Rill Shortle was used to the road and the rewards of his own resourcefulness, but this was one of those unpredictable turnings.
            He drove into Provincetown amidst the April rains of 1972. He didn't expect to stay long— a day or so, a week at most— but after a trek of the town from end to end and a tramp through eerie Beech Forest, he realized he might never leave.
            He was ingesting this unsettling inkling along with a jelly donut and coffee at the counter of Adam's Pharmacy, when a windblown lady with awkward parcels and a tangled poncho came in to catch her breath.
            Her name was Auxlilia Lomes— Axy to her friends. She indulged in a rueful, inclusive laugh at her plight. He gave assistance in getting her arranged and they exchanged pleasantries.
            "I don't know what I'm going to do," she said at length, accepting his offer of a coffee refill. "My house-sitter suddenly left town and I'm supposed to fly to San Francisco tomorrow morning for three months, and I have this cat..."
            "Madam," said Rill, displaying his palms, "I'm at your disposal."
            "Really?" she said and searched his ruddy, wry face, flat nose and startlingly bright, kindly blue eyes. He had the lopsided grin of one who knows he's absurd, and his whimsical eyebrows moved singly, independent of each other.
            "So," she said decisively, "who are you?"
            He explained himself— a year of junior college in business administration, then the Marines in deference to a stern, contemptuous father who had thought to make a man of him, followed by a varied life, a list of jobs, no true vocation but travel, and now at age 30, Crash, love at first sight! So, as a matter of fact, he was looking for lodging and employment. And besides he liked cats.
            "Not everyone does," she said vaguely, consulting her instincts. He seemed all right, and how could she find someone on a moment's notice? And the house was a mess.
            The rain had become a fantastic downpour, splashing drops in the deep street. "So," she said, "how about giving me a ride home, and we'll have some lunch."
            Rill went out and got his car. She lived in a secluded bungalow in the woods off Back Street, reached by a sandy path slick with a skin of black oak leaves. Bare brambles and vivid green-briar twined overhead. "This will all be grown up by June," she said. "The house just disappears."
            She preceded him into a large, odd-angled living room of many nooks, not very neat, with cozy window-seats, old furniture, overcrowded bookcases and dim prints on the walls. The fireplace smoldered; a canopy of luxuriant plants overspread the rafters.
            A great black cat retreated before their dripping advance and prowled apart till they got their coats hung up. Then it came forth and sat in the middle of the rug, wrapped its tail around itself and looked at Rill with silver eyes.
            He lowered a compliant hand.
            It sniffed all his fingers, suffered him to pat its head, then walked off to its bowl, stretching its hind legs.
            "Ob-si-di-an," Auxilia doted, "I do hope you'll like your new friend."
            "Madam," said Rill, "I shall learn his every whim."
            "Well, you know," she said, "he has some," and began to outline his diet and pills for all possible ailments. He especially liked liver and she indulged him, with now and then some sautéed fish in cream. A beaten egg was welcome fare when nothing else would please; betweenwhiles he might nibble dried food, but touched nothing from a can. Moreover he needed a new flea collar; Rill said he would see to it.
            Their arrangements were soon sketched out; he would water the plants, forward her mail and do a few chores; she would send a check every two weeks for Obsidian's keep, utilities and miscellaneous expenses. "I know I ought to be embarrassed," she said, "but I think of him as a real person. I got him when my husband died, ten years ago. Isn't he grand!"
            Rill turned from the table to look. The beast was stretched out on the couch regarding G them. At that distance, in this odd light, with a sudden gleam in the leaves, his glossy, black coat seemed tinged with green.
            "I see why you admire him," Rill said.
            "I can trust you," Auxilia asked, "can't I?"
            "Yes, you can," Rill said without hesitation, and the three furrows in his forehead deepened and his eyes twinkled. "I will look after your house and your animal to the best of my ability. I appreciate your letting me stay in your fantastic abode. Not everyone would take in a stranger."
            "Well, thanks," Auxilia said, relaxing. "I won't worry."
            After lunch Rill busied himself cleaning house. There was a spare bedroom for his use and an electric blanket. The porch held a supply of dry logs and kindling, and he got the fire going again, then did several days of dishes, picked up the newspapers, swept the floor and took out the trash while she packed.
            With conjoined ingenuity and exertion, they proved her suitcase could be shut, then let it spring open again till the morrow.
            She made an herb omelette and salad for supper, had two vodkas and drank wine liberally from a carafe. He admitted he did not drink; his mother's horrendous alcoholism had made him leery.
            He gathered Auxilia was going to visit an old beau. She had a daughter in London and a disappeared son. "I'm quite sure he's dead," she said. A year after his father's demise, he had gone prospecting for tin in Indonesia, and had not been heard from since. Her daughter was a composer, married to an African diplomat in Brussels, and seldom came home.
            She stacked the dishes and poured herself a fulsome cognac to go with her coffee. They moved nearer the fireplace. She allowed she didn't like her daughter's music much, but doubtless didn't understand it either. San Francisco was an old romantic place to her; she could hardly wait to see the bay at night.
            Rill drank coffee desperately, trying to stay awake, but a monumental sleepiness weighed his eyelids down, and he strove to keep them open and follow her reminiscences, but a dream began in which her voice was a green bird flitting in a blue cage. He woke to find her smiling at him. "You're tired," she said. "Go to bed."
            He protested he was being bad company, but she insisted peremptorily and he realized when he tried to rise how strangely overcome he was, how heavy and dim. He toddled to his room, shut the door and fell asleep at once. At midnight he got up to piss. Auxilia dozed in her chair, a small cognac steadily in hand. He decided not to disturb her, went back to bed, set himself to wake at seven, woke at four. His latchless door had come ajar, and as he sought the cause his eyes gradually defined the tall, shadowy form of the black cat Obsidian sitting atop the bureau like a statue looking down at him.
            He must have given a start, for it blinked benignly, yawned and sprang down to the floor with a single, silent bound and disappeared.
            A little spooked, he stepped warily into the living room. Auxilia had gone to bed, leaving her door half open, and he peeped in. The moon filled her window. He was shocked to see how old she was, the frail death's head she wore asleep. He went back to bed, touched with fear and admiration.
            Now wide awake, he began to experience an imperceptibly-growing whisper in his ears, as of some vast, incomprehensible approach, and it was a while before he realized it was only the sound of the surf making up on the back shore.
            He fell asleep with a sense of blessedness, woke to a bright, crisp, windy day, and the smells of breakfast. Auxilia was all mutters and stares and vacant tours of the house. They closed the suitcase and stood a last moment on the porch. "I never lock the door," she said, "but here's the key. There's one thing I forgot to tell you: he yowls."
            Rill looked blandly blank, recalling the nocturnal visit.
            "I'm just forewarning you. It can be disconcerting," she said, put her head back, took a theatrical breath and gave a guttural, spine-tingling, ear-splitting, blood-curdling, "MEEYAOOWWW!" that dumfounded Rill and made Obsidian, sprawled unnoticed in the sun, get up, looking abashed.
            "Oh, there you are!" Auxilia cried with a choke of laughter. "Well, goodbye, darling." Rill drove her to the airport, both hands on the wheel, through the wind-perfected, white-shining dunes. The sky was immaculate. The scattered copses of scrub oak, poison ivy and beach roses seemed to swell in the sun, and the sea was crowded with whitecaps and glowing, golden spangles. Auxilia wore a placid smile and wave gaily from the window of the little plane as it taxied noisily away. He waited till it was well aloft, then went back to his new world, feeling auspicious and full of plans.
            First a survey of the job possibilities, then a search for a place of his own, and then perhaps the meeting of a female friend— all in proper sequence, one thing at a time.
            But the day was too brilliant to waste on the future. His cheeks burned and his blue eyes adored everything they saw. He got on his bicycle and rode down to the meatrack, the green benches in front of Town Hall, where already a motley group of grateful denizens was absorbing the sun, among them Embert Pernell, whom Rill had met the day he arrived.
            "How you doing?" Embert said. "Still in love?"
            Rill admitted his case was beginning to look fatal, and divulged his incredible luck.
            "Gur-rate!" Embert said. "Listen, do me a favor. My girlfriend kicked me out last night."
            He had been in town only three months himself, though already he seemed to have been around several times completely. He was black but otherwise white, spoke the King's English on occasion, and might from outward air or act have been the President of Harvard's son. He wore thrift-shop, baggy clothes, was cocky as a comely god, had attended various liberal colleges on both coasts without bothering about a degree, had lately bummed around the New York art scene, painting drizzles and splotches, circles, slashes and squares, and was now trying to become a poet, but found it hard to find the time, being a popular catalyst of bacchanals, a robust talker and toper, with formidable powers of recuperation, not to mention the mad lust for women and lack of cash that discomposed his mind.
            "I screwed her best friend and that was sort of the last straw," he explained.
            "I shouldn't do this," Rill said, knowing how sour such benefactions tended to turn, but he liked Embert and there was lots of room, so they went to the Fo'c'sle and got the poet's duffel bag and the battered pail a fisherman had given him— which he carried everywhere and called his office— with notebooks, pens, books (chiefly Wm. Carlos Williams) paperclips, envelopes and like paraphernalia of the trade, and a thick sheet of plastic and bungee cord against rain.
            "Mister Black, our Lord and Master!" said Embert with oracular condescension at Obsidian's first approach, and immediately gave the curious cat a hearty whack on the shanks, as if it were a dog or girl's bottom. Quick's a cross cobra the beast sprang upon Embert's leg and clung there with twenty-odd claws and not much constrained jaws of teeth, holding his eyes while he howled and tried to pry it loose without making it madder. Then suddenly it relented and walked off without looking back, but its fur had grown bulky and it swayed from side to side like an old buffalo.
            "No quotidian Obsidian, that cat! said Embert, nonchalantly rolling up his pants, but he wore a scowl, and Rill thought it ominous.
            Still, once Embert had swabbed his red punctures with witch hazel from the bathroom he cheerfully tossed his bag on Auxilia's bed, took pail in hand once more, and set out for the Fo'c'sle again, where a worry- free day of work now awaited him, he hoped. But how could he get his hands on a bicycle? He could hardly use Amy's any more.
            Rill sailed grinning past in a tailwind, and Embert envied him. He trudged along, toting his office, wondering how many really decent poems one needed to get some kind of a grant, and for that matter where was his next drink, dollar or kiss coming from?
            From Barnie Blatt, no doubt, no doubt, reading the New York Times in the west window. "Hava beerrh, me bi," said he with a Gaelic flourish, and went to the bar.
            Embert related his latest disaster with Amy and his good luck in meeting Rill. Barnie was soon to leave town, more rent being due, his last unemployment check having come. "Chump change," he called it, but for what work he would never say.
            "I'd love to see the spring in," he said, eyeing the empty street. "I made it through the whole winter. Summer, no; spring, si."
            After two more congenial rounds they went to Barnie's room on Pearl Street, packed his satchel— he had fewer possessions, Embert noted, even than himself— and then they walked the half-mile out to Auxilia's.
            "Kitty-cat," Barnie said with a cursory glance at the notorious, wary Obsidian. He stuffed his satchel under the couch. "What a place!" he said. "We should tell Milo."
            "Milo?" Embert said apprehensively.
            "Milo Stroon," Barnie said. "He's been sleeping in a junked fishing boat on the beach. It would only be for a few days. He'll find a job once things start to open up. I don't know where he would sleep."
            "On these straw mats behind the couch," Milo decided. He had no possessions at all except the thin clothes he wore and a canvas bag of his books, notebooks, pens, etc.
            "Pretty sleek," he said of Obsidian. "He better not have fleas."
            The cat circled the three of them and sniffed its empty bowl.
            Embert and Barnie had gone right out again, and run into Milo with grim visage hunching the streets, rubbing his blue hands in the dank cold and looking in windows. He had lately lost his day place, the back booth in Rosy's Cafe, when a change of ownership and gender made it Bob's, ending his welcome and cutting off the flow of free coffee and leftovers.
            "Last night was a killer," he said. "Wouldn't have an extra dollar, would you?" His eyes went back and forth between them.
            With the result that Rill, returning from his day in the dunes, found an embarrassed Embert, and two strange guests.
            "I won't take up any room," Milo said. "I won't even be here most of the time."
            "Me either," Barnie said. "I don't even have a shadow. Believe me."
            Rill had seen a seal at the breakwater, and the memory of its puckish, whiskered face nudged aside his normal misgivings. Still he folded his arms across his chest and regarded them from under skeptical brows. Wiry Milo was dressed in black chinos and black sweater, and had black eyes in a haunted, gaunt pallor. He seldom ceased to grimace, and he never stood still, but fidgeted in all his limbs, as if he had a severely constrained St. Vitus's dance.
            Barnie was the oldest. His bushy hair burgeoned white around the sides. Scattered white hairs showed through a not too recent shave, and shrewd, humorous, resigned wrinkles radiated from his bloodshot eyes. He wore a suit-jacket over a hooded sweatshirt, looked like the Bronx gone native.
            Rill assumed a serious mien and tone. "I suppose you both have girlfriends."
            "To tell you the truth, I never touch the stuff," Barnie said ruefully. "Believe me. I was married twice."
            "I hate women," Milo said with a sort of bluster, and issued an awful, inward laugh.
            "Hey, fellas," Embert said, "some of us have got to enjoy life," and he spread his arms with grandiloquent indignation at Rill, who sighed.
            "Just so long as you don't turn the place into a brothel," he said.
            "Now that's not a bad idea," Embert said.
            "Yeah," Milo said, "I could use some income," and he laughed his private, gloomy laugh that mocked itself.
            "I'm game," Barnie said and grinned. "It might be interesting."
            They stood around, scuffing their feet, cracking jokes while the dark came in, and Rill listened indulgently.
            "Is there anything to eat?" Milo said.
            "What's to drink?" said Barnie and instantly located the last of the vodka. His smiling, bloodshot eyes went round, and Embert made large, clown's haste to get glasses.
            "I'm starving," Milo said.
            Rill managed to rescue one small chicken liver from the frying pan for Obsidian, but felt bad for Auxilia.
            The cat looked up for more. "Mr. Black, you are just a cat," Embert said, but bent down and let it lick his fingers.
            "Living better than the Indians," Milo said.
            Rill guessed it would all work out, but he worried and poured Obsidian some dried food, which it walked away from.
            Barnie and Embert, sans pail, soon left for the Fo'c'sle. Milo lay down on the couch and began to copy into his latest notebook, in painstaking, Gothic script, without a single millimeter of straight line, yet distinct— as if he also had a perfectly-controlled Parkinson's disease— a passage from Nietzsche.
            He had two more such notebooks, full of his winter's gleanings on the superiority of the spiritual to the material life. Thoreau was his first hero, Nietzsche his second, and often, sitting in the library, he dreamed of a rustic, solitary existence far from the rotten world, on the edge of a lake, with the leaves forever blowing.
            He was desperate for a respite. Over the past few years he had stretched ends to meet with summer odd jobs and an ongoing, winter poker game. Before that he had been a waiter at Ciro's and had earned enough to survive the off-season, but the rude vulgarians he had to serve outraged him and he quit finally, determined to live by his wits.
            But this year the poker game, with its rich, hard-drinking principals, had decamped to the Caribbean; his counted-upon, cheap sublet had fallen through; and his little hoard of dollars had disappeared by the end of January. He realized how bad it was when he caught himself considering things to steal. He had borrowed from everyone he knew and hated to go out on the street.
            He would have been glad to spend the rest of his life on Axy's couch. He could have lain there forever poring over the pages on how to live. He had never been to college, but every day he envied more those who had, ever more fiercely despised their blasé waste, their loutish blindness to their own luck, their easy denial of the moral imperatives of true knowledge. He came from a poor neighborhood in New Rochelle he hoped never to see again. His sister was addicted to sleeping pills, and the rest of his family were conventional, debt- tormented, would-be consumers. In the last few weeks his asceticism had sharpened to the point where he hardly needed to eat and lived on nicotine.
            Rill sat at the fireplace, mending a tear in his boot, wondering if grains of sand were unique like snowflakes. An enormous sleepiness enveloped him, and after yawning loudly he inspected the premises, washed a stray dish, located Obsidian on a rafter, and went to bed, exchanging goodnights with Milo.
            At two he heard Embert and Barnie outside on the porch, laughing quietly. Milo stopped snoring, vacated the couch and lay down on the mats behind it, where he had contrived a sort of cave with cushions and a blanket. Presently Embert and Barnie came in, went to bed themselves, and Rill slept.
            He was gone before they were astir, feeling negligent but irresistibly drawn by the sun. Obsidian too went out, apparently not hungry. Two hours later the others gathered around the rekindled fire, drinking coffee and finishing the eggs. Milo smoked his last Pall Mall, and when Embert and Barnie left he made a vain search of the house for loose change, and then went out himself.
            Thus began the pattern of their days and nights. Rill explored the town, every path and alley. Barnie bought the Times and sat in the Fo'c'sle window, watching the world go by. Embert sat by the jukebox with his pail. Milo walked the streets, looking for someone to bum a smoke from, or give him word of a job.
            When Rill got back at dusk he found all well at Axy's. Milo was reading on Barnie's couch. Barnie and Embert were drinking beer in front of the fire. Obsidian sprawled on his rafter.
            Rill fed him the liver he had brought. Embert broiled the big steak he had stolen from the A&P, and Barnie poured the noble vintage he had stuck a cheap label on.
            Rill raised his eyebrows but said nothing and ate his share.
