THE MOTHER TOLD THE BOYS THAT SHE WAS MUCH unappreciated in this house. She was just like a slave. She pushed the vacuum cleaner back and forth on the floor at their feet where they sat on the sofa. They had been trying to watch a western show on the black-and-white television before she had turned on the vacuum and begun to shout her words over its howling motor. I am the only person who does anything around here, she shouted, yanking the vacuum cleaner back and forth. I cook, I clean, I wash, I go to work and bring home what little money we have and nobody helps. I am just like a slave but I’ll tell you one thing — and she turned off the vacuum cleaner over whose howl the boys had heard nothing but had sat there watching her bewildering expressions, her wide eyes and wide-open mouth — ONE OF THESE DAYS I AM GOING TO WALK OUT OF THIS HOUSE AND NEVER COME BACK.

The mother let the vacuum cleaner handle fall to the floor with a bang and she stomped into the kitchen where she had been frying a chicken. The boys really wanted to see what was going to happen in the western show, but now they had missed it because they had been watching their mother make faces and then yell that one day she would walk out of the house and never come back. And then they stopped watching the commercial that was coming on because they heard a banging and a clatter and a loud hissing sound in the kitchen, and saw a large cloud of steam and smoke, because the mother had burned her chicken and tumped her pan into the sink and now she came stomping past them toward the back of the house saying that they could Eat What They Wanted, She Didn’t Care.

The boys went outside in the gloaming while mosquitoes whined around their bare shoulders and talked about how they could keep their mother from walking out of there one day and never coming back. The youngest boy said they could trap her in her room, because that’s what the older brothers did to him whenever they didn’t want him to follow them or get in their way. The oldest brother called him a moron and said they couldn’t trap their mother in her room because she was a grown-up and grown-ups couldn’t be trapped in their rooms by their own boys. The middle brother said the point was that they wanted to keep their mother, not lock her away from them because she was a pest, which was why they would sometimes lock up the youngest brother. I mean, yeah, she wouldn’t be able to get away, he said, but it’s just not the point. The oldest brother said, All right, you’re both morons. Then the middle brother suggested they get one of the other families’ maids to come down and help with some of the household chores in their house and make it easier on their mother. The older brother thought about this for a second, then said, What are we going to pay them with?

If it was Rosie, the middle brother said, we could pay her in dirt.

All the brothers knew that the Harbours’ maid, Rosie, was a dirt eater, and so they considered this solution for long enough to decide that they would sleep on it. They went back into the house, which had chicken-oil smoke hanging up around the ceiling, and made themselves bologna sandwiches on white bread with lots of salad dressing mayonnaise and ate them in front of the television and went to bed at a reasonable hour, as that seemed the honorable thing to do. From the crack between their mother’s bedroom door and the flooring there came a steady drifting wisp of cigarette smoke and the sounds of muttering and weeping as they filed by to their own room in the rear of the house and went to bed.

It was summertime and the next morning after the mother went to work, the boys pulled on pairs of shorts and crossed the street to the vacant lot there and dug some premium blue-veined, hard clay out of it and put about a dozen good waxy chunks into a paper sack. Then they walked up the hill to the Harbours’ house to see the maid, Rosie, about their proposition. One of the Harbour twins, Derrick, was in the side yard in the sandbox digging a hole. He was far too old to be playing in a sandbox but they knew better than to ask him about it. Besides, he wasn’t playing, he was digging a hole, as if to excavate the sandbox. What do you want? he said to the boys. We want to talk to Miss Rosie about some chores, the youngest brother said. Talk to her about whatever you want, the Harbour twin said, but don’t call her Miss Rosie. Why not? Because she’s a nigger, the Harbour twin said. You don’t call a nigger woman Miss, you idiot.

He’s right, the oldest brother said.

If you had a maid, you’d know that, the Harbour twin said.

We had a maid, the middle brother said.

Shut up, the oldest brother said.

That’s right, the Harbour twin said. And then your old man knocked her up, and got sued, and almost got the nigger maid hung by the Ku Klux Klan, and got cut in the gizzard by the nigger maid’s nigger lover, who had to run off or get hung by the Ku Klux Klan, and lost his job, and ran off.

He didn’t run off, the middle brother said.

Shut up, the oldest brother said.

He didn’t run off, the middle brother said, he’s a traveling salesman.

He sure is, the Harbour twin said.

The boys knocked on the carport entrance to the Harbours’ house, the door that went straight into the kitchen, which was where they knew Rosie was most likely to be, unless she was off in the house somewhere vacuuming.

She was not. She was at the kitchen window doing something, and saw them before she even heard them knock, and they saw her face brighten like it always did when she saw them. Rosie had been their maid before their father had fired her in order to hire the younger, prettier maid whom he had then knocked up and all the trouble started, but Rosie didn’t hold it against the boys.

My babies! she said, swinging wide the kitchen door. Come on in this house. What you doing, coming to see me? She said this as if she were getting on to them, like, Did she get on to you about it? But they could tell she was still very happy to see them.

Rosie was stout but not round except in her face. She was tall, and kept her hair back in a tight little bun, and wore a clean blue maid’s uniform with a white collar. She had flat feet you could see because when she worked around the house she liked to go barefoot and the pink flat soles of her long feet slapped against the cool linoleum and hardwood floors. The middle brother remembered once, when he had asked her about it, she’d said, I like cool feets.

We brought you some dirt, the middle brother said, handing her the sack.

Mm-hmm, I see, Rosie said, looking into the sack. It’s some of that good dirt from the bank across the street from your house, by them blackberry bushes.

Yes, ma’am, said the middle brother.

The older brother popped him hard between his shoulder blades, and he shut up.

We were wondering if you wouldn’t come down to our house and help out a little bit, the oldest brother said then.

Rosie, who had been peering again into the sack of dirt, looked up and raised an eyebrow.

I don’t know if I know what you mean, since your daddy fired me two years back and hired that trash to come in and take my place.

They had to be careful now as it was clear she was getting her dander up.

Mama’s been having a hard time with having to work her job at the clinic and clean the house and cook supper and all that, the middle brother said. We were just hoping we could get her a little help at it.

Rosie frowned and looked into the sack full of dirt again. She was maybe thinking that if she had to go to work and then go home and do those things, then why couldn’t that white woman go to work and then go home and do those things? If her children had to help out with the chores around the house while she was at work, then why couldn’t that white woman’s children help out with the chores while she was at work? She might would have said those things right out if she thought anybody would’ve listened, and if she didn’t have a soft spot for these boys because she practically raised them. She was about to say something when the little brother said something.

He said, Rosie, are you a nigger?

Rosie’s face changed, and pulled into itself, and her eyes flashed.

What? she said. What did you say?

She was looking at the youngest brother, and then at all three of them, like she had never seen them before and was mystified, and if they hadn’t been so mystified themselves by the expression on her face, they might have been smart enough to leave right away, but they weren’t — or they were. Mystified.

I said, the youngest brother said before the other two brothers, still mystified and too stunned to act quickly, could stop him, are you a nigger?

I’m not a nigger, Rosie said. Niggers is dogs. Don’t you come in here calling me a nigger.

She began to straighten up her kitchen by throwing some things into the kitchen sink and some things from the drainer back into the cabinet, making a loud clatter and banging.

I tell you what, she went on. You can get your lazy good-for-nothing selves out of this house and back down there where you want me to come and you do them chores yourself. My chirren would never sit around while they mama did all the work. Did, they wouldn’t be sittin for a long time I’d wear them out so good, you git on.

The boys had not moved while she spoke to them and banged around but when she stopped for a moment, they began to sidle out of the Harbours’ kitchen door. As they were going out Rosie said to the middle brother, I can see them other two being like that but not you. I thought you had better sense than that. The middle brother, who wished she wouldn’t do that because he hated being the goody-goody and she was making him look like the goody-goody again, said, Well, I don’t.

You can all get on out of here, then, she said. We will, they said. And you can take this dirt, she said, I don’t want it, I don’t need your dirt. She stood there shaking the paper bag at them but the boys ignored her and kept walking.

Shut up, Rosie, said the Harbour twin who had been standing with his shovel in the sandbox, watching all this.

Don’t you tell me to shut up, young’un, Rosie said.

I will if I want to, the Harbour twin said.

You just wait till your daddy gets home, Rosie said, and after that the boys paid no more attention and were soon out of earshot back down the street.

Way to go, igmo, the oldest brother said to the youngest brother.

That night when the boys’ mother came home from work again she was not mad like the night before but she still looked swollen-faced and didn’t say much while she cooked a pound of bacon and made them bacon-and-tomato sandwiches on white bread with salad dressing mayonnaise and she still cut them all into triangle halves and stacked them on a plate which she set down in the middle of the table. Then she asked the middle brother to say the blessing and after that they played the game where they all sat there waiting for her to say go before they started grabbing sandwich halves and eating them as fast as they could. The mother didn’t eat any of the sandwiches herself, though, and went to her bedroom again as soon as she’d done the dishes and shut the door.

The next day the boys decided to try something else. The only other person they thought they could go to for advice was old Dr. Hornegay up the street who was retired from the charity hospital. Every other grown-up who lived on the street was either at work, or a colored maid, or a white woman friend of their mother’s. They couldn’t ask help of their mother’s white woman friends because it might make their mother ashamed. And Dr. Hornegay might have some old medicine lying around that would make their mother feel better. So they waited until Dr. Hornegay had time to get up and about, then went up there and knocked on the door to the den from the carport. In a minute the door cracked open and Dr. Hornegay’s white-bearded face appeared in the crack wearing a pair of one-armed spectacles on his red and blue nose that was the shape of a deformed, dried-out potato. His white hair was flattened in some places and pointed straight out at others. What can I do for you boys? he finally said.

We know you’re not a doctor anymore, the oldest brother said, but we thought you might have some old medicine left laying around.

Once a doctor, always a doctor, Dr. Hornegay said, and coughed. He opened the door on up and stood there in it, wearing an old cracked pair of leather slippers on his white feet, a stinking-looking pair of pajama bottoms, and a tartan robe that had no belt. He fished a nonfilter Camel from a package in the breast pocket of the robe and lit it with a match from a book of matches and blew a cloud of smoke out over their heads where they stood in the carport looking up at him. The boys were astonished at the amount of gray-and-white-speckled hair on his stomach and chest. It was like he was wearing squirrel pelts there or something. It was hard not to stare. The middle brother looked past Dr. Hornegay into the den. He was hoping for a sight of Dr. Hornegay’s wife, whom no one had seen in years because, word was, Dr. Hornegay’s wife was ridden down by sadness and an extra one hundred and fifty pounds and no longer came up out of their basement. The only thing the middle brother could see in the den was a stretched-out La-Z-Boy on the headrest of which lay a scrawny yellow cat, looking right back at him. It gave him the creeps.

What would you need medicine for? Dr. Hornegay said then, scratching at the squirrel pelts.

The brothers told him they needed it for their mother, who was afflicted with sadness and rage and who was threatening to walk out of their house and never come back. Is there a medicine for that? the youngest brother said.

Plenty, Dr. Hornegay said. He laughed as if to himself. Oh, ho, yeah, lots of tinctures and remedies for that malady. What time does your mama get off from work?

About five, the middle brother said.

I’ll be down at six, Dr. Hornegay said, and closed the door gently in their faces.

I don’t know, the middle brother said as they walked back down to their house. If he can’t do anything to help his own wife, how’s he going to help her? Meaning their mother.

The only thing wrong with Doc Hornegay’s old fat wife is she’s a drunk, the oldest brother said. Who told you that? the middle brother said. Everybody knows that, the oldest brother said, you igmo. Yeah, the youngest brother said. You did not know that, the middle brother said to him. I did, too, the youngest brother said, you igmo.

That afternoon when the mother came home the boys were all three sitting in a row on the sofa in the den with their hair combed, their shirttails tucked in, their shoes on and their shoelaces tied. My goodness, their mother said, to what do I owe the honor? The boys smiled at her and kept their mouths shut. She stopped where she was, standing beside the kitchen table, holding the sack of groceries she’d picked up on the way home from work, and looked at them. What are y’all up to? she said then. Nothing, the oldest brother said. The middle brother and the youngest brother shook their heads and said nothing. The mother set the bag of groceries carefully down on the kitchen counter, as if its contents were very fragile, and looked at the boys as if they were hiding something like a bomb or a stray cat or a snake somewhere in their clothing, and with that expression on her face and her jaw cocked in curiosity and wariness, she walked past them, looking at them sideways, and went down the hallway to her bedroom to do whatever she did before she got started on cooking their supper.

One thing they knew she did was change out of her nurse’s uniform and put on regular clothes. And maybe pee. She wore a crisp white nurse’s uniform even though she was not a nurse, but she worked in the pediatric clinic as one of the ladies at the reception station and did some kind of paperwork back in the office area behind the reception station. The boys just figured that the doctors at the pediatric clinic liked for all the ladies who worked there to look like nurses, whether they were nurses or not. They didn’t know why the doctors might want it that way but on the other hand it seemed to make a kind of sense, though they couldn’t say just what kind of sense it might be. That was for the grown-ups, and they didn’t really have to worry about it, or think about it, and so they didn’t.

The mother came back into the den and stopped short when she saw that the boys were still sitting on the sofa where they’d been sitting when she got home. She folded her arms and looked at them for a few seconds before saying, I know something is up. What have you done? What’s wrong?

Nothing’s wrong, I promise, the oldest brother said. The other two brothers kept their mouths shut, as they’d agreed to do, and after looking at them suspiciously for another long minute, the mother turned and walked slowly into the kitchen, as if thinking. She was most likely thinking that one or another of the boys had had some kind of accident. That maybe they had broken a window she hadn’t noticed yet, or destroyed the mechanisms inside an appliance, or gotten caught stealing something or destroying something somewhere else and were therefore waiting either to tell her about it or to be visited by the injured party, coming to inform her that because of what her boys had done that day she must pay them a certain sum of money, in order to repair or replace what was missing or destroyed.

And then she looked out the window and saw Dr. Hornegay walking up their driveway into the carport carrying a bunch of flowers and a bottle of something inside a paper sack, and wearing a suit and tie.

Oh, God, she said to herself, and then louder she said to the boys, What did you do to Dr. Hornegay?

When she heard nothing she looked over at the sofa. The boys were still sitting there and staring at her as if they were not only mute but deaf, or like dogs being spoken to and unsure what the tone of the person’s words meant, that clap-mouthed momentary attentive interim between daydreaming and the next distraction. Or like children in the convenience store who, having just slipped candy bars into their pockets, were looking at the clerk with expressions that were the most balanced and perfect combination of innocence and guilt.

The mother was fairly mystified. Between the looks on her boys’ faces and the appearance of Dr. Hornegay in her carport, now at her carport side door, the den door, and ringing the bell, and dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a bunch of flowers and a bottle of something inside a paper sack, she felt a strange unintelligible flutter of panic.

What have you done? she said to the boys, who did not hear this because she said it in a voice just barely above a whisper.

When she opened the door, Dr. Hornegay stepped back from it with the flowers and bottle in his hand and made a deep bow. Good evening, my dear, Dr. Hornegay said. You look lovely as ever. It’s been far too long since we’ve had the pleasure of your company.

Their mother did not open the screen door but said through it, Hello, Dr. Hornegay, what can I do for you?

For me? Dr. Hornegay said, and laughed to himself, looking off toward the street and heaving a sigh, as if he were suddenly a little pleasantly saddened by something, maybe the thought of how he’d never gotten rich like the doctors their mother worked for down at the pediatric clinic, or how his wife had gotten so sad that she gained a hundred and fifty pounds and moved into their basement and now couldn’t get out, or how he himself couldn’t go anywhere now since the police had taken away his driver’s license after he’d run into a telephone pole on the way home from the Traveler’s Club out on the highway. Or maybe it was something way back, whatever it was he had done that had banished him to the charity hospital in the first place.

Madame, you need do nothing for me, Dr. Hornegay finally said after his long and melancholy pause. The question is, what can I do for you?

For me? their mother said. I’m sorry, Dr. Hornegay, but there’s nothing wrong with me.

No? Dr. Hornegay said, looking surprised and most perplexed, but in a playful way. Well, your fine boys there, and he gestured with the hand that held the bottle in the paper sack toward the brothers still sitting on the sofa in the den behind her, those precocious, compassionate young men of yours, said that you were afflicted with a grievous sadness, and I, madame, am the doctor, here to cheer you up.

Their mother then turned a look on the brothers, still sitting very still on the sofa, that they had never seen before. The look was so thrillingly unfamiliar and so deliciously terrifying that it was all they could do not to yelp and cower or leap off of the sofa and run out into the yard. But they were in effect paralyzed by the look and remained very still, and only their expressions changed from attentive curiosity and expectation to attentive and paralyzed, panicked delight.

May I be so bold, Dr. Hornegay said then, and he opened the screen door with the little finger of the hand holding the bottle in the paper sack and held the flowers toward their mother with the other hand. Their mother took the flowers and said thank you in a voice that was neither here nor there in terms of being grateful and pleased or puzzled and annoyed, and then she said, What’s in the sack?

Only some of the finest bourbon made in the great southern state of Kain-tuck, Dr. Hornegay said, and with a flourish he removed from the sack by its neck a bottle of Old Crow whiskey.

Oh, my, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a drink of anything like that, their mother said.

The boys knew this was true, that the only person drinking anything like that around their house for the last few months before their father left for his job as a long-haul traveling salesman was their father himself and sometimes, during the daytime when she was supposed to be washing or ironing or vacuuming the house and watching them, the good-looking young maid who would soon enough cause so much trouble for herself and everyone else. They knew that the only thing to drink around the house nowadays was their mother’s jug of kosher Manischewitz, which she rarely sampled and which she kept not because she was Jewish (she was raised a Methodist) but because it was the only wine around their town that wasn’t wino wine like Boone’s Farm or that other one that you often saw actual winos clutching as they staggered down the street or lay in the gutter behind Woolworths downtown until the police found them and hauled them down to the pokey to sleep it off and then work it off sweeping the very gutters they had been passed out in the day before.

Too long, madame, too long, Dr. Hornegay said, gently slipping past their mother into the den and giving the boys a nod and a wink where they sat on the sofa. He made his way to the little dining table just outside the kitchen where they ate almost all of their meals. The bigger, nicer table where they ate their special meals like Thanksgiving and Christmas was in the formal dining room, which also had a fancy sofa and two fancy stuffed chairs and a hi-fi, but which was almost never used or even entered, in order to keep it clean and neat for the next special occasion. All the houses on their street, a cul-de-sac that had until then been a little dirt road down to a small lake in the woods on the northern edge of town, had been built by the same builder at around the same time, and they all had the same setup, with the den being the room that people hung around in, and the living room in which almost no one ever actually lived. It was one of the small, curious things about the world into which the boys had been born.

I’ll have a drink with you, their mother was saying to Dr. Hornegay, who had helped himself to a couple of small glasses from the cupboard and some ice from the freezer atop the refrigerator and set the glasses of ice and the bottle of Old Crow down on the little dining table. She said, I’ll have a drink, but then I have to cook supper.

Oh, pish posh, Dr. Hornegay said with a courtly gesture of one hand. I’d be willing to wager that these boys would love to have a simple repast, something we could order over the telephone — my treat, he said. Turning to the boys sitting on the sofa, he said, Boys, tell me if I’m wrong, but I’d be willing to wager that you wouldn’t turn down a sack of Mrs. Benson’s hot tamales, am I correct?

You sure are, you bet, the boys said, piping up but sticking to their spots on the sofa as if glued there by their pants.

The mother said she would think about it while she had her drink with Dr. Hornegay, and in the meantime she allowed the boys to watch television. The oldest boy got up and turned on the set and they began watching a different episode of the same western they had been watching the day their mother had become upset. At first they partly watched the western and partly watched their mother and Dr. Hornegay having a drink and talking. Then Dr. Hornegay offered their mother one of his Camel cigarettes, and they both began to smoke along with their drinking and talking, and Dr. Hornegay was offering to call in an order to Mrs. Benson for the hot tamales but pouring himself and their mother more drinks first, and the boys became more distracted by the western. Dr. Hornegay and their mother were becoming louder and were laughing a lot and the smoke from their cigarettes was creating a beautiful haze of gently swirling blue smoke in the hanging lamp above the little dining table, but all of this had moved into that part of the boys’ brains that resembled the waking equivalent of a dream, there but not there, attached to but somewhat removed from their primary consciousness. This is something that often happened to them, in school or church or while watching something unfathomable on television, such as the evening news. But now it was the eminently fathomable western program they were watching, whereas the little get-together of their mother and Dr. Hornegay, although engineered by themselves, had become unfathomable, and thereby had been relegated to the nonverbal part of their brains.

Outside the big sliding glass door beside the dining table where their mother and Dr. Hornegay sat drinking and smoking and talking and laughing, the darkly silver gloaming began to creep again into the sky, and the greens of the grass and the unkempt shrubbery on the hill behind the house also darkened softly.

In the den, in the failing light outside the penumbra of the hanging lamp where their mother and Dr. Hornegay sat, the animated light from the television set trembled, flickered, and leapt about the room.

Ooo, damn, the oldest brother whispered to the others, all three of them with their eyes on the western program. How does he jump off the top of a house like that and land on the horse and not rack his balls?

I don’t see how, the youngest brother said.

You don’t even have balls yet, the oldest brother said.

I do, too.

I see how he could do it, the middle brother said.

Bull, the oldest brother said.

I do. It’s all in how you land. You have to land with your legs squeezed up, and back on your butt a little bit.

Slightly, the oldest brother said. You’re so full of crap.

I’ll show you, the middle brother said.

Stay in the yard, don’t wander off up the street, their mother called as they filed out the carport door.

The oldest brother helped the middle brother extract their old rocky horse, which was actually a springy horse, from the storage room built just off the carport and set it up in the grass just below the lowest overhang of the roof there, then the oldest brother helped the middle brother up onto the eave by cupping his palms together and boosting the middle brother’s foot, and the middle brother was half tossed, half self-hoisted up onto the roof and he turned and squatted and looked down at the faces of his older brother and younger brother where they stood on either side of the springy horse, looking up at him in the softly failing light.

He knew, all of a sudden, what a fool he was, how badly hurt he was going to be if he made the leap onto the back of the springy horse from where he now squatted on the roof. His first idea upon knowing this was to leap and pretend to miss the horse, and maybe he would only twist his ankle. Then his second idea was to suggest that the youngest brother try it first, since he didn’t have balls yet, not really anyway, and the oldest brother and the middle brother could also check the youngest brother’s landing when he arrived at the plastic saddle of the springy horse, and control it all.

And then he thought he would cry, because he was flooded once again, for the first time in a long time, with the shameful memory of something he had done to the youngest brother one time when they were being watched by Rosie, back when she was their maid and the oldest brother was in school but the middle and youngest brother were still both too young to be in school. It was a warm afternoon and they were all three out in the yard, the two brothers in shorts with no shoes or shirts, and Rosie, who sat on the low retaining wall between their yard and the next while the youngest brother and the middle brother played in the grass nearby. Rosie, who wore a maid’s uniform that was not unlike their mother’s nurse’s uniform except it was blue instead of white, was reading the newspaper where she sat on the retaining wall a few feet away. Looking down into the thick St. Augustine grass, the middle brother spied something gleaming and picked it up. It was a toy razor blade, double-edged. He knew it was a toy razor blade because it was so easy to bend back and forth.

Look, he announced, I found a toy razor blade.

Rosie, biting at a fingernail, glanced over at him and wrinkled her brow. She was trying to finish something she was reading in the newspaper and didn’t really want to be disturbed in order to deal with some foolishness on his part.

Put that thing down, she said, before you hurt yourself.

I can’t hurt myself, the middle brother said. It’s a toy.

It’s not a toy, Rosie said, it’s a razor blade, young’un, you put it down.

It is not a real razor blade, the middle brother said, I’ll prove it.

He walked over to the youngest brother, who had been niggling with his finger at a worm or roly-poly in the grass, not hearing any of this, and he ran the edge of the razor blade down the length of the youngest brother’s sun-browned, naked back, following the bumpy line of the youngest brother’s spine.

A bright red line of blood jumped from his brother’s back and began to bead and run down in crooked trails. The middle brother dropped the razor blade and stepped back, and he screamed just as Rosie dropped her newspaper and began to shout, and a moment later the youngest brother, turning in a circle like a dog after his tail and trying to see what had happened to his back that was making everyone scream and shout, began to scream and cry, and the middle brother fell down into the grass, bawling and striking the ground with his fists, blubbering out, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, I thought it was a toy.

Remembering this now as he squatted on the roof, looking down into the youngest brother’s irritating but inarguably innocent face, the middle brother felt the same terrible wave of shame he’d felt just after slicing open the youngest brother’s back three whole years before, and he felt a heartbreaking longing, also, for the presence of Rosie, who had been such a comforting maid, because she had never been afflicted with sadness, and had always been cheerful except when she was mad, and she was never mad for longer than it took her to get the madness out, and then she was always and ever her regular self again, and it had always brightened his spirits to see how she could be such a normal person, even though she was colored, even though a maid, even though he knew quite well she must miss her own children while she spent her whole long day there taking care of them, him and his brothers, who didn’t appreciate her at all. And now, just today, they had called her a nigger. He might as well have said it, too. The only thing he could do, now, was to jump.

He landed perfectly, which didn’t make any difference because two of the springs suspending the horse in its frame snapped and the belly of the horse hit the ground, and his mouth banged into the horse’s flowing plastic mane, and then he bounced off the horse to one side and his mouth, though immediately flowing with blood, didn’t hurt much because very possibly, he thought for the moment he had before the pain occluded all thought, he had broken every bone in his butt and his back. After a moment, he lay in the cool grass in what was now once again the gloaming, and began to scream.

The youngest brother began to scream, too, out of his own terror. He ran in a tight circle for a moment, screaming, and then he ran around back of the house and up the steps and ran smack into the sliding glass door, on the other side of which their mother and Dr. Hornegay looked up from the dining table in surprise.

Good God, Dr. Hornegay said, standing up. Their mother had already dashed over to the sliding glass door, frightened but angry, with the incredulity of one who has suffered too often, too long, the reckless, mindless behavior of boys. She muttered, What in the world, What in the world, over and over to herself. She knelt beside the youngest brother, who, stunned from running into the sliding glass door, lay on his back on the patio with his eyes wide open. But when the mother leaned over him and said, Are you okay? he began to scream again and point frantically in the direction of his brothers around the side of the house.

When the mother and Dr. Hornegay came around there, the mother holding the youngest brother in her arms, the oldest brother said, He jumped off the roof onto the rocky horse. I told him not to.

The oldest brother stood off to one side in order to detach himself from any semblance of blame.

The mother screamed, then, and set the youngest brother down hard enough in her haste to set him crying, too, and she began to shout to Dr. Hornegay, Help, help! Has he broken his back? Oh, my God!

Don’t move, son, Dr. Hornegay said, just lie still there, now. Can you feel this?

After a moment, having managed to stop screaming, himself, the middle brother began to come back into the world, into the shooting, searing pain in his butt and his back, the throbbing pain in his mouth, into the frightening vision of Dr. Hornegay’s horrible nose just inches from his own face, into the hot, overwhelming odor of the whiskey and cigarettes on Dr. Hornegay’s breath, and finally into the strange and tickly sensation of Dr. Hornegay’s fingers wiggling and pinching at one of his toes. He nodded his head.

Then Dr. Hornegay was feeling at his neck and along the bones of his spine, and saying, He’s going to be all right, I believe, and he could hear the sounds of his mother weeping and saying, Oh, when will it stop? And then, kind of like in the distance, a car pulling into the drive, headlights glancing against the whole odd scene, and then there was their father standing above him, seeming impossibly tall, and saying, I got a message over in Vicksburg, said it was something from Rosie? He looked from the middle brother, to the busted rocky horse, to the mother, and to Dr. Hornegay, standing upright now a little wobbly and attempting to straighten his jacket and tie. The father said, What in the goddamn hell is going on?

The middle brother started to cry as if his heart were broken, as indeed it was, and he burbled out, We were supposed to get a sackful of hot tamales. And then the youngest brother began to wail, and the oldest brother broke into choking sobs he was trying to hold back.

The father looked around at all of them strangely.

Dr. Hornegay said, Your son attempted, apparently, to leap from the roof onto this contraption. However, after what I concede was merely a superficial examination, I do believe the boy will be fine, aside from bruises, a busted lip, and possibly some slight injury to his tailbone. And now I’m sure you’ll have no more need of my attentions, so I should get back to the house and check on my beloved Eustice, who as I’m sure you know has not been well for some time.

Holding himself fairly erect, Dr. Hornegay made a little bow with his head, adjusted his eyeglasses. He turned and walked into and through the deepening twilight of the neighbors’ yard, a listing specter, emerged on the other side, and followed his grainy shadow from the streetlamp flickering out front of their house, up the hill toward his own.

The father carried the middle brother into the house and laid him down on the sofa where the boys had been sitting all afternoon, and he said a proper hello to the other two brothers, and then he kind of hugged their mother, who was sniffling but getting ahold of herself, and the two of them spoke quietly together for a few minutes. But soon they began to speak in normal-volume voices, and then, when the father noticed the bottle of Old Crow on the table with two glasses half filled with melting ice, their words got louder, and the father was saying things about What was she doing down here drinking whiskey with that old pervert while his boys were outside with No Parental Supervision and They Could Have Been Killed, and she was saying things how He Had Some Nerve Lecturing Her About Responsibility, and then he was making himself a tall drink from Dr. Hornegay’s bottle of Old Crow and they continued to argue, and at one point finally the father slammed his empty glass down on the kitchen counter and said, Well, I’ll be damned if that pathetic son of a bitch is going to come sniffing after my wife, separated or not, and he stormed out the carport door, and the mother stormed through the den into the back of the house saying not quite under her breath, Oh, my fucking God.

The oldest brother and the youngest brother immediately ran out of the house to see what their father was going to do to Dr. Hornegay, and though he didn’t feel very good and was very sore in his back and butt, the middle brother got up off the couch and limped after them up the hill, calling, Wait for me.

Up at Dr. Hornegay’s house, from the light of the streetlight at the edge of the yard, they saw their father in the Hornegays’ carport pounding on the door to Dr. Hornegay’s den and shouting, Open this goddamn door, Hornegay! And then he came out of the carport and stepped into the shrubbery in the bed beneath the picture window that looked out from Dr. Hornegay’s living room and pounded on the glass with the same fist and shouted some more for Dr. Hornegay to Get His Ass Out There Right Now. When Dr. Hornegay still did not come out, their father walked to the street and dislodged a piece of asphalt from its edge and stepped back into the yard and was about to heave it toward the picture window when the front door from the living room opened and Dr. Hornegay stepped out into the shadow of the little stoop there with a rifle of some kind in his hands.

You step back, sir, he called to their father. Their father, the piece of asphalt in his hand, did indeed step back a step, and stared at Dr. Hornegay with the gun in his hands.

Run home, boys, their father said to them, but they only scurried out into the street and then across the street into the Harbours’ yard and stopped there.

Then their father said, Shit, that’s only a BB gun, you damn fool, and he started toward Dr. Hornegay, and Dr. Hornegay lifted the BB gun to his shoulder and began to fire and slide the pump and fire again, demonstrating what seemed to the boys a remarkable facility with the BB gun, an example they would remember the next time they had a BB gun war with the other boys on the street. The Harbour twins had a Daisy pump just like the one that Dr. Hornegay was shooting their father with right now.

Their father had begun to shout out in pain as the BBs from Dr. Hornegay’s Daisy pump pinged off his body, until finally he retreated into the street, where Dr. Hornegay got him a few more times until the father and the boys all retreated all the way down the hill back into their own carport and into the house.

The boys sat on the sofa again in a neat row while their mother fixed their father another drink of Dr. Hornegay’s Old Crow, on ice, and used more ice to press against the several very red bumps on their father’s face and neck. One of the BBs had pinged him in or near the eye and that eye was swollen badly and the skin around it had turned purple and yellow and black.

Their mother said, As long as you’re here you might as well stay and eat, I’ve got a chicken I was going to bake with some barbeque sauce and some rice and broccoli.

I sure would love some fried chicken, if you wouldn’t mind doing that, their father said.

Well, I guess I could fry it, their mother said, it might be quicker, and I know the boys are starving, they were supposed to get some hot tamales.

She got the chicken from the refrigerator and cut it up and shook the pieces in a sack with flour and salt and pepper while she heated Crisco in the pan and soon the boys could smell the chicken frying. They watched from the sofa as their mother bustled about the kitchen tending the chicken and starting the rice and broccoli, and as their father sat at the dining table nursing his drink and pressing an ice pack against his swollen eye. It was all wonderful and very strange. Their mother moved about in the kitchen’s bright light. Their father sat in the dim umbrella of yellow light from the hanging lamp above the little dining table. In the brothers’ minds, it was like this maybe wasn’t something real. It was like the quiet, weird, clear part near the end of a crazy dream. They could see their father, sitting there, but the light was funny and it was almost like he could flicker out, and not be there, and it would be only their mother in there, frying chicken. The middle brother felt himself tuning up. Their father then removed the ice pack from his eye and looked over at the boys, and smiled, and was about to say something when blood began to spout from the swollen eye and he fell back against the table and cried out.

Jesus God! their mother shouted, and ran to grab her car keys and hustle their father out the door, calling back to them, I have to take him to the emergency room, and then they were gone.

The boys went out into the carport and watched them drive away up the street, then they went back into the den.

The oldest brother looked dejected and said to the middle brother, You better go turn off that chicken before it burns up again.

I can cook chicken, the middle brother said.

The other two brothers looked at him standing there with his swollen, blood-crusted lip and his eyes swollen from crying, not believing him, and then the middle brother limped into the kitchen and looked into the pan where the chicken was frying, took a fork and turned the pieces of chicken over in the hot oil, and let them cook like that for a while.

Get me a plate and put a piece of newspaper on it, and put a paper towel on top of that, he said to the youngest brother. The youngest brother looked at the oldest brother, who motioned for him to do what the middle brother said, so he got the plate and a piece of newspaper and a paper towel that the oldest brother handed to him from the roll on the counter and he set it down beside the range. In a few minutes the middle brother took the chicken pieces out of the hot oil and drained them on the plate with the newspaper and paper towel on it. Then he checked the pots with the rice and broccoli.

Get some butter out for the rice and the broccoli, he said to the youngest brother, and the oldest brother nodded for the youngest brother to do what he said. When everything was on the table and they had plates to eat on and forks to eat with, they sat down and helped their plates.

The youngest brother said, Aren’t you going to say the blessing?

The middle brother looked at the oldest brother and thought about it for a moment and then said, No, I don’t want to.

All right then, the oldest brother said, and they began to eat.

THE MOSES SISTERS LIVED TOGETHER, ALONE, IN THE fine old brick house near downtown where they had grown up. Who knows why neither had ever married. The older, larger one, sure, you could imagine reasons. The younger, frail one, maybe she’d been too timid. It wasn’t hard to think she’d been pretty. She had bones as delicate as a mouse’s. A mouse is beautiful, if you really look at it.

She, the smaller Miss Moses, pushed open the screen door from their front porch with a hand that was itself mousishly thin and delicate.

“Please do come in,” she said.

The larger Miss Moses stood behind her, big arms folded, as if blocking further entrance. She smiled, too, but there was some kind of obvious skepticism, as if she were thinking, I could take you, buster. Don’t try anything with me.

All I wanted was a cheap, clean apartment for a few months, till things got better. I already wished my mother had not put me in touch with these two.

The house had that little old lady smell, like a spotless, dust-free, uninhabited attic. Old, expensive rugs and drapes in some late stage of decrepitude, their worn, exhausted fibers a molecular stage above disintegration. Dark, heavy wooden tables and sideboard and china cabinet. Hard stuffed chairs and sofa covered with sheen-blotched silk and heavy fabric that looked like a softened, premium burlap. Cloudy mirrors in baroque frames.

