expendable, including yourself,” he liked to say. “The important thing is to keep your eye on the game.” An expression his wife had never heard, though she had heard him instruct her to keep her eye on the ball. Did she believe him to be a compassionate person? Who could say? She was never asked the question nor ever volunteered an opinion, though she herself was judged to be, as Ellsworth put it in an article on her many charitable activities following the devastating fire at Settler’s Woods, “the very paragon of compassion, grace, and civic virtue,” a woman loved by all no less than John was by all esteemed.

When Ellsworth dropped by Gordon’s studio to ask for a recent photo of John and his wife to accompany the article and to schedule a shoot of the charred and spectral woods, where bulldozers were already rumbling in like robotic predators, eating up the historical moment, he found his friend much changed. Gordon was suddenly an old grizzled fat man, stooped and broken like the ancient humpback bridge they were tearing down out there, and Ellsworth wondered if he himself seemed as changed in Gordon’s eyes. The shutdown photo shop was a shambles. Ellsworth had never thought of Pauline as much of a housekeeper or business manager, but her absence was clearly being felt. Photographs and curling negatives littered the floor, albums lay open on chairs and countertops, the bead curtains had been torn away, the portrait studio was a wreck, and there was dust and clutter everywhere, yet Gordon, poking lugubriously about, seemed hardly to notice. His sagging jowls were covered by a dirty gray stubble and his eyes were filmy and unfocused. Ellsworth commiserated with him on his bereavement, remarked that his place looked about as chaotic as his own Crier offices (“storm-tossed” was the word that came to mind), and expressed his indignation at Gordon’s unjust treatment at the hands of the police, which he said he intended to write an editorial about. “Artists are always misunderstood.” “Jail,” Gordon said dully. “I’d never been there. But I recognized it. It had the smell of death in it. It was my own darkroom.” He picked up a photo from a pile, studied it, set it down again. Ellsworth saw that it was a picture of John’s wife in the Pioneers Day parade, one he might use, but that Gordon had been looking at it upside down. “I felt terribly wise and terribly stupid at the same time. And very much alone. I kept hoping you might come by.” “I’m sorry. I only just found out. At the time, I was, well, somewhere else. Some time else. It was, I don’t know, like I was locked into a certain day, if that was what it was, one I thought would never end.” Ellsworth meant to say no more, but realized that what he’d just said made no sense. “I was writing a novel.” Gordon seemed surprised by this and a glimmer of his old self returned. “You mean The Artist’s Ordeal? Is it finished?” He hesitated. “I don’t know. I think so. But I can’t find it.” He’d returned from the grim desolation of smoldering Settler’s Woods to the grimmer desolation of his own offices, shocked afresh by what had met him there. His shelves and file drawers were all spilled out and he’d evidently ripped up the sole remaining archival copies of the precious wedding issues, among many others. Perhaps, he’d thought, he was mistaken about the importance of the official chronicler to the keeping of the communal memory, but he’d shaken off his doubts and set about putting his and the town’s lives back together again. He’d just been pasting up the scraps as best he could when, around noon, she came in. While sitting all night at the hospital bedside of her child, she’d composed a little essay for his paper on “The Kiss of Life,” she’d said, looking up at him as she used to look up at him when they were children, adding with an apologetic smile that she hoped it was not too badly written. Suddenly, he’d wished to hold her hand and read to her as he used to do, this time from his own work, and she’d seemed pleased when he’d suggested it. But when he’d gone looking for the novel, it wasn’t there. Only traces. A sheet or two. Scrawled notes. A few mad ravings tossed helter-skelter. “I guess I burned it after all.” He glanced again at the photograph on the top of the pile, but saw now that it was of Gordon’s dying mother. Gordon must have shuffled them about. The old lady seemed to be staring accusingly up at him, her flesh sunken, toothless mouth agape. A shriveled breast scissored between her gnarled fingers. In his novel, he had written about “the unspeakable things” the Stalker was doing with the Model, but, no, wrong, everything was speakable. “What did you want from her?” Gordon asked suddenly. He’d picked up a soupy grayish photo that seemed to have no image on it at all. “Her?” “You know.” “I–I’m not sure.” His friend’s sorrowful gaze dropped to the murky photograph. “Nor I.”

