Several months later, Junior appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom on a rape charge. Annie and Walter went to the trial, where Walter was to be a character witness.

“How can you witness something that isn’t there?” she had asked him.

“You’d like him whipped down the street.”

She recoiled physically from him. She wouldn’t want that done to anyone, she cried. But he’d managed, as he always did, to push her back into self-accusation. She would like to have asked him why he never saw his old friends, Paul Lavan, or those other people she’d met out at the big house in the valley. What about the party people he’d wanted her to know? In some sense, he was further away from her now than when he’d shipped out—working overtime almost every night, drinking heavily on weekends, or lurching from bowling alley to honky-tonk bar with Junior and his pack of loutish friends.

The rape charge was dismissed for lack of evidence; on the courthouse steps, the alleged victim, a squatter version of Augusta, looked at Junior and emitted a shriek of equine laughter. “You still think he ought to be whipped down the street?” Walter asked Annie. “I never said that,” she protested hopelessly.

Not long after Junior’s courtroom appearance, Annie came home from work and found yellow hairpins in the bed and a torn silk stocking. She sat for a long time with these things in her hands. When Walter arrived, his face and hands dirty with grease, she remained unmoving, the hairpins clutched in her fingers, the torn stocking falling across her lap. He washed at the sink. He sang to himself, “I got the blues—and I can’t be satisfied…”

He looked down at her. He picked up the stocking. He smiled his old smile. “It was nothing,” he said.

She was silent.

“Somebody who said she knew you. How did you meet her? A girl named Karin. She came here this morning, said she’d been trying to reach you for months.”

Annie opened her mouth and screamed.

Walter threw himself at her clapping his hand over her mouth. She bit down on the soft flesh of his thumb pad.

He jerked his hand away. She gasped for air.

“Stop it! Stop it!” he cried.

“You’re trying to kill me!” Her head fell back against the chair. She wept with open mouth—she was deranged. He stood silently, sucking his thumb, his eyes half shut. She slipped to the floor and lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the dusty carpet. He sat down beside her.

“I won’t see her again,” he promised.