31

PATRICK WAS BACK THE NEXT DAY. HE WAS LOSING IT. IT WAS late afternoon and their throats ached. He thought that there was fire in the daylight.

“We could fall in love,” said Patrick, sickeningly swept past all reason.

“And then he’ll hire a detective.”

“What?” From the trance.

“Have you been listening?” She flicked a fox-spur from his hair. “We pull this and it’s ‘Katy, Bar the Door.’ ”

“What?” Where was he?

“Put on your boots. If we can keep walking, I won’t feel so nervous. My God, what is this we’re doing?”

Down toward the stream that swept past the fine old house, the heavy-trunked cottonwoods seemed to hold their dismaying branchloads of greenery in the awkward and beautiful whiteness which at a distance gives the valley river bottoms of the West almost their only sentimental quality. The rest consisted of towns with the usual franchise foreshore at either end; or in the case of Deadrock, the whirring elevations of the interstate, quiet only when the arctic storms of middle winter feathered every concrete radius with snow. Patrick felt drunk. The house hung over him. Claire pulled herself against him in the warm air. He panicked at the driveway. There might have been too many cars. There might have been chartered aircraft or police. There might have been dead people or banshees to militate against this surge that held him in its force.

They were in a bed in a room with a south-facing window that the sun crossed like a bullet. When the horses whinnied to be fed at the end of the day, gathered below the darkening window in a plank corral, Claire’s tears chilled all over Patrick’s face. The old dive-bomber comic they found in the trunk was crumpled under the pillows. A pale star had bravely arisen to follow the sun across the window; brave, thought Patrick, because it privately knew it was two hundred thousand times the size of our solar system, though its millennial flames are the only thing that would stop me now. All it is, is this small evening star. The horses are hungry. We are sore. Saying she loved me made her cry. In the iron-cloistered control station of the fast American tank was the glossy photograph of a German princess’s strangely expressive anus, and beside that the release buttons for the rockets. The whir of treads on deep Teutonic sod brought peculiar memories. Marion Easterly, the mystery heartthrob, the archangelic semaphor known as the Dead Father and now the snowy grid beneath which his sister would lie forever were all contained in that upendable shallow bowl, the rim of which divided past and future. I am finally outside the bowl.

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