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increased.
               Then the army came, and for months I hadnt spoken to my father. (We would sit at the table eating silently, ignoring each other.) And when I left, that terrible morning, I kissed my mother. And briefly I looked at my father. His eyes were watering. Mutely he held out the ruby-ring which once, long ago, he had given me and then taken back. And I took it wordlessly. And in that instant I wanted to hold him— because he was crying, because he did feel something for me, because, I was sure, he was overwhelmed at that moment by the Loss I felt too. I wanted to hold him then as I had wanted to so many, many times as a child, and if I could have spoken, I know I would have said at last: “I love you.” But that sense of loss choked me—and I walked out without speaking to him.... Only a few weeks later, in Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, I received a telegram that he was very sick.
               And I came back to El Paso.
               I felt certain that this time it would be different.
               I reached our house, in the government projects we had moved into from that house with the winged cockroaches, and I got in with the key I had kept. There is no one home. I called my brother. My father was dead.
               I hang up the telephone and I know that now Forever I will have no father, that he had been unfound, that as long as he had been alive there was a chance, and that we would be, Always now, strangers, and that is when I knew what Death really is—not in the physical discovery of the Nothingness which the death of my dog Winnie had brought me (in the decayed body which would turn into dirt, rejected by Heaven) but in the knowledge that my Father was gone, for me —that there was no way to reach him now—that his Death would exist only for me, who am living.
               And throughout the days that followed—and will follow forever—I will discover him in my memories, and hopelessly—through the infinite miles that separate life from death—try to understand his torture: in searching out the shape of my own.
               The army passed like something unreal, and I returned to my Mother and her hungry love. And left her, standing that morning by the kitchen door crying, as she always would be in my mind, and I was on my way now to Chicago, briefly—from where I would go to freedom: New York!—embarking on that journey through nightcities and nightlives—looking for I dont know what—perhaps some substitute for salvation.
     

          
              
    MR. KING: Between Two Lions
     
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               34TH STREET IN New York City hurries urgently from river to river, and on that street, east, is the soul-squashing building where a few days later (not yet) I will add to the shadows in that cavern of halls, rooms, community kitchens, yellow-mirrored bathrooms (and whatever light entered the maze from outside squeezed in reluctantly through grimecoated windows at the ends of each hall), and at one corner was the Armory like an Errol Flynn movie, and on the next Lexington Avenue rushes determinedly past bars and stores and checkertabled Italian restaurants; and everywhere, gray steel buildings stab the sky—and beyond the Armory, past technicolor Kress’s, is the goodbye Greyhound station, where I arrived from Chicago one weepy day in September, welcomed by banner headlines warning of a female hurricane—and I think suddenly for the first time:
               My God! Im on an island!
               From El Paso, I had gone to Evanston outside Chicago—a serene green campus city—where I saw a friend I had met in El Paso when he was in the army. Sensing the anarchic restlessness in me, he tried to persuade me not to go to New York yet. (And through him—because I had given most of my separation money to my mother and what I had was running out—I got a job cleaning autumn yards.)