Two or three afternoons a week, she would go with me to the beach at St. Augustine, but she went to tan her legs for Hillary, and got into the water only to cool off. And even then it was only knee deep, always keeping one hand on top of the straw hat she wore to protect her face and neck.

She seemed vaguely interested in my swimming, but had no interest in learning herself.

And so we would drive to St. Augustine and park the car and walk down to the beach, and I would take off my shirt and pants and swim straight out, conscious of my form, as if that mattered to her, and she would lay a towel across the hot sand, and then undress—we wore our suits underneath our clothes—and lie down, turn on her radio, and cover her face with the straw hat.

When I came back, I would drop into the sand next to her, out of breath, and study the lines of her body. Her skin was barely puffy against the elastic of her suit, there was no flesh hanging off her when she turned to lie on her stomach.

Her suit was one-piece, cut deeply in back to the exact spot where the line separating her buttocks began. It fit her cheeks as if it had melted over them, riding down into the crack. There was no angle of her bottom that did not strike me as beautiful, and lying in the sand next to her, feeling my breath against my arm, I would also feel the growing weight of my erection, and then I would roll onto my stomach too, so that she wouldn’t see the effect she had on me.

I had a sense that she would feel betrayed.

No, I didn’t know anything about women at all.

On our third or fourth visit to St. Augustine, she pulled the straps off her shoulders and handed me her lotion.

“I hate strap marks,” she said.

It was the first time, I think, I’d ever touched her. Her skin was cool and my hand slid from her shoulders down her back, and finally stopped at the bottom of her suit, where her body divided and rose into perfect cheeks. My hand stayed in that place a moment, and then she lifted her head and looked at me, as if to ask what I thought I was doing.

“They look so ignorant,” she said.

“What?”

“Strap marks. They look like white trash.”

I put the top back on the lotion and stuck it into the sand. Without straightening up, I dropped back onto my towel. I had reached a condition, rubbing lotion over Charlotte Bless’s back, that was a spasm short of Hillary Van Wetter’s jailhouse ejaculation, which is to say you could have put a propeller on the thing and flown it.

“You’re breathing through your mouth,” she said a few minutes later, watching me.

“It was a long swim,” I said.

And she smiled behind her dark glasses and turned her head away from the sun.

“You need a girlfriend,” she said, still looking the other way. When I didn’t answer, she picked her head up again and looked around, spotting half a dozen girls sitting around a cooler of beer. They were behind us perhaps forty feet, at the border of the beach where the tall grass began. Pink toenails and radios. They looked like sorority girls to me, the way they drank their beer.

“You ought to go over there and make friends,” she said, teasing me in some way.

“I don’t like girls like that,” I said.

She lowered her sunglasses on her nose and looked over them at the girls again. “I’ll bet you’d like that one in the red,” she said. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. She said, “Go over there and pick out one that bites her nails, and she’ll blow you. I promise.”

“I don’t want anybody to blow me,” I said, and she looked at me, vaguely disappointed. I remembered what she’d written then, about Hillary Van Wetter wanting himself sucked just like a judge. An intact man.

“It’s not that I don’t want it,” I said, making the correction, “I just don’t want any of them to do it.”

She considered that a long time. “It’s a good thing you’re not in prison,” she said finally, bringing it back to Hillary. “You wouldn’t have any choice in there.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

She smiled and dropped her cheek back onto the towel and I got up, angry and coated in sand, and followed my cock—which for the first half of my life was always stiff and pointed in the wrong direction—back out into the water and began to swim. I was two hundred yards out, feeling strong and angry, feeling as if I were riding the very top of the water, like the flames in an oil fire, when I realized suddenly why the metaphor had suddenly come to mind. I was on fire.

I stopped in the water and looked around, the burning feeling moving across me like air from a fan as it scans the room. A certain chill followed behind the movement, and it took my breath. Half a dozen translucent jellyfish floated just under the surface, several in front, that many more behind me in the water I had just come through.

I lifted one of my arms, dropping deeper into the water, and saw that tentacles had broken off the jellyfish and wrapped around it, crossing over themselves like whips. The burning passed over me again; I felt distinctly cold.

I turned and began to swim. The burning did not change as I went through the jellyfish again, but a few yards beyond them I noticed a heaviness in my arms, and then in my chest, and I thought it would sink me. I rolled over onto my back to rest and realized that something was wrong with my breathing.

I kicked slowly, listening to the sound of the air passing through my mouth, unable to pull it deeply enough inside. I closed my eyes and kicked, thinking that I might be dying, and a long time later the water turned warm, and I knew that it was shallow and that I was not going to drown.

When I felt the bottom, I sat down a moment, collecting myself, and then turned onto my hands and knees, crawling from the water to the beach, and then made it to my feet, dizzier than I had ever been, and walked toward Charlotte Bless, who was still lying facedown and strapless on her towel.

It was one of the girls drinking beer near the weeds who noticed me first. I heard her say, “My God.” I looked down at myself then and understood the dimensions of the poisoning. The tentacles were embedded in my arms and legs, the skin around each of them was raised and pink. Necklaces, I thought.

I heard the girls coming, but when I looked up I couldn’t see. I rubbed at my eyes and the lids were in the wrong place, swollen out beyond the bone of the brow. I tried to step again and fell.

The sun was warm and I began to shake. “He’s having an allergic reaction,” one of them said. She came over to me, blocking out the sun, so close I could smell the beer on her breath. “Can you hear me?” she said. “We’ll get an ambulance.…”

I felt one of the girls scrubbing my leg with sand. And then someone else had my arm and was doing the same thing.

“I know it hurts,” said the one over me. “I’m a nurse.”

“What’s wrong with him?” It was Charlotte’s voice.

“He’s having an allergic reaction,” said the one who seemed to be in charge. “He must have got into some jellyfish out there.”

One of them was still scrubbing sand into my thigh. I heard her, a long way off. “Jesus, look at this stuff.…”

And then the one over me was talking again, calmly.

“Can you hear me?” Her voice faded. “What’s his name?”

“Jack,” Charlotte said, sounding timid.

“Jack,” she said, closer again, “we’re getting an ambulance. Can you hear me?”

The ground began to turn under me, slowly at first and then faster. “Listen, honey,” said the one in charge, “we’ve got to do something a little embarrassing here.”

I did not try to answer, and then I felt them pulling my bathing suit off, turning it inside out as it rolled down my legs. “Just hold on,” she said, and then she stood up, the light of the sun turned everything red, and a moment later I felt a gentle trickle moving up my leg, as if one of them were washing me with a warm beer.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Charlotte said, still scared. There was no answer—these were trained nurses—but the first trickle died and then another of them blocked the sun and I felt it again, this time on my chest, moving from my stomach almost to my neck. I distinctly smelled urine.

“Lie still,” said the one in charge. “We’ve sent for an ambulance.”

I sat up anyway, dizzy and sick. The sting—some of it, at least—had gone out of the places where they had urinated.

“Honey,” said the one who was in charge, “it’s on your face too. Would you rather we didn’t urinate on your face?”

The real meaning of such a question, of course, is not in the question itself but in what it implies—that one moment you could be in perfect form, right on top of the water, riding the tops of the waves, and the next moment could be lying blind and helpless on a beach being asked if you would prefer not having strangers urinate in your face.

“No,” I said, “don’t do that.” My lips were swollen now too, thick and stiff; the words sounded as if they were coming out of someone old.

“What did he say?” one of them asked.

“I think he’s out of it,” said the one in charge. Then, to someone else, “Go ahead.” And then another one of them was urinating from my shoulder down my arm all the way to my hand. I lay back down, glistening in the sun.

“I never heard of anything like this,” Charlotte was saying.

“He’s poisoned,” said the one in charge. “He’s poisoned and he’s having an allergic reaction.”

“I can see he’s poisoned,” Charlotte said. “But you don’t piss on somebody after they’ve been bit by a snake.”

I remember thinking, You suck on them. Which, of course, was where I came in.

I heard the ambulance then, a long ways off. I heard voices in the siren.

THE DOCTOR WAS OBESE, I saw that when he held open my eyelids to study the pupils. He examined my eyes with a small light, first one, then the other, then took the light away and considered my face, as if to estimate the problem for a moment in its entirety. He smelled of cigars.

And then he dropped my eyelid and the room was dark.

“Give me some epi,” he said.

“How much?”

“A vial, give me the damn vial, I’ll do it myself.…” It was a quiet moment, and then he said, “Come on, come on. If we lose this one it’s going to be embarrassing.”

And then I felt a coolness on my chest as he washed a spot with alcohol, and then a slow, spreading sting as he pushed a needle down through it into my chest.

I slept.

I AWOKE IN A dark room. A wedge of light from the door lay across the floor, and the sheet covering me from the chest down glowed a faint green from the heart monitor at the side of the bed. There was a needle in the back of my hand, connected to a bottle of liquid suspended overhead. The green, uneven line of the heart monitor reflected more distinctly in that.

I blinked and my eyes felt thick and unfamiliar, but were no longer swollen shut. They were dry, though, and they stung. I sat up a little in bed and knew I was all right.

“Jack?”

My brother was sitting in the darkest part of the room, in a chair beneath the heart monitor where little of the light from it or the door reached. He was wearing a white shirt and a tie; his bus ticket was stuck into his shirt pocket. I saw the word Trailways. In the darkness, his face was hollow. I was chilled and began to shake.

“Jesus, it’s cold,” I said.

He stood up and came to the side of the bed. In a moment, I felt the weight of a blanket, and, a moment behind that, the warmth. “The doctor said you might have another allergic reaction,” he said. “They’ve got you hooked up to something here to keep you from going into shock.”

I felt another chill. “I got pretty sick,” I said.

Ward nodded, the monitor dancing in his eyes, and then he looked away. I was chilled again—the cold seemed to be coming from the bottle overhead—and when it passed, I was profoundly, unaccountably sad. It was as if I had fainted from some bad piece of news and was just coming back now, where it was waiting. The sadness lay over me like the blanket and gathered in my throat, and without warning I was suddenly blinking tears. Ward saw them, and for a moment he seemed about to touch me. I think he wanted to, but in the end he turned and sat back down on the chair.

“You had a bad time of it,” he said in the dark. “That takes a lot out of you.”

“Not too much,” I said. And that was true, but it had done something else, and I didn’t have a word for it. My brother didn’t have the words either, and we sat listening to the sound of the machine monitoring my heart.

THERE WAS A PICTURE of the emergency room doctor on the front page of the St. Augustine Record on the morning I got out of the hospital. It was above the fold, where you could see it as you passed the honor box. He was posed outside the emergency room entrance, his coat straining at the buttons, a cigar between his teeth. Smiling.

Charlotte had come over to pick me up, bringing clean clothes and a razor and a comb. She waited while I showered and dressed, and then took my arm as we walked through the door. She was still holding it when I saw the picture and stopped.

“What is it?” she said.

Above the doctor’s picture, across the top of the page, was the headline FAST ACTION SAVES THORN MAN AT BEACH.

“What’s wrong now?” she said.

I did not open the paper until we were in the van and moving.

I closed the paper and closed my eyes. Charlotte stopped at a traffic light. “What?” she said. And when I didn’t answer, she put her hand on my leg, just above the knee, and left it there. “Are you sick?”

“How did they know I was on the swimming team?” I said.

“They came to the hospital,” she said.

“You told them?”

She watched the traffic light, leaving her hand on my leg. “It seemed germane,” she said.

I shook my head, more aware now of the weight of the newspaper on my leg than her hand next to it. She patted my leg and moved her hand back to the wheel. “You shouldn’t read in the car,” she said. “It makes you carsick.”

A few miles farther west, I opened the paper and looked at the picture of the doctor again. I could smell the cigar, and the sweet, greasy odor that came off him in the intensive care room when he dropped in to see how I was doing. He was one of those doctors who also function as local characters—and consider themselves, and all their odors, beloved.

The students apparently saved Mr. James by urinating over the many areas of his body which were attacked.

“The boy’s arms and legs were covered with stings,” Dr. Polk said, “as well as his back and chest, buttocks, genitals and face.”

“Dear Jesus,” I said, and closed the paper again.

“I told you not to read in the car,” she said.

THAT WASN’T ALL.

The story of my being saved at the beach by nursing students who urinated on me was noticed by an editor at the Associated Press office in Orlando who condensed it into six paragraphs and added it to the day’s national wire stories. In this form, it went out over the Associated Press wire service to the offices of fifteen hundred newspapers across the United States and Canada, where other editors trimmed it for reasons of length and taste, put a humorous headline over the top, and ran it as a sort of antidote to the bad news of the day.

HOME REMEDY SAVES BEACHED SWIMMER.

That particular headline, while not the most embarrassing one I saw, was the most memorable, running, as it did, in my own father’s newspaper. I do not know if my father saw the headline or the story before it ran. It was not the sort of story that would ordinarily be brought to his attention, although if his managing editor had noticed my name, she would have come to him for permission before running it.

It was brought to my attention by Yardley Acheman. I walked into the office the morning following my release from the hospital and he said, “Congratulations, Jack, you made the paper.”

“I know.”

I crossed the room to the window to sit down. I was tired of Yardley Acheman and tired of waiting around the office for my brother to finish what he was doing. I was thinking that if I had to be in the newspaper business, I’d rather go back to driving a truck.

“Not just St. Augustine,” he said, smiling at me now, and then he picked up the Moat County Tribune.

“Home remedy,” he said, and handed me the paper.

I walked over and took the paper out of his hand, and then I turned to my brother, who had laid the entire trial transcript across his desk and on the floor that morning as if he were drying the pages, and stared at him until he looked up.

“What’s he trying to do to me?” I said, meaning the old man.

“It’s called the newspaper business,” Yardley Acheman said, behind me. My brother blinked, still caught somewhere in the transcript of Hillary Van Wetter’s trial, and the next thing Yardley Acheman said—I don’t remember what it was, only his presumption that he could put himself into the middle of the private matters of my family—I turned and threw the newspaper in his face.

And then he stood up and came around the desk furious, a little speck of white spit coming off his lips, pointing his finger at my face, and I remember the look of bewilderment that replaced the other expression when I pushed his finger aside and grabbed his hair, and then his neck. He had no strength at all. And then I had him in a headlock on the floor, and I squeezed his head until all the noise coming out of it stopped, and then I noticed Ward bending over me, completely calm, a foot or two away, telling me to let him go.

