Dear Reader: This is long. I'll make no apology for it. It can not be chopped up into smaller segments with out losing its integrity. It's all of one cloth. So if time and member bucks are your consideration, I can understand that. However, I would feel redeemed to know you at least read the first two or three paragraphs before you wandered off to greener pastures. So as not to make this still longer, my further thoughts can be found in my Author Notes. Thank you—J.S. 

On this otherwise fine, hot day, I thumbed my way north from Los Angeles where I’d said my second goodbye after they disinterred Julie and failed to find the diamond ring in the contents of her stomach. The shooter’s wife swore she saw her swallow it. Ordinarily, the path to justice may meander a bit, but when it’s a residential burglary and the home-defending shooter is a Superior Court Judge, that path has a way of straightening itself. And it did—though not until after she was already buried. A trifling inconvenience, that.

They made me take back the quarter I had put on her forehead at the first viewing. I wanted her to take something of me with her and that was all I had. Now the only thing she’ll be sailing off with, for eternity, is a crude, cross-stitched scar across her belly; the post mortem surgical cost will be passed on to the city of LA, spread out over nearly four million people, so no one will even know his or her pocket has been ravaged. She’d have laughed—perhaps is laughing—over the irony of it all. She was like that. Next to spaghetti, I think she loved a good laugh most.

I’m sitting on the curbing, on a street that fronts a strip mall in a town between LA and Bakersfield. Unlikely neighbors behind me, a Burger King crouches next to Kroger and Son’s pawnshop. I used the Burger King facilities when I got here. I had only a quarter—the quarter—in my pocket. I wasn’t too hungry, anyway. On the other side of Kroger and Son’s, a square of grass extends right out to the street. The sprinkler is on and apparently the soil is saturated because the water pours freely over the curb and streams down the gutter.

The water was what attracted me. It gets hot in the valley during the summer. My sneakers sit beside me, socks stuffed in them, my feet in the gutter. Based on the rush of water over them, I’m sitting at more of a downward slope than it appears. The problem with this fast-flowing water is that it tends to lift up all manner of things from the gutter and send them downstream. My left foot creates an obstruction, a not-too-effective dam against which a Styrofoam cup collides, makes a half-rotation, then scuttles and tumbles over my toes, continuing on. A gum wrapper does its slow-motion aquabatics in the cup’s wake. About thirty feet downstream the cup eddies out and then suddenly, centrifugally, veers in towards the curb where it drops with the water down a two-foot open drain. The gum wrapper follows.

I pluck a package of Marlboros out of the flow, opened, thoroughly drenched, with two or three missing. I can smile at the recognized pattern. How many half-full packs had I chucked out before it finally took—before I could quit for good? Julie smoked upwards to two packs a day, right up to the night the judge’s bullet made her an instant non-smoker, instead of allowing her the self-determination to die of lung cancer or emphysema forty years down the road.

Something ten feet or so away, makes slow, tumbling movements on the surface of the water toward me. I scoop it up into my palm. It is paper, wadded, familiar, unsettling. I smooth it out on my thigh, careful not to rip it, but keep my eyes averted in deference to that brand of magic or superstition that can change the value of things. It’s at least a one. With a dollar I could get a package of chips from a machine. But with a five or a ten, or, good Lord, a twenty, I could swagger right into Burger King and order anything on the menu. Slowly, I peel my hand away. I blink, look away, and then look back. I blink again. I’m staring at a hundred dollar bill!

After the initial shock, the deeper reality settles over me like a cold coastal fog. A one, five, ten, or a twenty—one of those—would help me over an immediate obstacle. I would get some food in my belly by this evening so I could think clearly. But a hundred! That’s enough to throw my spiritual equilibrium out of whack. It’s already started doing that now that I know what I have. A hundred’s a symbol to remind me of the real money, the big bucks, that somehow I’m entitled to, the big bucks that part of me desperately desires—or, rather, all of me desperately desires, but only part of the time. It’s going to act as a goad and cause me to do something stupid. I’m certain it will; and I’m capable of being very stupid in order to get, quickly, what my cupidity tells me I require. You see, I’m wired into being comfortable if I lived in poverty or with inherited wealth. The tepid, middleclass mentality, though, is out of the question! When ignobly motivated, I become a striver, a climber! And the act of striving will do me in.

