He was doing what Joey had thought he’d done two nights before. In a way this made him feel more honest. Sometimes other people get the facts wrong but the intent correct. She had said nothing of Sloane. Even if her account of the night of Canadian fiddle tunes was honest there was the omission of some detail, some way that Sloane fit into the night for her. Even if he was not there. The problem, Jamie had long felt, was not that people weren’t capable of telling the truth; it was that they weren’t able to understand what they were hearing. The truth was not a line from here to there, and not ever-widening circles like the rings on a sawn log, but rather trails of oscillating overlapping liquids that poured forth but then assumed a shape and life of their own, that circled back around in spirals and fluctuations to touch and color all truths that came out after that one. So a thing was not one thing but many things. A fact many facts. He understood this perfectly and understood also that with the first words out of his mouth this understanding would collapse to a small mean thing, a target to be driven home toward. There was the sensation of being trapped, caught between who he was and what could be explained. He lay back in the hay, his hands behind his head, fingers laced, the moonlight spread around him, the bottle upright, nestled in the stubble beside him. The summer nightsky, the Milky Way, was a broad smear of light overhead. Except for the Dipper he did not know the stars. As a boy his father had tried to show them to him and he would strain to follow the broad thick finger and nod his head but could not discern shapes or patterns in the great blot of distant lights. He wished he knew them. It was one of those understandings people seemed to have of the world that he could not grasp. He strove to ignore them but he knew his lacks.

He sat upright suddenly, waking, hay in his hair. He did not know where he was. Some time had passed. The moon was gone, the sky more pitched, the stars brilliant. He found the whiskey bottle, his cigarettes. Stood and drank, wavering. Retched and leaned and spewed a vile stream onto the hay. It backed up into his nose and he hawked and spat. Drank from the bottle once more and then once again. Spat and walked a ragged circle against the heavings of his stomach. Lobbed the bottle off into the woods, where it fell into the underbrush without the satisfactory crack and splatter of glass. Smoked. He felt unspoken between them was tacit understanding that screwing for gain or leveraged compensation was private, business, something that lay outside the slender artifact each returned to the other for; he did not expect purity from her anymore than of himself but only fealty of her heart. Hers the same as his, damaged goods, an ill organ beyond hope of repair or long life but known to the bearer and so something to be trusted. He felt her his twin, so deeply mirrored as to be a sister sent over from some world running side by side with this poor one, some part of himself missing now found. He believed this, of himself, of her. He trusted her.