“Maybe. But you still might crank up some day and do a killer. You got that chance. Could happen any time, and then somebody in two hundred years might be readin’ your poems when the rest of us are just dust blowin’.”

“This is such baloney. Five billion people on the planet and my poetry doesn’t count any more than stuff Raf’s done or you’ve done. The buildings you two have worked on have steel girders. They’ll be here.”

“We worked on ’em, but we didn’t fuckin’ make them. That’s the difference. And Raf does his best work in the air, you may’ve noticed—talking his talk.”

“It’s not my fault that he drinks, Raymond, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“No, but how could he be around you and not wanna drink? And it’ll stay that way until he finds something better than popping bottles and girls and tracking after the mayor’s daughter. What’s this in this bowl? Looks like cat chow.”

“Ah, lemme remember. Dottie said it’s chopped mission figs and oat bran. Very healthful. Dottie digs you.”

“I can hold off urinating till after I eat,” Raymond said. He got the breakfast tray positioned, shook open his napkin. “I’m sorry I made the speech at you and I’m even sorrier that I think it’s true,” he said.

I pulled a peacoat on over two sweaters and went out the main entrance. Some of the front lawn had been leveled by the wind. It was still snowing. Grass patches showed. I paused under four stunned birch trees, listening to the far-off whizzing noise of car tires on ice.

From the hoop gate, I saw the stuck car—crunched nose first into a scoop of snow—down on the Point Road before the climb.

“Raf,” I thought.

The inn stood on such high ground and in such hard wind that the driveway had been blown nearly clear.

I went snow-blinded into the cold Dutch barn and started up the smoke-colored car. It always started.

On the Point Road, I faced the stuck car—a long Granada. Its engine noise was no more than a sewing machine’s. Only two of the pistons were firing, I guessed, and those pretty meekly. Thin twists of exhaust spun away.

The Granada’s driver got out into the light.

“Where were you trying to go?” I asked from my rolled- down window.

“Lost,” the man said.

“I’ll tell you, your car’s blocking the only way in or out. You have to move. Any ideas?” I asked him.

“Sure, but not about getting the car going,” he said. “More about blowing it up with a stick of dynamite if I had one.”

He was thick-waisted, thick-necked, with a ski cap tugged down to just over his eyes.