The return of The Town Crier was greeted by the usual disparaging wisecracks, but even its severest critics were relieved to find it each week on their front porches again. Things had been happening during its absence, but now it was as though they were really happening, and even those events that had gone unreported had been rescued from oblivion by Ellsworth’s reconstruction of them, in the same way that the more ancient past had been recovered through his innovative “I Remember” columns. A popular former town librarian, who had passed on some years back, had written in an “I Remember” contribution of her own that “Memory is all we have to keep time from taking everything away from us,” and not only did most townsfolk agree with her, but many had that column clipped and pinned up somewhere or tucked in a cookbook or the Bible so they wouldn’t forget it. For Marge, the weekly newspaper was less significant as history (she had her scorecards for that, sharing her husband’s respect for numbers as about all the history one could count on) than as a bully pulpit, she having been a frequent contributor to its letters page, though less so now than in the past. Had she lost her crusading zeal? Had John finally worn her down? Not exactly. For dreamless Marge had had at last a dream. Where she’d had it, she wasn’t sure. She remembered being out on the darkening golf course, feeling very tired, and stumbling toward the seventeenth green, which looked very soft and cushy. She’d just holed out and the last thing she recalled was bending over to look in the hole for her ball. Then she woke up at home. But in between. She’d tried to tell Lollie about it, but though she’d had to listen to countless dreams from Lorraine over the years, her friend had refused to listen to the only one Marge had ever had. “I was dancing with … somebody,” she’d said. “Then suddenly it was more than dancing.” “I don’t want to hear about it, Marge!” Was Lorraine reading her mind? No, that was over and even her memory of what she’d heard had dimmed. Lorraine was just being selfish. The dream had begun in the basement of John’s fraternity house where Marge learned that she’d just been elected. They prodded her forward and, because the issue was zoning problems, she took off her clothes or maybe they were already off for the same reason. Likewise her partner, who told her it was time to start straddling the issue, and that was when the slamdance began. Body contact, he grunted bruisingly. I love it! Though it was the only dream Marge had ever had, the amazing thing was, she was still having it, though most of the preliminaries had long since dropped away. No complaints. It was a pretty good dream, even if there was not much to tell anymore, were there anyone to tell it to. Certainly not to Trevor who was too tired even to talk most of the time and who got terribly flustered whenever she even mentioned the bed, not to speak of sleep and dreams. So, in effect, she’d been subverted from within, knew it, didn’t care: dancing John could do what he liked, or almost. When she learned of John’s plans to develop Settler’s Woods after the fire, she had written to The Town Crier about it, accusing the city of sinister collusion, but her letter had appeared the same week that they dug up some old human remains out there, including a skull with the middle of the face missing, Ellsworth heading the story, “Grisly Find in Settler’s Woods,” and flaunting his rhetoric in an editorial on the need to clean up that dangerous area, so her message did not get through. No matter. Back to beddy-bye. To speak in the philosophizing manner. Besides, Settler’s Woods was one of John’s most graceful developments and popular with the community. He preserved most of the surviving trees, mature timber enhancing property value these days, carved the area into interesting odd-shaped lots following the old creek bed (Marge and Trevor bought one), and built a pretty little park with a children’s playground around a small grove in the center that had somehow escaped the fire, John thus, ironically, becoming celebrated, like his fondly remembered father-in-law before him, as a builder of city parks.

Opal was proud of her son and loved the park he built, wishing her grandchildren were still small so she could bring them to it, as she used to take them to the old one and her own little boy before them. Oh so long ago. The statue of the Old Pioneer had been rescued from the civic center parking lot and given a nice new pedestal and, though you had to crane your neck to look up at it, it was like having an old lost friend back home again. She missed the old bandstand and the performances there and the family picnics and the summertime speeches her handsome brother used to give, but her husband Mitch, at her urging, had donated a dozen benches in memory of members of the family and old political friends, and they were not as comfortable as the old ones perhaps, but they made her very happy. She liked to sit in them, half dozing in the sun, and watch the children play, letting the past wash over her like a loving embrace, and she often found herself being asked to mind this one or that one for a moment while their mothers dashed off on errands, something she was pleased to do, for it made her feel wanted again. It was so much nicer than the malls, which had no trees or benches at all and no neighborliness either, whatever Kate might say. One day, she found herself sitting on one of the roomier contoured benches of the old city park with that dear friend and with Harriet, too, one on each side. It seemed that Audrey had recently died and they were talking about this, Opal understanding that her friends were really congratulating her on the Audrey inside her having died, since if they were still alive Audrey must be, too. Nonsense! snorted Harriet, and Kate said that, yes, life was, that was what made it so sad. And so beautiful. They saw the young stringy-haired newspaper editor coming their way with a camera, looking sheepish, and Opal exclaimed: All this has happened before! Kate smiled and said, Yes, no doubt, probably everything has. Harriet smiled her own ironic smile and said that the one thing she had no doubts about was that nothing ever happened twice. Opal realized that this conundrum her friends had posed on either side of her and the distinctive smiles on their two lovely faces there in the dappled sunlight were the last things she would see or know before she died, and she felt a pang of grief, and a pang of love.

