What I was hearing made a sudden kind of sense. Chance and I used to follow the war together. We tracked the battles, the politics. We knew what carrier groups were deployed, and where. Lately, that had changed, and the more time passed, the starker those changes seemed to be. If I brought up the war, Chance got quiet. My talk of enlisting made him increasingly nervous.

“It’s Vietnam,” I said. “Everyone feels that way.”

Chance nodded once, but this was a hard thing between us. “So you’re going home?”

“It’s getting late.”

It wasn’t an answer, and Chance knew it. “Call me later?”

“Sure. Course.”

When his friend was gone, Chance stood long in the twilight, thinking about the parts of his soul he’d just laid bare. It didn’t matter what Gibby had said or how calm he’d kept his features. A new doubt was in his friend. And it should be, Chance thought. The war was real. People like them were dying.

Inside the house, Chance knelt at the bed, and dragged out a box of magazines he’d collected about the war in Vietnam. The photographs were graphic. On one page, thirteen bodies were trampled into the mud, a soldier in the ditch with his jaw shot off. Another page showed a blinded marine no older than Chance and a North Vietnamese soldier trapped in a burning tank, bubble-skinned and screaming as his face melted and flames danced from the crown of his head. There were a thousand images just as bad, and Chance could spend all night with them.

He spent an hour this time, then tucked it all beneath the bed: the magazines he hid like pornography, the secret of his schoolboy shame.

I thought of Chance as I worked the car south. I didn’t know what he needed or what to tell him, but it was true I didn’t want him involved. As the Carriage Room drew closer, I thought less of my friend and more about what might happen next. When people got murdered in Charlotte, odds were pretty good they’d die within a two-mile radius of the Carriage Room. Drugs. Gangs. Pick your poison.

The bar was redbrick and narrow, a single story surrounded by cracked tarmac. Motorcycles and pickups filled the lot. The women going in and out showed mostly skin, and the men, mostly leather. I stood in the lot, and came very close to changing my mind. The sun was falling, darkness rolling out. I took a deep breath, and started walking, three men staring hard when they saw me. Patches on their vests said HELLS ANGELS instead of PAGANS, but no one stopped me, so I wedged myself at the bar, and waited for the bartender to notice me. A tall man with a towel on his shoulder, he said, “I think you’re in the wrong place, kid.”