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a local restaurant. A quiver of frites.
    I hold out my hand.
    Extraordinary to meet you again, I say, but his attention is on the food. The silent screen shows cricket now. Sachin Tendulkar in blue and orange is batting for the Mumbai Indians.
    Yes, goodbye, says Mohammed.
    In the lift I look at myself. I’ve forgotten to shave again. I decide to have a drink. Yes, I’ll go to The Nightjar. I need to think about things. And there’s an article I have to write.
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In Goliath’s country

    Her Honda makes the turning and she drops down slowly into Black Canyon City. But what she remembers today, for no reason she can understand, is something that happened further up the highway.
    Somebody had told her there was work in Flagstaff. Boomtown. So what was there to lose? She shared a room with a deaf woman. There was no air con. The office where she cleaned held a thousand desks and every time she clocked on she wondered what the desk people did all day in their miles of metal and glass. Crunch paper? Spill coffee? There were famished flies in the double glazing.
    Years of night shifts had brought her down. Daylight sleep meant lethargy. And the TV was on all the time. Bonanza in the mornings, I Love Lucy any time. You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent. Maybe that was why people went to work, fleeing to their desk islands and the Aqua Chill cooler. The deaf girl would sit and goggle, eating peanuts and drinking milk, a yellow mash in her mouth. With the money she’d saved, Maria decided to try north of Phoenix.
    The bus had dropped her at the railway station. She had stood outside and waited for the line to clear, for that Santa Fe with its mile of iron carriages to go wherever it was going. She had looked at each freight car as it passed. Each a casket. A coffin. Sealed tight as an airplane hold. No riding that. No way.
    There was a man looking at her from the platform. Blue and white bandanna, dark glasses. She could see his body through the singlet. He was old but he was fit. Or so he might think.
    The next day she was sweeping the pine needles off his floor while he made the Impala roar through a cloud of sawdust. They had slept on a mattress in the back and in the morning he had cooked onions and eggs together in a skillet. She used Pillsbury sweet bread to soak up the grease.
    Be back round five, he had said. Adios.
    And she had kept sweeping because there was nothing else she knew how to do in that place. When he came home she was still there. Her choice.
    The house was a shack above a new lot being cut into the trees. Juniper, pinot pines. Early on, when he wasn’t there, she would walk out as far as she dared, climbing a hill in the forest where there were slabs of moss-covered rock with seams of crystal in it. She watched the lizards there, walked higher and stared out at the tops of the hills. All green. All smoking. Each hill with its rocks, its lizards.
    Don’t get lost, he had told her once. There’s fifty miles of it outside. Lion territory.
    From the rock she watched the jays, blue and black. Their voices reminded her of the travellers who had raised their puppet theatre one weekend in her home village. Mad voices. Whiny, stupid voices. She and Juan and the other children pointed at the shapes of the ventriloquists through the curtain. But how people had laughed at the puppets’ cruelties.
    She had thought the jays couldn’t see her but maybe they could. How dazzling they seemed. Jays in their jewels. Such crowns they wore. But they were thieves, weren’t they, the jays? The greatest of thieves. And out there in the forest were fifty miles of thieves and robbers. Of silent lions. On her fingers the pine needles had smelled of orange peel.
    Thirty years ago? Close enough. Thirty years ago, she’d been standing on the station. A man regarding her. She had felt his eyes. Yes, thirty years of feeling eyes upon her. Thirty