Ah well, grief, love, sometimes it was hard to tell them apart, so profoundly bound up in one another were they, for no mortal love was free from death nor death’s grief from a grievous love of self. When Yale was killed in the war, Oxford, though paralyzed with a sudden despair that dropped him to his knees, realized that he’d been suffering the loss of his beloved son from the day he was born, and that he’d cherished that suffering. In her suicide note three years later, his cancer-stricken wife Kate wrote: “Why we turn against reason, Oxford, is because it tells us we can never have the one deathless thing we most desire and that all our lesser loves must end in sorrow. It’s almost unreasonable to be reasonable. I love you, Oxford, but can express this now only by inflicting grief upon you, which, alas, I find I would do with pleasure. And so I deny my love and mourn only myself. My own grief satisfies me and, as you are no longer loved — indeed, you no longer even exist for me — you are freed from all mournful thought of me, who certainly does not exist, unless grieving gives you joy.” He’d thought it a cruel letter at the time, but had come to understand that wise Kate had loved him with a rare transcendental love and had found a way, while dying, to express it, and then the tears had come afresh, self-pitying tears, of course, at what he’d lost. For Kate’s friend Harriet, who’d died a couple of years earlier, tears were nothing but a sales hook for the entertainment racket, though she’d happily shed plenty over books and in the movies, if seldom in life. “Meat’s meat,” she always said dismissively. “It has its needs, but you can’t take them seriously,” and her husband Alf, whose hands were daily busied by needful flesh, agreed — until he held her trembling hands in his (“Hey, do you remember when …?” he’d murmured awkwardly) and felt the life go out and knew then that what he’d loved, though rooted in the self, was not the self. Over the years since then, Alf had found some consolation in the healing of others, or at least in the easing of pain, his own included, bourbon being his usual self-prescription, just as Oxford had consoled himself with his multitudinous grandchildren (at least two more now on the way), the two men meeting most mornings for coffee in the Sixth Street Cafe to exchange thoughts on such topics as love and grief and also the news of the day, which on this particular occasion had to do with the building of the new racetrack (“Coming Soon: The Sport of Kings!” was the headline in the Crier), the old bones found out at Settler’s Woods which Alf had been asked to examine, the return of Alf’s nephew, a high school classmate of John’s, to run John’s new international transport firm, recent rumors about the hardware store next door, closed since Old Hoot fled town (there was a business associate of John’s visiting from the West Coast this week, she said to be a high-tech hotshot), the surprise marriage announcement of old Stu’s widow, and the decision of Oxford’s daughter, who was also Alf’s nurse, to go back to school and complete her degree, which Alf, generously, offered to help pay for. John’s wife, walking her dogs, passed by the cafe window just then, reminding Alf to tell Oxford about the strange sensation he’d had at the tip of his finger and how it had vanished, but before he could get to it, Trevor the insurance agent came limping in and joined them briefly with a cup of soup which he spooned up hastily with quaking hands, and then as quickly got up to go. There were dark bags under his eye and eyepatch and what looked like bruises on his face and neck. “Are you all right, Trevor?” Alf asked. “I–I’m not sleeping well.” “I’ll give you a prescription.” “No. It won’t help.” He ducked his head, tugging at the cuffs of his linen suit. “It’s all right,” he said. He squinted at them with his good eye, then leaned closer. “It’s a lucky life to have known delight,” he whispered, his soft lips quivering. “Isn’t it?” “He’s suffering from delusions,” Alf explained when Trevor left, as though that explained anything at all.

“Oh, I know, honey, I was just kidding myself, it was a big mistake, but he said he loved me and that big booger between his legs was as hard as brass and all mine, so how could I help it? I’m basically a nice person, you know that, but it was all I could think about, it was driving me crazy and I did crazy things. I still think about it, all the time, but now I have to help him find it. It’s awful, but what can I do? He owns half the garage, I can’t get out of it, I can only hope to hell the pathetic sonuvabitch falls out of his bed and dies. That fitness freak you’re so crazy about who gave him the kiss of life can kiss my ass, goddamn her. Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? Isn’t that Brucieboy’s girlfriend? If so, I wish to hell he’d come back and claim her. She knows Rex from somewhere and keeps butting in, watching over him like he’s her kid brother or something, it really gets my goat. The chilly bitch says she doesn’t trust me, and when he comes home from the hospital, I’m afraid she’s going to move in on us. Do you think she’s trying to get a piece of the action? Probably, hunh? What a mess. And he’s so mean to me! Honest to God, it’s the worst thing that’s happened to me since back during my first marriage when I was playing around and got that infected lovebite on the ass. You remember? Thought I’d die. Why the hell was Rex driving John’s car anyway? Oh, I don’t blame your daughter, poor thing, she’s suffered enough. No, it was Winnie’s fault, I’m sure of it. The old ghoul was just getting her own back out at the humpback bridge where she bought it herself. I’m glad they’re tearing the fucking thing down, scares the pants off me every time I have to drive over it. Winnie’s nailed old Stu, and me, too, in her witchy way, sticking me with this murderous basket case, maybe the old battle-ax’ll go away now and leave me alone. What’s worse, I have to admit, honey, I miss old Stu. His hillbilly music, his dumb jokes, his sneezing and farting, all of it. And I don’t have anyone to get swacked with now. It’s so boring tying one on alone! At least you’re back, sugar. I’m so glad, I was lost without you! I’ve got so much to — hey, did I tell you? I ran into Colt again. Why didn’t you warn me John was bringing him back here? It was terrible. He didn’t even recognize me. When I told him who I was, the dickhead just stared at me and said, No shit. Really! It was disgust at first sight. I couldn’t blame him. I’m such an ugly old bag now, who’d want to recognize me, even if they did? Looking in a mirror makes me puke. It’s all over, it really is. Oh God, I’m crying and I can’t stop! The good times are gone, sweetie! I’ll never know hard dick again! I’m so scared! How am I going to get through the rest of it?”