“Jack,” he said, “c’mon, you’re going to mess everything up.”

“Everything’s already messed up,” I said, and I was crying.

He said, “I’m talking about the papers,” and turned around to remind me that he had arranged them across the floor. A moment passed, and I let go of Yardley Acheman’s head, hearing a popping sound either in his head or my arm, and then leaned back against the wall and caught my breath.

Yardley Acheman got to his feet. His ears were bright red, and a patch of his skin over his eyebrows was scraped. He was shaking. “You are fucking crazy,” he said. Then he looked at my brother. “I want him out of here.” Ward didn’t answer.

“He’s a time bomb,” Yardley Acheman said. “The next thing, he’ll be in here with a shotgun.”

My brother looked at him, up and down. “He’s all right now,” he said quietly.

“He goes or I go.”

My brother went back to his desk and found his place in the transcript of the trial. I thought about what Yardley had said, thinking he was probably wrong about the shotgun, and then I thought about my father, wondering if he had seen the story before it ran, and then realized it was something I would never ask him. I did not want to be lectured on the price we pay for freedom of the press.

“Did you understand what I said, Ward?” Yardley was back behind his desk now, calmer, rubbing at his ears. The scraped place on his forehead was more defined than it had been, it had raised and turned faintly blue at the edges. “I want him completely the fuck out of here, do you understand?”

My brother gave no sign that he understood any such thing.

I looked out the window and watched Charlotte park her van and cross the street to the office. She wore a yellow skirt, and her behind fit it like something dropped into the bottom of a soft sack. Yardley Acheman picked up the telephone and dialed a number. I sat still.

In the immediate aftermath of a wrestling match on the floor of my brother’s office, while I was still trying to decide if it was possible that I would come into this place someday with a shotgun, I suddenly pictured her behind pressed into the bottom of a satin bag, a green bag with drawstrings at the top, about the size of a pants pocket, or a scrotum, and imagining that, and the solid weight of the thing loaded in this way, I felt a familiar stirring, and took that as a sign that I was myself again.

“I’m calling Miami,” Yardley said.

SHE CAME INTO THE office as Yardley was telling his editor what had happened.

“He fucking tried to kill me,” he said.

She sat down on the chair near my brother’s desk and inspected herself in a mirror from her purse. One side, then the other; touching her hair, running a finger along some line beneath her eye. We were going to see Hillary again that afternoon, and she was worried about her appearance.

She closed the mirror, miserable, then looked at me for help.

“You look fine,” I said, and she studied me a moment, still welty from the jellyfish, considering the source.

“Will somebody please get him laid?” she said.

“No, right here in the office,” Yardley said into the phone. “I can’t write in an atmosphere where I don’t know when somebody’s going to go off the deep end and strangle me.…”

Charlotte took that in, noticing the scrape on Yardley’s forehead, and then took the compact back out of her purse, opened it, and looked at herself again. “Did you strangle him?” she said, checking her forehead for scrapes.

“No,” I said, “we only wrestled.”

“That’s exactly right,” Yardley said into the phone. “I don’t have to put up with this shit. Not from him, not from anybody.…”

For a moment, the room was still while Yardley listened to the editor on the other end of the phone. I could hear the voice, but not the words. When it stopped, Yardley took the phone away from his ear and spoke to my brother.

“He wants to talk to you,” he said.

“Who?” my brother said.

“Miami,” he said. He seemed irritated my brother wasn’t paying more attention. “I told you I was calling Miami.…”

Ward got up, reluctant to leave the transcript, and crossed the room to Yardley’s desk and took the phone.

“This is Ward James,” he said. He stood completely still as he listened; he could have been waiting for the correct time. Charlotte put the mirror back again and inspected Yardley Acheman while my brother listened to the phone.

“All he needs is to get laid,” she said finally.

“He needs a fucking straitjacket,” Yardley said, feeling more removed all the time from that moment he was helpless on the floor.

“He’s oversexed,” she said.

Yardley Acheman seemed to consider that, and then turned on her. “Oversexed is a forty-year-old woman that dresses up like she’s eighteen,” he said, and the room was suddenly so still I could almost make out the words coming through the receiver into my brother’s ear.

My brother broke the silence. “No,” he said into the telephone, and then hung it up. Then he walked back across the room and stared at his desk, trying to remember where he was.

“So?” Yardley Acheman said.

My brother sat down, looking for something now.

“He goes or I go,” Yardley said.

And my brother looked at him a long time and then said it again. “No.”

And in some way I did not understand, he had closed the door on it.

“If he ever touches me again …” Yardley said, but my brother wasn’t listening. Charlotte turned to me and winked.

WE WERE BACK IN the interview room with Hillary Van Wetter again that afternoon, and my brother was trying to get him to remember where he had been stealing lawns on the night Sheriff Call was killed.

“What town was it?” he said. “Can you remember the town?”

Hillary smiled at the question, and answered without taking his eyes off Charlotte Bless. “It could be a thousand places,” he said. And then, as if it had some secret meaning between himself and Charlotte, he said, “There’s lawns to be mowed and ashes to be hauled everywhere in the world.” He smiled at her and she smiled back.

Yardley Acheman, sitting against the wall, closed his eyes as if he were too tired to continue.

“Could it have been Orlando?” my brother asked. He had called police departments all over the north-central part of the state, asking about lawn thefts, and there were more of them than you would imagine, especially around Orlando.

Hillary Van Wetter thought it over. “That’s a long ways to go for a lawn,” he said finally. And then, to her, “On the other hand, sometimes the farther you reach, the sweeter the grass,” and he laughed out loud after he said it.

She moved in her chair, and then crossed her legs. Hillary leaned forward a little to look as far up her skirt as he could. Charlotte did not seem to mind.

“These boys been taking care of you?” he said to her.

She nodded, about to tell him, I think, of what had happened on the beach, of who was taking care of what, but then changed her mind.

“Everything I need,” she said.

He turned his head suddenly and stared at me, something in it clean and cold. If he hadn’t killed Sheriff Call, I knew then that he could have. “Better not be everything,” he said.

I stared back at him, feeling clean and cold myself. He either didn’t see that, or didn’t care. He turned slowly to my brother, and then to Yardley Acheman. “She’s spoken for,” he said.

“Do you have any idea at all?” my brother said. “You remember what direction you drove?”

“Going or coming?” he said, sounding interested.

“Either way,” my brother said.

He thought a moment, and then shook his head. “No,” he said. It was quiet again as he stared at Charlotte and she stared back. “There was a night in there we took the greens off a golf course,” he said.

“Where?” my brother said.

“That would have been down in Daytona, I believe,” he said. “My uncle might remember.…” He smiled, remembering something funny. “He played it once himself … golf.” The image welled up in Hillary Van Wetter and then spilled over. He held his nose and shook, laughing, from what I could tell, at the notion of his uncle on the golf course.

“You’re sure it was Daytona?” my brother asked. The question stopped Hillary’s laughing, and he stared at Ward as if he had just walked into the room uninvited.

“I was speaking of golf,” he said finally.

My brother nodded.

“I was saying my uncle played it once.” He was angry; it was hard to tell why. “I had this pitcher in my head of it,” he said, “my uncle in green pants, and then you said what you did, and cut me off.”

He looked around the room, as if he were seeing it all for the first time. “And where’s that leave me now?” he said quietly.

My brother didn’t answer.

“You paperboys so damn smart.”

“Everything’s the same as when we got here,” Ward said.

“Exactly,” Hillary Van Wetter said, slowly nodding his head. “Exactly.” He closed his eyes, trying to get it back. “It ain’t that easy to pitcher somebody you know playing golf,” he said. He didn’t seem as angry as he’d been a moment earlier.

“Sorry,” my brother said.

“Sorry is the most useless thing in the world,” he said. “A man tells me ‘sorry,’ and it just aggravates the situation.”

I imagined Thurmond Call telling Hillary Van Wetter he was sorry for stomping his cousin. I wondered if the sheriff had done that, or if, in the end, he’d died without explaining anything to anybody.

I wondered how much he cared for his life; if he would have traded what was still left of it for a moment or two of humiliation on the highway in the rain. If he would have begged.

I didn’t think so, but, then, I’d only seen the sheriff in parades.

“A comical thing like that,” Hillary said a few moments later, “it don’t sound like much to you, but there ain’t nothing in here to laugh at but something that hurts.”

He turned his attention back to Charlotte then, trying to enjoy the sight of her legs disappearing up into her skirt, but that was spoiled too.

“Are you sure it was Daytona?” my brother said. He was polite to Hillary Van Wetter but he was not afraid of him.

“It don’t matter,” Hillary said a moment later.

Ward said, “If it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t bother you with it.” He paused a moment. “Are you sure it was Daytona?”

“Someplace over there. Daytona, Ormond Beach … one of them places. It was a golf course, and we took the lawn off all the greens.”

“All of them?” Yardley Acheman said.

“All we could find, walking around in the dark,” Hillary said.

“Where did you take it?” my brother said. Hillary looked at him; he didn’t seem to understand.

“Sold it,” he said finally.

“To whom?” Yardley Acheman said.

“Whom?” Hillary said. “Whom?” He reconsidered Yardley Acheman, and slowly a smile crossed his face.

“Maybe I don’t have to worry about leaving my fiancée alone with you boys after all,” he said. He looked to her, to see if she thought that was humorous. Testing her somehow.

“Where did you take it?” Ward said.

“A developer,” he said. “They pay till they bleed for golf course grass.”

“What kind of developer?”

“Condos,” he said. He looked again at Yardley Acheman, who hadn’t spoken since Hillary insulted him. “You’d like condos,” he said. “They’re full of ‘whom’ boys.…”

“Not that it’s any of your business,” Yardley said, “but for the record, I’ve got a fiancee of my own.”

A smile suddenly lit Hillary Van Wetter’s face. “What record is that?” he said.

“Where were the condominiums?” my brother said.

Hillary rubbed his eyes. “You did it again,” he said.

“Every time a thing is humorous, you want to know where something was.”

“It isn’t humorous,” my brother said evenly. “We ‘re running out of time.” And as if on a signal, the door to the room opened and a guard walked in and put his hand on Hillary Van Wetter’s shoulder.

“That’s it, boys,” he said.

Hillary stood up without looking at the guard who was holding his shoulder. It was exactly as if Hillary had decided to get up on his own. The guard’s hand went to the crook of his elbow and pulled him toward the door. Hillary did not struggle, but for a moment he held himself where he was, and neither of them moved.

“Open your mouth a little bit,” he said to Charlotte, but it was a joke this time, and he let the guard lead him out.

Yardley Acheman picked at a little piece of scab on his forehead, and in a moment it beaded blood. “This is fucked,” he said to my brother.

Ward didn’t answer.

“Hillary Van Wetter is an innocent man,” Charlotte said.

Yardley Acheman turned on her then. “Who cares?”

“Me,” she said. “That’s what I’m doing here.”

“What you’re doing here is getting your pussy wet off the idea that this guy’s going to the electric chair,” he said. And then, indicating me, he said, “You’re crazier than he is.”

Ward stood up, tired, and walked toward the door. I followed him out, and a moment later Charlotte caught up with me in the hallway.

“You all aren’t going to quit on this …” she said. Yardley Acheman was just coming out of the visitors’ room; my brother was ahead of us, waiting at the iron gate to be passed through.

“Ward isn’t going to quit,” I said, “and he’s the only one that matters.”

THERE WAS AN ACCIDENT that night on the highway, a couple of bikers from Orlando met a station wagon from Michigan, head-on, and the highway patrol was hours clearing the mess.

My father was still in his chair when I came in, the pile of newspapers sifted across the floor at his feet.

He was drinking a bottle of wine, which he’d set on the table next to him. Before my mother left, he’d leave the bottle in the kitchen and make the trip back and forth; he didn’t like to sit still and drink, believing that was a signal of addiction, and that getting up and walking to the kitchen was a sign the other way. He always looked for signs of things, and not the things themselves.

“You’re late,” he said, looking at his watch.

“There was a big one out on the highway,” I said.

“Local people?”

“No,” I said, “bikers and tourists.”

He dropped his arm and picked up the glass. He studied my face, and then my arms. “How are the bites?”

“Stings,” I said. “They’re all right.”

“Stings,” he said, and seemed to let that settle. He had drunk most of the bottle, and it had begun to show.

“They hurt much?”

I shook my head and walked into the kitchen and got a beer. Then I heard the door swing open behind me and he came in and sat down heavily at the table. He set his glass and the bottle in front of him. “That must have been a hairy situation,” he said.

I sat down at the table too; there was no place else to go. I didn’t know if it had been hairy or not; it was removed, like a story I’d read about someone else.

“This time of year,” he said, “I understand jellyfish are common in this part of Florida.” I took a drink of the beer, nodded. “You have to respect the ocean,” he said a minute or two later.

To my knowledge, my father had never been in the ocean in his life. He liked the river. When I was six or seven, before my mother left for California, he would let me squirt him with the hose after he’d washed the truck, and that was the only time I remember seeing him wet. He stared at his glass, a speck of something black floating an inch below the surface. He picked it up and drank it anyway, and the speck was stuck to his lip when he finished. He looked at his watch.

“Working into the night,” he said, “that’s when you wear out, start to make mistakes.”

It seemed to me that he wanted to know how my brother was doing. “Ward doesn’t get worn out the way other people do,” I said.

My father smiled, looking like an old man. “Everybody wears out,” he said. “Sometimes it’s because they don’t know when to quit. Like racehorses, if there wasn’t somebody there to stop them, they’d run themselves to death.”

In some way it seemed possible, Ward running himself to death. My father filled his glass again and stared a moment at the bottle, as if he were confused at the amount he saw inside.

“They had a shark attack up in Jacksonville,” he said.

IN THE MORNING, Yardley Acheman loaded his suitcase and a cooler of iced beer into Charlotte’s van, and then climbed in behind it, headed for Daytona Beach to find the golf course Hillary and Tyree Van Wetter had vandalized on the night Sheriff Call was killed.

Yardley Acheman had been complaining for weeks of heat and boredom and the lack of good restaurants in Moat County, but now, leaving the place, he wasn’t appreciably happier.

He did not speak to Charlotte as he got in; did not, in fact, acknowledge her at all. He settled into the passenger seat, set his sunglasses on his nose, and folded his arms over his chest.

