“It’s some you bought yesterday in King City,” said Samuel.

Now that Samuel and Adam were seated together and the barriers were down, a curtain of shyness fell on Samuel. What he had beaten in with his fists he could not supplement easily. He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on. His mind grinned inward at itself.

The two sat looking at the twin boys in their strange bright-colored clothes. Samuel thought, Sometimes your opponent can help you more than your friend. He lifted his eyes to Adam.

“It’s hard to start,” he said. “And it’s like a put-off letter that gathers difficulties to itself out of the minutes. Could you give me a hand?”

Adam looked up for a moment and then back at the boys on the ground. “There’s a crashing in my head,” he said. “Like sounds you hear under water. I’m having to dig myself out of a year.”

“Maybe you’ll tell me how it was and that will get us started.”

Adam tossed down his drink and poured another and rolled the glass at an angle in his hand. The amber whisky moved high on the side and the pungent fruit odor of its warming filled the air. “It’s hard to remember,” he said. “It was not agony but a dullness. But no—there were needles in it. You said I had not all the cards in the deck—and I was thinking of that. Maybe I’ll never have all the cards.”

“Is it herself trying to come out? When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”

“Maybe it’s that. She’s all mixed up with the dullness, and I can’t remember much except the last picture drawn in fire.”

“She did shoot you, didn’t she, Adam?”

His lips grew thin and his eyes black.

Samuel said, “There’s no need to answer.”

“There’s no reason not to,” Adam replied. “Yes, she did.”

“Did she mean to kill you?”

“I’ve thought of that more than anything else. No, I don’t think she meant to kill me. She didn’t allow me that dignity. There was no hatred in her, no passion at all. I learned about that in the army. If you want to kill a man, you shoot at head or heart or stomach. No, she hit me where she intended. I can see the gun barrel moving over. I guess I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had wanted my death. That would have been a kind of love. But I was an annoyance, not an enemy.”

“You’ve given it a lot of thought,” said Samuel.

“I’ve had lots of time for it. I want to ask you something. I can’t remember behind the last ugly thing. Was she very beautiful, Samuel?”

“To you she was because you built her. I don’t think you ever saw her—only your own creation.”

Adam mused aloud, “I wonder who she was—what she was. I was content not to know.”