            Milo's shrunken stomach was so stuffed with Axy's peanut butter and half a box of Ritz Crackers that he had no room even for wine. He lacked for nothing. Julie, his waitress friend at Bob's, had bought him a pack of Pall Malls.
            The cat got the scraps for dessert, which it devoured with loud satisfaction.
            Embert and Barnie were high and clear as stars on a fine night. They kept bumping shoulders as they browsed Axy's books, reading the elegant or scrawled inscriptions in faded fountain pen.
            "I never even heard of most of these bozos," Embert said.
            "Yurra a mere babe, me bi," Barnie said. "I'd like to read some of this shit myself."
            "Yeah, she's got quite a library," Milo said with a laugh, part cough, part scorn. "Nothing I'd want to read though." To him everything was light reading but the handful of tomes that he revered like Bibles.
            The only book Rill cared for was an encyclopedia.
            "I used to write humor— filler and stuff for magazines," Barnie said, "but it never got accepted."
            "Tell me," Rill said and grinned crookedly, "what are poems worth these days?"
            "Hey!" said Embert, taking prodigious offense. He turned to Barnie. "I wrote five today. That's not bad, you got to admit. Only one of them's serious though."
            He had sat for ten hours by the jukebox which the bartender on a lonely jag had kept playing full-blast, vibrating Embert's elbows and feet. Writing wanted inspiration, for Embert had nothing to say but everything, one thing thoroughly the equal of another, and how to choose? So he would extemporize on such themes as bums, pigeons, neon and wet pavement, women in red scarves. Sand, wind and washashores had lately appeared in his new verse, which now zigzagged down the page in irregular leaps and falls. He had lost an hour trying to turn one phrase into a palindrome, as simple syllabic luck seemed to demand, and then, vexed by what to do next, the old trial of how to reconcile black song with white prosody for a moment adjourned, he idly started a line that went on and on through three pages, sans capitals or punctuation, sans effort almost, sans anything to do with him at all apparently except a virgin ecstasy of pure possession that made his forehead prickle and the tears well.
            Why the spell had begun or ended, whence it came, what it meant or portended, Embert didn't know, only that it was new, an unsuspected, electrifying thing. Dazed and amazed, he read the strange words over and over, falling ever more deeply in love with their mysterious beauty.
            This first gift of the muse he now plucked from his pail and held up like a proclamation.
            "How many words to the page do you get?" said squinting, smirking Milo.
            "How many," Rill inquired with an air of genteel malice, "trees to a book?"
            Barnie took the pages and gravely perused them. "Keep writing, keep writing," he said, "you can't get any worse." He shot a glance at Embert. "Now, now, me bi, it's very nice, but what's it all about?"
            Unfazed, Embert retrieved his treasure, once it had gone the rounds, and read it again with unspoilt pleasure, though it was true: it did not quite make sense in every particular. Obscurities occurred, it was slightly beyond even the author himself, but it sounded right and the powerful current that had borne it into the world could hardly be false, he felt.
            Full of his genius, ablaze with friendship, wine and the prospect of women, he soon got Barnie into gear again, and the two set off for town to investigate the night. Nothing could have induced Milo or Rill to go out.
            Rill didn't like the dark much; he didn't care for entertainments. Once the sun set his instinct was to eat and roost: the sound of the wind occupied him as he sat by the flithering fire. "I don't know anything about poetry," he said at length. "What did you think of Embert's poem?"
            "Pure garbage," said Milo, lying on Barnie's couch, pinching out his Pall Mall. His lungs ached and his ribs felt arthritic. "I can write better than that."
            Milo's presumption, got from copying passages from Thoreau et al, was that if he were to write at all he would write as they wrote, with the ease of finished thought. In fact he had never written anything voluntarily, and since high school not even a note, so great had grown his awe of the act. "What's Barnie's scam?" he asked.
            "I don't know," Rill said. "What's yours?"
            Milo gave his laugh like a shudder. He could never bear to explain himself because the reality of his existence was so at odds with his ideals. Rectitude was what he wanted, a life of high integrity and pure ideas. But the longer he went without a job the less could he stand the thought of submission to another human being, and his proud, sensitive ego, battered by poverty, swollen too big to consort with ordinary souls and concerns, hid in the many guises of cynicism.
            "When is Lady Lomes coming back?" he said.
            "Any day," Rill said, as a practical policy. He was not wholly pleased with the situation he had allowed to develop, but he intended at least to keep all three poised to decamp.
            The rains began again, suddenly drumming on the roof. Obsidian with ears laid back, eyes wide, speedily left his rafter and crept under Axy's bed. A flash whitened the windows, and a thunderclap cracked. The two men sat listening to the storm, giving each other not another glance.
            Stolid Rill was steeped in pleasure, wretched Milo was wrenched with angst. The fates had begun buffeting him in earnest. First Julie's mother had come, elegant and cool-eyed, and rented a room at the Holiday Inn for a week. Next Julie's old boyfriend, whom she had been vainly trying to break up with for the past two years, had come down from Burlington to stay with her for three or four days.
            At Julie's insistence Milo had gone to meet them at her apartment, and drunk too much. He whose rule it was to drink no more than two of anything had downed two Scotches from the expensive fifth brought by her mother, then an uncounted number of bottles of beer, and finally an bottomless tumbler of Soave, while making an obvious fool of himself between fits of officious volubility and paralyzed silence, then had left abruptly in self-disgust. In the hall he and Julie had lurched into an agonized embrace before he broke free and nearly stumbled down the stairs.
            I really like this girl, he thought with a thrill of fright. He had survived the winter, ensconced with the waitresses in the back booth of Rosy's. The town was dormant, customers few in the dim afternoons. He would read Julie passages from his notebooks, and she made approving comments, to his gratified surprise. He snacked, drank coffee, smoked, resting from his huddled nights on the beach in the wreck of the Donna D. Julie had even begun to buy him cigarettes— thank god for that— for he quickly got in a bad way without tobacco. She had no sense of his real life, did not dream that all he had to eat was what she gave him, but she had hinted that perhaps he should move in with her, once she had overcome her guilt and irrevocably separated from her old boyfriend.
            Milo doubted it would work out; he could not imagine such a relation; he despised people like her. She had a new car with four doors, nice clothes, jewelry; she was too young for him, 23 to his 32, and far too naive; he hated women and the bourgeois world; he never again wanted to be anyone's slave.
            But he was getting painfully enamored of her delicate voluptuousness and sympathetic lips, her kindness and intelligence. He had never had a steady girlfriend. Five years before he had fathered a son in a one-night encounter with a woman who, still mad for a man who had jilted her in Orlando, took the child at ten months and went back to Florida, having already with fierce vehemence rid herself of Milo, refusing to concede him any rights, adjuring him never to try to contact her or the child again. Relieved of unwanted responsibility, yet guilt-ridden and bereft, he had turned decisively against women, though over the last few months Julie had insinuated herself into his confidence, weakening his bitterly-founded animus.
            Now that her boyfriend was here he suffered the astonishment of a tormenting jealousy. She acted perfectly at ease in the presence of both, but it put Milo in a sweat; worse yet he liked Jim, who treated him with deference and seemed to regard himself as something of an interloper. Whether he and Julie were making love Milo tried not to imagine; against his will he wildly hoped they were ending their entanglement, not extending it. All Julie would say was, "I think everything is going to work out, you'll see. Anyway he's leaving soon, very soon."
            Providential therefore was Embert's procurement for Milo of a place to sleep, eat and relax from the relentless immediacy of sexual tumult, making up somewhat for the decline of Rosy's into Bob's, now ruled by the new owner himself, who could tolerate Jim, who drank beer all day at the counter and paid for what he ate, but looked on Milo as leech and lecher both.
            Rill for his part wished Milo would take a bath. Though clean-shaven he smelled and seemed to have but one set of clothes— black chinos and black sweater. Rill was loath to offend this baleful stranger with reference to wardrobe or personal odor, thought it possible his own olfactory receptors were unduly sensitive, and anyway kept making the reasoned assumption that Milo would wash on the morrow.
            What Rill found most grueling was the reek of peanut butter that seemed to ooze from Milo's pores. The Pall Malls Rill could stand. His mother had lived and died for smoke and drink, and these homely aromas only bowed his sad soul in resignation.
            The days whirled by however, and neither Milo's odor nor outfit nor anything else changed one iota. At some point in each evening Rill's lopsided grin would appear, his palms would turn up abashed, then snap- clasp his waist like a drill sergeant, his jaunty eyebrows would waggle up and down like stairs, wry gaze surveying his guests— Axy's guests, to say true— and he would declaim, in tones ever-more ironical and bland, his daily-more formal and hollow refrain: "Ahem! What progress? I am all ears."
            And they would tell, as best they could. Rill began to suspect that no such thing as progress was likely, given nature and circumstance, nor was he himself pursuing employment with any resolve, as he had planned and ought to do, but was merely still exploring the mesmerizing town.
            Whatever answer Milo made, it never touched upon his dalliance with Julie, but always hinged on the coming of spring and the promise of jobs, of restaurants where he was known, of gardening possibilities, of nail banging. He invariably expressed eagerness to get back to work, a sentiment perennial with him till now. For he was beginning to understand what it meant to be rich: there was nothing to do, and no one to take orders from. You got up in the morning to pure freedom— Nietzsche and Thoreau, books about Nietzsche and Thoreau, and the growing treasure of your own notebooks— in short, perfect happiness.
            To feel secure he lacked only a very little— the dollar a day for his Pall Malls, plus enough for jars of peanut butter and Ritz Crackers. The latter, he found, he did not absolutely require. A spoon or finger would do. His system seemed to thrive on the stuff; he had snuck it for dessert as a hungry child; it clung comfortably to tongue and gullet, weighed well in the gut. The few dollars or coins he managed to borrow or swipe sufficed for all his wants, for the others casually shared their victuals.
            Around him his smell hardened like a suit of armor and he seldom or never bathed because he could not bear to undress in the sight of other men, and rarely was there no one home, at which opportune times he anyway wished to take advantage of his privacy to read and write.
            Nothing bothered Barnie Blatt. He had a few dollars saved, and a Long Island uncle who employed or dismissed him on request. He was at an end now, mentally in transit, waiting for instinct or instance to tell him when and where to go. His winter, while pleasurable, had produced only a chronic hangover, a paunch and a tinge of grim fear for his future. Meanwhile he went to the Fo'c'sle with The New York Times, read the war news, drank and waited for who might come. At noon he moved to the Governor Bradford, and played chess, eventually ate a bite at Nasty Jack's, returned to chessboard or bar, made jocularity with all who came near.
            "Never fear," he would say, waving a reassuring hand at Rill, "I can be gone in a flash. There's two buses a day. Never fear."
            Rill didn't worry much about Barney, but Embert was blithely indefinite about his prospects. "I'm looking, I'm looking," he would say. "She's got to be rich, she's got to have a place on the water, she's got to be fantastically beautiful. Everybody understands these necessities."
            Every other day or so, with much bluster, fustian and embarrassment, he would recite the most grievous details of his latest catastrophic conquest. He had a knack for soothing women he had jilted, lied to and betrayed, but when they got together and compared affairs— as was bound to happen, given the small town and the bevies of his victims— he would resolve to lay low and shack up with Amy, who was getting to know his nature and showed signs of becoming reconciled to it. In any case she had resumed loan of her bicycle and typewriter, and not little of Embert's foresight was applied to the prime task of keeping on her good side.
            In fact Embert was unsure that he might not quit P-town overnight. He had come because people from Big Sur to Quebec had told him he would like it, and they were right. He had got quickly and easily acclimatized to the busy bars, with new blood in the offing, via the sweet month of May— yet still he felt in flight from another self, his late kid brother, cop-killer and suicide.
            Their father owned a funeral home in Pittsburgh. At the time, ten years before, Embert had been in the front lines, in grey flannel suit, in a managerial training program. He had always worried about charming Charles the quick tongue, who loved fine clothes, fast cars, fancy women. Stopped for squealing a U-turn after midnight in his red Thunderbird he shot and killed his nemesis, the pugnacious white face. A girl was present: she identified him. He refused all appeals to give himself up and on the ninth day put a bullet in his head in a hotel room on Destitution Row.
            But what had finally finished black middle class life for Embert were the friends he sought refuge with in Boston, who looked askance when he drank beer from the bottle, and when he shat said, "Don't you know enough to utilize the air freshener?"
            Did I ask to be born? he quizzed himself. He wanted to write it out: What was I born for? But he didn't dare. It sounded too trite, and who cared? But he feared his brother's soul was in him, and he must somehow do for both.
            He found he liked Barney, the first Jewish lush he'd ever met; he liked his aggressive wit and unflagging spirits, his absolute anonymity. Barney— at least in Embert's ken— had never answered a direct question with any sort of definiteness. He seemed to admit to almost no past existence, though apparently he had trekked all over the Middle East, Europe and Asia, but why? Evasive, Barney was, but loyal so far, and generous in the bars. He bought till you quit or he fell asleep. And as older man, he stood a little to Embert as mentor.
            One night Barney happened to be elsewhere when Embert needed him, but in the sequel inopportunely present.
            First came the ripe hour of ten. Embert had had a splendid day with his pail, had been well fed and - bedded by Amy, and was only out looking for good company and talk.
            Inattentive, lulled by contentment, he checked out the Governor Bradford, found no lively soul, crossed the street to the Old Colony, bought a beer, and with his usual princely insouciance sat down uninvited at a table with Corbo and entourage.
            The author, whose three published stories, in obscure little magazines, none recent, had gained him a bright place in the literary firmament of his own esteem, and whose promise and novel-in-progress he assumed everyone valued at his own conception of them, was on his weekly binge, extolling his favorite theme, the violence of sex.
            With him were several faded sycophants, twilight types, always a little blue, who loved only alcohol, and a girl who had lately sprung up in his domain, like a velveteen orchid, all petals of pleated skirt, lipstick and mascara, blacks and reds, with little pixie shoes. She looked adorably dopey, had large, luminous eyes, and Corbo could hardly contain his hopes, having been alone far too long.
            "Well, gang, I wrote a great poem today," said Embert, hoisting his schooner.
            Corbo at fifty had been through the meat-grinder of proletarian life in South Boston, and knew a phony when he saw one. Son of immigrant Neapolitans, he had nearly lost his sanity in the Korean War and only through persistent resolve had avoided protective incarceration. A fondness for tinkering with car engines, the consolation of his two Angora cats, and a passionate attachment to literature had helped him subdue his tendency to ruinous rages, but even now he sometimes reached the brink. His disdain of Embert was already well-advanced, for the youth in a previous encounter had blithely boasted of his own good fortune in escaping the Vietnam War. In the line of prospective draftees stripped to their underpants, he had gone from cubicle to cubicle, doctor to doctor; had been signified fit in every category of body and mind; each and every little box of every page and chart had received its positive check mark, cumulatively denoting him a superlative specimen of military manhood; and then, clad once more, clutching his folder, still taking in the tone of the last doctor's congratulatory compliments, with sinking heart he headed for the desk at the end of the busy corridor, the last way-station before dismissal, where the fatal dossiers were collected by a bored private who was chain-smoking and leafing through the pile of comic books in his lap.
            Embert simply ghosted past in a doleful daze, walked out the door, and finding himself on the street with folder still in hand took to his heels and never heard from Uncle Sam again.
            Nor did it further endear Embert now to interrupt Corbo's customary harangue, seize the stage and spout a half-facetious spiel about his own merry future with the muse of funding— grants, fellowships and cushy university sinecures. "All you need is genius," he said.
            Corbo had labored for years over every line of his little novel, hardly more than a hundred pages, and had never thought of asking any institution for help, having lived strictly within his small disability pension. His eyes began to bug out.
            "Embert," he rasped in his stentorian twang wherein the quintessence of the gangster rang, "I hate you and all your ilk."
            Embert, steeled for every eventuality, refused to be taken aback. Ilk— no matter how ferociously spoken— was too blunt a weapon to pierce. He was bent on pity for racists; baring that, contempt; failing that, ostracism. But death to the enemy, if need be.
            The imperturbable and well-favored black put one foot up on an empty chair and grinned at the orchid. She had yet to speak, but seemed to have communicated to him, from the depths of her fathomless eyes, the promise of paradise, so that he underestimated, then ignored, Corbo's burgeoning choler.
            "I suppose you think you're a better writer than I am," the veteran next remarked in a more offhand manner.
            Again caught by surprise, and thinking the opinion only natural, as well as warranted, to be expected, and thus condoned, Embert answered promptly, "Yes."
            The entourage reeled a little, winced and cringed, except for the orchid, who kept her placid complacency.
            "You're a fake, Embert," Corbo roared in his ringing voice.
            "Aw," Embert said, shaking his head with an exaggerated childhood gesture, "Aw, let's don't take on like that!"
            Stung by the condescension, Corbo bent with berserk speed across the table, grabbed Embert's throat in both knotty hands and began to choke him very, very slowly, almost dilatorily, while spewing a stream of vituperation in his face, but so wide of his true character, that he felt bemused, remote, personally absent from the proceedings, and thus had leisure to contemplate in gratifying detail the cupping of his large left hand behind Corbo's pallid skull and smashing his frenetically-moiling mouth with the right fist in straight, short, sharp blows: One. Two. Three. Etc. It also occurred to Embert that it was time to seek other company, but the orchid's eyes held his with their depthless blandishment.
            The more Corbo roared the worse he felt, for the gap between his accents, volume and slanders and Embert's actual faux pas had begun to sound mortifyingly racial, unfortunate puns appeared in his diatribe, and thus he stormed ever more guiltily insulting and vehement, for he would not for the world have impugned any man's color.
