“He knows what you mean, Ray,” the trail groomer told her.

Our one night together in the apartment above the restaurant, my mother decided for herself what the bad smell was. “It’s a dead Greek, sweetie—a dead man smells worse than any octopus,” my mom said. I guess blaming the Greeks was okay, but not their octopus. When it had been a bad Greek restaurant, maybe the cooks got into a fight in the kitchen; perhaps an errant sous-chef had been chopped to pieces with a cleaver. The dismembered sous-chef was somehow interred in one of the heating ducts, my mother decided. I was glad it would be my last night in that rat’s-ass apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

In the morning, I hesitated to tell my mom about something I’d been putting off. “One should meet one’s obligations before leaving town,” I remembered the snowshoer saying, before she left Exeter. I’d dedicated one of my novels to someone I felt beholden to—Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann. It had been my intention to autograph a couple of copies of this novel for Zim’s parents and his adored Elmira. I thought it would be too impersonal to have my publisher send the books in the mail, so I planned to carry the inscribed and signed copies to the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment building; if Colonel Zimmermann wasn’t at home, I would leave the books with the doorman.

I remembered the outgoing colonel among Zim’s homeless friends. He was a man who enjoyed the fraternity of others; I believed the colonel would like to see me again. But my teammate Sam—the general, and a real marine—told me Zim’s dad had died. I could envision their white headstones at Arlington National Cemetery, though I didn’t ever want to see Zim’s actual headstone. General Joseph Zimmermann had been the first to die—“the big-deal, World War One Zim,” the snowshoer called him. Zim and his dad were the next to arrive in Arlington. Under the circumstances, I thought it would be difficult or awkward for me to see Elmira again—maybe for both of us. I was embarrassed that I didn’t remember Mrs. Zimmermann, Zim’s mother, at all; I wouldn’t have recognized her. Yet I imagined that my giving the books to the doorman was less impersonal than mailing them.