We went into the kitchen, which was large, and sat at an oval kitchen table with chrome legs and skirt and a kind of faux-marble Formica surface. It looked like the Misses Moses’s single concession to modernity, a moment in maybe 1959, since which there had been no more of that.

The smaller Miss Moses sat in one of the chairs — they matched the table, with chrome frames and faux-marble vinyl cushioned seats — and said, “We were just about to make some pimento cheese. Would you like some?”

“You’re going to make it?” I said. I guess I’d never thought about someone taking cheddar cheese and mayonnaise and pimentos and making pimento cheese in their own home.

A knowing smile crept into the small, soft face of the smaller Miss Moses. You could tell she creamed her face every night — that’s what my grandmother had called it, “I have to go cream my face,” she’d say — you could smell the sweet, milky residue still in her pores. She looked over at the larger Miss Moses, and the larger Miss Moses pursed her lips in a satisfied way, nodded, and went over to the Frigidaire to get out the ingredients for the pimento cheese.

A large ceramic bowl the color of skim milk, with a pattern of thin blue curling lines, sat in the center of the table between cut-glass salt and pepper shakers and an empty wooden napkin holder. Next to the bowl stood one of those old tin box graters. A long-handled wooden spoon lay in the empty bowl. While the smaller Miss Moses sat and watched, occasionally turning to smile at me and make conversation, the larger Miss Moses took the spoon from the bowl, set the box grater in there, and began grating the cheese. She did it slowly and without effort. Her arms looked strong. They had seemed fat, but it was that hard fat you see on fat guys who work with their hands, mechanics, or butchers, or middle-age moving van guys. It was impressive.

The smaller Miss Moses kept turning her sweet little face to smile at me and ask if I wanted a Co-Cola.

They seemed in no hurry to show me the apartment.

“You don’t smoke, do you,” said the larger Miss Moses. It wasn’t a question, ending on a down note. Not exactly not a question, but one for which the proper answer was assumed.

“We could smell it, if you did,” said the smaller Miss Moses with a guileless little grin. “And we know you don’t drink,” she added. I saw the larger Miss Moses raise her heavy eyebrows and drop her gaze to the cheese she was grating. Her poor little sister would get a reprimand for that, later on.

“I used to smoke, too, of course,” I said, wanting to help the smaller Miss Moses out of her gaffe. “But I quit when I got the chance.” I smiled at them and shrugged. “Why not?”

The smaller Miss Moses leaned forward and nodded, her expression one of earnest concern and sober agreement, but before she could say something else the larger Miss Moses moved us on.

“Yes, it’s a filthy habit,” she said. “It’s a sign of good character that you could stop.”

I had handed my pack of Camels to the counselors and said, You might as well take these, while we’re at it, and they had laughed, waved them off, said, No we don’t even try to deal with those things here. I handed them over, anyway. I remember that I recalled the scene in The Stranger where Mersault, in jail, can’t smoke and says at first he was jittery, nauseous, resentful. Then he says, “Later on I realized that that too was part of the punishment. But by then I had gotten used to not smoking and it wasn’t a punishment anymore.” Remembering this again, sitting there with the Misses Moses, I almost laughed a little bit, and they must have taken my expression to be one of cheerful agreement. Their faces relaxed again, the smaller Miss Moses’s into her sweet front-porch smile, the larger’s into her own, which I decided was indeed just a little bit smug.

By this time the larger Miss Moses had finished making the pimento cheese.

“Would you like a sandwich?” she said.

“Or we can put you a little bit on a saucer, with some crackers,” the smaller Miss Moses said.

I said I would very much like some of the pimento cheese, but as politely as I could I added that I might enjoy it more if we waited until after I had seen the apartment.

“Oh, of course,” the smaller Miss Moses exclaimed in a voice that was nearly hushed, as if she were mortified they hadn’t offered to do this before offering me the sandwich.

“Oh, no, it was very kind of you to offer it,” I said. Still, she was embarrassed.

The larger Miss Moses covered the bowl of pimento cheese with a kitchen towel and said, “Come this way, we’ll go in through the carport.”

I followed her through the kitchen doorway into the carport, the smaller Miss Moses toddling behind me. The apartment was in a low, square addition on the carport’s far side, entered through a plain wooden door. Inside, it was mostly one large room, a double bed in one corner, a sitting area in another, with an old television set and an easy chair and a coffee table. The opposite wall of the room opened into a tiny kitchen and, off of that, a tiny dark bathroom. All in all, it wasn’t so different from other apartments I’d rented in the past, when I was younger and single.

Maybe because I stood there just inside the apartment doorway, taking the place in, blinking a bit, and saying nothing, the Moses sisters took my expression to be one of critical concern.

“Our previous tenants have all found it to be quite comfortable,” the larger Miss Moses said.

“And we don’t charge much for it,” the smaller Miss Moses said. “We don’t do it for the money, not at all.”

I looked at her and smiled.

“It looks fine,” I said. She seemed relieved.

“We want people to be happy,” she said, as if she felt this almost desperately. “Would you like to sit on the bed? It’s old but very comfortable.”

The larger Miss Moses chuckled and gave her sister a mildly critical look.

“Now, Karen, when was the last time you laid on that old bed? Go on, now,” she said to me. “Try it out.” The smaller Miss Moses seemed a little crushed.

I went over to the bed and carefully laid myself onto it, keeping my shoes off to the side, off the coverlet. They both watched me. It was strange, looking at them from that angle.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Feels good.”

The smaller Miss Moses grinned, and the larger Miss Moses smiled also, in a confident way, as if vindicated.

“Come into the kitchen, then,” she said.

In the kitchen she ran cold, then hot water from the faucet into the sink.

“Pressure’s good,” she said. “And the hot water tank is only ten years old. We never have a problem with the drains.”

“Oh, no,” the smaller Miss Moses affirmed.

The larger Miss Moses stepped over to the stove, a small gas model, and turned all the burner dials, causing each of the four to gently harrumph into blue flame. We said nothing, watching them burn small and beautifully for a moment, and then one by one she shut them off.

Then we went to the door to the bathroom, just off the kitchen. The larger Miss Moses flicked on the light switch with a thick finger and two fluorescent tubes on either side of the medicine cabinet mirror flickered on with the sound of someone tapping a tiny fork against a china cup. Once illuminated, the tubes buzzed quietly. The larger Miss Moses ran water into the sink, then ran water into the tub. She flushed the toilet, and we all three stood there crowded into the little bathroom and watched the water swirl and kerplunk down the drainpipe and gurgle as the bowl and tank refilled themselves.

Out in the main room again, I said that I would be pleased to rent the apartment from them, if they saw fit to rent it to me.

“Oh, marvelous,” the smaller Miss Moses said, her smile beatific. The larger Miss Moses smiled grimly and nodded.

“Well, then, how about that sandwich?” she said.

I said yes, I would love to have the sandwich, and so we went back into their kitchen and the smaller Miss Moses and I sat down again at the table. The larger Miss Moses set a loaf of white bread beside the bowl of pimento cheese and the jar of mayonnaise. She set out small plates and found a new package of paper napkins and set those out for us, too. Then she sat down and the smaller Miss Moses began to make our sandwiches, spooning the pimento cheese onto slices of bread, and spreading mayonnaise onto the second slices. She put them together, and cut them into halves, and handed the little plates with our sandwiches on them back to us. When she set mine in front of me, she paused and looked into my eyes with such feeling, I was taken aback and embarrassed.

“We’re so sorry about your family,” she said. I saw the larger Miss Moses stiffen. “Maybe it will all work out, in time.” The larger Miss Moses frowned and laid a large hand on the small, slim hand of her sister. The smaller Miss Moses drew up like a little night flower sensing the dawn. She seemed about to speak again, but then I saw the larger Miss Moses’s hand tighten a bit, dropping her into silence, her lips visibly clamped shut, eyes large and baleful.

“I’m sorry, Percy,” she said to her sister.

We began to eat.

I had watched as the larger Miss Moses had spooned scarlet pimentos onto the orange mound of grated cheddar cheese, and as she had stirred in a dollop of the mayonnaise — which looked homemade, because the jar was a Mason jar with no label, and the mayonnaise was a little off-white, instead of the white-white color of the store-bought kind.

“This is delicious,” I said to them as I ate the sandwich. “It must be the homemade mayonnaise.”

Their eyes brightened.

“Yes,” said the larger Miss Moses. The smaller Miss Moses seemed to blush then, as if I had chucked her diminutive chin and told her how pretty she was. They watched me eat the sandwich. The look in their eyes was almost tragic.

IN A DENSE PATCH OF PALMETTOS ABOUT TEN YARDS off the nature trail, she lay still and stared up at the broad blue April sky. Her hand gripped a torn blue nylon gym bag. The bag was unzipped, a pair of jeans pulled from it and lying on the ground, the belt still around the jeans waist. Some kind of small black beetle crawled along the cuff. A light Gulf wind swayed the high tufts of longleaf pines, rustled through the small hard leaves of gnarly dwarf oaks, through the long grasses and cattails, clacked the palmetto fronds. Across the glinting lagoon, beach sand skittered grain by grain over little green pads of milkwort, into the striated shadows of sea oats and scrub oak bramble.

Beyond the tall, broad, hoary dunes, surf popped and crushed on the beach’s gentle slope, but she could not see or hear it. She would never see or hear it again. She must have been out there earlier, though, judging by the slightly damp sand between her crimped toes, and the skimpy flowered swimsuit she wore, nothing but three little patches and a couple of strings, a suit for a younger, firmer woman. She wasn’t fat or homely or ugly, just not as fit and pretty as she must have been, once. Her skin looked tired, a little weather-worn, a sallowness her tan didn’t quite disguise. Her mouth had begun to pinch up a bit. Her nose a little veiny, red. You’d almost mistake the small black hole in her forehead for a browsing insect or a tiny smudge. The wound on her shoulder, which had been gnawed tentatively by some small animal, the blood congealed and darkening, would be somehow more disturbing at first, until the notion of what really happened here began to sink in.

Hard to tell about her age, seeing her like this. She was one of those people anywhere between thirty-two and fifty. You just guessed she probably lived life hard. She looked stunned, now, by its swift departure, hard pale blue eyes staring up at the scarcely drifting horsetail clouds that resembled the kind of hairpiece girls wore in the sixties, when she’d have first dreamed of dating boys from the high school, the older boys who populated her fantasies of being older and freed from the humiliation of being a powerless, sexless child. She would have shadowed them already by the time she was twelve, younger than the other bad girls but bolder, too, and that only made her more attractive, dangerous. She was maybe a girl who would act on a dare. A wild girl who’d reach out the window of the car and snatch a flying bug from the air and put her small, buzzing fist, with its ragged chewed nails at the ends of little soiled fingers, right up to your ear. She’d put her tongue in your ear while you were driving seventy on a two-lane. Her tongue in your ear and her hand on your cock, daring you to lose control.

A fall. That’s what they called the hairpiece back then. Pinned it on their crowns and let the long lock fall away down the back. She’d sat on the bed in the room she and her mother shared at Grandmama’s house and watched her mother pin one to the top of her head, pouf it up, turn her head this way and that in the mirror to check it out. And then pecked her on the cheek and left with that man, whose name was Porter something. Longest date she’d ever heard of. A postcard arrived from Missouri, a snapshot from Oklahoma, twenty dollars from some little town in Washington State. Her mother sent a finger-length lock of her hair. Some fingernail clippings, for some odd reason, faded red hard and dry thick crescents. Her Alabama driver’s license, expired. Good riddance, her grandmother finally said one night, tired of hearing Nellie cry. Get her out of your system like a piece of bad meat, she’s my child but was never any good, we’re better off this way, just think of me as your mama and grandmama, too, I ain’t going nowhere, I’m tough as an old pine knot, I am.

Grandmama didn’t turn on her or give up when she started acting just like her mama had, going wild with boys, with booze, with pills, with weed, and generally trashy acting out. She was one of those girls at the Hangout, public beach, always jumping into this car or that, going off, coming back, jumping in, jumping out, a cold can of this or that in her hand, Schlitz, Busch Bavarian. She was nothing but a little Hangout whore. She despised those goody little Fairhope boys, those Montrose boys, all those boys in their daddies’ cars with good weed and folding money and so much time on their hands, boys who rode around shouting about pussy, calling it that, whispering, Please, Nellie, gimme a little pussy. She came on strong and turned the tables, made them fear their own desire, watched them slink back to their corsaged sweethearts who left their middle fingers smelling like moist talcum powder and Massengill’s douche. She, baby, was a day-old oyster, she was a steamed mollusk on their tongues, made them go down where their little peckers would go, poking about inside their jeans like blind puppies after the teat, and it was only her they breathed in that closeness, no powder, no perfume, the heavy slick and salty firmness they never expected. She held them there with strong thumb and finger-knuckle by their large, soft, voluted ears.

Her grandparents’ cottage back on the bay, made of heart pine her grandpapa milled and nailed together in ’26, just after the hurricane that year, that sealed itself with heart sap so you couldn’t drive a tenpenny nail into it now, it was like iron, the pictures on the walls had never been moved because no one could even tap a little tack between the grains, and it stood through more than half a dozen hurricanes since, and dozens of tropical storms. Doors and windows battened, she and Mama and Papa, her grandparents, sat in the living room, Papa smoking his pipe, Mama quilting or shelling beans, she sitting with her knees pulled up and painting her little watercolors on a piece of paper in a sketchbook, all the tourists fled like the deer to high ground. Not she and Mama and Papa, though, as God willing you didn’t leave home for a gale. She, Nellie, wasn’t afraid of the weather, it made her excited. She touched herself sometimes during storms. She painted her pictures of birds blown awry by the gale in trees bent double and leaves ashriek, birds tumbling like blasted feathery leaves in the howling winds. Frederic got no more than part of the roof in ’79, though whole pieces of other homes, gables and porches, hung in the live oaks around the house like they’d rained down from bomb blasts, dunes on the Gulf side mostly gone except in the wildlife refuge, where she lay now.

But she’d been well gone from their home by then, hadn’t lived there since that previous spring, a few months after her grandpapa passed away, when she’d walked off from Foley High one day, got into Melvin’s Corvette, and never went back. Melvin had the good stuff then, redbud, quaaludes, they had a good time. Spent the summer in his parents’ cabin on Bay La Launch, nobody there but fishermen and retirees percolating into death. They sold Melvin’s boat to a boy from Bay Minette who believed he could make a living shrimping. No one believed that anymore. No one knew that better than her, it was what her grandpapa had done all his life until it wasn’t possible for even someone such as him to make it work smalltime anymore.

After Melvin’s father kicked them out and Melvin insisted on going ahead to Wisconsin without her, said he would grow cannabis tall as corn and bring her up when the growing got good and he’d made some money, she tended bar at Top o’ the Port, lying about her age, and did tricks with conventioneers when the Passport Inn was still the only real hotel on the beach, before they built the center at the state park. Old boys there with aluminum siding, fertilizer, sod operations — Arcus, Kaarrrl, Buck, Oliver — hogfat, sawtoothed, streak o’ lean. Boys getting thick and heavy-necked. They thought her a hot beach babe all right, with her tan and bleached hair and hard blue eyes the color of the slick cold clay the poor women ate in the country up near White House Fork. Her aunt up there was one of them, still ate the stuff about once a month, and Nellie’d fetched it for her more than once, in a little paper sack her aunt gave her, saying, Here, hon, go fetch me some dirt out of that bank back of the house. About all there was to do up at her aunt’s, where they sent her when she wouldn’t stay out of the Gulf, riding the riptide way on out, fearless, a tiny white naked body with a bushel of wild black hair, just a speck out there and them screaming on the beach, but she never feared the water. She tried eating the clay once, a bland cold confection with only the mild stink of the earth about it. Auntie had a craving for it. She, Nellie, shuddered at the thought, as if it were a craving for the grave, to eat and become what she came from, hard cold clay and forgotten forever. You are what you eat! Auntie said, baring her yellow canines with her deep, hoarse laugh.

So she was not in her old safe home when Frederic came through and blew just about everything else away, was not with Melvin back on the bay. All the little old cottages that had been there since the thirties and forties, including the one she rented, were lifted off their blocks or wrenched from their pilings and drifted, floating, till they folded into flattened ruins. The old wooden boat she’d clung to floated all the way to the Winn-Dixie by the bridge, and they wrote a story about her in the Islander: “Rub-A-Dub-Dub, a Girl in a Tub,” though it wasn’t even a tub at all. The Passport survived, the drugstore, a piece of the Hangout, the Lighthouse, a couple of other little motels. Everything else was just washed-out dunes and debris, the outer peninsula past her mama’s house scattered with the flotsam of beach retreats: washer tubs and dryer drums, twisted bedsprings, busted stoves and sand-scoured frying pans and Dutch ovens and butcher knives and forks and spoons from rickety beach-shack kitchens, toilet tanks and commode seats, and the pages of thousands of trashy paperback novels scattered like dried and warped discolored autumn leaves. She worked inland for two years, at a little joint on 59, and then on the bay on the other side of Fish River, a bar and restaurant there, a little more upscale. Time passed. At twenty-four she could feel herself aging in increments as small but distinct as the ticks of a clock. She could feel the fluid swirl in each tiny cell, microscopic planets bound by a body, an infinitesimal universe speeding away from all others. She had a vision of this and was stricken with fear that woke her at two, three in the morning parched and dizzy. She grasped at others to decrease her speed, Biloxi gamblers, itinerant roofers, lonely old snowbirds, and finally mostly regular local trash, reaching for them as she sped past, and at this speed they had no faces, no names. In this manner she tumbled through time all the way to the very end of it. Doesn’t matter which one did it to her, which gaptooth left her here in the palmettos beside the trail in the wildlife preserve along the beautiful white dunes of Bon Secour Beach. It was done.

I THOUGHT I HEARD A WOMAN SNEAKING UP ON ME IN the grass. This is the predatory season for women, when men lie pale and naked in their yards like dazed birds. I let my head drop casually over the side of the lawn chair, open one eye, look. No woman. It could have been the birds.

You never know what will come up from behind. I take a shot from my flask and shift in the lawn chair. Even the mailman, crossing the yard to the neighbor’s house, can make me jump and stare.

Two days ago this woman snuck up on me and watched me for five minutes before I knew she was there. I jumped up and the beer resting on my stomach spilled.

“Look out, there, cowboy,” she said.

She was stunning. Very young, tall, and tanned, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t cover her browned belly, where there was a single gold ring piercing her navel. Her hair, maybe a natural blond, was cut short and stood up on her head as if she’d been shocked, but her expression was calm. She sat down on the edge of the lawn chair and took a sip of what was left of my beer.

“Are you Conroy?”

I nodded and glanced at her navel. “Who are you?”

“I’m working on that,” she said with a little laugh from her throat. She drained the rest of my beer.

“All right,” I said, for I’d been trying to loosen up a little the last few months.

“I got your name off the mailbox,” she said.

I INVITED HER IN for a colder beer and she didn’t leave for two days. I think she was just hungry, mostly. I took a shower and when I came out she was at the kitchen sink, ripping bites off a cold roast chicken I’d had in the fridge since Friday.

During those two days, she took about eight showers, walking naked from the billowing steam of the bathroom and padding about the place drip-drying or coming up to me and pressing herself into my clothes until I was wet, too, and when I took them off she pulled me into the bedroom, or onto the sofa or the floor. She pinned me down and rode me, come to think of it, like I was one of those mechanical bulls in bars. I think she even slapped my thigh one time.

I looked up at her from the laundry room floor, my head wedged into a pile of wet towels. “Really, you know,” I said, “I think I need to know your name.”

“Sylvia,” she said.

“Sylvia,” I said. “All right, then.”

But you can never tell what will come up from behind. I take another shot from the flask and close my eyes, let the sun burn the liquid out again. I’m getting brown, burning down to the muscle. All I seem to want is purge.

FOUR MONTHS AGO, my wife died. I’ve tried hard not to think of her since, but it’s proved almost impossible.

My house is full of her things: leftover prescription bottles, a makeup kit, patent leather shoes and sneakers and dainty sandals, a diaphragm that she called her “bonnet,” hair curlers, old grocery lists, wrinkled blouses packed into the backs of drawers, notes asking me to meet her at church that night, hundreds of useless pots and pans, dumb aphorisms on lacquered plaques, sheets and towels with the initials of her maiden name sewn in. The list could go on. I can’t seem to throw or give any of it away. I sleep with one of her favorite old quilts at the foot of my bed.

A month or so after her death, I decided I was going to get away from the house for a while, rent it out, let someone else bother with the mess. I put an ad in the paper and almost immediately this enormous, red-faced, blond-haired woman answered. I interviewed her in my den.

It took me a minute to realize how fat this woman really was. She had trouble getting through the front door. She sat down and took up half the space of the single bed I used for a sofa, and I heard the old springs groan as it sagged. I couldn’t tell if that embarrassed her or not. I really didn’t know what to think.

I rented her my house, though. Partly because I’d have hated to refuse her just because she was big. But also I had the feeling that the house would be safe with her. She promised not to sit in my wife’s old rocker and I rented the place to her then and there. I couldn’t believe she’d brought it up herself. It almost made me feel worse than if I’d said it.

MY WIFE AND I had run a two-person ad shop downtown in the Threefoot Building. I often worked there until very late so I’d fixed it up with a small daybed for catnaps. There was a men’s room down the hall where I could take bird baths. I lived there for almost a month.

Things went fine until one night, Crews, the night watchman, dropped in on me with a bottle of Ezra Brooks.

“You look like you could use a drink, Mr. Conroy.”

Crews was retired from the city water and sewer department. He carried a fat radio to call the cops if he had to, but no gun. He was tall, shaved his head to hide the gray hair, and generally had the air about him of a man of leisure. He walked like a hip cat, paddling his palms to the rear as he strode the halls like he was walking with some ease through water. Now, having knocked on and opened my office door, he stood in the opening, his old eyebrows raised.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve had a drink in three weeks.”

Crews held the bottle up, hand poised to uncork the top.

I thought about it a moment and motioned him in.

“What’s with the ‘Mr. Conroy’?” I said. “Just call me Conroy.”

“Oh, yes, last names,” Crews said. “Like gentlemen.” He’d already been into the bottle and was affecting a dapper air.

“Oh, yes,” I said, going along. “At the club.”

“Indeed,” Crews said. He poured me a slug of the bourbon into one of the Dixie Cups he’d brought with him.

We had a pretty good time. Crews had a finger-snapping little shuffle dance he did. He sang “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” I did Tom Waits grumbling through “Long Way Home.” We kept slugging the whiskey. I walked over to the window, unzipped, and lobbed a stream down eleven stories through the neon light of old downtown. Crews ran over and stuck his dirty old Security cap under me, rasping out a laugh, and said, “Man, you gon’ get us both arrested.” I went ahead and emptied into his cap. He became sober-looking, thoughtful, then shook the cap out and put it back on his head, doubling over into that raspy laugh again.

“Hot damn,” I said. “Are you crazy?”

“I’m not crazy, man,” he said. “I’m just drunk.”

Then he got thoughtful again, uncorked the bottle, and dropped the cork to the floor. He nodded at the wedding band I still wore on my finger.

“You’re a married man,” he said. “Where’s your wife?”

“My wife’s dead. If it’s any your business.”

He cocked his head and looked up at the ceiling. I thought maybe he really was nuts.

“Your wife ain’t dead,” he finally said. “I know your wife, seen her up here with you many a time. I saw her yesterday, hanging out with some strange-looking dudes down at the Triangle, eating some of them Chik-Steaks.”

I felt myself flush, and my mouth flooded with saliva like I was going to throw up. I went over to the window again and spat.

“Just get out,” I said.

There was a half inch of bourbon left in the bottle. Crews drank it down and then walked to the door. He stopped, turned around.

“My wife,” he said, “has been dead for nine years. Heart attack. Only forty-seven years old.” I looked at him, and he looked back at me as if he’d never had a drop to drink in his life, and calm. “I don’t need to manufacture no grief,” he said then, and walked out.

I felt pretty rotten then. How to say it, except straight-up. My wife wasn’t actually deceased.

She was an oddly pious woman I’d married because, I suppose, we were both studying public relations at the same school, took almost all the same classes, and just didn’t really know anyone else. We were shy and awkward and it was just easier to be around someone as painfully self-conscious as yourself.

She was pious, but I always thought there was another side to her trying to get out somehow. In bed she cussed like a Marine and got crazy, which was fine, but she’d cry about it afterward, and she might even ask God to forgive her, lying there in the bed naked next to me. It was like she’d been possessed and then left behind in her pale, timid shame.

She was on her scooter one day, making a quick trip to the post office, when she hit a slick spot, went down, and banged her head pretty hard on the pavement. She’d left her helmet at the office. When she woke up four days later, she was a different person. She was not the woman I had married. That would have been all right with me, to tell the truth. I’d been having some serious second thoughts. But it wasn’t all right with her.

She said I was a nice man but kind of boring. She said she was thinking of moving in with Majestic 12.

I said, “Who’s that?”

“Well, they’re artists. Painters,” she said, leaning her head to one side and sticking a finger in her ear. The finger in the ear was a peculiar habit she’d picked up since the accident. As if she were listening to something inside there, receiving signals about what she should do or say next.

She took the finger out of her ear.

“They live in this big Victorian house up on the ridge south of town, by that old radio tower. It’s kind of like a commune. I mean, you don’t have your own room or anything, you just sleep where you want to, with whoever you want to, or by yourself, it’s up to you. You know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“I mean,” she said, holding her arms out and shaking her fingers like they were wet, “none of this bullshit.”

She put the one finger back into her ear and wandered off into her studio, which was empty because she’d taken all of her old paintings, of puppies, quaint storefronts, and still-lifes of fruits and flowers, to the dump.

And she moved in with Majestic 12. They smoked a lot of dope, painted with oils, were obsessed with alien visitation and abduction, and rode Harley-Davidsons. After weeks of trying to coax her home with letters, phone calls, knocking on the door to the big Victorian and being turned away by one Majestic 12 or another, I gave up. I didn’t even have the heart to file for a divorce. I just kind of pretended to myself that she’d died.

And that’s the way I’ve left it.

AFTER CREWS LEFT I drove to Midway, an all-night bootleg joint, bought a bottle of sour mash, and hit the streets. I was working some things out of my head, and it wasn’t pretty. I saw a group of teenage girls walking home from the bowling alley, and whistled and yowled at them from my car. I took a pellet pistol that for some reason I had in the glove compartment and shot out a couple of streetlights in a new subdivision north of town. I’d never smoked but I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes from a convenience store and chain-smoked them as I drove around, coughing and slugging the whiskey. I got out into the country and saw a big vegetable garden, with tall corn and bean vines strung on poles, glowing in the moonlight beside a house, and I steered the car into the driveway and across the yard and mowed down the whole little crop and got back to the road and hauled ass. Then I felt so bad about that little garden that, for the rest of the night, I just drove around and drank the whiskey, trying to forget.

At four a.m. I was so crocked I didn’t know where I was and got lost. I’d had nearly a whole bottle of whiskey and all my reckoning finally collapsed. I ended up in front of my house somehow, jamming the spare key into the lock, the pellet pistol hanging from my other hand. I completely forgot about the enormous woman I had rented to, forgot she was living there at the time.

I was still on automatic, moving through the living room with my free hand outstretched in the dark, my eyes nearly swollen shut with booze, sleepwalking toward the bed fully clothed. But I’d fallen just halfway to where the mattress should have been when I hit something soft but firm, bounced off onto the floor, and rolled over onto my back, dazed — only to see this massive shape blot out the moonlight coming through the bedroom window. She screamed, a high-pitched one for such a large woman. Then I screamed, too, to let her know she was not the only hysterical person in the house, and plinked off a pellet at her before I could think about it.

She paused, then screamed again, and didn’t stop until she had pulled a giant Navaronnean handgun from the bed-table drawer and fired off a deafening round. I dove for the hallway just as she fired again, taking off a hunk of doorjamb above my shoulder. She screamed again and I heard some thing wrench and then a kind of twanging. I lay tense for a moment, then turned around to see her broad behind framing the area where the lower half of the bedroom window had been. She’d tried to dive out through the screen.

I ran around to the back door but when I stuck my head out she fired at me from her hanging position. The bullet popped into the asbestos siding of my next-door neighbor’s house.

“Miss Duke!” I shouted. “It’s Conroy, your landlord. Don’t shoot.”

“Conroy! Oh, God.”

I peeked around the doorjamb and saw that her arms were hanging limp, and she was kind of bouncing, her arms jiggling around, the big gun still clutched in one hand.

“Help me,” I heard her whisper. Her head hung down, her mussed hair all around it, nearly touching the dew-laced grass. I pushed and heaved at her, she grunted and pulled, until finally she came free and sat back onto the floor. She shook her head and wiped her eyes.

“Oh, my God,” she said in a soft voice. She looked up, saw me, seemed confused for a moment, and then she slowly raised the revolver again and pointed it at my head there in the open window.

I ducked just as it went off, over my head and into the little stand of trees behind the house. I scrambled to the car and peeled out. Twice more I heard the gun’s Caroom! slam and echo into the night, and soon after the distant wail of sirens.

When I cruised past the house the following afternoon her car was gone and the front door stood wide open. Inside, dressers were torn apart, the closets in disarray. A trail of parachute-like smocks led to the bedroom and I walked on them back and forth. They were printed and embroidered with little-girl things, teddy bears and Raggedy Anns and bluebirds, plantation waifs in sunbonnets, all feminine and soft.

I moved back in.

MISS DUKE FILED CHARGES and I spent a few hours at the police station with a lawyer, working things out. She had no permit for the pistol she’d shot at me, and I certainly didn’t want to press charges of attempted murder, so her lawyer persuaded her to drop the charges of breaking and entering and assault. The pellet I’d shot at her had sunk a couple of inches into one of her arms. I paid for her outpatient surgery to have it removed.

A few weeks after it was all over, I made the mistake of spilling my heart to a lady down the street, a nosy old widow named Mrs. Nash. She’d been bringing me jars of fresh homemade soup and chili ever since I’d come home, and she seemed very nice and concerned, so one day I broke down and told her everything. The worst was that I’d confessed I was about to die of being lonely, that I wished I just had a good friend, and so on. After that, people on the street just looked away when I drove by, and their awful children got a kick out of calling me on the phone. It would ring in the middle of the night and when I answered some kid would be on the other end.

“Hello, is this Mr. Lonely?”

“Who?”

“Is this Mr. Lone-lee?”

“No, this is not Mr. Lone-lee.”

“You must be lonely,” said the boy’s voice.

“You kids cut it out,” I said.

“Oh, please don’t be lonely.”

Mrs. Nash told them everything. The phone rang one night about twelve-thirty and I answered it without speaking.

“Hey, mister, there’s a naked fat woman in your front yard and she has a gun.”

I was furious.

“I’ll kill you,” I shouted into the phone.

Even so, I crept to the window and peeked through the drapes. The shrubs and trees stood silvery black in the evening, very still. Something small and quick darted over the lawn, and I wanted to run out there, run it down, and rip it to pieces.

I went to the library and saw a group of Harley choppers outside the door, but didn’t think anything of it. Inside, I was thumbing through a book when, glancing up, I saw the face of my wife peering at me from the other side of the shelf. She walked around and stood there staring at me. She wore a full set of tight black motorcycle leathers. Her hair was jet-black and cut in a pageboy. A big gold nose ring, the kind they actually used to put onto bulls, hung down over her upper lip. A pair of heavy, strapped, chrome-buckled boots came up to her knees.

“Hey, Conroy,” she said. “You don’t look so good.” Then she smiled and leaned on the bookshelves. “How’s the old homeplace?”

“I don’t know you,” I said. I put the book back in the same place I’d taken it from and walked out.

On my way home Majestic 12 came out of nowhere and roared past me on their Harleys. I saw a slim black leather-clad arm flip a wave at me from a quivering pattern of red taillights that disappeared into the night like a spaceship.

THINGS HAPPEN.

Last night Sylvia and I were going at it, in the bedroom for once. But she lost her head, forgot where she was. Her eyes were closed, and she was humming to herself, and I could see her eyes darting back and forth behind her pale bruised lids. I was a little mesmerized. But then something emptied my mind and left everything quiet.

I lifted my head and looked at her, but she didn’t notice. She was murmuring, “Pedro,” in a kind of whispering moan. “Pedro, baby, oh, man. Pedro.”

I couldn’t go on.

She went still and opened her eyes. “What’s the matter?”

“Who’s Pedro?” I said.

I could tell she felt awful about it.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Conroy. I didn’t mean it. I just spaced out.”

I felt like an idiot for caring.

“Oh, fuck, Conroy,” Sylvia said. “I mean, that’s not even his real name, man.”

“What?”

“I mean”—she kind of wiggled her hands—“it’s just a pet name.”

“What’s his real name, then?”

She sat there a moment looking at the opposite wall, then shrugged.

“Wayne. I haven’t seen him in, like, weeks, I guess.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

I rolled over and looked at the darkened bedroom ceiling for a while.

“I’m really sorry, Conroy,” she said then. “Don’t be upset.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry about Wayne.”

It took me hours to go to sleep. Bad dreams kept me restless. They were all dreams in which I said the wrong things, did the wrong things, dreams in which I forgot the names of people I’d known for a long time.

Early this morning I got up and came out here with my lawn chair and my flask. An hour or so later I heard her voice behind me.

“Well, goodbye, then,” she said. “I’m going.”

I raised a free hand, waved it. I heard her retreating footsteps in the grass.

I went back into the house, just to look around, really. I walked around the den for a minute, then into the kitchen, where I washed a dish. Then to the bedroom, where I found my bed neatly made up, the pillows fluffed. It was the first time I’d seen my bed made up since I didn’t know when. Since I’d shown the house to Miss Duke, I suppose. I went into the bathroom, pressed my bare feet on the cool tiles, looked around. I noticed that Sylvia had stolen all my shampoo and soap. I looked into the closet. Half my towels and wash rags were gone. I thought for a moment, then went back into the bedroom and looked at the neatly made-up bed. Sure enough, my wife’s old quilt was gone. I went through the kitchen and the living room. Something was missing from one of these rooms, I knew. But I still haven’t figured out what.

I went back out to my lawn chair and I’ve been sitting here all day, listening. When I close my eyes the world seems full of sound. Traffic on the highway half a mile away. Children shouting on a playground at the neighborhood school. Dogs barking to other dogs, those dogs barking back. Telephone ringing in a house somewhere. The knockity-knock-knock of a roofing crew. Birds scratching in the shrubbery for grubs.

A breeze drifts through the live oak leaves, cooling the sweat on my burning skin, dropping me into the kind of sleep that’s deep as death, or the underworld, a whole other life you never knew you were living. It was nice, for a while. Only the sound of the blood rustling quietly like the ocean in my veins.

ONCE THERE WERE A MAN, A WOMAN, AND THEIR DOG. Neither the woman nor the dog had ever conceived, so there were no babies or pups. The man and woman drank heavily and often had terrible arguments late in the evening, and raged back and forth at one another for an hour or more, their fights often spilling out of the house and into the yard. If they had guests, which was rare, they tried not to argue but usually failed, and then they would argue in loud hissing stage whispers that inevitably became loud hushed gargling voices like people being strangled. They were sure that the guests heard almost every terrible word they said to one another: the threats to leave, the vows of retribution and declarations of hatred, the sock-footed stompings in and out of the room, and the openings and furiously careful closings of the front door as one or the other went outside to smoke or pace around in frustration and rage.

