He was a heavyset man in overalls whose tiny piglike eyes studied Edgewater in drunken fixation. He seemed to be trying to remember where he’d seen Edgewater or perhaps someone like him. He made some gesture near indecipherable to the barkeep and the barkeep brought up from the cooler a dripping brown bottle and opened it and set it before the man then refilled his shotglass with something akin to ceremony. There was a drunken, belligerent look to him. Seedy, dissolute, as if he had tried respectability and had not cared for it.

What are you lookin at? the man asked Edgewater.

Nothing, Edgewater said. He looked away, into the mirror behind the aligned green bottles. His reflection dark and thin and twisted in the wonky glass.

He took up three of the dollar bills and slid them across the bar. Let me have some change for the telephone, he said.

Was you in the war? the man downbar asked him.

Edgewater thought of the concussion of the shotgun, the drifting shreds of willow leaves. Not in one of the official ones, he said.

Change rattled on the bar.

What the hell’s that supposed to mean?

Edgewater raked the change and cupping it in a palm went past a silent jukebox to the rear wall where a telephone hung. He stood watching it for a time as if puzzled by its function or manner of operation, the fisted change heavy in his hand, and he could feel sweat in his armpits tracking coldly down his ribcage. He turned and went through a door marked MEN and urinated in a discolored trough and washed his hands and face at the sink and toweled dry on a length of fabric he unreeled from its metal container. His cheek had been scratched by the gravel and he felt a raw scrape under his jawbone. Above the sink there was no mirror, just four brackets where a mirror had been. On the spackled plaster some wag with a black marker had written: YOU LOOK JUST FINE.

He went out and used the phone, heard it ring in what by now seemed some other world entire. Yet the room where the phone rang and rang was real in his mind and he wondered idly was anything missing, anything added, had they painted the living room walls.

Finally a young woman answered the phone. Edgewater’s sister.

I’d about given up on you, Edgewater said.

Billy? Is that you? Where in the world are you at?

How is he?

He’s how I said he was the last time you called. He’s dying. Why ain’t you here?

I’m on the way, he said. I’ll be there. I ran into a little bad luck.

She knew him, she didn’t even want details. You’d better get here, she said. He has to see you. Has to. He wants to make it right. He’s tryin to hang on until you get here.

He said that? He said he’s trying to hang on until I get there?

You know some things without them bein said, she told him. Or ought to. Would you want to go before your Maker carryin all that?

I’m not looking forward to it carrying it or emptyhanded either, Edgewater said.

Well. You and your smart mouth.

I’ve got to go, Edgewater said.

There’s something wrong with you, she said. If you weren’t so—

He quietly broke the connection and cradled the phone. Then he took it up again and held it to his ear and it seemed a wonder that there was only the dialtone.