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alley window as she was with the scent of the wind whipping through the vast farmlands. He remembered now lying in bed beside her and staring into the darkness. In Denver, when the smog lifted, you could sometimes smell the entire Midwest, the heart of the country, whipped up against the Rockies. He might have been able to stay in Denver. Then one night Maureen said she wanted to have a child. The darkness over the bed suddenly seemed infinite. He remembered when his first wife, Nancy, had gotten pregnant. Instead of cementing their marriage, the pregnancy had ended it. For a while he’d wanted her back; he wanted the child, his son, he’d told himself. Lying beside Maureen, staring into the darkness, he tried to imagine his son. Denver was an impossible city, he told himself; he couldn’t stay there any longer.
    One day, while Maureen was at school and the Bears were out of town, he went into the garage to look for a mower. The backyard was overgrown with high grass. Before he could find the machine, his leg went numb and the numbness seemed to reach from his toes to his chest. He pitched onto the floor. His chest hurt. He coughed into his fist.
    â€œWas there blood after you coughed?” the doctor asked. The doctor was young but moved slowly, speaking through a western American accent, as if the wind were blowing in his face.
    â€œYes,” Lofton said, but wondered if it was true. Had he seen blood? His mother had died of cancer, but he did not really believe it could happen to him.
    â€œHave you ever hurt that leg before?”
    â€œNo,” he said. Then he remembered yes, of course, he had hurt the leg, when he was coming down, years ago, from retarring a roof, and his ankle twisted on a lower rung of the ladder. He was answering everything wrong, backwards. He avoided the doctor’s eyes.
    â€œDid the blood leave any stains? On your shirt, your handkerchief?”
    He shook his head. He hadn’t checked, he said. The doctor held a stethoscope to Lofton’s chest. The man’s face was inscrutable. “I had a man in here yesterday who insisted that faith heals, that medicine kills, that men only die when, deep down, they want to die.”
    â€œWhat was he doing here?”
    â€œDying,” the doctor said.
    Eventually Lofton slammed out of the office. The doctor watched placidly. A few days later, while sitting at his desk, a cigarette in his hand, Lofton felt his chest tighten. He got angry, no explanation in the world, and smashed his fist, first into the keys of his typewriter, then into the windows of the lower part of the house. By the time he had finished, the tightness had passed.
    Maureen looked around in disbelief. “Why have you done this?”
    â€œTo relieve my tension,” he said. He grinned. Maureen ran upstairs, and he chased her. She would not let him into the bedroom.
    Lying in his bed, Lofton kept thinking of Maureen. He remembered places he had been, most of them alone, so that while he thought of her, he also thought of the humid fields of Iowa, of a gas station somewhere in the California desert, of the ragged sweep of brownstones in polluted Denver. She was everywhere, even here in this sagging bed, listening with him to the street noises coming through the window. He touched the letter in his pocket again. He wished she would not write.
    He set the half-finished beer can on the nightstand. He was drowsy. Forcing himself up, he sat at the Formica table and opened the letter. It was brief, written in her strange, angular handwriting. It did not seem like the handwriting of a schoolteacher. She said simply that she was selling the house, filing the papers for divorce.
    He went to the refrigerator and opened a new beer, forgetting about the half-finished one by the bed. He thought about the story he had to work on, how he should focus on Sparks, but in a way that would not humiliate the pitcher. He lay down and played with the first line in his