He tickled the wood with a glistening blade. “Was a pretty nice funeral, I bet?” “Very nice, very nice,” I allowed, watching the knife. “Considering.” “Good.” Thhht thhht. “I’m glad.” Curlicues of barbered pine fell like trimmed tresses at his feet. Viv wriggled herself deeper into the cushions, and I drank again from the gallon of the old man’s blackberry wine. The liquid had been aprickle with thorns at the top of the bottle, lumpy with seeds at the shoulder, now, halfway down, it had smoothed out soft as cotton. We waited for each other, wondering what on earth had prompted us to risk our cool by straying so far into long-forbidden territory, wondering if we dared throw caution to the winds and go even farther. Finally Hank turned the stick over. “Yeah, well, like I said, I was really sorry to hear about her.” I still felt a little of that first anger. “Yeah,” I said. Meaning: You should have been, you cad, after the way you— “Huh?” The knife ceased its whispering, half a curl of pine lifting unfinished from the stick. I held my breath; had he heard the thought behind the words? WATCH OUT, Old Reliable warned, HE’S GOT A SHIV! But the knife moved again on the wood; the curl looped complete and fell with the others; my breath drifted out of my nostrils in a swirl of relief and disappointment. Blank expectations (what had I imagined he would do?) remained blank. The earth turned again (what had I imagined I would do?), continuing its falling circle. The curlicues curled. I sipped again of Henry’s homemade wine. I was sorry for my anger; I was glad he’d chosen to ignore it. “Sack time.” He folded the knife and with a woolen sweep of his stockinged foot swept the curls into a neat pile. He bent and cupped the pile and dropped it into the woodbox: tomorrow morning’s kindling. He flapped his hands free of sawdust and sentiment, calluses husking against each other like wood against wood. “I believe I’ll see if I can catch a few Z’s; I told Joe I’d give him a hand at his place in the morning. Viv? Kitten?” He shook her shoulder; she yawned, showing a rose-petal tongue over bright white pips of teeth. “Let’s head up to the sack, okay? You might as well make it too, bub.” I shrugged. Viv slipped past, dragging the sheepskin robe and smiling sleepily. At the foot of the stairs Hank stopped; his eyes lifted to mine for an instant—“Uh . . . Lee . . .” bright, green as glass, pleading for something, before they dropped to study a broken thumbnail. “I wish I could of been there.” I didn’t say anything; in that quick click-and-glitter of lifted eyes I saw a hint of more than guilt, more than contrition. “I really wisht there’d been something I could of done.” Meaning: Was there? “I don’t know, Hank.” Meaning: You did enough. “I always worried about her.” Meaning: Was I partially to blame? “Yeah.” Meaning: We were all to blame. “Yeah, well,”—looking down at the destroyed thumbnail, wanting to say more, ask more, hear more, unable to—“I guess I’ll hit the hay.” “Yeah,”—wanting everything he wanted—“me too.” “G’night, Lee,” Viv murmured from the top of the stairs. “Good night, Viv.” “Night, bub.” “Hank.” Meaning: Good night but stay. Viv, silent and slim as a shaft of sleepy light, stay, talk more to me with your articulate eyes. Hank, forget my words behind my words, stay, say some more. This is our chance. This is my chance. Say enough more for love or hate, enough more to make me sure of one or the other. Please stay, please stay . . . But they left me alone. They frightened, tantalized, excited me with contact, then left me alone. And confused. I think we approached each other that night and muffed it. He didn’t venture further, and I couldn’t. I look back on that evening through a film of mashed blackberries, trickling juices spiny and sour, as my brother and his wife fade out up the stairs, into personal realities, to dream dreams, and I think, We almost made it that time. A little courage on someone’s part and we might have made it. We were swollen and ripe for an instant together, ready for picking, offering our store to each other’s hesitant fingers ...a little tender courage at that rare right instant, and things might well have turned out differently.... But the breath of memory still plucks such instants, setting the whole web shaking. People fade up the stairs, but to dream of each other’s dreams; of days coming gone and nights past coming; of hard sun-rods crisscrossing back and forward across outspreading circles of water, meaningless-seeming. . . . From the dappled surface of the river a red-gilled, blue-greenstriped steelhead salmon explodes in a shimmering dance, gyrating wild in glistening suspension, falls back on its side with a blistering crack, and jumps again and falls, and jumps again—as though trying to escape some terror pursuing it beneath the water. And falls and this time darts to the bottom to lie behind a rock, with its stomach resting exhausted on the sand and the sea-lice still gnawing its fin and gills in spite of its efforts. Swarms of black, squawking crows harass a herd of hogs. Green beer sloughs in the throbbing stovelight. Indian Jenny’s old man rises, disgusted, and tries to clear up “The Sheriff of Cochise.” Molly watches her life pumping from her in clouds of white frost. Floyd Evenwrite curses himself for not having made a better impression on Jonathan B. Draeger, and curses Draeger for being so goddamned biggity and making him feel like he had to make a good impression, and curses himself for letting Draeger be so goddamned biggity as to make him feel like he had to make a good impression. . . . Willard Eggleston hopes. Simone prays. Willard Eggleston despairs. And a Diesel freight running empty to Wakonda for the last of Wakonda Pacific’s stockpiled lumber at the Cascade Pacific yards honks for a crossing, low and obscene, like the rutting call of a mechanical dragon . . . At a scarred tabletop near the front door of the Snag, sitting with a cluster of cronies who are obviously more interested in his free beer than in his talk, old Henry jiggles his ill-fitting dentures in his cheeks and draws a deep breath. He takes another swallow from the pitcher, holding it by the handle as though it were a giant mug; whenever he filled a glass, he has noticed, one of the audience at his table drank it, so he has resigned himself to the pitcher. He is relaxed, glowing, feeling his swelling belly push for another notch in his belt. For the first time in his life the old man finds the time to pursue his pitifully neglected social obligations. Almost every afternoon since his accident he has propped his plaster frame against the same beam near the Snag’s front door, where he drinks, rambles about old times, argues with Boney Stokes, and studies the way the big iridescent-green river-flies electrocute themselves on the charged screen door. “Hsst! Listen. I hear one—” Teddy’s electric killing device holds a great fascination for Henry; during some gusty preamble—eyes half closed, smile nostalgic with mellow reminiscence—he will suddenly freeze in midword. “Hsst! Hsst! Listen now . . .” He cocks a white-fuzzed ear toward the grid as some yet unseen victim buzzes closer. “Listen...Listen...” There is a sizzling spurt of blue. The parched carcass falls to join its predecessors on the doorstep. Henry cracks the tabletop with his cane. “Son of a gun! You see that? Got a nother one, didn’t it? Lord, lord, if they don’t make some foxy outfits these days then I’ll eat your goddam hat. Modrun scientific technologee: that’s the ticket. I said so all along; ever since I seen the first winch an’ cable rigged to snake out spruce I been saying so. Ah, I tell you we come a long ways. I can recall—an’ I swear this is the truth— but you know it’s goddam hard to believe the way it was sometimes, because things changing so all the time, every day ...I still say we’ll whip it Boney, you old sobersides—anyhow, let me think, it was durin’ Coolidge, I think . . .” A young Henry with a fashionable black mustache skitters nimble as a squirrel up the trunk of a log lodged against a steep hill, and with hands like flickering steel frees drunk cousin Lari-more from the tangle of oxen reins. A swift, grim, taciturn young Henry, carrying a compass in every pocket of his trousers and a boning knife in a scabbard on his boot . . . “Listen! Don’t you hear? Ah . . . ahh . . . ............