— Because they were setting up Victor Sweet, and that story that he's a jailbird I'll tell you where that came from. He was dumb enough to park his car in some two bit town in Texas and a couple of good old boys set fire to it, he reported it to the police and they jailed him for littering the street. They were setting him up.
— I mean that's what I just said! that that's where Edie's money went setting him up so he could run against Cettie's father in the Senate and…
— No no no. Grimes, that whole wing of the party out here on the front page this morning howling for blood, planned to set up their black pacifist marshmallow with the nomination and then wipe up the floor with him suddenly the whole damned thing moves faster than they expected. Draw the line, run a carrier group off Mombasa and a couple of destroyers down the Mozambique channel, bring in the RDF and put the SAC on red alert. They've got what they want… He finally lighted the cigarette he'd made, brushed a speck of tobacco from his tongue on the back of his hand. — How he happened to be on that same damned plane with Teakell…
— I thought you'd know she said, steaming water into the cup there.
— Well, yes well of course there aren't that many flights out of a place like that, maybe two a week. One like this comes through and if you've got any connections, if you've got a name you can throw around you can usually…
— That's just the papers, the story they put in the newspapers no, I mean one of those fine phrases that you, that doesn't mean anything. The unswerving punctuality of chance, one of those.
He pulled on the cigarette, drew it away in a cloud of smoke. — There's not a drink, is there?
— You can look.
— Where would it…
— I don't know where! Over there, on the counter behind all those newspapers if there is any. Paul would keep getting it and then there never seemed to be any, behind that bag of onions… pulling up sharp — please! twisting from his hand's surprise at her waist behind her — there, you've made me spill the tea… from the apologetic haste of its retreat down the swell of her thigh, — honestly!
— No I'm sorry, Elizabeth lis…
— And stop calling me that! That's, what's sorry no, that's what my father always did, saying I'm sorry and he'd pat me and try to give me a kiss no, it's always something else, saying I'm sorry it's always for the wrong thing that's why people say it. I'm sorry I disturbed you Mrs Booth, loading all those books on him and driving away filling his head with, with I don't know what; that whole show you put on for him in there from the minute he, the minute you found out his name, that his name was Vorakers. Fossils and brimstone and calling Reverend Ude the missing link so he could make fun of Paul why, why. Just to make it all worse between him and Paul? yes, and me?
— You've been the only thing that held them together.
— Me? do you, when you said when you feel like a nail everything looks like a hammer if that's what I, if you think that was holding them together is that what he told you? taking him out to dinner, taking him out drinking in New York asking him all kinds of questions about my father and the company and Paul and the whole, because he was up here. He came up here the night before he left and it wasn't even him, it wasn't even Billy he'd picked up your no no no and your Belgians chopping off hands and your comic books about the Bible and Reverend Ude, that the church is built on the blood of its martyrs you said that, didn't you?
— Well I, actually it's a loose translation of Tertullian's the blood of the martyrs is the seed of…
— No you said it I heard you, and if Reverend Ude wanted to do things right he'd go out and get himself shot? that the Crusades were nothing but slaughter and that's what his is going to be too? Turning his harvest of souls into this crusade against the evil empire like Lincoln turning the war to save the union into a crusade to free the slaves after the battle of Antietam I mean where did he get all that. Billy never heard of Antietam no, it was all just to start a fight with Paul because of Paul's southern, about the flower of southern youth what did Billy know about it, that it was Lee who wiped out the flower of southern youth keeping the war going when he knew he'd lost it that that's what the south still is? a paranoid sentimental fiction? a bunch of losers where the degraded upper classes go around with their crackerbarrel talk like they're all these poor cousins blaming the rich part of the family up north for stealing their birthright? Keeping the memory fresh till somebody gives them a war they can win, that that's why there's so many of them high up in the army? A war to restore the national dignity because they lost theirs a hundred years ago and nobody's let them get it back and that's what the war Paul was in, that they wouldn't let them win it I mean what did Billy ever know about the Civil War and all that, that he thought all that up himself just to make fun of Paul with? How the south is this cradle of stupidity where they get patriotism and Jesus all mixed up together because that's the religion of losers where they'll get their rewards someplace else so they're the only real good Christian Americans still living down there in this sentimental junkyard of the past where there's strength in stupidity and this mushmouthed vulgarity like Reverend tide's, taunting him with Reverend Ude but it was you, wasn't it. It was really you all the time.
He'd crushed the cigarette in a saucer, not a coal, not a wisp of smoke left, crushing it there till it crumbled between his yellowed finger and thumb. — Your tea's getting cold there, he said finally, and then — you know, I didn't take him out drinking he took me out drinking. I didn't sit him down and question him I didn't need to, I could hardly get a word in, he…
— That Paul wasn't even a southerner? that I, that somebody'd just told him Paul was adopted so he was probably really a Jew and didn't even know it? Paul the bagman? that it was Paul who made all these payoffs for Daddy and the whole…
— No no no listen, it was all in the papers wasn't it? I didn't have to ask him, you saw the papers didn't you?
— That's what I just told you! They're right there, that pile right there I just told you with those old pictures of Daddy and Longview and the, and that picture of Billy from his school yearbook they even found that. They even found that.
— I'm sure they had it… He'd started making another cigarette, dashing the spilled shreds of tobacco off the table, off his lap, — in the morgue, must have been in their morgue.
— But what morgue where no, no… blanched, hands gone white as the sink they clung to behind her — there wasn't a picture in the morgue they…
— The papers I mean, the newspapers, it's what they call their files, that story on Paul, the big Lightning Division hero blown up in a…
— Because they had that picture that's what I mean, so they could put it all over the front page and make up a story to go with it just because they had that picture…
— It was quite a picture.
— And make him a killer? a killer without a war to go to who told them that.
— Well good God, he killed him didn't he?
— He didn't mean to.
— Didn't mean to? a skinny nineteen year old kid tries to mug him he couldn't have just knocked him down? But she'd turned away looking out on the fading turmoil of the terrace, the overturned chairs and the leaves and doves, three or four of them, picking indiscriminate, specked like the leaves in the sun still casting a warmth, or the look of it out there, like her voice when she'd spoken just beginning to fail. — Tell me… he'd lit the cigarette, and he coughed. — Why did you tell me your father had been pushed off a train.