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was now.
    Watching a bat's shadow dart across a moonlit patch of ground and thinking of Val and of something else she'd told me, something Robert Frost had said, I think: "We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant."
    My to-do list just went on getting longer. Go see Red Wilson about the barking dog. Get up to Hazelwood to interview Miss Chorley, former owner of Billy's Buick, to try to figure out what had been going on with him. Check in with MPD about Isaiah's friend Merle. Do whatever it was I was going to do to help Eldon.
    I'd told Isaiah I would see what I could find out about his friend, and asked for a favor in return. "Absolutely," he said. "Anything."
    So Eldon was up there in the hills with Isaiah and the others, where he should be safe until I figured out what to do.
    Of course, I'd been waiting all my life to figure out what to do.
    Back in prison it was never quiet. Always the sounds of toilets flushing, twittery transistor radios, coughs and farts and muffled crying, the screech of metal on metal. You learned to shut it out, didn't hear it most times, then suddenly one night it would break in on you anew and you'd lie there listening, waiting—not waiting for something, simply waiting. Just as I'd sat out on this porch night after night once Val was gone.
    Like nations, individuals come to be ruled by their self-narratives, narratives that accrue from failures as much as from success, and that harden over time into images the individual believes unassailable. Identity and symbology fuse. And threats when they come aren't merely physical, they're ontological, challenging the narrative itself, suggesting that it may be false. They strike at the individual's very identity. The narrative has become an objective in its own right—one that must be reclaimed at all costs.
    I thought about the radical shifts in my own self-narratives over the years. And I had to wonder what scripts might be unscrolling in Eldon's head now.
    Or in Jed Baxter's, to fuel his pursuit of Eldon.
    Whether by heritage, choice, or pure chance, we find something that works for us—amassing money, playing jazz piano, or helping others, it doesn't much matter what—and we hang on, we ride that thing for all it's worth. The problem is that at some point, for many of us, it stops working. Those who notice that it's stopped working have a window, a way out. The others, who fail to notice, who go on trying to ride—it closes around them, like a wing casing. It wears them.
    I sat on the edge of the porch floor. A sphinx moth had landed in a swath of moonlight on the beam beside me.
    Back in country, some of the guys would keep insects in these cages they lashed together out of splinters of bamboo. Scorpions, a few of them, but mostly it was insects. Cockroaches, grasshoppers, and the like. They'd feed them, rattle them hard against the sides of their cages, jab them with thorns, talk to them. One kid had a sphinx moth he'd stuffed—with what, we never knew, but it was a raunchily amateur job, and the thing looked like one of the creatures-gone-wrong out of a bad horror movie. "Just think," he'd say, "it'll never leave me, never die, never break my heart." But the kid died, snipered while out on a routine patrol near the closest friendly village. Later that day Bailey brought the cage into the mess tent. He was sergeant, but no one called him that, and he had maybe a year or two on the kid. He set the cage on the table and stared at it as he slowly drank two cups of coffee. Then he picked up the cage, put it on the ground, and stomped it flat. His boots were rotting, like all of ours were (just as the French had tried to tell us), and like the feet inside them. A chunk of blackish leather fell off and stayed there beside the remains of the kid's cage as Bailey took his cup over to the bin.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    TWO DAYS LATER, a cloud-enshrouded, bitter-cold Thursday, I was sitting in a Memphis squad room being lectured, basically, on what cat