When they took me away to the operating room, she drove back to Longstreet as fast as she could, then ran through the night to animal control. Everything was as she had left it. She climbed the levee, walked down to the boat, set it loose, and took it up to the marina. Then it was back in the car, and Memphis again.

“I waited until you woke up and gave you the story. Then I took the car back, paid, got on the boat, and brought it up to Memphis. I got here at five o’clock in the afternoon,” she said. “No sweat.”

No sweat. By the time she arrived in Memphis with the boat, she’d been up for a brutal thirty hours.

I left Vicksburg in the early afternoon. North of Greenville, I was on remote control, flying through the flat bean and cotton fields with the window down, through the stink of anhydrous ammonia and rotted cow manure, up the river, the sun burning my left arm and the sound of gravel banging up under the fenders.

The ice cream social was scheduled to start at six o’clock. It would be something of a political event, Bobby said, when he called on the wire to relay the invitation, part of Marvel’s campaign to get Longstreet’s blacks and whites talking to each other.

I rolled into town a few minutes early and took a turn past the marina. From the levee you could see the new bridge going up. The pilings were already in, and part of the superstructure. A couple of work barges were tethered below the pilings, with warning blinkers already operating on the riverside corners. If John had actually bought the land we’d used in our Brooklyn Bridge scam, he’d have lost his shirt. The bridge was going in at the opposite end of town.

When I got to Chickamauga Park, a swarm of kids covered the slides, the swings, the teeter-totters. Ladies in pastel dresses scooped ice cream out of cardboard buckets and cut cakes out of aluminum baking pans. Marvel was directing traffic at the kitchen end of things: more ice cream there, we’re running out of cake, like that. She didn’t notice me. I got in line at the ice cream tables, paid a dollar for an adult ticket, got a scoop of Dutch chocolate and a healthy chunk of carrot cake, and went and sat on the rim of a tractor tire being used as a sandbox.

Marvel was as beautiful as ever, and then John showed up, no longer the phlegmatic radical I’d met in Memphis. He was laughing, fooling with her. In love.

A few minutes later, while I was waiting to catch Marvel’s eye, another body settled in next to me.