“That was one fine bitch,” he goes on, watching my reaction. “Had too much of everything, that was her trouble.”

The skin of my face seems to stretch and burn, but I say nothing, unwilling to be drawn into this game. After an interminable wait, he says, “You here to ask me about Del Payton?”

“I’m here because I heard you had a gun for sale.”

He picks up a remote control and flips through several channels, finally settling on a fishing program. “You heard wrong.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What kind of gun did you hear it was?” His eyes remain on the screen. “This gun you’re talking about, I mean.”

“A featherweight thirty-eight. Smith and Wesson.”

“That’s a damn good piece. Good for close work. How much would you be looking to spend on a gun like that?”

I take a piece of paper from my wallet, write 50,000 on it, then lean forward and pass it to him.

He studies it for a few seconds. “That’s a piece of money.”

“Cash.”

He hands the paper back to me. “Too bad I don’t have what you’re looking for. I could use a piece of money like that.”

“I think you need some air. Why don’t we step outside?”

“I don’t get around so good anymore.”

“I didn’t realize you’d lost so much strength.”

His pride thus goaded, Presley puts down the remote and stands almost as easily as he must have at age twenty. He walks to the double glass doors, slides one open, and steps onto the little square redwood deck.

I follow.

Presley stops at the rail, surveying the modest lot left him in life: a few weed-choked rows of exposed earth where a garden once grew; a small barn stripped of its walls, rotted, and collapsed inward, leaving a modernist sculpture of rafters and tin. The wall boards were probably bought by some itinerant New England artist. Beyond the barn the land falls abruptly into the woods.

“Take your shirt off,” Presley says in a peremptory tone he probably used with prisoners in the days before he was one himself.

Had he not demanded this ritual, I would have, but it irks me that he beat me to it. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” I reply.

He actually grins at this. We pull off our shirts and turn in a circle. My body is lean but smooth as a lamb’s, the legacy of my generation, which was never shipped overseas to do battle, and has done less manual labor than any generation before it. Presley’s torso is marked by multiple knife scars, at least two bullet wounds, and what might be the scar of a central venous line for chemotherapy.

“Pants too,” I tell him.