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rambling, promising again and again that we were going to move out of the apartment, we were going to move far away from Blackmer.
    Her mom answered the door, looking like hell. The woman was a waitress with a raspy voice and bleached gray hair. She was long divorced from Jill’s father and remarried to a tough little Filipino biker. They lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a tiny, grubby house that smelled of their pugs, Vinnie and Minnie, and their cigarette smoke. I hadn’t phoned ahead. I walked Jill to the door and delivered her inside. She kept saying, “I’m fine now. I’m fine,” as we went up the darkened walkway. She seemed a little irritated with me but I didn’t dwell on it and went ahead with my duty. I began trying to explain to her mother, saying, “Two guys   . . . they   . . . they came into our place   . . .” my speech halting idiotically until Jill threw me a look and recited the basic facts in an eerily tranquil voice.  
    I assumed her mother would get her through the police and medical stuff, and was ashamed at how glad I was to be avoiding it. As soon as I could I began inching toward the door, saying, “Listen, I got some stuff to do.”
    Jill sat at the dining room table, which was a few feet from the front door. She didn’t look disappointed or hurt by the idea of my leaving. She didn’t even seem to hear me. Her mother glanced at the clock and said, “I hope you don’t have any stupid ideas, Sam!”
    I said, “No, no, I don’t,” and slipped out the door, my heart pounding, pulling the cool night air into my lungs like I’d been suffocating. I made it to my car in the damp dark evening, in that sleeping, ugly, lower class neighborhood, relishing the solitude, reveling in the sudden silence, relaxing with the momentary relief from the high, tense feedback of misery emanating from Jill.

    But it was a false calm. I was a momentary escapee, hugging myself against a tree in the
midnight
woods, catching my breath as the hounds barked and bayed and closed distance behind me. And I was sprinting again in no time, charging ahead into this new wilderness of troubles, this waking nightmare, and knowing it couldn’t turn out any way but fucked.

5
     

    I kept the F airlane at seventy-five along the deserted highway and got off at the familiar exit back in Blackmer. Mist was visible under the street lamps. The red traffic lights blinked over the deserted intersections. Thick clouds drifted in front of a full white moon like the backdrop in a vampire movie. I rolled into Baron Square and parked next to Rancho Bonita, the Mexican place across from Vanguard, and did something for which I should be dead.
    How do you explain this? I guess it’s what guys do in war. They march into fire when everything in them shrieks to turn and run, to dive for cover, to cry and beg God or the enemy or fate to spare them. But they tromp onward with the bullets streaking past, blowing heads apart and snapping into chests and limbs, with bombs detonating and their friends doubling over, disemboweled, screaming, in little pieces. And at the end of it they’re either dead, they wish they were dead, or they’re appalled by their own ridiculous luck.
    My palm hit the worn, metal plate and the door swung open. It was after
one a.m.
in the middle of the week and the barroom was alive in a slow, dark way like a welter of snakes in the bottom of a pit.
    It was a small bar with a small stage in the corner where local bands and karaoke outfits set up a few times a week. The walls were spotted with the usual neon, relief tins from beer companies, and framed pictures meant to add character. There was a tropical Mexican motif, with a few clay parrots painted in primary colors and standing in metal rings suspended from the ceiling, and there was a shitty mural along the far wall that might have been painted by a ten-year-old, depicting a beach, blue skies and some palm trees.
    As I stepped in I caught a glimpse of