Charlotte smiled at me and forced the van into gear, and then rode off into the early sun, trailing black smoke from a tear in the exhaust system.

WARD SPENT HALF AN HOUR that morning studying a navigational map of the river, and then we went looking for Uncle Tyree. We went to the store along the highway first where I had delivered ten papers each morning all through the winter and spring. There was a naked child playing in the driveway, squatted over something shiny in the dirt—perhaps a flattened can or a piece of glass—pounding on it with a hammer.

He looked up at the sound of the car, dropped the hammer, and ran inside when we stopped.

“This isn’t going to do you any good,” I said.

Ward nodded, and then opened his door anyway and got out. I sat still a moment before I followed him, not wanting to go in there again.

My brother picked up the hammer and carried it with him to the front door. I locked the car doors and watched him step inside.

Ward was standing in front of the counter when I came in, still holding the hammer. The place was dark and hot, a black spider sat in the jar of beef jerky sitting next to the cash register.

A voice came out of the back. “Where’s your pants?” A man’s voice, there was no answer. “I askt you a question, mister. Where’s your pants?”

There was no answer. My brother looked around at the shelves. Cookies, candy, flour, tobacco, sugar, Hostess cup-cakes—none of it in any order I could see, it was stacked in the shelves as it arrived, I suppose, put wherever there was an open spot.

There was another voice in back now, a woman’s.

“Jack,” she said, almost softly, just that word, and for a moment I thought someone was speaking to me.

And then she came through the curtains, the woman with the beautiful skin, and saw us standing in her store, and at the same time I heard the sound of a strap hitting flesh.

“Where’s your pants?” the man said again, sounding more angry now, and the question was followed by another smack, and then another, and another.

The woman moved to her place behind the counter, expressionless, waiting. There was nothing to indicate she remembered who I was. The beating in the back room continued, and I realized I was counting the strokes; the number twenty-two was in my head.

Ward put the hammer on the wooden counter in front of the woman and smiled.

Twenty-four, twenty-five.

The child had not cried.

“This was outside,” my brother said. The woman stared at the hammer, but did not touch it. The beating went on, but the only sounds were the strap against the boy’s body and a labored breathing that I took to be the man’s.

It stopped for a moment and my brother said, “I was wondering if you might be able to tell us how to find Tyree Van Wetter’s place.”

It started again then, and a tiny tremor passed over her bottom lip; passed and was gone. My brother took out his wallet and began looking for his business card. “My name is Ward James,” he said, putting the card on the counter next to the hammer. When she didn’t look, he pushed it a little closer.

“I am trying to locate someone who can substantiate Hillary Van Wetter’s whereabouts on the evening he is supposed to have killed Sheriff Call.”

No answer.

“Mr. Van Wetter has told me,” my brother said, “that he was with his uncle Tyree.…”

The strokes reached forty, then forty-one. They were coming slower now, as if the man was wearing out. “I suppose he would be another generation removed from you,” my brother said. “Your grandfather, or great-uncle … ”

The beating stopped completely for the second time, then began again.

“You want something?” she said. It wasn’t rude, but she was asking us to leave. “You got to buy something, or you can’t stay.” She glanced back in the direction of the curtains.

My brother picked up a pack of Camel cigarettes and handed the woman a dollar. He didn’t smoke.

She rang up sixty cents on the cash register, the drawer bell sounding exactly as the fiftieth crack filled the room and then receded, leaving the place quiet. She stood still, with the drawer still open, until the strap fell again. Lost in it.

She picked the change out of the drawer; the coins in there were not separated into bins but tossed randomly together wherever there was space.

“I saw Hillary yesterday,” my brother said.

She did not seem to hear. Another stroke landed, and then a low, sustained howl started somewhere inside the building, you could not tell where, and grew as it changed pitch—a dog’s sound—until it filled the place, and all of us in it. The tremor crossed the woman’s lip again, and this time it did not stop there but shook her chin too, and then I saw the light from the window collected in her eyes, and then she was crying, without noise. The beating had stopped with the wail; fifty-four strokes; and the woman cried that it was finally over.

The man’s voice came from behind the curtain. “Now you go find them pants and put them on,” he said. The curtain moved and the man with the burned face came through it. He was flushed and bare-chested, the sweat glistening on his stomach. He looked at us, and then at her. I could tell that beating the boy had made him want to fuck her.

“My name is Ward James,” my brother said. “I am with the Miami Times.…”

“Store’s closed,” the man said.

“I was looking for Tyree Van Wetter.”

The man walked to the door and opened it, waiting for us to leave. “I’m not with the courts,” my brother said. “This is about Hillary.”

The man nodded and waited for us to get out. He looked quickly at the woman, blaming her for our being in the store. My brother waited, not moving, and finally the man shook his head.

“They ain’t here,” he said, “either one of them.”

“I know they’re not here,” my brother said, staying where he was.

I remembered an afternoon then, outside the Paramount movie theater in Thorn. A kid named Roger Bowen with a ducktail haircut and a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his T-shirt danced a foot in front of Ward, leaning into his face. He moved his arms like wings and made chicken noises while his friends laughed. I’d tugged at Ward’s sleeve; he wouldn’t move.

Roger Bowen died the following year crossing the railroad tracks in front of a train, and on the afternoon I remembered, the theater manager finally came out and chased him and his friends away for being white trash.

Or perhaps it was because we were the children of William Ward James, and were in some way protected.

“I’m trying to locate Tyree Van Wetter,” my brother said again.

The man at the door reconsidered him and then smiled, the kind of smile that leads to something else, and shook his head. “I said the store’s closed.” His voice had turned polite, and I knew something bad was in the works.

“Who would know where to find him?” my brother said.

The man shook his head. “Tyree? He’s got family all around here, up and down the river.”

“You’re his family,” my brother said.

The man shook his head. “Ain’t the same bunch,” he said. And then, nodding to the woman behind the counter, he said, “She was one of them, but she married into my side of the family.” It was a joke between them, one that wasn’t funny to her.

“Jack, please …”

He looked at her a moment, suddenly angry, and then, just as suddenly, he seemed to give in.

“Honeymoon Lane,” he said.

My brother walked past the man and out of the store. I hurried to get out with him, and the moment I was clear the door closed. I heard a bolt slide on the other side.

My brother got into the car and sat in the heat, thinking, without opening his window. I turned on the air conditioner and looked at him to see where we were going. He was still a moment, staring at his hands, then looked back at the store.

I drove the car out of the parking lot slowly, and turning toward the road I saw the boy again, still naked, standing behind the store, something draped from his hand. He moved his arm in a long arc, and the movement gave shape to the thing in his hands, and I saw it was a pair of pants. He let go of the pants at the top of the arc, and they floated up into the air and landed on the roof, one leg dangling over, as if trying to crawl the rest of the way up.

He stared at the pants a moment, making sure they would stay, then turned, and squatted, and began pounding the bare dirt with his fist.

“They shouldn’t beat him like that,” my brother said.

A MILE NORTH OF the store we turned east onto a baked dirt road identified as Honeymoon Lane by a sign that had been dented and perforated by shotgun pellets. There was marsh grass on either side of the road, and, a mile or two farther, where it turned wet, there was a long stand of trees. Insects crawled over the windshield of the car, trying to get in.

Honeymoon Lane itself lay ahead like rough water. It rose and fell a foot or more in a regulated pattern, and then, in some places, dropped more than that, banging the car’s undercarriage onto the ground. I slowed, but it did nothing to improve the ride. I was beginning to feel nauseous.

Ward looked out the window.

“If people live back here, they don’t take this road in and out,” I said.

“If they come out,” he said.

The road quit a dozen feet from standing water, and a path led off into the trees. The trees were thicker than they’d looked from the highway; the path resembled a tunnel.

“Last stop,” I said, and turned off the engine.

He got out and started into the trees, and I followed him in. It was shaded there, and cool, and the trunks of the trees were covered with moss, some of them eight or ten feet around. They grew in eroding soil, their roots visible for yards.

Between the trees, the ground dropped away and was covered by water. River water, warm and brown. Reeds grew in some places, in other, deeper places, there were none.

Mosquitoes moved over the water in clouds and made a humming noise that was electric, a deeper sound than they make close to your ear. I slapped at one in my hair and the movement seemed to draw others, and a moment later they were everywhere, even in my nose and mouth.

I brushed them off my arms and head, and then, looking at Ward, I saw a dozen of them had set down on his face. He didn’t seem to notice they were there.

We walked along the edge of the water for a hundred yards, and then took a narrow stretch of raised ground farther east, deeper into the trees. We turned north again, on a kind of peninsula, and the texture of the earth was softer, and our shoes made sucking noises as we walked. The car was long out of sight, and although I have a certain sense of direction, I was not sure, left alone, that I could have found my way out.

“There’s a boat landing here somewhere,” Ward said. His voice carried clearly, and seemed to come from the trees behind me, although he was a few yards ahead.

I looked for a boat landing. “Where?” The sound of my own voice startled me.

He stared into the trees without answering, trying, I think, to remember exactly how the shoreline looked from the river. It had been ten years at least since he’d been out there on a boat.

Farther ahead, a dead tree had fallen across the path, one end still hinged to the base of the trunk, the other resting in the water. A moccasin as thick as my wrist lay on it near the water, the same color as the wet, rotting trunk.

I stepped over the trunk, blind to what was lying on the other side. My brother stopped again. There was water in front of him, perhaps fifty feet of it, and beyond that the ground rose into an island, a yard higher than it was here.

Standing still, he had sunk to his ankles in the mud.

“There’s a house in there,” he said.

I didn’t see a house, but then I’d been watching for snakes.

“How do you know that?” I said. I wanted to turn around and go back to the car. I slapped my arm, killing two mosquitoes at once. One of them full of blood. The noise seemed to hang in the trees, unable to get out.

“What else would it be?” he said.

“What else would what be?”

He pointed into the trees, and I saw it then, a dark, familiar shape barely visible against the lines of the branches. A television antenna. A crow screamed, and when I looked, another inch or two of my brother had sunk into the mud.

“You’re sinking,” I said.

He studied the problem, buried to his ankles in mud, and then slowly pulled his feet out. His feet came out, his shoes stayed.

Water filled the holes his feet had left, and when he reached down to retrieve his shoes, he couldn’t find them. Brown wing tips lost to the mud.

My thoughts turned to quicksand.

Ward’s arm went into the mud halfway to the elbow. “It’s some kind of suction,” he said. He stood back up, his hand black, and looked at the soft earth and then the water. He said, “There must be an underground current.”

I looked at the water too, but nothing in it moved.

“What I think,” he said, still looking around, “the whole thing is eroded underneath.” He looked at me a moment and smiled. “I think it’s all floating.”

I heard something behind me drop into the water, and turned to look at the fallen tree we’d crossed a few minutes before. The moccasin was gone. Ward lifted one foot and then the other, taking off his socks and sticking them in the front pockets of his trousers, and began wading across to the island. I studied the water a long time before I took off my own shoes and socks, rolled up my pants legs, and followed him in.

The bottom was cool and soft and came up between my toes. A few feet ahead Ward was in up to his waist. “Are you sinking or has it gotten deeper?” I said.

He stopped for a minute to consider that. “It’s hard to say,” he said finally, and then moved ahead. A moment later I dropped into the same hole and the mud was colder underfoot but more solid. Ward had reached the other side, and was using the low branch of a tree to pull himself up onto the bank. He struggled, half out of the water, his weight changing the equation as he emerged. His arms shook with the effort, and I arrived under him just before he fell back in, and put my hand on his behind and pushed him up.

And doing that, I sank deeper into the bottom, and when I pulled myself out I was caked in it to the knees. I stood where I was while Ward caught his breath. I was surprised that he wasn’t stronger—he had always seemed stronger—and that the few moments he hung between ground and the water had used him up. The thought crossed my mind that he was sick.

The narrow spot of cleared ground that we were on was not much bigger than a closet, not really enough room for us both. The underbrush leading farther in was thick, and there was no trail here.

“There’s got to be another way in and out,” I said.

“Maybe we can find it when we leave.”

He nodded, his hands on his knees, still catching his breath. I noticed the mosquitoes had no interest in my feet, which were now covered with mud. My shirt stuck to my skin. Ward stood up, looking pale. “You want to go back?” I said.

A moment passed and he said, “What’s the point of that?”

And then he turned and pushed away the undergrowth and branches with his hands, and slowly made his way through.

He was awkward in everything he did now, the branches came at him from unexpected angles. He stumbled once, then stopped to inspect a cut on his foot.

Still, he pushed into the trees toward the antenna. A broken branch caught his sleeve and tore his shirt, and, turning to loosen himself, a smaller branch slapped him in the eye. He stopped, holding it, and when he let go it had begun to swell. Tears ran from the corner as if he were crying.

I walked past him and took the lead, holding the branches until he was through them, making sure there was nothing unexpected waiting to hit him in the other eye. It did not seem impossible that I would have to lead him back to the car blind, and within a few minutes he was in fact tearing from both eyes. No one was ever more out of place than Ward was here, and yet he pressed through, starting to sneeze. It occurred to me that it didn’t matter that he was no good at this; what mattered was that he was willing to do it.

The thing he was good at was born of a lack of talent. He did not need grace to push ahead.

He stopped for a moment and wiped at his eyes, using the bottom of his shirt. The mosquitoes moved off his face, then resettled even before he was finished. I whacked the back of my neck and the jolt carried straight through my head. “I’m beating the shit out of myself here,” I said. I did not bother to speak softly now; there was no chance we had not been overheard already, if there was someone to hear us.

Ward blew his nose into his shirtsleeve and tried to clear his vision, closing his eyes and wiping the lids with his fingers. “It isn’t much farther,” he said, and a minute later I heard the chickens.

THE HOUSE SAT ON cement blocks at the far end of the clearing. Dozens of chickens hunted under it and over the bare ground of the yard for bits of food; a rooster sat on a pile of shingles.

Beyond the shingles, a nylon line had been rigged, leading from the corner of the main house to the single tree still standing in the yard. Half a dozen alligator skins hung from the line, none of them more than four or five feet long. There was a tree stump not far away where they did the skinning. An ax and some knives had been left there, two of them stuck into the stump itself, the rest on the ground and on a four-legged metal stool nearby.

