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listening to him exchanged a look of amusement.
    “Look, it’s not like I’m some kid or something,” he said sullenly. “I’m not here for your enjoyment or for laughs. I did a good thing today. Something not everyone would do—not many would do.”
    Finally he went with some other people to the back of a television truckand answered more questions. He told the exact truth, as best he understood it, because it was impossible not to.
    “Why do you think you did it?” a man asked.
    “Maybe it was because I’d been drinking all night.”
    “You don’t mean that.”
    “I’ve been pretty unhappy,” Aldenburg told him. “Maybe I just felt like I didn’t have anything to lose.” There was a liberating something in talking about it like this, being free to say things out. It was as though his soul were lifting inside him; a weight that had been holding it down had been carried skyward in the smoke of the burning bus. He was definite and clear inside.
    “It was an act of terrific courage, sir.”
    “Maybe. I don’t know. If it wasn’t me, it might’ve been somebody else.” He touched the man’s shoulder, experiencing a wave of generosity and affection toward him.
    He took off work and went home. The day was going to be sunny and bright. He felt the stir of an old optimism, a sense he had once possessed, as a younger man, of all the gorgeous possibilities in life, as it was when he and Eva had first been married and he had walked home from his first full-time job, at the factory, a married man, pleased with the way life was going, wondering what he and Eva might find to do in the evening, happy in the anticipation of deciding together. He walked quickly, and as he approached the house he looked at its sun-reflecting windows and was happy. It had been a long time since he had felt so light of heart.
    His brother-in-law was on the sofa in the living room, with magazines scattered all around him. Cal liked the pictures in
Life
and the articles in
Sport.
He collected them; he had old issues going all the way back to 1950. Since he had come back from the Gulf, Eva had been driving around to the antique stores in the area, and a few of the estate auctions, looking to get more of them for him, but without much luck.
    “What happened to you?” he said as Aldenburg entered. “Where’ve you been?”
    “Where’ve
you
been today, old buddy?” Aldenburg asked him. “Been out at all?”
    “Right. I ran the mile. What’s got into you, anyway? Why’re you so cocky all of a sudden?”
    “No job interviews, huh?”
    “You know what you can do with it, Gabriel.”
    “Just wondering.”
    “Aren’t you spunky. What happened to your face?”
    He stepped to the mirror over the mantel. It surprised him to see the same face there. He wiped at a soot-colored smear on his jaw. “Damn.”
    “You get in a fight or something?”
    “Right,” Aldenburg said. “I’m a rough character.”
    Cal’s fiancée, Diane, appeared in the archway from the dining room. “Oh,” she said. “You’re home.”
    “Where’s Eva?” Aldenburg said to Cal. Then he looked at Diane—short red hair, a boy’s cut, freckles, green eyes. The face of someone who was accustomed to getting her way.
    “Where were
you
all night?” she said. “As if I didn’t know.”
    “To the mountaintop,” Aldenburg told her. “I’ve been breathing rarefied air.”
    “Gabriel,” she said, “you’re funny.”
    “You sure you want to go through with marrying Cal here?”
    “Don’t be mean.”
    “What the hell?” Cal said, gazing at him. “You got a problem, Gabriel, maybe you should just say it out.”
    “No problem in the world on this particular day,” Aldenburg told him.
    “Something’s going on. What is it?”
    Aldenburg ignored him and went calling through the house for his wife. Eva was in the bedroom, sitting at her dressing table putting makeup on. “Keep it up,” she said. “You’ll lose your job.”
    “They wanted me to