            Some such inkling touched Embert and he forbore, beyond grasping Corbo's wrists and trying to loosen them, catch his breath and make fair answer. The table shook and glasses and bottles jostled and clinked, two toppled, one rolled off and smashed. The entourage backed their chairs away, but the orchid sat unmoving, hands in lap, eyes fixed on the two men, who commanded her respect as rivals for her heart.
            She could, with nearly impregnable calm, have attended no end of such scenes in a drama so piquant, never once felt a qualm at the wear and tear on her suitors, both of whom in fact held a certain exotic appeal for her— daughter of an investment advisor from Newton— had not Dolly the waitress come hobbling to intervene on feet swollen from an aggrieving shift serving a thirsty party of college boys who did not tip, at length grew raucous, and had only moments before Embert's arrival departed with derisive remarks about the smell in the men's room, and the low tide atmosphere of the town in general.
            She surveyed the table, instantly identified Embert as cause of the ruckus, with his handsome, bland, black face and filthy foot up on a chair.
            Corbo had sat back, arms folded with dignified indignation. The others were regulars, not seldom Dolly's own drinking companions, though none spoke to set her right but the orchid, a recent washashore, who kept saying in a faint, plaintive voice ignored by all, "But, But, But..."
            Dolly snatched Embert's barely-sipped beer, which he had emptied his pockets to procure, flung his foot off the chair with a disgusted glower, and said, "Stop bothering the customers."
            "Aw," Embert said, rotating his head with the same sho nuff shy air that had charmed his way through childhood, "I just sat down. I never bothered anybody."
            She glared through her round glasses at him as if he had called her a fool. "You've had enough," she said. "You're shut off. Get out of here."
            "Aw," Embert said, "he was choking me."
            "I'll choke you," Dolly said, and seized him by the collar. "Out you go," she said to the sound of tearing cloth. He rose, made a rueful bow to the orchid, and let himself be hauled tilting toward the door. Always rightly in the wrong, he had all these women mad at him, and now this gloomy-looking dish about sixty with spilling bosom and mean mouth.
            "Awr," he growled, and stumbled over the threshold.
            "And don't come back," she yelled.
            Two passing cops halted. One hooked his thumbs in his belt, the other clasped his hands behind his back. Both rocked on their heels and inspected Embert, who was studiously trying to maintain a semblance of grace by pretending that nothing had happened.
            "Another crazy," Dolly said to the cops, dusting her hands into the street, taking a gander both ways as if Embert were no longer there, then withdrawing into her sanctum.
            "You go easy now," the cops warned Embert and strolled on east. Embert went west, nursing his hurts— the torn collar of his favorite jacket, the exorbitant injustice with its silent witnesses, the orchid relinquished to his preposterous assailant— humiliations not easily mastered.
            He had gone hardly a block before he met Barnie, coming the other way, with his characteristic mid- evening list.
            "Come me bi," said he, "and take a nip of nourishment."
            "Just a beer, please," Embert said distractedly, following him into the Bradford. They got sat down in a window and Embert gave vent, growing more and more outraged, casting glowers diagonally across the street at the windows of the O.C., where Corbo's table fortunately was too deep within to be visible, but where, nonetheless, dim shadows and shapes hulked and loomed.
            "Now, now, me bi," Barnie admonished, "keep a grip, keep a grip." He was always trying to moderate Embert's mad follies with women, though all too often his efforts had the opposite effect, due to the pleasure he took in his protégé's exploits, and to the rueful hilarity of the complications that ensued. He loved, above all, a world of comedy, with perpetual call for jokes, but deemed this occasion a bit too fraught.
            "Patience, me bi," said he, "you'll get your chance at her another time."
            "Ilk?" Embert snipped off the term with sharp disdain, wondering if P-town would prove to be like everywhere else, and this the first sign. "And what's with that waitress?"
            "She's a cunt, me bi, a cunt," Barney explained. His own relations with women were much unsettled, despite two divorces and a subsequent celibacy. How he could have sped from love to hate twice, and in such brief spans, was a mystery he had only with harsh hindsight finally resolved into the phrase, They cramped my style.
            Eleven thirty came, Barnie bought a second round, and suddenly the Bradford was loud with the late rush. Two women circumspectly took the next table and with fumbling fingers began arranging the backgammon board. Embert and Barnie turned as one with intent, friendly countenance, like flowers to the sun.
            Nor did Rhonda and Sophie rebuff this overture, but welcomed it as a kind of relief, a distraction from their growing constraint, for the once-spacious, initial evening of the long-planned splurge of their trip to P- town was drawing to an end, palpably shrinking toward the moment when they would have to return to their guest-house room, take turns in the bathroom down the hall, and finally slip, each on her side, into the one not very wide bed in the single room they had decided to share for economy's sake. Their expensive cognacs were deferment, the backgammon pieces mere worry beads.
            The two men appeared to them to be interesting and a little sleazy— precisely the sort of men Rhonda and Sophie had joked about beguiling to avenge their husbands' infidelities— and Barnie's easy grin and risqué tongue and Embert's manner, so patrician, yet naturally, sincerely ingratiating, due to his helpless, instantaneous infatuation, provided immediate social lubricants.
            Selective autobiographies soon sketched out, the two women moved their cognacs to the men's table, where four sets of fingers at once began to fidget with strewn chess and backgammon pieces.
            Chess was Barnie's true love and refuge from the news— so disheartening these days, as the furies of the war split the national psyche. He spent dyspeptic mornings in the Fo'c'sle with The Times, his afternoons at the chessboard, taking on all comers, or, lacking opponents, replaying great games from an anthology of Capablanca, Euwe and Alekhine, that he kept behind the bar.
            He hated backgammon for its dice, its embodiment of luck, its time-killing dilettantes indifferent to defeat.
            "That's just what I like about it," Sophie said. "I never could learn chess. Especially the horses that hop over everything."
            "We call those knights, dear," said Barnie with a note that put Embert on alert.
            "They look like horses to me," said Rhonda.
            "What I don't get is how the king and queen mate," Sophie said sweetly. "Why don't you teach us how to play."
            "Only for men, dear," said Barnie. "This is a military, not a courting game. Backgammon's for girls."
            "Why shouldn't women play chess?" Rhonda inquired, and she too had an edge on her voice.
            "No fighting spirit," said Barnie.
            "Hah!" said Embert.
            "True," Barnie allowed. "There's always the virago." His normal tendency was first to baby, then bully women, but tonight phase one never came. He had left off drinking beer, was now swilling whiskey, without visible effect, though Embert too well knew how quickly Barnie could turn scurrilous. Either or both of these babes would make a luscious end of Embert's evening and console him for loss of the orchid, and to forestall the bellicose gleam in Barnie's eye he said to them, "So how do you like P-town?" then turned up deprecating palms. "I mean so far. Where are you staying, by the way?"
            "Oh, we love it," they said with one voice, nodding earnestly, eyes lowered, each waiting for the other to finesse the rest.
            Barnie said, "They love it. I could have told you that. Let me guess where you're at," he addressed them directly. "Did you get your dyke discount?"
            They both eyed him uncertainly, with growing rue, ready for crude humor, loath to seem prudish.
            "You didn't forget your cards, did you?" Barnie said. "I fear they forgot their cards," he said to Embert.
            "Aw," Embert said, his hopes dying with each word.
            "You're card-carrying dykes, aren't you?" Barnie said.
            "Don't mind him," Embert said. "Blarny Brat. He's just the welcoming committee. He's really a mensch, once you get to know him."
            The women smiled gratefully, privately at Embert.
            "I've got an infallible dyke-detector," Barnie told Embert. "Same as in the army. Tongue inspection. Let's see your tongues," he demanded, "see if anything's growing on them. Roll 'em out, dears."
            They looked back at him, blind hands finding their purses.
            "Aw, come on!" Embert said to Barnie.
            "I'll bet their tongues are longer than my dick," Barnie said. "Maybe not yours."
            "Come on," Embert said. "It's a nice night."
            "Who's got the longest tongue?" Barnie asked them.
            Had they at any time responded with riposte mild or sharp— or even in angry, mean kind— he might have turned instantly to chivalrous comradery, but their sullen, allied silence only goaded him to worse. His cynic's secret rage at their comeliness came of knowing they would despise him if they glimpsed his incapacity for simple affection, guessed his dull and fickle lust that had nothing of human loneliness in it.
            "Dykes," said he to Embert, "are taking over the world."
            "Shall we?" said Sophie, and she and Rhonda rose.
            "You fucking cunts," Barnie shouted, aggrieved that two pretty women preferred to leave full snifters of cognac than sit another moment in his presence.
            Together they headed for the door, frightened now, and Barnie, after a confused cogitation, stood up with the cognacs, one in each hand, and unsteadily followed them into the street, Embert, who had never seen him so drunk, close on his heels in alarm.
            Here the various mischances of the evening converged. The two cops were just strolling by again to make sure all was quiet. Corbo emerged from the door of the O.C. in bitter solitude, the orchid having not two minutes ago thought better of her yen for adventure and gone home alone.
            Barnie raved something incomprehensible even to himself at Sophie and Rhonda, who hurried on with heads down. He lurched a few steps after them and hurled one glass at their backs, then in victorious spite drank off the second himself.
            Evans and Souza, the cops, bellied him up against the wall.
            "Fuck you too," Barnie said.
            Evans did not care for Barnie whose commentary had offended him on a previous night's visit to the Bradford in response to a melee over a disputed precedence of turns at the pool table. Thus he was a bit rough in cuffing his subject of protective custody, such that Barnie screamed in pain, which drew an instant and harsher wrench of his arms behind his back, and a more piercing squeal for mercy, which hurt Embert into dignified intervention, pleading, "Come on, come on now, take it easy," and trying with gently-applied counterweight to relieve the law's leverage, which had bent Barnie's head to his knees, whereupon both cops— but especially Evans, whose efforts of late on the unruly street to signal a hip benevolence toward the ubiquitous, black washashore had been blandly ignored— took huge umbrage, released Barnie, and began to wrestle Embert into position to be cuffed himself.
            Embert did not at first demur, partly out of surprise, and partly because he was determined never to fall prey to cops and courts. But the frustrations of the day and his own resigned pride caused him— he was big and strong— at least to straighten his posture, which Evans and Souza took for a sign of resistence to come, and so they wrenched his arms all the more fiercely behind him, while manacled Barnie danced about, shouting, "You fucking flunkeys," and a blue-flashing patrol car pulled up with reinforcements.
            Embert, trying to keep his head from being butted against the wall of the Bradford, saw his brother's face watching with his own mind's eye.
            In the windows above had gathered the curious, the awed, the knowing, the vindictive, bored, gleeful or outraged— blurred faces without features, all white but that of the masterful, impassive bouncer, a rastafarian black belt and adept at sedation of drunks, who considered Embert some kind of annoying nut. Anxious, angry Corbo circled the fringes, having dropped his pique at Embert. A fellow writer and bottom dog was under assault, and all his moral instincts urged him to the rescue, but he had suffered too many losses to the law in the past, middle age had damped his fires, and he held himself to shouting hoarsely, "Don't fightum, don't letum lump you, go limp, they're gonna lump you!"
            "You'd better be on your way," warned the cop who was standing by with billy club in hand, and Embert caught a glimpse of Corbo's stricken eyes and grim line of mouth, which made him feel slightly better about the world, once he and Barnie had been hauled in and locked up for the night in a basement cell with a high, barred window level with the walkway above.
            Sophie and Rhonda, determined not to be deprived of their nightcap by some masher, and needing one now more than ever, had talked up each other's courage to try the next bar they came to, a reassuringly dull looking place furnished all in black naugahyde, with a few middle-aged, gay men dishing quietly and chain- smoking.
            Dumfounded, shaky and parched, the women reverted to beer, their normal beverage, and drank down several bottles without pause, practically panting with vexation, outrage, vindictive gibes, tearful hilarity. You just never knew what men might do. Maybe they were all mad. The men at the office certainly were: either they wanted to screw you, or they were scared to death of you, or they treated you like a little sister in need of supervision.
            The bond of their mutual marital miseries and renegade husbands was complicated because each secretly, at first unwittingly, had begun to prefer the other's mate to her own, sympathized with his throes of confusion, and suffered fantasies of reforming him for herself. Lately these feelings had codified in thoughts that found veiled expression in words ambiguous or oblivious, clearer to hearer than speaker, with the consequence that each had become party to the other's moral morass, without resentment, but with growing warmth of heart.
            At closing time they set foot again on the strange street made stranger by the mist and rank sea smells which had enveloped the town while they salved their humiliation and fright.
            "Dykes!" said Sophie, pronouncing the loaded word aloud at last.
            "Never mind," said Ellen, "sticks and stones," and both began to laugh finally without constraint, as they wended a little unsteadily toward their guest house door and what exactly neither knew nor any longer much feared.
            Barnie, in a stupor of consternation, after profuse and sheepish apologies to Embert, had taken refuge in the pretense, then actuality, of sleep. He had never been in jail before, and despite his assumed nonchalance he felt the flat world suddenly tilt, his feet start to slide; he had never lost control before; he could recall only fragments of what had happened, grisly portents of metamorphosis from prized anonymity to public buffoon or bum; it was indeed time to be moving on.
            Embert was left alone with his own welter of disconsolate thoughts and the invisible company of Jade White in another cell.
            "Hey, Pard, whatcha doin in there?" the Portagee presently called.
            "Drinking champagne," Embert said.
            "Nah, can't stand the stuff," Jade grumped.
            Embert stretched out on his back on the steel shelf of cot. In a while he heard metal creak somewhere. Shortly a pair of boots clumped past the window, a cop going off duty he supposed. Soon the same boots went by the other way. Embert dimly heard another creak, then a dull, solid clunk of steel closure. Later, in the deep silence of three a.m., he finally identified a mysterious series of repeated sounds— clinkage on concrete, glottal gasp and sigh, soft mutterings of song— with the smell of whiskey, and concluded that Jade had gone out, retrieved a bottle stashed nearby and come back, in short was not locked up at all.
            Embert arose soundlessly, tried his door, lay down again. People were hard to figure. The cops at the desk had been perfectly nice to him and Barnie, treated them like welcome guests, blameless, enviable victims of too much of a good time. And even Evans and Souza, having asserted their authority, seemed to hold no grudge and joked and clapped Embert on the back before leaving to finish their shift.
            Lying there running his brain, Embert decided that Jade stood well with the more clement element of town. Embert knew him slightly, as he did all the street-people— by casual palaver or hearsay. Jade was a daily drunk in a deep-drinking town, a hoarse haranguer and lurcher banned from every bar in town. His townsmen stopped to talk with him gravely, their fellow familiar, dark-skinned Cape Verdean and decorated veteran. He had been shot up at the Chosin Resevoir and survived the frigid gauntlet of retreat in a constantly- mortared convoy of 61 wounded, of whom 45 died before reaching a medevac. He did occasional day labor, every year declared his candidacy for something, House, Senate, School Committee, Selectman, and retained a huge energy for accosting people on corners day or night or reeling up and down bumming smokes between respites on the meatrack. And apparently had free run of the jail, which spoke well for the local temper, not so unrelievedly white as it had first seemed.
            All the same Embert could not help but mull what he had heard of the disasters that had befallen isolated black men not natives of the town— Rosy Williams who had been found wandering in a haze of amnesia after stabbing his white girl friend too many times for the coroner to count exactly; Al Payson, the contractor, whose tools vanished from his truck, and despite general consensus, if not evidence, about where they had gone, the police had taken a week to search his suspect competitor's premises. The tools were never traced nor recovered, and Payson had fallen back to banging nails in the employ of others.
            And then there was Jim Wilson, hard-hustling, door-to-door, cut-rate shoe salesman who had a little sideline in pot and cocaine, the only accused to get hard time in a bust of eleven small dealers, the rest of whom, one way or another, beat the rap.
            About his lone downfall people winced when they laughed, but their laughter at second breath rang free with condescending acknowledgment of the way the world was, had always been, would surely always be.
            And it was funny, too, in its way. When warrants were issued and word went out that the police wanted to speak to him he had hurried happily to the station, thinking he had been awarded the Department shoe contract.
            In court the case against him was air-tight, as he had nursed the undercover agent, an addict with the heebie-jeebies of solitude, through many a tormented night. Well, in foreign climes, you took your friends where you found them.
            But one must needs be wary. Embert rued his disillusionment with Barnie, who was truly his friend and sane counsel, he had no doubt, but still the jinxed evening had cracked Barnie's facade of superior remove. Embert had known men who hated women— all black, to be sure, with their own reasons— but these automatically sought to charm each and every female they met: antagonism arose only later, after a honeymoon, however brief. Barnie was more apt to mock "The Ladies"-- as he called them— at sight, though not, apparently, with intent to repel, but somehow, oddly, to attract, the better to avenge some self- wrought ill.
            Embert himself felt no contention toward his forest of former foxes, only a desire to snatch occasional romps with them, and escape unscathed, a feat more and more difficult. Finally dozing off at dawn, he dreamt of a royal, African mask hung from a vast, spreading tree among innumerable other masks glimmeringly reminiscent of the religious emblems of the miraculously cured he had once seen in a cathedral in Quebec, but when he approached it turned in the breeze and the back of it swallowed him in a blank abyss.
