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Quaker meeting houses and lectures at Ethical Culture that she was never much of areligious guide. I couldn’t claim, therefore, to see myself as a Catholic. Yet I did. Give me a hangover, put me on my knees cleaning dog poop, and I would feel virtuous. (Indeed, I almost managed to forget how much blood had been spilled over the right seat of the car.) Then the phone rang. It was Regency, Alvin Luther Regency, our Acting Chief of Police, or rather, his secretary, asking me to wait until he came on the line, long enough to strip me of much good mood.
    â€œHello, Tim,” he said, “you okay?”
    â€œI’m fine. I’m hung-over, but I’m fine.”
    â€œThat’s nice. That’s good. I woke up this morning feeling concerned about you.” He was going to be a modern police chief, that was for certain.
    â€œNo,” I told him, “I’m all right.”
    He paused. “Tim, would you drop in this afternoon?”
    My father always told me that when in doubt, assume a confrontation is brewing. Next, get to it quickly. So I said, “Why don’t I come over this morning?”
    â€œIt’s lunchtime now,” he said reprovingly.
    â€œWell, lunch,” I said. “That’s all right.”
    â€œI’m having a cup of java with one of the Selectmen. Make it after.”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œTim?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œAre you okay?”
    â€œI think I am.”
    â€œWill you clean your car?”
    â€œOh, Christ, I had a terrible nosebleed last night.”
    â€œYes, well, some of your neighbors ought to belong to the Good Snoopers’ Society. The way they phoned it in, I figured you lopped somebody’s arm off.”
    â€œI resent that. Why don’t you come over and get a sample? You can check my blood type.”
    â€œHey, give me a break.” He laughed. He had a real cop’s laugh. A high-pitched soprano whinny that had nothing to do with the rest of him. His face, I can tell you, might as well have been made of granite.
    â€œAll right,” I said, “it’s funny. But how would you like to be a grown man with nosebleeds?”
    â€œOh,” he said, “I would take good care of myself. After ten shots of bourbon, I would be punctilious about drinking a glass of water.”
Punctilious
had just made his lunch hour. He gave a big whinny and signed off.
    I cleaned the inside of my car. That did not feel nearly so unhazardous as the dog poop. Nor was my stomach taking the coffee well. I did not know whether to be agitated at the effrontery and/or paranoia of my neighbors—which ones?—or to live with the possibility that I had gotten sufficiently unhinged to break one or another blonde lady’s nose. Or worse. How did you lop off an arm?
    The difficulty is that my sardonic side, which had been designed, presumably, to carry methrough most of a bad day, was, when all is said, not a true side, but only a facet—one stop on the roulette wheel. There are thirty-seven others. Nor was anything put to rest by my increasing conviction that the blood on this seat did not come from anyone’s nose. It was much too abundant. So I was soon revolted by the task. Blood, like any force of nature, insists on speaking. It is always with the same message. “All that lives,” I now heard, “clamors to live again.”
    I will spare you such details as the rinsing of the cloth and the trips with pails of water. I had friendly conversations about nosebleeds with two neighbors who passed while I was on the task, and by then I had decided to walk to the Police Station. Truth, if I brought the vehicle, Regency might be tempted to impound it.
    There had been times over the three years I was in prison when I used to wake up in the middle of the night with no sense of where I was. That would not be unusual but for the fact that of course I knew exactly where I was, down to my cellblock and cell number,