He fell silent for a moment. God, I was glad he’d come after me. “Oh yeah. He knew. He said he believed everybody in there knew. Said that was why some tried to touch her. But she come on down to him. Stopped right in front of him. He was nineteen years old. He thought it was the sign of his death, see. But it wasn’t.”

Bobby sounded almost ready to cry, and I knew to be silent. I found the bottle on the seat, and drank straight from it.

“She touched him,” Bobby said, and he reached his fingers out lightly, and touched my left temple, twice. I hadn’t known that his touch could be so light. “Like that,” he said.

We were somewhere around Tula, Edie Hill or London Hill or Round Station, I don’t know. You couldn’t see anything where we were sitting but blackness.

“She touched him,” Bobby said. “And he said he even saw her face for a moment. He knew her. It was his mother. My grandmother. Said it was like just a glance at her face, but he knew her from the pictures. He knew it wasn’t his death then, when he saw her face. He knew he was going to be protected, be able to survive Iwo Jima and the whole war and get out of the marines and come home and marry and have a family. But he said he knew there was death all around him, in all those boys he was sitting with, that they were all going to die, most of ’em before the end of that day. But she left. They didn’t even see where it went. They dropped anchor a minute later, and they called ’em up out of the hold and over the sides, down the nets to the landing craft. Then they left for the beach. He said it was a beautiful mornin’, the water was so blue. They were slaughtered, Daddy said. Three thousand marines killed the first day at Iwo Jima. And he said he should have been killed fifty times. The bullets wouldn’t hit him. He never got a scratch. Seven hundred and sixty-two out of the eight hundred on his ship killed before dark.”

I didn’t see so much as I felt him look at me in the night.

“Now what do you think it was hollerin’ at us over there that day?”

I told him.

Third season comes and the fire is off you. Jim had clients to see, policies to sell. He told me two or three times over the phone about all the clients he had to sell to. I got pissed off finally and asked him did he want to just give up the land deal or what? He never would say.