The watery slaps of the wheel faded and the steamer’s silhouette blurred in the mist. I turned away, my footsteps echoing on the planks, the Stockings’ song sounding inanely in my brain like a movie soundtrack. Hero walks up the dock. Alone. Fade into the mist.
We are a band of ball players
From Cincinnati City,
We go to toss the ball around . . .
Was someone calling?
“Mr. Fowler!” I heard a voice with high-pitched girlish lilts, familiar.
I peered into an alley. As nearly as I can remember—I’ve spent hours trying—it was off Broadway, between Stockton and Powell. In the gloomy passageway a figure materialized with a bundle extended to me. I stepped back involuntarily.
“For you, Mr. Fowler,” she said. “From Caitlin.”
I recognized Clara Antonia. So I had seen her that night. She put the bundle in my hands, bulky and soft. I untied the paper and stared at a patchwork coverlet. It was the size of the one from my childhood. I recognized some of the patches, several from Cait’s yellow dress.
“Did she make this?”
Clara Antonia’s ringlets bobbed below her bonnet. “For you,”
“But there hasn’t been time.”
She smiled. “She intended that you have it.”
“Cait sent you here to find me?”
She smiled again, the opaque eyes regarding me. “Your pain is nearly ended, Mr. Fowler.”
I stared as she retreated into the murky alley. What did she mean by that?
“Wait!” I shouted.
She was gone. Dissolved in the mist. Exactly the sort of weirdness I needed right then, I thought. I studied the patches: fragments of Cait’s dresses, curtains, tablecloths. She’d wanted to encircle me, warm me, with the shapes and colors of her surroundings. I pressed the fabric to my face, breathed—or imagined that I breathed—Cait’s faint minty scent, and wondered why this had arrived.
The climb from Vallejo Street was long and steep. Over a shoulder of Russian Hill I saw tendrils of fog being swept before a brisk ocean wind. I stood at the edge of a high bluff. Far to the north the steamboat carrying the team looked like a toy. I strained to make out the stocking flag flying at its stern.
My vision began to change. I first I thought it was the sun emerging from the fog. The bay took on a milky, dazzling radiance. I rubbed my eyes and felt the vertigo coming. Not here, I thought. Not so close to the edge. Move away. But the dizziness muddled my sense of direction.
“Sam!”
Blurred as if behind a scrim, Johnny was running toward me, yelling urgently. I lifted my hand to wave. He shook his head, pointing to my left.
A figure stood several yards up the slope, erect against the gray sky. I raised my eyes slowly, puzzling over the familiarity of the green trousers. Above a wool topcoat, Fearghus O’Donovan’s face regarded me with a thin, humorless smile. He held a gun aimed at me.
His smile broadened as my eyes focused on his. “Sure and you thought to make me the fool again?” The cutting voice sounded almost genial. “Not going with the others . . . did you think I’d be taken in?”
My hands trembled badly. I pressed them hard against my thighs. O’Donovan seemed wrapped in grainy light.
I'll be having the money now.”
Johnny moved into my truncated vision. He halted when O’Donovan moved the gun threateningly.
“It’s gone.” My voice sounded muffled.
His eyes were the blue of deep ice. “You’re a liar.”
“All gone in the gold collapse.”
The sound of a boat’s horn wafted up from far below, a flat, tinny buzz.
“No,” he said. The gun wavered for an instant.
I realized then that I’d removed the only obstacle to his killing me. Would he do it? Probably. The whiteness thickened slowly, enveloping us. It was important to finish this.
“You’ll never have the money,” I said. “Or Cait.”
He said nothing, but his eyes stared. Mad, brilliant blue. Out there. Nearly gone.
“It’s not really the money you want.” I heard a distant reverberation, like drumming wings. “McDermott and Le Caron couldn’t do it, so you came.”
“To do what?” he snapped.
“Finish me.”
“Hush, Sam!” Johnny shifted his feet, looking, I knew, for a sign to spring at O’Donovan. He wouldn’t get one from me. Death stood with us on the hillside.
Within the milkiness the drumming neared, a thrashing, whirring disturbance, gargantuan wings beating overhead. Or in my brain.
O’Donovan glanced upward. Did he hear it? Coming very close now: wings hammering the air, battering my face. Hard to breathe.
“Colm was murdered,” I said.
“Murdered . . . ?” O’Donovan’s face bled into the light. Only his eyes remained, cold blue beams. From the whiteness I heard him say something about McDermott.
I was borne backward in the milky light. Greenery floated on the peripheries of vision. My heart pumped lifeblood, a rhythmic exalted drumming.
“Sam!” Johnny’s distant voice.
“You killed him.” I floated rearward through a leafy forest, trunks of trees drifting past. “You wanted Cait.” A wing touched my shoulder, pulling my arm upward. As if in a tide, hand thrust high, I struggled to stop receding, to take a single step forward. “Wanted my Cait!”
A rush of angry sound poured from O’Donovan.
“You killed Colm!” I screamed it above his voice and above the wind’s roar and the wings and the rush of backward flight. “YOU MURDERED HIM!”
Then the wings were no longer wings but folds of a green banner, the light not milky but smoke-filled, and finally I was reliving it, all of it, and it was as starkly clear as if I’d always known. . . .
I carry the standard like a javelin, the folds of cloth snapping and rustling beside my face as I sprint through the smoldering aisle, hurtling charred stumps and saplings. Explosions erupt close by. The ground buckles and dirt rains through the branches. I run on, keep running, gaining on the blue-clad figure ahead.
I reach for him, my straining