Nevada, whom Daphne called a chilly bitch, had a more professional attitude toward hard dick perhaps than did the likes of sentimental heart-on-her-sleeve Daphne, but it was not as callous a one as those who’d enjoyed her services might have supposed. For Nevada, hard dick was a monument which she helped raise, sometimes merely by what she revealed or concealed, a kind of magical sleight of body, other times more dynamically, using her orifices and appendages like an artist’s tools, making something happen out of nothing — though of course it wasn’t nothing, that was just the point: monuments were never the thing itself, merely an emblem of and tribute to it. All her life, at least since she’d given up oldtime religion, Nevada had believed fundamentally in hard dick — something to hold onto in a time of trouble, she often said to Rex, a mighty rock in a weary land — and in the mystery behind it, something not visible on the surface, part human, part cosmic, which it was her task and fortune to help reveal, or at least to invoke. To erect. Which made her something of a priestess, she knew, a responsibility she took seriously (pleasure, she took seriously, too, most else besides; Nevada was at heart, contrary to the popular perception, a serious woman), keeping herself fit with a rigorous training program and staying alert to the nuances of the vocation. Now, with Rex’s accident, it was not that her faith had been shaken, but that it had deepened, drawing her beyond the iconic and the monumental into the subtler paradoxes of soft-dick love. Or such, at any rate, was the consequence of her decision to stay on here in a small prairie town she loathed with all her heart to be near to and care for the only thing human she’d ever connected to in this world since her old granny cashed in. And he needed her. The fat lady was trying to renege on their contract and might even be dangerous, and John, fearing a major lawsuit, was as usual taking the offensive and might hit Rex with everything from statutory rape to murder to force him to cut a deal. John blamed Nevada for the trouble Clarissa had got into and for what had happened to Bruce and Jennifer as well, both assumed dead, saying that as far as he was concerned she was an accessory to kidnap and murder, but he also owed her a favor for dragging his bloody child out of the creek and saving her life, for dressing both of them before the ambulance came in the clothes she’d found scattered by the roadside while tailing them (until she found the shorts, she’d thought she was following John), and for getting Rex to agree, conditionally, to say that he’d been the one driving. Nevada had expected a substantial payoff from Bruce for setting him up with his farewell cherrypop, he’d even talked about making her a full business partner of John’s, presumably by way of a final will, it was the main reason she’d wanted to go up to the cabin with John that night, but she wasn’t surprised that she’d been double-crossed. By Bruce or John or both. All she got handed by John was a wad of dark-stained bills tagged, For the pimp. Was that blood, or had Bruce wiped his ass on them? She handed them back. Suspicious by nature, she didn’t trust them anyway. When she asked John pointblank if there was a will, he said there might have been, but it wasn’t worth much, was it, if there was no body. And that was exactly how much she learned from John about what he’d found up there, though he did have effective operational control of a lot of Bruce’s properties and investments after that. What Nevada asked for, standing there in her bloody clothes in the hospital room that grim dawn, knowing she was beaten, beaten badly, was a permanent job in or near town so as to be near Rex. John gazed at her thoughtfully, then at crushed and unconscious Rex, putting things together. We can work it out, he said, and later he sold her the new health club franchise at the expanded civic center for a dollar where she gave aerobic and weight-training classes and he transferred a couple of investments into her name which were probably hers anyway, and in time they even became something like friends, though they never got it on again, nor did she wish to. Not now. Maybe later when his own dick went soft.

