“What is the religion here?” Anna asked. “Was Adam created on the sixth day? Was Eve created from his rib?”

“Different.”

“How different?”

“There are different stories, which I remember poorly. Have you seen the clowns at the dances here?”

“No.”

“Well, when the world was new, a brother and a sister set out across the mountains. He was handsome. She was beautiful. As they slept on a mountaintop, he realized that he loved her. When she woke up, she saw that he did. She tried to escape by stamping her foot and splitting the mountain so that a river flowed between them. He threw himself on the ground until he was bloody, and she felt so sorry for him that she swam back across the river and slept with him. The incest made them outlaws. Their children became clowns.”

“What about everyone else?”

“Everyone sort of wandered up out of the earth.… I really can’t tell you about Indians.”

Least of all, the Indian steeping in the water. Why the hell was he taking the chance of stealing high explosive to give the stuff for nothing to Cleto when he could make a killing off the contractors in Albuquerque? Did he want to get caught and sent back to Leavenworth or shipped to the Pacific? There was an element of not just self-contempt, but of self-destruction.

“I can tell you about Indians,” Harvey said. “When I was eight, some so-called civilized Cherokees threw me into a water tank. The walls were about six feet high and it was half full. It didn’t have the aroma of this water, but it had slime, hence amusement value, the payoff being what I would look like when I hauled myself out. As I climbed out I noticed the water level sinking a little bit. I got back in and the water level went up. I went in and out, in and out. Then I calculated the volume of the water displaced and its weight, and from that my weight and volume. I had recently read in the National Geographic, between pictures of African breasts, that crocodiles weighted themselves by swallowing stones so they could swim lower and sneak up on those poor African girls. So I shouted from the water for the kids to throw some rocks into the tank. That was my real start in physics. You know, I’m starting to like this water. Does it mean I’m sweating poisons or I’m cooked?” He paddled back and forth between Joe and Anna Weiss. “What are you going to do after the war, Joe? Still thinking about opening a jazz club? I bet you’d need a silent partner.”

“How silent? Does that include the clarinet?”

Harvey stopped in the middle of the water. “Joe, do you think I’m drunk?”

“Are you?”

“Pi to ten places is 3.1415926535. Could a drunk say that?”

“You did.”