Keyed up though he was, he noticed my damp and chilled condition and said, “I’ve got an extra jacket on the truck. Want me to get it?”

“If it’s not too far away.”

He pointed to the gray pickup sitting in plain sight.

“You stole a state license plate?” I said.

“Borrowed. And I’ve got to give it back by five o’clock.”

It was three-thirty.

I watched as he splashed over to the truck, slipped aside the tarp that covered the bed, and pulled out a black plastic garment bag, which he brought back to the caboose. Inside were several shirts, a couple of tweedy slacks, and a Durham Bulls warm-up jacket.

It felt wonderful around my shoulders. I settled back on one of the iron benches and said, “Okay, talk.”

“How about some coffee, kiddo?” he asked. “I bet they have some at the concession stand.”

“C’mon, Denn. You promised if I came without telling Dwight-”

He slumped down on the opposite bench and the wrinkles around his mouth made him look another ten years older. “Yeah, okay. I know.”

But he couldn’t seem to start. I’d seen this with witnesses before.

“You left me a message on my office machine,” I prompted. “You wanted me to meet you at the theater?”

“Yeah, but before that…” He got up and started pacing back and forth from one end of the caboose to the other. Rain drummed so noisily on the iron roof that I barely heard his words as he walked over to the doorway to watch water cascade off in silver sheets.

I felt like drumming my fingers on his head. “Why was Michael there?” I prodded. “Did you shoot him?”

“God, no! How can you even ask that?” He turned and for a moment I thought his face was splashed with rain. Then I realized that beneath his John Deere cap he was crying uncontrollably.

“I loved him. He was my life.” Tears streamed from his eyes and dropped in dark splotches on his vest. “Now he’s dead- and dear God in heaven, how can I-how will I live without him?”

I can’t stand to see anybody cry uncomforted. Convulsive sobs wracked his thin body as the rain sluiced down all around us, and I held him like a child and went on holding him, listening to his incoherent grief, till the worst was over.

Yet, even after his emotions were back under shaky control and he’d used his handkerchief to wipe his eyes and blow his nose, it still took a few minutes before he could talk about anything except his enormous loss.

“I’d been with others by the time we met-hell, it was the swinging sixties-of course I had. We both had. But after that, he was the only one,” said Denn. “I never looked at another man after our first night together. After a year, he comes back down here and I think I’ve lost him forever… but then he sends for me and eighteen years, kiddo. Sounds soupy in this day and age, doesn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “Actually, it sounds lucky.”

“We were good together, too.” He sat down on the iron bench opposite me. “Michael gave me security and I gave him warmth-someone he could be free with for the first time in his life.”

“My mother used to say that Dancys live behind glass walls,” I said.

He thought about it a minute, then nodded. “Only Michael was always trying to get out. He was a good person. Too good sometimes. Too religious. The kind of religion that-” He fell silent again, twisting his handkerchief in his small clever hands. “I’m not religious myself. But I always thought it ought to comfort and sustain. Not put you on a cross, too.”

The rain had slacked off. I glanced at my watch. Almost four.

“What happened Friday?” I asked again.

“We fought. Again. He’s been so restless this spring.” His face threatened to crumple again, but he forced himself to stay calm. “He says he’s tired of me. Tired of the country, tired of making pots and being good, tired of me.” Denn’s voice dropped. Became shamed. His head drooped until his face was obscured by the bill of his cap. “He’s seeing someone else. Someone younger than me over in Durham. Twenty years younger.”

Once more he resumed his pacing. “But he’d have come back to me. I know that now. He would have.”

How many times I’ve sat in my office, filling in the blanks of a divorce petition, and heard tearful wives or brokenhearted husbands say those exact words: “It’s just a phase. A fling. The seven-year-itch. The other lover doesn’t matter. It won’t last. We have too much history together.”

Sometimes they did; more often they didn’t.

“I pop off. I admit it. I say things I shouldn’t. Make threats I don’t really mean. But after all the things he says-” He blew his nose again to cover a choked gulp. “This time’s different and I see there’s nothing to do but leave until he comes back to his senses.”

While Michael had gone stomping off to the creek with the dog to cool off, Denn had flung his most important possessions into the pickup.

“-because I can’t get my Chinese chest in the Volvo and I don’t want to leave it. Not that I expect to come back and find the locks changed-”

From his tone, I gathered that was exactly what he expected. It sounded as if there’d been an ultimatum: get out or be thrown out.

“So why was Michael at the theater?”

“Cathy must have heard me call you and told him. I don’t know. Maybe he thinks I’m gonna keep the truck to make him mad. He’s ashamed of being gay. Did you know that? That’s why it was so brave of him. To come out down here-I mean even if it was self-punishment-which it wasn’t. Not really. But he could be pure Primitive Baptist at times. Very moralistic. And, of course, the truck’s part of it.”

He was chattering, lurching from one subject to another, barely making sense, and I said so.

“Well, it was like, okay, maybe he’s gay, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a man like any of those other good ol’ country boys. Pickup truck, dog in the flatbed, rifle on the gun rack, the whole goddamn schmear. Sitting up there in the cab of that truck, he can tell himself he’s just like everybody else. I hate the fucking thing, but I need it to move my stuff to a friend’s place over here. I was gonna see you and then take it back and get my car.”

While I was still curious about what he wanted to give me, I’ve learned not to interrupt witnesses when the narrative flow is upon them.

“It takes me longer to get my stuff unloaded than I think and it’s a little past nine before I get back down to the theater. I drive around to the rear and the first thing I see is the Volvo. I drive right up to it and shine the headlights inside and-and-”

He nearly lost it again.

“Why didn’t you call for help?”

“Okay, so it’s dumb, but walk in my shoes for one minute, kiddo. I’ve just had a flaming fight with Michael, right? Everybody knows I’ve got a half-inch fuse. And there he sits, blown to hell before he can even get out of the car to talk to whoever’s holding the gun. I’m gonna call the same deputy sheriff that comes out the day before and lectures me about shooting at people?”

He held up his hands.

“I know, I know. Some dumb schmuck from Long Island, right? Too stupid to remember that there’s a test they can do to prove whether or not you’ve fired a gun, but God! I’ve just seen the man I’ve lived with eighteen years-I’m supposed to think straight?”

“Why did you shoot at him out at the mill?”

Without thinking, he blurted, “I wasn’t shooting at him. I-”

He looked at me guiltily.

I was incredulous. “You were shooting at me?”

“Not at you. I just wanted you and the Whitehead kid to quit bugging Michael about Janie Whitehead and go away. That’s why those flyers. To get your mind back on your campaign and off Michael.”

The rain had stopped entirely now. There were occasional drips from the trees above and I could hear the carousel’s Wurlitzer again.

He was so outrageous that there was no point getting angry. I could only shake my head and marvel.