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had wiped at the steamy window beside him, making circular motions with his mitten on the glass, trying to see his mother one more time. She’d stood there and was hard to see in all the smoke from a lot of buses and on the other side of a window that was dirty on the outside and which Clayton couldn’t get perfectly free of steam on the inside no matter how hard and fast he’d wiped it. People were already carrying Christmas packages, hurrying through the weather and passing in front of and behind Margaret Price in her black cloth coat and faded orange scarf. Big wheels turning and Margaret Price running then alongside the bus on the wet street with her purse hanging over her left arm and flopping out there all the while she ran. And Clayton reading her lips with which she was saying, “I love you,” but he didn’t believe it then and didn’t later on and never would after that day.
    When he’d finished boot camp at Parris Island in 1960, both Margaret and Elmer Price had come down for the ceremonies. He hadn’t invited them, but his grandmother had written Margaret and said Clayton had joined the marines partly because his teeth needed a lot of fixing and the government said they’d fix his teeth if he joined up. His parents had gotten back together a year after he’d left Park Slope but never said anything about him coming back there and sending instead some money to Ely each month to help out with his board.
    His head had been shaved close for the ceremonies, and he’d received a special award for marksmanship. A younger Clayton Price had been able to hit a jackrabbit on the run in heavy brush by the time he left Ely, could do it with a .22-long rifle bullet. He hadn’t cared much for shooting at stationary targets the way they had in boot camp, and it wasn’t hard measured up against what you had to do in the woods, particularly for Clayton Price. Some people can draw faces or make pool balls dance to any tune they want right from the start; others can think through mathematics and paint in watercolors. Clayton Price could handle guns and eventually outshot twenty-six hundred other marksmen at the National High-Power Rifle Championship at Camp Perry, Ohio. He did that later on in the early sixties, did it shooting at a target a thousand yards out where the bulls-eye looked like a pinhead down his scope.
    His parents had come up to him after the ceremony and all full of pride and saying how fine he looked in his uniform. Clayton hadn’t smiled, not even a flicker of one, and he hadn’t been trying to hold it back or anything, it just hadn’t been there for these people from another time, from a different planet or another world, was how he thought of them back then and still did ever after in the times out in front of him. But the marines in addition to fixing his teeth had taught him something about being a gentleman, so he’d shaken hands with both of them and hadn’t done any more than just that all the while his mother was standing on her tiptoes and kissing his cheek and having her picture taken with him. Said then he had to go, even though he hadn’t gone anywhere except back to the barracks, where he’d cried a little over seeing those people from another world again and knowing then he’d never go near them, not one more time in his life. Also knowing the best way to go from there on out was not to count on anyone ever again or even to care for anyone again or let anyone care for you.
    And a few years later, dawn and warm rain falling on leaves and grass, mist above the rice paddies. Twelve hours in the “hide” with gnats around your face and ants crawling in your ears and under your clothes… leeches hanging on to you… mosquitoes biting and you can’t swat them away, no movement allowed. Becoming part of the landscape. Estimating windage by the feel of it on your face and the bend of grass five hundred yards out, watching heat waves to get a sense of how the bullet will ride. Living