A week later, when it smells of rain, Vince swears it is the toads. “And I was the one that let them out of there.” But at the same time the strange man returns, looking different. When he stops by the office, Al notices the man’s face is calmer. He feels good just to stand near. But the stranger, Al said to people later, didn’t go right to his room. He walked out onto the beach and continued to walk. He walked west like a mirage, looking in the heat wave as if he wore a blanket of wavering clouds, then he was only a shimmering shape of a man and it seemed he went north and then disappeared.

Ruth, the lightest of sleepers, is asleep when the man climbs quietly into the boat and even more quietly into the top bunk above her. Ruth sleeps through all this, but she is awakened later by the first sound of dropping rain. Slowly at first, the water tapping like at the Western Union when she was a girl, then the sound of all the raindrops seeming to run together. It smells of rain, too, the way it smells inland. She goes outside. It is the best thing she’s ever smelled, the sweetness of it. She stands, wet, and breathes it in, the water pouring straight down on her, making everything look blue. Soaking wet, she breathes it in. Then she returns and puts a towel over her head. Going back to her bunk, she sees the man in the bunk above hers.

She already has her knife in hand when he props himself up on his elbow and smiles at her, to show he is harmless. “You snore,” he says.

She knows who he is. And here is the rain. Heart sinking, she says, “So, you! It’s your boat now, isn’t it? You are the one.”

“Yes.” He feels bad for her, she can tell. “It was you who made part of the sacrifice. It was you who asked.”

She walks back out and stands in the rain, as if it might not last, her face to the sky, her lonely face that looks like that of her father, the original owner of the Marco Polo, then she looks back at the bringer of rain.

She sees that he is an inward kind of man. When she talks to him, she gets the feeling he might cry easily. His must be a very hard life. She thinks he would like to be ordinary. He would like to work at a gas station or garage or even a 7-Eleven, or as a greeter at the new Wal-Mart near the city. And he is a kind man. He has a calm face. His countenance is special. A normal life has not been chosen for him. Like the rain, he has his job to do. Just as prayers are sometimes only one-sided, so is he. Just as light enters the sky and falls to the earth, this is his life. As water falls from the heaviness of pregnant clouds. She suddenly feels as much compassion for him as he did for her. He thanks her for it, as if reading her thoughts. “Yes, it is my work.”