Julie was of the same warped mindset. That’s what killed her.

She had homed in on two hundred thousand. That, she reckoned, would be the cost of our boat—the boat already moored and shimmering in some hazily defined harbor her imagination sheltered, waiting to be actualized. Most nineteen-year-olds when addressing such a challenge would begin analyzing the occupational choices most rapidly yielding that kind of money. Julie immediately saw it as a simple transfer of assets. Ownership was a fluid and oddly communal thing. What was another’s and what was hers was more a question of the exquisite timing of the transfer.

She set out at once Googling the neighborhoods in Los Angeles and settled on Beverly Hills, convinced through a flawed and logically insupportable notion that the expendable wealth down there was precisely five times—not four, not six, but five times—greater than Bakersfield’s. With the impetus of that belief feeding her enthusiasm to a manic pitch, she’d spend the first day casing the neighborhood, target her house, then make her covert entry the following night. In the world of crime, no force of self-destruction is more powerful than success. And for a while she was quite successful.

Understand this: all along, I tried very hard to be her moral compass. I pleaded with her that what she was doing was not only illegal and hurtful to others, it was also morally and spiritually debilitating for her. She agreed with a grim smile and an incongruous shrug. But then, she knew more about me than I cared to examine. She knew, without having the words to express it, that while our immorality and spiritual decadence differed, it was more of degree than kind. The worm of depravity had burrowed deeply into each of our souls, dining and thriving on different diets, but each undeniably corrupt.

Hers killed her outright. My little worm, lacking outwardly driving ambition and courage, will continue to eat away at my soul, fattening as my soul shrinks, until I die a demeaning and cowardly, but likely natural, death.

I pull my feet out of the water and swing them around to the sidewalk. While they’re drying, I try to think it out. Probably some desperate bastard pawned his steel guitar or watch or ring for a hundred bucks. More than likely he was drunk or stoned and needed to prolong his high. That would account for his carelessness when he tried to shove it into his pocket.

I slip on my socks and shoes, stand up and fold the bill into neat fourths; then, feeling with my fingertips for holes in the lining, I push it to the bottom of the pocket.

* * *

I make two passes of the glass pawnshop door and when the broker’s eyes begin following me, I—for reasons that evade me—make one more pass before I reach for the door. Bells tinkle above as I enter, and then behind, as I let the door close.

The pawnbroker, an obscenity of corpulence, peers at me from behind his wood and glass counter. Huge hairless forearms yield to strangely tiny and delicate white hands embracing each other in a lilied clasp on the countertop. I feel his eyes wander over me, sizing me up. Speaking in a voice that is the counterpart to his diminutive hands, his words seem too comically frail to come from the center of that over-full-bloom of a face.

“May I help you?” His eyes dart to my hands, as though he expects a trumpet or violin to materialize there, then back to my face. He waits a few discretionary moments and adds, “Buying or selling?”

“Occasionally,” I say, “but sometimes I just look … just look.” I angle to the counter on my right. His eyes and finally his laboring, lumbering torso follow to the corner where the counters join. I bend over the counter to consider the floor. I see a red button on a black rectangular plate affixed to the back of the counter, at about knee level. I smile. It’s obvious this makes him nervous. I straighten and point to a table. “What’s that?” I ask.

He follows my index finger with his eyes to the contents on the long table running three-quarters the length of the wall. “You mean that?”

“Maybe.”

“The bronze three-headed dog? He’s Charon, who guards the gates of Hell.”

“Cerberus. But next to it.”

“Oh? You’re sure? Cerberus?” He is flustered.

“Charon escorts the dead across the Styx.”

