They came upon a dead rabbit stiffening by the roadside.
“S-a-a-y, what’s the idea?” she asked in a shrilly lengthened voice.
With a dazed giggle she picked a dead branch from the ground and jabbed at the loose black loam. Then she gingerly prodded the dead rabbit with the branch, shoving it into the depression she had made. She scooped earth over it with her foot.
“Now we’re both crazy,” she said uncertainly, and her nervous smile was the juggled wreck of a silver helmet.
“You have buried your meekness,” said Bolin, calmly amused. “Now walk beside me and do not speak unless, being brave, you desire to leave me.”
The woman stood gaping at him, like a vision poignantly doubting the magician who has created it. Sullenness made her lips straight for a moment, then faded into twitching awe. She slid her arm into his and once more seemed a doll dragged along the dust of a road by some distracted giant. Bolin retraced his steps; he and the woman passed by the garden of cold peonies and came to a bend in the road. Late afternoon blundered sedately through shades of green foliage beneath them. Below the hilltop on which they stood, a barn-like house crouched, its tan cerements repelling the afternoon light.
The woman tapped her chin with two fingers in a drum-beat of reality.
“Gotta get back to work, old dear,” she said, amiably squinting at Bolin.
Bolin’s sallow face shook once and became chiseled apathy.
“So do I,” he answered, his voice like the accidental ring of light metals. “I’m the new waiter Foley hired last week. You’ve been too busy to notice me much.”
For a full minute the woman stood staring at him, her hands upon her hips, her slightly bulging gray eyes like water-drops threatening to roll down her shattered face.
“You’re the guy they call Nutty Louie,” she said at last, as though confiding a ludicrously startling message to herself.
Then for another full minute she stood staring at him.
“We’re bughouse,” she said in a mesmerised whisper. “Bughouse.”
Bolin walked forward without a word. The woman gaped at him for a moment and then ran after him as she had in the garden of peonies.
Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat and read the Bible. Green waves died upon each other, like a cohesive fantasy. Each small wave rose as high as the other and ended in a swan’s neck of white interrogation. Sunlight blinded the water as style dazes the contents of a poem and the blue sky lifted itself to symmetrical stupor. The air fell against one like a soothing religion. The bristling melancholia of pine trees lined the wide river. But Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible. He read the Songs of Solomon, and a sensual pantomime made a taut stage of his face. When not reading the Songs of Solomon he was as staidly poised as a monk’s folded arms. He had borrowed the colours of his life from that spectrum of desire which he called God. Different shades of green leaves were, to him, the playful jealousies of a presence; the tossed colours of birds became the ineffably light gestures of a lost poet.