JAMES DICKEY
527
the running. He put the whiskey on the floor and, holding on, stepped
and felt into the tub, his eyes closed, sat on the end and slid by
degrees down the smooth enamel, consumed by fiery water, his feet
going for the far wall where the tap still ran thundering in on him, as
in a cave. He leaned forward and quieted it and lay back with final–
ity, almost floating, his muscles lengthening, his bones separating,
breaking a facial sweat, waiting for nothing.
In unopposed arrival, responding as though called wordlessly
by his whole body, like the opening of all his veins, the snow he had
just left came to him, a directness, a seeking-out of piercing darts of
flame which at the same time glanced off and disappeared, not being
head-on when most head-on: small parts of a flock, of an enormous
sheet, each meaning to be forthright but dying, as in a touch the
essential fire that made it were leaving it. He had been wandering
with Harbelis in a kind of wall, an unhinged black, a shadowed
flocking, unballasted, hooded, hovering, unfurling, failing and on–
coming. It was the right kind of scene for secrecy; the snow had
something to do with a code of some kind. Also with an instrument;
also with his son born joel Hamilton Cahill twenty years ago in At:
lanta, Georgia, and raised in Memphis, who had gone one year to a
small college and had been, until recently, in this town .
He stirred the water, a turbulence in depth unguessed in the
deepest seas of the world, reached over the side, picked up the bottle,
hauled it in and tilted into his throat four strong swqllows of the hot
sick-tasting sweetness. He did not dissolve. He drank again and fin–
ished it all, the warmth around him in steam now and leaving the
water. The presence of snow was also leaving: the ticks of flame in
his face, the scatter as of hooded coins, the released and compulsive
swirling about, the seething, the hiss from all sides, the in-ranging,
the suggestion of hammers and anvils, paper-thin bells, forge-fires,
the peltering of sparks, the bee-shower, the vague quick coals dying
instantly, and the sense of disclosure there in all that hoodedness and
numbness and unlikeliness-was that gone? What had Harbelis meant?
Was he supposed to pick up on what it might have been? Guess it?
Build a meaning that he could add to, when he went back to them to–
morrow? He shuddered, now helpless, the whirling envelopment of
the snow gone except as a memory of discomfort temporarily dis–
pelled, but returning as the water cooled. The cold room outside the
door waited also, with linoleum ready to frost the brain through the
foot-soles before he could lump into bed, and beyond that the town
purposelessly feathered and draped in whiteness, half-stunned, fro-