“Next to it … oh, you mean the toothpick-constructed three-mast schooner?” He takes in a gulp of air and when he lets it out his ample neck flutters. “An old man, I think he’s dead now, used to bring in one a week, each different, each hand-crafted and beautifully painted, like that. See the sails? Real canvas. Gorgeous craftsmanship. I paid him twenty dollars apiece. Then, each week, like clockwork, an old woman, about his age, would come in and buy the latest one he sold me. I charged her twenty-five dollars. I have to make a profit. You know . She never came in to buy his last one, this one. She’s probably dead, too.” His face is flushed. He has to breathe now. He leans his weight into the space between his delicate palms, flattened on the counter. On each of his wrists a plump blue vein bulges.

“What’s this?” I ask, tapping my nail against the glass counter top.

In a moment he answers. “A pump-style pellet pistol.”

“My cousin had one. The more you pump the more power it has. It works?”

“No pellets.”

“But it works?”

He straightens, leaving two moist smudges. “Of course. You know you’d have to sign for it.” No inflection. A statement.

“Sign? But it’s just a BB gun with megalomania.”

He smiles briefly. “Still.”

“So, how much?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He seems edgy, evasive.

“Go ask your dad, why don’t you?”

He mumbles something.

“He’s not here, is he?” I grin and hold it. This rotund man-boy empowers me. I don’t know why I should so readily covet that feeling; the thought of it does make me feel a little shameful, but still I find myself grinning.

He shakes his head. “He’ll be back any time now.”

“Tell you what I’ll give you twenty bucks for it.”

He starts laughing, and then he stops, seeing that I’m not laughing. “You’re not serious?”

“What, then? A thousand?”

“Well, no.” He flutters his eyes, incongruously.

“Okay, we’ve established the perimeter as somewhere between twenty and a thousand. How much?”

He brushes an imaginary moustache with thumb and forefinger while he seems to study me. “Hundred and ten,” he shoots out suddenly.

I hold my grin on him until I can sense he is squirming. “Ninety,” I say.

“One hundred dollars—that’s it.”

“Ninety-five. At least leave me enough to buy a value meal next door. Please.” I say this last word in a tone of playful supplication, one that instantly seems to wash away the grim suspicion that had lined his face. I’m having a great time. I add: “Ninety-five and I’ll throw in a big hug.” I spread my arms and cock my head and smile the way a child would, begging his mama for a cookie.

“Ninety-five, and “ he says and chuckles in a falsetto that sets his jowls and neck trembling in an aftershock, “and only if you keep your hug to yourself.”

I laugh immoderately at his little joke. He giggles at my laughter. Soon we are laughing together in that ancient brotherhood of shared frailty.

While he opens the case, I congratulate him on being a good salesman. I can see it pleases him.

“This is all I do,” he says. “You learn to read people.” I watch the pulse in his throat. It reminds me of a fallen bird—isolated, dying, alone.

“Read me,” I say.

The request startles him. He looks up from the case. “No, I—you’re—I couldn’t.”

I level a smile at him. “Do it,” I demand gently.

He straightens. “Well, you’re educated. I saw that right away, and you’re sure of yourself—and yet—” He looks puzzled.

“Go on.”

“I don’t—maybe I shouldn’t say.”

“Do it.”

“Well it’s just that successful people usually don’t come into pawnshops.”

“And I couldn’t be successful in a stained tee-shirt and torn jeans, wearing dirty sneakers?” I smile. He’s struggling. And damn, but I’m enjoying it!

“None of that matters, not to me.” He reaches into the case and pulls out the pellet gun. “Just figured you were going through a rough spell.”

“Or, how about this—I’m fabulously wealthy, but I’m on vacation and I refuse to dress up. I was just passing by and I saw your pawnshop. I’d never been in one, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll go do a little slumming.”