My brother walked slowly across the yard; one of the chickens crossed his path and dropped feathers hurrying out of the way. The house itself was prefabricated; I had seen hundreds like it in developments outside Jacksonville and Orlando. It had one story with a pitched roof and a large picture window in front, where the living room would be. Ranch style, the real estate people called it.

I wondered if it had been hard to steal.

Half of the front of the place had been covered with aluminum siding, the rest left in shingles like the ones in the pile. An outboard Evinrude lay in pieces on a blanket in the carport; the tools used to take it apart lay among them.

My brother walked to the front door and pushed the doorbell. He and I looked at each other a moment, waited, and he knocked. Nothing moved. He took a few steps back and looked at the roof, one end to the other. It was covered with tarpaper which was torn here and there, exposing the wood underneath. Chicken droppings were everywhere.

He went back to the door and knocked again. He called out Tyree Van Wetter’s name.

I had moved to the side of the house, and from there I saw the inlet behind it. A small boat had been left upside down in the backyard. The yard itself was wet and grassless, a strip of dirt no more than ten feet wide that sloped from the house to the water.

My brother’s voice carried out over the water and bounced back. “Mr. Van Wetter … I am here to ask you about your nephew Hillary.”

I walked back around to the front. “There’s nobody home,” I said. My brother looked at the house, undecided.

He knocked again, much louder this time. “Tyree Van Wetter?”

The chickens resumed their search of the yard, as if we were of no consequence. My brother sat down on the step leading to the front door and began unplugging the mud between his toes with a stick. I sat down next to him. The step was warm from the sun. I smelled tar, probably from the roof. I looked at my brother, waiting to see what he intended to do.

“Let’s give it a little while,” he said.

I watched him clean his feet. “You know,” I said, “this might be somebody’s fishing cabin.”

He was studying one of his toes. “No,” he said, “it’s the right place, I think.” And then he said, “Someone’s in the house. I heard them.”

We sat on the porch and waited. The sun moved, and the house took more of it for a shadow. The place began to feel cooler.

“I’m sorry about what happened with Yardley,” I said, sometime later.

He was staring at one of his feet; it had been a long time since either of us had spoken. I had not heard anything from inside the house. He frowned, I couldn’t tell why.

“Nobody was hurt,” he said.

“He acted hurt.”

“Yardley thinks he’s protected,” he said. “ ‘You can’t do this to me, I’m with the Miami Times.…’ ” Hearing the words, he began to smile. Ward knew that no such protection existed. He had no misunderstanding about that.

THE SUN HAD JUST DROPPED behind the trees at the west end of the clearing when I heard the boat. Ward and I stood up and walked to the backyard and watched it come across the inlet—a small aluminum fishing boat with an ancient Johnson motor. There were two men inside, one about my father’s age, the other one younger, perhaps his son. They were both blond, and they did not seem surprised to see us standing at the edge of their property.

The one in front—the younger one—stood up as the boat approached land, holding a Coleman cooler under his arm, and jumped to shore. The boat rocked violently behind him; the old man sat at the motor and waited while the younger one set the cooler down and pulled him onto the landing. The younger man’s arms were long and clearly defined, the sort of arms you get from work or swimming.

The old man pulled the motor out of the water, the shape of his own arms changing, and then stepped out himself.

My brother stood still, waiting for one of them to speak. The younger man tied the boat to a stump and then reclaimed his cooler and walked between us and up to the house. When he was almost there, the back door opened and a pale-faced woman stood in the crack and began to speak to him in whispers. He nodded, without answering her, and then stepped past her and disappeared inside.

The old man put his hands in the back pockets of his pants and approached my brother. He was wider than the younger man, but not as hard or as tall. He stopped in front of Ward, studying us like a problem. “You lost your shoes,” he said finally, a smile playing somewhere behind the words.

Ward nodded and looked over to the place we had come in. “Yessir,” he said.

“There’s snakes all through here, you was lucky that’s all that happened,” the old man said. He seemed good-natured, and looked at me a moment to see if I was afraid of snakes, and then turned back into the boat and pulled out a full bag of groceries. A sack of potato chips was perched at the top. His whiskers were coming in, a gray line that followed his jaw and in the failing light made him seem just out of focus.

“Mr. Van Wetter?” Ward said.

The old man nodded.

“My name is Ward James, I am with the Miami Times…”

The old man started up the bank to the house. His legs looked heavy. My brother followed, a few feet behind. “I wanted to talk to you about your nephew …”

The old man stopped before he went in the door.

“Which nephew would that be?” he said.

“Hillary,” my brother said.

The old man shook his head. “You come walking through them snakes for nothing,” he said. “Hillary ain’t my nephew. That’s the other branch of the family.” A moment passed.

“Which branch is that?” Ward said.

The old man stopped and scratched his head, still holding the groceries. “You might to ask Eugene there, he’s Hillary’s first cousin.” He nodded toward the house.

My brother looked at the house, trying to put it together. “Eugene’s married twict,” the old man said, “and bridged the two sides of the family. He’ll be out in a bit, we got to eat some ice cream.”

We walked back to the front and sat down again on the porch and waited. There was movement inside the house; a baby cried. The sun dropped farther into the trees, taking the house in the shade. There were specks of spit in the corner of my brother’s mouth. We had been a long time without a drink.

He stared into the treetops, sensing the place, the people in it.

Half an hour had passed when the door opened and the old man came out carrying a half gallon carton of Winn Dixie vanilla ice cream. The one named Eugene stepped out a moment later, carrying a spoon in his shirt pocket, and, after they had each settled in a spot on the ground with their backs resting against the blocks supporting the house, the old man slowly opened the top of the ice cream, looking up at Eugene after he had pulled back all four covers to reveal what was underneath. It was a kind of ceremony.

The old man went into his pants pockets and came out with a spoon. He considered it a moment, and then dropped it into the ice cream. He put the spoon in his mouth and left it there a long time. When he pulled it out, half the ice cream came out with it.

The door opened a few inches and the woman stepped out sideways, carrying a baby. She wore a man’s T-shirt, her breasts loose underneath. She kept her eyes down, not wanting to look at either my brother or me, and took a seat on the ground beyond Eugene.

The old man put the spoon back in his mouth again, and when he brought it out this time it was clean.

“You’re Hillary’s cousin?” my brother said suddenly. Eugene had been watching the old man eat, and his head snapped in my brother’s direction. He stared at Ward as the old man balanced a load of ice cream on the spoon and guided it into his mouth. The ice cream was soft and some of what had melted dripped out of the bottom of the carton onto his pants.

“Hillary Van Wetter,” my brother said. “You’re his cousin?”

The old man chuckled with the spoon still in his mouth, as if the ice cream had made him happy. “Don’t mind Eugene,” he said. “He gets irritable waiting his turn.”

My brother nodded, and Eugene looked away, back in the direction of the ice cream. Farther down the line, the woman was stealing looks in that direction too.

The old man caught her at it and said, “Ice cream,” before he put the spoon in his mouth again. Barely, the woman nodded.

We sat outside the house for twenty minutes while the old man ate vanilla ice cream. Swamp etiquette. He seemed to enjoy the feel of it in his mouth as much as the taste, and once, after he had slid the spoon out of his lips, he put it against his cheek, and smiled at the way that felt too. The ice cream melted in the carton and dripped onto his pants, and the stain there spread until it covered his lap.

And suddenly he stopped and closed his eyes and dropped his head back until it touched the bricks he was leaning against. He seemed to be waiting for a pain to pass, and when it was gone, he had a last, long look into the carton—it was still half full at least—and passed it along to Eugene.

The carton dripped as it was moved, and Eugene lifted it over his face and sucked on a corner.

The woman watched more carefully now, brushing insects away from the container, ignoring the ones that lit on her arms and shoulders. Her nipples were clearly defined under her shirt, and I looked other places, not to be caught staring.

The old man folded his hands over his stomach and closed his eyes. “Getting dark,” he said, I didn’t know to whom.

My brother nodded, as if that had been on his mind too. He had a quick look around the clearing. “Is there another way out of here?” he said.

The old man opened his eyes to consider that. “Two ways,” he said, “the way you come in and the boat.”

It was quiet again; my brother would not ask for the ride. The old man smiled at him again. “You proud, ain’t you?” he said.

Ward didn’t answer. The old man turned to Eugene, who had closed himself around the carton of ice cream.

“These paperboys is proud, Eugene. I like that …”

Eugene nodded.

“I might just give you proud boys a ride home,” the old man said. He started to get up—pretended to get up—then dropped back onto the ground. He shook his head. “Too much ice cream,” he said. “I’d sink that old boat with all this in me.”

He smiled at the woman, who had forgotten the baby in her arms and was watching the ice cream. Eugene was in it to his wrist now, and it had puddled on the ground between his legs; I couldn’t tell how much was left.

“Looks like you two got to leave the way you come,” the old man said. I thought of the moccasin lying on a branch in the dark, imagined putting my hand there to climb over.

“I have to talk to Tyree Van Wetter,” my brother said, and it seemed to ruin the old man’s good humor, that my brother didn’t care if we had to go back the way we’d come; that snakes didn’t frighten him.

“Can’t do you no good,” the old man said.

Eugene picked up the carton and sucked from the corner again. He seemed ready to turn what was left over to the woman; he looked at it, he looked at her; then dipped his spoon into it again.

“He could help Hillary,” my brother said.

“Hillary’s gone,” the old man said. “They got him, and they ain’t going to let him loose.”

“Hillary says he was with his uncle the night Thurmond Call was killed,” my brother said.

The old man thought about that, but didn’t answer. When I looked at the ice cream again, the woman suddenly turned in my direction, glaring, as if it had just come to her that I might be ahead of her in line.

“They’re gone keep that boy,” the old man said.

“They’re going to strap him into a chair and electrocute him,” my brother said.

The old man nodded. “That’s good,” he said. In the quiet that followed, Eugene put the container on the ground beside his leg. The woman looked at him, then the ice cream, and then, on some unspoken signal, she picked it up herself. The old man said, “Then it’s settled.”

“He says he was in Daytona Beach when it happened,” my brother said.

The old man shrugged.

“Stealing sod …”

The old man rubbed his chin. “That’s against the law, ain’t it?”

“Yessir.”

“So they’d put poor old Tyree in the pokey too.”

My brother shook his head. “There’s a statute of limitations on that. They can’t arrest anybody for that now.”

The old man smiled again. “I seen your statues,” he said. And he caught Eugene’s eye and held it, as if they were deciding something, and a little later the woman put down her spoon and ran her finger along the inside of the ice cream carton and stuck it into the baby’s mouth.

THE AIR TURNED COLD as we made our way back, and we stepped on bare feet into pinecones and rocks that we could not see. The sky was dark and, looking up, it was impossible to distinguish it from the trees. A breeze came up from the east, the direction of the water, and behind it was a soft roll of thunder.

I walked ahead and heard him behind me, breaking through the trees even though I held the branches after I had gone through. He was breathing hard, and sniffing. I could hear him clearly, but I couldn’t see him, even when he was so close his hand touched mine on the same tree branch.

And then there was a flash of lightning, and in that flash I did catch a glimpse of him, walking with his hands out in front of himself, his head slightly turned away, like someone in a water fight at the swimming pool. I straightened my own posture, seeing his, and dropped my hands to my sides. A moment later I walked into a tree branch that felt as if it had taken off my ear.

There was a moment then, as I held the ear and waited for the pain to pass, when it suddenly seemed to me that the old man and his son were in the trees somewhere, watching, and I straightened up again, not wanting to look foolish.

Later, I slipped on some wet ground and caught myself with my hands. Ward walked into me from behind, but managed not to fall. “How far do you think we came in?” I said.

“Someplace in here,” he said.

“I can’t see a damn thing,” I said. And a moment later I thought I heard a smothered laugh; someone else was there in the trees and mud, watching. I was furious.

“You know what I think?” I said. “I think these fucking people are too stupid to know you’re trying to help them.”

“If we just keep headed straight a little longer,” my brother said, “we’ll find the path to the car.”

It was quiet while I got back to my feet, and then we began to walk again. “They aren’t stupid,” Ward said later. “They were playing with us.”

And then the earth gave way under my feet and I dropped off it, catching my arm on something solid on the way down, and then landed, it seemed like a long time later, sideways in the water.

“Jack?” His voice came from a distance, and from behind something. “Jack? Are you there?”

I got myself up and stood in the mud, which closed around my feet. The water itself seemed warm and came about to the top of my pants.

“There’s a drop into the water here,” I said. “I’d say five feet.”

It was quiet then, while Ward reconsidered the terrain.

“We must be too far east,” he said finally. His voice was muted; I felt my feet sinking into the mud and moved to another spot.

“The edge gave way,” I said. “You better watch where you’re standing or you’ll be down here on top of me.”

“Can you move around?”

A pattern of lightning lit the sky, and was followed a few seconds later by more thunder. In the light, I saw the root system of a tree in the bank over my head. It resembled a nest. Farther down, to my left, I could see a fallen tree lying one end in the water, and beyond that the ground dropped level to the water. I was suddenly cold.

“I think we came in over here,” I said.

The lightning moved in and the thunder behind it shook the sky. It began to rain. Underneath that noise, I could hear my brother above me on the bank, making his way through the trees.

And we walked that way back to the place where we crossed to the island earlier in the day; Ward contending with bad footing and branches he could not see, and me, waist deep in water, ankle deep in mud, thinking of snakes.

MY SHOES WERE ON the bank where I had left them. The car was where we had left it too, but had been rolled upside down and left with its doors open, glowing inside from the small light in the ceiling. We stood in the rain looking at it.

“You know the worst part?” I said, “we can’t even get in to wait out the storm.” Ward didn’t answer. He seemed tired and weak; his clothes clung to his skin and underneath them he was frail.

Without a word, he began walking toward the highway. I waited a moment longer, watching the car rock in the wind, hoping in some way that the wind would blow it right and we could drive home. And then I turned and couldn’t see him, and felt a quiet panic that he might be lost. I jogged up the dirt road in the direction of the highway, calling his name, and found him standing still again, staring back into the darkness where we had been.

He looked at me and blinked. The rain washed across his face and dripped off his chin. He looked pale and desperate, but then, looking back at the swamp, he smiled, and I understood that he’d gotten what he came for. That we had spent the afternoon with Uncle Tyree.

