She nods like a type of doctor herself. “That fits,” she says. “Be crazy to keep free. The life you been leading lately sounds crazy enough to last you a while.”

“What did I do wrong? I was a fucking Good Samaritan. I took in these orphans. Black, white, I said Hop aboard. Irregardless of color or creed, Hop aboard. Free eats. I was the fucking Statue of Liberty.”

“And it got you a burned-down house.”

“O.K. That’s other people. That’s their problem, not mine. I did what felt right.” He wants to tell her everything, he wants his tongue to keep pace with this love he feels for this his sister; he wants to like her, though he feels a forbidding denseness in her, of too many conclusions reached when he wasn’t there. He tells her, “I learned some things.”

“Anything worth knowing?”

“I learned I’d rather fuck than be blown.”

Mim removes a crumb, as of tobacco but the cigarette is filtered, from her lower lip. “Sounds healthy,” she says. “Rather unAmerican, though.”

“And we used to read books. Aloud to each other.”

“Books about what?”

“I don’t know. Slaves. History, sort of.”

Mim in her stripey clown costume laughs. “You went back to school,” she says. “That’s sweet.” She used to get better marks than he did, even after she began with boys: A’s and B’s against his B’s and C’s. Mom at the time told him girls had to be smarter, just to pull even. Mim asks, “So what’d you learn from these books?”

“I learned”—he gazes at a corner of a room, wanting to get this right: he sees a cobweb above the sideboard, gesturing in some ceiling wind he cannot feel—“this country isn’t perfect.” Even as he says this he realizes he doesn’t believe it, any more than he believes at heart that he will die. He is tired of explaining himself. “Speaking of sweet,” he says, “how is your life?”

“Ça va. That’s French for, It goes. Va bene.”

“Somebody keeping you, or is it a new one every night?”

She looks at him and considers. A glitter of reflexive anger snipes at her mask of eye makeup. Then she exhales and relaxes, seeming to conclude, Well he’s my brother. “Neither. I’m a career girl, Harry. I perform a service. I can’t describe it to you, the way it is out there. They’re not bad people. They have rules. They’re not very interesting rules, nothing like Stick your hand in the fire and make it up to Heaven. They’re more like, Ride the exercise bicycle the morning after. The men believe in flat stomach muscles and sweating things out. They don’t want to carry too much fluid. You could say they’re puritans. Gangsters are puritans. They’re narrow and hard because off the straight path you don’t live. Another rule they have is, Pay for what you get because anything free has a rattlesnake under it. They’re survival rules, rules for living in the desert. That’s what it is, a desert. Look out for it, Harry. It’s coming East.”