“That was my second guess,” he says, without as much as a pause. He turns the key in the case and tests the lock. “And I’m thinking if you should come over anywhere near the shop—of course that’s after you take your feet out of the gutter and put your shoes on, well, I’m thinking I’d like to talk with you. And even if you don’t come in, I might even stick my head out the door and ask you to give me a minute. You know? Because I’d really like to get some advice on money-making from such a fabulously wealthy person.” He pushes the gun across the countertop to me. “Ninety-five,” he says.

“You’re good,” I tell him, bowing from the waist. “I apologize, sir, for calling it slumming.”

He bows, too, his belly spilling over onto the countertop. “And I apologize for saying I thought you were wealthy.”

I think by now each of us is trying strenuously not to laugh, thinking one might be giving to the other the leverage needed to imprison one’s forfeited dignity. Before long it doesn’t matter. We gasp and guffaw like a couple of buffoons.

He breathes fitfully, his face distorted, blotched and puffy. He holds up a white little hand in way of a truce. “I—I—I don’t know whawhen I’ve laughed so much. It’s like we’ve known each other for—”

“Well, I—” I feel pressed in upon.

He tries again: “We don’t even know—”

I raise my hand. “Okay You know, I just remembered an appointment. I’m kind of in a hurry. You said ninety-five.” I pull the bill from my pocket, unfold it and smooth out the creases. It is still a little damp.

* * *

In Burger King, at the booth next to the window, I bite into my burger and look out at the curb. I can’t see the water flowing from here, but the sprinkler was still on when I left the pawnshop, so it would be. I squeeze catsup from the packet onto the burger wrapper and drag a french fry through it. Glancing at the paper bag on the cushion beside me, I wonder if I should have bargained-in the toothpick schooner. Or, Cerberus I could have worn him down for one of those. Not both, but probably the ship. Bought them for twenty, sold them for twenty-five.

I wish Julie could see the toothpick schooner. The last time we were together, all she could talk about was scoring a boat. A full-sized boat, of course. And what she really meant was a ship, but as crazy as she was letting herself get at that point, the still somehow flickering rational part of her brain needed an image small and uncomplicated enough to wrap her reason around.

“We’ll get this boat, see, and—”

“Where?”

“We’ll—I know people—shut up, Buster!—And we’ll stock it up, food and booze and weed—can’t you just see?”

“A ship—you’re talking about a ship.”

“Yes, you and me in it—Oh! It’ll be so good!”

“But a ship—you mean a ship! Where’ll we get this ship?”

“I’ll get it; that’ll be my job. You’ll see, Bus. And we’ll put it out on the ocean, just you and me—and—and at night under the stars—”

“But Jul, a ship like that’ll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our imaginations don’t even go into the hundreds of thousands. You don’t even know anyone who knows anyone who owns a ship like that or has the money to buy one. So where are we going to—”

“A marina. There you go.” She started making erasing movements, the way a mime would clean an imaginary blackboard. “You’ll see. We’ll go to a marina. We’ll sneak in late, real late at night. Pick out one we want, get on it, pull up the anchor and and just—just go.” A victory smile for me.

I considered at that moment, while I looked into her unfocused, defiantly suicidal eyes, that it wasn’t my place to confound her dubious premises; the onus belonged rather to society—that safe notion of social reality—to dash her magnificently structured ice-sliver mansion. I resolved to no longer play the assassin.

“So, we find the one we want, Jul. Either we get past the guards at the marina and find a ship that isn’t locked tight—or better yet, we find a way to come up with a couple hundred thousand and we buy our ship and we stock it and pull up the anchor and steer it out into the ocean, where do you think we’ll go?”

“Why, I don’t know,” she said like she never entertained the thought. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll just go out, and on and on.”

“At some point we’ll pull out of the sight of land. It’ll be water, the sea, deep and vast and black, all around us.” I found the image of it suddenly disquieting, chilling. “We won’t have a point of focus, my dear”—laying a hand gently on her forearm—“dear sweet Jul.”

