“He the cornet player?”

“Godchaux?”

“Yuht.”

She nodded.

He waited, then said, “So who’s we?”

She looked at him. “Just Godchaux and Scully and me. Godchaux drove us over there and then Scully and me home. Wasn’t anything more than that. I slept in a chair there at that house a couple of hours.” She shook her head. “You don’t need to worry about that Godchaux. He’s just a horny boy which is the last thing I want. Think about it a second. Though he plays that horn sweet. From New Orleans, Louisiana, if you can imagine. Everything to him’s ragtime or barrelhouse, stuff like that. I can’t figure that music out myself. But I like listening to it. But that’s all. I believe he’s got some nigger blood to him also; you look at him, you have to wonder. Skin like a lemondrop. Maybe he’s just unhealthy. There’s fevers down there in New Orleans I hear.”

Jamie pinched off the cigarette head with his fingers and let it smolder in the needle duff, sending up a fine trail of smoke like an incense. He flicked the dead butt off into the mint patch beside the house, then stood looking down at the little flame running along the needles a moment before he stepped onto it with his bare foot and ground it out. Looked back up at her. “He was colored he wouldn’t be working here.”

She laughed. “How could anybody tell? He’s never out in sunlight. What’d you do last night, yourself?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“Nothing? Come on.”

“Stayed away from Laird’s because you’d told me to. Rode out to Franconia and drank a bottle of whiskey and went for a cold goddamn swim and rode back here. Went to bed alone. Had a fine old time.”

“I bet you did.”

“Did what?”

“Had a fine time. You likely didn’t even know you were enjoying yourself, riding along getting drunk. Feeling sorry for yourself. I bet you had a grand old time, doing that.”

“I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself.”

“Of course you were,” she said, grinning at him. “You wasn’t feeling sorry for yourself you’d of been chasing after some girl somewhere. Don’t think I don’t know you a little bit.”

He tipped his head and squeezed his nose between his thumb and turned-back forefinger and said, “You think so?”

Then she said, all the gaiety gone from her, “You thought, in your heart, I was off with someone else, the first thing you’d do is get laid. Yes I do. I know that.”

He looked off, over at the bucket of balls and the dropped driver, then off into the tamaracks where the sun had gone, leaving them standing in a cool shade of cloud cover. While he looked a burst of wind picked the boughs and flopped them hard and then was gone. The air was still again. Cooler. It would soon rain. He said, “I never hurt you.”