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through the front window. Catherine was asleep on the couch in her shorts and I thought my heart would stop. I studied her from this luxurious point, staring at the wildly curly hair on her bare back; her arm hung down and her fingertips just rested on the floor next to a crammed ashtray. I had the nails in my shirt pocket, the hammer in the top of my pants like Jesse James’s Colt.
    â€œCatherine,” I said, “you let me in.” This handsome woman, whom Peavey had once had the nerve to call my common-law wife, was suddenly on her feet, walking toward me with jiggling breasts, to ram down the front window and bolt the door. Then she went upstairs and out of sight. I called her name a couple of more times, got no answer, and nailed my left hand to the door with Jesse’s Colt.

2
    T HE SILVER ROOFS extended from my window in a fractured line under a sky which displayed a small but ineffably shiny cloud to the west. The radio was playing “Volare” by Dean Martin, the notorious companion of Frank Sinatra.
    Catherine, bless her heart maybe, Catherine pried me from the door and put me in the guest room. Then she had Doctor Proctor come over and load me good on some intravenous downer. At first I thought I had passed into the great beyond. I thought quite objectively about the dead. They are given so much credit; when, in fact, they don’t know much of anything. And why should they? They have enough to do.
    I’m busy too. I’m still alive and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of this raiment. Bring on the ghosts. I’ll pack them through the streets. Let the ones who have ringed the city, who have made our lives an encampment, let them whiten the air, the sea. I happen to have enough to do already. Let the dead run a grocery store or build an airplane. I am not impressed with them, with the possible exception of my brother Jim. And having to argue as to whether my father is actually dead deprives the whole question of its dignity.
    In the photograph of my mother’s funeral party, I am the third mourner from the left. I am wearing a Countess Mara tie, older than me, whose blue flowers arise like ghosts toward my throat. It is widely presumed that the expression on my face is a raffish grin; whereas it is plainly the grimace of gastric distress.
    In the foreground of the picture, my aunts carry on their bulbous flirtation with the photographer. The picture is covered with the somnolent stains of handling by interested parties who believed me to have been grinning.
    By noontime, Catherine had not come home and I had suffered a whiteout, a silence, a space between the echoes of the dead I had trifled with; and I felt prefigured in the vacancy, as though my future inhered there.
    My hand was bandaged, I had evidently passed out and hung from the nail until discovered. The muscles in my arm were sore and stretched. From dangling.
    I was falling asleep again when I heard Catherine arrive with someone, unloading groceries in front. Then she and the other person, another young woman, came and sat on the bed and looked at me. I pretended to be asleep.
    â€œHe’s still out of it,” said the other woman.
    â€œThis is Marcelline,” said Catherine.
    â€œHow did you know I was awake?”
    â€œI can read you like a Dell comic.”
    â€œHow do you do, Marcelline.”
    â€œMarcelline has just had an abortion.”
    â€œI wasn’t making a pass at her, Catherine.”
    Marcelline said, “If I roll a J will you all smoke on it with me?” I told her that stuff was cluttering up the drug scene and that I was opposed to its use.
    â€œWho gave you the abortion?” I asked. All I wanted was to talk to Catherine.
    â€œA laughing nurse in New Orleans. A real card. I had to change planes in Tampa.”
    â€œMarcelline loves Tampa,” Catherine said.
    â€œThey make a nice cigar there,” I offered.
    â€œHow’s your