We buried her Thursday.

She fell silent, there was static in the receiver, trouble along the wires.

Where was you, Billy? She wanted you there at the last.

I don’t know. The brig. When was it you tried to get me?

Lord we been tryin. You knowed she was bad.

The operator told him when three minutes were up, charged for time passed, not for words, mostly there’d been silence.

Her hair had done come out and everything. From them treatments. God, it was awful, Billy.

Yeah. Well.

Are you comin?

Yeah.

When?

I’m on my way now.

What’ll I tell Cathy?

Tell her I had trouble. Tell her I’m coming. I’ll have to hitchhike.

There was silence again, he could hear the voices at the other end, dim, indecipherable. She back on. The brig or a beerjoint one, she said all in a rush. Goddamn you, Billy. Why do you do like you do?

He hung up. His hand ached, he had not known he held the phone so tightly.

He awoke. He heard thunder and came to. The rain had stopped, there was a deep and lingering stillness. Then fieldmice moved softly about the joists, keeping their furtive rounds. Something conspiring perhaps against the interloper from the night beyond the walls.

And what is the height of your arrogance, the geography of your righteousness? Oh sister, you’ve changed, you change still. You who squatted and pissed in the road in front of a carload of boys who dared you. All your drunken laughter in the moonlight. He told me so, in the alley behind the poolroom. It caused me great pain, sister, not the least of which was the arm he broke with the tire spud. When the weather is just so it pains me still. At sea it did, perhaps the damp.

What are you now, where have you gone these years? You were a little girl, there was a dirty stuffed lamb you would not be shut of. Now factory floorwalkers berate you, and, undone, you weep against limegreen walls. We are all changed, time cheapens us all.

He entered the outside. The night was clearing and there were patches of sky almost silver. Frogs called from some near pond, nightbirds took up the chorus. Whippoorwills from some deep hollow. He walked through the rubble, momentarily lost from the way he had come.