And I remember hearing her sigh just then, a sigh that seemed to come from a private, enraptured depth. And I knew that the image of being without a reference point, so frightfully disparaging to my imagination, was her long-sought-after Nirvana. She longed to lose herself in the borderless, the pathless.

“If we need a focus,” she said wistfully, as out of a trance, softly, “I’ll have you; you’ll have me.”

“But after the poetry of all that we will surely die. We’re going to die, Jul, you know?”

“Yes we will, I suppose.” Each mini-sentence spoken with deliberate thoughtfulness. “And if we don’t do it, won’t we also just as surely die? Won’t we, Buster? And—and right in the middle of all those points of focus that are clawing into us, chewing us up with their—focused fucking fangs!”

Those were her final words on the subject—the final words spoken by her to me on any subject. I think my final words to her were: “Don’t do it, Jul.” But her Ford Taurus was gassed up, a change of clothes and various tools of her trade in the trunk. She would soon be leaving for her third, and what would turn out to be her last trip down to Beverly Hills.

I finish the last bite of now cold burger, the few fries left in the bag, brittle as twigs, and drain the remaining diet Coke. After I slide them from the tray into the trash and stack the tray on top of the others, I go with the bag I’m carrying into the restroom. It’s unoccupied. I remove the pellet gun, crumple the bag and drop it into the trash. Pulling my shirt up above my waist, I slip the pistol barrel into my jeans and let my shirt fall over it. I can feel the cool barrel even through my underwear.

* * *

Sonny Boy seems pleased to see his brand new buddy again so soon. I’m thinking he has few close friends. “Hey,” he says, through the fleshy little hole in the lower quarter acre of his face, “you better not be coming back to steal that hug, ’cause if you are—”

I tell him I’m not, and then I smile back.

He leans toward me over the counter in the relaxed, open manner of one who enjoys a newly won, easy confederacy with life. Before long he blinks and his face takes on a mildly bemused expression. “You got your value meal, didn’t you?”

”Oh, I did. Yes.”

“Well,” he says. He takes his weight off the counter. The joint between wood and glass groans.

“I’ll tell you what,” I say from a deep center of calm. “It’s good that you’re standing up. I want you to slowly back up to the wall.” I pull the pellet gun from under my shirt and wave it in his general direction.

“Come on! No,” he says. “You’re kidding me!”

“I’m as serious as you are about the size of your next meal.” I try to smile again, but can’t bring it off.

He stares at me a long moment and then he says, “It’s no secret I’m fat. So, why—?” His sudden intake of breath makes very nearly a whimpering sound. Shaking his head, he looks away from me briefly, then back. “Anyway, that’s a damned pellet gun! Come on, please. Put it down and we’ll have a big laugh about it, huh?”

“Nothing to laugh about, fat stuff.” I watch him wince and I feel a tightening inside. I wonder why I am doing this? Why am I being so needlessly, stupidly, childishly cruel?

“Besides, I told you there weren’t any pellets in it.”

“And you want to believe there aren’t any in it now, don’t you? Even though I had plenty of time to go to Wal-Mart.” I had seen a Wal-Mart about a half-mile down the frontage road when the car dropped me off here this morning. I almost chose to go there, instead, and wander around their aisles—and then I decided on the Burger King.

“Even if you did,” he adds, and finishes with a phlegmy chuckle. “It’s still a pellet gun.”

“Ever been shot with a pellet gun? What’s your name?”

“Autry—no.”

“Well, let me tell you, Audrey …” Again, I feel the tightening.

“Why are you doing this? It’s Autry—”

“As in Gene?”

“As in Autry Gene Kroger. If you really want to know, dad was Gene Autry’s biggest fan. Do you have to keep that pointed at me?”

I bring the barrel to the floor. “I was shot by a pellet gun, just like this, a pump action. My cousin did it. He got me right on the fleshy part of the thigh. Would you believe, it penetrated a quarter of an inch? My aunt had to dig it out with a penknife she sterilized over an open flame. I don’t know which stung worse—the pellet going in or the knife she used to dig it out with. Hell, Autry, I know it’s not going to kill you.” I bring the barrel back to the level of his stomach. “But it’s going to burn like crazy. And you know how you people are doing everything for pleasure and avoiding pain at all cost.”