One day, long before that happened, when John had to make a trip up to the state capital for a meeting his father had arranged with members of the state gaming commission, Nevada said she knew someone up there John should visit. She was a professional, but she’d buy him his ticket and it would be worth his time. John doubted this and distrusted Nevada still, but took the phone number along. Before leaving, he stopped by the police station to talk with the troubled chief and suggest a career change, but learned that Otis had left for Settler’s Woods where they might have found their missing prisoner at last. Not so. “These have been here some while,” Otis said, kicking at the bones. Bulldozers, clearing the charred stumps, had turned them up at the edge of a ravine. Otis was disappointed and worried, looking edgily over his shoulder, and so was receptive to John’s proposal. He said he’d think on it and let him know when John got back. John, in turn, was sobered by the bones, and realized he’d not yet shaken off the emotional garbage of Bruce’s suicidal betrayal. Something in him still wanted the old days back, but the loss of his old friend, he knew, was permanent. The miserable asshole was either dead, which was highly likely, or, if John ever ran into him again, he’d have to kill him. Grief for John was an appetite like any other and, a man of many appetites, John believed in feeding one with another. Thus it was that the idea of an exotic fuck in the old style appealed to him as both wake and exorcism, so after the meeting, which did not go well (luckily, he’d made sure that nothing was in his own name), he called and booked an hour before dinner, figuring he could return later if she was good and he wanted a nightcap. He expected her to surprise him and she did. Not the sex. She was young, skilled, limber, thoughtful, even contemplative, better with her vagina than her mouth (she’d had a good teacher), but, except for her expressionless mask and Goldilocks wig, conventional. She fucked by the numbers, almost as though out of a manual. Probably the most exciting thing about her was her aura of terrible vulnerability: she was, whore or no, intensely virginal. She was literally trembling as he entered her. But that wasn’t the surprise either.

When Clarissa got out of traction and was able to travel, albeit with a back and neck brace and crutches, she went up to the capital for the first of the plastic surgery her father had scheduled (nothing but the best, as always), and, though she did not know her father had preceded her nor ever found out, Clarissa also paid a visit, arranged by Nevada on the promise that it was a secret between them, to her old friend Jennifer. It was a cold wintry day, and Jen’s flat was dark and chilly. The living room and bedroom looked like shutdown movie sets, very posh and with lots of soft beautiful fabrics, even on the walls, but they sat at a plain wooden table in the dismal little kitchen at the back, Jen in a droopy housecoat and close-cropped hair, drinking Diet Cokes together. It was an awkward meeting, around noontime, before Jen’s working day began, and although, thanks to Nevada, each knew a lot about what had happened to the other, they found it hard to start talking about it. It wasn’t that Jen was unhappy, really, but she was different. Or something was different between them. For one thing, Jen had taken up smoking. But more than that. She seemed thinner, more hollow cheeked, still pretty in an angular sort of way, but older, her faded complexion showing traces of creamed-off makeup. Clarissa had suggested in her phonecall that they meet for a taco or a hamburger somewhere, but Jen said she never went out anymore, so now Clarissa asked her why not, and she said she just didn’t like it out there, it was too confusing, a big meaningless blur. “In here, I know what’s what,” she said, turning her Coke glass round and round in its own sweat ring on the table. Clarissa filled Jennifer in on all the family news (“The Creep came to see me every day …”) and told her how Nevada pulled her out of the wreck and gave her the kiss of life, and Jennifer, stubbing out her cigarette in the jar lid that served as an ashtray and lighting up another, said that she and Nevada were lovers now. “Sort of. It’s more like being sisters maybe, but it’s what we have that’s steady. The men just come and go.” Clarissa was shocked but tried not to show it. Jen asked her why Rex was in her car that night and Clarissa told her. “I was really pissed off that you’d gone off with Bruce alone. I got stoned and went completely out of my skull.” “Probably they were just trying to protect you. It wasn’t very nice. I think maybe he meant to kill me and changed his mind.” She stood up, cigarette dangling in the corner of her mouth, and dropped her housecoat and Clarissa, blinking, saw slanted light on scarred flesh, and then Jen was sitting again, the housecoat wrapped around her. “It was beautiful, though. The whole cabin was full of flowers. It was like a dream I’d had.” Clarissa, trying to stay cool, said: “Well, my scars are worse, and there was nothing beautiful about it.” Jennifer nodded, stubbed her butt out in the heaped jar lid. “I’m awfully sorry.” “Except for one moment maybe, when I felt wildly free. But I can only vaguely remember it.” Clarissa went to use the bathroom, Jen helping her as far as the door, and when she came back she asked about the ruined painting hanging in there. “Marie-Claire did it. It was the only thing he gave me afterwards. A kind of souvenir. While he had me strapped down, he said he believed Marie-Claire had found a kind of final ecstasy through pure form before she died, and he wanted to use me the same way she had used her canvas. It was pretty scary.” They both agreed that Bruce was a totally screwed-up guy, though Jennifer said she still loved him, even if he was dead. Maybe that was what was different about her. When Clarissa got up to go, Jen started to cry. She apologized, and what she said, wiping her eyes on her housecoat sleeve, was: “I can never fall in love again.” “Who knows?” Clarissa said, leaning on her crutches. She was feeling strangely jealous of Jennifer, and she was ashamed of it. “Anyway, Jen, once was better than nothing.”