            At 7 a.m., set free with friendly, derisive admonitions to keep their noses clean, the pair of reprobates went their separate ways, Barnie to restore himself with coffee and a glance at the early Boston papers, Embert to Amy's house in a vain attempt to explain his disappearance of the night before, but she was furious and disbelieving after all his past derelictions, and thus they arrived simultaneously back at Axy's, where Rill and Milo were sitting by the fire, and Obsidian was finishing his first of many ablutions of the day. With the unspoken accord of old cronies Embert and Barnie dissembled the nature of their night out with grins and cryptic groans, but no hint of mishap.
            "Ah, the weary swordsmen," said Rill without envy, thankful that their tender entertainers had homes of their own. His luck with women was unfailingly bad. The noon before he had been stood up for a coffee date and that night had spied her in the window of a restaurant having dinner with another man. Inured to such disappointments, Rill advised himself that it was anyway imprudent to be pursuing female companionship before he had found a job.
            Milo looked with scorn at his whoring house-mates, who flipped a coin to see who would have the first shower. Barnie won, then deferred to Embert, saying, "I owe you, me bi, I owe you." Barnie lay down on his couch to wait and caught a whiff of peanut butter and acrid, ashen body odor, which at first he presumed to emanate from the makeshift nook behind him where Milo slept in his nest of mats and blankets, but then he realized it permeated the ticking of his pillow, which proved greasy besides.
            Barnie thought himself not unduly fastidious, and when Embert emerged with a towel around his waist, imperishably shining and fresh, he said to Milo, "After you."
            Milo blankly blinked at him. "I'm not in line," he said, and laughed hollowly, thinking, I got no cooties on me. They better not give me anything, and he resolved to crap in the woods henceforth. He was as naive as his maiden aunt about toilet seats, and thought crab lice could jump.
            Neither did Barnie think himself unduly delicate, but when a glance at bland Rill drew no support, he went in silence to take his shower.
            Milo washed his hands and face and brushed his teeth every morning, but showers he did not require, nor clean clothes. It was the inner life that animated him. He despised Embert's shamelessness, his amorous intrigues and braggadocio, and was disagreeably shocked to find that Barnie, notwithstanding his caustic jeremiads about "The Ladies", partook of the same vice. Milo himself was personally quite as reticent as Barnie, and never told anybody anything, while the terrible conflicts of his life— his loathing and need of sex, his idealization of love, his lack of income and his want of moral immunity— had begun to squeeze him, like a submarine gone too deep, so that each dawn he woke wet with sweat, reaching for the cigarette he had pinched out at his last waking, with only sundown to look forward to, and the next, long night of enraptured reading, infusions of nicotine, fitful oblivion.
            For Julie's mother had gone, Jim was leaving this morning, and Milo had no idea what the future held, only that it looked perilous, and that he had to get his hands on some cigarette money quick, as well as keep Rill satisfied that a job was in the offing. Mostly he had to steel his nerves to face Julie again and adapt to his new situation, whatever it might prove to be.
            "Here we go again," said Embert, having eaten Barnie's last two bagels and bummed a glass of Rill's orange juice.
            "Lead on, me bi," said Barnie, still red-eyed but ready for a few hairs of the dog. "I'll spring for dinner," he added over his shoulder.
            "Hey!" said Embert. "Now you're talking!" And back they went through the glittering mid April morning to the Fo'c'sle, Embert swinging his pail. He ensconced himself with a mug of coffee at the back table, opened his notebook to a blank page and stared at it, trying to think what to write. Barnie sat in a window, nursing a beer, trying to interpret the New York Times.
            A massive North Vietnamese assault west of Quangtri City had been thrown back with heavy loss of life. Government casualties were not given, but were thought also to have been heavy. B-52s bombed deep inside North Vietnam for the first time since November, 1967. The U.S. Command said the raids were in response to the Communist invasion across the demilitarized zone. Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird warned North Vietnam the strikes would continue until it ended its offensive in the South. Despite the attacks the U.S. would meet its goal of reducing its force in South Vietnam to 69,000 by May 1, he said. Unnamed U.S. sources said the North Vietnamese offensive might affect President Nixon's decision to pull more American troops out of South Vietnam after May 1. General Creighton W. Adams said the Communist push would prove to be an even bigger miscalculation than the 1968 Tet Offensive. The U.S. repeated its pledge to do whatever was necessary to help South Vietnam stop the Communist drive, but was not contemplating the use of ground forces.
            Barnie's stomach burned, his Jewish heart quailed, at the gathering catastrophe. It was a bad war, worse to lose.
            Rill, rolling slowly by on his bicycle, saw his bushy head bent in the window, arm stretched across the paper, reaching blindly for his glass, and marveled that anyone could spend a spectacular morning like this in a dingy bar.
            At the Post office, in Axy's box, was a check for Obsidian's keep, gas, utilities and "unforeseen emergencies."
            A few days earlier he had held a cordial phone conversation with her, assured her that Obsidian was in fine fettle, that all was well at her house, that he was happily encamped there. He did not mention her three new tenants. The duplicity troubled him, but he did not wish to worry her, and counted on them to be gone soon. She seemed to be having such a good time. "San Francisco is just so wonderful, I'd forgotten how wonderful it was," she kept repeating, without citing any particular, her tone worrying Rill to wonder if she would be coming back alone, or perhaps only to return to the West Coast.
            Having deposited the check in his new account, he rode out to Race Point and inspected the tranquil sea, on the way back stopping in at the A&P for some liver and a few household necessities, then went "home," as he caught himself calling it, and set about cleaning the pleasantly empty house. When he put his loose change into the bedside dish, which he saved for the laundromat, it was almost empty, and he supposed, without paying much heed, that some coins had been borrowed for that purpose— by Milo he hoped.
            Milo was sitting at the counter in Adam's Pharmacy with two packs of Pall Malls in his satchel at his feet, a cup of coffee and a package of toasted peanut butter cracker snacks before him. He would have been content had there been room to spread out a bit and read and write in his notebooks, or if only he didn't now feel unwelcome at Bob's. He had too little left of the change he had taken from Rill's dish to buy even an English muffin to justify taking up a booth, where he might have been able to have a few words with Julie, and so, despite his immediate amenities, he felt no less beleaguered.
            He hoped in the next few days to run into various restaurant owners and cadge the promise of a job, but it was still early in the season, and he had long since— he was only too aware— won a name for haughty surliness, nor would any retail shop in ten million years want to feature his gaunt, grey, ferret-like face.
            Back on the street, he was deliberating where to go and what to do, when along came Chas Bogan, whom he had not seen in what? three years? Chas however had an exact memory of the $125 gambling debt Milo owed him from the days when such sums passed casually around their winter circle. Chas had simply disappeared, and Milo had never given him another thought, but here he was, out of the blue, a new Chas, red-faced, angry and adamant, wanting his money, and wanting it now. That Milo had no job, not a cent on the horizon, nor even a place to call his own— none of this was Chas's problem. He expected the money by tomorrow, or else. He would be looking for Milo. Chas had always had a touch of the mobster in his unsmiling eye and hard expeditions, but now Milo divined the unpredictable mayhems of cocaine, and, badly frightened, he barged forthrightly into Bob's, only to be told that Julie had taken the day off.
            He used one of his precious dimes to call her from the nearest phone. She said, "The coast is clear. Come on over."
            He smoked two cigarettes on the meatrack to calm himself, then furtively slouched to her apartment. The door being ajar, he went in. She was in the shower. That door being wide open, he could not help but look. She was rinsing her hair, her head back to the rain of water, hands caressing her cheeks. A devastating glimpse of breast and thigh through the curtain propelled him down the hall into the living room, where he had a clear view of her bedroom.
            It was a large apartment, luxurious compared to any place he had ever lived, and he stepped within the even more potent aura of her personal odors and perfumes, and gaped into the jewelry box on her dressing table, shocked at the profusion of gold and silver, ruby, jade and amethyst, Wealth incarnate.
            With barely an instant's hesitation he plucked a heavy necklace from the tangle, pocketed it and slipped back into the hall. She was soaping her face and the water frothing down her round belly and over her pubic mound had made a pendant spout of her sumptuous bush, which poured a braided stream like a penis, and for a moment he saw a man. A sexual charge shot straight through his own throbbing prick, scaring him out of his wits, and he tiptoed in repugnant panic down the stairs, found himself stunned on the street, running to get beyond sight of her windows, panting for his den at Axy's. It was several hours before he remembered the necklace in his pocket.
            Embert, after a dozen false starts, by mid-afternoon had filled the wastebasket by the waiter's station in the Fo'c'sle with balled pages, and called it quits. He went down the street to the Governor Bradford and bummed a beer from Barnie, who was glaring across the chessboard at his neophyte opponent, who was trying to plot his next three moves, with all possible variations.
            "Move!" Barnie kept droning like a foghorn. "Move!"
            Embert had no taste for games and strolled down to the wharf, where the Windfall was unloading a good catch, and one of the crew, a Cape Verdean drinking companion of his, handed him down a fine cod from the first basket, without even being asked.
            Walking back, pail in left hand, fish-tail gripped in his right, he met another friend, who told him that Coral had moved in with Amy.
            This Embert was not glad to hear, as he must to some degree be thereby discommoded. Amy's compact, two-room apartment had a convertible couch in the living room, where Embert liked to lounge, on the admittedly rare evenings when he was not occupied elsewhere.
            Amy's last house-guest— her best friend from Worcester— Embert by noon of the third day had just got plushly knelt upon a hassock, panties around her knees, skirt around her waist, when Amy came home early from work, occasioning the guest's departure and his own removal to Axy's; though lately, excepting his night in jail, he had begun to slip back into Amy's good graces.
            But Coral had the look of permanence. She was a pathetic creature, a runaway, maybe nineteen, sweet-voiced, dreamy, lost in her own world, as if she'd had too much acid, perhaps a bit simple, or simply recalcitrant to the normal exigencies, albeit possessed of a robust figure. Undismayed, always smiling, she wandered the streets in the rain with all manner of derelicts, who treated her with unified consideration, as someone special, and from her first appearance in town had aroused Amy's irresistible, elder sister's penchant for taking responsibility.
            "She'll cramp yer style, me bi," grumped Barnie, himself not in the best of moods, having moved ever more disdainfully and carelessly after each of his opponent's interminable analyses, and finally attended so little to the resulting, inane position that he had succumbed to a knight fork of his king and queen, and resigned in disgust, his unsurprised conqueror airily denying him a chance to get even, leaving at once, none the wiser.
            On their way back to Axy's Barnie bought some potatoes and broccoli and two bottles of French Chardonnay, but the benighted clerk was not on duty and he had to pay full price, shrinking his remaining funds.
            He could, with one phone call, have got all the money he wanted from his Uncle Nathan, but he was loath to do it. His uncle indulged him, always hoping he would settle down, always ready to employ him in one warehouse or another, eager, at any time, after a token interim, to move him into management, set him up for life. Uncle Nate never dreamt he drank more than the glass of sacramental wine; he deplored Barnie's divorces, would have been sickened by his recent donnybrook. He loved Barnie, understood him in a way, sympathized with him far more than Barnie's late parents had ever done, envied him his sated wanderlust, especially his trips to Israel, which vicariously assuaged somewhat Nate's own yearnings, balked by an invalid wife and a mistress, agoraphobic refugee of the Vichy regime, whose life took place at her window.
            Soon, soon, the vagrant nephew promised himself, he would go home, work and save money, for a little while consort with the old man, the only human being for whom his respect had survived intact the vicissitudes of manhood.
            Rill gave Embert a lesson in fish filleting, while Barnie prepared the vegetables and risotto and made the wine flow. Listless Milo, glass in hand, sat and watched, intermittently taking a few small puffs of relief, then, at the sharpening pangs in his chest, pinching out his Pall Mall for a little respite before lighting up again. He had finally called Julie and made elaborate apologies for not having been able to come over, blaming important matters that had suddenly arisen, and in atonement inviting her out to dinner on the morrow's eve, all the while inwardly pledging eternal love to her so earnestly that, once he had hung up, he was unsure how much he had said.
            New terrors now seized him. He had no idea what the necklace was worth— whether enough to buy off Chas Bogan and pay for dinner both— nor even which jewelry shops were open at this time of year, whereat he realized that if the necklace were sold in town it would be traceable to him, and any dealer would be suspicious of someone like himself trying to fence this singular item. Where could he say he had got it? Or suppose no one would buy it, or they tried to cheat him, or discounted its value against risk of its being hot? He could hardly go around comparing offers. A blitz of baneful aspects— not least the fact that the necklace belonged to Julie herself— swelled his mind, stinging him worse than his lungs, and he began to smoke with fervid impunity, drink the wine like beer, and wonder if he might somehow sneak the necklace back into its box, but that accomplished, how could he then pay for their dinner, which he now conceived as a sort of betrothal, and what about Chas Bogan's absolutely credible threat to break his fingers if the $125 were not forthcoming?
            He ate ravenously with the rest, sat smoking while they cleaned up and shared out the last of Axy's Grand Marnier. This latest dead soldier would be replaced, Rill could not doubt, from his own pocket, but he had no heart for seeking recompense from the obviously broke. He could only hope they would soon be employed, if not gone, but he had ceased to ask with any audible urgency after their prospects, felt a certain concerned curiosity, even affection, toward them all, and seemed to have been won over by an unfamiliar lassitude. What did a few dollars matter in a life of almost total discipline and frugality? And the strange thought passed through his mind: After all, are these not my children?
            Milo's spirits, lifted on the tide of Chardonnay, were buoyed full moon-ward on the billow of liqueur, till he felt superior to his fate. The humiliations of begging and petty theft were hazed with an almost heroic hue. He was a noble desperado of the unappreciated world of pure intellect, the equal of anything or anyone. With the advent of summer and sacred Julie by his side all things fine and true might come to pass.
            Barnie wandered about restlessly. He was so saturated with alcohol that instead of calming it only aggravated him. The ubiquitous books made him feel his failures acutely; he seldom read anything any more but the news, and yet it seemed to him he did little else but read. He had come to Provincetown the previous November with the idea of writing a play, but had never got sat down to it. The only serious thing he had done beside drink and play chess was to re-read Confucius, wherein (Book XIX, 4) he had found the line, spoken by Tzu-hsia, Even minor arts are sure to have their worthwhile aspects, but the gentleman does not take them up because the fear of a man who would go a long way is that he should be bogged down.
            Barnie himself was going nowhere steadily but straight down. He had no destination, no future: it had to be faced. He had at least chided Embert for playing at poetry, and Embert had seemed to agree that what he really ought to be writing was a novel. Then Barnie had quoted the Master himself: I have yet to meet the man who is as fond of virtue as he is of beauty in women.
            All Embert had said to that was, "Thank god in this country we have separation of ethics and art."
            Rill, having fed Obsidian, occupied his favorite chair by the fire, puzzling how Milo might most diplomatically be prompted to wash both his person and his clothes. Evidently the missing change had not gone to the laundromat— of course Rill could only surmise who had taken it, though the others seemed unlikely suspects. He might merely have asked, but he was loath to embarrass anyone. Still he felt a need to solve the problem. For Embert too showed signs of restiveness at the aroma that preceded and followed Milo wherever he went, and even kind-hearted Rill himself, dimly aware that Milo's travail was not strictly material, now kept at a distance, strove not to wrinkle his nose.
            "It all goes back to Eisenhower," Barnie was saying. "He wouldn't allow elections because he knew the Communists would win."
            "It goes back to the French," Milo said in his hollow voice. "We're just the next bloodsucker on line."
            "And after the French came the Japanese, and before that it was the Chinese," Embert said. The last time he had been up in Boston the bars around the Fenway seemed to be full of dark skinned amputees. "It's human nature," he conceded. "The strong screw the weak."
            "I can't be bothered with a thousand years ago," Milo said. "Right now we're Planetary Enemy Number One."
            Rill turned his chair to listen. Too young for Korea, he had missed combat in Vietnam by luck of special assignment. He followed the fortunes of the First Marine Division with a kind of squeamish remorse, grateful not to be slogging through rice paddies or trying to distinguish friend from foe hiding in thatched huts.
            "What a nice country this could be! You know?" Milo said, drink having dimmed his pessimism.
            "It could be a great country," Barnie corrected.
            "It is a great country," Rill said, "it seems to me. In spite of everything."
            "Thank you," Barnie said with sincere vehemence. "Thank you." Notwithstanding his pride in Israel, he was still a patriot, fearful of America's new self-flagellating liberalism that lacked the courage to win its misbegotten war. "I'm a great believer in the free enterprise system," he added.
            Milo said, "A nation of thieves. The whole system's rotten to the core."
            Rill said, "In general I think it's probably fair to say that everything is getting better. In a way, I suppose, science makes it inevitable. Life expectancy is up. People are living better."
            Patient Embert refrained from saying, "Some people."
            Milo laughed with scorn, had a coughing fit. "Everybody's got their scam. We could cure cancer right now," he said, "if it weren't for the AMA. There's billions involved. Hospitals. The whole medical establishment. The drug companies."
            "The undertakers," Barnie said.
            "Yeah," Milo said. "Life's a joke."
            "The only thing funny about life is people," Barnie said.
            Milo nodded, started coughing again.
            "It's a scary world out there," Barnie mused, feeling middle-aged suddenly. "If you want peace of mind you've got to be a hermit. There's a lady from Cambridge down here for the winter. She says, 'I come out my door on the beach in the morning, the only decision of the day is whether to turn left or right.'"
            "Yeah," Milo said. "Another rich bitch who doesn't know what to do with herself."
            "The piece that passeth all understanding," said Embert. "That's the one I want. What does she look like, by the way?"