I SLEPT IN YARDLEY ACHEMAN’S bed that night, too tired to make the trip back to my father’s house in Thorn. The pillow smelled of his cologne, and I woke once in the night, full of the smell and nauseated.

HE AND CHARLOTTE RETURNED from Daytona Beach at two o’clock the next afternoon. When they came in, I was sitting at Yardley’s desk, on the phone, going over the particulars of the overturned car with a claims agent at the car rental company headquarters in Orlando. I had been over the same story three times, starting with the clerk at the desk in Palatka, where we’d rented the car, and ending up with the man in Orlando, and at each step the person receiving the information seemed to take what had happened more personally.

“You just left it there, in the swamp?” he said. He had a distinct, mouth-full-of-grits north Florida accent.

“We parked it at the end of the road,” I said. “We didn’t leave it in the swamp.”

“And when you found it, it was upside down,” he said. Something in this was hitting a false note with the claims agent, and he wasn’t trying to hide it.

“It was upside down,” I said. I was tired, and I was wearing Yardley Acheman’s shirt and a pair of his pants, which did not fit in the crotch and smelled faintly of his cologne. “And you didn’t leave the keys in the ignition.…” “You think it rolled over because I left the keys in the ignition?” I said.

“I don’t know what to think,” he said.

And that was when Charlotte and Yardley Acheman came through the door. Charlotte appeared first—it looked as if Yardley had held the door for her—and I could see in that moment that something was different.

“Mr. James?” said the man in Orlando.

“I’ve gone over this four times with you, and three or four times with two people before you, and nothing’s changed,” I said. “I didn’t turn the damn car over.”

Yardley recognized his shirt, I don’t know how. It was a plain white shirt with long sleeves that I’d found in his drawer; I’d never seen him wear it.

“What’s he doing in my shirt?” he said to Ward.

“We had trouble with the car last night,” my brother said. “He had to stay over.”

Yardley Acheman nodded as if he understood. “What’s he doing in my shirt?” he said.

“He didn’t go home last night,” Ward said.

“Your shirts don’t fit him?”

“We’ll send it to the cleaners,” my brother said. “We’ll expense it.” As much as Yardley liked to expense things to the Times, he shook his head no.

“I don’t want the fucking thing now.”

Ward and I looked at each other, then I glanced at Charlotte, hoping she was about to tell Yardley off, but she stood quietly, listening to him, as if this discussion of a single shirt made sense.

“I hate people wearing my clothes,” he said. And then he turned back to Ward and said, “And I hate people sitting at my desk.”

“He’s getting us a new car,” Ward said.

“He’s sitting there in my shirt, on my telephone.…”

He was angry, but I’d seen that before. Then I found myself noticing the way Charlotte was looking at him.

I stood up and opened the shirt without unbuttoning it, then balled it up and threw it at his head. It landed in his hands. He took a step back, remembering the headlock. Then I kicked off my shoes, still frosted in mud, and stepped out of his pants and threw them at him too. I stood in Jockey shorts and socks, daring him to say anything else.

Slowly, he began to nod, as if this were the sort of behavior he’d been expecting all along. I realized I’d spent myself, or at least had nothing else to tear off, when Charlotte interrupted.

“Yardley found the golf course,” she said.

And in that second, ripping Yardley’s shirt off without unbuttoning it was all for nothing.

Yardley turned to my brother and nodded, acknowledging it, then dropped the shirt and pants on the floor. As if to say, “And this is the way you treat me.”

“Where is it?” Ward said.

I walked around the desk in my underpants, brushing past Charlotte, and sat in the window. A breeze I hadn’t felt before blew over my skin. She watched me a moment, then turned away, disinterested.

“Ormond Beach,” Yardley Acheman said. He took a notepad out of his back pocket and read from what was written down. “August twentieth, 1965, six thirty-five A.M., the grounds superintendent phones the Ormond Beach Police Department to report that his greens have been vandalized; somebody’s stripped the sod in the night.”

“Where’d you find it?” my brother said.

Yardley Acheman shrugged, as if it were some intuitive talent he couldn’t explain.

“He saw it in the newspaper,” Charlotte said, and for a moment I embraced the thought that the change in her was only that he had found the way to save Hillary Van Wetter. But then she looked at him again, and I knew I was wrong.

“It was in some old clips at the Ormond Beach Satellite,” he said.

“It was in all the papers,” she said. Charlotte was bragging on Yardley, but she did not understand that the size of his accomplishment depended on its difficulty. I folded my arms and leaned back into the window frame.

“You talked to the man.…” Ward said.

Yardley Acheman nodded. “Not the superintendent, he got cancer from the weed killer out there, but another guy. He remembered it because the membership voted to ask the governor to declare it a disaster area, they could get funds to replace the greens without going into their own pockets. It made all the papers.”

“They were old,” Charlotte said. “A bunch of old men, walking around in plaid pants, still mad that somebody took their grass four years ago.” She smiled at that, and smiled at Yardley Acheman. He was handsome, all right, and something from Daytona Beach had intruded on her feelings for Hillary Van Wetter.

Yardley Acheman walked to his desk and sat down, stepping over the shirt and pants on the floor.

WE HAD TO SEE Hillary again, and Charlotte did not want to come along. I saw it even before she told my brother that her period had just started and she had cramps and bled too much the first day to go anywhere.

Another woman would have just said she was coming down with a cold. “I bleed like they cut it off,” she said.

A little later she said that the prison was beginning to depress her. “I don’t know how much longer I can go out there and see Hillary waiting to be executed.…”

“We’ve got to ask him again,” Ward said, “about where he sold the sod.”

“He already said he didn’t know,” she said.

“He’s had time to think.”

A little later, Charlotte went over the details of her menstrual cycle with my brother again. Ward stared at his hands as she explained how much she bled, and did not try to talk her into coming along. “I got to take a bottle of Midol and go to bed,” she said, and a minute later, throwing an uncertain look in the direction of Yardley Acheman, she disappeared through the door.

“Will he talk to us without her there?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Ward said.

“If he won’t,” Yardley Acheman said, “fuck him. We’ll go find somebody else.…”

But my brother, at least, didn’t want to find somebody else. He wanted Hillary Van Wetter, he wanted the story he’d begun. It didn’t have anything to do in the end with whether Hillary had killed Sheriff Call, or if he’d been fairly represented at his trial.

At the bottom of it, my brother wanted to know what had happened and to get it down that way on paper. He wanted to have it exactly right.

COTTON HAD BEEN PACKED into both sides of Hillary Van Wetter’s nose, the last bit of fuzz hung beneath the nostrils. It was hard to say if the swelling across the bridge was due to the cotton or the injury. His eyes were both bruised underneath, the streak of black running at similar angles on both sides, as if they had grown from the same spot.

“Where’s my intended?” he said. It sounded as if he had a cold.

“She didn’t feel well,” Ward said.

It was a quiet moment.

“What’s wrong with her?”

My brother began to shake his head, looking for a way to explain it. Yardley Acheman moved in his chair. “She’s on the rag,” he said. Hillary turned and looked at him, the sound of his leg irons the only noise in the room.

“The monthlies?” he said finally. He was handcuffed, and there was a guard outside the door. Yardley Acheman checked these things before he spoke again.

“That’s what she said.”

“Just come in and discuss it, did she?”

Yardley nodded.

“Pussy bi’niss, in front of paperboys,” Hillary said.

“We ought to talk about Ormond Beach,” my brother said, but Hillary Van Wetter continued to stare at Yardley Acheman.

“Mr. Van Wetter?”

Finally Hillary turned away from Yardley and considered Ward. “She told you about it too?”

For a moment no one spoke. “I’ve got to know where the sod went,” he said finally.

“For what?”

“I have to find the person who bought it.”

He turned back to Yardley Acheman. “You got a smoke?” he said.

Yardley nodded in the direction of a sign on the wall warning visitors not to give anything to inmates. “Not allowed,” he said.

Hillary nodded. “Follow the rules,” he said, “follow the rules.…”

Ward asked what direction Hillary and his uncle had driven from the golf course.

Hillary closed his eyes, picturing it. “International House of Pancakes,” he said finally. “We had pancakes and ice cream.”

“In Daytona?”

“Must of been.”

“And then what?”

“And then we got paid and went home.”

It was quiet again. “I need to find the place,” my brother said.

“We all need something,” he said. And then he had another long look at Yardley Acheman. Yardley stared back briefly, then he turned away. He checked his watch, then the door, reminding Hillary of the guard outside.

Hillary Van Wetter watched him, his gaze as flat as still water. He watched until Yardley got up and crossed the room and stuck an open package of cigarettes in Hillary’s shirt.

Hillary never took his eyes off Yardley until he was back in his place by the wall. Then he nodded, slowly. You couldn’t tell if he meant to say thanks, or if everything he’d been thinking about us had been confirmed.

“How far from the pancake house was the condominium?” Ward said.

There was no answer.

“What direction? It was early morning by then, right? Were you driving into the sun or away from it?”

Hillary Van Wetter shook his head. “Overcast,” he said.

“FUCK HIM,” Yardley said. The new rental was a Mercury with a noisy air conditioner that shook the car as it came on and off, but didn’t do much in the way of cooling. Yardley was sitting in the backseat with the windows rolled down.

“He isn’t worth it,” he said. He was talking to my brother as if I weren’t there. He did that more often than he needed to, reminding me that I didn’t count.

“We have to go through the building permits,” Ward said. “They were putting condos up in sixty days back then, before the building inspectors had a chance to see what they were doing, and this one would have been almost done if they were ready for a lawn.…”

“He isn’t worth it,” Yardley said again. He pulled himself up in the seat.

My brother said, “There can’t be more than a dozen that started construction the same time, some of them might be the same builder …”

“And then what?” Yardley Acheman said. “The guy’s going to admit he bought sod off a golf course?”

“He might say he didn’t know it was stolen.”

“He isn’t going to give a shit,” Yardley said. “The lawyer doesn’t give a shit, Hillary Van Wetter doesn’t give a shit.… We got too many people here, Ward, that don’t give a shit.” He thought about it, still sitting up in the seat. “The truth is, I don’t give much of a shit anymore myself.”

Yardley stopped and considered what he’d just said, perhaps how it would sound if it somehow got back to the editors in Miami.

“I mean, what am I supposed to write?” he said. “I picture myself at the typewriter, trying to interpret this person to the reader, and I don’t have a damn feeling in my body about him except if he wasn’t the one who opened up the sheriff, he was probably out that night fucking owls.”

It had long been Yardley’s premise that his obligation was to interpret for the reader.

The air conditioner kicked in again and the engine sagged under the weight. “If the contractors are local, it won’t take more than a couple of days,” Ward said.

Yardley Acheman dropped back into his seat. “I can’t write what I don’t feel.”

My brother nodded, as if he agreed with that. “You want to go back down to Daytona,” he said, “or you want me to do it this time?”

Yardley Acheman shook his head. “What I want, we fold the tent on this guy,” he said, “go find something fresh to do back in Miami.…”

Ward smiled politely, as if that were a joke. I suppose he’d heard the same thing from him before. A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details.

Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.

AT HOME THAT NIGHT, I told my father that Yardley Acheman wanted to quit. Anita Chester was still in the house, doing some late cleaning, and we were sitting on the porch.

“Hit a dead end, did you?” he said, having a sip of his wine. He set the glass on the uneven boards of the floor next to his chair. It sat at an angle, the wine closer to the lip on one side than the other.

“No, it isn’t that. Ward’s still working.”

My father thought it over. “Your brother’s a damn good newspaperman,” he said finally, “but he doesn’t know everything yet.” He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. The sound of the vacuum cleaner came through the window to his study. There was no light left in the sky; it must have been ten o’clock. I wondered why he hadn’t just told her to go home. She had children to put to bed.

“Ward knows what he’s doing,” I said. I hadn’t told my father about the visit to the Van Wetters’ home in the wetlands. It was the kind of story he would have liked—at least it was the kind he liked to tell—but there was some residual exhaustion from that day left inside me, and I was not up to taking it on again yet.

In some way, telling a true story puts you back into it.

My father nodded his head. “He knows how to get stories,” he said, “but what he doesn’t appreciate fully is that the stories go into a newspaper, and the newspaper goes out into a community.”

The sound of the vacuum stopped, and he looked quickly in that direction and at the same time reached for his glass. “She’s been late every day this week,” he said, and then, softening, “I hope she isn’t having some sort of trouble at home.”

His hand touched the glass and it rocked a moment, then fell, three or four inches onto the floor, and shattered. He stared at it, and then slowly reached for the bottle, which was half empty on the other side of the chair.

“She have children of her own?” he said. “I can’t remember? …”

“A couple of them,” I said. “Six and nine.”

He picked up the bottle and held it to the light, as if to read the label. “I hope they aren’t sick,” he said.

She came through the screen door a moment later, carrying her purse and her working shoes, wearing white tennis shoes that came up over her ankles. She always walked home. Tonight she was in more of a hurry than usual.

“Good evening, Mr. James,” she said, heading for the steps.

“Good evening,” he said, and then, before she reached the steps, he said, “I wonder would you mind taking an extra minute. I smashed a wineglass over here.…” She stopped in her tracks for a long moment, then turned without a word and went back into the house for a broom.

“I hope she isn’t having trouble with those children,” he said.

WARD WAS WAITING ON the sidewalk alone outside the rooming house in the morning. He got into the car and slammed the door, a departure of sorts, as we were brought up not to slam the Chrysler’s doors. “No Yardley?” I said.

He took his time answering. “He’s an adult,” he said finally, but I knew he didn’t want Yardley out sleeping with local girls. It made him furious. He was still dependent on the town for his story, and did not want to poison the source.

There was something else too. Ward had certain standards of virtue, which he kept to himself, but which were always at work. I didn’t know anything then about how many girls he had slept with himself, but I had never seen him with a girl of his own and assumed he would not sleep with one casually. He didn’t even like being in the room while anyone talked about sexual matters, particularly Charlotte Bless, who talked about sexual matters constantly.

“As long as it’s with another adult,” I said, preparing him for the inevitable day when I’d arrive for work late and sticky too. He turned to look at me. “Somebody over eighteen,” I said, thinking he’d misunderstood what I’d said, and then realizing, even as I said it, that I’d missed the point. And half a second later, the point came home.

Yardley was with Charlotte.

We drove in silence, mutually outraged, to Moat Street and climbed the stairs to the office.

