They come trooping in from the sea in mighty masculine columns, and, squinting, she leans bulkily forward to try to make out the half-remembered faces of this army—handsome, handsome and tall they were, an army handsome and tall and white as snow, stretching back over the horizon of her memory. “Was a god-dam span of ’em,” she recalled with wistful pride and mixed herself another spoonful of snuff in a glass of warm whisky, the better to review the army’s passing. Which one was the tallest, among these soldiers of mist? Which one was the handsomest? the wildest? the fastest? Which soldier of them all had she liked the best? Of course, all, one-an-everyone-all they was good men, and she’d refund the two dollars doublemoneyback to any man jack of that throng just to be able to host him again this minute—but, just for fun, which one of all that army had she liked the very best? ...and, with this just-for-fun contest, begins springing on herself an old, old trap. While Jonathan Bailey Draeger, comfortable under his electric blanket watching an old Bette Davis movie on his free TV, takes from the nightstand beside his bed the little notebook and adds to his last note: “And women, when confronted by superiors, substitute for drink the crippling liquor of their sex.” While Floyd Evenwrite jumps from his car and rubber-balls his grumpy way across the parking apron toward the door of a roadside bar on the outskirts of Portland, mad at everything in sight. While the old wino boltcutter listens to the citizens in the Snag talk about tough times and trouble. And the electric screen pops and snaps at hapless flies. And Hank Snow presses loudly onward: Fireman, shovel that coal, Let this rattler roll, ’Cause I’m movin’ on. And, East, the mailman drops the card and is answered by a blast that lifts him like a cork before a wave and tosses him all the way back to the middle of the lawn. “Hoo-what!” After a timeless period of severed consciousness—while his head cleared, while the lawn bucked and tossed, rippled and glittered like a square of rolling emerald sea—the mailman perceived a far-off ringing. This ringing gradually filled the fissure torn in his senses. Numbly he rose to his hands and knees and watched time ticking red off the end of his bloodied nose. He remained all-foured in this bemused state, aware only of his bleeding nose and the shatters of demolished windows that lay about him, until a crackling of walked-on glass from the cottage porch brought him scrambling to his feet in a wide-eyed fury. “What!” he demanded. “What the everloving devil”— swinging about, holding his bag clutched tight over his fly in the event of a recurrence of the eruption—“is going on here, you!” Thin, lint-filled smoke parted momentarily to emit a tall young man with a face covered with soot and flecks of tobacco clinging like pockmarks. The mailman watched the scorched apparition swing its head to meet its interrogator’s eyes and lick blackened lips through the singed remnants of a beard. The face was at first blank, stunned, then the features clicked abruptly into positions intended to convey the pretentious insolence of a fop; this affected expression of amused arrogance and disdain was made even more phony by the comically blackened face, so obviously phony that it appeared to be more a caricature of contempt than an affectation—like a mime’s expression. Yet there was something about the very falseness of the attitude—perhaps the acknowledged falseness—that vastly increased its stinging effect. The mailman began again to protest—“I mean just what do you think you’re doing, you . . .”—but was so enraged by the taunting expression that his anger sputtered away to frustration. They stood facing each other another few moments, then the scorched mask closed its lashless eyelids, as though it had seen enough of irate federal employees, and informed the mailman haughtily, “I think—I’m attempting to kill myself, thank you; but I’m not quite sure I’ve found exactly the right method. Now, if you will excuse me a moment, I’ll have another go.” Then pompously—and still making the sharpness of his contempt somehow explicit in his mockery of himself—the young man turned and walked back across the porch, into the smoking house. Leaving the mailman standing in front of the steps, feeling strangely puzzled and more disoriented than he had been since rising from the lawn. Which reels and rolls, and glitters in the sun... The jukebox bubbles and throbs. The clouds troop past. Draeger slips off to dream of a labeled world. Teddy studies fear through a polished shot glass. Evenwrite pushes through the door of the Big-time Bar and Aristocratic Cuisine, planning to have a drink or two to unkink the kinks he picked up sitting in that goddam straightback chair reading that goddam meticulous report that little spy had compiled—hard to fit the sort of citified finks like him, or the sort of red tape that made this sort of report necessary, in with the picture of honest-to-god men who had started the whole labor game, the good old Wobs, the Wobblies, but it looked like that’s what it’d come to so that’s how you gotta play it—anyhow...aiming to drink, unkink, unwind and unlimber over a couple beers, and to once more prove to any one of these big-city bigasses in here who might doubt it, that Floyd Evenwrite, ex-bushler and chokersetter from the little pissant town of Florence, was just as goddam good as anybody else whateverthefuck size of the city they come from! “Barkeep!” He thumps the bartop with both balled fists for service. “Bring ’em on an’ keep ’em comin’!” And to prove to himself that these balled and swe............