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"Let's hear what you have to say, Karyn. I need to get home."
She smiled with her eyes, turned and walked away without speaking. When I didn't immediately follow, she paused and looked back at me expectantly. I followed her through the kitchen, a den filled with books and glass gun cases and soft leather chairs, down a darkened cypress-floored hallway hung with oil paintings of Buford's ancestors, into a sitting room whose windows and French doors reached to the ceiling.
She pulled the velvet curtains on the front windows.
"It's a little dark, isn't it?" I said. I stood by the mantel, next to a bright window that gave onto a cleared cane field and a stricken oak tree that stood against the sky like a clutch of broken fingers.
"There's a horrid glare off the road this time of day," she said. She put ice and soda in two glasses at a small bar inset in one wall and uncorked a bottle of Scotch with a thick, red wax seal embossed on it.
"I don't care for anything, thanks," I said.
"There's no whiskey in yours."
"I said I don't want anything."
The phone rang in another room.
"Goddamn it," she said, set down her glass, and went into a bedroom.
I looked at my watch. I had already been there ten minutes and had accomplished nothing. On the mantel piece was a photograph of a U.S. Army Air Corps aviator who was sitting inside the splintered Plexiglas nose of a Flying Fortress. The photo must have been taken at high altitude, because the fur collar on his jacket was frozen with his sweat, like a huge glass necklace. His face was exhausted, and except for the area around his eyes where his goggles had been, his skin was black with the smoke of ack-ack bursts.
I could hear Karyn's voice rising in the next room: "I won't sit still for this again. You rent a car if you have to . . . I'm not listening to that same lie . . . You're not going to ruin this, Buford . . . You listen . . . No . . . No . . . No, you listen . . ."
Then she pushed the door shut.
When she came out of the room her eyes were electric with anger, the tops of her breasts rising against her sundress. She went to the bar and drank off her Scotch and soda and poured another one. I looked away from her face.
"Admiring the photo of Buford's father?" she said. "He was one of the bombardiers who incinerated Dresden. You see the dead oak tree out by the field? Some of Buford's other family members, gentlemen in the Knights of the White Camellia, hanged a Negro and a white carpetbagger there in 1867. If you live with Buford, you get to hear about this sort of thing every day of your life."
She drank three fingers of Scotch on ice, her throat swallowing methodically, her mouth wet and cold-looking on the edge of the glass.
"I'd better get going, Karyn. I shouldn't have bothered you," I said.
"Don't be disingenuous. I brought you here, Dave. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got mixed up with you."
"You're not mixed up with me."
"Your memory is selective."
"I'm sorry it happened, Karyn. I've tried to indicate that to you. It's you and your husband who keep trying to resurrect the past or bring me into your lives."
"You say 'it.' What do you mean by 'it'?"
"That night by the bayou. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."
"You don't remember coming to my house two weeks later?"
"No."
"Dave?" Her eyes clouded, then looked into mine, as though she were searching for a lie. "You have
no memory of that afternoon, or the next?"
I felt myself swallow. "No, I don't. I don't think I saw you again for a year," I said.
She shook her head, sat in a deep leather chair that looked out onto the dead tree.
"That's hard to believe. I never blamed you for the worry and anxiety and pain I had to go through later, because I didn't make you take precautions. But when you tell me—"