Like sister, like brother. Jennifer’s brother Philip, too, carried the torch for a lost love well past all hope of reciprocation and past even his desire for it. Years later, married and with children of his own, teaching at a small college not unlike the one his father taught at when Philip was in kindergarten, enjoying an affair with a young biology colleague (hey, let it happen) and popular with the students of both sexes (his philosophy, taught him in his father’s own study by the beautiful schemer who changed his life: if you can’t send the soul to heaven, lover, at least, hallowed be thy kingly come, send the body …), he still suffered a kind of wistful flush whenever Clarissa came to mind or was brought to mind by news from home sent by Zoe. As when she first got elected to the state legislature, for example: he could hardly recognize her from the newspaper photo, but what he saw when he stared at that strong handsome woman standing by her private jet in her business suit was the vulnerable little teenager in her hospital bed, utterly locked up in casts and braces, but fiery-eyed and taunting him still, even as she asked a favor of him, demanded it, rather, an image that provoked in him an almost unbearable longing which, as an educated man, he supposed was at heart a longing for a lost innocence. Got the hots, as he and Turtle used to say, but the hots he got these days were not for sex but for the wonderful all-consuming glow that used to accompany its anticipation while it itself was still largely unknown, a glow he could only experience secondhand now by way of the occasional undergraduate or, glimmeringly, by reliving his passion for Clarissa. His friend Maynard had also gone the grad school route in time and had even visited Philip’s college when Philip managed to get him short-listed during a search in what passed for a philosophy department there, but Maynard was too weird even for this lot. He lectured from his thesis-in-progress which espoused the theory that the big bang theory of an exploding and contracting universe was nothing more than a residual memory from the womb — but nothing less either, for who was to say that we did not, in each of our cells, reenact the entire history of the universe? That might have gone down without a blink had he not defended his thesis with a wild mix of evangelical religious metaphors and research based largely on his ritual visits to porn parlors, Maynard being evidently another trying to recapture a lost delight, but about as crazy as his poor mother who, last time Philip saw her, screamed every time someone opened a door or she had to turn a corner. Of course, loopy as his own folks were, Philip was not really one to talk. Maynard’s embittered father, who had whipped the boy for things as insignificant as a dirty wristband found in the woods or a childish question about angels and orgasms, did a bit of prison time eventually, caught out in some irregularities at the racetrack, and since Philip was off to college by then, Maynard was taken in by his own folks and given Philip’s old room. Which always made Philip feel uneasy in a way he could not quite pin down, though Maynard became more like family to him than his own family did, except for Zoe. Philip had drifted away from his parents over the years, or they from him, never did get used to baby Adam, who always seemed a bit scary to him, nor ever saw Jennifer again, though he knew she was alive somewhere because Clarissa told him so. He’d gone to visit his love every day after the accident while she was in the hospital, enduring her bitter invective, responding abjectly to her least demand, mostly in silence, never once professing his love, nor replying in kind to her humiliating ridicule, often with an audience of other friends about. Then one day, when no one else was around and she seemed particularly angry and restless inside all her bindings and apparatuses, Clarissa asked him to reach under her bedclothes and jerk her off, not being able to use her hands was driving her crazy, come on, Creep, make yourself useful. And so, breathless with terror and excitement, his eye on her braced hips and rigid cast-locked elbows, his broken nose tingling inside its own plaster mask, he slid his damp trembling hand into that tender crevice he had so long coveted and, with his finger up her at last, felt all thought dissolve into pure sensation, like a hot brain bath, what his mother would have called beatitude or an ecstasy attack, a sensation which lingered in the memory to this day, though he no longer remembered what his finger felt, if in fact, stunned as he was, it felt anything at all. Her own pleasure engulfed him and he came in his own pants, not knowing how it happened. Okay, I owe you one, Creep, she said afterwards. Now get lost. Never did collect. Never hoped to. Dreamt of it, though. All the days of his life.