More than once, as he stomped out to his car intending to leave her to her own insane devices, she leapt onto his back and rode him around like a fierce, undisengagable monkey until he fell down and promised that he wouldn’t drive away. She demonstrated a frightening strength when she was enraged, and all he could do in the face of this was submit. Once, he managed to throw her off in a jujitsu-type move onto her back, throwing his own back out, and she was so astonished, outraged, and incredulous that she made him fetch the cordless phone from inside and called the police as she lay in the yard. When the police came, they argued so vehemently over who had attacked and hurt whom that the officers put them into the caged back seats of separate squad cars until they calmed down and then made them go back inside their home and behave.

Sometimes their lives entered less disturbing or fearful periods of relative calm. These times were most often disturbed in small ways, incrementally, subtly and insidiously cracking the door to more serious arguments, awakening their hibernating ires. They might argue about the salt and pepper shakers, gone empty again, how the one never bothered to refill them and so the other always did. They argued about the recycling, how the one never bothered to take it to the recycling center. They argued about who failed to remove their hair from the shower drain sieve. About who snored or farted, frequently, in sleep. About who left the front door unlocked in the night. Who left the car windows down when it rained. They fought over the dog, over who loved the dog more or less, or walked it less, or yelled at it when angry, or did not love it, or traumatized it by yelling at the other, not at the dog. They fought over who had wanted the dog in the first place. About who picked up more of the dog’s turds from the yard. Who had let the dog chew on the battery whose acid had eaten away part of its tongue. Who’d let it eat the mothballs that had nearly vaporized its anus.

For her part, the dog seemed traumatized by their constant fighting. She had a put-upon look on her face as if she wished they would just settle down. She had been a shelter rescue and although they knew nothing of her past they assumed it had not been good. She was an exceedingly good-natured, gentle dog, with big brown eyes she would level on them as if they were the saddest creatures in the world. But she was nervous, a little neurotic, and in truth such outright conflict increased her anxiety to the point where she had become a compulsive eater. In addition to the battery and the mothballs, she had eaten a mole, a chipmunk, a piece of rope from a corner in the garage, the dried corpse of a mouse from the same place, a pine cone, several sticks of various sizes, a bunch of roses from the garage garbage pail, cat turds, dog turds, coyote turds, squirrel turds, a pair of severed crow’s feet, a songbird’s skull and beak, several small stones and one larger sedimentary rock, a rubber part from a motor mount, a valuable 1924 buffalo nickel, a utilities overdue notice, a box of wooden matches, a hot sausage right off the grill, many fleas, and of course hundreds of pounds of kibble. She shat approximately twice a day, in the best possible accessible places in the yard or the park or out on the prairie. When she was on long trail walks she liked to shit on top of tiny shrubs, no one knew why.

Sometimes when the dog held them in her long, inscrutable gaze, the man believed she was truly thinking about them, truly regretting being adopted by them, and he felt ashamed. Then he would think it was ridiculous to feel ashamed over what you thought a dog might be thinking of you, as if their thoughts could be anything but the simplest kind of reaction to your behavior or possibly your moods. A dog didn’t know how to reprimand. He really should try not to have such absurd thoughts. It wasn’t making things any better, that’s for sure. No matter how they tried, things seemed to get steadily worse. At least, he told himself at such times, we were never foolish enough to have children.

IT WAS NOT UNHEARD-OF for them to argue over the way in which one or the other took steps intended to ward off the possibility of an argument in the first place. One might do more than one’s share of the cooking or cleaning, only to have the other accuse him or her of trying to gain the moral upper hand, of shoring up ammunition for or against some future assault.

Their therapist told them they were both emotional infants and this stung badly enough that for several days they were sullen and mute and limped about the house like injured pets who’d been kicked by their masters.

Sometimes, in their studied attempts to get along and avoid unnecessary argument, they argued over whether or not one or the other was, in fact, actually angry. The interpretation of a mood, a gesture or the lack of one, a meaningful look or a meaningful avoidance of eye contact or acknowledgment of a gesture or a mood. And then the one, indignant that the other was angry for no apparent reason, would begin to display obvious and intentional signs of frustration or anger, perplexing and then angering the other, all of which led to loud accusations of the one or the other and then of the one and the other having lost his and/or her mind.

Once they had a fantastic blowup over whether or not a certain actor in a particular movie was Albert Finney. She insisted the actor was Albert Finney, and he insisted that she was wrong, the man was not Albert Finney and possibly was not even English. They became impossibly enraged, out in the yard shouting at one another about Albert Finney, until one of their neighbors called the police.

He was essentially right in the end but it was spoiled because the other actor was in fact English, just like Albert Finney, and this tainted his victory with the faint odor of speculation, of luck. Afterward, they laughed over what the dog would think if she could understand that their argument was over the identity of an actor who resembled another actor, Albert Finney.

The dog lay on her pallet in the den, surrounded by her comforts — her buddy toy, and her bunny which she’d had since she was in the shelter, and her ball and her bone — and gazed at them evenly, her snout resting on her paws, and said nothing.

They fought over sex, of course. Of course! Even so, it was horrible and humiliating all around. Each believed sex to be a great mediator, a mollifier, a rich black coal to stoke the fire of love. For they did love one another, in spite of their frequent and intense hatred. Their love and hatred were simply two sides of the same emotion, easily flipped. And so when they were enraged one with the other, and when the intense heat of the argument had cooled down, one or the other would sometimes attempt to blow gently into the embers, warm things up, maybe get it on. Timing was crucial, however, and almost never correct. You couldn’t make your move a moment too soon, or the argument started right back up, and to wait a moment too late was futile, exhausting, as if years had passed, as if the one had spent much time in a coma, traveling eons in a cocoonlike, strange-dreamed world, awakening to this weirdly familiar stranger mooning and touching and whispering terrifying words into an ear.

Their secret, not necessarily kept from one another but an openly shared secret, was that each knew the other was the only kind of person either might be remotely capable of continuing to care about, much less stay with for any length of time. Each knew that the other was the kind of person who, little by little, inevitably, grew to hate whomever it was that they had once (perhaps) loved. That the other was just like them, the kind of person who hated him- or herself so deeply and thoroughly, and was so rottenly insecure of his/her intellect, moral fiber, looks, and so on, that it was impossible not to hate anyone who genuinely cared about them. And, if that person perhaps did come to genuinely despise them at some point, it only served to confirm their bitter certainty that such a betrayal was bound to happen. But—but—if you were with a person who was just like you, not only in those ways but also in terms of being overly temperamental, extremely hypercritical, constantly suspicious of one thing or another, and who abused you verbally and sometimes, to some degree, physically, who in other words both treated you exactly as you deep-down believed you deserved and gave you damn good reason to think of him or her as the meanest, sneakiest (son of a) bitch, well, it was a marriage made by the gods, that’s all there was to it.

In her own humble and quiet way, the dog was in accord with this assessment of the situation.

THEN THERE WAS THE business of the gun. One could argue that it would be insane for either of them to believe that one or the other should bring a gun into their house, of all places. Even so, when a colleague of his gave him the gun, he was delighted, though later on he was mystified that he had been delighted over the gift of a gun, that he had not thought it an unusual gift, a dangerous gift, a gift almost never given, especially not to someone who is simply a colleague and not a frightened spouse who must on a regular basis get to his or her car across a forlorn and empty parking lot in a bad part of town, or deliver large bags of cash from the till to the bank in the bleak evening, or rob a store or a bank. It was not much of a gun, a little.25-caliber semiautomatic pistol, cheaply chromed, with a white plastic handle that was a little loose in the screws. The colleague had laughed and called it an Italian Assassin’s Gun, given to him by a friend after a poker game one night for the same reason the colleague was giving it to him right now, which was that his wife had demanded he get rid of the gun, she would not have the thing in her house, and so would he like to take it home and — HA HA HA, the colleague had laughed — try it out on his wife?

And so quite possibly, of course, even he had to admit it, this was why he had accepted the gun and taken it home and pretended to be nonchalant about the fact that he was bringing a gun into their house. Their house, of all places. Because of the challenge, the bald-faced effrontery serving some vague, untethered resentment or another.

Of course they fought over it, the gun. Over the wisdom of having it and keeping it around. She was in the camp of those who believed having a gun would only, inevitably, put a gun in the hand of an intruder who otherwise might not have a gun. He was in the camp of those (or so he told himself conveniently at the moment) who believed that, whether or not one was especially handy with a gun, it was better to have a fighting chance with a formidable weapon in the admittedly unlikely but not beyond-the-pale chance that one would indeed be confronted by an intruder with a knife or a gun. I will not be a passive, helpless victim, he said. What difference would it make, she said, whether you had a gun in your hand when you got shot or did not have a gun in your hand? At least we’d have a chance! he said. What are the odds — the chances, if you prefer — of it ever coming up? she said. Then they fought over the quality of the gun, which was obviously not good, and over whether that mattered since it had been a casual gift from his colleague whose wife had told him it couldn’t stay in their house any longer. I’m not talking about the manner in which we acquired the stupid thing! she said. And if she didn’t want it around what makes you think I would, for God’s sake? Well, it shoots just fine! he said. At aluminum cans, she said. CANS ARE NOT ARMED AND DANGEROUS!

Where are you going? he said.

To throw the goddamned thing away.

He ran ahead and blocked her from entering his study, where he had put the gun. She tried to get around him, and they began to wrestle. She dug her sharp fingernails into his arm, and instinctively he did something he’d never done before. He slapped her across the face. They both froze in disbelief of what had just happened, their faces two variations on some kind of horror. Then, giving him the coldest look she’d ever given him, she walked away.

It was late in the evening. She went into the bedroom and began taking clothes off the closet rack and from the dresser drawers and throwing them onto the rumpled bedcovers and took a duffel from the closet shelf and threw it onto the bed beside the clothes and began to stuff them into the bag. He followed her and stood in the doorway.

Where are you going?

I don’t know, a motel, whatever. Maybe I’ll just get into the car and drive, I don’t know where.

You can’t just do that.

Watch me.

She made for the front door with the unzipped bag in her hand, still in her pajamas and furry slippers.

Come on, she said to the dog, who had retreated from her pallet to a safer place beneath the coffee table. The dog looked from her to the man, and didn’t move.

You’re not taking the dog, he said.

She’s my dog! she said. I’m the one who got her from the shelter. I’m the one who feeds her, gives her her medicine, brushes her coat. You don’t give a damn about the dog.

I do, too! I do those things!

Where’s the leash?

She found the leash and snapped it onto the dog’s collar and started coaxing the dog from beneath the coffee table. The dog reluctantly began to creep from under the table to follow her, eyes frightened and moving rapidly from the woman to the man.

Stop that! he said. You’re freaking her out.

Me! she said.

He went to stop her, trying only to restrain her from leaving the house, but they grappled in the foyer, her bag falling open into the living room and spilling her clothes, the dog trying to scramble out of the way but she was restrained by the leash held tight in the woman’s hand. He knocked over a hat and coat stand with his elbow and sent it tumbling. She let go of the leash and the dog scrambled past them on clickity claws toward the rear of the house, trailing the leash.

Look at that! she shouted. You’re traumatizing the goddamn dog again. Stop it. Just stop!

You can’t just get into the car with a bag of clothes and head out into the night.

How do you know, how could you know? Let me go, you bastard. I’ll kill you!

She twisted in his grasp and chopped at his throat with her fist. He deflected her blows, backing up.

Stop, he said. You’d better stop.

He backed away and she immediately stooped to gather her clothes back into the bag. He rushed into his study and snatched the little pistol off the shelf next to the dictionary and went back into the living room and stood over her. She looked up, saw the gun in his hand, and froze.

You don’t have the guts to use that ridiculous thing, she said. Even you’re not that insane.

He stepped back, shucked a round into the gun’s chamber, and for a moment thought he would shoot a bullet into the floor near her, just to let her know he would do it. But at the last moment he pointed the muzzle toward his right foot and fired.

The pain was blinding. He fell to the floor.

Jesus! Jesus fucking Christ! she kept saying as he writhed on the floorboards, moaning, touching and then recoiling from his bleeding foot. Somewhere in another room the dog barked frantically, as if an intruder were breaking down the door.

ON THE WAY TO the hospital, while he gritted his teeth and poured out a cold sweat, they did not fight verbally but carried on a battle of silence wherein each believed himself or herself superior to the other, she because he had been enough of a hysterical idiot to shoot himself in the foot in order to make a point, he because he was in agonizing pain and knew that anyone who could drive another person to shoot himself in the foot just to get her to shut up and stay put must be out of her mind.

The young, balding emergency room doctor ordered X-rays, anesthetized and cleaned the wound. The police came and required them to fill out a report. Luckily they were not police officers who had ever been to their house, called by one of them or by their neighbors. And then they went back home.

Miraculously, the bullet hadn’t cracked through any bones. It was five a.m. He hobbled off to bed, his foot bandaged and throbbing. He took one of the sample Percocets they’d given him and slept.

She stood over him for a long while, watching him sleep. It was difficult for her to gather her thoughts. She was rather stunned, a little in shock. She went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and forgot what she was doing and stood for a long while at the sink staring at her shaking hands and the stained porcelain in the basin of the sink.

In the afternoon he woke to find she was not there, had left a note that she was going away for a while, that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to come back or not, whether there was any point to coming back at all, and that the insanity with the gun was truly frightening to her and caused her to wonder whether things had finally gone too far, that if he could shoot himself in the foot in order to make a point, then who was she to say that one day, in order to make a point, he would not shoot her in the foot or the hand or point-blank right between the eyes?

He stood at the sink reading over the note, trembling at first with rage that she would leave while he lay wounded in the other room, then awash with a flood of shame and grief. He could hardly believe that she had gone and might not come back and that he hadn’t been able to keep this from happening, yet another disaster, his third marriage down the drain.

He limped back to bed with the note crushed in his fist and lay down and stared at the ceiling. Theirs was an old house with real plaster on the ceilings and walls and he lay there for a long while looking at it, its hidden patterns slowly revealing themselves. How had the workmen made that simple but beautiful finish on the plaster? As if it had been pressed into place with crushed flowers. There were no craftsmen such as that at work anymore. He couldn’t imagine how they might have done it, and he wondered for some minutes about the various ways in which they possibly had.

The dog, who’d been hiding somewhere in the house, crept into the bedroom, her head low, still trailing the leash clipped to her collar, her eyes wary and vulnerable. Then she crept backward from the room again and he heard her claws clicking across the kitchen linoleum and the sound of the leash dragging behind her on her way back to the den.

It was not all over, surely. She wouldn’t stay away forever. He was fairly certain of that. She would’ve taken the dog, surely, if she meant to be gone for good. She was right that he should somehow get rid of the gun. The whole thing was at least as absurd as anything else they’d ever done, and the gun was the most absurd thing that he’d ever done, he’d have to grant that, and the painful embarrassment, the horror he was feeling, as he lay there, was nearly as excruciating as the throbbing pain returning to his foot. He fought against a great creeping weight of despair. What a fool he was. My God. He sighed heavily and reached for the foil packet of Percocets, popped one out, and swallowed it with water she’d left in a glass on the bedside table within reach. He took a pillow from her side and put it underneath his injured foot, to elevate it.

BACK IN THE DEN, the dog was not at all certain the woman would ever return. She had only watched the woman leave the house and drive sadly away in her vehicle, without saying a word to her, the dog. Now the dog didn’t know what she would do. She thought all this was at least partly her fault.

With her previous owners, before she’d escaped and been taken to the shelter, she’d been beaten for simply crossing from one room to the next. For crapping in the very yard into which they had kicked her in order to crap. For barking when the very real threat of another dog entering their yard had been imminent. She had protected them! Defended their honor and territory! And they’d beaten her! It had scrambled her mind. She ran away. She was captured and put into yet another cage. The man and woman came by one day and took her home, and were kind to her, but almost immediately the daily loud barking and snarling started up, and even if she could usually tell when it was about to start she was always frightened and wanted to run away. Now here she was beneath the coffee table, licking her paws, with their leash fastened to the collar about her neck, and nowhere to go. No walk. No drive up into the mountains to chase squirrels. No quick trip to the prairie to jump jack rabbits, harass the cowardly pronghorn herd. She could trip open the back screen, jump the fence, and walk until another man or woman or couple saw the leash and took it up. She could offer herself to someone else this way, take her chances.

But another couple, another family, would only present a new set of baffling circumstances. Of this she had no doubt. In spite of their bad behavior, this couple had loved her and cared for her and served her well. She resolved to stay under the coffee table, the leash clipped to her collar in hope, and wait for the woman to return.

But she couldn’t rid herself of the darkening fear that once again everything had gone to hell. She didn’t know if she could take it all happening all over again. She had tried so hard to be smart, to stay out of trouble. But she had been distracted by her own anxiety, hadn’t paid proper attention, and if the woman had been driven away, maybe she would have to go away now, too. She began to gnaw hopelessly at the end of her leash, but that didn’t comfort her at all. For the first time in a long time, since she was very young and homeless and hungry, she raised her muzzle into the air and let out a long, mournful howl.

IN THE BEDROOM, the man felt the howl penetrate to the very center of his wretched heart. He lay there looking at his discolored toes sticking out from the white gauze wrapping, blinking back tears, and tried to console himself. However horrible he had been, he had not actually harmed her and perhaps she’d consider this and come home. However colossally stupid he had been, concerning the gun, at least it had put an end to that terrible argument.

BACK IN LATE MAY A TORNADO DROPPED SCREAMING into the canyon, snapped limbs and whole treetops off, flung squirrels and birds into the black sky. And in the wet and quiet shambles after, several new stray dogs crept into the yard, and upon their heels little Maeve. You’ve seen pictures of those children starving on TV, living in filthy huts and wearing rags, and their legs and arms just knobby sticks, huge brown eyes looking up at you. That’s what she looked like.

These strays, I sometimes think there is something their bones are tuned to that draws them here, like the whistle only they can hear, or words of some language ordinary humans have never known — the language that came from Moses’s burning bush, which only Moses could hear. I think sometimes I’ve heard it at dawn, something in the green, smoky air. Who knows what Maeve heard, maybe nothing but a big rip-roaring on the roof: the black sky opens up, she walks out. She follows an old coon dog along the path of forest wreckage through the hollow and into my yard, her belly huge beneath a sleeveless bit of cloth you might call a nightslip.

I knew her as my Uncle Sebastian’s youngest child, who wouldn’t ever go out of her room, and here she was wandering in the woods. They lived up beyond the first dam, some three miles up the creek. She says to me, standing there holding a little stick she’s picked up along the way, “I don’t know where I’m at.” She gives it an absent whack at the hound. He’s a blue-tick with teats so saggy I thought him a bitch till I saw his old jalapeño hanging out.

I said, “Lift up that skirt and let me see you.” I looked at her white stomach, big as a camel’s hump and bald as my head, stretched veins like a map of the pale blue rivers of the world, rivers to nowhere. I saw her little patch of frazzly hair and sex like a busted lip wanting nothing but to drop the one she carried. Probably no one could bear to see it but God, after what all must have climbed into her, old Uncle Sebastian and those younger boys of his, the ones still willing to haul pulpwood so he hadn’t kicked them out on their own, akin to these stray dogs lying about the yard, no speech, no intelligent look in their eyes.

This creature in Maeve would be something vile and subhuman.

I said, “The likes of those which have made your child, Maeve, should not be making babies, at least not with you. It was an evil thing that led to it.”

She said, “Well, when the roof lifted off the house and blew away I climbed on out. They was all gone, out hiding or gone to town.”

She took to wearing the little blue headphones radio I got in the mail with my Amoco card. I had no idea what she was listening to. She wandered around looking at nothing, one hand pressing a speaker to an ear, the other aimless, singing. She scarcely ever took them off, not even when she slept. She was quiet before, but now with her head shot through with radio waves she was hardly more than a ghost.

She would never even change out of her nightslip, though when I’d washed it for her it nearly fell apart. She was pale as a grub, hair a wet black rag all pressed to her head. Not even seventeen and small, but she looked old somehow. She’d seen so very little of the world and what she’d seen was scarcely human. She would forget, or just not bother to use, the toilet paper. Climb into the dry bathtub and fall into naps where she twitched like a dreaming dog. She heaved herself somehow up the ladder and through the little hatch in the hallway ceiling to sit in the attic listening to her headset until she came down bathed in her own sweat and wheezing from the insulation dust. Maybe the little fibers got into her brain and improved her reception.

I MADE HER PUT on a raincoat over the nightslip and took her to the grocery store, since I didn’t want to leave her alone. I thought if I took her there she wouldn’t think herself so strange compared with some of the women who lurk those aisles. Town is only three miles away but you would not think it to stand here and look at the steep green walls of the canyon. And what does it matter? The whole world, and maybe others, is in the satellite dish at the edge of the yard, and I have sat with Maeve until three in the morning watching movies, industrial videos, German game shows, Mexican soap operas. It’s what Greta would do sometimes while she was dying, her body sifting little by little into the air. When I started to get the disability and was home all the time I could see this happening, so I wasn’t surprised when one morning I woke and she didn’t. I grieved but I wasn’t surprised. She was all hollowed out. We’d never had a child as she was unable, and near the end I think she believed her life had been for nothing.

I felt the same way about myself after some twenty-odd years at ChemGo. Sometimes it seems I wasn’t even there in that job, I’d only dreamed up a vision of hell, a world of rusty green and leaky pipes and tanks and noxious fumes. But as I was not there anymore and was not dead, I began to believe or hope my life might have some purpose, though nothing had happened to confirm that until Maeve appeared.

At the grocery store I couldn’t get her away from the produce section. She wouldn’t put on any shoes, and she was standing there in her grimy, flat, skinny bare feet, the gray raincoat buttoned up to her chin, running her dirty little fingers all over the cabbages and carrot bunches, and when the nozzles shot a fine spray over the lettuce she stuck her head in there and turned her face up into the mist. I got her down to the meat and seafood area, where she stood and looked at the lobsters in their tank until I had everything else loaded into the cart, and I lured her to the cashier with a Snickers bar. She stood behind me in the line eating it while I loaded the groceries onto the conveyor belt, chocolate all over her mouth and her fingers, and she sucked on her fingers when she was done. And then she reached over to the candy shelf in the cashier chute and got herself another one, opened it up and bit into it, as if this was a place you came when you wanted to eat, just walked around in there seeing what you wanted and eating it.

I looked at her a second, then just picked up the whole box of Snickers and put it on the conveyor belt.

“For the little girl,” I said.

The cashier, a dumpy little blond woman with a cute face who’d been looking at Maeve, and then at me, broke into a big smile that was more awkward than fake.

“Well,” she said to Maeve, “I wish my daddy was as sweet as yours.”

Maeve stopped chewing the Snickers and stared at me as if she’d never seen me before in her life.

UNDERSTAND, WE ARE IN a wooded ravine, a green, jungly gash in the earth, surrounded by natural walls. This land between the old mines and a town, it’s wooded canyons cut by creeks that wind around and feed a chain of quiet little lakes on down to ours, where the water deepens, darkens, and pours over the spillway onto the slated shoals. From there it rounds a bend down toward the swamps, seeps back into the underground river. The cicadas spool up so loud you think there’s a torn seam in the air through which their shrieking slipped from another world.

One evening I was out on the porch in the late light after supper and saw Maeve sneak off into the woods. The coon dog got up and followed her, and then a couple of other strays followed him. When she didn’t come right back I stood up and listened. The light was leaking fast into dusk. Crickets and tree frogs sang their high-pitched songs. Then from the woods in the direction she’d headed came a sudden jumble of high vicious mauling. It froze me to hear it. Then it all died down.

I went inside for the shotgun and the flashlight but when I came back out Maeve had made her way back through the thicket and into the ghostly yard, all color gone to shadowy gray, the nightslip wadded into a diaper she held to herself with both hands. I suppose it wasn’t this child’s first. She walked through the yard. What dogs hadn’t gone with her stood around with heads held low, she something terrible and holy, lumpy stomach smeared with blood. She went to the lake’s edge to wash herself and the slip, soaking and wringing it till she fell out and I had to go save her and take her into the house and bathe her myself and put her to bed. Her swollen little-girl’s bosoms were smooth and white as the moon, the leaky nipples big as berries.

I couldn’t sleep and went out into the yard, slipped out of my jeans and into the lake. I thought a swim might calm me. I was floating on my back in the shallows looking up at the moon so big and clear you could imagine how the dust would feel between your fingers. My blood was up. I thought I heard something through the water, and stood. It was coming from across the lake, in the thick bramble up on the steep ridge, where a strange woman had moved into an empty cabin some months back. I heard a man one night up there, howling and saying what sounded like a name, I couldn’t tell what it was.

I’d seen her in town. She carried herself like a man, with strong wiry arms, a sun-scorched neck, and a face hard and strange as the wood knots the carvers call tree spirits. I heard she’s an installer for the phone company.

When I stood up in the water I could hear a steady rattling of branches and a skidding racket, something coming down the steep ridge wall. I waded back toward the bank, stopped and looked, and she crashed out of the bushes overhanging the water, dangling naked from a moonlit branch. She dropped into the lake with a quiet little splash.

I saw her arms rise from the water and wheel slowly over her round, wet head and dip again beneath. She made no noise. She swam around the curve up into the shallows, stood up, and walked toward me and never took her eyes off my own. When she got close I started to back up a step but she grabbed hold of me with a hand that had sharp, callused edges on the finger pads and the palm. I hadn’t even realized I’d swelled up. She grinned and looked down at it, gave it a little yank, then let go.

She sighed and looked back across the lake. I turned my eyes from her saggy little fanny and skinny legs. She had a lean rangy skinned-cat body, and a deep little muttering voice.

“My name’s Callie. I’m your neighbor,” she said.

“I know it.”

She said, “Who’s the little girl you’re taking care of?”

“My niece,” I said. She was my younger cousin, but I had told her to call me uncle because it sounded more natural. I said, “She’s had a hard life.”

“Mmm,” she said, and we were quiet for a while. “Well, the world ain’t no place for a child these days, is it?”

“It is not,” I agreed.

“Must be hard on a man,” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean being alone out here with a pretty little girl.”

“She’s my niece, I’m not that way.”

She looked at me and then at the house for a minute.

“Why don’t you come on up to the ridge sometimes and pay me a visit?” Her thin lips crooked up and parted in a grin. “At least till she’s not in the family way anymore.” She raised a hand and walked back into the water and swam around the curve into the cove and out of sight. I sat down on the bank. There was a sound and I turned my head to see Maeve up from bed and standing unsteady on the porch, fiddling with the little blue headphones radio, which she didn’t at the moment seem to understand how to use. Then in a minute she had them on again, and just stood there, swaying a little like she might fall over. I went up and carried her back to her bed, pulled the sheet up over her. She kept the little blue headphones on, not paying me any attention.

I fed her some antibiotics left over from when I’d had the flu, and in a short time she recovered. She was young. Her old coon hound never came back, nor the others that went out with him, and I had a vision of them all devouring one another like snakes, until they disappeared.

NOW THAT SHE WASN’T carrying, she roamed the canyon with the strays. She ate raw peanuts from a sack I had on the kitchen counter, and drank her water from the lake down on her hands and muddy knees. She smelled like a dog that’s been wallowing in the lake mud, that sour dank stink of rotten roots and scum. I finally held her in the bathtub one day, took the headphones off her head, and plunged her in, her scratching and screaming. I scrubbed her down and lathered up her head and dunked her till she was squeaky, and plucked a fat tick out of her scalp. But when I tried to dress her in some of Greta’s old clothes, shut up in plastic and mothballs all these years, she slashed my cheek with her raggedy nails and ran through the house naked and making a high, thin, and breathless sound until she sniffed out the old rag she wore and flew out through the yard and into the woods buck naked with that rag in her hand and didn’t come back till that evening, wearing it, smelling of the lake water again, and curled up asleep on the bare porchboards.

When I went to the screen door she didn’t look up but said from where she lay hugging herself, “Don’t you handle me that way no more.”

“I had to clean you, child.”

“I can’t be touched,” she said.

“All right.”

“That woman at the big store said you was my daddy.”

“But you know I’m not, I’m your uncle.”

“And I don’t want no daddy,” she said. “I just come out of the woods the day I come here, didn’t come from nowhere before that.”

“All right,” I said, though my heart sank when she said it, for I wanted her to care about me in some way, but I don’t think that was something she knew how to do. I convinced her to come back inside, sleep in her bed. As long as I kept my distance and made no sudden moves toward her and did not ever raise my voice above the gentle words you would use with a baby, we were all right. But it was not a way any man could live for long and I wondered what I could do — send her back to Sebastian’s place, where she was but chattel? I feared one day she would wander into the woods and go wild. I might have called the county, said, Look, this child, who has wandered here from my uncle’s house, is in need of attention and there is nothing more I can do.

Who would take in such a child but the mental hospital down in Tuscaloosa?

I FIGURED SEBASTIAN THOUGHT she’d been sucked up into the twister and scattered into blood and dust, until the afternoon I heard his pickup muttering and coughing along the dam and then his springs sighing as he idled down the steep drive to the house, and then the creaking door and I was out on the porch waiting on him. He stopped at the steps and nodded and looked off across the lake as if we were lost together in thought. Uncle Sebastian was old and small and thin and hard as iron and he had the impish and shrewd face of all his siblings. His face was narrow and his eyes slanted down and in and his chin jutted up so that if you viewed him in profile his head was the blade of a scythe and his body the handle. He blinked in the sun and said, “We been most of the summer fixing up the house after that tornado back in the spring.”

I said, “Anybody hurt?”

“Well, we thought we’d lost little Maeve.” And he turned to me. “Then I hear tell she’s showed up over here, staying with you.”

“Where would you hear that?” I said, and he said nothing but I saw his eyes shift just a fraction up toward the ridge where the crazy woman’s house was perched.

The strays had shown little interest in Sebastian’s arrival and kept mainly to their little scooped-out cool spots under the bushes, a flea-drowsing shade. Hardly moved all August; through the long hot days all you’d hear was the occasional creaking yawn, wet gnashing of grooming teeth, isolated flappity racket of a wet dog shaking out his coat. Hardly any barking at all. We heard a rustling and Maeve stood at the edge of the yard in her headphones, a scruffy little long-haired stray at her heels.

“She was with child,” Sebastian said.

“She lost it.”

“That late?” he said, and looked at me a long moment, then back at Maeve. “You keeping her outdoors and living with dogs?”

“If it was true, it would not be so different from what she came from,” I said.

“Go to hell,” Sebastian said. I saw him take note of the little scar from where Maeve had scratched me with her ragged nails. “Living out here by yourself, you going to tell me you ain’t been trying some of that?”

“That’s right.”

“Them boys of mine done all wandered off now she’s gone. I ain’t got no help.”

He walked slowly toward Maeve, who was standing there with two fingers of one hand pressed to the speaker over her right ear, head cocked, eyes cut left looking out at the lake. The little stray slinked back into the brush. Only when Sebastian laid his hand on Maeve’s arm did she lean away, her bare feet planted the way an animal that does not want to be moved will do. He began to drag her and she struggled, making not a sound, still just listening.

I walked up behind Sebastian and said his name, and when he turned I hit him between the eyes with the point of my knuckle. Small and old as he was, he crumpled. Maeve did not run then but walked over to the porch, up the steps, and into the house.

I dragged the old man by his armpits to the water, and waded out with him trailing. Maeve came out again and followed in her nightslip to the bank, and stood there eating a cherry popsicle. She took the popsicle out of her mouth and held it like a little beacon beside her head. Her lips were red and swollen-looking. She took the blue headphones off her ears and let them rest around her neck. I could hear the tinny sound of something in there, now it wasn’t inside her head.

“What are you doing with that man?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you drownden him?”

I said the first thing that came to mind.

“I am baptizing,” I said. “I am cleansing his heart.”

It was late afternoon then. I looked back over my shoulder at Maeve. She was half lit by sunlight sifting through the leaves, half in shadow. A mostly naked child in rotten garment.

Underwater, Uncle Sebastian jerked and his eyes came open. I held him harder and waded out to where it was up to my shoulders and the current strong toward the spillway, my heart heavy in the water, the pressure there pressing on it. Behind me, Maeve waded into the shallows.

“I want it, too, Uncle,” she called.

Sebastian’s arms ceased thrashing, and after a minute I let him go. I saw him turning away in the water. Palms of his hands, a glimpse of an eye, the ragged toe of a boot dimpling the surface, all in a slow drifting toward the spillway, and then gone in the murk. Maeve lifted the gauzy nightslip up over her head as she waded in, her pale middle soft and mapped with squiggly brown stretch marks. I pushed against the current trying to reach her before she got in too deep. There was such unspeakable love in me. I was as vile as my uncle, as vile as he claimed.

“Hold still, wait there,” I said at the very moment her head went under as if she’d been yanked from below.

The bottom is slippery, there are uncounted little sinkholes. Out of her surprised little hand, the nightslip floated a ways and sank. I dove down but the water slowed me and I could not reach her. My eyes were open but the water was so muddy I could barely even see my own hands. I kept gasping up and diving down, the sun was sinking into the trees.

She would not show again until dusk, when from the bank I saw her ghost rise from the water and walk into the woods.

The strays tuned up. There was a ringing from the telephone inside the house. It would ring and stop awhile. Ring and then stop. The sheriff’s car rolled its silent flickering way through the trees. Its lights put a flame in all the whispering leaves. There was a hollow taunting shout from up on the ridge but I paid it no mind.

I once heard at dawn the strangest bird, unnatural, like sweet notes sung through an outdoor PA system, some bullhorn perched in a tree in the woods, and I went outside.

It was coming from east of the house, where the tornado would come through. I walked down a trail, looking up. It got louder. I got to where it had to be, it was all around me in the air, but there was nothing in the trees. A pocket of air had picked up a signal, the way a tooth filling will pick up a radio station.

It rang in my blood, it and me the only living things in that patch of woods, all the creatures fled or dug in deep, and I remember that I felt a strange happiness.

LOOMIS HAD NEVER BELIEVED THAT LINE ABOUT THE quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships. Then one day he’d decided that he should marry, have a child, and he told himself that if one was open-minded these things could lead to a kind of contentment, if not to exuberant happiness. That’s why Loomis was in the fix he was in now.

Ever since he and his wife had separated and she had moved with their son to southern California, he’d flown out every three weeks to visit the boy. He was living the very nightmare he’d suppressed upon deciding to marry and have a child: that it wouldn’t work out, they would split up, and he would be forced to spend long weekends in a motel, taking his son to faux-upscale chain restaurants, cineplexes, and amusement parks.

He usually visited for three to five days and stayed at the same motel, an old motor court that had been bought and remodeled by one of the big franchises. At first the place wasn’t so bad. The continental breakfast offered fresh fruit, and little boxes of name-brand cereals, and batter with which you could make your own waffles on a double waffle iron right there in the lobby. The syrup came in small plastic containers from which you pulled back a foil lid and voilà, it was a pretty good waffle. There was juice and decent coffee. Still, of course, it was depressing, a bleak place in which to do one’s part in raising a child. With its courtyard surrounded by two stories of identical rooms, and excepting the lack of guard towers and the presence of a swimming pool, it followed the same architectural model as a prison.

But Loomis’s son liked it so they continued to stay there even though Loomis would rather have moved on to a better place.

He arrived in San Diego for his April visit, picked up the rental car, and drove north up I-5. Traffic wasn’t bad except where it always was, between Del Mar and Carlsbad. Of course, it was never “good.” Their motel sat right next to the 5, and the roar and rush of it never stopped. You could step out onto the balcony at three in the morning and it’d be just as roaring and rushing with traffic as it had been six hours before.

This was to be one of his briefer visits. He’d been to a job interview the day before, Thursday, and had another on Tuesday. He wanted to make the most of the weekend, which meant doing very little besides just being with his son. Although he wasn’t very good at that. Generally, he sought distractions from his ineptitude as a father. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of bourbon, and tucked it into his travel bag before driving up the hill to the house where his wife and son lived. The house was owned by a retired Marine friend of his wife’s family. His wife and son lived rent-free in the basement apartment.

