“Just let them have it. Just like that?”

“As much as possible. It’s nothing to you.”

“What about Eigen?” I asked.

“Eigen will be Eigen. You have to trust her.” Coltrane looked at his hands. “A little about me. My last name is Coltrane but we’re no relation. I think we’d be about the same age. I mention him, though, because of time. Time is like nothing. Everybody keeps it, but nobody knows where. It’s always lost or lost track of or standing still when it’s not flying by. You know, that’s all music is. Time. Time to recognize related tones, time to rest, to repeat, reminding us that all movement is mere illusion. There can be times on top of times, while one time slows down, another one speeds up, another stops, but they end up together as if no time has passed at all.”

“You’re more poetic than Trigo,” I said.

“What’s wonderful and something one never experiences is a song, that wonderful illusion of movement, ending on a rest.”

“If it did,” I said, “what difference would it make?”

“None,” Coltrane said.

I asked, “If one didn’t observe the rest, what would you hear differently?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” I repeated.

“But of course it would be a different song.”

He studied me while I thought about that.

“What about Sill?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“He’s a villain,” I said.

“So? That doesn’t make him wrong. Vengeance is mine, the Lord supposedly said. I think God is big enough to share.”

“I was there when he had two men killed,” I said.

“Yes, that’s kind of difficult to explain away. It happens? You know what I think? I think as soon as you identify a monster, it’s neutered. As soon as you name it, it’s done. That’s what I think.”

“Did you just change the subject?”

“Why would you think that? Remember that there is a distinction to be made between the future and what is to come.”

“What is the difference?”

“Hell if I know.”

5

I awoke from my rest thinking about the town of Quincy. Certainly the map was different, adjusted, that was there to see, sight being the privileged of our twenty-odd senses, but what must have been most affecting was the sound of nothing. Very much like a vacuum, but not, because nature abhors a vacuum; however, nature actually needs nothing. Yet nothing loves a vacuum.

It was one in the morning and a full moon had claimed the pasture. I had slept well. I couldn’t imagine that Gloria had stood outside for so many hours, but when I opened the door a crack, there she was, stiff-backed and eyes forward. She didn’t turn at the sound of my door, but I suspected she would have pounced had I exited and there was no telling what she would have done to me. Though she must have weighed all of 110 pounds, I had no doubt that she could beat me to a pulp without breaking a sweat. Many attendant thoughts came with a realization like that, the most disturbing being that I might have enjoyed such a thrashing. Perhaps as much as I enjoyed using the word thrashing.