Otis owed one to the Virgin and she did collect. After retiring from the police force and before taking over the management and security operations of the municipal airport, a vacancy created by the election of Mayor Snuffy, Otis went on the religious retreat he had solemnly promised her, withdrawing from friends, family, and all worldly obligations to a small rustic cabin at the edge of a summer camp run by the church. Except for attending Mass in the little chapel in the woods, he kept himself apart from the children and the staff and the other people on retreat, eating alone, reading the literature provided, taking long silent walks, praying and meditating and reflecting upon the cross and images of the Virgin and of Pauline. These latter he kept out of sight nor did he even mention them in the confessional, for, though he had the Virgin’s own permission to study them and attached no sinfulness to them, others might not have understood that his interest in these little paper blowups of the creases and dimples and hairy bits of naked flesh was not prurient but contemplative: Otis, in short, thumbing through the photos, was seeking something like the mystical hot brain bath that had benchmarked the emotional life of young Fish. That fateful night in the woods in Pauline’s lap, pressed up under the tender overhang of her monumental breast, illumined only by the stuttering radiance of the turbulent skies, Otis had felt himself as close to a true religious experience as he’d ever known, but one interrupted by his sudden untimely and painful fall between her thighs (he could remember, as he hit the ground, glancing up in panic at her massive craglike buns for fear she might sit down before he could get to his feet and scramble out of there), and his desire now was to recapture that visionary moment just before, wherein, as he now recalled, his whole life as Officer Otis the guardian warrior had been revealed as a mockery, a self-delusion: what did his lifelong obsession with order and disorder have to do with this turbulent, radiant, and tender world which knew, at heart, no such distinction? Oh ye of little faith! her belly had seemed to murmur into his pressed ear. What measures you take to conceal the truth from view! Yes, he had been ready at last to shed all artifice — to be a man merely of the here and now was to be a man closed out from eternity! — and to embrace, if it could be said to be embraceable, the legendary abyss, which seemed to lie just beyond the warm undulant flesh to which, before he fell, he clung. But then, suddenly, he was on the ground again and, with gunfire crackling, it was back to business as usual. Except he was dead tired, hadn’t slept for what seemed like weeks, so the rest of that night was like a walking nightmare — the madness of the fire, the exhausting storm, her weight, the confusion, the mud at the landfill, his terrible weariness — and he remembered little of it, dependent upon these photos to bring it back to mind. Which they did but dimly, referring, like most criminal evidence, more to themselves than to anything else. But then, one twilit evening, he was staring, his thoughts elsewhere, at a shot apparently taken in the rain, or perhaps in the bath, and he suddenly seemed to see behind Pauline’s twinkling pubes a faint second image peeking through: a pure white presence, like a tunic, flowing beside its ghostly twin as though shadowed by its own reflection. What? He peered closer. No. Nothing more. A photographic flaw perhaps. No, wait! There, up by the appendectomy scar: a gaze — that gaze! He gasped and fell to his knees, felt a tingling on the back of his neck. It was she! The Virgin! A miracle!

Gordon, the town photographer who had taken the photos that so engaged the attention of the former police chief on his religious retreat, received in time an unexpected bequest when Trevor the insurance agent suddenly fell victim to time’s ceaseless violence and wasted away and died. There was no explanation in the will, only the proviso that it be used to further the legatee’s artistic endeavors. Not quite a miracle perhaps, but certainly a surprise. In an article in The Town Crier, editor Ellsworth praised the deceased for his generous support of the arts in the community and pointed out that the recipient of his beneficence, recently widowered, had devoted his life to serious artistic endeavors, both public and private, which had heretofore gone largely unrecognized. When interviewed, the photographer was reported to have said that he hoped to accomplish a complete study of the town, exploring it exhaustively, block by block, to unlock its elusive secrets and reveal its hidden surfaces. What Gordon really told Ellsworth was that he was through with photography, there was nothing left to see worth seeing, it was his inclination to return now to drawing and painting, and to portraiture in particular, which he proceeded to do, though with the help of photography, copying directly from his studio shots and sometimes, for variety, from photos taken out on the streets, or even from magazines. A bit mechanical maybe, but everyone seemed to love them and to think of him thereafter as the town artist. Ellsworth objected privately (Gordon, gazing at him as one might at a prospective model, was shocked to notice how gray his thin stringy hair had become, how deep the bags beneath his eyes, and wondered where those photos were he took when they were young), but without conviction, for he himself, shrugging his shoulders when asked what had happened to The Artist’s Ordeal, had launched a new novel about his grandfather, an itinerant printer who had made his living passing through villages such as this one, producing commercial handbills and selling how-to-do-it and children’s books, and who here met a widow who wrote poetry for weddings and funerals and married her and settled down. He would not call it The Artist and His Muse, he said when Gordon suggested it. Something more like: I Remember: The Story of My Grandfather. Gordon offered to provide illustrations for it. The studio reopened, but by appointment only. Disenchanted with his former pursuits, Gordon no longer sold or developed film, accepted news photo assignments for the Crier, added to or even refiled his backshop collections (though many of the prints were useful to him in his new career), nor took school, club, wedding, anniversary, team, or any other personal, social, or group photos away from the shop, but he did put up new hangings and reactivate his old studio, the portraits taken there often serving as the basis for his higher artistic aspirations, and thus he continued to contribute to the town’s pictorial history, if not so extensively as before.

