I stood there for a moment looking around, wondering if they operated the place like a serve-yourself market. I went over and looked through the grilles above the cages, thinking somebody might have passed out with a heart attack and be lying on the floor. Money was lying around on the shelf but there was no one in either cage.

Then I heard someone step inside the door behind me. A voice said, “Wheah the fiah, Mister Julian? Heered the sireen and the people a-runnin’ but ain’t nobody tell me wheah the fiah is at.”

I looked around. It was a gaunt, six-foot figure, a Negro, dressed in what looked like the trousers of some kind of lodge uniform and a white T-shirt with a big, frayed straw hat on his head. Then I saw the cane and dark glasses. He was blind.

“I don’t think there’s anybody here, Dad,” I said.

“Mister Julian must be heah. He always heah.”

“Well, damned if I see him.”

“You know wheah the fiah is at?” he asked.

“Yeah. Down the street just this side of the gin. It’s a hamburger shack.”

“Oh. Thank you, Cap’n.” He turned and tapped his way out with the cane.

Just then a door in the rear opened and a man came out, apparently from a washroom. He must have been around sixty and looked like a high-school maths teacher with his vague blue eyes and high forehead with thin white hair.

He smiled apologetically. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting. Everybody’s gone to the fire.”

“No,” I said absently. “No. Not at all.”

He came over and went into one of the cages, and said something.

“What?” I hadn’t been paying attention.

“I said what can I do for you?”

“Oh. I want to open an account.”

I made out the draft and deposited it and went on back to the lot, still thinking about it. Everybody in this town must be fire crazy.

I sold a car that afternoon and felt a little better for a while. I saw Gloria Harper only once, when she came out of the loan office at five o’clock with another girl. She went up the street without looking towards where I was leaning against a car on the lot. We locked up the office a little later and I got in my own car and drove over to the rooming house. It was sultry and oppressive, and after I took a shower and tried to dry myself the fresh underwear kept sticking to my perspiration-wet body. I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?

After a while I put on white slacks and a shirt and went down to the restaurant. When I had eaten it was still only seven o’clock, and there was nothing except the drugstore or the movie. I wandered up that way, but it was a Roy Rogers western, so I got in the car and drove around without any thought in mind except staying out of that room as long as I could. Without knowing why, I found myself following the route we’d taken that morning, going over the sandhill past the abandoned farms and down into the bottom.

There was a slice of moon low in the west and when I parked off the road at the end of the bridge the river was a silvery gleam between twin walls of blackness under the trees. I stripped off my clothes and walked down to the sandbar and waded in. The water was a little cooler than the air and went around in a big lazy eddy in the darkness under the bridge.