“Je-sus!” he says, in two emphasized syllables, as a country preacher might when under the grip of the Holy Spirit. “Just tell me what you want. The cash?” His eyes flutter involuntarily, and now I swear I can smell his sweet-hot perspiration.

“I want the little schooner the old man made.”

“What? Why didn’t you buy it earlier?”

“I couldn’t afford it and the pellet gun together—And I needed the pellet gun.” Then I smile, waiting for him to ask the question I’m prodding him to ask.

“Why?” he asks. He is already on his slow, plodding way to the table on which the schooner sits.

“I needed it to stick you up and get the schooner.”

Autry stops and half turns, swinging his great head toward me the way a heifer might. “To stick me up,” he says through a grin. But then that fades and I see just for an instant his eyes fill as he turns abruptly away from me. He reaches across the table for the schooner, but his other hand goes to his face. When he turns back, he has the schooner cradled in both palms. His fingertips on one hand glisten wetly. “You know, you never told me your name.”

I smile at his audacity. “I’m fucking sticking you up, Autry! You expect me to give you my name?”

“Forget it,” he says, but his face doesn’t conceal the injury.

I shrug. “It’s Buster.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Want to check it against my Diners Club card?”

“So, it’s Buster?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Buster,” he repeats, slowly, like he’s tasting the syllables. “Bus-ter. Bet you took a ribbing in school.”

“A little. My folks took to worshiping Buster Crabbe about like yours did Gene Autry. He was one of the movie Tarzans. You know?”

“I guess not.” It’s obvious something else is on his mind. “Buster?”

“What.”

“Buster, I want you to have this. As a gift.” He holds it out to me.

“No, now damn it, Autry!” I pull back. “You can’t just give me what I’m robbing from you.”

“Why not? Put your gun away. It’s something I want you to have.”

“Why?”

“Because—because when you left today I thought, well, that we were like friends—and well, because I would give it to a friend. It would make me feel good.”

“Fuck you! Do you think I care how you feel?”

“Oh!” he says, but it was like the word was sucked out of him as one’s breath would after being kicked in the stomach. Then, he moans.

“Well, I don’t care. I don’t! I have half a mind to take the fucking ship and before I leave to shoot you in the gut just to watch the fat ooze out.” I feel again the now familiar tightening.

He no longer tries to conceal the tears that rim his eyes. We seem at an impasse. For perhaps a full minute neither of us says anything. Then, Autry leans into the counter and sets the schooner on the glass surface. He steps back. I study it, aware that he is all the while studying me. It is listing to the right. It wasn’t before. Anticipating my question he says, “There’s no stand. I had it leaning against Cerberus.”

I nod.

“The old man said it’s precise-to-scale, though. Said it floats perfectly in water. Shall I get a basin and we can try it?” He has regained his composure. There is something childlike and playful in his manner.

“No! Just give it to me.”

“We can, though. No trouble at all.”

“No, goddam it!” I grab it off the counter, surprised at how light it is. I get to the door, open it to the tinkling overhead, and then without going out, I close it again. I turn and then go back and lay the pellet gun on the counter.

“No, take it with you.” His face instantly reddens.

“I don’t need it now.” I turn back toward the door.

“But that means I owe you seventy-five, no, seventy dollars, deducting for the value meal, you bargained for.”

“That would be like I bought the ship. This is a fucking robbery!”

“Well, if you insist on it being a true robbery, then I have to give you your whole hundred dollars back.”

“Go to hell! I don’t want your goddam money, Autry!”

“Well, then you just bought yourself a very expensive schooner,” he says.

“I didn’t buy it, and you know I didn’t buy it,” I say, stalking to the door, then, over my shoulder, add: “And I won’t accept it as a fucking gift!” I slam the door behind me.

