I listened to the blues trumpet, a young guy in a beat-up suit, he had

"What do you hear about the body in the sludge?"

"They won't find a body The body's just another embellishment," he said. "The main thing is the ship itself."

"What about it?"

"A ship being on the high seas for two years, changing names and crews-that's just a story too. The ship made one recent voyage, East Coast to West Coast. Carrying sludge to California to deliver to a composting operation. Ordinary simple shipment."

We ran along city streets, landscaped avenues of a certain fallen aura, an out-of-timeness that was ravishing in its open regret.

"Look, Sims, here's the thing."

"Let's run," he said.

"I don't know. I'm a little, and I shouldn't say this, I know, to someone like you."

"Love your kids, right?"

"Yes of course."

"Then run," he said.

"How close I am, some of the time, I sometimes think, as much as I love them all, to feeling like an imposter, Because it has not fucking, ever, been something I am comfortable with."

We stood in the kitchen wasted by miles of hills and hot pavement, reluctant to move about for fear of dripping sweat on something, two men in shorts, and Greta gave us glasses of water, a brown-haired woman with long hands and a half-hidden gauntness, a sort of lean and angular suchness, an x-ray Greta that probably showed itself in argument or stress.

"You like this place?" I said.

"I think I'm at the ends of the earth. Four years we are here and I am waking up every morning and trying to remember where I am. So far from everything."

"We are backed up," Sims said, "to a very big ocean."

And the son, the five-year-old, sitting at the table with his cereal bowl and oversized spoon, Loyal Branson Biggs, a boy so softly handsome, so offhandedly blessed with expressive beauty that I could not stop looking at him, I looked at him while I spoke to his parents and they looked at him too and they looked because I was looking-I reminded them to renew their sense of amazement in the child.

I was taller than Sims but not so solid and volumed and I'd never used my head as an instrument of medieval siege.

I butted him just above the nose, driving down, and it stung him, I could tell, it sent a message unit ringing through his skull.

He jolted me good. He hit me so hard I was stunned backwards half stumbling, right out of his grip on my shoulders, and the guy showed up with the car and stood by to watch.

The pain was electric and compact, reducing everything to its own sort of benumbment, making the world beyond my head seem small and dazed.

This is what we did, we hairlined in, blocking out everything but the butting and glaring and pain.

When he butted me again I moved my head, eased back a quarter inch, trying to tone the blow a little, and he jutted his chin and glared.

Pain is just another form of information.

We knocked heads one more time, one time each, and the guy stood there with the car keys, watching.

In my hotel room I looked in the mirror above the washbasin. I put both hands to the wall and leaned into the mirror and saw bruises and welts, deep discolorations, and a slash of dried blood with a winy flush around it. I used cold water to clean the wounds and then I went to bed. But I felt dizzy as soon as my head hit the pillow and I had to sit in a chair for an hour before the feeling passed.

The thing kept coming back to me and I tried to get inside it, inside the tremor, our faces sort of double-framed over the ice cubes in our drinks, flying out of focus, then in again-not to detail my own feelings but only to understand the hidden triggers of experience, the little delves and swerves that make a state of being.

We ran through smogged-out hollows past houses stilted over raw defiles and we ran into wooded areas that had the look of tinder, a dry white dusty stillness, a sense of combustible edge, but maybe not-I might have been devising my own newsreel.

everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.

When I shot George Manza I began to understand the nature of this kind of feeling. They put me in a radio car with a cop who smoked and they sent me eventually to a facility in upstate New York, a place that featured one of the oddities of the penal system. This was a miniature golf course, nine holes, with cartoon turrets and windmills-we were youthful offenders, you see, and maybe the guidance counselors thought we'd take snug comfort in the nursery shapes and bright colors or in the anal stuff of balls and holes. I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now. But my mates and I, the D-felonies, the E-felonies, the head breakers, the thieves in the night, a mixed group as you'd imagine, with races, creeds, cries in the dark- we used to amble past the windows in the mess and look at the layout' down there with its loopedy-loops and tunnels and puddle lakes, its sward of tinsel grass, and we called it California.

Phoenix was a neater package for me. I needed a private life. How could you have a private life in a place where all your isolated feelings are out in the open, where the tension in your heart, the thing you've been able to restrict to small closed rooms is everywhere exposed to the whitish light and grown so large and firmly fixed that you can't separate it from the landscape and sky?

I walked in the door and Marian said, "What happened to your face?"

I walk in the door and this is what I hear, children playing, radio playing, the news, the traffic, the phone is ringing, the washer is pumping through a cycle.

I smiled and kissed her and she picked up the phone. The kids were making noise out back, our kids and the neighbor's kids, a game made up by Lainie-I knew this from the quality of the shrieks. Lainie made up fiendish games, inventive shrill spectacles of torture and humiliation.

"What did you do to your hair?"

"Had it cut. You like?" she said, still on the phone with someone. "What happened to your face?"

I walk in the door and see light strike the cool walls and bring out

"What happened to your face?" Greta said to me.

I looked at Loyal work his spoon through the lumpy milk.

"Well, this is a good question actually."

"And what is the answer?" she said.

"Well, I had a little scuffle in the elevator. It's noticeable? At my hotel. I didn't know the marks still showed. Two drunks. A white guy and a black guy."

I could feel Sims enjoy this in his hot Reeboks.

"Nick started the fight," he told her.

"This is true?"

She said it to me but she was looking at the child eat his breakfast. We were all looking at Loyal.

"They told him he was going a little gray and he went berserk," Sims said.

Greta had to take the child to school and then she had to go to her own school where she taught chemistry three days a week with the ocean at her back.

Sims and I stood on our spots, drinking water.

"You two still mad?" I said.

"She's still mad. I got over it."

"I have a plane to catch," I told him.

He showered and dressed and took me to my hotel and I hurried through a shower and got dressed and grabbed my bag and got back in the car and there was a man on the freeway, a man on an embankment, nodding his head to drive-time radio, and he sat on the grass with an object across his knees and Sims said it was a rifle and I said it was a crutch, one of those metal crutches with a forearm brace, and it took me a couple of seconds to understand that Sims was kidding- this was just the language of the freeway.

I found southern California too interesting. The experimental aircraft, the fault systems, the inferno of cars and smog, the women from nowhere, even the street gangs that were coming into prominence at the time, adopting varsity colors. I made business trips but kept them brief and blinkered, after the first one. The place had that edge-of-ranger for a few minutes before we drifted off, one by one, although there was nothing else, essentially, to see.