“Sorry. I just thought you oughta get the whole landscape.”

“Oh,” I said, “I know the landscape.”

The show wasn’t a movie, it was a video, and the moans and gasps that went with it sounded contained and local, as if coming from the next room.

“Well, look at that,” I said.

“I don’t wanna,” said Raymond.

“She’s made different from me.”

“You better hope she is,” he said. He put out the picture and his shoulders sagged.

I didn’t move. My knees were crooked over the high edge of the bed and my bottom seemed to be sinking through the mattress, but I didn’t get up, didn’t let my gaze wander from the gray iridescence of the blank TV screen.

“Well,” Raymond said. “We need us a telephone before we can go any fuh-thuh.”

Back in the green convertible we drove an access road that paralleled the Gulf Freeway. We passed a furniture warehouse, industrial plants, a Flintkote factory that was sided with glazed tiles.

My motel room was at the Park Inn, a pricey building built during the boom.

The room had a low ceiling, and off the front balcony was a great palm that sent barbed shadows through the picture window and made pointy areas of darkness and chill.

Raymond docked his car next to my rental, the red Firecat.

“Don’t think we’re quitting yet,” he said, as he stopped his engine from screaming.

Now instead we had the happy ratcheting of a zillion cicadas.

“There’s still several of Raf’s people I can ask. Who might’ve caught his act someplace or other.”

In my room were pieces of blond rattan furniture. The quilted bedspread and cushions and carpeting were gray-green colors. Tropical-Confederate was the motif here, I supposed.

Raymond yanked off his heavy boots and kicked them that-away, dropped backward onto the bed, stacked both pillows behind his shoulders to prop himself up.

Over the dressing-room counter, I slit cellophane from a throw-away drinking tumbler but could draw only warm water.

Raymond steadied the gray desk phone on the lap of his jeans. He was all business, readying to make calls.

I went out for a bucket of ice.

On the room’s far back wall were glass doors that could be jerked open to a catwalk and for a view of the court below. The court had a patio, web-and-metal lounge chairs, an Olympic pool, all-out landscaping.

I went with my tumbler of ice water through the sliding glass doors.

It was evening now, and a hundred artificial lights glowed on the court below. Down there were Black Southern Baptist goings-on.

The Park Inn was hosting a couple of conventions this week—the Baptists, who posed in maillots and swim trunks of sherbet colors on the pool’s concrete patio, and a gathering of foreign scholars, bearded men and pale women in dresses.