By coincidence, on the day of Trevor’s funeral, Floyd called home. He wouldn’t say where he was. On the road somewhere down South. He had another truck which he’d got from a guy who suddenly didn’t want it anymore. And now a hitchhiker he’d picked up had just offered him a job running drugs up from the border with it. “You gonna do that?” “Heck, no. The sonuvabitch’ll pay dear for even askin’.” “Don’t do nothin’ wrong, Floyd.” “No. Where was you all day? I rung up earlier.” “To a funeral. You recall that feller we bought our house insurance from? He died.” Edna pressed her skirt down across her knees. “When you comin’ back, Floyd?” “Not for a time, I reckon. Who’s John got in the store?” “It’s shut down. I hear tell it’s gonna be a museum.” “Always was one. Did he find him some sucker yet to run his truckin’ racket?” “Looks like it. Some feller from outa town who useta live here oncet. His wife seems nice, she was at the funeral today. They say she used to be on TV. Anyways that’s what they wrote in the newspaper.” “What did they write about me in the newspaper?” “Nary a word. Was you expectin’ to be famous?” “You know what I mean. What did they say when Stu got killt? Who’d they say done it?” “They never did.” “It wasn’t me, Edna. I swear on the Bible. I never touched old Stu.” “Who said you did?” “There’s some thinkin’ it.” She really didn’t want to talk about all this. It was making her cry again. It was awful all the questions she had to answer when he left, all the things they told her. “Are you keepin’ warm, Floyd?” “Here where I am, keepin’ warm ain’t a problem. What’s a problem is I don’t have no money to send you. Not yet.” “It’s okay. I’m gonna have a job soon at the new pioneer museum.” “It ain’t okay. But nothin’ I can do. If I get some, though, I’ll drop it off with your half sister like always.” “I reckon she’ll be about as happy about that as she ever was.” “Just so she don’t turn me in. Did you talk to the bank about the mortgage?” “Yes.” Charity ticked Floyd off so, she figured it best not to tell him the rest. “It’s okay for now.” “How’s it okay?” “Just okay. Oh, a funny thing, Floyd. John’s wife come by not long after you went off. She brung me that little rug. You remember? She said she heard they’d been some mix-up and she was sorry and wanted me to have it.” “That damn rug!” “I told her I didn’t want it, thank you. I wouldn’t let her leave it. Finally, I just shut the door on her.” “You done right! Who does she think she is, anyhow? Uh-oh. Listen, I gotta go now, Edna.” Edna felt a sudden chill. It was like a cold wind had got inside her. What it was was a thought, plain and simple: Floyd wasn’t coming back. Not ever. It was like he’d died. All she’d have would be this voice. Maybe. “I’ll call again soon as I can. I miss you, Edna. You take care now, you hear?” “You, too,” she said back, her voice trembling, but by then the line was dead.

The forest had vanished. It was as though a door had closed. She searched for it but the landscape had changed. Wherever she walked, it was ever more desolate, as though it were dying from within. Like a failure of the imagination, she thought, having been taught to think this way. Her friend and teacher, too: gone, as if he’d never existed. She’d only meant to lead him out of the forest before it destroyed him, just as she’d said in the note she left behind, but as usual, he must have misread it, and now all she had left was his voice in her head, his fancy declarations about art and nature and truth and beauty and all that, his barked commands and the cruel criticisms that made her cry, his stormy impatience with failure, the groans that wracked him as he ripped up his drawings of her when he despaired of ever approximating his unattainable ideal. She loved him, perhaps simply because she had no other to love, but she learned not to say so for it made him distant and moody and caused his drawings to smudge and the paint to run on the canvas. To love and be loved was not what she was given to do. She might rather not do what she did, be what she was, but there seemed little choice, it was as though it were somehow her destiny and her due to pose forever, kneeling on a rock at the edge of a flowing river, that he might enact his noble pursuit and its attendant tragedy. But where now was that river? Where was that rock? And where the forest that framed them? Could she find it and resume her place, it might restore him to his and to his famous ordeal, but as she roamed the world in search of it, a forest seemed less and less likely. That which had created and sustained the forest had vanished with the forest’s vanishing. Now a cold wind blew, from which no cover. In the old days, he’d sometimes read to her, holding her hand, and she often dreamt now in her bleak wanderings of a fairytale rescue like those in the stories she’d heard then and heard now in his voice only, but her waking life knew no such dreams, for all those stories, she knew, had died when the forest died. A fire? She seemed to remember one, but perhaps it was not so dramatic as that. More like rot at the roots maybe. A withering away, a withdrawal, a subsidence, much as a fading memory sinks away and is gradually lost to recall, so too this forest so lost to sight one doubted that it ever was. But though astray and abandoned, she persisted in her search in spite of all that had happened, tracing and retracing her steps, for she was sure of it: there was a forest and she was there and a man was there. Once.