“You’re wrong,” Harry said quietly. “I feel sorry for you—to be as old as you are, and not to know that.”

Sam laughed. “You just said how young I was.”

Harry was staring into the crystal again, frowning, as if this were very important to him and he must get it right. “A man can live his whole life in a place and not belong to it. Nor it to him.” He squinted at Sam to see if he was paying attention. “Or he can step off the train in a place he’s never laid eyes on before and belong to it body and soul, world without end.”

“Amen.” Sam smiled.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Sure—the first part. Seems to me that’s where Alex Manly comes in.”

“Not just him.”

“Oh, stop being so serious, Harry.”

“It doesn’t get any more serious than this. It’s time you understood that.”

“You love this place.”

Harry nodded slowly, looking him in the eye. “So do you.”

“Not me,” Sam lied.

He gestured for more mineral water. The bartender leaned over slowly to pour it from a quart bottle, and Sam half expected him to put in his two cents. He had intelligent eyes and the soft hands of an intellectual. Probably studying at night to be a lawyer, Sam figured. He had no idea what these people did at night—not just the blacks, but the whites, too. They drank and talked, he knew that. And the ones like his neighbor, Farley, beat up their women. But what else? What made them stay here? What made them love it here so bad they’d suffer almost anything to live out their lives between the river and the sea?

Harry said, “It’s the sound of your childhood, gets in your blood. The smell of mint under the kitchen window. The rotten stink of the river at low tide. The chatter of cicadas and pine borers on a humid night. In your imagination, you always live in the place where you were brought up.”

“Wait a minute—how about the man stepping off the train?”

“He’s lived there all his life, only he doesn’t know it yet. In temperament. In books, maybe. Or the music he’s listened to, the paintings he’s seen. In dreams and desires. The women he’s loved.”

Sam waited for him to drink his whiskey, craving to join him.

“There is a landscape of the soul, Samuel. We walk around on this rocky planet, swatting skeeters and slipping in the mud. But we also walk around on the little postage stamp of ground inside our heads.” He tapped an index finger against his temple. “That’s our real compass. That’s the place we know every inch of by heart.”

“Too early in the day for speeches, Harry.”

Harry shook his head. “No, no. It’s late. Later than you know.”

“You’re drunk again.”