            "Me bi, me bi," Barnie remonstrated perfunctorily. "At least McGovern's got a chance. Whatever happens Nixon's not going to be re-elected. We may be stupid, but we're not morons."
            Milo laughed his hollow laugh.
            Embert kept quiet.
            Rill said, "I have to agree with a lot of things Muskie says..."
            Barnie, browsing Axy's shelves, idly opened a collection of Alfred Steiglitz's photographs, and a print fell out, not part of the book, a separate portrait— sequestered within its pages— of a young woman of such sensual beauty and radiant spirit that he turned from the conversation in grave wonder and meek regret. He finally, mutely passed it to Embert.
            "Now, that's what I want," said the young Casanova. "Who's she?"
            Milo half glanced with dismissal and handed it on to Rill.
            Rill sat stunned. "It's her," he said at length.
            "Who?" Embert demanded.
            "Axy," said Rill. "Auxilia Lomes."
            "When did you say she was coming back?" Embert wanted to know.
            Rill narrowed his eyes with rare opprobrium, went on staring. "She must be 75," he said at last. "But that's her. None other."
            "She was one beautiful babe," Barnie said. "Fifty years ago."
            "And what does she look like now?" Embert asked.
            "Exactly like that, only older," Rill said crossly. "And she's coming back any day now. And we've got to be out of here."
            "You too?" said Embert slyly.
            "I'm afraid so," Rill affirmed, recovering his balance. He dangled the picture for Obsidian, who happened to be passing. The cat stopped, sniffed a corner and walked on. Rill took the picture into his room and laid carefully it in the middle of an empty drawer, with the vague idea of getting it framed for Axy's return. It seemed odd to him that there was not a single photograph in the house.
            Otherwise the place was exemplary, the eye endlessly entertained. Only Milo was immune to its benign influences, despising everyone more carefree than himself, believing them to be unworthy of their good fortune. All about were paintings, sculpture and antiques, chipped or cracked or dented with usage, nice things everywhere, faded, elegant, rightly situated or conjoined, with lots of small oddities to be handled and examined, souvenirs presumably of her travels. Milo's worst fear was aggravated here: suppose the mind weren't enough? He hated the comfort.
            Eventually they all went out on the porch. Obsidian followed them and crouched at the far end, peering wide-eyed into the woods. The full moon shed its silver sheen over everything, dimming the stars for eons around. The air was almost balmy, the peepers astoundingly loud.
            "Hey, shut yer yaps!" yelled Milo. In the human silence their din seemed to recede for an second, then with renewed frenzy swelled again. Milo laughed his hollow laugh, and the others nodded and grinned. Then Barnie and Embert set out for town, and Milo and Rill went back inside.
            At the Fo'c'sle Embert and Barnie joined a table that had been making merry since mid afternoon, and, having just restored its stamina with a feast of fresh oysters, warmly exhorted them to finish the succulent few that were left.
            Ray Rasharkie cleared away some of the debris and bought another round of drinks. He and his wife Helen were in town for their annual week, untimely business deals precluding their preferred stint in July or August. Still, the off-season had its appeal: none but real people were around, no dilettantes, no phonies, though flesh was in drastically short supply.
            They looked to be in their early fifties, lean and athletic, with the waxen tans, brittle, grey hair and lined faces that come of chain-smoking and naps under sunlamps. Ray at once, with an air almost boyish, removed from its leather carrying case, divested of its chamois jacket, and placed back upon the table a foot- long, carven, mahogany coffin, while his initial audience chortled indulgently. Bent forward he seemed to dote on his totem or toy, withholding explanations, caressing its smooth sides like a sleeping salamander, the whole time shooting quizzical, insinuating glances upwards at Embert and Barnie, who by their mutual, intent inspection conceded that it was indeed an item of interest, with its curious hieroglyphs incongruously inlaid with gold leaf.
            "I got it in Madagascar," Ray said. "Go ahead. Open it. Slowly, gently," he adjured.
            Barnie reached forth a fingertip and began to slide open the lid. The inmate, evidently a ship's captain, wore a blue cap, his penitential visage surmounting a brass-buttoned jacket, formally, precisely carved and painted, his aspect one of dignified decorum and somber resignation, classic in its rue of all things human, flawed, ephemeral.
            As the lid passed the waist, then exposed the thighs where the jacket's side panels parted, up leapt a colossal red-headed prick. Some ingenious mechanism within made it quiver.
            Embert gave a shout of glee; Barnie withdrew his hand. The others grinned as the lid slid shut of its own accord, but what was most startling at first tended to go unnoticed because of the vibrating, red phallus— the eyes had opened wide, lewd and alive.
            "Hey, let's see that again," demanded Embert amid the hilarity.
            "No more today," said Ray, wrapping it reverently as a renowned flute. "Don't want to wear it out. It could never be repaired."
            "He takes it everywhere," Helen said. "He gets a kick out of it. And it's always a hit."
            "An authentic artifact that ain't," opined Barnie the traveler.
            "Doubt it myself," Ray easily agreed. "The good times are over. No offense," he averred to Embert. "Nobody would want them back."
            Embert shook his head sincerely. Of Madagascar he seemed to recall only the ancient custom that families dug up their dead relatives, with profound ardor identified the relics of each, lavishly feted, re-arrayed and reburied them every few years, as fortunes permitted— recent cadavers and immemorial bones alike. Or was that Mozambique?
            A casual fragmentation reigned; everyone had been drinking for so long a general sobriety seemed to have come round again and a steady current of energy flowed in all directions through one and all, except perhaps Kimball Tardiff, snoozing in his paint-smeared work-clothes, a benign smile on his unshaven face, a half-smoked Parodi behind his ear, his pen and sketchbook open before him. At intervals he opened his eyes, mildly surveyed his animated table-mates, then ceremonially toasted them one at a time with his whiskey, let his eyelids down once more.
            He had stepped out of his studio to get some air and was hailed by Helen and Ray, a juncture happily choiceless, as he had just finished painting for the day, and because they never allowed anyone to buy a drink in their presence for the entire length of their stay, which they always spent exclusively in the Foc's'le, regaling all comers, Ray gravely peeling twenties off a fat wad that he replenished daily from an equally ample stack of travelers' checks.
            The others— Miz Maud, refractory daughter of distinguished lineage, in black beret, sailor pants and British middy shirt, and Rima Katz, red-haired, hoarse, brash with loss, up from Queens for a few days in search of a summer rental— were, each in her way, busily bemused, Miz Maud by visualizing the architectural marvels of St. Petersburg (the name Leningrad had never passed her lips, never been permitted even to approach the threshold of her consciousness) which it was her unremitting dream some day to see through the lenses of her own eyes, Rima enjoying a respite from the torments of her moribund marriage, comparing the beach houses she had looked at thus far, taking the measure of mad Ray, familiar Barnie, dashing Embert.
            At some point— eight? nine?--- Helen flashed a silver cigarette case. The others declining, Embert found himself going solo out back with her to smoke a joint.
            It appeared that she and Ray had been doing this for years, that it was a sort of sexual safari. "What a tool he's got!" she said. "He fucks me three times a day, and then he goes out to get more."
            Embert nodded and nodded, handing back the joint, holding his breath.
            "You wouldn't believe his tool," she said. "You should see it. When he goes to the men's room go along and get a look. He's a real phenomenon. And he's not slowing down either. We've been married 30 years, we've got three grown children, and he's still going strong. All his secretaries love him. No complications. Just a quick dick once a day in his rocking chair. He's got this great rocking chair in his office. Which I can vouch for, believe me! We've got one just like it at home."
            Embert's pent breath burst free, she handed him back the joint and he filled up again, kept nodding, eyes on his feet.
            She went on in her velvety voice and little by little he gathered she was making an overture, though in a most modest manner, as if he doubtless had better things to do. Embert was wary. She was one spooky lady, and it was unclear whether their sport was to be private, or superintended by the paragon Ray himself. Embert had never denied a woman in his life, but this cool specimen, this whole, apparently annual, joint enterprise, gave him pause, made him feel outmaneuvered— and then to his discountenanced non-response the veteran connoisseur was saying, without resentment or regret, "Well, you're a fine-looking guy, but you're a poet. You're the sensitive type. You probably wouldn't be any good."
            A bit flummoxed, Embert kept shaking his head as he followed her back inside, where a new round awaited him. He drank thirstily, wondering if she had been making fun of him, it was all so cordial and bland. In the next shuffle of trips to the bathrooms, he found himself beside Rima, more to his taste in any case. She was lively and provocative at badinage, and presently he said sotto voce, "Come to bed."
            "No thanks," said she cheerfully. She would have gladly done so by night's end had he paid her the minimal regard of getting acquainted before making his play in public no less, but she was not about to reward arrogance. She gave him an incandescent grin and pointed her breasts across the table at Barnie.
            First beaten, now balked, Embert began to want Rima in earnest, intolerably teased by her full- throated laughter and russet promise. Attending with more care, he observed that she and Barnie seemed easy with each other, projecting amiabilities at a distance, like ruminative, old friends in amused or rueful agreement about every subject that came up. He had never seen Barnie so genial, nor so alert at this hour of an evening, and turned his hopes momentarily toward Miz Maud, only to have his first impression finalized: she was simply too old, starchy and inscrutable, lectured rather than spoke, and unfailingly, with remote condescension and familial sincerity, addressed him as "dear," even at one point remarking, "You seem to be still a bit green."
            Embert allowed the possibility while she gave him a list and précis of bildingsromans to read. "Just plunge in," she said in answer to his professed ambitions and doubts. "Don't wait. Just plunge in and swim."
            At eleven, when the party broke up, he and Barnie hiked a few blocks toward Axy's and came to a miniature house ablaze with lights. The half-open door emanating festive voices and the smells of incense and cannabis, they made bold to seek welcome.
            Around a table with bottles several people milled, among them two pretty young women Embert knew by sight. A narrow stairs without banister furnished busy passage up or down, precarious with hilarity. It was like a bare-walled child's house with no heat, a shack tacked up for summer play, apparently unused at present.
            "You can stay for a minute, but this is a private party, which is going to start as soon as the last guest gets here," said debonair Archie Felton, and studied his watch.
            Barnie sat down and poured himself a glass of Jim Beam. He could not remember the last woman he had liked at first sight, and that went double for one who had seemed to reciprocate. All his concern for the future melted— barring a Chinese and/or Russian entry into the war— life felt full, and the bourbon whirled him away to a warm refuge a bit more sedate than the Fo'c'sle, where Rima Katz was even now hastening to meet him in a soft light beyond antipathy or demand. It was not so much fantasy as a sort of rehearsal of hope, exhilarating to feel the heart swell with new strength, and most consoling of all, once again to be able to get higher and higher without losing his comic distance or saving vestiges of sobriety.
            Embert saw a chance to repair his fortunes, the more auspicious as it emerged that they had stumbled into a prearranged orgy, but thrill met disillusionment when the awaited one proved to be the great-grand niece of a popular Episcopal theologian, whom he was much enamored of, an elegant and cool eighteen, who glimmered like gold, wore antique furs or torn leather, and drove a dented Mercedes.
            By now everyone but Felton the facilitator had withdrawn upstairs. "I'd be happy to arrange something for you," he said. "Weekends are best. You let me know the players you want-- five male and five female is about the right number, intimate without being claustrophobic, and maybe a few bi-sexuals, if you want some options. My fees are very reasonable. Confidentiality guaranteed," he added with emphasis.
            "Sounds great," said Barnie perfunctorily. "You line up the ladies, we'll bring the booze."
            Upstairs sounded with low voices, constrained giggles, male guffaws, then several thumps and more, louder laughter, as of children rough-housing, succeeded by parodic squeals and growls.
            Felton dithered a bit; on occasion, this being one, half his fee came from an in kind part in the proceedings, but he hesitated to assume the role of doorman; he hoped the crashers— familiar faces both— would leave of their own accord.
            Embert's heart hurt; he deserved his golden goddess, and she him. Why was she acting like a common rabbit? While Felton was gazing elsewhere with an air of polite but jaded patience, Embert shed his clothes and climbed speedily up the stairs, Barnie cocking a wry eye after him.
            Shouts and wary laughter ensued, then mostly girls' voices, good-natured, insolently, operatically awed, half-challenging. Felton turned up eyes and palms to the ceiling, and shrugged at Barnie, who nodded with grave amusement, listening as the muffled introductions overhead gradually give way to apologetics. Presently Embert came down the stairs looking dour, and Felton went up, saying, "Close the door behind you."
            Embert got dressed, the only one to have stripped naked. "And take Barnie with you!" a girl's voice called down.
            About to pour a nightcap, Barnie too felt aggrieved, half a bottle of Beam remaining, but then he thought how little sense it made to booze alone while randy youth disported and outcast Embert fumed.
            The two pals went homeward, shoulder-bumping and boisterous, both slightly shell shocked, orgies being luxury beyond their ken. Embert, crawling naked upon the candle shadowed scene, had had an impression chiefly of a slant-roofed, low room with mattress-padded floor, strewn pillows and bedding, dim figures lounging decorously apart, minus only their outer wear, his golden goddess in a slip sitting cross- legged, without expression on her face, the image of insuperable composure.
            They hadn't gone two blocks before Embert changed his mind and turned back toward Amy's. Fondly crowing, "Go to it, me bi, pump yer bilge in good health," Barnie reeled on in his happy dream, unbothered by the stumblings that at dawn would wake him with a sprained wrist so stiff it hurt to brush his teeth and a pair of skinned knees.
            At Amy's Embert found only Coral. Amy had gone home to take charge, her little brother— now seventeen— having got into liquor troubles again with the law, their mother a helpless hysteric, their father long gone.
            Embert cracked a beer and sat on the couch with Coral, watching tv. Social humblings aside, he was downcast by his fruitless day with poesy and the growing recognition that it was not a serious endeavor with him, that the novel about his brother was what he ought to be writing— or should it be plain biography?--- The Short Life and Death of Charming Charles Pernell.
            But it was a fearsome theme. He shied from thought of its endless reverberations. Proud, pampered, rambunctious Charles, always the apple of his anxious family's eye, had combined a warm-hearted exuberance for everything life had to offer with an unappeasable fury at the white world hemming him in, which he shunned when he could, nor would he, even in benign situations, dissemble his abhorrence with veiled eye and seemly tone.
            Their urbane, courtly, Southern father, pillar of his precincts, member of myriad committees, boards and clubs, never left the house without a vest and tie, had made himself at home on both sides of the street, and devoted his life to catapulting his five children far beyond reach of the mean poverty and social wreckage he had climbed up from and daily dealt with yet. Charles' death had nearly killed him, and Embert's consequent defection from the quest for economic eminence to bohemian vagabondage had made him an old man, and Embert in private retrospects a doubt-ridden, remorseful son.
            Painful puzzles these, to be deferred or fled. Embert was too drunk, too upwrought this chaotic hour to think gravely, his evil demons raging to break loose. Something about Coral had always galled him, her perfect unresponsiveness perhaps; he was not used to women ignoring him, and against his will he wondered if it was race that let her deem him insignificant.
            He toed off his shoes, swung his legs up and across her lap and lounged back with a cushion behind his head. She turned with mild unsurprise, gazed at him in silence for a disconcerting ten seconds, then turned back to the tv, her thighs warm beneath his calves.
            "Hey, little sister," he said.
            She turned again obligingly and flashed her familiar, enigmatic smile that seemed meant only for herself, like a cat closing its eyes briefly in the sun.
            "Come on over here," he commanded, "and keep me company. I've had a hard day."
            She glanced again at him with what, sympathy? Curiosity? Scorn? He could not tell. "Come on," he said. "It's a cruel world out there."
            When she finally, almost absentmindedly, turned back to the tv he sat up and on his hands hoisted himself close beside her, thigh to thigh. This she acknowledged only by seeming to become even more indifferent, and he put an arm around her shoulder, pulled her tight against him, and got a whiff of hair and female muskiness.
            His own startled, indrawn breath affronted him, and he tilted her chin upwards gently but firmly with the tips of his fingers. Her eyes met his unblinkingly, pools mysterious, opaque and deep. He kissed her unresisting, immobile mouth, shockingly soft. He licked and probed until his tongue slid between the wetted lips, scraped through her unclosed bite, and after a moment found out her tongue, which first made shy retreat, then little by little seemed to uncurl and swell, wallow and loll the length and breadth of his.
            Prolonged, the kiss grew tedious, for while their tongues gamboled like slow whales, her lips moved not, nor her hands, nor any other part of her, nor did her eyes, which never left his, divulge what she was thinking. It felt every moment more eerie, but he lusted now in earnest. She was, he knew from prior appraisal, marvelously made, despite her shapeless shift, her always indifferent dress, and with growing determination he pressed his palm down hard on her mons and closed his fingers around her vulva. She pulled his hand up and put it on his knee. He tried again, and a guileless contest five times played out— neither saying a word— until on the sixth he simply held her mons beyond her strength, even with both hands, to drag him off, and presently she relaxed and her eyes strayed to the tv.