The van appeared beneath the window just after eleven o’clock. The passenger door opened first and Yardley came out, holding a beer, and then waited for Charlotte, who came around from the other side. I studied her carefully, looking for some sign of self-loathing. He put his hand in the middle of her back when she was close enough to touch, left it there a moment and then, as she moved past him toward the door leading inside, he patted her behind. They were a long time making it up the stairs.

I did not look at either of them when they came in, and Ward stared at the papers on his desk. They came inside the door and stopped.

“Uh-oh,” Yardley said, “I think Mom and Dad have been waiting up.” She laughed at that, a nervous laugh. Yardley drained the beer in his hand, went to the cooler and found a fresh one.

“You sure you won’t have one?” he said to her. “Nothing tastes as good as a beer in the morning, before you’re supposed to have it.”

“I’m fine,” she said, and I didn’t care for the way she said it. She was not just speaking of being fine without a can of Busch beer.

Yardley Acheman walked to his side of the office and sat down. He leaned back, holding the beer on his stomach, and put his feet on the desk. He looked at my brother and burped. Ward did not look up. Charlotte crossed the room to the window, leaned into my line of vision and said, “Good morning.”

I thought I could smell Yardley Acheman on her.

“Good morning,” I said. I tried not to forgive her.

“What I was thinking,” Yardley said to my brother, “I might take one more crack at finding this condominium guy they sold the lawn to after all.” He looked at Charlotte, and I saw it was something they’d decided before they got to the office.

“We could go back down to Daytona, spend a couple of days knocking on doors.”

Ward nodded but didn’t answer. Yardley Acheman said, “It probably won’t work, but we’re not doing any good around here.”

Another looked passed between them, she seemed about to laugh. My brother’s face had flushed, as if he were embarrassed.

“I thought we might as well go today.”

YARDLEY’S FIANCEE CALLED late in the afternoon, after they were gone. Ward had stepped outside to visit the bathroom on the main floor of the building, and I picked up the phone only after I realized it was going to ring until I did.

I told her Yardley was in Daytona Beach on business. She said he’d just been in Daytona on business. “I guess he didn’t finish,” I said, and gave her the number of the motel he’d written on the notepad on his desk when he’d called for reservations.

She took the number and then repeated it back to me twice, to be sure it was right. “I know he’s a great reporter,” she said, “but sometimes I wish he wasn’t so devoted to his work.”

CHARLOTTE AND YARDLEY ACHEMAN stayed in Daytona Beach four days. They took separate rooms at a motel on the beach, but Yardley was never in his room when his fiancée called, not even at night. She would call me in the morning, to be reassured that he was not doing dangerous work.

I wondered at the things he told her.

WARD AND I WENT to the sheriff’s office, which occupied the second floor of the county courthouse. The cells were in the basement, some of them with barred windows which looked out over the town of Lately at grass level.

We had been there before to look at the report of Hillary’s arrest, and knew what to expect. The deputies would not speak to anyone from the Miami Times, knowing the paper’s liberal slant, and referred all inquiries to the departmental spokesman, a smiling, white-haired man named Sam Ellison who had once been a deputy himself.

Mr. Ellison was retired from active duty, and worked mornings at the department, Tuesday through Friday, even though the department did not need to be spoken for nearly that often. He did not seem happy to find visitors waiting for him outside his office door.

“The Times,” Mr. Ellison said. He had seen us in this same hallway the last time we were at the courthouse, but had not spoken to us because it was four minutes after twelve. The sheriff’s public information office closed at noon, Tuesday through Friday.

Ward said, “Yessir,” and Mr. Ellison unlocked the door and walked into the office. We followed him in, uninvited. He opened the shades, lighting the room, and the dome of his head shone under his thin hair.

“You’re World War’s boy? …”

“Yessir,” my brother said, still standing.

He went to his desk and sat down. “Gone to work for the competition,” he said, and shook his head. He opened his desk drawer and stared inside.

“How is your daddy?”

“He’s fine,” Ward said.

Mr. Ellison closed the drawer and leaned back in his chair, smiling. “The most contrary man in Moat County,” he said in an admiring way. Ward did not reply to that, and Mr. Ellison sat up, ready to do business.

“What may I do for you gentlemen today?” he said.

And my brother told him we were in town looking into the murder of Thurmond Call and the conviction of Hillary Van Wetter for the crime. He said, “There was some physical evidence that was lost.…”

Mr. Ellison nodded, as if he knew everything Ward was going to say. As if we were all in agreement. “Yes, there was,” he said.

“Significant evidence …”

“Yessir,” Mr. Ellison said. The room went quiet.

“We were wondering,” my brother said, “what sort of explanation …”

Mr. Ellison was shaking his head. “There is no explanation,” he said, “unless you ever been in a situation where your life was endangered. Unless you ever felt an attachment to someone who was murdered. That’s the only explanation, that our officers are human.”

My brother sat still and waited. Mr. Ellison looked at him, then turned for a moment and stared at me. “I don’t believe I caught your name,” he said.

“Jack James,” I said, and he smiled again.

“The swimmer,” he said, and I didn’t know if he was talking about the University of Florida or what happened on the beach up in St. Augustine. He looked at us both, a wax smile fastened to his face.

“You going into the family business too?” he said. “World War must be a very proud man.”

He smiled, Ward kept himself still. “Mr. Ellison,” my brother said, when enough time had passed, “what happened to that evidence?”

He shook his head. “I wisht I knew,” he said.

“Mr. Van Wetter has told us the blood on his clothing was his own,” Ward said. “That he’d cut himself on some equipment he was using that night.”

Mr. Ellison nodded thoughtfully. “Mr. Van Wetter has been known to use his equipment at night before,” he said, and then paused while that sank in. “Cut a deputy’s thumb off, as I remember.” There was another pause, a long one. “Over a traffic ticket,” he said.

And then he looked at his own hand and dropped his thumb until it was pressed against the palm. “A man can’t do much without his thumb,” he said. “It’s what separates us from the primates.”

“Is there a deputy we could talk to?” Ward asked.

“Somebody who was out there when they arrested him?”

Mr. Ellison was still looking at his hand, working the fingers. “A little thing like holding your wife’s titty …” He stopped moving his fingers and looked up suddenly, directly at my brother. “You married yet, Mr. James?”

Ward shook his head no.

Mr. Ellison looked back at his hand. “A little thing like that, you can’t do it.” He put his hand on his own chest and tried to cup the breast through the shirt. “You can poke a titty,” he said, looking up, “but they don’t like that, you know. They like to have them held. You go poking around all the time, before long they won’t allow you to touch them at all.”

He looked up again and smiled.

“Can I talk to somebody who was there?” Ward said.

“You can talk to whoever you want as long as they’ll talk to you,” he said. “But when you talk about Mr. Van Wetter, keep in mind what it’d be like, not to be able to hold your own wife’s titty in your hand.”

A moment passed and he said, “Oh, that’s right. You aren’t married.” He seemed to be teasing him.

We went from Mr. Ellison’s office back to the dispatch room, passing two deputies in the hallway, and arrived finally in front of a belligerent, overweight woman sitting at a desk reading a copy of Motor Trend magazine and wearing a name tag on her blouse that said, “Patty.” There was a swinging door next to the desk, no more than waist high, and a sign attached to it prohibiting entrance to anyone not employed by the sheriff’s department.

My brother and I stood in front of her a long time, waiting to be acknowledged. When she did that finally, looking up, she did not speak or smile. She only waited. “My name is Ward James,” my brother said. “I was talking with Mr. Ellison, and he suggested that I come down here.”

She took us in a moment longer, then went back to her magazine. I saw a deputy then, thirty feet behind her, leaning across his desk to watch her work us over. The deputy was smiling.

“Excuse me,” Ward said, and she looked up again. “I would like to speak with any of these deputies …. ” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote down the names of five deputies who were at Hillary Van Wetter’s house the night he was arrested. He slid the paper across the desk. She looked at it a moment, then looked at us, and then picked up the paper and dropped it into the wastebasket.

Someone behind her laughed. She went back to the magazine, aware that her performance was being watched and appreciated.

I turned away, wanting to get out of the room, but Ward stayed where he was. She looked at Motor Trend, he waited. Minutes passed, and she reached into her purse for a pack of cigarettes, looking up once at Ward, then lighting a match and going back to the magazine. She had been on the same page a long time. Half a dozen deputies were watching now, waiting to see how it would come out.

She shifted in her chair and stole another look, and then suddenly slammed the magazine down on the desk in front of her, stood up, and walked off into the back. There was some laughing back there, and then it was quiet. No one came to the front to take her place, and the deputies seemed to have gone back to wherever they had been before.

“Are we just going to stand here?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“They aren’t going to talk to us,” I said. And he nodded at that, but he didn’t move.

The woman returned perhaps fifteen minutes later. She did not seem surprised to see us still standing in front of her desk. “Is there something else?” she said.

My brother reached across her desk to a pile of paper, took one of the sheets, and wrote down the names again. He pushed the paper toward her without saying a word. She looked at it and then at him.

“You’re slow, aren’t you?” she said, sounding concerned, and dropped that paper into the wastebasket too. She looked at me then, as if I might be a faster study. “I can do this all day,” she said.

But she couldn’t. In another minute or two she stood up again and walked into the back. There were no chairs, so we stood in front of the desk. Half an hour passed, and a deputy took her place. He nodded at my brother and sat down at the woman’s desk.

“May I help you?” he said.

My brother leaned over the rail and reached into the woman’s wastebasket for one of the pieces of paper. He put it on the desk in front of the deputy. “I would like to speak to these men,” he said.

The deputy looked at the list a moment, then slowly shook his head. “These officers don’t have time to speak to you, sir,” he said. “They’re busy with their duties.”

“When would they have time?” Ward said.

The deputy shook his head. “You might come back tomorrow.…”

He waited.

“Are you one of these officers?” Ward said. The deputy looked at the list as if he couldn’t remember. There was a place above his pocket where the color was brighter blue than the rest of the shirt, and there was a hole in the material there. He’d taken off his name tag.

“I don’t see where that’s got anything to do with it,” he said. “I told you we don’t have time for you now.”

“Are you one of these officers?” my brother said, sounding patient, as if it were the first time he’d asked.

“What I am,” he said, “is the one telling you to cease and desist and allow us to get back to work.”

My brother looked at the list of deputies. “Which one are you?” he said. And a murderous looked passed over the deputy’s face.

“You know, there’s some people,” he said finally, “they won’t let you treat them well.”

Ward nodded at that, as if it were a compliment.

The deputy left and we stood in the room until four-thirty, when the cleaning lady came in and said that the place was closed.

“Thank you,” my brother said, and we walked past her out the door, and then, in the hallway, I could hear people cheering. I went back to the door and saw that the deputies had come out from the back to applaud the cleaning woman. She was still in the middle of the floor, holding a mop that was set into a bucket on wheels, looking embarrassed but not entirely surprised at the sudden attention. As if it was about time.

We drove through Lately at quitting time. Citizens were coming out of their stores and offices, locking the doors behind them. Schoolchildren were on the street too, some of them smoking cigarettes and eating candy bars at the same time. The older ones, from high school, hung out of the windows of their fathers’ four-door sedans, the drivers tearing up the engines, revving them until the noise was like a scream.

Ward and I had watched the same ceremony in Thorn, but had never had any part in it.

“Imagine what it would be like,” my father would say from time to time, “if your name appeared in a police story in your father’s own newspaper.”

He was telling us, in his way, that there would be no favoritism; but we already knew that. Ward and I grew up in a house where my father’s principles were a regular topic of conversation, and we were often asked to imagine the embarrassment which would be visited on the family in the event either of our names had to be put in the newspaper.

Ward seemed better at imagining the embarrassment than I was; it threatened him in ways I didn’t understand.

At some point, of course, my father realized that there was no need to warn my brother to stay out of trouble. And perhaps by then, he was already beginning to worry that Ward had never been in any trouble; that he hadn’t any friends to get into trouble with.

I looked at him now, wondering if he thought of Yardley Acheman as a friend. “Another fine day in the newspaper business,” I said.

He shrugged. “It wasn’t bad.”

I stopped the car and let a woman pushing a baby carriage cross in front of us. Behind me, a load of kids in a Plymouth honked, and the woman jumped at the noise, looked up into the front seat of the car I was driving, frightened, thinking that I’d honked, and then hurried across to the other side. I had never seen her before and never expected to see her again, but I thought of getting out of the car and telling her that it was the driver behind me who had blown the horn.

I was triggering a hundred misunderstandings a day, and I couldn’t seem to straighten out the important ones without straightening out them all.

“I don’t see what it accomplished,” I said, speaking again of the afternoon at the sheriff’s department.

“We were there,” he said.

“That’s all?”

“It’s enough,” he said.

And I saw it then, clearly, that he found something in the waiting—or the shunning—pleasurable.

“We ‘re going back?” I said.

He was looking out the window when he answered. “Of course,” he said.

WE STOOD IN THE sheriff’s department all the next day, and the day after. The woman behind the desk did not speak to us except to tell us to move out of the way when other visitors came through the door.

“Please move to the side of the room and do not interfere with the orderly business of this office,” she would say. Words a county lawyer had given her, probably, the groundwork for our arrest if we failed to get out of the way.

But my brother and I moved politely to the side of the little room and listened as stories of stray dogs and dead chickens or children who did not belong in neighbors’ yards were laid out across her desk.

“Do you wish to fill out a complaint?” she would say, cutting off their stories. And those words seemed to make them afraid.

“We don’t want to get nobody in trouble.…”

“There is nothing this office can do until a complaint has been filed.…”

And then, more often than not, the visitors would leave, nodding to my brother and me politely on their way out. Thinking that we were a different kind of people, that we were not afraid of the law.

Still, none of the deputies on my brother’s list had come out of the office behind the desk to speak to us, not even to say they wouldn’t speak to us. My brother was not discouraged. If we were constant enough, things would fall into their natural place.

WE ARRIVED AT OUR OFFICE late in the afternoon and found Yardley Acheman sitting in the stuffed chair against the wall and Charlotte sitting in front of him on his desk. From there, he could see up her skirt.

They were both drinking beer, and when Yardley saw us, he lifted his in a toast.