When Loomis arrived, the ex-Marine was on his hands and knees in the flower bed, pulling weeds. He glared sideways at Loomis for a moment and muttered something, his face a mask of disgust. He was a widower who clearly hated Loomis and refused to speak to him. Loomis was unsettled that someone he’d never even been introduced to could hate him so much.

His son came to the door of the apartment by himself, as usual. Loomis peered past the boy into the little apartment, which was bright and sunny for a basement (only in California, he thought). But, as usual, there was no sign of his estranged wife. She had conspired with some part of her nature to become invisible. Loomis hadn’t laid eyes on her in nearly a year. She called out from somewhere in another room, “’Bye! I love you! See you on Monday!” “Okay, love you, too,” the boy said, and trudged after Loomis, dragging his backpack of homework and a change of clothes. “’Bye, Uncle Bob,” the boy said to the ex-Marine. Uncle Bob! The ex-Marine stood up, gave the boy a small salute, and he and the boy exchanged high-fives.

After Loomis checked in at the motel, they went straight to their room and watched television for a while. Lately his son had been watching cartoons made in the Japanese anime style. Loomis thought the animation was wooden and amateurish. He didn’t get it at all. The characters were drawn as angularly as origami, which he supposed was appropriate and maybe even intentional, if the influence was Japanese. But it seemed irredeemably foreign. His son sat propped against several pillows, harboring such a shy but mischievous grin that Loomis had to indulge him.

He made a drink and stepped out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. Down by the pool, a woman with long, thick black hair — it was stiffly unkempt, like a madwoman’s in a movie — sat in a deck chair with her back to Loomis, watching two children play in the water. The little girl was nine or ten and the boy was older, maybe fourteen. The boy teased the girl by splashing her face with water, and when she protested in a shrill voice he leapt over and dunked her head. She came up gasping and began to cry. Loomis was astonished that the woman, who he assumed to be the children’s mother, displayed no reaction. Was she asleep?

The motel had declined steadily in the few months Loomis had been staying there, like a moderately stable person drifting and sinking into the lassitude of depression. Loomis wanted to help, find some way to speak to the managers and the other employees, to say, “Buck up, don’t just let things go all to hell,” but he felt powerless against his own inclinations.

He lit a second cigarette to go with the rest of his drink. A few other people walked up and positioned themselves around the pool’s apron, but none got into the water with the two quarreling children. There was something feral about them, anyone could see. The woman with the wild black hair continued to sit in her pool chair as if asleep or drugged. The boy’s teasing of the girl had become steadily rougher, and the girl was sobbing now. Still, the presumptive mother did nothing. Someone went in to complain. One of the managers came out and spoke to the woman, who immediately but without getting up from her deck chair shouted to the boy, “All right, God damn it!” The boy, smirking, climbed from the pool, leaving the girl standing in waist-deep water, sobbing and rubbing her eyes with her fists. The woman stood up then and walked toward the boy. There was something off about her clothes, burnt-orange Bermuda shorts and a men’s lavender oxford shirt. And they didn’t seem to fit right. The boy, like a wary stray dog, watched her approach. She snatched a lock of his wet black hair, pulled his face to hers, and said something, gave his head a shake and let him go. The boy went over to the pool and spoke to the girl. “Come on,” he said. “No,” the girl said, still crying. “You let him help you!” the woman shouted then, startling the girl into letting the boy take her hand. Loomis was fascinated, a little bit horrified.

Turning back toward her chair, the woman looked up to where he stood on the balcony. She had an astonishing face, broad and long, divided by a great, curved nose, dominated by a pair of large, dark, sunken eyes that seemed blackened by blows or some terrible history. Such a face, along with her immense, thick mane of black hair, made her look like a troll. Except that she was not ugly. She looked more like a witch, the cruel mockery of beauty and seduction. The oxford shirt was mostly unbuttoned, nearly spilling out a pair of full, loose, mottled-brown breasts.

“What are you looking at!” she shouted, very loudly from deep in her chest. Loomis stepped back from the balcony railing. The woman’s angry glare changed to something like shrewd assessment and then dismissal. She shooed her two children into one of the downstairs rooms.

After taking another minute to finish his drink and smoke a third cigarette, to calm down, Loomis went back inside and closed the sliding glass door behind him.

His son was on the bed, grinning, watching something on television called “Code Lyoko.” It looked very Japanese, even though the boy had informed him it was made in France. Loomis tried to watch it with him for a while, but got restless. He wanted a second, and maybe stronger, drink.

“Hey,” he said. “How about I just get some burgers and bring them back to the room?”

The boy glanced at him and said, “That’d be okay.”

Loomis got a sack of hamburgers from McDonald’s, some fries, a Coke. He made a second drink, then a third, while his son ate and watched television. They went to bed early.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Saturday, they drove to the long, wide beach at Carlsbad. Carlsbad was far too cool, but what could you do? Also, the hip little surf shop where the boy’s mother worked during the week was in Carlsbad. He’d forgotten that for a moment. He was having a hard time keeping her in his mind. Her invisibility strategy was beginning to work on him. He wasn’t sure at all anymore just who she was or ever had been. When they’d met she wore business attire, like everyone else he knew. What did she wear now, just a swimsuit? Did she get up and go around in a bikini all day? She didn’t really have the body for that at age thirty-nine, did she?

“What does your mom wear to work?” he asked.

The boy gave him a look that would have been ironic if he’d been a less compassionate child.

“Clothes?” the boy said.

“Okay,” Loomis said. “Like a swimsuit? Does she go to work in a swimsuit?”

The boy stared at him for a moment.

“Are you okay?” the boy said.

Loomis was taken aback by the question.

“Me?” he said.

They walked along the beach, neither going into the water. Loomis enjoyed collecting rocks. The stones on the beach here were astounding. He marveled at one that resembled an ancient war club. The handle fit perfectly into his palm. From somewhere over the water, a few miles south, they could hear the stuttering thud of a large helicopter’s blades. Most likely a military craft from the Marine base farther north.

Maybe he wasn’t okay. Loomis had been to five therapists since separating from his wife: one psychiatrist, one psychologist, three counselors. The psychiatrist had tried him on Paxil, Zoloft, and Wellbutrin for depression, and then lorazepam for anxiety. Only the lorazepam had helped, but with that he’d overslept too often and lost his job. The psychologist, once she learned that Loomis was drinking almost half a bottle of booze every night, became fixated on getting him to join AA and seemed to forget altogether that he was there to figure out whether he indeed no longer loved his wife. And why he had cheated on her. Why he had left her for another woman when the truth was he had no faith that the new relationship would work out any better than the old one. The first counselor seemed sensible, but Loomis made the mistake of visiting her together with his wife, and when she suggested maybe their marriage was indeed kaput his wife had walked out. The second counselor was actually his wife’s counselor, and Loomis thought she was an idiot. Loomis suspected that his wife liked the second counselor because she did nothing but nod and sympathize and give them brochures. He suspected that his wife simply didn’t want to move out of their house, which she liked far more than Loomis did, and which possibly she liked more than she liked Loomis. When she realized divorce was inevitable, she shifted gears, remembered she wanted to surf, and sold the house before Loomis was even aware it was on the market, so he had to sign. Then it was Loomis who mourned the loss of the house, which he realized had been pretty comfortable after all. He visited the third counselor with his girlfriend, who seemed constantly angry that his divorce hadn’t yet come through. He and the girlfriend both gave up on that counselor because he seemed terrified of them for some reason they couldn’t fathom. Loomis was coming to the conclusion that he couldn’t fathom anything; the word seemed appropriate to him, because most of the time he felt like he was drowning and couldn’t find the bottom or the surface of this body of murky water he had fallen, or dived, into.

He wondered if this was why he didn’t want to dive into the crashing waves of the Pacific, as he certainly would have when he was younger. His son didn’t want to because, he said, he’d rather surf.

“But you don’t know how to surf,” Loomis said.

“Mom’s going to teach me as soon as she’s good enough at it,” the boy said.

“But don’t you need to be a better swimmer before you try to surf?” Loomis had a vague memory of the boy’s swimming lessons, which maybe hadn’t gone so well.

“No,” the boy said.

“I really think,” Loomis said, and then he stopped speaking, because the helicopter he’d been hearing, one of those large, twin-engined birds that carried troops in and out of combat — a Chinook — had come abreast of them a quarter mile or so off the beach. Just as Loomis looked up to see it, something coughed or exploded in one or both of its engines. The helicopter slowed, then swerved, with the slow grace of an airborne leviathan, toward the beach where they stood. In a moment it was directly over them. One of the men in it leaned out of a small opening on its side, frantically waving, but the people on the beach, including Loomis and his son, beaten by the blast from the blades and stung by sand driven up by it, were too shocked and confused to run. The helicopter lurched back out over the water with a tremendous roar and a deafening, rattling whine from the engines. There was another loud pop, and black smoke streamed from the forward engine as the Chinook made its way north again, seeming hobbled. Then it was gone, lost in the glare over the water. A bittersweet burnt-fuel smell hung in the air. Loomis and his son stood there among the others on the beach, speechless. One of two very brown young surfers in board shorts and crew cuts grinned and nodded at the clublike rock in Loomis’s hand.

“Dude, we’re safe,” he said. “You can put down the weapon.” He and the other surfer laughed.

Loomis’s son, looking embarrassed, moved off as if he were with someone else in the crowd, not Loomis.

THEY STAYED IN CARLSBAD for an early dinner at Pizza Port. The place was crowded with people who’d been at the beach all day, although Loomis recognized no one they’d seen when the helicopter had nearly crashed and killed them all. He’d expected everyone in there to know about it, to be buzzing about it over beer and pizza, amazed, exhilarated. But it was as if it hadn’t happened.

The long rows of picnic tables and booths were filled with young parents and their hyperkinetic children, who kept jumping up to get extra napkins or forks or to climb into the seats of the motorcycle video games. Their parents flung arms after them like inadequate lassos or pursued them and herded them back. The stools along the bar were occupied by young men and women who apparently had no children and who were attentive only to each other and to choosing which of the restaurant’s many microbrews to order. In the corner by the restrooms, the old surfers, regulars here, gathered to talk shop and knock back the stronger beers, the double-hopped and the barley wines. Their graying hair frizzled and tied in ponytails or dreads or chopped in stiff clumps dried by salt and sun. Their faces leather-brown. Gnarled toes jutting from their flip-flops and worn sandals like assortments of dry-roasted cashews, Brazil nuts, ginger roots.

Loomis felt no affinity for any of them. There wasn’t a single person in the entire place with whom he felt a thing in common — other than being, somehow, human. Toward the parents he felt a bitter disdain. On the large TV screens fastened to the restaurant’s brick walls, surfers skimmed down giant waves off Hawaii, Tahiti, Australia.

He gazed at the boy, his son. The boy looked just like his mother. Thick bright orange hair, untamable. Tall, stemlike people with long limbs and that thick hairblossom on top. Loomis had called them his rosebuds. “Roses are red,” his son would respond, delightedly indignant, when he was smaller. “There are orange roses,” Loomis would reply. “Where?” “Well, in Indonesia, I think. Or possibly Brazil.” “No!” his son would shout, breaking down into giggles on the floor. He bought them orange roses on the boy’s birthday that year.

The boy wasn’t so easily amused anymore. He waited glumly for their pizza order to be called out. They’d secured a booth vacated by a smallish family.

“You want a Coke?” Loomis said. The boy nodded absently. “I’ll get you a Coke,” Loomis said.

He got the boy a Coke from the fountain, and ordered a pint of strong pale ale from the bar for himself.

By the time their pizza came, Loomis was on his second ale. He felt much better about all the domestic chaos around them in the restaurant. It was getting on the boy’s nerves, though. As soon as they finished their pizza, he asked Loomis if he could go stand outside and wait for him there.

“I’m almost done,” Loomis said.

“I’d really rather wait outside,” the boy said. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away.

“Okay,” Loomis said. “Don’t wander off. Stay where I can see you.”

“I will.”

Loomis sipped his beer and watched as the boy weaved his way through the crowd and out of the restaurant, then began to pace back and forth on the sidewalk. Having to be a parent in this fashion was terrible. He felt indicted by all the other people in this teeming place: by the parents and their smug happiness, by the old surfer dudes, who had the courage of their lack of conviction, and by the young lovers, who were convinced that they would never be part of either of these groups, not the obnoxious parents, not the grizzled losers clinging to youth like tough, crusty barnacles. Certainly they would not be Loomis.

And what did it mean, in any case, that he couldn’t even carry on a conversation with his son? How hard could that be? But Loomis couldn’t seem to do it. To hear him try, you’d think they didn’t know each other at all, that he was a friend of the boy’s father, watching him for the afternoon or something. He started to get up and leave, but first he hesitated, then gulped down the rest of his second beer.

His son stood with hunched shoulders waiting.

“Ready to go back to the motel?” Loomis said.

The boy nodded. They walked back to the car in silence.

“Did you like your pizza?” Loomis said when they were in the car.

“Sure. It was okay.”

Loomis looked at him for a moment. The boy glanced back with the facial equivalent of a shrug, an impressively diplomatic expression that managed to say both “I’m sorry” and “What do you want?” Loomis sighed. He could think of nothing else to say that wasn’t even more inane.

“All right,” he finally said, and drove them back to the motel.

WHEN THEY ARRIVED, Loomis heard a commotion in the courtyard and they paused near the gate.

The woman who’d been watching the two awful children was there at the pool again, and the two children themselves had returned to the water. But now the group seemed to be accompanied by an older heavyset man, bald on top, graying hair slicked against the sides of his head. He was arguing with a manager while the other guests around the pool pretended to ignore the altercation. The boy and girl paddled about in the water until the man threw up his hands and told them to get out and go to their room. The girl glanced at the boy, but the boy continued to ignore the man until he strode to the edge of the pool and shouted, “Get out! Let them have their filthy pool. Did you piss in it? I hope you pissed in it. Now get out! Go to the room!” The boy removed himself from the pool with a kind of languorous choreography, and walked toward the sliding glass door of one of the downstairs rooms, the little girl following. Just before reaching the door the boy paused, turned his head in the direction of the pool and the other guests there, and hawked and spat onto the concrete pool apron. Loomis said to his son, “Let’s get on up to the room.”

Another guest, a lanky young woman whom Loomis had seen beside the pool earlier, walked past them on her way to the parking lot. “Watch out for them Gypsies,” she muttered.

“Gypsies?” the boy said.

The woman laughed as she rounded the corner. “Don’t let ’em get you,” she said.

“I don’t know,” Loomis said when she’d gone. “I guess they do seem a little like Gypsies.”

“What the hell is a Gypsy, anyway?”

Loomis stopped and stared at his son. “Does ‘Uncle Bob’ teach you to talk that way?”

The boy shrugged and looked away, annoyed.

In the room, his son pressed him again, and he told him that Gypsies were originally from some part of India, he wasn’t sure which, and that they were ostracized, nobody wanted them. They became wanderers, wandering around Europe. They were poor. People accused them of stealing. “They had a reputation for stealing people’s children, I think.”

He meant this to be a kind of joke, or at least lighthearted, but when he saw the expression on the boy’s face he regretted it and quickly added, “They didn’t, really.”

It didn’t work. For the next hour, the boy asked him questions about Gypsies and kidnapping. Every few minutes or so he hopped from the bed to the sliding glass door and pulled the curtain aside to peek down across the courtyard at the Gypsies’ room. Loomis had decided to concede they were Gypsies, whether they really were or not. He made himself a stiff nightcap and stepped out onto the balcony to smoke, although he peeked through the curtains before going out, to make sure the coast was clear.

THE NEXT MORNING, Sunday, Loomis rose before his son and went down to the lobby for coffee. He stepped out into the empty courtyard to drink it in the morning air, and when he looked into the pool he saw a large dead rat on its side at the bottom. The rat looked peacefully dead, with its eyes closed and its front paws curled at its chest as if it were begging. Loomis took another sip of his coffee and went back into the lobby. The night clerk was still on duty, studying something on the computer monitor behind the desk. She only cut her eyes at Loomis, and when she saw he was going to approach her she met his gaze steadily in that same way, without turning her head.

“I believe you have an unregistered guest at the bottom of your pool,” Loomis said.

He got a second cup of coffee, a plastic cup of juice, and a couple of refrigerator-cold bagels (the waffle iron and fresh fruit had disappeared a couple of visits earlier) and took them back to the room. He and his son ate there, then Loomis decided to get them away from the motel for the day. The boy could always be counted on to want a day trip to San Diego. He loved to ride the red trolleys there, and tolerated Loomis’s interest in the museums, sometimes.

They took the commuter train down, rode the trolley to the Mexican border, turned around, and came back. They ate lunch at a famous old diner near downtown, then took a bus to Balboa Park and spent the afternoon in the Air & Space Museum, the Natural History Museum, and at a small, disappointing model railroad exhibit. Then they took the train back up the coast.

As they got out of the car at the motel, an old brown van, plain and blocky as a loaf of bread, careened around the far corner of the lot, pulled up next to Loomis, roared up to them, and stopped. The driver was the older man who’d been at the pool. He leaned toward Loomis and said through the open passenger window, “Can you give me twenty dollars? They’re going to kick us out of this stinking motel.”

Loomis felt a surge of hostile indignation. What, did he have a big sign on his chest telling everyone what a loser he was?

“I don’t have it,” he said.

“Come on!” the man shouted. “Just twenty bucks!”

Loomis saw his son standing beside the passenger door of the rental car, frightened.

“No,” he said. He was ready to punch the old man now.

“Son of a bitch!” the man shouted, and gunned the van away, swerving onto the street toward downtown and the beach.

The boy gestured for Loomis to hurry over and unlock the car door, and as soon as he did the boy got back into the passenger seat. When Loomis sat down behind the wheel, the boy hit the lock button. He cut his eyes toward where the van had disappeared up the hill on the avenue.

“Was he trying to rob us?” he said.

“No. He wanted me to give him twenty dollars.”

The boy was breathing hard and looking straight out the windshield, close to tears.

“It’s okay,” Loomis said. “He’s gone.”

“Pop, no offense”—and the boy actually reached over and patted Loomis on the forearm, as if to comfort him—“but I think I want to sleep at home tonight.”

Loomis was so astonished by the way his son had touched him on the arm that he was close to tears himself.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Really. We’re safe here, and I’ll protect you.”

“I know, Pop, but I really think I want to go home.”

Loomis tried to keep the obvious pleading note from his voice. If this happened, if he couldn’t even keep his son around and reasonably satisfied to be with him for a weekend, what was he at all anymore? And (he couldn’t help but think) what would the boy’s mother make of it, how much worse would he then look in her eyes?

“Please,” he said to the boy. “Just come on up to the room for a while, and we’ll talk about it again, and if you still want to go home later on I’ll take you, I promise.”

The boy thought about it and agreed, and began to calm down a little. They went up to the room, past the courtyard, which was blessedly clear of ridiculous Gypsies and other guests. Loomis got a bucket of ice for his bourbon, ordered Chinese, and they lay together on Loomis’s bed, eating and watching television, and didn’t talk about the Gypsies, and after a while, exhausted, they both fell asleep.

WHEN THE ALCOHOL woke him at 3 a.m., he was awash in a sense of gloom and dread. He found the remote, turned down the sound on the TV. His son was sleeping, mouth open, a lock of his bright orange hair across his face.

Loomis eased himself off the bed, sat on the other one, and watched him breathe. He recalled the days when his life with the boy’s mother had seemed happy, and the boy had been small, and they would put him to bed in his room, where they had built shelves for his toy trains and stuffed animals and the books from which Loomis would read to him at bedtime. He remembered the constant battle in his heart, those days. How he was drawn into this construction of conventional happiness, how he felt that he loved this child more than he had ever loved anyone in his entire life, how all of this was possible, this life, how he might actually be able to do it. And yet whenever he had felt this he was always aware of the other, more deeply seated part of his nature that wanted to run away in fear. That believed it was not possible after all, that it could only end in catastrophe, that anything this sweet and heartbreaking must indeed one day collapse into shattered pieces. He had struggled to free himself, one way or another, from what seemed a horrible limbo of anticipation. He had run away, in his fashion. And yet nothing had ever caused him to feel anything more like despair than what he felt just now, in this moment, looking at his beautiful child asleep on the motel bed in the light of the cheap lamp, with the incessant dull roar of cars on I-5 just the other side of the hedge, a slashing river of what seemed nothing but desperate travel from point A to point B, from which one mad dasher or another would simply disappear, blink out in a flicker of light, at ragged but regular intervals, with no more ceremony or consideration than that.

He checked that his son was still sleeping deeply, then poured himself a plastic cup of neat bourbon and went down to the pool to smoke and sit alone for a while in the dark. He walked toward a group of lawn chairs in the shadows beside a stunted palm, but stopped when he realized that he wasn’t alone, that someone was sitting in one of the chairs. The Gypsy woman sat very still, watching him.

“Come, sit,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

He was afraid. But the woman was so still, and the look on her face he could now make out in the shadows was one of calm appraisal. Something about this kept him from retreating. She slowly raised a hand and patted the pool chair next to her, and Loomis sat.

For a moment the woman just looked at him, and, unable not to, he looked at her. She was unexpectedly, oddly attractive. Her eyes were indeed very dark, set far apart on her broad face. In this light, her fierce nose was strange and alarming, almost erotic.

“Are you Gypsy?” Loomis blurted, without thinking.

She stared at him a second before smiling and chuckling deep in her throat.

“No, I’m not Gypsy,” she said, her eyes moving quickly from side to side in little shiftings, looking into his. “We are American. My people come from France.”

Loomis said nothing.

“But I can tell you your future,” she said, leaning her head back slightly to look at him down her harrowing nose. “Let me see your hand.” She took Loomis’s wrist and pulled his palm toward her. He didn’t resist. “Have you ever had someone read your palm?”

Loomis shook his head. “I don’t really want to know my future,” he said. “I’m not a very optimistic person.”

“I understand,” the woman said. “You’re unsettled.”

“It’s too dark here to even see my palm,” Loomis said.

“No, there’s enough light,” the woman said. And finally she took her eyes from Loomis’s and looked down at his palm. He felt relieved enough to be released from that gaze to let her continue. And something in him was relieved, too, to have someone else consider his future, someone aside from himself. It couldn’t be worse, after all, than his own predictions.

She hung her head over his palm and traced the lines with a long fingernail, pressed into the fleshy parts. Her thick hair tickled the edges of his hand and wrist. After a moment, much sooner than Loomis would have expected, she spoke.

“It’s not the future you see in a palm,” she said, still studying his. “It’s a person’s nature. From this, of course, one can tell much about a person’s tendencies.” She looked up, still gripping his wrist. “This tells us much about where a life may have been, and where it may go.”

She bent over his palm again, traced one of the lines with the fingernail. “There are many breaks in the heart line here. You are a creature of disappointment. I suspect others in your life disappoint you.” She traced a different line. “You’re a dreamer. You’re an idealist, possibly. Always disappointed by ordinary life, which of course is boring and ugly.” She laughed that soft, deep chuckle again and looked up, startling Loomis anew with the directness of her gaze. “People are so fucking disappointing, eh?” She uttered a seductive grunt that loosened something in his groin.

It was true. No one had ever been good enough for him. Even the members of his immediate family. And especially himself.

“Anger, disappointment,” the woman said. “So common. But it may be they’ve worn you down. The drinking, smoking. No real energy, no passion.” Loomis pulled against her grip just slightly but she held on with strong fingers around his wrist. Then she lowered Loomis’s palm to her broad lap and leaned in closer, speaking more quietly.

“I see you with the little boy — he’s your child?”

Loomis nodded. He felt suddenly alarmed, fearful. He glanced up, and his heart raced when he thought he saw the boy standing on the balcony looking out. It was only the potted plant there. He wanted to dash back to the room but he was rooted to the chair, to the Gypsy with her thin, hard fingers about his wrist.

“This is no vacation, I suspect. It’s terrible, to see your child in this way, in a motel.”

Loomis nodded.

“You’re angry with this child’s mother for forcing you to be here.”

Loomis nodded and tried to swallow. His throat was dry.

“Yet I would venture it was you who left her. For another woman, a beautiful woman, eh, mon frère?” She ran the tip of a nail down one of the lines in his palm. There was a cruel smile on her impossible face. “A woman who once again you believed to be something she was not.” Loomis felt himself drop his chin in some kind of involuntary acquiescence. “She was a dream,” the woman said. “And she has disappeared, poof, like any dream.” He felt suddenly, embarrassingly, close to tears. A tight lump swelled in his throat. “And now you have left her, too, or she has left you, because”—and here the woman paused, shook Loomis’s wrist gently, as if to revive his attention, and indeed he had been drifting in his grief—“because you are a ghost. Walking between two worlds, you know?” She shook his wrist again, harder, and Loomis looked up at her, his vision of her there in the shadows blurred by his tears.

She released his wrist and sat back in her chair, exhaled as if she had been holding her breath, and closed her eyes. As if this excoriation of Loomis’s character had been an obligation, had exhausted her.

They sat there for a minute or two while Loomis waited for the emotion that had surged up in him to recede.

“Twenty dollars,” the woman said then, her eyes still closed. When Loomis said nothing, she opened her eyes. Now her gaze was flat, no longer intense, but she held it on him.

“Twenty dollars,” she said. “For the reading. This is my fee.”

Loomis, feeling as if he’d just been through something physical instead of emotional, his muscles tingling, reached for his wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to her. She took it and rested her hands in her lap.

“Now you should go back up to your room,” she said.

He got up to make his way from the courtyard, and was startled by someone standing in the shadow of the Gypsies’ doorway. Her evil man-child, the boy from the pool, watching him like a forest animal pausing in its night prowling to let him pass. Loomis hurried on up to the room, tried to let himself in with a key card that wouldn’t cooperate. The lock kept flashing red instead of green. Finally the card worked, the green light flickered. He entered and shut the door behind him.

But he’d gone into the wrong room, maybe even some other motel. The beds were made, the television off. His son wasn’t there. The sliding glass door to the balcony stood open. Loomis felt his heart seize up and he rushed to the railing. The courtyard was dark and empty. Over in the lobby, the lights were dimmed, no one on duty. It was all shut down. There was no breeze. No roar of rushing vehicles from the 5, the roar in Loomis’s mind canceling it out. By the time he heard the sound behind him and turned to see his son come out of the bathroom yawning, it was too late. It might as well have been someone else’s child, Loomis the stranger come to steal him away. He stood on the balcony and watched his son crawl back onto the bed, pull himself into a fetal position, close his eyes for a moment, then open them. Meeting his gaze, Loomis felt something break inside him. The boy had the same dazed, disoriented expression he’d had on his face just after his long, difficult birth, when the nurses had put him into an incubator to rush him to intensive care. Loomis had knelt, then, his face up close to the incubator’s glass wall, and he’d known that the baby could see him, and that was enough. The obstetrician said, “This baby is very sick,” and nurses wheeled the incubator out. He’d gone over to his wife and held her hand. The resident, tears in her eyes, patted his shoulder and said, for some reason, “You’re good people,” and left them alone. Now he and their child were in this motel, the life that had been their family somehow dissipated into air. Loomis couldn’t gather into his mind how they’d got here. He couldn’t imagine what would come next.

The Bodies

The bodies were posed as speakers, lovers, discus throwers, runners awaiting the starter’s gun, as models for artists or medical students, one breast, say, removed of its skin but for the nipple, a penis flayed down one side, scrotum as if it were never there — eyelids severed, noses sheared, abdominal walls peeled away in layers, and hearts, intestines, livers, kidneys there like fruits dried on the vine.

In another room there were glass cases in which millions of blue and red capillaries floated like strange galaxies captured, reduced to the size and shape of human bodies — what worlds operated in there, now?

The man and his son strolled through the exhibit as if through a gallery of art.

The son seemed disinterested, bored. Embarrassed by the sexual organs, at this delicate age of his own development? Or by the other visitors’ intense and open interest? Embarrassed, perhaps, for these people, who were once Chinese, who were once the unnamed and newly dead, who perhaps were prisoners or the inhabitants of a village, caught in the path of war. No one knew or was saying. Even the man felt somehow embarrassed to be alive among them, and he sympathized with his son’s discomfort. He and the boy’s mother had been divorced for only a year, and the man did not know very well just what the boy carried about in his mind and heart.

They came to a woman sliced the length of her body into four standing, parallel slabs, separated only by inches. The boy stood looking fiercely away. He glared at someone in a group that walked past them to another part of the exhibit.

As they left and walked out into the park, the boy said in an angry undertone, Did you see that woman looking at you?

What woman? the man said.

That woman, the boy said. You didn’t see her?

I was looking at the bodies, the man said. Weren’t you?

It was disgusting, the boy said, though he didn’t explain or say what or why.

I WAS OUT ON THE FRONT PORCH WHEN THE PHONE began to ring. An orange sunset was bleeding into the sky across the street, and I didn’t want to leave it. But Lanny was busy with supper so I went inside and answered the phone.

A Mr. Secrist from Carl’s school introduced himself.

“Is anything wrong?” I said.

“Well, we’ve been a little worried about Carl,” Mr. Secrist said. “He hasn’t been himself.” He paused. I didn’t say anything. “He’s been getting into fights, falling asleep in class. Nothing we haven’t been able to handle, you know, but it’s not like Carl.”

There was an awkward pause. Then Mr. Secrist went on.

“Anyway, this morning Carl fought—argued—with his teacher, Miss Fortenberry, and I just thought I’d call and let you know she had to send him to the principal’s office.”

“I see,” I said.

“Carl is normally such a quiet, well-mannered boy,” Mr. Secrist said. “I mean, I know Carl, everybody at school knows Carl, he’s a great kid. I just thought I’d call and tell you, in case it’s something you might understand and, you know, deal with better than we could.” He was choosing his words carefully. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I think I know what’s troubling Carl. We can talk to him.”

“I don’t mean he’s been a troublemaker or anything,” Mr. Secrist said. “Carl’s a good student.”

“He’s not in any trouble here, Mr. Secrist. Thank you for calling. We appreciate it.”

“Well, if you’d ever like to come in for a conference or anything, just let me know.”

“Sure. Thanks.” I hung up. I was nearly out of the room when the phone rang again. I walked back and answered it.

The voice was puzzled.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mr. Secrist said. “I was trying to dial another number and must have redialed yours by mistake.” He chuckled. “Busy day.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I know what you mean.” We hung up. I was almost to the kitchen when the phone rang again. I called ahead to Lanny, “I got it,” and answered the one on the kitchen wall.

The caller made a surprised sound. It was Mr. Secrist again. “Man, I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I made sure I dialed the right number this time. Something must be wrong with the phones.” He paused. “Well, this is embarrassing.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Maybe you should try another phone, or call the phone company.”

“I’ll call the phone company from another phone,” he said.

“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. “Thanks again for calling about Carl.”

We hung up. Lanny looked at me. She was slicing peeled potatoes into halves on the chopping block. It made a sound that filled the momentary silence between us. Schock. Schock.

“What about Carl?” she said. “Who was that?”

“A counselor from school. He said Carl fought with his teacher today and got sent to the principal.”

She looked at me and set the knife down on the block and wiped her hands on a towel.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “Kids know things. They can tell when something’s wrong.” She picked up the knife again. “It’s us he’s upset over.”

The phone rang again.

“Jesus, if that’s him again,” I said. We had a couple of old phones that came with the house. No caller ID, none of that stuff. “He’s called three times already.”

“Who?”

“The counselor. He said his phone’s messed up.”

I answered it on the third ring.

“Bob?” the caller said.

“You must have the wrong number,” I said, and hung up.

“What are we going to do about Carl?” Lanny said.

“We need to sit him down and tell him. Explain it to him.”

She was quiet. She chopped another potato. Schock. Then set the knife down again. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “We’ve just ignored Carl through all this. We never pay him any attention. And he’s going to be the one it’s hardest on.” She breathed hard and looked down at her hands. They were pink from working in the kitchen and I had a moment of guilt about sitting out on the porch while she started supper by herself. I put it out of my mind. Lanny took a deep breath and seemed on the verge of tears. The phone rang again. I snatched it up.

“Yes?”

“Who is this, please?”

“Who is this?”

They paused and hung up. Lanny was looking at me. I hung up the phone.

“We never even taught him to ride his bicycle,” Lanny said. “He can’t even ride a bike. The kids all rode by here a few minutes ago and they all had their own bikes except Carl. He was riding on the back of Frederick Nelson’s.” Our kitchen was in a small separate wing of the house. A window at the sink overlooked the backyard, and our breakfast table sat near a bay window that looked out front. Lanny could see the street out that window. I’d seen the kids ride by, too, when I was on the porch, Carl on Frederick’s old splayed banana seat while Frederick rode the pedals. Carl’s legs hanging listless, bare ankles in old sneakers and toes stubbing pavement with Frederick’s desultory lunges.

“Even the little girls ride their own bikes,” Lanny said. “He hasn’t even touched the one we got him last Christmas.”

“I know,” I said.

“Well, why haven’t you taught him to ride it?”

“Well, why haven’t you?” I shot back.

“My father taught me.” Schock. Four large Irish potatoes, halves rocking on the cutting board, crazy beveled edges like fat whittled sweetwood sticks. We seemed to have more than enough for supper.

“All right, I will,” I said then. “But I don’t know why his friends haven’t taught him, if it’s such a tragedy.”

“It’s a matter of pride, Ben,” Lanny said, not looking up.

The phone rang again.

“How you been?” a woman’s voice said. “I ain’t seen you in a long time.”

“Who’s this?”

“Terry?”

“You have the wrong number,” I said, and hung up. I felt the urge to turn on Lanny and held it back.

“I’m going outside,” I said. The phone rang as I stepped onto the porch, but I ignored it. The kids were a couple of blocks down the street on their bicycles. I walked out to the curb, cupped my hands, and called out, “Carl!” Down the street a few heads among them turned. The bicycles wobbled to a stop. They talked among themselves, then turned and started my way.

It was seven o’clock, daylight saving time. Thin, high pink clouds fading overhead. They looked like faint brushstrokes in a painting. The lush greens of the trees and grass deepened, the sharp lines and angles of houses and cars and power poles easing off, softening. The children drew closer, brown-skinned on their rangy bikes. Poker cards were fastened by clothespins to the bikes’ front forks, so that they flapped against the spokes making stuttering noises the children imagined to sound like motorcycles.

They called their group the Road Hog Club. I knew how they came up with this. What they loved to do was line their bikes up in the street until a car came along. Then they reared up on their back wheels and stood their ground until the driver got out cussing. Then they scattered and scooted, motocrossing through the yards and whooping like Indians.

They zipped up and skidded to a stop, looking at me and waiting on what I had to tell Carl. They may as well have been reared up, the looks on their faces. The formidable Road Hog Club, defiant. I could hear the phone ringing faintly inside the house. Carl sat loose on the back of Frederick Nelson’s rigged-up banana seat, waiting.

“C’mere,” I said to him.

“Aw, I want to ride.”

“Just c’mere. I want you to do something with me for a few minutes.”

He dismounted in silence, Frederick slipping forward on the bar to let him off. Carl’s a good-looking kid, with his straight sandy blond hair down on his forehead and his tiny wedge build. He doesn’t have the wiry or pudgy looks the others have. Carrot-headed Bubba Weeks, Wick’s kid, stared at me with a cool gaze I took for insolence.

“Y’all go on. Carl’s going to be a little while. Get.” I shooed them away with my hand. Carl stood a little behind me with his back to them. The Road Hogs wobbled slowly around and at some silent signal scooted, Bubba Weeks and Frederick Nelson’s sister doing wheelies. They dipped, turning right onto Ashland, like birds swerving.

“Come on,” I said to Carl. We went around back, phones ringing faintly, then clearly, as we passed windows thrown open for a breeze.

“What’re we doing?” He stayed a few steps behind me, dragging.

“We’re going to teach you to ride your own bike. Your mother’s ashamed.”

He mumbled something, then said, “What’s Mama ashamed about?”