            Aggravated, impatient and needy, he firmly fondled her through the thin cloth, feeling her mat of bush but no outline of underwear, then decisively lifted her shift. Her exquisite nakedness justified everything at last; it was late and he was tired too, too tired for games. He pulled down his pants and kneed open her thighs. She tried to hold him off, but he was much too imposing, she too voluptuously lethargic, her vagina slippery. He was suddenly, frightfully excited. Amazed too to feel her hands at the back of his neck, her eyes still fixed on his, he with defiant malice, with abysmal vengeance faltering into entreaty, convulsively thrust into her clasping luxuriance, faster, harder, more repeatedly than he meant, and feeling the onset of orgasm, at every instant thought to withdraw, intended to withdraw, was ever verging on withdrawal, yet could not help thinking, This one's for Charles, with the immediate admittance that his brother almost certainly had never touched a white woman, would have been too proud to have permitted himself even to want a white woman— so that in the end, chagrined by his own groans of restraint, he only managed to strain to an excruciating, dread-paralyzed stop, and sustained an incomplete, almost painful spillage, which left him aching, still partially tumescent.
            What to do then he knew not. He kissed the tip of her nose so clumsily hard she winced. He sat up. She too sat up and smoothed out her shift, looking away, always away.
            "Shouldn't you douche?" he finally suggested. "Are you on the pill?"
            She turned slightly and closed her catlike eyes at him, somehow with her whole posture expressing acceptance of whatever life might bring.
            "We'd better not tell Amy," Embert warned with some sternness.
            Her eyes widened. "Oh, no!" she said.
            He went to the door, came back and kissed her, and again felt her fingers at his nape.
            Walking home unhappily, he decided she was the strangest woman he had ever had— hardly a word had passed between them— then remembered with regret that he had not even bothered to handle her breasts, and in almost the same moment read clearly the catastrophic look in her eyes— it was shy trust. Wo! he said to himself. This is a child.
            When he got back to Axy's it was two o'clock. Barnie was snoring loudly on the couch, and a nettled- looking Milo was bent at the dinner table, writing in a notebook, his broken-spined canons spread around him, his ashtray full, a veil of smoke bluing the air.
            "Hey!" said Embert. "What's happening?"
            Milo mutely jerked his head once in negligent greeting, and resumed his meticulous calligraphy. Embert retired to Axy's room, shut the door, and starting to get into bed noticed Obsidian with slitted eyes upon him curled up in the jumbled bedding. "Can't take it, eh, Mr. Black?" he said derisively. But he was careful not to disturb the cat any more than he had to, and felt oddly comforted.
            The next morning they sat around the fire, nursing their various hurts. Rill too had had a date of sorts. Out for a rare evening walk, he ran into the girl who had stood him up two weeks before. Convivial conversation developed, and they went back to her place to drink some coffee, black, no sugar for him, a shot of peppermint schnapps in hers.
            It was a cozy if minuscule room. They sat on her bed with their backs to the wall and talked amiably for hours it seemed. "Typical of me," he explained, rueful and wry.
            At length, nothing having happened, apparently no happenings in view, he began to feel importunate, thanked her for her hospitality and went home. It was only after he had got into his own bed that he construed her occasional glances at his crotch as hope of his arousal.
            Well, might she not have leaned her head on his shoulder, as girls were wont to do, or invited him to make love, or simply undressed and sat on his lap, but all she had done was talk and sip schnapps in the raw once the coffee was gone— the smell of which a bit repelled him. God knows what she had wanted! As for him, as usual he was evaluating the situation through the lens of his past of perpetual postponements, as always leery that little or nothing in life was ever apt to equal its expectations— she was in all candor quite appealing, perhaps a pound or two heavier than his ideal shape, and perhaps a trifle toothy, but on the whole she was a lively and intelligent female of about the right age, six or seven years younger than himself, with no visible blemishes, a commendable love of the outdoors and a manifest ability to live on little or no money, in short potentially a compatible mate, but was he really ready for such complications, such fateful crossroads? Maybe he would meet her again, and they could explore the future with more method, though he had to acknowledge, not without some relief, that as for ordinary company, call it day in, day out durability, it was doubtful she could ever hold a candle to Auxilia Lomes herself, who all too soon, or perhaps not soon enough, was destined to appear, and might well be wanting his attention to various pressing, practical matters, for the house was sunk in dire decrepitude, and he had a hankering at the very least to patch a few shingles and replace the softest boards of the mossy porch.
            Nods, head-shakes, eye-rollings empathetic or incredulous attended his deprecatory narrative, abridged to illustrate only his haplessness with women, and then Barnie and Embert gave a sort of choral account of their mutual adventures, ending with cheerful mention of Barnie's injuries, and leading to Embert's dolorous description of his coitus with Coral.
            "Ah, me bi!" said Barnie gravely.
            "No, not too cool," Embert admitted with a grim glower.
            No one tried to conceal his disapprobation, in Rill's case amounting to alarm. "I should think it would be pretty awkward once Amy gets back," he said.
            "That's no problem," Embert said gloomily. "Coral won't tell."
            "She won't, eh?" said Milo, the only one with no tale of his own. He was breakfasting on peanut butter and crackers, between swallows taking frugal drags on his next to last Pall Mall. In disgust he burst into a phlegm-burbling, gullet-clearing cough, covered his mouth too late, and shot a spot of mixed mush onto his knee, absentmindedly rubbed it in with his thumb.
            "Quit smoking!" Barnie said irritably.
            "Quit drinking!" Milo retorted with indignation.
            "Drinking's a hobby," Barnie decreed, "not suicide."
            "I'm the problem," Embert explained to Rill. "I'll be wanting to screw her again. I'm like a mad fool. After a certain point I just don't care what happens. I'd like to go over there right now. Once I get started I can't stop. I hate to put Amy through any more shit. But Coral's got these weird eyes... I mean, I know myself."
            "If I were you," said Rill "I'd drop them both." Embert's perplexities and predilections were beyond Rill, for whom the gift of sex invariably begot such a sense of obligation that he could not deny attendance on even a hopeless candidate for his long-term affections once he had accepted her initial favors— making it risky for him to dally, impossible to seek pure pleasure, even in a brothal— and he went on to relate in his usual, rueful manner, how a monetary conduit had evolved between himself and a Moroccan prostitute with three children, from which situation he had been extricated only by his fellow Embassy guards backed by redeployment Stateside.
            The whole thing had been perhaps— he confided with rare candor— at bottom a defiance of his father, who thought him neither a real man nor quite presentable, but it had proved fruitful at least in being the last time he ever acted or reacted with regard to what he supposed the old man's attitude might have been towards anything under sun or moon.
            "That I can understand," Barnie said. "Everybody has to overcome his upbringing." Embert groaned, shook his head, ground his teeth.
            "GodIsGreat," Barnie muttered resignedly.
            Embert reflected that there were those who believed in the efficacy of social conventions and the law, and so followed them, and got where? Nowhere! Some renegade whites to be sure got rich, but enterprising blacks got dead or jailed. They had not a lot of stars to steer by. And whites couldn't be trusted in a crunch— no heroes there, or anywhere for that matter, stupid to expect any— for in serious circumstances it was nearly as lethal to be a white friend of blacks as black itself.
            To reassure Barnie, he averred, with causal imprecision, "Well, one good thing came out of last night: I decided to write my novel."
            Milo cast Embert a look of incredulous contempt, disgust, indignation, outrage.
            "Now yer talkin, me bi," Barnie cried, greatly moved and gratified. "Let's get on with it," and he eased to his feet a little stiffly. His head ached, his stomach churned, on the whole he felt quite chipper and cheerful— especially given Embert's crucial turn, for the lad had talent and had only to apply himself in a sustained way— and he was looking forward to The Times and a few medicinal beers and then some chess, no lapses, no mad sacs on pure spec, no chitchat back and forth, just silent mate in the fewest moves, all straightforward, economical elegance, and then maybe in the evening Rima might put in another appearance at the Foc's'le, it didn't really matter if she did or didn't, he simply felt better about life, he felt better about everything, and in any case eventually there would be some freebees from Ray and Helen, and god knows what unforeseen entertainments to end the evening.
            But Embert shook his head. "I'm going to stick around for a while," he said.
            Barnie eyed him severely. "You're not going a-courting, are you?"
            "Believe me!" Embert said. "I'm keeping out of that. I've got to get some peace and quiet."
            Barnie nodded approval and left limping, groaning comedically all the way down the path to Back Street.
            Rill had chores to do— they were running out of staples— and he soon set off for the Post Office and A&P, with a preliminary stop at the Portuguese Bakery for a malassada, a new weakness of his.
            Milo was in a horrific state of nerves over his lifted necklace, his debt to Chas Bogan and his dinner date with Julie. Furious at Embert's trespass upon his accustomed morning privacy, he desperately wanted to escape into his notebooks until noon, when some jewelry store might open, though even sooner he would have to go out to get cigarettes, or rather money for cigarettes, for with Embert there the change dish on Rill's bureau was beyond reach. He would never have left the house at all this day, but for need of nicotine.
            Embert sprawled gloomily in Rill's rocking chair before the fire, trying to plot his novel, but he could not stop thinking of going back to Amy's and slipping into bed with warm-naked, lazy, late-sleeping Coral, sucking her tits, lapping her cunt, fucking her till she clutched his neck and came and he drowned in her engulfing eyes. How was one supposed to concentrate? he fumed with despair, and how long would Amy be away, how much temptation must he endure?
            Presently, Barnie's worried voice in his ear, he took his pail to the table and sat down opposite Milo. "Hope you don't mind," he said with gruff insincerity.
            Milo, queasily aware that Embert had not showered since his rape of Coral, wordlessly, hastily gathered his notebooks, put on his thin jacket and walked into town in the brilliant sunshine, praying he would not meet Chas or Julie or anyone except someone to loan him a few dollars or give him a job.
            Hunching past the window of Adam's Pharmacy he was surprised to see Amy sitting at the counter. He walked on half a block, his mind in a blur, then turned back with vague purpose and went in. She had a pack of Winstons beside her coffee cup.
            "Can I bum one of those?" he said.
            "Oh, sure," she said. "Want a cup of coffee?"
            "Yeah! Thanks," he said, shivering and rubbing his thin biceps. "Cold!"
            "What d'you mean?" she said cheerfully. "It's spring."
            She had driven back early, in her brother's car, not to lose another day's work, and because she couldn't take any more of her crazy mother, who maintained that the blame for everything lay with the police, who had been after him ever since he had beaten a speeding rap the day of his high school graduation.
            Amy was pleased with the world, having persuaded her endless ordeal of a sibling to enter detox in exchange for dropped misdemeanor charges; meanwhile she had the loan of his car, a rare luxury.
            Milo knew her casually. She had worked in various shops, signed on for unemployment in the winter, slaved to pay her summer rent, like everybody. She was just a good person trying to survive, like himself, someone who always got taken advantage of, like most people, a decent human being who deserved better.
            "There are some things I have no right not to tell you," he said, and made a quick abstract of the true character of her deceiver, Embert the gigolo, the lecher, the bully, the lush, and, though he didn't like to say it, a crappy writer and useless piece of black trash.
            She listened without expression, saying only, "I didn't know you knew Em so well."
            The diminutive gave Milo pause— as if a dream door had opened upon a crowded room, whose almost-familiar occupants, variously, wholly engrossed with each other, took no note of him— but having just torn the filter off yet a third, or was it a fourth? of Amy's Winstons cordially left halfway between them, he let the scene and its oblivious figures fade.
            With her little red bic lighter he ignited the ragged end of the cigarette, puffed until the loose, extruded fibers burned away and a solid core of reddened embers pulsed and greyed into ash, then to requite her made explicit report of Embert's debauch of Coral.
            He could not interpret her non-reaction. After sitting with lowered eyes, she finally seemed to rouse herself, rose, stood a moment, staring out the window, zipped her jacket, went to the register, leaving her few Winstons, bought a fresh pack, paid for their several coffees, on her way out said, in a voice remote and cold, "I'm glad to know about that."
            Irked by her peremptory departure, nonetheless he felt vindicated and emboldened too. Back on the sun-bright street, slipping past Bob's window, he caught a glimpse of Julie gliding among the tables with a coffeepot. Why was she working? Her jewelry box could feed her for a year, and her car for ten more. She was just hogging a precious job that others were starving for.
            As he hurried along, aimless, but wary of meeting Chas Bogan, he was elated to find a jewelry shop with door wide open. Readying for the season, its sly proprietor— a fat fifty with bald head and immense, sagging mustache— eyed Milo, gave the necklace a cursory glance and heft, inquired with sardonic jocularity, "Divorce settlement?"
            "Found it in the parking lot," Milo muttered, commenced his hollow laugh, but was saved from further exigencies by a prolonged fit of coughing.
            "Hundred and twenty-five," rejoined the gold broker with hasty distaste, and without waiting for a response, thumbed his wad, found no small bills, jumped his eyebrows, smirked, drawled, "Your lucky day," and thrust $130 at Milo, who, skulking away with sick heart, saw the necklace tossed atop a glimmering sprawl on the black velvet boards.
            Turning for the nearest cigarettes, he bumped headlong into Chas Bogan, in panic managed to extricate three twenties from his pocket. "That's all I've got," he nearly wept and pushed past, realizing too late that shaky, strung-out Chas would have settled for anything this day.
            Back at Axy's with five packs of Pall Malls and his remaining $62.75, he curled up in his lair, to hoard fortitude and composure for his dinner date with Julie.
            Embert still had the table, intently, silently mouthing names at the blank page, loud rock booming from the radio. All he needed was a name for Charles, but he had yet to find one with the right sound, nor could he put pen to paper till he did, since it must be the first word of the book's first sentence, and it felt too dire to start with an x or a blank.
            "Hey, would you mind turning that fucking shit down?" yelled frazzled Milo, whose idea of music for intellectual endeavor was Haydn and Mozart.
            Embert got up with dignity, turned off the radio, took his pail and headed for the Fo'c'sle, to bum a beer from Barnie and sit by the jukebox to think in peace.
            Before he reached his refuge though he met an icy Amy who said, "I want to talk to you."
            With heart-thud of foreboding and sullen resentment at being intercepted— but too much in the wrong to refuse— he trailed along to her apartment, half a step behind her mute, resolute stride. In the old days, after one's absence, they would simply have hastened to bed for an hour or so, then gone out for pizza and beer, then strolled home again for more bed, but now it was hard for him to act glad to see her.
            Coral was sitting on the couch, picking lint off Amy's best, black skirt. She didn't look up, and Amy said nothing to her, but balefully drew Embert into the bedroom and shut the door.
            "I am disappointed in you," she said.
            "What else is new?" said he, trying to think which of his multifarious offences she might mean. Lately he had been a saint, except for Coral, but he felt sure that secret was safe, if only he kept his hands off her henceforth, which now, at this serendipitous moment, he categorically, thankfully, painlessly resolved to do. Had Amy perhaps heard he was at that orgy? Once you had a bad rep you were always suspect. He sighed and looked at her, long-suffering.
            "You're a real bastard," she said.
            "What, what? What have I done now?" he wailed, all aggrieved innocence.
            "I almost can't believe you'd do this," she said. "I actually thought better of you. Do you remember that talk we had? Do you remember the promises you made? How are you going to be a writer if you can't tell the truth? You're not even human if you can't keep your word. You're like a little boy who thinks life's a cookie jar, and you can stuff yourself forever without getting sick or caught."
            Hurt, bewildered, heavy-hearted, he reeled with a sudden wave of doubt— having not seldom been tracked down by women's ad hoc posses— and finally sought refuge in fury at this white chick he'd hitched himself to, who moreover was wasting his morning, when he should be at the Fo'c'sle working, who dared in fact to lecture him on the subject of life. Life! He regarded her now with remorseless animosity, and she, cold with retribution, slammed him whole armed and hard across the face with a man's full force.
            His first response was one of pleased esteem, next ego interceded to demand he assert superiority, and he grabbed her, considered throwing her at the wall, then magnanimously tossed her into a rickety chair, which splintered with a sound like the crack of doom, whereat a more reckless ruckus ensued, and it took all his quickness to fend off her sinewy, simultaneous assaults of nails, feet and teeth.
            "What?" he kept saying, trying to sound piteous "What, what, what?"
            "You know what," she panted with furious challenge. "Say it. I want you to tell me."
            "What?" he said. "There's nothing to tell. So I smoked a joint with some harpie who wanted to screw me! So I walked into an orgy by mistake! I never touched anybody."
            "Why?" Amy said, undistracted by betrayals yet to hammer her. "Why did you have to touch Coral? That's despicable. She's completely defenseless. She's living in my house, where I let you come and go as you please..."
            "I was drunk," Embert said unhappily. "She wanted to."
            "You'd better get out," Amy said, starting to pick up the wreckage, not looking at him.
            He went into the living room, rife with humiliation and betrayal. Coral was gone. He made for the door, then saw her lying foetally on the floor at the end of the couch, knees to chin, with a pillow clutched over her ears with both hands.
            "Scumslut!" he uttered with dudgeon.
            Amy came out of the bedroom like a hornet. "Milo told me," she said. "And why did you let that creep into my private affairs?"
            He gaped at her, completely at a loss.
            "Embert," she said, "you've got a big mouth. Who else knows my business?"
            "No one," he said, guiltily glaring.
            "Embert, you're a liar," she said.
            The best he could do was warp an inward smile and shake his head with dubious qualification of everything he had ever been accused of, rolling doleful eyes at the ceiling.
            "You didn't tell Barnie?" she demanded with heavy sarcasm, "and that other weirdo? The one that looks like a mass murderer."
            Embert glanced down at Coral, who had not moved, still clutching the pillow over her head. "Rill Shortle?" he inquired pensively with a growing sense of injustice.
            "Shill Rortle?" she said. "He's a creep too. You too. You're all creeps!"
            Offended friendship swelled his veins. "Cool it!" he said gruffly, and shoved her backwards onto the couch. "Who're you?"