She smiled at us, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Something had been going on in the room before they heard us on the stairs, and I felt a familiar, quick heat in my face. “The guy who bought the lawn,” he said, “I found him.”

He walked past her then without a glance, as if she were a panhandler on the street asking for his change, and she saw that she’d been discarded.

He picked up a reporter’s notebook, opened it to the front page, and found his notes.

“He remembered them,” he said. “They showed up at six in the morning in a truck. He said he looked at the two of them and what they had and thought they’d stolen it from a cemetery.”

My brother nodded slowly. “You showed him pictures?”

“Of Hillary. That’s when he remembered thinking they’d robbed a graveyard.”

“And he bought it anyway.…”

Charlotte got off the desk and walked to the window. She crossed her arms under her breasts, as if she were cold, and stared outside.

“He doesn’t want to be connected to this in any way,” Yardley Acheman said. “He doesn’t want to talk to anyone else about it.” He glanced quickly at Charlotte, who was still facing the window, and then at my brother. “You can’t blame him for that,” he said.

“Who is he?” Ward said.

Yardley scratched his chest. “This is the hard part,” he said. “The only way the guy would talk to me, I had to promise to keep him completely anonymous.”

Ward nodded. “What’s his name?” he said.

“It’s completely anonymous,” Yardley said. “I had to give him my word. He’s in a position to get some work with the state.…”

“But who is he?”

Yardley Acheman shook his head. “You’re not listening,” he said. “I had to make a promise to get him to talk to me, and I can’t break it. There’s a principle here.…”

Ward looked at him a long time. I do not know if he believed him or not.

“It was the only way it could be done,” Yardley said. “I can only tell you he exists, and he recognized the picture.”

“How did you find him?” Ward said.

“The hard way,” he said. “We went through the county records.”

Ward thought it over.

Yardley Acheman shrugged. “It’s a matter of trust,” he said. “I can’t violate that.”

Charlotte turned suddenly away from the window and walked, without a word, out of the office and down the stairs, as if she had just realized she didn’t belong in the room.

IT WAS NECESSARY to see Hillary Van Wetter again before a story could be written. Charlotte and Yardley Acheman, for reasons that were not clearly drawn, were no longer speaking to each other, and she sat next to me in the car on the drive to the prison, with Yardley and my brother in back. She wore a blue dress and did not seem as concerned with her appearance as she had on the earlier visits. She looked in the mirror only once, after we had stopped in the parking lot.

What had happened in Daytona Beach had taken the excitement out of things for her, I think, and she was left with a situation which, while of her own making, bore no resemblance to the one she had envisioned.

HILLARY VAN WETTER WAS led into the interview room in leg irons and handcuffs and pushed down into his chair. The bruises under his eyes had faded since the last visit.

The instructions were familiar now, mindless and repetitive. The smell of the place, the way words sounded in this room—it was all the same. Charlotte crossed her legs, showing some thigh, and lit a cigarette. And in some way that was the same now too. Hillary studied her a moment and then looked directly at Yardley Acheman.

He knew.

She smiled at him, unsure of herself.

“Don’t you look nice,” he said, sounding too polite, as if he were talking to tourists.

“Thank you,” she said, and crossed her legs the other way. She felt his eyes and tried to hide from them. Every move she made to hide herself seemed to please him more.

“We found the man in Ormond Beach,” Yardley Acheman said, and Hillary turned to him, nodding as if he were interested.

“The one who bought the sod,” he said.

“That’s good news,” Hillary said, smiles all around.

“He made a note of the day and the amount he paid,” Yardley said. “He remembered you from your picture.”

Hillary looked back at Charlotte, and from her to Yardley Acheman.

“That’s good,” he said again, without looking at Ward, and then he moved his gaze to Charlotte. “These newspaper boys done me a big favor, wouldn’t you say?” She nodded back, trying to diagnose the nature of the change that had come over him.

“It isn’t done yet,” Ward said.

“They’re going to let me loose now,” he said.

Charlotte had begun to nod again when my brother said, “We don’t decide that.”

For a moment the smile disappeared from Hillary’s face, but he was acting. “I know that,” he said, and then the smile reappeared, narrower than it had been before. He looked right at Charlotte and spoke to my brother. “I know your limitations,” he said, and she blushed.

“Open your mouth a little bit,” he said to her.

She looked at the rest of us, then back at him. She shook her head no. “That’s private,” she said, almost whispering.

My brother said, “There’s one thing we need.”

“What thing is that?” Still looking at her.

Ward didn’t answer at first, and Hillary said, “What is it?” sounding suddenly angry. Never taking his eyes off her.

“To speak with your uncle again,” Ward said.

Hillary turned slowly back to my brother. “I expect that’s up to him,” he said.

“It could help if you give us a letter to take to him,” my brother said.

“A letter,” he said.

“A note, something to tell him to trust us.”

On that word, Hillary turned and stared at Yardley Acheman. “What do you think about that?” he said. “You think I ought to tell my uncle to trust you?”

Yardley Acheman didn’t move. The smile spread across Hillary Van Wetter’s face again. His teeth were yellow, the whole place smelled of disinfectant. A long ways off a man yelled, and the sound was hollow as it echoed down the halls. A light shone through the small window in the door and particles of dust hung in the air.

I stood up, wanting to move, and walked from one side of the room to the other, passing within a foot or two of Hillary’s chair. He smelled like disinfectant too. The door opened and the guard leaned in with his head.

“No contact with the prisoner,” he said. “Do not pass on any materials, written or otherwise.”

“Mr. Van Wetter is going to need a pen and paper,” my brother said.

“You’ll have to see the warden,” the guard said and closed the door.

When he was gone Hillary said, “The truth is, Tyree ain’t much of a reader anyway.”

My brother looked at him, becoming impatient. “He’d recognize your handwriting.”

Hillary thought it over. “Numbers,” he said. “He can read numbers.”

“Is there something we can tell him,” Ward said, “he’d know it came from you?”

Hillary shook his head as if he didn’t understand.

“A story, something that happened, so he’d know you want him to talk to us.”

“A story that happened,” Hillary thought, and he stroked his chin. The chain holding his wrists rattled once against the handcuffs and then was quiet. “There was a girl,” he said, “something happened to her.” He waited, but that seemed to be as much about it as he wanted to say.

“What girl?” my brother said.

“Lawrence’s wife,” he said. “A girl from out of the family, he’ll remember her.”

“Lawrence,” my brother said, and Hillary nodded.

“What happened to her?”

Another pause. “Went away,” he said. He stared at his legs, studying the irons attached to his ankles.

Ward looked toward the door. “They can’t hear what you tell us,” he said.

“Sometimes you don’t have to hear a certain thing to know it.”

“Prisoners talk to their attorneys in here.…”

“Attorneys,” Hillary said, and as I watched, his mood turned dark, or perhaps was only revealed. “It comes right down to it, they can’t do nothing more than paperboys. Come right down to it, the only ones can do something in here is the man, and he can do whatever his whimsy is. They ain’t nothing to stop him.”

In the corner, Yardley Acheman closed his eyes and dropped his head into his hands, as if he’d had as much of this as he could stand. Charlotte lit another cigarette and leaned toward Hillary, her elbow resting on her knee. He could see some of her chest.

“Look at it this way,” Yardley Acheman said, “what do you have to lose?”

Hillary turned slowly to the corner where Yardley was sitting.

“What are they going to do, electrocute you twice?”

“Shut up,” Charlotte said, and that made Yardley smile. He shook his head, as if he would never understand women, and then he shut up.

“It doesn’t have to be about the woman,” my brother said. “Just something I can tell your uncle, he’ll know we have your confidence.…”

“My confidence …” He played with that a little while.

“What happened to her?” my brother said. “Lawrence’s wife …”

Charlotte dropped the cigarette she’d just lit onto the floor and ground it out with the tip of her shoe. She didn’t want to hear what happened to Lawrence’s wife, but she said, “Tell the damn story,” and for that moment, she and Hillary already could have been married.

“There ain’t a story, the way you tell it and somebody listens,” Hillary said. “The girl’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“She was from the outside; one day she was there, the next day she was gone.”

“Did she go back to her family?” my brother said, and Hillary began smiling again.

“I wouldn’t think so, no sir,” he said. Hillary stared at my brother and then finally turned himself back to Charlotte, and looked at her as he spoke to Ward.

He said, “I would think she went back whence she came.”

He knew she had been with Yardley Acheman. He was telling her he knew.

“Ashes to ashes,” he said. And then he smiled at her in the way he was smiling earlier. “Tell Tyree,” he said, “ashes to ashes. See what he thinks about that.”

MY BROTHER AND YARDLEY ACHEMAN got in the backseat again on the ride to Lately, Charlotte was in front with me. She’d said good-bye to Hillary when the guard came for him and hadn’t spoken since. She hadn’t even waited at the car door for someone to open it.

“Ashes to ashes,” Yardley said, “what a subtle guy.”

It was humid, and the air conditioner was dripping on Charlotte’s shoes. She was staring straight ahead, as if she were fixed on something a long ways down the road.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she said, sounding tired.

“Worst case,” Yardley said, “they ate her.”

Charlotte put a cigarette in her lips and punched in the lighter on the dashboard. After it popped back out, Yardley Acheman said, “Not that it makes any difference.”

Charlotte turned suddenly and stared at him over the seat back. Her shirt pressed against her side and took the shape of her breast. “Will you shut up?” she said.

“You don’t mind, we’re trying to figure something out back here,” Yardley Acheman said, and he sounded hurt, the same tone he took when he argued with his fiancee on the telephone. “Trying to save your intended from the state of Florida’s electric chair.”

“Ashes to ashes doesn’t mean they killed a girl,” Charlotte said, and she was furious, “it’s biblical.”

Yardley laughed out loud.

She turned back around, disgusted with everyone in the car. “Hillary was right about you,” she said, meaning that for all of us. “You’ve got no empathy.”

“Hillary said that?” Yardley was playing with her now.

“In so many words.” And then she closed her eyes, exhausted. “Everybody in the world isn’t stupid, Yardley,” she said. “And even if that was true, it wouldn’t make them any smarter, working for the Miami Times.”

Yardley laughed again, and she seemed discouraged.

“You see right there, that’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’d rather have one compassionate person on my side than all of you put together.”

Yardley was laughing again; feeding off her.

“I’ll tell you something else,” she said, “I’d feel sorry for your fiancée, but I think you deserve each other.”

WE HAD TO GO BACK into the wetlands. Yardley did not want to come along, and pretended he’d hurt his ankle. “I can write it without going out there,” he said, but my brother shook his head.

“You better come,” he said.

“I sprained my ankle.”

“You need to see it,” Ward said, and in the end Yardley gave in, his limp becoming more exaggerated as we got to the marina where we rented the boat. Even Ward did not want to try walking back in.

We followed the west bank of the river, moving slowly, looking for the television antenna in the tree line. The boat was powered by a small outboard which coughed and stopped at low speeds, and I sat at the throttle nursing the choke to keep it going. There was something in the quiet when the engine quit that none of us liked.

Yardley Acheman was in front, holding on to the sides with both hands. My brother sat in the middle, studying the shoreline. World War had taken us fishing on this part of the river when we were young, pointing out the cabins in the trees and recalling the stories he knew of the people who lived in them, the Van Wetters, who in his stories were pioneers. And those stories, along with the color of the water and the smell of the air and the vegetation along the bank, were married in me to the sight of a river bass slapping the bottom of the boat, sometimes leaving its blood on our legs.

And to the sight of a dozen bass a foot or two under water, hanging from a single piece of nylon cord hung over the side, some of them still alive, their white bellies glowing through the brown water.

My father did not make fishermen of his sons, and by the time I was ten or eleven, he had stopped trying.

It seemed to me that we had come too far down the river.

“We must have missed it,” I said, and began a slow circle back into the current.

“A little farther,” Ward said.

I said we were too far south.

“Keep on a little farther,” he said, and looked at his watch. I did not like to be told where to steer the boat, but Ward had a good compass in his head, and mine always told me to circle.

Still, it seemed to me that matters of the water, and driving, were my area.

Yardley Acheman turned around without letting go of the sides. “We’re lost, right?”

Ward didn’t answer him.

I steered in closer to the shoreline and the boat moved in the shadows of the trees growing out of the water. Some of the branches were so low I could have touched them without standing up. The last time my father took me fishing, a moccasin dropped out of one of those branches onto the floor of the boat, and he grabbed it by the tail while I was still realizing what it was, and tossed it into the air. The snake straightened to its full length, wheeling through the sky, and my father stood in the rocking boat, watching it, gradually smiling as he realized what he had done.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he said, but it was the first thing out of his mouth when he saw her at home.

WE SAW THE CHICKEN before we saw the antenna. It was tethered by one leg to a stake not far from the water’s edge, left there as bait. The other chickens kept their distance. I took us in to the shore and lifted the engine out of the water a moment before we landed. I got out and pulled our boat next to the one already in the yard. Yardley waited until I’d stopped to get out, holding on to the sides until both his feet were down on solid ground.

My brother walked ahead, around to the front of the place, carrying a picnic cooler. He set the cooler on the porch and knocked on the door. “Mr. Van Wetter?”

The door opened before he could knock again, and the young man who had been there before stood in the doorway, looking at us. First my brother, then me, then Yardley Acheman. He spent longer on Yardley than either of us.

“Is your father in?” Ward said.

The man in the door moved to one side and the old man appeared, naked below the waist. “Y’all brought reenforcements,” he said, looking at Yardley. Yardley would not meet his eyes. He looked around the yard instead and found himself staring at the alligator skins drying on the clothes line.

“This is my associate Yardley Acheman,” my brother said. “He is also with the newspaper.”

The old man stepped out onto the porch. His balls hung like an old dog’s. My brother took off the top of the cooler.

“He’s pretty, ain’t he?” the old man said.

“Ice cream,” Ward said, and the old man looked inside and then cocked his head as if to reconsider us, “strawberry and vanilla.”

“You want what you want, don’t you?” the old man said.

“Yessir,” my brother said. He took out one of the cartons and handed it to the old man, then took out the other and offered it to the man still standing in the door. When he didn’t take it, Ward set it back in the cooler. The old man opened the carton and looked at the ice cream.

“Go get us some spoons,” he said.

The man leaned back into the house and shouted, “Hattie, get some clothes on and bring us spoons,” and then resumed his posture in the door.

