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minister looked faint. His right hand reached for the back of a kitchen chair to anchor the spinning room and steady himself. He took a deep breath, then shook his visitor’s hand and motioned for him to sit down at the table. “When they said I needed to see you, I had no idea—”
    Smith’s lips lifted ever so slightly at the corners. “Thank you for taking the time to see somebody like me, Reverend. I know you busy. But, I swear, ever since nineteen fifty-four,people been telling me I got a twin. Looks is about all we got in common, though. People love you. Especially white people. Sometimes”—he laughed again, at himself it seemed—“I figured God flicked up and missed with me, but He had you for backup.” Smith peered down at his hands, squeezing them together. A dollop of sweat slid from his hairline down his cheek to his chin, and suddenly I had the feeling he was acting, playing a role he’d rehearsed many times, even using black English—a pâté of urban slang and southern idioms—playfully, as one would a toy. “I’ve read your books. Everything I could about you. Caught you on TV more times than I can count. So when I heard you were in Chicago, I figured I had to come by and at least shake your hand.”
    â€œYou live here, then?” asked King.
    â€œAll my life, mainly on the South Side. That’s where I grew up, in one of the county’s juvenile homes. I reckon I been everywhere and done a li’l bit of everything. Most of it”—he laughed again—“come to a whole lot of nothing. Not like with you. I went in the service when I was twenty, the year after Truman signed Executive Order 9981. That put me right in the middle of Korea, but I was lucky, you know? I cruised through two years without a scratch. Guess it was ’cause I was on my knees every night, praying God’d get me outta there safely. See, I trusted Him. That’s how I was raised. ’Bout a month before I was to fly home, I was filling out college entrance forms. Day before my plane left, I walked outside the base to celebrate with a buddy of mine named Stackhouse and smoke a li’l Korean boo—and what you think! My boot-heel came right down on a land mine. I left part of my leg—and all of Stackhouse—back in Pyongyang.”
    Smith lifted his left trouser leg, and my stomach lurched. The sweep of his shin was crooked. Brown flesh below the knob of his knee was twisted, muscleless, blackened as crispand crinkly as cellophane. Amy’s hands flew to her lips, stifling a moan. And then, suddenly, Smith looked straight at me, flashing that ironical, almost erotic smirk again, as if somehow we were co-conspirators, or maybe he knew something scandalous about me, though we’d met only minutes earlier.
    â€œThe doctors spent a year rebuilding that from the femur to the metatarsal. My jaws were wired for months. Reverend, I tell you, after that—after my discharge—I just drifted and drank. I stayed in the East, sorta like being in exile, till I healed. I knew every bartender by his first name in Kyoto, Jakarta, and Rangoon. Finally come back to the States, and got me a li’l room at 3721 Indiana Avenue, and I was doin’ okay for a while, trying to stay dry and go to school over at Moody Bible Institute—I always wanted to preach—then things kinda … fell apart for me again …”
    The minister bent forward, squeezing his hands, unaware he was mirroring perfectly Smith’s posture. “How do you mean?”
    Smith drew a deep breath. (King took one too, as if slowly they were slipping into synchronization.) “I ain’t sure what happened. I don’t look for trouble, sir, but sometimes trouble just comes looking for me. Maybe it’s bad karma, or something’s wrong with my
ch’i
like they say in the East, I can’t figure it.”
    He was working nights as a