The car reached the end of the road, turned back into the desert, and the music floated away.

At nine o’clock he walked to the back of the house, switched on the bulb, filled the kettle, and set it back on the flame. The kitchen smelled cold, though it was warmer than in the other rooms. The stove smelled of gas. He rinsed the Thermos and set it upside down on the sink. He took down the powdered coffee and sat at the table and waited.

He remembered sitting in the little two-room warming house in Hazen, waiting at the table for the doctors to come from Memphis. He had rinsed the mugs, set them in a line on the wood counter, each with a spoon, set down the tin of powdered coffee, and begun waiting for shooting time, warmed by the gas ring and the bulb light shining at the corners, bending shadows into the back room where the cot was. He waited in the cold until the doctors came down the car path, their heavy cars swaying and rocking, throwing their high beams across the field to the corner of the woods, where he could see through the half-glass door, red cinder eyes flashing and disappearing into the trees.

He had waited at the window until they came inside, old men in long wading boots and canvas coats, and took the pan off the stove and made the coffee while the men’s voices filled the room, laughing and coughing until it was warm, and he had slipped away to wait on the cot until he could see the window whiten and the first silver haze behind the treetops, and herded the men across the field in the stillness toward the timber so that the cabin sank and became just a single light and finally disappeared in the burnt flakes of sunlight. In the cold the men grew silent and morose like lumps of soft coal, plodding into the trees, their boots squeezing together, until the ground gave way to water. He had set them in the boats and waded down into the flood, towing them through the trees until he could hear the ducks squabbling and conniving a hundred yards farther in the deep water. High up he could see their imprint trading cleanly on the pale sky. He set the men out there, held the boats while they stumbled out into the thigh-high water, spoke the directions they ought not go, toward the channel of the creek, then left them wading noisily through the water, laughing in the shadows, until he could not hear them and had towed the boat back to the ground.

He had gone back then across the field to the house and waited, dozing under the light, until the morning had grown up bright and glassy. Then he walked back across the bean rows to the boats, where he would find one of them, always one, returned, lolling in the shallows, asleep and blue-lipped, a strand of yellow hair across his temple, asleep before light had ever come. He towed him sleeping back into the timber, through the black water to where the others were shouting and roiling the water and shooting, to where the ducks were down and bleeding on the lilting surface, swimming in circles among the trees.

He had waited there in that shack for the doctors to come from Memphis, or the fish salesmen to drive from Gulfport and Pass Christian, or the Jews from Port Arthur, driving all night through Louisiana and arriving before light, puking in the muddy yard, and bellowing in the night. He had waited there mornings, thinking of nothing, waiting for whomever old Rudolph took money from (a thousand dollars a head) and sent out, rinsing their spoons and sliding away noiselessly out of the light into the cold back room, waiting to take them in for the ducks.

Until that ended, after three years, without even a notice to old man Rudolph, or a message. He had slipped off with Jackie, under the nappy lights, blue and gauzy as if a chill fog had settled in between them, driving through Little Rock after midnight, all the way to Bishop, where he felt enough distance was opened between him and the shack and the fields and the whole life there that it would be too hard to go back. And when that distance was finally made, he felt safe.

He spooned coffee into the Thermos and poured water until it steamed in his face. He corked it, jostled the bottle, and snapped off the light. He walked back to the front room, sat by the door and listened for Jackie, for her breathing, for any sign, a groaning in the bed staves to indicate she was there, since she had gone without a word and closed herself in the room and never made a sound once the light was off inside. He sat, the chair squeezing in the dark, and waited, listening for the frailest sound. He could feel the breeze channel underneath her door, the gentian running east through the house back to the desert. He stood and walked to the window ledge, picked up his paper sack of rolled-up clothes, and went to the screen and looked across the plateau toward Bishop, dissolved in the night, the road to the mountains invisible except where a pair of elongated lights twisted down off the valley.

He thought that if your life was filled with beginnings, as he had just decided today that his was; and if you were going to stay alive, then there would be vacant moments when there was no breathing and no life, a time separating whatever had gone before from whatever was just beginning. It was these vacancies, he thought, that had to be gotten used to.

He lifted the latch and walked across the porch toward the truck. Jackie lay asleep, hearing him walk across the boards and the wet grass, heard his shoes in the gravel, and the nail settle of its own weight back into the eye of the latch, heard the truck heaving and hissing. And she lay still, unwakened by the sounds, unaware he was leaving, aware only of the sounds and of the cool air rippling the sheet and flowing out under the doorway into the room where, if she had awakened suddenly and sat startled in the bed, she might have called him, thinking he was there, sitting in the darkness smoking, and believed that all this had never happened.

2

Early in the morning he had lain awake in the gray light and let it all revolve through his mind again carefully.

Twelve years ago he had lain under the eaves at Helena in the little rose-wallpapered room, alert to the ticking through the cypress timbers, hearing the weight on the stairs, the coarse shuffing through the door, and turned his head toward it but couldn’t see.

“All right,” he said, startled, a heavy sweet smell riding the darkness. “I can’t see you now. Who is that?”

“It’s me,” she said, letting her quilt subside and releasing the gardenia smell into the room. “I can’t wait no longer.”

Her knees bent into the bedding as he was trying to climb to see her in the dark, and only saw her breasts rolling toward him and disappearing, and her arms taking him up and holding him until, when he tried to talk, he could only say, “Honey, honey.” And that was all.

In the morning she stood and kneaded her eyes and swung her arms through the dusty light, her underarms pale and dark at once. The bed smelled sour.

“Robard,” she said, stretching her fingers through her damp hair. “You wake up now.” (Though he was certainly awake.) She stared at him, her lips everted, and he strived to move his eyes, inch by inch, toward the painful sloping sunlight.

“I got a riddle,” she said.

“A what?” he said, smelling the sheets all around him.

“How come the birds wake up singing every morning?” She smiled and set her teeth edge to edge.

“What?” he said, not hearing it right.

“Cause,” she said, sticking her full belly out and smiling. “They’re happy to be alive one more day.” She laughed out loud.

And all at once her expression changed and she looked at him as if she had never seen him before and was surprised to find him lying there.