            She jumped up and went at him, hands on hips. "I'm me," she said. "You're a liar."
            He clipped her, as she had him, open handed, but with the hard heel, not his palm, and it knocked her into a rag-doll heap halfway across the room. Stunned less by impact than astonishment, she hauled herself up with the help of a table, looking nowhere staggered into her room and fell face-down across the bed, her feet sticking out absurdly in the air.
            After a pause came a low sob that grew into an awful, choked series of cries that made Embert shrink and draw breath, goaded withal by her naive surprise that he had hit her.
            He advanced to the doorway, angry, sorry, uncertain, his life again unraveling.
            Her grief increased in its terrible, knife-like plangencies, blades of disappointment, rage, despair and woe, that seemed to peel the world away to a nub of raw and bloody refuse.
            A sudden, unexpected wind blew up within him, an expansive pressure that blinded, burst and released him from anguish like a towering genie from a bottle on a glad gale gargantuan, implacable, riotous, joyful, avenging, austerely raging, and he wheeled and clouted her across the back of the head once, and then again and again in the rising malice he had always feared lay in wait for him and some white person.
            Whether she was any longer conscious he knew not, only that his aching knuckles had nearly brought him to a halt, when Coral appeared like a zombie in perfect silence and slipped between them.
            He stepped back as if burnt, panting and afraid, shaking his hands.
            "Get out," Amy said with muffled contempt. "Go get drunk."
            He reeled into the living room, bent like an old man, lifted his pail with two fingers, trudged back to the Fo'c'sle in a sick daze. Barnie bought him a beer. Embert was too appalled to speak, Barnie too cheerful to be borne, the unread Times before him, and Embert, omitting his token sit-around and chitchat, arose at once with pail and beer— Barnie urging him on, "To work, me bi, to work!"--- and went to sit by the jukebox, craving some exultant blast of sax to spirit him away.
            Amy was by far his best girlfriend ever, his unfailing helpmate, except when she got mad, which never happened without due cause. She could read him like a book, a faculty at times disconcerting, at times an unfamiliar ease and comfort. When he woke up from their first night together his prick felt as if it had been packed in cold cream; some women were acidic; she was made for him. She was beautiful enough, especially unclothed; he liked her pockmarked cheeks, her slightly different-sized, different-hued eyes, her formidable tongue and acrobatic sex, her hard little tits and ass, her tight, quick to spasm cunt. The only thing wrong with her was she was not all other women. But why on earth did he want Coral? She was just a freak. But now he was mad to mount her again. At least once. To see what she was really like. Never mind his vow of ten minutes ago. He had to admit with nettled chagrin, that he never kept a vow to anyone, let alone himself. And then he remembered the golden goddess. The grip of desperate desire, never much or long abated, wrung his heart. Maybe deliberate Rill was right: he ought to drop them both.
            Too miserable, too baffled to write, he left his pail with Barnie, went out into the kindly sunlight, and bumped into Jimmy Z, looking jaunty. "I got something choice," said he. "Just came in."
            Embert shook his head with short vehemence.
            "Man," wheedled Jimmy Z, "this too good to miss." With Embert he always affected black syntax; he wanted to belong, though Embert amounted to a clique of one.
            "I have got no money," Embert said distractedly, pulling out both his pants' front pockets like a clown. "I mean. No. Money."
            "Come on," said Jimmy Z. "Le's go do some this shit. We just sample it. On me."
            Embert drew breath, shrugged and followed along. He dallied with heroin once in a while, just for relief, for R&R, for the pure, obliterating kick, for token solidarity with all who cared no more for life than death— and today was certainly a good day for it, the first time in fact since he'd hit P-town.
            Sitting by the window in Jimmy Z's trash-strewn, borrowed pad, long after Jimmy himself had gone, the sumptuous flood of well-being smoothed into euphoric lethargy, Embert reflected with vast, fascinated detachment that Bro Charles had never done any drugs but weed, never did white women, never did snow. Discipline was what he had, or rather a high indifference to such things. And he was dead, with half his face blown off, by his own self. Funny how lives went, who knew why exactly? Now here was Jimmy Z heading for a junkie; he was dealing now to feed his habit; he probably figured Embert for bird of a feather. Everybody was on the make one way or another, with no concern for anybody else. But that was cool because that was the way the world was, and he could live with it, could live with anything real, there being no choice.
            Finally the hard-to-find-again-once-lost, faint moon afloat on the piece of cloudless, blue sky framed by the filthy window reminded him that bad as the scene with Amy had been, she'd never mentioned breaking up, not once said, "That's it, that's the end, we're finished," as she had done on other disastrous occasions. Maybe she realized she couldn't give him up; maybe she was resigned to his vagaries. In forgiving whimsy he built an image of a dauntless camel bearing bales of straw piled to the sun, and felt his whole face glow with a smile of good faith. She had always treated him like a child, like her child; she always forgave. Along the way she'd said some brutal things. But, 'despicable, liar, creep' were the worst. That had hurt, though no more. And she was right too, from her point of view. Well, he would do better; he would try; he would! Things could be made to mesh: maybe she would let him and Coral hang out a little, get acquainted, get around, get through, get past, get over it. Why not? That was the only sane answer to mad nature, especially now that Life was going his way and he knew where he was with his novel. He would call his protagonist Charles. Why not? That was the only name that would ever suit his ear. And then he was flying, full of grace, higher than he had ever flown, the impeccably-lettered sheets turning of themselves, beautiful and clear, resonating line by line, fleetingly legible, the whole book.
            Eventually he remembered Milo.
            In the chill of late-afternoon Embert yawned and shivered his way to the Bradford, where Barnie, dreaming of Rima, was gazing out the window at the empty street, Embert's pail on the stool beside him. He had hardly skimmed the Times— Locninh, a district capital 75 miles north of Saigon, had fallen, and the garrisoned city of Anloc, several miles south, was beseiged by Soviet made T-34 tanks. Advance enemy elements were already in the streets.
            It was like a fatal disease, he mused, and tried not to hope against hope the ARVN could hold out. He bought Embert two beers and then a third before Embert finally took courage and told him about Milo, Amy and Coral. He didn't mention heroin, knowing Barnie would be appalled.
            "That guy's got to go," Embert said.
            Said Barnie, "I got him in, and I'll get him out. Either he goes," he added, remembering that Rill ruled the roost, "or I go. And I'm not going. Just yet."
            Embert said, "Actually, I'd like to abridge his life a bit."
            "The first thing you should do is apologize to Amy," said Barnie, who never failed promptly to beg pardon of any man he had wronged, but though there had been opportunities galore he had never been able to apply the principle to women.
            "I think I'd better let her cool off for a day or two," Embert said gloomily.
            "Too late comes pretty quick," Barnie warned.
            Embert nodded, and they grew philosophical about things done and undone, things undoable and unundoable, and then went back to the Foc's'le where Ray and Helen, just departing for dinner at Ciro's, bought them a Bushmill's, promising to return.
            Not long after, to their amazement, past the window, arm-in-arm, strode Milo and Julie.
            "Who's that?" cried Embert, maddened to tenor.
            "Don't know," said Barnie. "Works in Bob's, I think."
            "What's she doing with him?" Embert howled.
            "Ah, me bi, me bi," Barnie sighed.
            Seething Embert began to extend and improve his imprecations.
            "Very smooth, this Bushmill's," said Barnie. "Perhaps we'd better have another."
            "She must like peanut butter," Embert marveled.
            Milo and Julie had found the notion of dinner somewhat awkward and artificial, and neither being hungry had gone to Bob's and sat drinking beer in the back booth, where they had whiled away the winter. Bob himself was not there, it was a slow, lazy, cozy night, and the lone waitress joined them from time to time for coffee with a splash of Amaretto.
            What shocked Milo was how pleased with life Julie was, how cheerful about everything, how warm- hearted and sympathetic toward everyone, even perfect jerks. He realized she probably had not missed her necklace, in any case would never guess where it had gone. As always he was aggrieved by how little she fathomed his evident depths— his unconcessive frame bent all day long over a notebook, pen in one hand, Pall Mall in the other— how she grasped absolutely nothing of his hatred of her class, never sensed her own privileged innocence which he preserved, resented, despised, and, craving her admiration, yearned to breach. Lost without his satchel, unable to smoke his usual quota due to the ache in his chest, he soon began to fidget and fume.
            "You're like a prophet of doom," the waitress said.
            "In this country everything's corrupt," he said. "Money's all that matters. Especially in this town." And he laughed his hollow laugh. "Anyway, I have a feeling I'm not going to be around much longer."
            "Why, Milo?" Julie said.
            "Too many queers," he said.
            The two women looked distressed. In truth Milo himself thought no ill of homosexuals, identified with them as outcasts, now felt a bit embarrassed, coughed studiously, unable to recant.
            "I can't stand that cat either," he said by way of diversion.
            "Your house-cat?" Julie said, mystified, having heard no end of random disparagement of his fellow- tenants, but nothing till now against Obsidian.
            Milo said. "He sheds. It's like he owns the place, nowhere's off limits. His fur's everywhere. This well- to-do dame keeps her whole house open just for him," he explained to the waitress. "He's big too, he's huge. He's like a panther, he's got these evil eyes. He eats steak and eggs and fish— soup to nuts— and then you see these stooped-over, little, old Portuguese ladies in the A&P buying a can of cat-food for their one meal of the day."
            The girls shook their heads in dismay, made dolorous murmurs, eyes on the table.
            When they looked up Amy and Coral, heads bent, were just passing from sight on the far side of the street, Amy with an arm around Violet's shoulders, talking in her ear.
            The waitress said, "The older one, she's that handsome black guy's girlfriend, isn't she? I wouldn't mind being her for one night. What a hunk!" And she rolled shameless eyes.
            "Milo knows him," Julie said. "What's he like?"
            "He's a phony," Milo said, turning to look, too late.
            "What's phony about him?" the waitress asked, level-voiced.
            Aggrieved at women's naivete, Milo scowled. "He's a lecher," he said at last, "masquerading as a poet."
            "I didn't know he was a poet," the waitress said with a wistful shrug. "Nothing wrong with that. I talked to him once. He seemed really nice."
            "I know a lot of people who say he's a real sweetheart," Julie appealed to Milo. "Maybe he's different with men."
            It had started to rain very lightly, almost a mist. Outside everything sparkled romantically.
            "I'm off tomorrow," the waitress yawned. "Good weather to get stoned and stay in bed with the stereo on. If you should happen to see what's-his-face..."
            "Embert Shakespeare," Julie supplied.
            "...send him on over," the waitress said.
            It was a rough hour and a half for Milo, who the whole time felt inconsequential without his satchel of notebooks and pens to rummage in, at moments almost overwhelmed by the palpable presence of the two women who seemed so intimate and knowing, so fearless, so fond of men.
            Amy and Coral, deeply engrossed, went past the Fo'c'sle windows without glancing in, did not see frozen Embert and Barnie gaping at them.
            Barnie said, "Here's your chance, me bi. Go apologize. To both of them. Quick! Now! Go! me bi, go!" "This freaking, one-street town!" Embert said. He drained his whiskey, looked heavy liddedly, dully after them, undecided, unable to seize the moment, unwilling to humble himself, hoping his sudden, heart- sinking sense of loss was not a true premonition.
            He shrugged, sighed, said, "Women are like buses. There's another one in ten minutes."
            "After a certain point, me bi," Barnie admonished gravely, "it's every ten years."
            Embert didn't think it likely he'd ever have to do without. Women made the world go round. Too many was his problem, not too few. Too fast, too dizzy the ride, too many the hassles. "I'm afraid I'm liable to plug Milo's mouth with his teeth," he said.
            "Don't you do anything," Barnie said. "I'll see to everything."
            "I'll appreciate that," Embert said as Barnie rose to get more Bushmills. "I need a rest. I really don't want to have anything to do with anything any more. I just want to write this novel."
            "So long as you write your novel," Barnie agreed, "everything will be all right. Nothing else will matter very much, whatever happens. But if you don't..."
            "Yeah," Embert said. "I might end up in the embalming parlor, after all. Consoling widows, like my old man's assistants."
            "Not to mention the chilly thrills of necrophilia!" said Barnie with a leer and toddled off to the bar, while Embert, relieved of his rage's need to act, wove a warm fantasy of fast-piling pages, agents, advances and an all-obliterating, all-transforming, all-resolving encounter with the golden goddess.
            Presently, both being well-inured— and aware that Milo was likely still in town, having not gone by their window again— they drained their glasses, and hiked out to Axy's, glad to find Rill alone, sitting contentedly by the fire.
            "I hate to tell you this," said Barnie, and began. Embert soon took over the narrative— all outline, few details— with Barnie amplifying echoes of outrage and contempt.
            Rill, looking wary, got up and made himself a cup of tea. This was exactly the sort of thing one had to expect, he knew, and be prepared to cope with. He could not imagine what Milo had been thinking of, or what he could have hoped to gain. Was he in love with Amy himself? It couldn't be, could it, simple malice? Perhaps Embert had somehow got it all wrong, though that seemed equally unlikely. "I'll have a word with him," he said, "and see what he has to say."
            "He can't stay here," Barnie said firmly. "I'll tell him. I'll be happy to do it. I have no qualms about telling him."
            "I'm just afraid I'll knock his head off," Embert said. "I mean, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for him. But he's got to go. Or I do."
            "He's a snake," Barnie said. "We can't live with a snake. Who's he going to bite next? He's my responsibility. I brought him in. Out, I say."
            "So say we all," said Embert.
            "I don't believe he'll bite me," Rill said dubiously, "at least any more than he has already."
            "We've been living here like kings," Barnie said. "You wonder what makes a guy fuck up like that."
            "Peanuuut, peanut butter!" Embert sang. "I'll knock his fuckin teeth out, he don't needum." And then he disclosed the untold part, which somehow hurt the worst, viz. Coral and the pillow, and how he had cursed her for telling Amy.
            "Well, I've got to admit," Rill shook his head, "this all sounds pretty bad."
            "Worse than I've said," grim Embert said.
            Rill nodded. "I'll make inquiries," he said, adding to himself, Auxilia Lomes would not approve of Milo Stroon, if he's guilty as charged, and she would certainly long since have asked him to take a bath.
            Embert went to bed and slept. Barnie drank the two beers in the refrigerator, exchanging dismays with somber Rill, then lay down on his couch to await Milo's return, should Rill need backing up, but by then he was smoothly snoring, the lights were out, a second chair had been pulled up to the dying fire, and he never heard a word.
            In the morning when Barnie awoke and Embert emerged from Axy's bedroom at the same time, Rill was still sitting at the cold fire, having dozed in his chair. Milo was gone. It was a glorious day. Normally by now he would have been off on his bicycle, but there he sat staring into the ashes.
            Accomplished in whispers, the expulsion had been mercifully brief, pathetic in retrospect, Rill informed his groggy house-mates. Over his distracted protests Barnie emptied his wallet and Embert took Rill's car to the bakery and came back with malassadas and coffee and three little nips of brandy for Barnie.
            Milo had denied nothing. Having done the right thing, as usual he had to pay for it, while the real culprit got off. Worse yet, of the household he liked and respected Rill alone. He was thunderstruck that Rill could take Embert's side, grasped little of what had transpired at Amy's— Coral and the pillow drove him to scorn— and Rill himself knew not enough to give a clear indictment of consequences, since Embert had omitted all of the blows but two, the first delivered by the admittedly injured Amy.
            After his gruesome date— which had ended on Julie's doorstep with her saying coolly, "I'll let you go now, I've got to get up early tomorrow,"--- Milo was in no mood for remorse; Embert deserved his comeuppance, and Amy had every reason to thank Milo for his decency, as she had done, if not very gratefully.
            Rill's exasperation spilled over into mention of his depleted change bowl. To himself Milo had minimized how much he had filched, never adding one amount to another; he was amazed now to find himself censured in this as well, having assumed all along, since Rill never complained, that the paltry few coins had not been missed, or simply that Rill, so liberal in all his other dealings with everyone, did not begrudge their borrowance.
            As was his mature experience of life, woes one by one had ganged up and lain in wait for him— as he had known they would, as they always did— and now, once again, the bourgeois world closed ranks against him. He was too proud to protest or explain, too tired and bitter. He was not at home here anyway, among heedless free-loaders. He was better off on his own.
            Rill said, "I'm sorry. We decided— we voted— unanimously. Harm one, harm all. You've got to go." Milo never met Rill's eyes, spoke no word, went to his nook, shouldered his satchel and departed, coughing interminably as he went down the path.
            Rill spent the night in painful second thoughts. At least he had said nothing of peanut butter and baths. Embert and Barnie sympathized earnestly; they too felt bad. Something terrible had happened, and they all knew it, nor did anyone quite see how things could have ended otherwise, yet all felt vaguely guilty, each reflecting on his own failures of life, unrelated though they might be, and on some larger, general failure of life itself.
            It took the wind out of their sails. They hardly left the premises that day. Rill beat Milo's bedding over the porch railing with a broom, mopped the floor and made a large batch of baked beans with a lot of molasses. Embert sat at the table with his notebook and still blank first page. It did not seem an auspicious day to start, to write "Charles did such and such. Anyway, what did Charles do? And Charles who? Pernell? Embert's heart ached. Thirty times that day he braced to call Amy, then slumped back, letting grief fade, bonds break in the saving dream of the golden goddess.
            Barnie felt like a schmuk, went to the nearest pay phone, and asked his Uncle Nate to send him $300. "I'll be home soon," he said. "We'll have a game. There's no competition here."