We turned to the little window above the kitchen sink and saw his mother’s head there.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was only kidding. We want you to learn to ride your bike.” He mumbled something. “Come on, now, let’s do it.”

I got the bike from the shed and rolled it through the backyard, past the cherry tree, and out to the alleyway lined and shaded with old woolly oaks and tall upflung sweetgums. Twice a week garbage trucks rumbled through, stirring dust and a faintly sweet stink. Carl followed like a small prisoner. He stood a couple of steps away, hands in pockets. I heard a breeze and looked up, the thick oaks rustling and the star-pointed sweetgum leaves playing against the sky. I heard something and looked at the little window and her head was still there. Shouting something.

“The phone keeps ringing.”

I laid the bike down and went up to the window.

“There have been five calls since you went outside,” she said.

“Wrong numbers?”

“Yes. What the hell’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you should call the phone company.”

“What are you doing out there?”

“I’m teaching Carl to ride his bicycle,” I said. She looked at me and I could tell she was holding back a comment. Behind her, in the kitchen, the phone was ringing. She looked around at it and then at me.

I went back out to the alleyway and picked up the bike and grabbed it by the handlebars and the seat.

“Okay,” I said to Carl, “get on.”

He trudged over, wiped the dust off the seat with his soft grime-edged fingers, wiped his fingers on his shorts. He grabbed the bars and mounted.

“You set?” I said. He put his feet on the pedals and nodded.

“Was the phone for me?” he said, looking up.

“No. You ready?” He nodded. I pushed and got him going a little ways and said, “Okay, go.” He tried to, but his feet slipped off the pedals and the bike fell over with a crash. The alleyway road’s a dirt one, hard-packed sand with a little gravel ridge in the middle and scattered gravel on the edges. Carl got up breathing through his nose and scowling and blinking his eyes. I felt my skin prickle with shame and I ran over to help him pick up the bike.

“Jesus, Carl, I’m sorry,” I said, almost to myself. “My fault. My bad.” I pushed the hair from his forehead and looked at him. He frowned and pulled his head away. “I’ll do it right this time,” I said. I looked back at the house. Lanny’s head still at the window.

Carl wouldn’t look at me. He got on the bike again. I grabbed the back of the seat.

“Ready?” I said.

He gave a serious nod.

“Is Mama watching?” he said.

“Yeah.”

We took off. I ran beside him, holding on with one hand. He didn’t pedal, but kept his feet ready and his eyes straight ahead. He was on the right-wheel path. I ran on the gravel ridge, having a tough time of it. Then I let go and ran beside him and yelled, “Pedal!” and in a second he did and took off down the alleyway. He was going pretty good. Down where the alleyway ran into the street, he slowed and fell over. He jumped up and hopped around, holding his elbow.

I called out, “You all right?”

He stopped hopping and examined his elbow. Then he picked up the bike and walked it back to me.

“Did Mama see that?”

“I don’t think so.” I didn’t turn to the window. Carl stared at the house for a minute. A group of kids rode by in the street down where Carl had fallen over. They were younger than the Road Hogs, ringing chrome bells clamped onto their handlebars. The ringing faded, shring-ring, fainter than their shouting voices, then was sound lost in rustling leaves and air.

Carl climbed back onto the bike, and I grabbed hold and pushed him going again. He wobbled a little when I let go but didn’t fall down when he turned, and got started back to me by himself. He got the hang of it and rode back and forth for a while, up and down the alleyway. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and watched. Carl whizzed past on the bike, kicking up dust.

He was having a time. He started trying to do wheelies, catching on so fast because he’d waited so long, hanging around such good riders. He was being cool, paying me no mind. And he was beautiful, with his hair blowing back away from his forehead. The breeze had died and the air was quiet. The phone lines and power lines dipped and rose from pole to pole along their graceful paths through the trees, and in the quiet warmth of the evening I could almost hear them humming. I sensed a vague feeling of dread creeping in, but then Carl zipped up and skidded to a stop, breathing hard and sweating, his eyes wide open.

“It’s almost suppertime,” I said.

“Can I stay out just a little bit longer?” He leaned forward over the handlebars, pleading.

I remember this moment sometimes, by itself. It stands apart, in balance, like Carl balanced over the handlebars of his bike, wanting another few minutes outside. There are moments like that, and when you remember them they grip you inside. But at the time I only hesitated for a second.

“Go ahead,” I said.

It was twilight. Lamps snicked silently on in houses. I walked down the alleyway toward the street, where light bloomed pinkish in streetlamps curved from poles like thin-chromed gargoyles brooding over what traffic might wander their way.

I crossed the street and walked on in the relative dark of the alleyways, into a part of the neighborhood whose houses from the back looked unfamiliar. The shadows had deepened. The trees were towering dark shapes. A bit of breeze ran through them like a shiver.

I turned and started back, taking my time. Sounds changed subtly with the light. And in the cooling calm of the settling dusk I became aware, like someone waking up from a dream, of a steady ringing.

Behind one house I stopped in a mimosa’s shadow to watch. Under a single lamp, sliding-glass door open for a breeze, a fat scarlet man and woman in T-shirts and three near-naked pudgy children sat eating supper. Their faces glistened with sweat. Steam rose from their meal. Their phone was ringing. It stopped for a moment, then began again. None of them said anything, glowering, forking food into their mouths with an angry urgency.

I walked on toward my house through the darkening backyards. In every house the phone was ringing. Toot Nelson stood beside his, yelling at his oldest son and pointing outside. The boy ducked his head and came out the back door, his startled angry face looming suddenly into mine.

“Yah!” He jumped back. We stared. He turned wide-eyed and hurried on.

I crossed through a yard and out into the street. Through the screen doors and windows open for fall breezes I could hear the phones ringing as I walked. A television blared in the Hirlihues’ house, blue light filled their empty den. Before I stepped onto our porch I saw the dim figure of a phone-company truck parked way down the street.

I cupped my hands and hollered, “Carl!” No answer.

Except for the kitchen, the house was dark, and I stood there for a minute in the den, the phone in the hallway jangling dully on, off, on, like a senseless alarm. In the dark the rooms felt vast, everything in the air tingling and electric, jumping needles. I felt I couldn’t breathe in enough air. I inhaled until I could feel a small tight spot deep in my chest expand like sore muscle. The dread welled up and spread through me. In the kitchen the phone rang, stopped, and began ringing again. Lanny stood at the sink washing tomatoes and ignored it.

“There’s a phone truck parked down the street,” I said.

“A man came by and said to let it ring while they fixed it.” She looked up, her face blank.

“I taught Carl to ride,” I said.

She stood at the sink with her hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, wearing an old loose sundress and sandals. She dried a tomato and set it beside two others on the porcelain drainboard beside the sink. Behind her on the stove the potato halves rose and tumbled like the blunt noses of tiny white whales.

“Supper’s almost done,” she said.

It was dusk outside, the sky a deep dark blue, a thin line of pale pink above the tree line high in the darkening window. The glaring overhead light in the kitchen cast an odd glow on things. It made her skin look weirdly smooth, like a doll’s. I looked at my hands. Skin and veins stretched taut over bone and muscle. The phone rang. It rang again. And then it stopped. We stood waiting for it to start again. She stood at the sink looking down. I went over to her and touched her arm. I felt her stiffen. I put my arm across her shoulders and tried to hug her to me.

“Don’t,” she said.

I pulled her closer, but she stiffened.

“Don’t make a scene,” she said. “Carl’s outside.” I looked but didn’t see anyone outside the window. Then I saw someone sitting in the fork of the cherry tree, just a silhouette in the failing light. A bike lay on its side in the grass. I looked back at Lanny, let her go. She stared at the tomatoes on the drainboard. I looked again at the figure in the tree. It was hunkered down on a branch. A shape not sharp but vague in the faint light, shading darker in almost clocklike moments. With the kitchen light on, through the screen, you couldn’t tell who it was.

“That’s not Carl,” I said.

“What?”

“Carl’s riding,” I said. “Must be some other boy, spying. Maybe it’s Toot’s boy.” I leaned toward the window. “Go on, now,” I called. It sat still. Too small for Toot’s boy.

She looked at it, closed her eyes, and rested her palms against the sink.

“Ben,” she said.

It didn’t move at all.

“What are we going to do about him?” she said.

I looked at the figure in the tree.

“Carl?” I called.

No answer.

“I don’t think it’s Carl,” I said.

Lanny shook her head and turned away. The child in the tree had not moved.

“Carl?” I called out. “Come on in the house.”

It sat very still.

“Carl,” I said louder.

It was a still, dark statue.

Out front in the street a clamor clapped up. The members of the Road Hog Club, quick shadows in the deepening dark, rode in a furious circle, slapping their mouths with their hands and whooping like movie Indians.

I cut the light to see through the bay-window glass. They broke and curved out of sight. I didn’t see Carl. Out back, a soft scrabbling and clatter. When I looked, the tree was empty.

We stood, not saying anything, looking out at the tree.

Slowly, sounds came back to our ringing ears. The gurgle of the boiling potatoes in the pot. The quiet hum of the refrigerator motor. The flutter and quiet hiss of the stove eye’s blue flame. Lanny reached over and turned it off. The flame snuffed out with a little popping sound. She turned off the oven and I heard the jets chuff once, then the metal crackling and ticking. I could hardly see her face in the darkness.

She said, “You don’t even know your own son,” and walked out through the dining room.

I heard the front screen door open and shut. I heard her lift her voice out in the street.

“Carl?” she called.

I was thinking about the time I stole in on Carl asleep and watched him until he seemed some child I didn’t know, some beautiful foundling.

And the nights I lay awake beside Lanny like someone moving through dark space at high speed.

“Carl,” she called. “Carl?”

Moving away, growing fainter, her calling like a birdsong you know by heart but never knew which bird sang it. I stood very still and listened, as if to memorize her voice, fix it in my memory. But she’d gone too far down the street by then. And there were actual birds, outside the window in the yard, singing in the onset of evening.

THE ROAD TO THE COAST WAS A LONG, STEAMY CORRIDOR of leaves. Narrow bridges over brush-choked creeks. Our father drove, the windows down, wind whipping his thick black hair. Our mother’s hair, abundant and auburn and long and wavy, she’d tried to tame beneath a pretty blue scarf. He wore a pair of black Ray-Bans. She wore prescription shades with the swept and pointed ends of the day. He whistled crooner songs and smoked Winstons, and early as it was, no one really talked.

This was before things changed, before Hurricane Camille, the casinos.

My older brother, Hal, slept sitting up, his mouth open as if he were singing silently in a dream. My younger brother, Ray, had been left with our grandmother, too young for this trip, too much trouble most of the time. He was two, and the youngest of three, and his sharp, hawkish eyes constantly sought their prey, which was inattention, which he would rip to shreds with tantrums, devour in small bloody satisfying chunks of punishment and mollification. I was so very glad that he was not along.

By noon we smelled the brine-and-fish stink of the bays. The land flattened into hazy vista, so flat you could see the curve of the earth. Downtown Gulfport steamed an old Floridian vapor from cracked sidewalks. Filigreed railings, shaded storefronts, not a soul out, everyone and everything stalled in the heat, distilling. The beach highway stretched out to the east, white and hot in the sun. Our tires made slapping sounds on the melting tar dividers and the wind in the car windows was warm and salty. We passed old beach mansions with green shutters, hundred-year-old oaks in the yards. A scattering of cheap redbrick motels, slatboard restaurants, bait shops. The beach, to our right, was flat and white and the lank brown surf lapped at the sand.

The Alamo Plaza Motel Court’s white stucco fort facade stood flanked by low regular motel rooms around a concrete courtyard. The swimming pool lay oddly naked and exposed in the middle of the motel’s broad front lawn, one low diving board jutting over the deep end like a pirates’ plank.

We stopped in the breezeway beside the office and went inside where the floor was cool Mexican tile, lush green plants in large clay pots in the corners, and a color television on which we could watch, late afternoons and evenings after supper before bedtime, programs unavailable back home. I have a vivid memory of watching a Tarzan movie there in which Tarzan, standing in the crook of a large tree, is shot right between the eyes by a safari hunter’s rifle, and he doesn’t even flinch. Is it possible this is a true memory, not invented or stretched? Would even Hollywood in the thirties — for this was an old movie even then — have Tarzan being shot directly in the forehead with a high-power rifle, the bloody spot at the point of entry jumping out on his skin, and him not even blinking his eyes? I was, I am, as incredulous as the safari men on the jungle trail below, holding their high-power rifles and gaping at this jungle god, who just stared coolly back at them with the bullet hole in the center of his forehead.

WE RENTED A BUNGALOW in the rear of the Plaza. In the mornings we went to the beach, joining hands to cross the white concrete path of U.S. 98, the beach highway, to the concrete steps that led down to the beach on the Sound. It was not an exhilarating beach, as Gulf beaches go, its white sand dredged from beyond the barrier islands twenty miles out to cover the naturally muddy shore, where the natural flora included exposed roots of cypress and mangrove. Huge tarpon, an almost prehistoric-looking fish, cruised here between the river and the sea.

Our father, my brother, and I waded far out into the Sound, where the water was still just knee-deep to a six-year-old. We turned and waved to our mother, who sat on the white sand on a beach towel, the pale blue scarf on her head, the cat-eyed sunglasses perched on her nose. She did not swim, and though one reason we came to Biloxi instead of the more beautiful beaches in Gulf Shores or Pensacola was the cheaper prices at motels, the other reason was her fear of the water. She felt safer sitting on the edge of the Sound, which was more like a lake, than she did near the crashing waves of the Gulf. The year before, standing near her beach towel in the sand at Gulf Shores, Alabama, as if it were her sole tentative anchor to the dry world, she had seen a young man drown trying to save his little boy from a rip current. She’d watched as the rescue squad dragged the man’s body onto the beach. A year later, and for many years after that, the terror she felt still welled up in her with a regularity as steady as the ticking minute hand on the clock, and with that same regularity she forced it back down, into her gut, where it fought with her frequent doses of Paragoric.

I can still remember her in the swimming pool, at the country club they’d struggled to join, before the hard times forced us to drop out. She would step into the shallow water with a look on her face that now I understand as terror but which then I took for simple cautiousness and uncertainty. A slim hand out as if to steady herself from some unknown that could unsteady the whole deal. A cream-colored bathing cap covered her dark curls, as if she were going to plunge in with the boldness of an Olympic diver, though her pointed, blue-framed sunglasses still rested on her slim nose. And before the water reached above her waistline she would bend her knees and, holding her head up on her neck as far as she could stretch it, push herself gently forward and dog-paddle around the shallow end, her toes bumping the bottom and pushing her forward every few little strokes. Knowing her now, I’m astonished she had the courage to get into the pool, with others there who might see her and laugh at the fact that she couldn’t really swim. All those club people, who might laugh and think what a country girl she was — Did you see that? Can’t even swim! And my admiration for her swells in some proportion to my sense of her loss in the intervening years.

BUT THERE WE STOOD, far out in the tepid brown Mississippi Sound, waving to her. She was not actually distinguishable to us as herself, that far out. She was a figure who occupied the spot where we’d last seen our mother, apparently wearing the same pale blue scarf on a head of short dark hair, with the same pale skin, and waving back for a moment, then falling still. A figure in the light of the moment just a millisecond away, her image reaching us far out into the Sound, yet gone as if she’d been gone for a dozen years.

IN THE EVENINGS, we went out to eat oysters on the half shell, platters of fried shrimp, fish, french fries, and hush puppies, and returned to sleep in the luxurious window-unit air-conditioning of our room. Our mother would almost never let us use the a/c at home, as it cost too much on the power bill.

Mornings and late afternoons, we went over to the beach and frolicked. I so love that word. Sand castles, not such artful ones, of mounds, moats, and tunnels. A tall woman with big blond hair and tits like pale luminescent water balloons walked by in a green two-piece bathing suit, walking so carefully she seemed to be treading along the shore through a very narrow passage only she could see. We glanced at our father, and he bobbed his eyebrows. We fell over into the sand, yipping like hyenas.

I once told my mother of being propositioned by a lascivious young country girl at a filling station in Buckatunna, Mississippi, on my way home for a visit. I’d been filling up my little Honda coupe and this woman kind of ambled over and stood there leering at me. You sure are good-lookin, she said. I’m having a party at my house, you want to come on over?

Did you go with her? my mother asked me when I told her the story. Of course not, I said. I didn’t know her from Medusa. Well, that’s the difference between you and your father, she said.

At this time they had been divorced for about seven years.

MY BROTHER AND I danced barefoot across the white-hot parking lot to the center of the Alamo Plaza’s interior court — its plaza, I suppose. There beneath a small shed roof sat a humming, sweating ice-making machine. We would tip open the canted lid to the bin and scoop out handfuls of ice crushed so fine it seemed shaved. We packed it into snowballs and threw them at one another, tossed them into the crackling hot air and watched them begin to shed water even as they rose and then fell to the sizzling concrete, melting instantly into a wet penumbra that shrank and evaporated into smoky wisps. We opened the bin again and wedged our heads and shoulders in there for the exquisite shock of freezing cold. For at least a few moments as we reeled in the white-hot courtyard on burning bare feet, our heads felt as dense and cold as ice cubes on top of our icicle necks.

WE DROVE TO A GROUP of small cabins on a cove and a grizzled man rented us a skiff. Our father sat at the stern and gunned the motor, buzzing us out into the stinking Sound, bouncing us through the light chop, our mother holding on to her sun hat.

We drifted half a mile or so off the shore, baited hooks, and cast out. For a while there was nothing, just the little boat rocking in the gentle waves of the channel, the hazy sky, gulls creaking by and checking us out with cocked heads, a beady black eye.

My brother pulled up the first fish. He swung it over my head and into the boat. It was a small fish, with an ugly face. As soon as it popped from the water it began to make ugly, froggish little sounds. Croaker, our father said. He unhooked it and tossed it back into the chop. I asked about the strange noise it made and he said it was the sound they made trying to breathe out of water.

The truth is the Atlantic croaker makes its sound by tightening the muscles around its swim bladder, and uses the sound for general communication and to attract a mate. It’s said to be a “prodigious spawner.”

I reeled one in, the fight leaving it. Up it came, into the boat. Croak, croak. A brownish fish with a little piggish snout. A small mark on the back of its eye gave it an angry look, a what-are-you-looking-at? kind of look. These fish looked pissed off to be interrupted in the middle of their prodigious spawning.

Soon we were all pulling in croakers. The boat floor crowded with flapping, croaking fish. A chorus of their dry frog noises rose around us. After a while, my father had had enough and started tossing croakers overboard. Some smacked dead on the surface and floated away. Others knifed the water with a final croak and were gone, back to their spawning and general communication with their kind.

WHEN I WAS TOO young to remember, now, how young I was, I began to have a recurring dream, or nightmare. The air in the dream was electric, very much like the electron-buzzing screen of our television when the station went off the air. Jumping with billions of little black dots. A charged, nervous air, the atmospheric equivalent of the feeling you get when you knock your funny bone. In the dream I felt very weak, and very heavy, as if my mass were compounding, draining my strength. I was aware of a hellish din of angry voices, though there were never any distinct words. I began to see I was in a very small room, the only door a tiny one in the corner, little larger than a mouse hole. Other times, the dreamscape changed to one of dreadful empty vastness, all gray, in which the horizon seemed impossibly distant and I seemed very small, and the pressure of the air was heavy upon me. I suppose it was a simple dream of anxiety, though I have sometimes fancied it a latent, deeply buried, sensorial memory from the womb, and who knows but that this is possible on some level? I was too young, it seems to me, to create such a memory from what little I’d heard about gestation. I probably knew nothing of that when the dream began. I may have been told where I came from. I don’t remember. In any case, I have no firm idea where such anxiety in one so young, where that could have come from. Except that I’d had, from a very young age, the sense and fear that my parents would divorce and force me to choose between them. Maybe I had picked up on some general unhappiness. I don’t know. But I spent much of my alone time worrying that something terrible and heartbreaking would happen.

AT THE POOL there were a couple of ladies laughing and sipping drinks at the little round table beneath the green-striped umbrella, and a very big fat man, not overly fat but very big, was taking huge vaults off the little diving board, leaving it bouncing on its fulcrum like a flimsy plank of pine siding as he hit the water in a cannonball, showering the laughing ladies with water, again and again. The ladies cried out, Stop! Oh, stop it! Their laughter rose and drowned in the humid salty darkness and the clacka-clackity-clacka sound of cars cruising past on the cooling white-slab highway along the beach. I listened to the cars long into the night, in my bed, along with the faint surf, my father snoring lightly, my mother and Hal lying still as the dead. The Gulf breezes puffed against the windows, slipped through seams, and drifted through the chilled air of the room like coastal ghosts released from their tight invisibility, sustained for a while by the softly exhaled breath of the living.

MY BROTHER MET ANOTHER boy and began going off with him, around the Alamo’s grounds or at the pool or, when I’d followed them there, across to the beach, where I couldn’t follow without an adult. He became more of an absence, and so I drifted into the same safe quietude where I spent most of my time, anyway, where most middle children spend their time.

At some point in my childhood I wanted out of my family, although I loved my mother and father and tolerated my brothers as well as anyone else. I didn’t want never to see them again, but it would have been nice to live with some other family, possibly across or down the street, instead of my own. An imaginary one, maybe. When you are quiet, you are different, which makes everyone a little nervous and suspicious, if you are the only one that way. I was at ease if left alone in my room to read comics, or alone in the large tract of woods bordering our cul-de-sac street. I loved spying on others walking in the woods when I was hidden and could see them without their seeing me. Sometimes I looked into windows at night, but only at ordinary things. People eating supper, or watching television. No undressing or showers or such. I only wanted to experience the mystery of seeing things as they really were, when you yourself did not enter in. It seemed frank and honest in an exciting way. There was nothing to fear in terms of yourself in such moments. If you were quiet and still, it was almost as if you weren’t there. It was like being a ghost, curious about the visible world and the creatures in it. As if you were dreaming it, and not a part of the dream but there somehow, unquestioned.

ONE DAY HAL ASKED permission to go out with his new friend’s family on a charter fishing boat. They would have to leave very early, before dawn. I determined to rise then, too, and see him off. But I wasn’t able to, and no one woke me, so I didn’t get up until light was seeping into the sky over the Sound. I rushed outside onto the motel lawn, stood there barefoot in the dew and cool heavy breeze, and looked out across the water. On the horizon I could see the gray silhouette of a ship, a big ship, which in my memory’s surviving image appears to be a tanker of some kind, an oceangoing vessel. But at that moment, on the lawn, I thought it must be the boat Hal had gone on with his new friend and family — these people I’d never spoken to, whom I’d only watched from across the lawn, complete strangers to me and already fast friends with Hal. Watching the ghostly ship far out in the Sound, I had the strongest feeling that he’d gone away and would never return. It was something I couldn’t quit grasp, just yet, someone going so far out in the water on a boat that you can’t see them anymore, and then coming back in. I was very sad, I remember, thinking that he was gone forever. And I have lost the memory of his returning from the fishing trip to the motel. I’ve wondered why I felt so much sadder then than I did when he died. Anticipation is expansive in the imagination. Memory is reductive, selective. And any great moment must be too much to absorb in that moment, without the ameliorative power of genius or mental illness. When Hal died, years later, it seemed like the completion of something I’d been watching and waiting for all that time.

His last words, I was told, were a blurted, Look out!

My father’s last words, I was told, were, Something’s wrong.

If my mother had any last words, they are a secret, as she was old and alone. And if any words were formed in her mind as she lay unconscious and slowly dying on her bedroom floor, no one will ever know what they were.

IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER Hal in very specific ways. He was a small boy, and then a small man. I did not remember him that way, since he was four years older and so until I was into my later teens he was larger than me. I remember how shocking it was when, a couple of years after his death, I went into his room and tried on one of his shirts. It was tight across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. This was shocking because I had thought he was at least as tall as I was and stockier, but he was not. He had always carried himself like a larger boy and man.

A second child will always feel displaced by the first. People say it’s the other way around but it’s not. Later in life there are the photographs you discover of your older sibling, before you were born, with one or both of your parents. It’s then, after you’ve had children yourself and know the experience in your own life, that you understand the bond between the new, young parents and their first child. You understand how miraculous and illuminating it is. You know how the experience has remade the whole world for the parents, and how the only child’s world, entirely new in the magnificent, solipsistic way only an only child’s world can be, eclipses all else, and when the second child comes along it is only as if the eclipsing body has moved aside, moved along in its path. The wonder has passed, leaving the washed and dazed sense of deep and cathartic change, an experience that will never be repeated for anyone in that little world. And, in truth, it leaves everyone feeling a little bit diminished. You realize this, when you are older and you have memories and these memories are informed, in a slow infusion of understanding, by the old photographs taken before you were even conceived.

Hal was a prodigy, in many ways a typical first child in that he was precocious, gregarious, fearless, bestowed at birth with the grandest, most natural sense of entitlement. Every first child is a king or queen. A prince or princess, an enfant terrible of privilege and favor. And Hal was talented. When he was three, he learned the words to the popular song “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” and sang it so adorably that our parents secured a recording session for him down at a local radio station.

He was introduced by George Shannon, a local radio and television personality. I imagine Hal wearing his cowboy outfit, a black hat and black, sequined shirt, black pants, black, filigreed cowboy boots, a toy six-shooter in a toy holster on his belt. He probably wasn’t wearing this outfit, since it had nothing to do with Davy Crockett, but there’s a framed photo of Hal at about that age, wearing that outfit, that hung for decades on our mother’s living room wall, and so that’s how I see him, then. A musical cousin, Doc Taylor, strummed the song’s tune on a guitar, and Hal sang the song in his piping voice.

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,

Greenest state in the land of the free.

Raised in the woods so’s he knowed every tree.

Kil’t him a b’ar when he was only three.

Davy, Daavy Crockett.

King of the weeld frontier.

I write “wild” that way because that was how he pronouced it, like some kind of flamboyant elf.

In the background on the recording, toward the end of the song, you can hear a baby crying a little fitfully, fussing. That was me, only a few weeks old, trying as would become usual to assert myself, to little avail.

This recording was of course a precious possession, always, but it became all the more so after Hal’s early death, when he was a young man only recently married. It disappeared after the accident, and my mother bitterly accused Hal’s widow of having taken it for herself. I took this for the truth. And then, many years later, after my mother’s death, I found it beneath a stack of papers and documents in a dresser drawer in her bedroom.

Well, no, said one of my cousins. It was never lost, not that I know of.

She never told you that Sophie had taken it?

No, my cousin said. She never said that to me.

I could have sworn she’d told me the recording was missing, stolen, possibly destroyed out of spite. But even the memory of her telling me that comes from so long ago, now, that I can no longer be sure.

OUT AT THE Alamo Plaza’s pool next day there were a few people, a woman with two toddlers down in the shallow end, a few grown-ups in loungers along the apron. The big fat man who’d been jumping and doing cannonballs the night before was again on the diving board, leisurely bouncing and looking around, as if this were simply his place. He bounced easily, the board bending beneath his great weight and riding him slow as an elevator back up again. His toes hung over the end, his arms hung at his sides, and he nodded to us as we walked up.

Across the highway the beach was empty. The Sound lay flat and brown in the sun’s glare.

Morning, he called out to our mother. She smiled and nodded back. Morning, sir, our father said in his clear baritone sales voice. From my spot at the three-foot mark, I called good morning to the man, too, and he called back with a little salute and a wave, Morning, young man.

Standing there bouncing.

A long, big-boned woman lying flat out on a lounger with a broad hat over her face called to him. The voice came from her, but you couldn’t see her face. The hat didn’t move. Harry, she said to the man. Don’t go splashing all over creation.

The man looked at her, still bouncing, then looked at me and smiled and winked. He walked back to the base end of the board and turned around.

Harry, the woman said.

The big man rose on his toes. It looked comical, the action of a much lighter, fitter man. He spread his arms like a ballerina, ran tiptoeing down to the end of the board, came down heavily, and the board slowly flung him up. He came down in a cannonball, leaning in the woman’s direction, and sent up a high sheet of water that drenched her pretty good. She sat up and adjusted the wet floppy hat on her head. Harry swam to the pool’s edge and grinned at Hal and me. I looked at our mother. She stared at the man and woman, her mouth cocked into a curious smile. She saw me looking and picked up a magazine and started reading it. Our father sat in a deck chair in his swim trunks, his elbows on his knees like a man watching a baseball game. A can of Jax beer rested on the concrete apron between his white feet.

I heard a loud thawongabumpbump and a broad shapeless shadow darted onto the dimpled surface of the pool. There again was Harry suspended in all his bulk high in the air, a diving mule pushed off the circus platform. At the last second he tucked his head and rolled over onto his shoulders, sending an arc of water toward a mother and her two toddlers in the shallow end. They screwed up their faces and recoiled. When the water settled they all three turned, dripping, to stare at Harry, the mother annoyed, the children bewildered.

That’s enough, Harry, the woman said. She’d snatched her hat off and I saw she was wearing a man’s heavy black sunglasses, like our father’s, and her wide mouth was painted bright red. Her hair was frizzled and graying.

All right, sorry, Harry said.

But as soon as the woman had pulled the hat brim down over her eyes, Harry was up and tiptoeing back to the diving board. He made shushing gestures to all of us, a finger to his lips. At the shallow end, the mother hustled her two toddlers from the pool, grabbed up their things, and headed for their room.

Harry was poised at the base of the board. He spread his arms, rose on his toes, and pranced down its length. He swung his arms above his head, scrunched his big body down like a compressed spring. The board bent almost to the surface of the water, seemed to hesistate there, then cracked and split down its length and tossed Harry awkwardly into the air.

He hit the water with a loud, flat smack. The split board bounced a couple of times and lay still. Harry floated motionless as the rocking water lapped the edges of the pool. A little scarlet cloud bloomed around him. Then he jerked into a flurry of motion. His head rose up and he bellowed, then sank down again.

The big woman shouted and stood up from her chair, her hat tumbling into the grass. Two men standing poolside leapt into the water. They managed to subdue Harry and pull him to the pool’s edge. The woman stood rigid, watching them, her mouth hanging open. Then she closed it with a clap and her face took on what looked like a long-practiced expression of disgust. Other people came and helped drag Harry out onto the concrete apron. He made a groaning, desperate sound. Blood leaked from a wound on his foot. One of the men who’d helped rescue Harry from the pool pulled a car around, and he and the other man helped Harry into it. The woman got into the back seat beside Harry and they drove away, to the hospital I suppose.

I walked over to the diving board, leaned down low, and looked at the split board, its two pieces splayed, blond splinters sticking out like bleached porcupine quills. Hanging there jammed tight in the split, a small blunt wedge drained of color, was what appeared to be Harry’s little toe.

It was fantastic. It made the whole trip.

OUR MOTHER WAS HORRIFIED, of course. One year, a drowning. The next, a dismembered toe. Not so disturbing as a death, but awful in its own way. I think it settled deeply into her subconscious, an augury somehow of vague misfortune looming.

For our father, who was her opposite in terms of being able to live in the moment instead of living each present moment with a terrible awareness of the past and a foreboding sense of the future, the accident had a different effect. He would remember it with a kind of morbid humor, closing his eyes and pursing his lips and shaking with silent, wincing laughter. Ooo, shit, that had to hurt, he’d say. I still remember the time, riding with him in the car when I was a boy, and I had my arm out the passenger-side window. He glanced over and told me to take my arm into the car, that he’d heard about a man riding along with his arm out the window who was sideswiped by another car that took his arm right off at the shoulder. Ever since, I’ve never been able to leave my arm out a car window if there are other cars present within anything close to striking distance. I live with a combination of my mother’s morbid fear of danger, and my father’s irreverent appreciation of it.

ANYWAY, YEARS LATER, I wasn’t even sure if the incident with the poor man’s toe had really happened. It had been so long ago, and I had been so young, and I hadn’t thought about it in some time. But I had been remembering it and trying to recall the details when I had the disturbing thought that I may have invented it all. I asked my mother if she remembered it. She was eating a piece of toast at the breakfast table, so I suppose my timing wasn’t good. She stopped chewing, as if stomach acid had suddenly boiled into her esophagus, and her eyes took on that vaguely alarmed and unfocused look she got when she was presented with something horrible. But then it passed, and she swallowed.

It was his big toe, she said.

I found that hard to believe and said so. I asked was she certain.

I’m certain, she said. That’s what made it so horrible.

I saw my father a couple of weeks later, though, and put the question to him. I told him what my mother said. He scoffed.

It wasn’t his big toe, he said, that would’ve been impossible. It was his little toe.

I didn’t say anything.

It’s just like your mother to make it into something worse than it actually was, he said.

SO, WE WENT BACK home that very afternoon of the accident, and a storm had passed through. A tornado had hopped right over our neighborhood, which was in a low area between two modest ridges, and had snapped off the tops of several tall pines. One of the pine tops lay in our backyard, another in the street in front of our house. The air was gray and you could smell the spent, burned residue of destructive energy in the air, feel it prickling the skin, as if we were inside a big discharged gun barrel. Green leaves and small limbs were strewn across yards and in the street and on rooftops. A telephone pole leaned toward the ground, the wires on one side taut, those on the other side loose and hanging low toward the damp grass. Everything was wet and smoking.

Some incredible violence had occurred, and yet almost everything remained intact. There sat our little brick ranch-style house. There, the pair of mimosas in the yard where I crouched concealed in the fernlike leaves, dreaming of Tarzan. There, the azaleas beneath mine and Ray’s bedroom window where every year our mother took an Easter photo of her boys, our bow ties and vests and hair flipped up in front. There, the picture window of the living room we used only at Christmas or when she and our father hosted their supper club. There, the inexplicable everyday, the oddness of being, the senseless belonging to this and not that. I was barely able to contain myself. Something in me wished it had all been blown to smithereens.

THE DOCTORS HAD DELIVERED BETH AND TEX’S ONLY child stillborn, in breech, and the child had come apart. Their voices seemed to travel to her from a great distance and then open up quietly, beside her ear. She felt the strength leave Tex’s grip on her hand as if his heart had stopped, the blood in his body going still. She looked up at him, but he turned away. Then the drugs had taken over, what they’d given her after so much reluctant labor, and she drifted off.

They allowed the funeral home to take their child, and to fix her, though they’d never had any intention of opening the casket or even having a public service. And neither did they view the man’s work at all, despite his professional disappointment. He understood they wouldn’t want others to view her, but seemed to think they’d want to see her themselves. He was a soft and pale supplicant, Mr. Pond, who kind of looked like a sad baby himself, with wet lips and lost eyes. They explained, as best they could, that they’d wanted only to have her as whole again as she could possibly be, never having been whole and out in the world. But Beth couldn’t bear to see it, to see her looking like some kind of ghoulish doll. They’d named her Sarah, after Beth’s mother, who’d died the year before. Beth found a fading black-and-white photograph of her mother as an infant on a blanket beside a flowering gardenia bush. She placed it in her wallet’s secret compartment. This was what her Sarah would have looked like.

THEY’D MADE HIM DECIDE what to do, and he’d decided to save her more risk. She made him tell her about it, next day. He stood beside her hospital bed, hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, hair lopsided from sleep.

“It was getting a little dangerous for you,” he said. “It was either pull her out somehow or cut you, and they asked me what we wanted to do. You were kind of out of it.

“I understood what they meant,” he said. “You were having some problems. It was dangerous. I said to go ahead and pull her out, to get it over with as quickly as they could.

“I was afraid for you,” he said. “Something in the doctors’ voices made me afraid. I told them to get it over with and to hurry. So they did.”

What he was saying moved through her like settling, spreading fluid.

“I don’t want to dwell on it,” Tex said after a moment. He sounded angry, as if he were angry at her for wanting to know. “There wasn’t anything they could do. She was already gone and it was an emergency. There was nothing anyone could do about that.”

He stood there looking at the sheet beside her as if determined to see something in it, words printed there in invisible ink.