“My associate talked to a man down in Ormond Beach,” my brother said.

The younger man reconsidered the strawberry when the woman came out with the spoons, ate most of it and then passed the dripping container on to her. She did not speak once.

The old man was eating the vanilla, sitting on the ground, still naked below the waist. “That so?” he said.

“Yessir,” my brother said. “He recognized a picture of Hillary, had it written down in his books when he bought the sod from him.”

The old man nodded and stuck his spoon into the ice cream. “That was convenient,” he said.

The woman’s chin was sticky with ice cream, and there were specks of dirt in it. She wiped at her mouth with the back of her wrist.

“He said there were two of you,” my brother said.

“You didn’t show him no picture of me, did you?”

“I don’t have a picture of you.”

“That’s right,” the old man said. “That’s right.”

“But it was you, wasn’t it?” Ward said.

The old man smiled, not unkindly. “You want what you want, I’ll say that.” Then he looked up at Yardley, who was sitting on the step holding his ankle. “You hurt yourself on my property?” he said.

Yardley Acheman shook his head no. “It was before,” he said.

“Good,” the old man said. “You ain’t going to get a lawyer and change your mind.…”

“It isn’t that bad,” Yardley said.

“I didn’t think so,” the old man said.

“You were with Hillary?” my brother asked.

“Hillary’s in prison,” the old man said.

“Not for that,” Ward said. “He’s there for murder. If Thurmond Call was killed the night you two were in Ormond Beach stealing sod off the golf course …”

The woman brushed the hair back off her face and glanced quickly at her husband, then at the old man. I wondered if she belonged to them both.

“Let me ask you something,” the old man said. “You in prison, how much difference does it make what you’re in there for?”

“The statute of limitations …”

“You told me about your statues,” the old man said.

“What about this man that owns the golf course?”

My brother smiled at the question, as if he were relieved. “He was insured. You can’t have a golf course without insurance. It’s a long time ago, and he can’t do anything about it anyway.”

“He could come looking for me,” the old man said. He glanced quickly at his son. “He could come looking for my family.”

“It’s a lot of years,” Ward said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“I would,” the old man said.

The woman set the carton of strawberry on the ground. The old man took one last spoonful of the vanilla and handed her that carton too.

“It’s your nephew’s life,” my brother said. “If we’re going to do something, we have to do it.”

“You push too hard,” the old man said, not accusing him, just an observation.

“I don’t know any other way to act.” Ward said, and the apology in those words was not lost on the old man. He looked at Ward and smiled.

“We’re all born a certain way, aren’t we?”

The other man moved forward a little, blocking his wife from Yardley’s view, and bore into him with his eyes. Yardley rolled down his sock to inspect his ankle. The old man leaned back and laced his fingers over his stomach.

“You don’t talk,” he said to me. “I can’t decide out how you ended up with these two.”

“We’re brothers,” I said, indicating Ward. Making sure he knew which one I meant.

The old man smiled at that and addressed Ward again. “They’s always family hiding somewhere in the shadows, isn’t there?”

Ward did not answer.

“I was with him,” the old man said suddenly. “Dropped him off at home, the next time I went over there, he was in county jail for cutting open Sheriff Call.”

It was quiet again, and then Ward said, “Thank you.” He thought a moment and said, “What time would you—”

The old man interrupted him. “I’ve said as much about it as I’m going to,” he said. “This is as far as I go.”

He meant it, and there was nothing more to say. We stood up; the old man stood up with us. The other man sat where he was, glaring at Yardley Acheman.

“He didn’t hurt himself that night, did he?” Ward said.

The old man closed his eyes, trying to remember. “Not that I remember,” he said. “I sliced a toe half off, myself, trying to work in the dark.”

“It bled?”

The old man looked at Ward as if he didn’t understand the question. “Shit yes, it bled,” he said. “We’re mammals.”

“You go to a hospital?”

The old man began to nod. “Just go in, the middle of the night, covered with dirt and tell them I cut myself in my sleep.…”

WE PUT YARDLEY ACHEMAN back in the boat—he sat down facing the motor—and then pushed it into the water and got in ourselves. The woman came into my line of sight then, standing at the edge of the house for a second or two, the tip of her finger in her mouth, as if she did not want to let go of the taste of ice cream, and then there was a sound in the house, a squalling, and she looked that way and was gone. She had round shoulders and clear skin, and I wondered what she would have looked like in another place. I pulled the starter cord and the engine caught, sputtered, and then smoothed as I corrected the choke.

“Thank you,” my brother said again.

The old man nodded and his son came to the edge of the water and stood next to him. Yardley sat backwards in the boat, clutching the sides, nervous even before we pushed it off into the water.

The old man smiled at him and said, “Hold on to that boat now.”

THE RIDE BACK TO the marina was faster than the ride down had been, partly because we weren’t looking for the house in the trees along the bank, and partly because the river itself runs north, from the middle of the state to Jacksonville, where it empties into the ocean.

The engine was less erratic at the higher speed and the nose of the boat bounced against the plane of the river. There was a certain pleasure in holding the stick and in the smell of the engine and the feel of the water passing beneath my feet. Ward sat in front again, thinking about what the old man had said, in some way not satisfied with it, and Yardley held himself still, his eyes closed against nausea.

At the marina, he leaned over the side and vomited. My brother hardly seemed to notice. “The man in Ormond Beach,” he said when Yardley had finished, “did he show you his records?”

Yardley nodded, as if he knew what Ward was asking, as if the question had been asked a hundred times before. “They were right there on his desk,” he said.

“And he was sure about the date.”

“He was sure about the date.”

We left the boat and started back to the car; I could still feel the lift and fall of the water.

“He was absolutely sure,” Yardley said again, as if saying it would make it so.

Neither of them spoke again until we were back in the car and pointed toward Lately. “Did you give him the date, or did he give it to you?” Ward said.

Yardley came up in his seat to get a closer look at my brother. “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

Ward spoke more slowly. “Did you say to the man, ‘Was it August fourteenth, nineteen sixty-five,’ or did he look in his books and say the date to you?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t feel right,” my brother said.

“Look,” Yardley said, “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know when something doesn’t feel right as well as you do.”

“YOU KNOW THE TROUBLE with you?” Yardley Acheman said.

We were back in the office and Ward was going over some of the notes he’d made in the car after one of the early visits to Starke. He was missing some scrap paper, a word or two on it that he couldn’t remember.

Yardley was impatient to finish the story and get back to Miami. “You don’t understand that you have to let go of it to get it done,” he said.

My brother found the paper and set it carefully on his desk, uninterested in it now that it wasn’t missing.

THAT DAY OR PERHAPS the next, Yardley Acheman called an editor in Miami and reported that he was ready to write the story, but Ward would not let it go.

I am not sure how Yardley Acheman presented the situation—he did not make the call from the office, at least not while my brother and I were there—but at the end of the week a man with a beard and eyeglasses half an inch thick appeared in our doorway, knocked once, and walked in.

My brother was sitting at his desk, going over the early court proceedings again, and Yardley was on the phone with his fiancee back in Miami. My brother stood up when he saw the man with the beard, and in doing that knocked over a bottle of Dr Pepper, spilling some of it on the papers. He opened one of his drawers and found the shirt I’d borrowed from Yardley, which he’d subsequently refused to touch, and used it to blot the mess.

The editor—he was the Sunday editor, that was his title—was smiling, looking around, admiring the ambience. He went to the window and had a long stare at Lately while, on the other side of the room, Yardley Acheman was finishing up with his intended.

“Right,” he said, “I got to go. Right. Not now … tonight, I’ll call tonight. Yeah, me too, right … ”

“What’s that smell, onions?” the man from Miami said.

He was older than Yardley Acheman, perhaps forty or fifty.

He looked like he hadn’t been out of his office in a long time.

“There’s a grease shop downstairs,” Yardley said. “The whole street smells like onions.” He smelled his own arm. “It gets in your skin,” he said.

The man from Miami opened his eyes wide at the news, as if he had never heard of such a thing, then looked over to my brother. “How are we coming?” he said.

“We’re getting there,” Ward said. He had finished blotting the papers and was sitting in his chair again, not trying to do any work.

The man from Miami sat down on the chair against the wall. He looked at me a moment, not knowing what I was doing there.

“How much longer do you think it might be?”

“Not too long,” Ward said. “There’s some things here I’m not satisfied with.…”

“You think a couple of days, a week?” he said.

“Until what?” Ward said.

“Till Yardley can start writing.” He smiled, but there was an edge to it too.

My brother looked at Yardley Acheman, Yardley would not meet his eyes. “It’s hard to put a time on it,” Ward said.

“What’s left to do?”

My brother shook his head.

“It sounds to me like you’re ready now and just don’t know it.” The man from Miami paused and then he said, “I was the same way. I never wanted to let go of a story; I suppose that’s how you end up in an office.” He smiled at that, as if his own shortcomings amused him.

“I’m not comfortable yet,” Ward said.

“I appreciate that,” said the man from Miami. “It means you’re a good reporter, it means you’re cautious. But from what Yardley’s told me, it looks like things have turned up as black-and-white as you ever find them.”

“I don’t know,” Ward said.

“I know you don’t,” said the man from Miami. “But the thing is, you could stay here the rest of your life and still never be sure of every little detail. That isn’t our job. Our job is to get as much of it right as we can, and get it in the newspaper.”

Ward didn’t say a thing.

“You’re too valuable to be sitting out here in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “There’s other stories to write.”

“I don’t think this one’s finished,” Ward said.

“Yardley’s satisfied,” he said. Yardley Acheman nodded from behind his desk. “He’s the one who’s got to write it.”

The air was suddenly heavy with the smell of onions. Things had been decided outside this room, away from my brother, and there was nothing he could do about it. He rubbed his eyes as if he had not slept in a long time and then looked at me. He seemed to be asking for help. I did not know how to help him, I did not even know how to start.

“It isn’t finished,” he said again.

“It’s going to take Yardley a while to write,” the man said. His voice was reasonable and friendly. “You do what you need to do and he’ll do what he needs to do, and one way or another, we’ll get this thing in the paper.”

And my brother didn’t say anything more to the man from Miami, even when he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to a story that he finally couldn’t write it.

“That story,” he said quietly, “won me the Pulitzer Prize.”

The prize was the proof that he was right about my brother’s story, and about anything else that came up, and he allowed a few seconds for the weight of his accomplishment to sink in. Then he said, “And if it wasn’t for an editor kicking my ass to put it on paper, I’d probably still be sitting at my desk at the Broward County bureau of the Miami Times, trying to get it written.”

The man patted Ward on the shoulder when he left, and then three of us were alone in the room.

“I just thought we needed a fresh perspective,” Yardley Acheman said. “I didn’t know he was going to come up here and start telling us what to do.”

Ward nodded and stood up. He collected all the notes on his desk, all the transcripts and depositions, and walked across the room to Yardley Acheman and dropped them in front of him. He looked back at me a moment—I didn’t know if he wanted me to come with him or leave him alone—and then walked out the door.

I stood up to follow him, and Yardley Acheman said something to me, thinking I would repeat it to Ward. “It had to be done,” he said.

It occurred to me then that I had been in Lately too long. I had spent too much time staring at the people who lived here and too much time staring at Hillary Van Wetter in the visitors’ room at Starke, and too much time staring at Charlotte Bless.

When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.

MY FATHER WAS RELIEVED at the news that Yardley Acheman was finally writing the story.

“So now it’s time for Mr. Acheman to go to work,” were the words he said, but my father didn’t care if Yardley Acheman worked or not. He was satisfied that my brother had finished poking through Moat County.

“They’ll be going back to Miami to write it,” he said, asking me the question.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“There’s no reason to stay up here,” he said.

We were eating fried chicken and boiled potatoes, and he was into his second bottle of wine. My father watched me, his lips against the rim of the glass, waiting for me to agree with him, as if my agreement would make it so.

I found myself thinking of an afternoon not long after my mother left, my father walking into the kitchen while Anita Chester was boiling potatoes for dinner. He’d drunk three bottles of red wine, a glass at a time, and he put a fork into the boiling water, pulled out a whole, soft potato, and stuck it that way—whole—into his mouth.

He reeled backwards across the kitchen, reaching into his mouth, trying to take it out, falling across the table first and then through the screen door into the backyard.

Anita Chester followed him out, carrying a spatula, and stood over him in the yard. Unable to get the potato out, he finally chewed and swallowed it. “Mr. Ward,” she said, “have you lost your mind?”

He looked up at her through tearing eyes, beginning to cough, and nodded that he had. She stared a moment longer and then turned and walked back into the house, as if rich white men confessed to her all the time.

I looked at him now and thought of him on his back in the yard. “Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Acheman isn’t going to want to stay in Lately one hour longer than he has to,” he said.

And that was true, but it was also true that he would stay in Lately if Ward did. He could not write a story without someone there to lead him through the parts that could be checked. He had no interest in facts. It was a shortcoming for a newspaperman, I suppose, but he never saw it himself.

To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth.

It’s possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.

“Ward wants to satisfy himself about some things before he leaves,” I said.

“I thought the story was ready to write.”

My father refilled his glass. “It’s ready to go or it isn’t,” he said.

I had not told him about the argument between Ward and Yardley Acheman, or about the visit from the Sunday editor from Miami. It seemed to me it was something Ward ought to tell him himself if he wanted him to know.

My father drank half of what was in the glass and relaxed. “So what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“About the business,” he said. “You’ve had a look, what do you think?”

“I don’t think much one way or the other.”

“It’s better than driving a truck.”

I said, “It’s better than loading one.”

And he looked at me and smiled. “We all have our own speed,” he said, meaning, I supposed, that Ward had never been expelled from the University of Florida.

“One way or another, we do things when we’re ready.” He thought about something else for a moment, then looked at me and smiled again. A kind of peace had settled over him with the last bottle of wine. “Don’t be so serious about everything, Jack,” he said. “Your turn will come.”

I said, “I do things when I have to,” and that made him laugh, and I laughed with him. I’d had a few glasses of wine myself.

“Sometimes,” he said, fondly, as if he were remembering a story, “the only way you find out you’re ready is that when you have to be, you are.”

I had another drink of the wine, and felt peaceful myself. “Can I tell you something?” I said.

“Anything.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And that made him laugh too. “I’m talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about you.”

But he wasn’t.

He was still talking about handing his newspaper over to Ward.