We emerge on the other side of the building, the lieutenant curves back toward Cuttquisqui, and something white drags itself out the mouth of the second mine shaft there in the distance. It pulls its bulk on long spindly arms, stops, straightens its arms pushing its shoulders and rearing head up. Far-away black eyes stare at us. It holds this posture as it sinks into the ground no more rapidly than a candle burns down. It tilts back, so that its face is the last of it to disappear.

I can’t see the lieutenant’s face. He is not moving, looking back toward town, and he sounds like he’s choking. I take a step toward him, and he swallows and says, “Is it gone?”

I look unnecessarily.

“Yes.”

“Where did it go—into the mine?”

“Yes.”

He pauses. Perhaps he turned away after it started to sink.

“Let’s get back,” he says.

Back among the brick houses, the small-paned windows swing just a little in the fog.

*

Yours are the eyes I see open wide. Nothing in these images of you touches me until the moment I glimpse you from the side and a bit behind, and see a little fold under your chin; that melts my heart. I hear my voice speak before I know it is my rolled jacket whose folds my eyes are searching, “How do you feed stone fishes?”

Thrushchurl rubs his head, sitting up grinning as always. The long stringy hair he keeps under his top hat is pressed into two mats that sweep back from the peak of his high, narrow brow.

We sit gloomily in the street, straggling in and out of buildings, forking food out of cans. The light here is silver, haggard as rain and retarded by the fog. I join Thrushchurl as he slips into a narrow alley. He stands himself on top of a sizeable rock and gazes off toward the mines.

“They’re so still,” he says. But everything here is still.

Makemin stands with the Clappers around him, conjuring us to gather and hear his orders. This is not something I am eager to do. The loonies are there already—they seem cowed, and dislike to leave Makemin’s vicinity. They sit together in rows, looking around with mouths open and slumping eyelids. The Clappers’ tattoo struggles to make itself audible in the muffling air, and the rhythm begins to click and patter, its regularity to break.

Only now, as they start to their feet, do I realize that it’s bullets that click and patter around us. I turn and push Thrushchurl into the nearest doorway with both my hands on his broad flat chest. He turns suddenly and plucks at the latch, teasing it with his fingers, his other hand flat on the calloused wood, and then the door subsides and we are covered—I hear the bangs against the wall. Do I go to the window?

Thrushchurl fingers the air, saying “It won’t last long.”