“She broke,” she whispered. Her throat swollen and too tight to speak.

He looked at her, unfocused. She understood he could not comprehend what he’d seen.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “She was already gone.”

“It means something,” she said. “It means the world is a horrible place, where things like that can happen.”

They went home. They arranged the funeral and attended it with his parents and her father, who came with her two sisters. No one had very much to say and everyone went home that afternoon.

In the house over the next few weeks they seemed to walk through one another like shadows. One night she woke up from a dream so far from her own life she couldn’t shake it and didn’t know herself or who slept beside her. A long moment of terror before she returned to herself with dizzying speed. She lay awake watching him as calm was restored to her bloodstream, quiet to her inner ear. Her heartbeat made an aspirant sound in her chest. She gently tugged the covers from beneath his arms. Their skins were a pale, granular gray in the bedroom’s dim moonlight, which failed in silent moments as if an opaque eyelid were being lowered over its surface. She gathered his image to her mind swiftly, as if to save it from oblivion. But he seemed a collection of parts linked by shadows in the creases of his joints, pieces of a man put together in a dream, escaping her memory more swiftly than she could gather it in. In a moment he would be gone.

JULIE VERNER AND MAY MILLER had lost theirs, too, at about the same time. Miscarriages. They were all in their mid-to late thirties, friends for close to ten years now, ever since they were young and happily childless.

It was May’s first, but Julie and Beth had each lost two, so they were like a club, with a certain cursed and morbid exclusivity. Their friends with children drew away, or they drew away from the friends. They speculated about what it was they may have done that made them all prone to lose babies, and came up with nothing much. They hadn’t smoked or drunk alcohol or even fought with their husbands much while pregnant. They’d had good obstetricians. They hadn’t even drunk the local water, just in case. It seemed like plain bad luck, or bad genes.

On Friday nights the three of them went out to drink at the student bars near the college. They smoked, what the hell. Julie smoked now anyway but Beth and May smoked only on Fridays, in the bars. They smoked self-consciously, like people in the movies. Saturdays, they slept in and their husbands went golfing or fishing or hunting. Tex was purely the fisherman, and he would rise before dawn and go to the quiet, still lakes in the piney woods, where he tossed fluke-tailed artificial worms toward largemouth bass. When he returned in the afternoons he cleaned his catch on a little table beneath the pecan tree out back. He kept only those yearlings the perfect size for pan-frying in butter and garlic. On days he didn’t fish he sometimes practiced his casting in the backyard, tossing lures with the barbs removed from their hooks toward an orthopedic donut pillow Beth had bought and used for postpartum hemorrhoids.

On the mornings he went fishing Beth rose late into a house as empty and quiet as a tomb. Despite the quiet she sometimes put in earplugs and moved around the house listening to nothing but the inner sounds of her own breathing and pulse. It was like being a ghost. She liked the idea of the houses we live in becoming our tombs. She said to the others, out at the bar:

“When we died they could just seal it off.”

Julie and May liked the idea.

“Like the pharaohs,” May said.

“Except I wouldn’t want to build a special house for it,” Beth said. “Just seal off the old one, it’ll be paid for.”

“Not mine,” May said. She tried to insert the end of a new cigarette into a cheap amber holder she’d bought at the convenience store, but dropped the cigarette onto the floor. She looked at the cigarette for a moment, then set the holder down on the table and pushed her hands into her hair and held her head there like that.

“And they shut up all your money in there, too,” Beth said. “Put it all in a sack or something, so you’ll have plenty in the afterlife, and they’d have to put some sandwiches in there. Egg salad.”

“And your car,” Julie said, “and rubbers, big ones. Nothing but the big hogs for me in the afterlife.”

“Is it heaven,” May said, “if you still have to use rubbers?”

“Camel,” Beth said.

“Lucky,” May said.

Julie doled them out. When they were in the bars, when they smoked, it was nonfiltered Camels and Luckies.

THEY WENT TO THE Chukker and listened to a samba band, the one with the high-voiced French singer. Beth danced with a student whose stiff hair stood like brown pampas grass above a headband, shaved below. Then a tall, lithe woman she knew only as Gazella cut in and held her about the waist as they danced, staring into her eyes.

“What’s your name?”

“Beth.”

Gazella said nothing else, but gazed frankly at her without flirtation or any other emotion Beth could identify, just gazing at her. Beth, unable to avert her own gaze, felt as exposed and transparent as a glass jar of emotional turmoil, as if the roil and color of it were being divined by this strange woman. Then the song stopped. Gazella kissed her on the cheek, and went back to the bar. Watching her, Beth knew only one thing: she wished she looked like Gazella, a nickname bestowed because the woman was so lithe, with a long neck and an animal’s dispassionate intelligence in her eyes. Powerful slim hips that rolled when she moved across the room. And like an animal, she seemed entirely self-reliant. Didn’t need anyone but herself.

She looked around. The pampas grass boy was dancing with someone else now, a girl wearing a crew cut and black-rimmed eyeglasses with lenses the size and shape of almonds. Beth went back to the table. Julie and May raised their eyebrows, moved them like a comedy team, in sync, toward Gazella. May had the cigarette holder, a Lucky burning at its end, clamped in her bared teeth. Then the two of them said the name, Gazella, in unison, and grabbed each other by the arm, laughing.

Beth said, “I was just wondering when was the last time y’all fucked your husbands?” May and Julie frowned in mock thought. May pulled out her checkbook and they consulted the little calendars on the back of the register. “There, then,” Julie said, circling a date with her pen.

May spat a mouthful of beer onto the floor and shouted, “That’s 1997! A fucking year!”

“I’M NOT GOING HOME now,” Julie said. “Let’s go where there’s real dancing.”

Because she’d been drinking the least, Beth drove them in the new Toyota wagon she and Tex had bought for parenthood. They went to Seventies, a retro-disco joint out by the interstate. There they viewed the spectrum of those with terminal disco fever, from middle-aged guys in tight white suits to young Baptists straight from the Northend Laundry’s steam press, all cotton creases and hair-parts pale and luminous as moonbeams. Beth watched one couple, a young man with pointed waspish features and his date, a plumpish big-boned girl with shoulder-length hair curled out at her shoulders. They seemed somehow designed for raucous, comic reproduction. The man twirled the woman. She was graceful, like those big girls who were always so good at modern dance in high school, their big thick legs that rose like zeppelins when they leapt. Beth indulged herself with a Manhattan, eating the cherry and taking little sips from the drink.

May now drooped onto the table in the corner of their booth before the pitcher of beer she and Julie had bought. Julie whirled in off the dance floor as if the brutish, moussed investment banker type she’d been dancing with had set her spinning all the way back to the booth. She plopped in opposite Beth and said, breathless, “Okay, I think I’m satisfied.”

“Not me,” May intoned.

“Words from a corpse,” Julie said. “Arouse thyself and let’s go home.”

“Oh,” May said, and spread her arms as she sat up, then slumped back against the seat. She was crying. Too late, Beth thought, she’s hit the wall.

“Better gather her in,” she said to Julie.

“No, no,” May said, shucking their hands off her arms. “I can get out by myself. Stop it.”

“All right, but we’d better go home, honey.”

“I just keep thinking something’s wrong with me.”

“Come on, none of that,” Beth said.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” May said. “I know! It’s not as bad as what happened to you. Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” Beth said.

“’Cause, like, no one had it worse than Beth.”

“May, shut up,” Julie said.

“I have to shut up, I know that,” May said, and let them guide her out to the car. They managed to tumble her into the back seat. Julie, drunker than Beth had realized, tossed a match from the flaming end of her Lucky Strike, spat tobacco flecks off the tip of her tongue, and said, “Let her sleep, let’s go over to the L&N and sip some Irish whiskey. Leave a note in her ear, she can wake up and follow us inside if she wants to.”

“She’ll throw up in the car,” Beth said.

They reached in and rolled May onto her belly.

“Okay, I’m all right,” May mumbled.

“Good enough,” Julie said. “She won’t choke.”

THEY DROVE TO THE L&N and plowed into the deep pea gravel covering the parking lot. The streetlights cast a dim, foggy light onto the building, an old train station that stood on the bluff above the river like a ruined cathedral. May’s voice came as if disembodied from the back seat, “I’m sorry, Beth, goddamn I really am sorry for that,” and Beth was about to say, That’s okay, but May said, “I need to talk about all that. But y’all won’t talk about it. Y’all won’t say shit about all that. Tough guys.” She laughed. “Tough gals.”

Julie said, “May, I don’t want to hear it.”

“See, like that,” May said, trying to sit up. “The strong, silent type. John Wayne in a dress. No, who wears a dress anymore? Why, only John Wayne. John Wayne with a big fat ass. John Wayne with a vagina and tits. John Wayne says, ‘Rock, I’m havin’ your baby — but there’s complications.’” She got out of the car and fell into the pea gravel, laughing. “It’s so soft!” she said, rolling onto her back. “Like a feather bed! Look, it just molds to your body!”

Julie said something in a low voice to May but Beth had gotten out of the car, leaving the door open, and started down the road. She called back, “I’m going to take a walk,” and headed down the hill toward the river, the sound of Julie now speaking in an angry tone to May and May’s high-pitched protests pinging off the assault becoming distant, the beeping sound of Beth’s keys still in the ignition behind it all.

AT THE BOAT LANDING behind the Chevrolet dealer’s lot the river was broad and flat and black beneath a sky gauzy with the moon’s veiled light. Like old location westerns where they’d shot night scenes during the day using something like smoked glass over the lens. She stood there listening to the faint gurgling of the current near the bank, seeing ripples from the stronger current out in the middle.

She waded in to her waist, feeling her way with her old sneakers, and stood feeling the current pull gently at her jeans and the water soaking up into her faded purple T-shirt. The river was warm like bathwater late in the bath. She leaned forward and pushed out, swimming with her head above the water, and turned back to look at the bank now twenty feet behind her. She felt the need to be submerged for a moment, to shut out the upper world. She dunked her head in and pushed the sneakers off with her toes, then swam a few strokes under water before coming up again, where she heard a shout, “There she is!”

She threw a hand up. “Here I am!”

It was Julie shouting again. “Beth, that’s too dangerous! Come back to the goddamn bank, you idiot!”

“Beth!” May shouted. “I’m sorry! Come back!”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Beth said to herself. Farther out the water was still warm, though she passed here and there through columns of cool. She called out to them, “I’m just going to float along here for a while!”

More shouted protests, but she was farther out now, and moving downstream. She saw them start trotting along the bank, then came a crashing of leaves and branches, a jumble of cussing and some shouting, and then she couldn’t see them anymore. She was maybe thirty yards off the bank, mostly floating or treading water, moving with the current. The moon was beautiful overhead, its light on the water and the trees on either bank silver and weightless. The river was almost silent, giving up an occasional soft gurgling burp, and she could feel a breeze funneling through the riverbed, cooling her forehead when she turned her face back upstream. Nothing out there but her. There could be barges. This thought came to her. But she was lucky, none of that just then. Some large bird, a massive shadow, swooped down and whooshed just over her head, then flapped back up and away toward the opposite bank. “My God,” she shouted. “An owl!”

“Beth!” she heard from the near bank again, and she saw them, jogging along in a clearing atop a little bluff no more than a few feet above the water level.

“Here I am!”

“Swim in!”

“Beth, please!” May struggled to keep up with Julie’s long strides, and Beth heard them both, between shouting, panting, Shit Shit Shit. “Fucking cigarettes,” she heard Julie say. They disappeared into a copse of thick pines. There must be a trail, Beth thought. From the pines she heard Julie’s voice come up again. “Goddammit, Beth! Are you still floating?”

Their voices carried beautifully across the water, with the clarity of words transported whole and discrete across the surface, delivered to her in little pockets of sound.

“Still floating!” she called back. Then, “I’m not going to be able to hear you for a while, I’m going to float on my back. Ears in the water!” And then she turned over onto her back and floated, the water up over her ears to the corners of her eye sockets. Wispy clouds skimmed along beneath the moon, or was she moving that swiftly down the river? There was a soft roaring of white noise from the water beneath her. So much water! You couldn’t even imagine it from the bank. You couldn’t imagine it even here, in it, unless maybe you were a fish and it was your whole world. She heard a clanking, a moaning like whale soundings that could’ve been giant catfish she’d heard about, catfish big enough to come up and take her in one sucking gulp. Some huge, sleek, bewhiskered monster to swallow her whole, her body encased within its own, traveling the slow and murky river bottom for ages, her brain growing around the fish’s brain, its stem lodged in her cerebellum.

Half ancient fish, half woman with strange, submerged memories. She senses Tex on this river, in the early morning before first light, casting his line out into the waters. She follows some familiar current to where she hears the thin line hum past trailing the little worm, fluke tail squibbling by. It’s an easy thing to take it in, feel the hook set, sit there awhile feeling the determined pull on the line, giving way just enough to keep him from snapping it. Rising beside the little boat and looking wall-eyed into his astonished face, wouldn’t she see him then as she never had?

She remembered Tex fucking her the night she knew Sarah was conceived, their bodies bowed into one another, movements fluid as waves. Watching his face.

Tex saying two weeks after it happened, We could try again, Beth. But it was almost as if he hadn’t meant to say it, as if the words had been spoken into his own brain some other time, recorded, and now tripped accidentally out. He sat on the sofa, long legs crossed, looking very tired, the skin beneath his eyes bruised, though she marveled at how otherwise youthful he was, his thick blond hair and unlined face, a tall and lanky boy with pale blue eyes. Though younger, she was surpassing his age.

“I had this dream,” he said, “the other night.”

In his dream he was talking to one of the doctors, though it wasn’t one of the doctors who’d been there in real life. The doctor said that if they had operated and taken Sarah out carefully, they could have saved her. But she was dead, Tex said in the dream. Well, we have amazing technology these days, the doctor said.

Tex’s long, tapered fingers fluttered against his knee. He blinked, gazing out the living room window at the pecan tree in the backyard.

“I woke up sobbing like a child,” he said. “I was afraid I’d wake you up, but you were as still as a stone.”

“I’m sorry,” Beth said.

Tex shrugged. “It was just a dream.”

In a minute, she said, “I just don’t think I could do it all again.” Her voice quavered and she stopped, frustrated at how hard it was to speak of it at all.

“We’re not too old,” he said. “It’s not too late.”

But she hadn’t said just that.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said.

SHE TURNED HERSELF OVER in the water and came up again into the air, and her knees dragged bottom, and she saw the current had taken her into the shallows along the bank. She floated there and then sat on the muddy bottom, the water lapping the point of her chin. She wished she could push from herself everything that she felt. To be light as a sack of dried sticks floating on the river. She heard the thudding weary footsteps of the others approaching through the clearing at this landing, breath ragged, and they came and stood on the bank near her, hands on knees, heads bent low, dragging in gulps of air. “Oh, fuck, I’m dying,” Julie gasped. “Are you all right?” Beth raised a hand from the water in reply. May fell to her knees and began to throw up, one arm held flat-handed generally toward them. They were quiet except for the sound of May being sick, and when she was finished she rolled over onto her back in the grass and lay there.

Beth and Julie carried May, fortunately tiny, with one of her arms across each of their shoulders, back along the river to the downtown landing and then up the hill to Beth’s car. They left her in the back seat and struggled to walk through the deep pea gravel of the lot into the bar and borrowed some bar towels for Beth and then sat at a table drinking Jameson’s neat and not talking for a while. May dragged herself in and sat with them and the bartender brought her a cup of coffee. She lay her head beside the steaming cup and went to sleep again.

Julie reached out and took Beth’s hand for a second and squeezed it.

Beth squeezed back, then they let go. Julie looked down at the floor and held out one of her feet, clad in a ragged dirty Keds.

“Pretty soon I’ll need a new pair of honky-tonk shoes,” she said sadly.

“I like them,” Beth said. “My mother had a pair just like that. She wore them to work in the yard.”

“I didn’t cut these holes out, baby, I wore em out. I got a big old toe on me”—she slipped her toe through a frayed hole and wiggled it—“like the head of a ball-peen hammer.”

“My God,” Beth said. “Put it up.”

“Billy says I could fuck a woman with that toe.”

“Put it back in the shoe.”

“I’m’on put it up his ass one day,” Julie said.

Somehow they’d become the only patrons left in the place. The bartender leaned on an elbow and watched sports news on a nearly silent TV above the bar. Julie looked at the sleeping May and said to Beth, “Don’t worry about all that, that shit May was saying. She’s just drunk. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

“No,” Beth said. “I know what she’s talking about. She’s right.”

Julie stared at her blankly, then sat up and sighed.

“I can’t even remember what all she was saying. Forget it. You should forget it.”

“I don’t want to forget it,” Beth said, and set her shot glass down on the table harder than she’d meant to. “What do you mean?”

Julie didn’t answer.

“It changes you,” Beth said. “It’s changed me. It’s different,” she said. “It is worse, Julie. It’s not like the other time. It is worse. A real child.”

So then she’d said it. Julie had started to say something, then turned her head away, toward the wall. Neither said any more after that. The bartender roused himself, flicked off the TV, and his heels clicked through the tall-ceilinged old station as he went from table to table, wiping them down.

They drank up, paid, and left, hefting May’s arms again onto their shoulders, and put her into the car. Beth drove them to May’s house, and they helped her to the front door, got her keys from her pocket, and let themselves in. Her husband, Calvin, was at the hunting camp building stands. They took her to the bed and undressed her, tucked her in, put a glass of water beside the bed and a couple of ibuprofen beside it, and drove to Julie’s house. Julie started to get out.

“You okay to drive home?” She sat with one leg out the open door, in the car’s bleak interior light.

“Sure, I’m fine,” Beth said. She caught herself nodding like a trained horse and stopped. Julie looked at her a long moment and then said, “Okay.” Beth watched her till she got inside and waved from the window beside the door. Then she drove home through the streets where wisps of fog rose from cracks in the asphalt as if from rumbling, muffled engines down in the bedrock, leaking steam.

SHE WAS PRONE these days to wake in the middle of the night as if someone had called to her while she’d slept. A kind of fear held her heart with an intimate and gentle suppression, a strange hand inside her chest. She was terrified. Soft and narrow strips of light slipped through the blinds and lay on the floor. Their silence was chilling.

Just after four a.m. she woke and Tex was already gone. He hadn’t moved when she’d come in, his face like a sleeping child’s. She’d lowered her ear to his nostrils, felt his warm breath. He slept with arms crisscrossed on his chest, eyebrows lifted above closed lids, ears attuned to the voices speaking to him in his other world. She hadn’t heard him rise and leave.

The covers on his side were laid back neatly as a folded flag. One crumpled dent marked the center of his pillow. He had risen, she knew, without the aid of an alarm, his internal clock rousing him at three so that he would be out on the lake at four, casting when he couldn’t even see where his bait plooped into the water, playing it all by ear and touch. He knew what was out there in the water. If a voice truly whispered to him as he slept she hoped it spoke of bass alert and silent in their cold, quiet havens, awaiting him. She hoped it was his divining vision, in the way some people envisioned the idea of God.

For her the worst had been prior to the delivery, after she’d learned what she feared, that the child had died inside her and she would have to carry her until they could attempt a natural delivery, and that would be at least a month, maybe two. That had been worse than the delivery, because sometimes in her distraction she almost thought the delivery had not really happened, it had been only a nightmare that would momentarily well into her consciousness and then recede. This was not so with Tex, because he’d seen it all happen, it was imprinted in his memory as surely as Sarah had been implanted in her womb. It was what his mind worked to obscure, awake and asleep, in its different ways.

She lay in bed as dawn suffused the linen curtains with slow and muted particles of gray light. The room softened with this light, and she slept.

IT WAS NOON. The front that had kept them under clouds and in light fog was moving, the same clouds she’d seen beneath the river moon scudding rapidly, diagonally, to the northeast, and occasional rafts of yellow light passed through the bright green leaves and over the weed-grown lawn.

From the living room picture window she could see Tex in the backyard cleaning his catch in the shade of the splayed pecan tree. He worked on the plain wooden table he had built for that. His rod and reel leaned against the table’s end, his tackle box on the ground beside it. A stringer of other fish lay on the ground beside the box, and Beth could see, every few seconds or so, a fish tail rise slowly from the mess — as if the tail had an eye with which to look around, stunned — and then relax. Tex wore a baseball cap and a gauzy-thin, ragged T-shirt. The muscles on his neck and shoulders bunched as he worked away at one of the fish, his back to the house. He left them gutted but whole, heads on. He hadn’t always. When he slit their undersides to gut them, he did it carefully with just the tip of his sharp fillet knife. He gently lifted out the bright entrails with a finger, the button-sized heart sometimes still beating. Then he pulled them free of the body with a casual tug, as if distracted, an after-action.

She watched now from the picture window as he almost reverently palmed a cleaned fish into the pail of water. He rinsed his hand before sliding another one off the stringer. The shadows of patchy clouds moved across the yard and over him with the slow gravity of large beasts floating by. She still felt the effects of sleep, of the drinking and smoking, and a mild vertigo, as if she’d stood up too quickly. That hung-over sense of having waked into a life and body that were not her own. She reached out to the window and steadied herself.

As if he’d heard her, Tex turned to look, fish and knife poised in his hands, interrupted so deeply into his task he seemed lost, either not seeing or not recognizing her image behind the windowpane.

She had dreamed, reentering the waking dream she’d had of the catfish in the river. Her sight in the dream through the eyes of the fish. Tex had lifted her into the boat, taken her home, lain her on the old plyboard table, and carefully slit the fish skin covering the length of her belly, worked it away from her own true form. But he was unable to detach the fish’s brain from her own. Her words, some gurgly attempt to say she loved him, bubbled out and then she died.

It was a whole world, the way dreams can be.

He buried her in the yard, with a stone on top to keep the cats from digging her up to sniff at the bones. But over time she drifted in the soil. The grass grew from her own cells into the light and air. She watched him when he passed over with the lawn mower. The times between mowings were ages.

THE DAY WE RAN OFF WAS HOT, EARLY AUGUST, NO AIR conditioner in my 1962 VW bus. It topped out at forty miles per hour, so the forty-mile journey took us more than an hour, during which we drove along, kind of stunned by what we were doing, sweating, saying little, staring ahead at the highway, other cars and trucks blasting past us in the left lane. Just over the state line we stopped at a Stuckey’s and bought a pair of gold-painted wedding bands for a dollar apiece.

Olivia wore her favorite pair of red and white polka-dotted bellbottoms. None of her other pants fit, by then. The bellbottoms were low-waisted, and Olivia was carrying high, so she wore them often. She never did gain weight. She seemed to lose it. She threw up every day, throughout the day, from the beginning. How she’d been hiding that from her mother, I had no idea. She’d begun to look like one of those starving children in the CARE commercials, all big eyes, gaunt face, stick limbs, and a little round belly up high underneath her ribs.

We parked on the downtown square and started up the old brick walk to the courthouse door. But halfway to the building, Olivia headed back toward the bus.

I caught up with her, took her by the hand.

“Look,” I said, “what else are we going to do?”

She took a deep breath and then looked directly at me for the first time that day. The skin beneath her eyes seemed bruised from lack of sleep.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she said. “I want to do the right thing.”

“I know,” I said. “I do, too.”

We stood there listening to songbirds in the oak trees in the square, watching cars make their slow, heatstroked weave through downtown. A couple of old men wearing fedoras, sitting on a park bench in the shade, stared speechlessly at us, their old mouths open to suck a last strain of oxygen from the incinerated air.

She came along reluctantly. Once, she tried to go back to the bus again, but I held on to her hand. When we got inside the courthouse, she stopped trying to run away and sat like a chastened child in one of the hard wooden chairs in the anteroom outside Judge Leacock’s chamber as we waited our turn. Judge Leacock was known to marry just about anyone who asked. Two other couples sat there like us, silent, jittery. A third couple — a soft, pale, fat girl with pretty blond hair and a thin, pimply boy with a farmer’s haircut — waited in their seats with strangely beatific, vacant smiles on their faces, their hands on their knees. They seemed like Holy Rollers or something, but I didn’t imagine Holy Rollers would get married in a courthouse by a judge.

The ceremony took about five minutes. Judge Leacock was an older man with a slackened face and tired-looking folds beneath and at the corners of his eyes. But the eyes themselves were alert, even crafty, as he leaned back in the chair behind his desk and looked at us for a long moment.

“How old are you?” he said to Olivia.

“Eighteen,” she lied.

“You?” he said to me.

I lied and said I was eighteen, too. We were both heading into our senior year.

He asked us if we were sure we wanted to get married. I said yes. He asked us to sign the certificate, then asked us to stand up before his desk. He remained seated.

“Do you take this little gal to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you take this young fellow to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

Olivia stood there looking stunned, her lips parted, and stared at him.

“You need to be able to say it, darlin,” Judge Leacock said.

“Yes,” Olivia whispered.

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” the judge said. “That’ll be five dollars, please.”

“Can I kiss the bride?” I said.

“Go right ahead.”

I kissed Olivia, pulled out my wallet, handed the judge a five-dollar bill. He gave us our copy of the certificate. We drove back home at forty miles per hour, windows down, sweating, not saying a word.

A FEW WEEKS EARLIER, we’d secretly rented an attic apartment over a small frame house on the south side of town, a block from the state mental institution. They had drug cases over there, dementia, catatonics. Maybe a schizophrenic or two. Retarded people. People with injured or disoriented brains who thought themselves to be other people, elsewhere. No hard-core psychotic criminals like they had in Whitfield over near Jackson.

During the weeks we’d spent cleaning and painting the apartment, I took breaks and walked over to the hospital property for a smoke and a stroll. The grounds were beautiful, populated with big, dark, seductive oaks and magnolia trees, and you could imagine being very happily insane if you were allowed to walk their grassy, shaded slopes every day. Once I saw an old man, apparently a patient there, who crept along as if he were hunting something. He wore a pale blue robe over pink pajamas, torn paper slippers, and a broad-brimmed tan cowboy hat. He held an imaginary rifle in his hands and a look of mischievous anticipation in his watery eyes. It never occurred to me to wonder how he’d gotten out onto the grounds. Stealthy, I guess.

“What are you hunting?” I said.

He froze as if he hadn’t seen me standing there. He turned his little bald head very slowly and put a finger to his lips. He moved his fuzzy eyebrows toward the little glen that lay just beyond us, its grass deliciously lush and green in the afternoon light. Then he scrunched his eyes tight shut and whispered, “Lions.”

THE ONLY PLACES YOU could stand upright without knocking your head on the apartment’s attic ceiling were in the middle of the living room, the hallway, and the middle of the bedroom. You had to crouch to get to the sofa or the bed. The bathroom and kitchen were small but okay for standing upright because they were built into dormers. The bathroom had an old wood-frame window fan the size of a ship’s propeller. When you switched it on the blades began to turn slowly at first, and as they picked up speed they huffed and pushed out the wooden slats that stayed folded shut on the outside when the fan was off. Now that we were in mid-August, the temperature inside the place rose above a hundred during the day. Turning on the fan at night flushed that still, stifling air and pulled a slightly cooler breeze of about eighty-five degrees (on a good night) through the apartment’s open windows, small rooms, narrow hallway, and out the bathroom window. If you closed the bathroom door, the fan created a near-vacuum in there, so your ears sucked in and went deaf, and the whole house shook with the fan’s effort to pull wind through the little crack at the bottom of the bathroom door.

While we were fixing up the apartment, we’d be up there every late afternoon and early evening during the week, after our summer jobs, and all day on Saturdays and Sundays, sweat soaking our shorts and shirts, stinging our eyes and dripping from our chins. We scrubbed every surface clean. We painted the walls, the old brown wooden floor, and hung curtains. We made trips to K-Mart, half for the relief of the store’s air-conditioning, half to get cheap aluminum cookware and plates and cutlery, sheets and bedspread, towels, though some of this we filched from our parents’ houses.

And sometimes in the late afternoon, in spite of the heat, we’d go at each other in the little bedroom in the back of the apartment, right under the rear gable. The bed frame was imitation brass, so I could hang on to the headboard rungs with my slippery, sweaty hands. Olivia was getting so round in the belly, and we had to take care in how we did it, and I needed some independent purchase. We sweated deep into the bedding, the creaky set of old steel springs screeching and squawking at even our most discreet, restrained, ecstatic movements. The scrawny, bitter landlady downstairs shouted up through the floor, “HEY! HEY!” Banging on her ceiling with a shoe or something.

We’d lie there catching our breath, cooling off as much as we could, with the old fan huffing to pull a hot breeze across our reddened, sticky-slick skin, and then we’d dress, turn off the fan, lock up, get into the car. I’d drop her off at her parents’ house, and drive to my parents’ house. I would go inside, speak to my parents and my brothers, if they were home. Then we would all sit down to supper. Or if I was late, I would sit down by myself at the kitchen table and eat some of what was left, and maybe my mom would sit there and talk to me while I ate, if she had a minute. Then I would go to the bedroom I shared with my little brother, maybe listen to the radio for a while, and then I would go to bed.

I WAS UNDER A SPELL, those days. I had been ever since I’d first seen her.

I was with my friend Wendell Sparrow, that day, skulking about the pool at the local run-down country club my parents managed to belong to. Sparrow and I sat in the oak shade between the pool and the tennis courts, smoking cigarettes and waiting for girls to enter the dressing rooms to change for a swim.

We did this because we knew there had been, at some unrecorded time in this old pool’s history, peepholes drilled in the wall between the men’s dressing room and the women’s. The holes were artfully hidden beneath metal soap dishes attached to the shower’s water pipes that ran from the ceiling down this wall, ending in the hot and cold handles. Just below the handles were the little soap trays. And just beneath the soap trays, so that you wouldn’t notice as you stood there taking your shower, someone had drilled single peepholes about a half-inch in diameter that went through to the other side of the wall, which was the wall inside the women’s dressing room. If you held on to the water pipes and leaned down, peered just below the soap dishes, you could look through the peepholes into the dressing stalls there. It was ingenious and simple. Most people who weren’t in the know never noticed the peepholes, since you’d have to bend down in the shower to see them, and as these were mostly rinsing showers, few ever did. Those who did guarded the secret as if they were the only ones who knew it, for fear of such fantastic information getting out to the authorities, who — being at an age and level of respectability that it would never do for anyone to catch them peeping into the women’s dressing room — would probably plug the holes with concrete from sheer jealous outrage against youth and the effrontery of its prancing, tawdry, exuberant libido.

So, as Sparrow and I were sitting in the lawn chairs beneath the oak outside the dressing rooms, around three o’clock, the pool all but deserted, no one on the tennis courts, who should walk past us in her street clothes, holding a little bundle of swimwear, smiling a little half-shy smile, but Olivia Coltrane, on her way to the women’s side. We smiled and nodded to her. As soon as she’d cleared the door into the dressing room we shot out of our chairs and ran into the men’s dressing room and took up stations, Sparrow at the left showerhead peephole, me on the right.

She was in my stall already.

“You see anything?” Sparrow said.

“No, not yet.”

“Me, neither.”

Olivia had such a playful, placidly languorous look on her face through the peephole, I couldn’t imagine she didn’t know we were there.

She bent over, out of view. Then she straightened up. She raised her arms and slipped off her blouse. I could see everything from her beautiful rib cage up: her brassiere, her long, pale neck, her coy expression. I was trembling just a little bit.

“See anything?” Sparrow stage-whispered. He sounded desperate.

“Nothing yet.”

“Shit. Where the hell is she?”

She took off her brassiere. My God. Her little breasts were beautiful: small, a little heavy on the bottom, sloping down and then up to what looked to be a pair of hard, erect, hazelnut nipples. I was shivering, my body was all but bucking against my grip on the pipes against the wall above my head.

“See anyth — You son of a bitch!” Sparrow said, and he was on me. “Let me see, goddammit!”

But I was stronger and in fact I could not let go of the pipes. Sparrow pummeled me and made far too much noise. Through the peephole, Olivia’s face seemed to register just the slightest increase in some kind of strange satisfaction as she slipped the bikini top over her beautiful little breasts, roughed up her hair, turned, and walked out of the dressing stall, its door slapping shut against my eyes. I let go and sat down heavily on the shower floor. Sparrow grabbed the pipes and jammed his forehead against the soap dish.

“Shit! Son of a bitch. Goddamn you son of a bitch!” and so on for a good five or ten minutes, as he slammed things around the dressing room, lit a Marlboro, and smoked it in that way he had, sucking the life from it, his long scrawny neck flaring ten-dons, the bony Adam’s apple bobbing. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead where he’d jammed it against the soap tray. He stopped pacing and glared at me. One eye twitched at the little drop of blood leaking into it from his brow. He took off one of his tennis shoes and hurled it through the high window of the dressing room. It crashed through, sending glass shards out into the grass beside the pool apron. He stood there, his breath heaving in and out. He stomped over to one of the toilets and threw his cigarette into it and banged out through the dressing room door.

I sat there on the shower floor, entirely unfazed by Sparrow’s tantrum. You could not have shaken me from what I was feeling, not with the strength of a hundred men. That was when, pretty much, I knew that I had to have Olivia Coltrane. I was just about dying for her, right then.

SHE WAS SLIM, TALLISH, with a thick clump of short black hair that framed her small, delicate face, black bangs against her milky forehead. She was pale and pretty, if not conventionally so. Her teeth were a little too big for her mouth, so she may not have been smiling so often as she appeared to’ve been. She was a little nearsighted, but vain about wearing her glasses, so the crinkling around her eyes may have been more of a squint than the mirth you might have taken it for. You wouldn’t have put her in a magazine to model clothes or makeup. But you might have put her in an ad for some other product, say a snappy new red convertible, because she had a wholesome natural beauty in her, hard to say just what it was except maybe happiness. I think it was that sense of her natural happiness, really, that attracted me to her. I was never a very happy or contented person, and people like Olivia tended to ignite in me a secret, almost feverish desire to absorb whatever it was that made them so different from me. So at ease with the world and themselves in it.

She had a way of looking at me, straight-on, and seemed incapable of the usual emotional evasion, as if she had nothing to fear. It didn’t bother me in the least that she wasn’t the smartest girl around. She struggled in English, was competent in math. If you drew her as partner in biology lab, you would surely do most if not all of the work. She was a little bit lazy. She tended to spend her spare time reading ridiculous magazine articles like big spreads on the lavish lifestyle and strange marital relations of Jackie and Aristotle Onassis. But I really didn’t care. Most people thought me a little dim, too. I was ridiculously earnest and deliberate. I wasn’t the handsomest boy she could have dated, either, but I had a kind of appealing, homely kindness in my features, or so people would note from time to time, in one awkward way or another.

Soon after we’d started going out, I took every cent I had in my savings account at Citzens Bank and bought the ten-year-old VW bus, took the back seat out, padded the floor with old blankets and a flannel-lined sleeping bag, and began my serious courting of Olivia. I took her out as many nights as her parents would allow, and on Saturdays and Sundays, too. I started picking her up after church, in the bus, and either taking her on a picnic or over to Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. We did this every other week, alternating with her family’s Sunday dinners at her maiden aunt’s house, which I didn’t attend. I wasn’t exactly ever invited. Olivia enjoyed the picnics, and she loved the dinners at our house. My mom was an old country girl and a fantastic cook, whereas the Coltranes’ fare reflected Mr. Coltrane’s salt-free diet and the family’s general lack of interest in food.

She liked my folks, too, and kidded my little brother about his long, pretty hair and his dreamy, calflike brown eyes. She called him “Beautiful.” “Hey, Beautiful,” she’d say, and he’d frown and leave the room, but soon he’d be back in, grinning, and we knew he loved it. Once he slipped up to her and said, “Hey, Beautiful, to you,” and blushed so deeply I thought he might burst into tears of embarrassment. We all burst out laughing instead, and it saved him. Olivia spent the whole Sunday dinner in the chair next to him, her slim left arm over his shoulder while they ate. It almost seemed she loved him so much because he was still such a boy, and part of her still wanted to just be a girl, with crushes on beautiful boys. She would pet him, then look up at me with an expression of earnest if simulated heartbreak, as if she wanted to possess him somehow, possess his innocence and strange beauty.