            "You are in good health?" his uncle asked in a voice softer than he remembered, older.
            "Great," Barnie said. "The sea air agrees with me. So what d'you think? What's going to happen?"
            "Not good," his uncle said. "More war. More Nixon."
            The next day Barnie provisioned the house.
            "Bwana B. Blatt!" Embert crowed, salaaming. "All hail!"
            "Eat, me bi!" Barnie cried. "Drink! Yer've got to keep yer strength up."
            "Fraid you're right about that," Embert said. "I think I'm going to get a job down on the wharf. Not for long, I hope, but just..."
            "... for the chump change!" Barnie cried. "And the fish!"
            "And the mermaids," Embert dreamt.
            Rill marveled as he stepped out to get more firewood.
            Still, their gloom did not soon lift. Barnie drank at home with the New York Times, foregoing the Foc's'le and his hopes of seeing Rima again. Embert could not make up his mind to call Amy, or go down to the wharf either. Rill went on putting off both job- and house-hunting. All three dreaded coming across Milo in the street.
            "Well, it's warm, at least. There'll be plenty of work soon. He doesn't need us worrying about him. I don't think he'd welcome it," Rill said one day, when they were all sitting around with cabin fever, yet reluctant to go out.
            Obsidian, crouched on the wide window ledge, gave a blood-chilling yowl.
            Embert sloshed coffee on his manuscript, penned, alas, with ink that ran.
            "Pitty tat! What's the matter?" shouted gape-jawed Barnie, who had never paid Obsidian the least heed.
            "Goddamned cat!" yelled Embert, blotting his page with his sleeve. "Mr. Black, you seen a ghost?"
            "He yowls," said Rill, composure regained, still a bit unnerved. Grown intimate, nearly kin now to this uncanny beast he was charged to safeguard, this beloved pet of Auxilia Lomes, which never purred and often seemed more monkey than cat, he felt an obscure dread.
            Obsidian stood and yowled, head back, like a dog baying at moon or noon whistle, only terrifying, appalling, hideous, pitiful.
            They all jumped to their feet, staring at the cat, at each other and back.
            The sound departed their ears, as if it had never been. They breathed again. The episode, whatever it was, was done. Obsidian sprang down, pawed open the door, and went out on the porch. After a moment they followed.
            The green spring glittered and swelled, tropically hot, like August. What called the cat perhaps was the lightning-shattered, branchless, ivy-covered elm trunk at one corner of Axy's long-lapsed garden, a huge green column of which no speck of bark could be seen through the dense sleeve of gleaming leaves, green-briar and spiny, spiky, gnarled vines that climbed in spirals to the hollow top thirty feet above, where a thin forest of sapling shoots skyward raised their little flags.
            The ivy was alive with invisible starlings. All about the leaves black heads, bright bills, wing tips flashed and disappeared. A rich chittering filled the air, and the whole foliage seemed to ripple, as if breezes blew everywhere, though not a breath touched their faces.
            "Wo!" said Embert. "Lynch! I mean lunch!"
            "Sport!" said Barnie. "That is not a hungry cat."
            Apprehensive Rill said nothing. "Nature," he muttered at last.
            Obsidian stepped down from the porch, stretching hind legs as he went, walked halfway to the tree, and sat down, looking up at it with cocked head.
            "Go to it, Mr. Black," Embert cheered.
            "Like shooting fish in a barrel," Barnie said, but he was interested.
            Obsidian turned to look at them, then with strong tongue licked the length of his flank, turned again to the loud tree, sat watching intently for ten seconds, then bent slowly forward and without bothering to crouch set off toward the lowest leaves roiled by birds, six, seven feet up.
            He rose on hind legs, and reached high before starting up— almost it seemed he meant only to sharpen his claws— then he climbed, easily at first, stopping every foot or so, to see where the birds had got to, just a foot or so higher, nor much alarmed.
            Up Obsidian went, while ever higher went the chittering birds, which popped their eyes out at him, moment by moment, and submerged again. It did not look so easy now— ten feet up, spread-eagled amid the ivy and the spines, shaking one paw, now another, as if he'd got them wet, peering up into the heights, then with head nearly upside down glancing a little doubtfully back at his cheering keepers, the birds flaunting and flittering just out of reach, perfectly cheeky and undeterred from their noisy, busy activities within the green sleeve.
            "Go gettum, Mr. Black!" yelled Embert. "Yea!"
            "Never mind," said Rill. "Come on down."
            Up Obsidian went, progress measured now in inches. The trunk was so large, the greenery so dense, the footing so difficult, that he looked like a mountain climber on a sheer face of green spire with no rope. Halfway up he halted again, ears laid back, neck stretched, peering about. The birds above chittered on as before, but below him they had reappeared, and the leaves stayed undisturbed only in his close vicinity. Up he inched, now apparently climbing for the top to rest, but it was a long way, and he stopped again, leaning out, looking down.
            To Rill's mind it was no easier to get down than keep going up and take stock at the top in comfort, at leisure, when in fact a ladder could be brought, but Obsidian had already got turned halfway, meaning to climb down front-wards, or at least sideways with some semblance of dignity, but wherever he tried to lodge a paw it was sharp, and the springy foliage buoyed him outwards, kept him from getting his claws into the brittle bark.
            Seeing Obsidian's humiliation, Rill smiled wryly, not quite urgently, at the thought of Axy's ladder in the shed.
            "Better call the fire department," said Barnie.
            "Great minds," Rill observed, still hesitating.
            "Hey, don't quit now," called Embert, audibly aggrieved.
            But Obsidian had given up on the birds, was preparing to jump, but just as he set himself to spring free from the entangling vines he slipped and missed his right trajectory, sailed at a tangent, straight down belly first and hung a moment limp upon a rusty steel fence-post baled with sagging chicken wire.
            Wonder of wonders, he seemed unhurt, no blood was seen— perhaps he had buffered his guts with his paws too quick for the human eye— but however it was he scrambled writhing to the ground, then raced like a ricocheting shot in steel walls, zigzagging by huge, high bounds from nowhere to nowhere, then in one long arc cleared the garden fence and sat back-to their bent-over, choral moanings and groans amid the rotten stalks in perfect stillness like a sphinx.
            They called to him, but he would not turn, and finally Rill shooed them back into the house. They sat by the fire all talking at once about cats and birds and their likenesses to humans, glancing persistently out at Obsidian, who had not moved a muscle, till somehow between worried glances to their amazement he vanished. They went out and stood on the porch.
            "He's all right," said Rill. "He's just had his feelings hurt."
            "Rough life," said Embert.
            "He'll be back at them tomorrow," said Barnie.
            "If they're still there," said Embert.
            Rill spent the rest of the day waiting for Obsidian to come home. He did not appear till the next morning, much subdued, not very lithe but hungry, and Rill made a bed for him in Milo's lair.
            Released at last, Embert and Barnie set off for town with much of their old ebullience. Nearing the Foc's'le they met Amy and Coral, and after tipping an imaginary hat to the ladies Barnie in bashful apprehension, looking neither to left nor right, much less back at outnumbered Embert, fled on alone to buy his Times and get caught up, stuck to coffee until noon.
            Wallace had won in Tennessee, McGovern in Nebraska. Muskie quit. Nkrumah was killed in Burundi. Hoover died at 77. Central Highlands provincial capitol Kontum was surrounded. B 52s had flown 28 missions in one day, the most in history for the world's biggest bomber. Another ominous situation was developing in the coastal province of Binhdinh, where the Communists had captured three districts in two weeks, with little resistence.
            Embert had been overjoyed to see Amy and immediately gave her a bear hug, only to find himself embraced by both women. Holding Amy's face, kissing her eyes and forehead his fingers found the knots on the back of her skull, and he fought to keep from wailing aloud, all three eventually ending wet-eyed on the couch at Amy's, in discussion of domestic relations.
            Late in the day he went down to the wharf and got hired as a lumper— a sorter, an icer, a boxer of fish in the fish-house.
            Sometime after midnight Coral came to bed and Embert made love to her too, while Amy held one hand of each. He thought, I've got it made. All I have to do is write this novel, and the old man will be proud too, if it doesn't kill him all over again.
            Deprived of his drinking buddy, Barnie stayed in town only long enough to learn from Ray and Helen Rasharkie that Rima had gone back to Queens, having rented a place on Beach Point starting June 15. He sat silent, hand over his empty glass, while the afternoon familiars gathered around the unfailing fount of free drinks, then, as the general animation grew, he headed with heavy heart for Axy's, wondering if he could stand to stay another month and a half, merely for the sake of seeing Rima again, wondering too how Embert had fared— still in one piece, he hoped with a resistless grin— looked up from his ruminations in time to get off the sidewalk for two couples, men in front, talking vehemently. The women behind, also engrossed, proved to be Sophie and Rhonda.
            Standing aside like an usher, Barnie rolled a rueful eye, raised an imaginary glass many times rapidly to his mouth, grinned apologetically with true warmth, glad to see them— comrades of a sort in embarrassed folly— but their faces showed instant revulsion, and one in haste trod on her husband's heel, which caused him to swear and speed up, hauling them all along in his wake, so that the men never had a chance to identify or take revenge on their wives' molester, about whom both had heard ad nauseam.
            Barnie spent the evening sitting by the fire with Rill, whose only concern was Obsidian's downcast demeanor and apathy of motion of any sort whatsoever. Still mortified by the look on the women's faces, it seemed to Barnie outrageous, even mad, to feel so bad about small misdeeds and smaller mishaps, while the great wheels of circumstance were grinding thousands out of existence every hour.
            On May 5th Obsidian disappeared, darkening Rill's days as the sun rose on the cat's persisting absence. "He'll nurse himself back to health," Barnie said. "He'll be back."
            "I hope," Rill said. "I haven't told Axy he's gone."
            On May 9 Haiphong Harbor and other ports were mined, and an intensified air offensive was launched to sever the supply lines from the North. The escalation was coupled with a new peace proposal, contingent on the Communists releasing U.S. prisoners and agreeing to an internationally supervised cease-fire, an offer the Viet Cong rejected.
            People seemed more and more jumpy, immense headlines black on the street.
            On 15 May George Wallace got shot. Some people took pains not to seem too gratified or vindictive, others just shook their heads and nodded.
            On May 30 Barnie's world rolled upside down when three Japanese gunmen hired by a Palestinian commando group attacked the Lod International Airport near Tel Aviv, killing 25, wounding 76. "I've got to go," he said. "I've been here too long already."
            On June first Embert walked him to the Foc's'le an hour before the bus left, time for one or two for the road.
            Rima was there, having come up for the weekend. Barnie wrestled with himself, but he had gone too far. He was greatly tempted to delay his departure, for he had a poignant sense of an epoch of his life ending, the last days of a freedom never to be regained.
            Embert bought the first round. Strangely constrained, he and Barnie looked out the window, words failing them. When Embert's glass was empty he took his leave, sorry to lose these valedictory minutes, but knowing they must fall short, Barnie anxious to be alone with Rima, Embert too busy these days to sit around any bars, unless he was writing.
            "Take care, me bi," said Barnie.
            "You take care, too," said Embert.
            Half an hour later Rima walked Barnie to the bus, which idled silver in the sun, door open, while the driver hung up his hat and jacket. "You'll be back," she said. "Everybody comes back."
            Barnie was silent. He made it a practice not to retrace his steps. He had never gone back anywhere except to the great cities of the Mediterranean and a certain nexus of shady streets in Jeruselum. The thought passed through his mind that she might go with him next time.
            They stood squinting at each other in the blaze of sun till he was the last passenger left and had to board. As the bus pulled away he looked out the back window and saw her waving. He didn't wave back, knowing she couldn't see him.
            Rill had the house to himself now, preoccupied with worry about Obsidian. He had given up calling him from the porch, and walked the surrounding woods, forging through the green briar, looking under fallen logs, hunting for the cat's last resting place, thinking to put up a little memorial, at least have something definite to tell Axy.
            Embert came by one day to pick up a shirt he had left behind. "No Mr. Black, eh?" he said.
            Rill shook his head. "I've given up hope," he said. "I guess he went off to die. He must've been hurt worse than we thought. It's a sad thing."
            "One great cat," said Embert. "How old was he?"
            Rill shook his head.
            "Prime of life," Embert said.
            "How's lumping?" Rill inquired.
            Embert rubbed the small of his back, cracked his chapped knuckles. "Work," he said. "Hand-trucking fish boxes five high. I eat and go to bed when I get done, write on weekends. That's about it. It's getting easier though every day. Well, thanks a million. It's been real."
            Cleaning Embert's room— a ten minute chore— Rill realized he too was tired, but from what he couldn't say. He still felt dejected about Milo, whom he had not seen hide nor hair of since the night of his expulsion. Obsidian's loss weighed heavily on him, and his own lassitude seemed to bode no good. What was he waiting for? Axy would be home soon— he could sense it— and then he would have to move out himself. And then he reflected that after all his worry the whole thing had worked out more or less well
           enough— two successes out of three was not bad, given the odds. He did not count himself, as that outcome remained unknown, but really there was no call for these doubts. He had never failed himself in the past, why should he start now? Today or tomorrow, any day now, he would get underway, and make it three for four, 75%, not bad in this sticky, slippery world of mischance and inadvertence. But Milo! Ah, Milo! And Obsidian!
            He got on his bicycle and rolled slowly downtown, looking along the way for a dead black cat.
            Embert was writing with new facility and purpose, mixing his own life with his brother Charles', opening spectacular possibilities— only now he had to lump fish. He badly needed to find an easier job, with fewer hours, but their rent had gone up. They had moved to a bigger place. An elderly man had died after many years in the same upstairs apartment, and the ninety year old woman who owned the building— knowing Amy— had been glad to rent to them. Coral had got a job in a leather shop, which she loved, though it paid little. Things were going well for all, though the golden goddess continued to taunt Embert when he caught glimpses of her arrogant stride on the street, and occasionally he met up with Jimmy Z and took a little respite from the pace of life.
            It struck him occasionally that with what amounted to two marriages, work and curtailed freedom of social spontaneity, he was slightly out of phase, ahead of himself in his priorities, young for such consecration. This did not disturb him overmuch at the moment because he was happy as he had never been. Two women was great. Yet he could not help but wonder: Why not three? Or Four. Variety. Novelty. Theoretical questions. Infinity yawed away. He narrowed his eyes at it, but still he grinned.
            Embert noted one day that he hadn't seen Milo for a long time, not in fact since the morning of the peanut butter man's banishment. He no longer felt sorry for Milo. He held a growing grudge, often cursed him aloud, invoking all manner of evils.
            "If I run into him I really think I'd... I don't know, I don't even want to think about it," he said. "Don't question fate," Amy said sharply. "That's the one thing my father ever told me."
            Embert did enjoy strutting about with his foxes, then he cooled it and enjoyed it all the more. And other women, seeing how calm and regal he looked, how fine and happy his harem, were smitten and milled around.
            "Half the town," Amy said. "You poor guy."
            "Maybe," said Embert in jest, "we should renegotiate some things."
            "Quit it," she said.
            I will, thought Embert. I'm rolling, rolling, rolling.
            Axy returned on a day as beautiful as the day she had left six months previous. Rill had found no trace of Obsidian, and both spoke hopefully, without the slightest hope, of his reappearance some day, strong, healthy, unchanged.
            Rill indeed fixed the porch, shingles and much else, stayed on in Axy's guest room, made application to the National Seashore, attracted by the anonymity of uniforms, and began sketching the low gnarled pines and lithe locust groves roundabouts, having always wanted to go to art school, thwarted by his father. Axy was a great encourager.
            "Don't give up," she said. "Never give up."
            Those were the good old days, at the end of the fabled Sixties. They were all in their thirties then, Embert to die in ten years of AIDS from shared needles. Milo lasted less than five, dying on the street in Providence of many ills in bitter validation.
            Barnie grew courtly, patriarchal, a connoisseur of fine teas. He thinks now that he might marry again, if he could find someone. Many women has he admired, unrequitedly. He has long thought of Provincetown as a mad interlude, his only regret having not pursued contact with Rima. But she has been dead fifteen years of cigarette cancer. He feels very tender toward Embert too, even a bit proprietary, having put the bi on the right road, and he never passes a bookstore window without looking for the name Pernell, but Barnie's most persistent inkling as he walks the avenue, day after day, between the office and his late Uncle Nate's apartment, is that he will run across Rima Katz again somewhere some day.
            It's a Scorpio town, says one savant. Rill lives alone in the West End. He never made any close friends after the dispersal of his fellow house-sitters. He often wonders what has become of them, but he has many casual acquaintances, mostly natives or those versed in local lore, and that seems to suffice. He is pleased to have no car, phone or television, and rarely leaves town. He still hopes to find a mate, but there don't seem to be many eligible women around any more, and who could ever compare with Auxilia Lomes?
            She too is dead. His bereavement seems permanent, but he loves the world she gave him— so much variety, so small the scale— and draws every spare minute, in the dunes, in the woods, on the high marine scarp, looking inland or out to sea. He can never quite catch the richness, never get it right to his own eye, so that it says all that he means and more, never can contain the whole scene before him, nor remake the world to his own order like Canaletto, but then he supposes Lower Cape Cod-scapes are not the same as Venetian canal-scapes. Alas his best tend to get erased till they end up smudged.
            Though Rill knows nothing of her existence, Embert's orphaned, adopted daughter appears occasionally, sitting on the bench beneath the great linden in front of the library. You can see Embert's grand stature in her, and Coral too, her strange tranquillity.