Down below, like a string of beads being pulled over a piece of lace, the freight train moved along the lightly snow-covered ridge beside the river. In the airplane, the steady sound of the air-cooled engine had almost the same effect as silence. Leland felt isolated, and he wanted to believe that he was over a very quiet world—he knew he was deceiving himself. On both sides of the river, as far as the ground haze allowed, he could see farm buildings and wooded sections and snowy fields, brown and yellow and vivid, gusting white. Winter and summer, this was the route he flew to Port Smith, down the river without radio, charts, or landmarks, to the crooked X of Phillips Airport in Clausen County. By car he was still within an hour of Manitou; the radio stations reached here, and even some of the stronger transmitters of Port Smith. Delivery trucks brought the newspapers morning and evening. There was no such thing as isolation; this was very much the world in which MacIver had lived and died. He had traveled on those railroad tracks down there. At the northern terminus of the line, Leland had his wife and daughter—his entire existence. At the southern end was a grimy and blighted city of three million, still diverting itself with the search for Mary Shoftel—Leland had heard that while he was packing—and in a very few minutes, because the weather was so clear, Leland would begin to see the inverted dome of soot and smoke that rested permanently on the area. After the war when he had returned from his stay at Lake Charles, Leland had felt the sensation of coming home. Now he was indifferent—removed. He had learned that there were other cities and that each had its own character and charm. The memory of the happiness of his ignorance was like that of a man thinking back on an old girl friend, punishing himself with fantasy. He was not deluding himself. When this was over he would turn and walk away. If he did not feel comfortable in Manitou, then he knew he could never live in Port Smith again. His reasons were not the same as Karen’s. They had to do with her. One time, before the war, he would have never believed it would come to this. Then, too, he would not have believed he would ever walk out on her. His old captain, Bill Richardson—he was dead now—had had a way of staring off into space, as if he were reading the future. Most people agreed that they did not want to know what was coming. The way most people lived their lives, and Leland was among them, they did not want to know what had passed, either.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” she said as they started to dance.

“This isn’t my neck of the woods,” he said.