When I picked her up at the church on Sundays, morning service over and all the Baptist folk standing out on the lawn feeling good about the world and their lives, it was dismaying to see the vague pall of anxiety that seemed to settle over them when they saw me pull up in the old VW bus, and on some of the faces you could see it was a type of anger or disgust. And Olivia, in her yellow or powder-blue Sunday dress and white shoes, throwing her hand up in a wave, saying good-bye to her family over a shoulder, running on her toes out to meet me and climb up into the bus, me and my jeans and T-shirt and long hair — you’d think they were standing in the yards of their beloved homes watching some heartless foreclosure agent auction them away. It was always a rotten feeling, just barely made bearable by the vision of Olivia, how pretty and fresh she always looked, and I was always glad to round the corner, away from all those disapproving Christian eyes. The only thing I’d ever liked about church was the stained-glass windows in the sanctuary, with the human-looking animals and the people in colorful robes, and their pale, luminescent faces, yearning.

She was a good Baptist girl, but she wasn’t a prude, and she liked to drink a beer here and there, and go to parties, and she generally liked my rowdy crowd. She was a virgin, though, and determined to stay one until she married. After a few months, I’d just about given up on that, and then one night on the way home she told me to pull over somewhere, anywhere, and I did, and everything changed. I’m not sure what had changed for her. She was a nice girl, but nice girls liked fooling around, too, once they were able to arrange the justification for it in their minds.

AND THEN IT WAS like we’d turned on the power and couldn’t find the switch to turn it back off. We started doing it everywhere. Out in the VW bus in the parking lot during study hall. On the visitors’ side of the stadium, beneath the bleachers, during lunch period. Sometimes, at night, we’d just pull the bus over to the side of the road, traffic swerving past, people hooting and honking. We did have a favorite private spot, for a while, a little cubbyhole of a niche in the brush along a sparsely populated street on the north end of town. You could pull in there and it was like the brush closed up behind you, it was that inconspicuous. We’d pull in there and take our time, like real lovers, then collapse to either side of one another, giving our bodies time to stop humming.

We didn’t realize that people living in a new subdivision one block over had noticed our lights pulling in there night after night, shutting off, clicking on again, pulling out. Maybe they thought we were burglars working a plan. Maybe they just didn’t like the idea of young, careless couples fornicating, rocking the vehicle, practically in their new backyards. At any rate, one night as I leaned on an elbow admiring her pale, slim, spraddled legs, a flashlight shone its beam directly into my naked lap. A man’s voice said, “Looks like we missed the action,” and another one said, “Get dressed and step out of the love machine, son.” I could make out the uniform and the badge, the heavy gun belt, the gun, even in the darkness.

Olivia scrambled for her panties and bra. I groped for my own underwear and pants, pulled them on, opened the side door of the bus, and stepped barefoot onto the cool ground. I closed the door behind me, for Olivia’s sake.

The two cops shone their flashlights on me, keeping their distance.

“What are you doing here?” one said.

“Well,” I said, gestured, shrugged. I hiccuped out a nervous laugh.

“He thinks it’s funny,” the one cop said.

“I do, too,” the other cop said. He was older than the first cop, and a little shorter and stouter. That’s about all I could tell, in the dark with only their flashlights in our faces for light.

“The people who live in those houses right over there don’t think it’s funny,” the younger cop said. “They thought maybe you were parking here to case their houses.”

“Rob them,” the older cop said. “Break in, steal things, or worse.”

“Much worse.”

“I didn’t know they could see us,” I said.

They said nothing. The first cop leaned his head toward the bus window to look in at Olivia, trying to cover herself, cowering on the floor in there.

“All right, miss, get out and get your clothes on.”

They stepped back to let her out and kept their flashlights on her as she got dressed. They were quiet, as if they were studying her. This made me angry and I almost said something. She was crying. I moved closer and stood beside her. Something about looking at her in the small harsh glare of the cops’ flashlights made her seem all the more vulnerably beautiful to me. When she was dressed the cops switched off their flashlights. Every now and then they’d switch them back on and shine them into our eyes as we spoke. They asked us who our parents were. Where we lived. How old we were. But they didn’t really seem to care about any of that, hardly waiting for our answers, seeming bored. In the end they let us go with a warning not to park there again and a few halfhearted words about hauling us in if they ever caught us doing this again, and told us to go home.

“You know what’s going to happen, you keep doing this,” the younger cop said. “You know how it is that people make babies? With the old in and out?”

“A-makin’ whoopee,” the older cop said, and laughed.

“Seriously,” the younger cop said. “We’re gonna keep an eye on you.”

“’Bye, now,” said the older cop, giving us an odd little wave. Then they got into their squad car, backed out onto the road, and drove away. Strange cops.

WHEN WE GOT BACK to town after eloping, the apartment all ready for us to live there officially, we went to tell our parents what we’d done.

We went to Olivia’s house first.

“Oh,” her mother said, deflating into the sofa cushions, a hand over her mouth. “Oh, oh, oh.”

“WHAT?” her father said. He was a tall, good-natured man with a heart condition, who spoke very loudly and was a little bit deaf. He’d been an artilleryman, when he was young, in the war.

“THEY’RE MARRIED, IKE,” Olivia’s mother said loudly back to him.

It took a moment to register. He stood there vacantly, looking at her, then cast an embarrassed glance at us before jamming his hands into his trouser pockets.

“Well,” he said softly, “no use crying over spilt milk.”

THEN WE WENT TO my parents’ house. My mother was at the kitchen table, in a very good mood, nibbling peanut brittle. My father was in the back bedroom, reading a magazine. The kitchen opened up to the den, and Olivia sat in there on the couch, her knees pressed together in terror.

I sat down opposite my mother at the table, under the bright bulb of the hanging lamp. I didn’t want to go through with it. But it was too late for that.

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

Her nibbling slowed. She could tell something was wrong.

“Olivia and I got married,” I said. I said it quietly. So quietly that Olivia and my younger brother, Mike, sitting on the sofa on the other side of the den, couldn’t hear it. Of course, Olivia knew what I was saying. She sat there and stared into something only she could see. I said to my mother, “We went over to Livingston and did it this afternoon.”

She said nothing for a moment, unable to swallow the brittle in her mouth. When she finally could, she whispered, “Is she pregnant?”

It was awful to look at her eyes just then. A sudden grief had filled them, laced with a terrible dread, a horror, really, as if I’d just told her that one of us, one of her children, had died.

I nodded.

She got up from the table and walked to the back of the house. I looked over at Olivia. She had closed her eyes and grabbed on to my little brother’s hand. He looked confused but not displeased to have Olivia holding his hand.

In a minute, as I was pacing in the living room, my father came in and asked me if what my mother had just told him was true. I nodded.

He didn’t say anything, looking as if he couldn’t comprehend it.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“We have a place, an apartment over by East Mississippi,” I said. It’s what everyone called the asylum. “We’re going on over there, I guess.”

“How far along is she?”

“About five months, we think.”

“Damn,” he said. He shook his head, jingled the coins in his pocket. “Well, go on over there, then,” he said. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I have to go see about your mother. I think this is about to kill her.”

Olivia and I drove to our little apartment, mounted the rickety steps to the deck, and went inside. I turned on the big, chuffing fan, to pull out the stifling air. We sat down on the sofa, nothing but the engulfing huff of the fan for sound, the hot breeze searing our skin, beneath the bare bulb of the overhead light.

THE BARE BULB LIGHT was so harsh, I lit candles instead and set them on the coffee table. Olivia had brought over her old cat, Max, and he rubbed against my leg, hungry. I fed him, and checked the seedcake in the cage of her parakeet, Donald, who whistled and made as if to bite my finger. She’d left her pet rabbit, an old Easter gift, with her parents, because she’d never liked it, with its weird red eyes and bland personality. I think she felt guilty about it, though. I’d told her to leave them all, afraid the heat in the place would kill them during the day, but she couldn’t.

She’d been sitting on the sofa, that slightly stunned and day-dreamy look on her face I loved so much, and I’d taken heart. But then she seemed to come to, got up from the sofa, and began pacing up and down the little hallway from the living room to the bedroom and back. She took off her Keds and walked barefoot on her longish narrow feet, with the pretty toes I liked to roll between my fingers and call them her peanuts. She was crying quietly. At first I couldn’t tell. The place was so hot, before the fan had a chance to help out a bit, that we’d started sweating the moment we walked in, my T-shirt and Olivia’s peasant smock blotched with dampness, and our faces shone with perspiration. When I saw she was crying, I held her for a minute, but it was still too hot for that. I got her to sit at the kitchen table in front of the dormer window there for the breeze. I brought one of the candles in from the living room and set it beside the fridge, on the counter away from the window so it wouldn’t blow out.

There wasn’t much to eat, but there was a fat ripe tomato on the counter, and a new unopened jar of mayonnaise, and a loaf of white bread. I tore off a square of paper towel for a plate and made each of us a tomato sandwich, and got two beers from the fridge, all the while keeping an eye on Olivia to see if she was cheering up at all. We ate the sandwiches and sipped the beers, not talking. Olivia was still sniffling a little bit but she was coming around. When we’d eaten, I took her by the hand and led her to the living room, and put a record on our little record player, some easy stuff. Maybe it wasn’t the best choice. It was by that singer, Melanie, and when she sang “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma,” Olivia started sniffling again. I was holding on to her and shuffling us around in the old Teen Center slow dance, and she dug her chin into my collarbone and started to bawl.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” she said between sobs. “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to date lots of boys. I wanted to graduate and marry somebody successful and live in a big two-story house and have lots of children but not like this, and not in a shitty old attic that’s hot as an oven, and not even graduate from high school. And poor.” She punctuated her sentences with little bops of her fist against my other shoulder.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” she said, as if accusing.

“I do love you, though,” I said.

She drew in a big slow breath and let it out, still leaning against me.

“Oh, God,” she said. Then, “God, please forgive me.”

I said, “God doesn’t mind people having babies.”

“This isn’t funny,” she said, crying again.

“I mean it,” I said.

“Just stop.”

I shuffled us around for a minute, while she settled down.

“Well, wait and see,” I said. “I’m going to work hard, and build us a beautiful house — it’ll be like a mansion, to us anyway — and we’ll have beautiful children, starting with this one, and they’ll be so beautiful that people will hardly even recognize them as ordinary human beings, like a whole new amazingly beautiful and intelligent subspecies or something. Coltranians. Like you. And we’ll have dogs, and horses. A couple of fat, arrogant cats. And I’ll drive a cool Ford pickup, a good, solid, settled-down man, and you’ll have something like a Mercedes station wagon to haul around all the kids in style. And we’ll have a boat, if you want, and take it to the reservoir, and ski, and maybe even build a cabin beside my grandmother’s little lake up in the country, looking out over the water.”

Olivia gave a quietly derisive snort when I was done, but I could tell she was lightening up.

I said, “We’ve got all the time in the world. Look how young we are. Look how much time we have to try to get all the things we want.” I stepped back so I could look at her.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said.

She nodded, looked at me for a moment, then looked down again.

“Okay,” she said. The tears were there again, but quiet ones. They were tears of sadness, I thought, instead of fear. That was better, I hoped.

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER my older brother showed up, with his fiancée.

They came into the little living room, and I turned on the bare, bright bulb again, and after some sympathetic and concerned small talk from them, questions about how this came about and what our plans might be, they got down to business.

Olivia and I knew that his fiancée, Ruth, had been whisked to New York the previous year by her parents for an abortion. We knew what was coming. As soon as they even hinted at the idea that we should consider doing the same, Olivia leapt up and stomped to the bathroom and slammed the door. Immediately, the house began to shudder from the force of the chugging fan in there trying to pull wind through the little space under the door, which made a weird kind of howling sound.

Curtis and Ruth seemed astonished, looking from the hallway where Olivia’d disappeared, back to me, back to the hallway. Almost instantly after Olivia shut the bathroom door, cutting off the fan breeze, our sweating increased, beads popping out on our foreheads and running down our faces. It tickled me trickling from my armpits down over my ribs.

I went into the tiny hallway and knocked on the bathroom door, having to shout to be heard over the noise of the fan and the wind howling through the little space below the door.

“Olivia, would you just come out, please?”

“Tell them to go away!”

“Don’t worry, we’re not going to do that.”

“I’m not listening!”

I made my apologies to Curtis and Ruth and, after a moment, realizing that Olivia was not coming out of the bathroom until they left, and maybe worrying that the fan’s desperate huffing might destabilize the old frame house itself, they got up to go. When Ruth had stepped out onto the deck, Curtis came back to me.

“Just think about it, okay?” he said.

“Curtis, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Were you here just now? Did I imagine that you and Ruth were just in there talking to me while Olivia shut herself in the bathroom and lost her mind?”

He frowned, gave me a hug, and they left.

“Are they gone?” Olivia shouted from the bathroom.

“Yes!” I shouted back.

She opened the door and stalked back to the bedroom and fell onto her side into the bed. The house stopped shaking and the hot air in the apartment began to move again. When I followed her into the bedroom she looked up at me, her face puffy and streaked with tears.

“I’m not going to do that, I’m not,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I said, “I know. We’re not.”

“I couldn’t do that,” she declared.

“Me, neither,” I said. “And it’s way too late for that, anyway. They didn’t realize. Don’t worry.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Tell them to go away,” Olivia said, and burrowed herself beneath the bedsheet, clamping a pillow over her head.

It was the landlady from downstairs, standing in the weak yellow glow of the deck light, her scrawny arms crossed, a scowl on her face.

“If every night is going to be some kind of commotion like this,” she said, “I am not going to stand for it. You can take your kind of behavior to some other place.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I promise we’re not usually like that.”

“Or loud other kind of behavior, either,” she said, narrowing her eyes and arching her thinning brows.

I nodded, mumbled, “Okay, right.” Then she stomped down the deck stairs.

“Was it them?” Olivia said, her voice muffled beneath the pillow.

“Just Curtis,” I said. “Forgot his keys.”

Olivia stayed beneath the pillow. I watched her side move up and down with breathing for a moment, until it began shaking with sobs, and I went into the darkened kitchen and sat there alone for a while, sweating in the warm breeze the fan pulled through the kitchen window. I smoked a cigarette. I’d been there a good hour, knowing Olivia had cried herself to sleep, when an old Chevy Bel Air station wagon idled up to the stop sign on the quiet street below. I couldn’t see who was in it but I recognized it from the student parking lot at school. I knew the boy who drove it. I heard loud stage-whispers, and made out some girl’s voice saying, Is that it? Is that where they’re living? And other loud whispers, unintelligible. And then the wagon rattled off down the street.

This is about as strange as it gets, I said to myself.

But for the sound of the fan huffing away, then, the apartment was quiet. It was quiet on the little streets in our new neighborhood, down below. The streetlamps stood silently above their diaphanous pools of yellow-gray light. The neighbors’ houses were quiet, sleeping. The inmates at the asylum down the street were quiet, sleeping or lying awake, wondering how this had happened to them, or who they were, or where. Our parents were home, in their beds or sitting at kitchen tables, drinking coffee, sleepless.

I opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. The fridge was a small old Frigidaire, with the locking handle. It cast its chilly bright block of light onto me and into the tiny kitchen, which still smelled strongly of fresh paint and Formula 409 and Comet from all our cleaning. The cold air rolled into the hot room in a little cloud of condensation and rolled away toward the huffing fan. I closed the fridge, sat at the table in the dark, and drank the beer. It was so cold, and bitter, and delicious. I was bathed in sweat. I drank the beer down in big long gulps, then sat there blinking my eyes from the cold, the carbonation, the alcoholic buzz.

I set the empty bottle on the kitchen counter and took off my clothes and laid them on the chair, then went into the bedroom. Olivia breathed long and slow in her sleep. I carefully pulled the covers away from her, so as not to wake her. It was still so hot in the place. She made a little sound and smacked her lips, rolled herself slowly over to face the other direction. She was so pretty. I lay down beside her and snuggled up, rested my hand on her hip, and we slept, the fan rocking the attic apartment like we were inside some gentle engine, cradled and safe.

SOMETHING WOKE ME UP a few hours later. I saw I’d left a light on in the living room, so I shuffled in there to turn it off. That’s when I saw the man and woman sitting on our sofa. They wore identical pairs of white cotton pajamas and looked sleep-rumpled, and older, in their forties or fifties. They looked familiar, though I couldn’t say I’d ever seen them before. I didn’t know them, that’s for sure. A rush of fear went through me. My scalp prickled, I felt myself shrink up in my boxers. I kind of hunched over, ready to run or fight. But then the woman raised her eyebrows like she’d forgotten something, and waved a hand at me, as if passing something before my vision, and I felt myself relax somehow.

“Who are you?” I said.

The man and woman just sat there smiling at me.

“I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “My wife’s pregnant. She’s asleep.”

I felt foolish and confused. I realized it was the first time I’d called Olivia “my wife.”

“Oh, we know all that,” the woman said. She had a kind of grumbly voice that, even so, wasn’t unpleasant. And it sounded kind of familiar, I didn’t know from where.

“That’s right,” the man said.

“I really think you need to leave,” I said, wishing Olivia and I had a phone, but we didn’t. We couldn’t afford it.

“I’m very thirsty,” the woman said.

“Who are you?” I said.

“We’re what you might call aliens,” the woman said.

“Really,” I said. “You’re from the hospital, aren’t you?”

“No,” the man said. “We’re from a planet in another solar system only about five million light-years from here.” He held his hand up, palm toward me, and then slowly pointed a finger upward as if toward the very solar system he was talking about.

“Really,” I said, feeling so strangely calm all of a sudden that I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.

“If we fizzle and fizz out on you, don’t be disturbed,” the woman said.

“If we get a CME, we might revert,” the man said. “Kind of like a solar flare, but worse.”

“Much worse,” she said, as if bitterly amused.

“Why don’t you get yourself a cold beer,” the man said, “sit down and join us for a while?”

“Would you like one?” I said.

The man seemed as surprised as I was that I’d said this, then said, “I sure would love a beer, come to think of it.”

“Yes, I’m just dying of thirst and I would love a cold beer,” the woman said.

I went into our little kitchen and got three bottles of Budweiser from the refrigerator. On the way back to the living room I looked in on Olivia. She was still sleeping soundly, on her back, her mouth slightly open. At least she looked peaceful, though. The furrow was gone from her brow. I took the beers into the living room, opened them, and gave one each to the man and the woman. We raised them slightly to one another, in a little toast.

“How did you get here from that far away?” I said. I didn’t know much about physics and astronomy, nothing, really, but I was smart enough to know how long it would take even a ray of light to get here from five million light-years away.

“Can’t really explain it,” the man said. “We don’t normally have bodies like this, not limited to this.”

“Are you normally made of light?” I said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head and laughing, not unkindly.

“It has more to do with the fabric of the universe,” the woman said. “Sort of.”

“Negative energy,” the man said.

“Cosmic inflation,” the woman said. “Kaluza-Klein.”

“These are just terms some people are using these days,” the man said. “Their ideas are a little wacked, but they’re going in the right direction.”

“Okay,” I said. “But if that’s the case, where did you get those bodies you’re in?”

The woman grinned.

“Well, we did get these from the hospital, so in that sense we came from there.”

“It’s just easier, logistically,” the man said. “If there’s trouble with the police, or if the hosts have a little problem with the occupancy. And it’s just down the street.”

“I thought you both looked a little familiar.”

“I used to be an usher at the Royal Theater,” the woman said. “This body did, I mean.”

“I was a policeman,” the man said. “A homicide detective, actually. Busted down to traffic cop. I may have given you a ticket.”

“How did you end up in the hospital?” I said. I’d almost said “asylum,” and just caught myself.

“Drugs,” said the woman.

“Depression,” said the man. “Really bad depression.”

I said, “Do you know the old man who hunts imaginary lions on the grounds?”

“Oh, sure,” said the man.

“Imaginary?” said the woman, and she laughed.

“Mr. Hunter, believe it or not,” said the man. “He never got to hunt, before he went crazy.”

“He’s bagged two since then,” the woman said. She laughed again.

“Really.”

“You wouldn’t be able to convince him otherwise,” she said.

“You’ll have to forgive us,” the man said. “Sometimes we take on certain characteristics of the hosts.”

“Like crazy,” the woman said, bumping her eyebrows up and down. “You’re awfully young,” she said then, grinning. “I’ll bet you two ran off.”

“Yes,” I said. “We did.”

“Where are your parents?” she said. “Are they in another state?”

“No.”

The man and the woman looked at each other for a moment, then nodded. Whatever they were thinking seemed to make them very happy.

“May we have it, when it’s born?” the woman said.

“What?” I said. “No. Of course not.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed.

“Well, let’s think this over,” the man said. “We don’t have to actually have it.”

“No, I suppose not,” the woman said, cheering up just a bit. “But you could let us have it now,” she said, leaning forward. “We could take it, and it would be like it was never there.”

“Not like an abortion,” the man said.

“No, not like an abortion,” the woman said. “Just zip, gone,” and she snapped her fingers. “Gone! Into me, I mean. This lady’s not as old as she looks.”

“No side effects,” the man said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We want to keep it.”

“All right,” the man said.

“But if you change your mind,” the woman said, “just let us know.”

“Okay, but we won’t.”

“All right,” the man said. “But maybe you could let us be close to the child, somehow.”

“Like godparents,” the woman said.

“Yes,” the man said. “We’ll be available for advice. And if anything happens to you, we can take care of it.”

“Or help take care of it.”

“We’re from a very advanced civilization, for lack of a better term.”

“All right, sure,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” the man said, “we won’t interfere.”

“We have so much to offer,” the woman said. “And this place is our interest. It’s our subject, if you will. Like God.”

“You believe in God?” I said.

“Of course,” the man said.

“Well, not in the same way people here do, of course,” the woman said.

“Did you come from God?” I said. It seemed a logical question at the moment.

“Oh, let’s just not get into that,” the woman said.

“Right, yes,” the man said, laughing, closing his eyes and shaking his head, “let’s not.”

None of us said anything for a moment, me standing there in my boxer shorts holding the sweating beer bottle, them sitting on the sofa in their aged bodies and white pajamas, seeming to glow with heat and a strange satisfaction.

“It’s a glorious time for us, you see,” the woman said. “I suppose you could say we’re in the prime of our lives.”

I didn’t know what to say. I turned up the bottle and finished my beer. When I looked down at them again, they were still there, looking at me. Then she sighed and looked at the man.

“We should go now,” she said.

“Thanks for the beer,” he said.

“It was delicious,” she said. “Nice and cold.”

They said goodbye again and stepped out onto the deck. I hadn’t noticed earlier that they were barefoot. They made their way carefully, even tiptoeing on the balls of their pale, blue-veined feet, down the rickety staircase. They crossed the yard and walked down the street in the hazy light of the streetlamps, now blueish with the mist of early morning dew. I watched them from inside the screen door. At one point she turned and gave me a little wave, and I waved back.

AFTER SHE WAVED, and I had waved back, something changed. It didn’t look as if anything had changed, but it felt as if something had changed. I looked back down at the street. The strange crazy man and woman were gone. Everything else looked the same.

I went out onto the deck. If there had been a breeze, the old structure would have been swaying in it. But everything was very still. Almost as if before something terrible, like an explosion or the ground collapsing in on itself, sucking everything in. The trees stood massive, dark, and still, not daring to tremble their thin hard leaves. A vast cloud limned about its edges with moonlight seemed not to move even glacially across the sky.

I remembered my best friend Scotty and I once saw the strangest thing on a night that wasn’t so very different from this. It was clear, we could see lots of stars, and we lay on our backs on my parents’ patio, in sleeping bags, looking up. We were camping out in the backyard. And then, as we lay there, an odd thing zipped across the little opening of sky above us between the clusters of tall neighborhood trees. It was, or seemed to be, the lighted outline of a rocket, a classically shaped rocket I should say, heading from south to north, there and gone in less than a heartbeat.

We leapt from our sleeping bags and stared, and then began shouting, and kept shouting until my parents shouted at us from their bedroom window to pipe down.

It never made any sense. An illuminated outline of a cartoon-style rocket, zipping by faster than the speed of sound, without a sound, not even in its wake? A lighted outline of a rocket? Not even anything in the middle? It made no sense whatsoever. But even to this day we both still agree that we saw it, saw the same thing.

I went back inside. I was feeling hungry now. I opened the refrigerator, even though I knew there was nothing in there but beer, an aging tomato, and some milk, maybe a couple of eggs. We’d forgotten to go shopping on our wedding day. But I was wrong. There was a wide bowl of cold fried chicken down on the bottom shelf, and a Tupperware container of potato salad next to that. I rejoiced. Olivia must have gone to Kentucky Fried Chicken that morning, thinking ahead. I didn’t know just when she could have gone, but that was the only possible explanation.

Or maybe Curtis and his fiancée had brought it, and in all the anxiety of their visit I just hadn’t noticed.

I sat at the little kitchen table in the dark, and ate three pieces of chicken and two servings of potato salad, and drank another cold beer. It was delicious. I sat there for a while, digesting, feeling good, and finishing the beer. I checked the clock on the wall. Three o’clock in the morning. But I didn’t feel sleepy. I crept into the bedroom and looked in on Olivia. In sleep, her face seemed younger than ever, like a child’s. Just down the hill from the mental hospital, a few more blocks away, was the city park where each of us had spent time when we really were children, with our parents, swimming in the public pool and riding the famous old carousel. It seemed a long time ago, though of course it wasn’t. Now we’d be taking our own child there, soon enough. I crept back to the kitchen, got another beer from the fridge and took it into the living room, sat on the sofa and drank it. The apartment was much cooler now. In fact, it didn’t seem hot at all. All the heat from the day, the blasted fucking insane heat in that attic apartment, was whooshed out and replaced by what seemed a perfect temperature, somewhere in the seventies, a nice cool breeze now gliding through the place. That was a fine development.

I started thinking about Olivia lying in there, so pretty, asleep. I wished she would wake up, come into the living room, and start to love on me a little bit, even though she’d recently called a halt to fooling around. I waited for a few minutes, actually thinking against reason that this might happen, and then I gave up and crept in to have another look at her lying on the bed, asleep.

But she had wakened, atop the rumpled covers, and had removed her sleep-creased clothing, and lay on the bed in a pale beauty, in the scant light through the open window.

“Come on over here,” she said, barely louder than a whisper.

THE NEXT MORNING, I woke before Olivia and lay there in bed beside her for a while.

It was still August, school hadn’t started yet, and I was working full-time at the construction job Curtis had gotten me in June. But I didn’t feel like going in, so I just lay in bed with Olivia. When she woke up and snuggled against me, I said I thought we both should skip out today, and she didn’t give me any argument or worry about it. She just said, “Okay.” She sat up against the pillows and roughed her tangled black hair with both hands, bunched it up on top of her head, and held it there a moment. It brought her nice face out, like an old painting.

“What are you thinking about?” I said.

She seemed a little surprised by the question. Then she smiled in a kind of goofy way and said, “I don’t know. Blueberries, I think.” We had to laugh at that.

I said, “Why don’t we just go on a picnic up at the old pond on my grandparents’ property? It’s nice up there in summer. Maybe I’ll catch a fish.”

“That sounds good.”

“We’ll take that chicken and potato salad along, and a few beers.”

“Okay.”

“It’ll be our honeymoon,” I said, and laughed.

She was still half asleep, lying back against the pillows. I pulled myself up onto an elbow and faced her.

“Did you know we had fried chicken and potato salad in the fridge?” I said.

Olivia opened her eyes and seemed to think about it for a moment.

“I think so,” she said. Then she shrugged and closed her eyes again.

I went into the kitchen. The chicken and potato salad were still in there, minus what I’d eaten the night before. There were several eggs, too, and an unopened package of bacon.

“Wow,” I said. I called out to Olivia that I was going to make us a nice breakfast.

“Okay,” she said. “I could eat. I’m starving.”

I put the bacon into a pan and began to heat it, and waited for the smell of it to make Olivia sick. I listened for the sound of her getting up and running into the bathroom, but it didn’t happen. When I called out that the bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee were done, she came shuffling into the little kitchen in her robe, still sleepy, sat down at the tiny table across from me, and began to eat as if she were indeed the hungriest I’d seen her in a long time.

When we finished, she smiled at me across the table, and I smiled at her, and we went back into the bedroom for another little romp before making the preparations for our picnic.

She was beautiful, hungry, glowing, ecstatic. I’ve never felt more in love in my life. I wanted to swallow her whole, like a loving, cannibalistic god.

WE DROVE UP INTO the country in the VW bus, trundled it down the two-track path to the little lake, hardly bigger than a pond. I parked in a clearing beside the bank, and spread out a blanket on the grass.

We went for a walk in the woods and along the edge of the pasture on the nearby hill. Cattle grazed on the green slope there. A small herd of deer trotted through the trees in the ravine below us. A flicker chattered high up in an old pine, and flew away down the wooded decline, flashing the spot on its tail.

We went back to the lake and Olivia sat on the blanket and read a thick, steamy romance novel while I walked the bank and fished for bass. I was fishing with an artificial worm, one of the long thick purple ones with the big hook. Nothing was happening in the middle, so I walked on down to the narrow end, and cast across to the opposite shallows.

It was a beautiful day, cloudless, cool in the shadows along the bank. The trees filtered light where they stood on the gentle hill across the water, releasing it in stripes and patterned patches onto the leaf- and pine-straw-carpeted ground. Back where I’d walked from, at the other end of the lake, Olivia lay on her side, up on an elbow, and read her novel. She’d worn a light blue sundress, and it lay easily across the barely perceptible mound of her belly. I hadn’t noticed it this morning, for some reason, the dress. I hadn’t known she’d even owned it. Looking at her in it, reading there on the blanket in the shade, made me feel happy.

In a perfect cast I bumped the worm off a stump near the opposite bank and dropped it into the shallows there with a tiny sploosh. A fish hit it, I popped the rod, and it went wild, bent deep. The bass ran, stripping line from the whining reel, toward the bank where Olivia lay. When it paused, I reeled and it jumped, clearing the pond’s surface. It seemed to pause at the top of its leap, and even from that distance I could see its huge eye on one side, looking at me, as if it sensed its trouble came from the other world, the one that was not water, and wanted to see. When it slapped down into the water again Olivia looked up and watched me fight it for a minute, then went back to reading.

I brought it in, grabbed it by its broad, hard bottom lip, and walked it around the bank to where she was. It was at least a six-pounder. Now its big round eyes seemed to take in the whole world, and we were insignificant in it.

“Ooo!” she said, looking up. “What a fish!”

“I know what we’re having for supper tonight,” I said.

I tethered the fish on a stringer tied to a log at the water’s edge, and we had our picnic on the blanket, cool fried chicken and potato salad and a couple of cold beers. We climbed into the back of the VW and partially closed the doors and had us a little midafternoon play, sun-dappled leaves winking outside the old windows. We lay there awhile and had a deep nap. It was late afternoon when we woke, feeling sleepy but rested.

I laid the fish in the cooler we’d brought, on top of the melting ice, and drove us slowly home, down the dirt and gravel roads as far as they would take us, then on the old two-lane blacktop, and we pulled into the driveway of the house with the attic apartment and went upstairs and went immediately to bed and to sleep again.

I WAS SETTLING INTO THINGS, it seems to me now. Shaping up our little world a bit at a time. A modest measure of the American dream. I spent the next day just goofing off, resting, and in the afternoon I filleted the fish, marinated it in lemon juice, sliced some potatoes for frying, and made a salad.

“Oh, fantastic,” Olivia said. “I’m starving again.” She stood in the door to the tiny kitchen, cupping her little belly in both hands and grinning.

We went out onto the deck. Low thin clouds to the west hugged the horizon, glowing a strange and bloody blend of deep pink and fiery orange, as if distant lands were engulfed in a vast chemical inferno.

I fried the potatoes while the coals were burning down, then cooked the fish steaks on a little grill on the deck, and we ate out there in folding lawn chairs, the plates in our laps, and washed it down with some cheap wine from the liquor store that I’d put in the freezer for a while to make it cold and drinkable. The icy alcoholic coldness made frozen lumps in our brains, so we walked it off over to the mental hospital.

It was twilight, the strange glow gone from the horizon. No one was about on the hospital grounds. We strolled onto the broad front lawn, with its old magnolias limbed and leafed so low they covered the ground beneath them like huge mutant shrubs, and ancient live oaks, their massive limbs like the knotted arms of giants bent and lowered to lift some smaller creature into the sky.

We had our arms around each other’s waist, and I kissed her on the cheek, and she stopped and we kissed there in the failing light beside one of the magnolias. She had a strange but pleasant musky taste I’d never noticed before. We knelt and crawled beneath the magnolia’s sheltering low limbs, pushed aside the soft, fallen cones, and got lost in one another, everything around us disappearing, ceasing to exist, and we were a long few minutes catching our breaths in the dank, earthy air beneath the limbs and thick waxy leaves and letting the warm rushing feeling slowly leave our blood. It was as if time had changed, somehow, and we were alone in the world. I heard something outside the leafy cave we were in, and in the next moment something startled us pushing its way through the lowest limbs, too dark to see just what it was, but God what a stench. Olivia sucked her breath in surprise, and we lay very still because the broad, stinking muzzle of the lion was snuffling us, pushing its warm dry nostrils against our hair and our cheeks, running them down our bodies and back up to our mouths, a low quiet growl like a basso purr in its throat, and I dared to look into its burning yellow-green eyes, and when I did that the lion jerked its head up and backed rapidly out of the sheltering leaves and was gone.

I couldn’t speak. It took me a moment to get my breath back. Olivia said, “My God, oh, my God. That was fantastic.”

I realized I was excited, on fire. She had me in her cool slim hand. We went at it again, immediately, just as lost in it as we were before. I don’t know how long it was before we made our way back to the apartment. I can’t even remember that we did.

I WENT BACK TO my job the next day. I hadn’t really thought about it for a while.

Curtis was there, on the site, standing in a foundation ditch with a shovel. This was a job I was supposed to be handling, shaping up the ditch started by the backhoe, which he’d operated.

“I’m sorry, Curtis,” I said. “I hope Arlo’s not mad.” Arlo was the young contractor we worked for.

“He’s not,” Curtis said, and I realized that Curtis didn’t seem angry, either. Normally, after such a stunt, he would be. Then again, normally he’d have come to the apartment the day I didn’t show to see what was keeping me. But he hadn’t even called.

I decided not to say anything more about it, in case I’d break the spell of good luck. I found a shovel and hopped into the ditch and we worked at trimming and shaping the ditch all morning, and in the afternoon we laid and tied off the rebar, and when we were done the foundations were ready to pour the next morning.

“Are you coming in?” Curtis said, meaning the next morning. He was asking, as if there were an option.

“Sure,” I said after a moment.

“Okay, buddy,” he said, climbing into his green Bronco. “See you at seven.” He headed off to his fiancée’s place.

I hadn’t seen or heard from my parents since we’d broken the news, either, which suddenly seemed very odd, and so I thought I’d drop by the house on my way home, check in.

They were both at home, although my little brother was out with some friends. Mom was watching the news from the big lounge chair while she let a casserole cook in the oven. Dad was out on the back patio, sipping a bourbon and water. He held up the glass in salute when he saw me through the plate-glass window to the patio. I leaned over and kissed my mother on the cheek and she kissed me back on my cheek and said, “Hey, hon.”

I sat on the sofa and watched the news with her for a bit.

“Listen,” I finally said, “are you doing okay?”

She turned her attention from the news to give me a nice warm smile.

“Of course,” she said. “How are you? How’s Olivia feeling?”

“Oh, she’s fine, I guess,” I said. “I mean, she’s been fine. We went on a picnic.”