* * *

Sitting at the curb, I lay the schooner beside me, while removing my sneakers and socks. I swing my legs around and put my feet in the flowing water. Picking up the schooner again, I examine it from all angles. It is a fine piece of craftsmanship. At twenty bucks, Autry was the one stealing it from the old man! It’s worth probably two hundred. I just stole it back for half that. I am uncomfortable with the feel of my logic. It’s always been trustworthy. Now, I wonder if it’s losing its fine edge. After all, I did end up buying it. I need to stay with my senses for a while—and away from my thoughts.

I trace my fingers along the deck from its widest point and then its gradual narrowing to the bow where the old man had even carved a delicate figurehead. I feel the sail between my fingers. It is canvas. The deck is recessed slightly. I think it just might work. I dig my hand into my pocket and fish out the quarter, lay it flat on the deck, head up, and slide it slowly toward the bow until it snugs into the narrowing deck. Applying a slow, steady pressure against the deck walls, I gently rotate the coin a half turn. The walls yield enough for the quarter to seat into them. I inspect the schooner again from different angles and give it a prayerfully diffident shake. The quarter stays. Then, holding the schooner gingerly in both hands, I lower it to the water, my hands forming a safe harbor around it. It lists only slightly to the left. But it appears seaworthy. Lifting it from the water, I touch two fingers to my lips and then to the quarter. I close my eyes. “An eternity, dear Jul, without focus or borders.” I put the schooner in the water at my feet and let it go. It immediately caroms off the curb in a swirl of water that wets the deck, and it makes a complete revolution before continuing on, leaning just a little to the left. The sunlight glints off the quarter.

I get to my feet to follow along on the curb. Something catches my eye. Turning, I see the lazy rotation of red and blue lights atop a police car. It is parked at the curb on the far side of the pawnshop. A cop standing in the pawnshop doorway is waving his hands and now throws a thumb over his shoulder in my direction. I’m guessing that Autry had second thoughts and called. Or, he pushed the silent alarm after I refused the schooner as a gift. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. From the look on Autry’s face, which I can see along with that part of his body not eclipsed by the cop’s blue-uniformed back and sprawled high-booted thighs, the weight of evidence points to the alarm theory. Autry’s head is now moving from side to side with slow deliberate resolve.

Turning my attention back to the ship that moves closer to its journey’s end, I watch as it catches the eddy and is swept, whirling, tilting, dangerously near capsizing, away from the drain. This troubles me, and I take a few steps along the curb toward it. Then, I stop. The ship has to complete its journey unassisted. There is something sacrosanct about the process. Once released from human agency it must be pulled along only by the tug of the fates. I take another step just as the schooner escapes the grip of the eddy, dips its sails and plunges down the drain. I intone my third and my final “good-bye” to Julie and turn back to retrieve my shoes.

The police car is gone. Autry is still standing behind the closed door, staring at me, his face immobile. The corners of his mouth hold the slackness you’d see in the sleeper or corpse. Only his eyes carry in them an immensity of sadness and grace that causes that now familiar constriction in my stomach.

I keep my eyes averted as I put on my socks and sneakers. When I get up I see that he is still there, still watching me. Then, as I get to the street that leads to the frontage road I look back again. But now he is gone. He has vanished so absolutely, so completely from the door, it is as though he never had been there.

And isn’t that the way it should be? He’s not there. There never was an Autry. I make my way down the frontage road to the I-5 onramp and wait for someone to pick me up. Burger King and Kroger and Son’s are out of my sight. They, too, never existed. They no longer have any focus in my mind.

One thing remains. It is not of this day. It is not of any day. Nor is it at all connected with time in my mind. But it remains, nonetheless, drifting inexorably, as timeless as stars, as solidly rooted as myth and symbol. Unresisting, it is one with the force that pulls it along, unerringly, until it drops off into that boundless, borderless eternal.

I watch it drift through my mind with dread and longing.