“That sounds like fun.” And she turned her attention to the news again.

I went out back onto the patio.

“Hello, son,” my dad said. He wore an old pair of dress pants with a sheen worn into the thighs, his favorite high-top sneakers, and a guayabara shirt. “Drink?”

He’d never offered me bourbon before. He’d let me have a beer before, the previous year, and that had been a big deal. I guess the idea was I was grown up now, for all practical purposes.

“Sure.”

He went in and came back out with a second drink, handed it to me.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

We drank the bourbon and talked about golf. He’d been watching a tournament that day, at one of the local country clubs, following the leaders in a cart and drinking beer. I remembered how I used to go to the tournaments as a kid and put together long, elaborate strands of beer can pop tops and wear them around like primitive necklaces.

“So,” I finally said. “Are y’all okay?”

He looked at me with the sort of indulgent smile a father can give.

“Sure, we’re okay,” he said. “How about you? How’s Olivia?” he said suddenly, as if he’d just that second remembered our whole predicament.

“She’s good,” I said. “We went on a picnic, at Mom Bertha’s lake. I caught a pretty good bass.”

“Yeah? How big?”

“Maybe six pounds, I think.”

“Damn. You going to mount it?”

“We ate it.”

“Good for you.”

After the drink, I said my goodbyes and went on home to Olivia. She was in the little kitchen, making biscuits. I didn’t know she could bake anything. In fact, I’d never seen her cook anything. It was a pleasant surprise. I gave her a kiss on the cheek. The room was filled with a late, glowing, warm yellow light.

“What’s going with the biscuits?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Want breakfast for supper?”

“Always,” I said. I sat down at the table. “It’s so cool in here. Crazy. Just a couple of days ago, it was unbearable.”

“I know. Must be a cool front.”

“Well, it feels pretty much the same outside. As it was a couple of days ago, I mean.”

“It’s bearable out there,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”

She didn’t really seem to be listening. She was brushing the tops of the unbaked biscuits with melted butter before putting them into the oven, just like my mom would do.

“I guess the rent’s due,” I said.

“Mmm.”

“I’ve got the cash,” I said. “I’ll go down and pay it.”

I didn’t relish any contact with our landlady, but seeing her in order to pay the rent was preferable to having her pound on the door, pissed off, to demand it. I checked my wallet, pulled out three twenties and a five, folded them, walked down the deck stairs and around to the front door of the house, and knocked. No one answered. I knocked again, and heard no steps of anyone approaching the door.

I cupped my hands against the door’s glass window and looked inside. No one home. I’d never known the landlady not to be home. Aside from our measly rent, I didn’t know how she survived.

I looked through the windowpane again. In some strange way, the place looked as if no one had been home in a long time.

WE ATE SUPPER AT Olivia’s parents’ house the next night. As with my parents, it was like nothing had happened. Or it was like everything had happened, but no one was upset or even concerned. It was as if Olivia and I not only had been married a number of years, but had gotten married in an entirely conventional way.

Olivia’s mother’s cooking, normally unsalted green beans and white rice and bland baked chicken because of Mr. Coltrane’s blood pressure problem, was much better, too. It was a rich lasagna, with a green salad drenched in tangy oil and vinegar dressing, and French bread slathered with butter and garlic. We all ate like gluttons.

Mr. Coltrane ate like a man just released from a concentration camp, all but shedding tears of pure joy and gratification.

AT SOME POINT IN THERE, because I knew Olivia and her parents would like it, I joined their church, the Baptist church, and signed up to sing in the choir, and taught a Sunday school class to seventh-graders, and went out on witness nights with other men of the church, to convert and save souls. I didn’t particularly believe any of the things I was supposed to believe in as a Baptist, but I didn’t feel especially bothered by pretending to believe them, either.

Unbeknownst to myself before, I had a very nice singing voice.

We went to the Sunday morning service, the evening Sunday service, and the spaghetti suppers on Wednesday nights.

WE ENTERED A VERITABLE DREAM of days. At work, Curtis convinced the carpentry crew to take me on as apprentice, so I spent my days cutting studs to length, and joists, and hauling them up to the carpenters. I nailed the least attractive jobs, such as overhanging eaves, squeezing my legs around the two-by-six boards and leaning out over a drop of forty feet so we wouldn’t have to erect scaffolding. But I loved it. I’d always been afraid of heights but that seemed to have vanished. The crew voted to hire me on as a real carpenter after only six months. I decided I wanted to be the best carpenter in town, I would devote my working life to it. I took the GED and sailed through it, nights.

Our little boy was born in December. He came out with a full head of thick tawny hair like a lion’s mane, so we decided to call him Leo: William Leonardo Caruthers.

The next year, with a loan from our parents, Olivia and I bought a piece of land with a small stand of woods next to a pasture, and I began to build our house there in the late afternoons and evenings. Curtis helped me when he could. It was a simple but free-ranging design of our own. I wanted it to be at least part treehouse, remembering the ones I’d helped build as a child, so after the basic structure was done I began to expand it up and into a huge live oak we built next to for that purpose. Within two years we had our wish-home, all wood, with a broad front porch looking out over the pasture, a screen porch off our treehouse bedroom looking down into the woods out back. I was a good carpenter, as it turned out, and good at scavenging surplus and scrap materials from work sites, so when we were done the debt was minimal, and Olivia worked only part-time at home transcribing medical records, and sold rugs and coverlets and other nice things she wove herself on a big loom she kept in her workroom. She took long walks in the woods, early mornings, Leo toddling along or strapped in a carrier on her back, though he’d really gotten too big for that, to gather roots, nuts, flowers, and berries for natural coloring of the wool. Her body, which had been the lithe but soft body of a high school girl before, was now supple and muscular, beautifully toned. She was amazing in the sack.

I went on the walks with them, when I could. And lifted weights in the shed out back. I’d never felt stronger. I had my Ford pickup. She didn’t have the Mercedes, but she did have a pretty cool little VW station wagon, baby blue.

It was a good life. I was astonished and deeply grateful that we’d made it happen. Leo was growing into a strong and happy child, soon he’d be going off to kindergarten and school. I could see our whole lives ahead of us, peaceful and full of light. We were lucky.

I WAS STANDING ON our front porch looking out over the pasture at the end of a day, sun going down behind the pines and oaks and pale green sweetgum trees to the west.

Leo was inside reading Where the Wild Things Are to himself. He had learned to read just after turning four. Olivia and I had vowed to avoid treating him like a genius. No skipping grades, things like that. We would supplement his school at home, however we could. Give him novels, books about history and current events. Math problems from our old high school texts.

Olivia had a venison stew in a pot on the stove. I’d shot the doe not half a mile from our house, in the woods. Olivia had helped me butcher it. She was in her workroom weaving something new on her loom while the stew simmered.

The chickens pecked about the yard, an eye always on their rooster. He strutted the yard’s edge, very intelligent for a rooster. He’d killed two hawks in just the past month. Killed them before they could kill the chickens they’d swooped down upon to lift away. He and the hens fell upon the hawks and tore them to pieces.

Our dog, an Aussie mix, looked on from the other end of the porch. She kept away the foxes and coyotes. She understood the most subtle of questions and commands. I’d never owned a better dog in my life.

She was my first dog, in fact. I kept forgetting that.

I saw someone walking across the pasture toward the house. When the person got closer, he looked familiar, although I still couldn’t tell or remember just who he might be. He smiled and waved when he was just a stone’s throw away, maybe, and I waved back, and he walked up to the house and stood in the yard a few feet away from the edge of the porch and looked up at me. He was a tall man, dark hair cropped short and receding in a widow’s peak, heavy beard shadow, horn-rimmed glasses, a kind expression. He wore a conservative, narrow-lapeled suit and a modest narrow necktie.

“You look familiar,” I said.

He said, “I’m Lowell Bishop, your sixth-grade teacher.”

“Oh,” I said. “My God. Mr. Bishop. I always wondered what happened to you.”

Mr. Bishop had been a substitute, that year, for another teacher who’d gone on unexpected maternity leave. He hadn’t been a very good teacher, kind of lazy, actually, but I’d liked him and always hoped he’d had a good life after leaving our school and going on to whatever his next, probably temporary, job may have been. He’d been the only teacher who hadn’t treated me as if I were invisible.

“I did all right,” Mr. Bishop said. “I went back to school. Psychology. I was still fairly young.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “I’d kind of worried about you.”

He laughed. “I don’t doubt you did.”

Mr. Bishop had rented a garage apartment a block or so from my home while he’d lived in town. And on the day after school ended, I’d gone over there to say goodbye. When I knocked, he came to the door wearing his school trousers and an undershirt, the kind without sleeves, and he needed a shave, and behind him in the little kitchen area were two other men in similar shape, sitting at the dining table with hands of cards before them, a whiskey bottle and glasses on the table, and cigarette smoke filled the dingy light in there.

“Hey there!” Mr. Bishop had boomed at me. “Come on in!”

I declined and told him I just wanted to say goodbye.

“Suit yourself,” Mr. Bishop said. “But you be good, be a good student, now. If I come back through here in a couple of years and you’re not being a good student, I’m going to beat the crap out of you!” And he laughed. I all but ran away from his place.

So I had worried that Mr. Bishop was just an affable, unfortunate drunk.

I said to him now, standing there somehow in my front yard at our house in the country, some nine years later, “What are you doing here, Mr. Bishop?”

He smiled up at me in a curious and almost sad kind of way for a long moment before replying.

“I’ve come to tell you that now you have to go back to where you came from,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll know when you get there,” he said. “We just want you to know that we appreciate your cooperation.”

After a moment, I said, “With what?”

Olivia stepped out onto the porch beside me then. She smiled and nodded to Mr. Bishop. She was holding Leo against her hip, and he was clinging to her as if something had upset him, inside.

“Is everything okay?” she said to me.

I was gazing at them, my beautiful little family, and so in love I thought I might be drawn into their eyes and entirely absorbed, and disappear from the world, and be nothing but some barely traceable element in their very cells.

And then the light began to fade from the sky as if the arrival of evening had accelerated, the turning of the earth somehow sped up, and the image of Mr. Bishop before us darkened along with the rest of the world and was gone.

OLIVIA WAS STILL PREGNANT, of course. We’d been out for only a couple of days. Our parents stood next to our hospital beds. Our mothers were tearful, holding our hands. Our fathers seemed stunned, hands in their pockets, standing behind our mothers, rocked back on the heels of their shoes. The nurse disappeared and a few moments later came back in with a doctor.

“Well, well, what have we here?” the doctor said. He checked Olivia’s pulse, looked at her pupils, then did the same with me. He turned to our stunned parents and said, in a bright manner, “May we have a few minutes alone with these two?”

Our parents, like confused tourists in a foreign country, stared at him for a moment and then nodded and shuffled out of the room, bumping into each other trying to let one another out of the door before them.

The nurse stepped forward to stand beside the doctor. They stood there looking at us, smiling in an odd kind of way, I thought.

“Hello,” the doctor said then. Olivia and I looked at each other from across the little space between our beds.

“How’ve you been?” the nurse said then.

They looked nothing like the couple from the asylum, except there was something in their manner that was exactly that way.

Olivia watched them, a kind of vacant look on her face.

“I’ve been fine,” I said then, carefully.

“How did you like your experience?” the nurse said.

The doctor raised his eyebrows, waiting for one of us to reply. He tapped at his clipboard but didn’t necessarily seem impatient.

“What do you mean?” Olivia said.

The doctor laughed softly to himself, and scratched at an ear.

“Very different,” the nurse said, looking from the one of us to the other. “You’ll have to discuss that, soon enough.”

“What are you talking about?” Olivia said. “What are they talking about?” she said to me.

“You should have told her about us, I suppose,” the doctor said to me.

“Told me what?” Olivia said.

The strangest thing was, I was pretty sure I’d seen this doctor, off duty of course, around the old country club. He had a rather stolid expression, but also a head of neatly clipped, boyish blond hair. I’d never seen the nurse before. She was older than the doctor, with an old-fashioned perm, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, but with red lipstick and bright red nails, and a querulous expression.

“We just woke up,” I said.

“It’s not important,” the nurse said to the doctor.

“I will attempt to be more patient with the patient,” the doctor said. “How’d you like the lion?” he said to me then.

After a moment, I said, “It was amazing,” and then I felt something like a deep sadness well up in me.

“Very creative,” the doctor said. “Impressive.”

“And the fish,” the nurse said.

“And the frequent, vigorous intercourse,” the doctor said, raising his eyebrows again and smiling.

That made me a little bit angry, that.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “We’re scientists. I was only joking.”

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said.

He seemed amused.

“The house in the country, though, and the various elements of sentimental perfection,” he said. “Something of a disappointment, there.”

“They’re very young,” the nurse said to him. “It’s a long shot, to expect much better.”

“Interesting, isn’t it,” he said to me, “how curiously time moves when it’s decoupled from physicality.”

“Yeah,” I said vaguely.

“What in the world are y’all talking about?” Olivia said. She looked frightened.

“The sixth-grade teacher, though,” he said. “That was a nice touch.”

“Touching, actually,” she said.

The doctor laughed his quiet laugh again.

“You did that,” I said.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“It was all certainly more substantial than hers,” she said. “How did you like your experience, sweetheart?”

Olivia’s expression went flat again, but with something like irritation behind it.

“What experience?” she said.

The nurse had taken on an inscrutable smile.

“The mansion, the yacht, the handsome wealthy Greek husband.” She accompanied her words with a little swaying motion, a casual parody of romantic reverie.

“How do you know about my dream?” Olivia said in a small, quiet voice.

My heart got even heavier inside of me.

“Much more than a dream, dear,” the nurse said with a wry twist of her lips.

“No children, we noticed,” the doctor said in a pensive voice. He was looking down at the chart in his hand as if studying something there instead of talking to us.

“A little overload on the substitutions, maybe,” the nurse said. “Those strange house servants.”

“What do you mean?” Olivia said.

“That was actually pretty good,” the doctor said.

“Just a theory I have,” the nurse said.

“I was really upset,” Olivia said. She looked like she was about to cry.

“It’s all right,” I said to her.

“Nothing to be overly concerned about,” the doctor said.

“You simply have to approach these things with a measure of intelligence,” the nurse said. “Remove the emotional veil, so to speak.”

“That’s good,” the doctor said to her.

“I’ll make a note,” she replied. “Now we really must go.”

“The doctor and the nurse have many rounds to make,” he said.

“Would you like any drugs?” she said. “The doctor can prescribe.”

“Maybe some Valium,” I said. “For both of us.”

“Done,” the doctor said, writing something on the clipboard.

“Take care,” the nurse said.

Giving us those little sideways waves, they backed in shuffling backwards steps out the door.

IN THE MOMENT AFTER the couple from the asylum had left us that previous night, when I had begun to construct our little paradise in my mind, Olivia had awakened, dressed quietly, crept from the house, down the steps from the rickety deck, and walked away.

As she walked, and as dawn seeped into the cooled August air, the landscape began to change until she knew she was no longer in our little hometown. It was as if she didn’t know where she was, or where she wanted to be, and the landscape continually reshaped itself with the beautiful, disorienting whorl of a kaleidoscope turned by an invisible hand.

She put her own hand to her belly as she walked. It was flat and soft. Well, that was gone. That had ceased to exist. That was not a problem anymore.

She walked on. There was a vista now, improbably so. The trees had thinned out. There was a horizon, seemingly with nothing beyond the rise.

She heard a distant, quiet, susurrant sound, which grew louder the closer she got to the rise. And before she reached the rise she saw water, and when she stepped to the edge of the bluff she now stood on she could see it was the ocean, vast and blue-gray, with gulls sailing in the sky above it, and white breakers on the narrow beach below, and just beyond them in the water there was a very large yacht. There seemed to be no one on the yacht, which was at anchor in the swells. It was new, its hull made of polished, coffee-colored wood. And then there was someone on the yacht. She could see that a man dressed in a white jacket stood on the broad rear deck, facing her, a neat, sky-blue towel draped over his arm, which he held crooked in front of him in the manner of an old-fashioned waiter. Which he apparently was.

There was a stepped path down the face of the bluff and she took it, counting her steps as if she were a child with no more on her mind than the descent itself. One hundred and twenty-seven. She walked across the beach, the warm sand pushing up between her bare toes. She no longer had any need of shoes. She waded into the surf and swam through the breakers to the yacht, pulled herself onto the ladder hanging down from its gunnel, and climbed up onto the deck.

The waiter nodded to her. He was an older man, a soft and large and comforting man, dark-complexioned, and his expression was as somber as the expression on a tilefish. She wondered for a moment how she knew that, and then she remembered being amused by the photo of a somber tilefish in the margin of a page in her dictionary, when she was a little girl. And she had said to her father at dinner that night, when he seemed troubled by something and would not speak, You look just like an old tilefish! And after everyone had gotten over their astonishment at where this expression may have come from, they all laughed.

The waiter nodded toward a deck chair and said something to her in a language she didn’t understand. She sat in the chair and fell asleep and when she woke up her summer dress was dry and the waiter had placed a cold drink on the little table beside her. It was delicious and tasted like crushed watermelon on ice. The waiter was nowhere to be seen but there was another man across the deck from her, in another chair, watching her.

He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. More beautiful than any man she’d ever seen in a movie. Or in a magazine photograph. Or on a billboard or the cover of a record album. He was impossibly beautiful and impossible to describe. She blushed and could not say any more to me about how beautiful this man was, and I didn’t ask her to try.

She said, We went away on the yacht to another country.

The country was something like she imagined Greece to be, or possibly southern Italy. It was very sunny, the warm air brimming with golden light, and there were mountains in the distance you could see from the villa on a hill above the shore. Below the villa there were steep rocky cliffs and a wide blue sea. The villa had a broad terrace that overlooked a white swimming pool. There were large, slow ceiling fans turning in all the rooms. There was a constant cool breeze that blew in from the sea. There were servants as beautiful and slender and brown and silent as some kind of near-human, intelligent animal. Their eyes clear and limpid with an animallike devotion in their gaze. They transformed into other, similar creatures when they moved from one room to another.

There were dogs the size of small slender horses that roamed the grounds and guarded them against intruders, and killed rabbits and could be seen loping across clearings with these rabbits in their jaws.

There were great outsized housecats that lay draped over balustrades and the arms of stuffed sofas and chairs and they didn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of other creatures, not even the dogs.

The birds in the trees in their gardens watched her as she walked beneath them and they spoke to her in a silent language about things she could not translate to normal speech or even thought, and so these things remained entirely between her and the birds.

She and her Greek or Italian lover never spoke to one another, and yet they grew older, without appearing to. They only became more beautiful.

I became more beautiful, she said, until I wasn’t at all the person I had been before. I was entirely changed.

And that was good? I said.

She nodded, her attention distracted in the memory of her dream.

Yes, it was.

OUR PARENTS, HAVING BEEN terrified back to their senses, wasted no time seeking an annulment of our marriage. We’d lied about our ages, had no parental consent. Seeing us unconscious and possibly dying (as far as they knew or feared), they were sure we were being punished by God for being so young and so foolish, for thinking we could bring a child into the world when we were nothing but children ourselves. We were going to serve as a ghoulish example to other young people, the young couple who eloped and went to sleep and never woke up. Their child delivered by the doctors although the couple themselves would never know. Would never see that child, who would never see his or her parents, either — not awake and in the world, in any case.

Within days of our awakening, we were no longer married, no longer legal tenants of our apartment. Olivia was taken away to live with relatives in another state, I was never certain if it was Louisiana or Texas. I suppose it could have been a state even farther away, with a relative she’d never happened to mention in our brief time together. I don’t really think she put up much if any resistance.

I heard from someone a year or so later that she — we, I guess, but it no longer felt like that — had delivered a little boy, after all.

Then someone else told me they’d heard it was a girl.

In any case, I presume it went straight to adoption.

On the other hand, I once heard she never even had the child. She either miscarried or had what people called a phantom or false pregnancy.

I never spoke with Olivia again, so I never knew for sure.

Once, a few months after she’d been taken away, I saw her downtown, on the sidewalk, walking along as if nothing like what happened to us had ever happened to her, as if she were just another one of the people walking along, window-shopping, another person with no history at all.

It was winter, January. She wore a long, heavy coat and some kind of colorful hat, from which her dark hair just peeked at the bottom, even shorter than before. She wasn’t pushing a stroller or anything like that. Just by herself.

I looked different. I’d gained a lot of weight and some of my hair had fallen out, ridiculously, just from stress. I was depressed, I guess, what a joke of a word. And I was just driving by in a car, not our old VW bus. She wouldn’t have recognized me, anyway.

I tried not to worry or feel guilty about the child. He would always have someone looking after or over him. She would most likely have some very interesting fairy godparents, for lack of a better term.

LOOKING BACK NOW, of course, it’s obvious we got off pretty easy. There was always some young mindless dying in that town, those days. Cars flinging themselves into groves and against large stalwart roadside trees, the residents in their myopic ranch-style houses hardly bothering to venture out to the carnage.

During the year all this took place, one boy I knew was flung from a friend’s truck and crushed between the truck and a tree. A girl I knew and liked a lot died when an addled motorist drove the wrong way on the interstate. Another night, a guy who’d been on my Little League baseball team heckled a drunk stumbling into a pizza parlor and the drunk walked over and shot him in the heart. He’d been bored, the boy had, hanging out with a bunch of other bored boys in the parking lot, and too easily amused by potentially violent drunks hungry for pizza. Not long after all this, my own brother Curtis died in a head-on collision with a car driven by another young man his age. They’d gone to high school together, had known each other most of their lives.

I knew a boy who shot himself in the head, in front of his mother, in their front yard, because he was so sick and goddamn tired of her drunken bitching cruel ways.

The funerals of these young people were awful affairs, with parents wailing, suffering, siblings slouching about in angry grief, not a little frightened over their own suddenly looming mortality, friends fairly creeping around as if to avoid the contamination of bad luck.

Then of course there were the teen couples who ran off to get married, so alluring the delusion of greater freedom. They were so phenomenally bored with being nothing, and high school seemed little better than a minimal-security prison. They were almost literally mad to chain themselves to lives of eight-to-five jobs, punch-clock paychecks, puttering home to the little postwar starter bungalow, and having a couple of beers, cooking burgers on the grill, being grown-ups.

I was kind of mad to find something of significance, anywhere, though I was into the delinquency, too. It was the most obviously interesting thing going. There was plenty of good, cheap marijuana, the kind that made you laugh a lot. Quaaludes. Mescaline. Plenty of acid. A few people blossomed into full-blown junkies. It even went that way for my little brother, Mike. But, instead of smashing up my car and friends, or overdosing on one concoction or another, I fell in love with Olivia Coltrane.

IT’S NOT LIKE THAT anymore in that town. There’s more to do, inside the house, inside the magnificent motherboards of the new machines. Young people don’t just drive around, bored, drinking beer and crashing into trees and other vehicles, slashing and flailing away at one another in parking lots and vacant lots out of rage or boredom. If they get pregnant, they get a quick and easy abortion at the local clinic, the boy waiting outside for the girl who doesn’t want him to come in, and then she staggers slightly back to the car, a stunned look on her face, something in herself suddenly evaporated, beyond her ken. No one seems to get all excited over the drugs, even though there are more of them to choose from. They’re just not the big deal they were. I suppose there’s the usual brittle coterie of meth-heads, if you look.

You can get just about anything you want, these days.

But nobody runs off and gets married anymore. Nowadays, if you did that, you’d be greeted upon your return as if you were declaring, after an unexplained absence, that you’d been abducted by aliens, taken aboard their spaceship, and probed in various humiliating ways.

THE YEAR OR TWO after we woke up was a kind of limbo. I would live out some alternative life, and then come to on a park bench, or in the hospital again, or in my car somewhere, ignition on, engine dead, gas tank empty. I’ll admit that at one point my family had me admitted to East Mississippi. That was ironic, I thought. The old man who hunted lions, Mr. Hunter, was no longer around. None of the inmates remembered him, and no one on the staff would discuss him with me. I’m not sure how long I was in. I may have been used, myself, for a visitation or two. Fuzzy memories, as if from deep dreams. I was disciplined, once, for going AWOL and walking around. I was in a locked, padded room for two days. It was like being inside a white dream, or in a pure fog or cloud.

When I got out of the hospital, I would see other people with these lost, somewhat sad looks on their faces, and I would think that similar things were happening to them. But you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to get them started. There was the fear of the destabilizing admission. We left one another alone.

I went through a brief period when I wanted desperately to see Olivia again, and not just to see her but talk to her, too. But her parents would hang up on me when I called. A couple of times she answered the phone, but she wouldn’t speak after I said hello. And then her mother or father would take the receiver from her, tell me not to call again, and hang up.

I sneaked up to the house one night. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Maybe I fantasized that she’d step outside for something, to take out the garbage or just sit out in the night air looking up at the stars. She didn’t, of course. I crept into the shrubbery near their their living room window and peeked in. Mrs. Coltrane was on the sofa, knitting something, and Mr. Coltrane was watching TV. I crept out and around to what used to be Olivia’s bedroom and peeked in there.

She was sitting on the bed, reading something, dressed in a pink nightgown, her legs beneath the covers. My heart fluttered. I stared for a long time, trying to see what she was reading, before I realized it was that green, faux-leather edition of The Living Bible. Her brow was lined with concentration. She seemed to be moving her lips a little bit as she read. I backed quietly from the window and crept to my car and drove home, to my own parents’ house, and went to bed.

I could see her whole life ahead of her, then, and it seemed kind of simple. She’d been saved, from me and from everything else. She’d been pretty shocked by the whole affair, and wanted to do everything the proper way now. She’d marry, eventually, someone safe and predictable, and kind. Fold herself into her parents’ church. Develop a particularly amnesiac cartography of her past. Our past.

Obviously, I haven’t done that so well. I haven’t wanted to. Even now, when I think of Olivia, I’m looking at her sitting naked and unselfconscious on our creaky old bed in the attic apartment, lost in some thought that is destined to escape her. Maybe it’ll wander in the breeze and lodge itself in some poor thought-crazed head in the asylum down the street, maybe worm its way into the bitter landlady downstairs, maybe squeeze into the head of a scatterbrained cardinal in the pecan tree just outside the gable window. She wrinkles her pretty brow in thought, literally puts a finger to her bottom lip, but it’s hopeless, the thought is gone, never to be aired before me or anyone else in her line of mortal acquaintance. Her pale skin is beautiful, smooth and lightly blue-veined, a barely visible pale blue line at one temple, another across her growing tummy, and one on the back of the hand that holds the finger to her moistened lower lip, which cannot voice her fleeting thought, lost now to her before she even knows it.

I wondered what our lives would really have been like, had we gone on together, stayed married, kept the child, tried to deal with the kinds of things that always work like an underground river to undercut people’s happiness. I wonder if she ever wonders the same.

I DID, ONCE, live out that life. It was while I was in the hospital, early on in my stay.

We stayed married, for a while anyway. Instead of becoming a professional carpenter, I worked a wood-shop job and attended the local branch of the university in my spare time, because Olivia and her parents and my parents convinced me to do so. Olivia stayed home and took care of our child, who was a boy but whose name was Jackson, we called him Jack.

I was good at academics, as it turned out. This surprised me, but pleased me, too. I’d never thought I was very smart. You might think I’d have studied the hard sciences, maybe astronomy, but I chose anthropology, a so-called social science. I wanted to know about people.

The more I studied, of course, the more my sense of who I was began to change. It changed who I thought I was or was becoming, anyway. Olivia clung all the more stubbornly to who she thought I was, or had been. Naturally my skepticism toward organized religion only continued to deepen and grow. I began to lose interest in Olivia, who it seemed to me had no interest in growing, learning, changing with the times. We grew apart. And one day, though she did so kindly and without anger, she took Jack and moved back home to her parents’ house. We were still only twenty-two years old.

She remarried a few years later, to a prosperous local businessman, had two more children, belonged to the newer, richer country club, the larger and more exclusive Episcopalian church in town, and drove a Mercedes station wagon. I was amused to see that.

I eventually finished the PhD and did fieldwork for a number of years in Wyoming on prehistoric settlement sites, then took a job at a university not too close, but not too far from our hometown, so I could visit Jack more easily when he was visiting his mother during holidays from school. He was a sensitive young man, with a forgiving nature, and we were close. I remarried, twice, but neither one worked out. I fathered no more children, though I kept in touch with the daughter of my third wife, a girl she’d had during her first marriage, under circumstances not so different from mine and Olivia’s.

I grew old not so gracefully. I was a little bitter, though I had a dark sense of humor my students seemed to like. I drank far too much, pretty much every night. Stopped and started smoking in what seemed like regular seven-year intervals. I had an old dog, a pound mutt of inconceivable lineage. I died while out on a walk with the dog one afternoon in winter, of exposure, because of a mild heart attack that nonetheless left me unable to get back to my vehicle, parked half a mile away.

When I woke from this one, who should be sitting on the hospital cot across from me but Wendell Sparrow, looking strange as ever, but worse. He seemed to have aged to something like forty or fifty, though he was surely only twenty, just a couple of years older than me. Judging by the white orderly uniform he wore, and his crew-cut, balding head, he was now an employee of East Mississippi. He was smoking a cigarette, in the same famished way, and looked to weigh about a hundred and ten pounds. I couldn’t imagine him overpowering even the tiniest crazy person.

No, he said when I asked, he was a respiratory therapist. They need that in here, too, he said.

“Ever use the machine on yourself?” I said.

“I figure it’ll come in handy, one day,” he said.

“It’s good to see you,” I said then. “Even if it is in here.”

He didn’t answer for a moment, just watched me with a kind of detached or absent look on his ravaged face. I figured he was doing a lot of speed, maybe junk. Or maybe something he could only get in here.

“So,” he said. “How was that?”

“How was what?” I said. And then a little chill ran through me. He was looking at me in that way.

“That was real,” Sparrow said then. “That’s the way it would’ve really been.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute.

“What about the rest of it?” I said. “All the stuff after the divorce.”

Sparrow put out his cigarette on the floor, dug into his therapist coat pocket for the pack, niggled another one out of it, and lit up, put the pack back into the pocket.

“Yeah,” he said. “Could be pretty much that way. Probably a few minor differences. Might look a lot different at times, along the way. But in the end, not a whole lot.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Gotta go,” Sparrow said, getting up. “So many lungs, so little time.”

He walked out. I never saw him again, after that.

IT HAD BEEN SPARROW, in a perverse concession, who’d driven us on our first date. He drove us around in his mother’s humongous emerald-green Electra 225. I say date, although really it was a contrived, rolling parking session, Sparrow sitting alone up front behind the wheel while Olivia and I made out in the back seat.

I’d begged him. My father was on the road again and my brother had our mother’s car. Sparrow agreed only because he needed to be angry, he hadn’t gotten it all out. I could see his beady, furious eyes watching us in the rearview mirror. He chain-smoked, hardly ever taking the cigarette from his mouth, just sucking hard and burning it a half inch at a time. But after a while the strange rhythms of his driving began to rock us into a kind of submissive stupor. He drove with his left foot on the brake, right foot on the accelerator, so that we moved through the evening like a big green fish swimming in fluid lunges against the current. The effect was lulling, hypnotic. After a while we forgot he was up there, forgot we were in his car. We fell almost into sleep into one another’s kisses.

Later, when we dropped Olivia off at her home, I stayed in the back and Sparrow drove me home in silence, fuming tobacco smoke and rage. I felt pretty good, like a rich man’s son, Sparrow my father’s powerless chauffeur, forced to drive me on a date with his own beautiful daughter.

That had basically been the end of my friendship with Sparrow. I haven’t seen him in decades, now. But the funny thing is that he’d looked kind of like an alien, I mean like the ones in abduction stories. He had the teardrop-shaped head already balding at eighteen, the long skinny neck, the long thin hands and fingers, and his eyes just enormous. Except that Sparrow’s eyes were normally very expressive, very human. Normally, he was just an alien of the everyday variety.

A YEAR OR TWO after all of this, after I’d gotten a little better, I was tending my dad’s bar, the one he opened up after Curtis died in the accident and he lost his job from drinking too much. He bought the bar, and ran a little liquor store in a corner of the building, and I ran the bar, evenings. I took classes at the junior college during the day.

One night when almost no one was in the bar, a weeknight, a man came in by himself and sat on a stool and asked for a beer. I’d never seen him before. He was maybe forty, forty-five. Hard to tell, as I was still only nineteen, myself, legal age in Mississippi in those days, but far from having any view over the nearer horizon.

He was a pleasant man, with a small, pleasant, unremarkable face. He was dressed in what looked like business attire minus the jacket and tie he’d left either in the car or at the house. His collar was pressed but knocked awry. His medium-length, but definitely barbered hair was just the slightest bit mussed up. Mine wasn’t the first bar he’d been to that evening.

When he’d ordered his second beer, he said this was his one night in the year to go out and get drunk.

“I don’t drink, otherwise,” he said. “Just one night a year, though, I go out and I get plastered. It’s a safety valve.”

“Well, that sounds okay,” I said. “Can’t fault you for that.”

“No, you cannot, that’s true,” the man said.

He reached across the bar to shake my hand.

“Monroe Clooney,” he said. “My friends call me Mo.”

“Call me Will, Mo,” I said.

“I will, Will,” he said, and laughed. “Sorry.”

“No, no, Mo,” I said, and we both laughed.

Then Mo Clooney told me his story. He was a civil engineer, made a good living, but he and his wife couldn’t have children, they’d tried, and so about ten years earlier they’d started taking in foster children from the local orphanage. There were mostly boys in the orphanage, and so they decided to take only boys, just to keep things simple as possible. But here they were ten years down the road, and now they had ten boys running about their house, which was fairly large, but still.

“They’re great boys, mostly,” Mo said. “But even so, you got to blow off a little steam every now and then. Hence,” he said, raising his beer, and then draining it. I got him another, on the house.

“Thank you,” he said, as if I’d paid him a compliment. He spilled a little of his beer on the counter and mopped it with his shirtsleeve.

“My boys need a project,” he said then. “Always have to keep them busy. So I’ve decided to buy some kind of old car that they can take apart. Doesn’t really matter if they can put it back together again.”

“They get the ‘exploded view,’” I said. I loved that term. So did Mo Clooney, because he was an engineer, I guess. Most people don’t know it. It’s the simulated photo of something, like an engine, as if it’s just been blown into pieces that happen to be all its component parts, and they’re suspended just inches away from one another, as if in the act of flying apart, so that you can see all the parts separately and where they fit into the whole. Mo Clooney could hardly stop laughing. He probably didn’t get to hear much engineer humor. I knew the term only because I tended to thumb through dictionaries when I was bored sometimes, a habit I’d picked up lately. When Mo Clooney finally could stop laughing, he asked me about the old VW bus I’d parked in the corner of the bar’s dirt and gravel parking lot.

“Doesn’t run anymore,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’ll you take for it?”

I shrugged. “Fifty bucks.”

“Deal,” Mo Clooney said.

He pulled out his wallet, peeled off fifty dollars and handed the money to me, and shook my hand.

“No need for a bill of sale,” he said. “I trust you.” He laughed. “I trust everybody. It was nice to meet you. I’ll have someone tow the vehicle to my house by tomorrow afternoon.”

And then he left, giving me a little wave over his shoulder, and walking only a little bit unsteadily.

Next afternoon when I got to the bar, the bus was gone.

I’d had a thought, when he was walking out the night before, that he was a pretty odd guy, and so I’d gone outside to the parking lot, to see if he was really there.

Or to see if I was, I suppose.

Mo Clooney was there, fumbling with the keys to his car, and then getting into it, cranking it up, and driving it slowly away down the darkened, lamp-lined street.

I’d thought for a moment that he was one of them. But his sense of humor had been too normal, his laughter too real. And the look in his eyes had been so vulnerably human. It seemed filled with a kind of muted loss.

No, I said to myself then, he’s one of us.