Bradley Biblow featured himself an excellent judge of Character – a man capable of quantifying that particular human attribute just as a team of accountants might tongue the tips of sharpened pencils and calculate the net profits of a business venture. And not just of Character, but a practiced evaluator of Capacity and Collateral as well. The three C’s they called it in the sterile and starched-shirt world of moneylending. Bradley Biblow knew that world from the inside out. Not that he, mind you, was ever going to lend anyone any of his money or, for that matter, any of somebody else’s money. No sir, that was not the kind of thing for Bradley Biblow to do. But it was a fact that others did do that sort of thing and when that sort of thing was done, the sterile and starched-shirt world of moneylending in general and the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Montgomery, Alabama, in particular, demanded that someone should overlook the shoulders of the moneylenders to see that they had done their job with circumspection. And so enter Bradley Biblow, loan auditor at the Farmers and Merchants, who spent his mornings, noons and afternoons at a small oak-veneer desk, scaling mountains of manila folders that were the debts of the farmers and ginners and cattlemen and timber barons and land developers of south-central Alabama. A stack here for the ones that were solid credit, a stack there for the questionable, and yonder, stacks for the doubtful and hopeless, all neatly classified, if not with pure Aristotelian logic, then at least with methodical Biblowainian analysis according to the profession’s accepted criteria – Character, Capacity, and Collateral.

Biblow’s fourth floor office window framed an appealing view that looked directly east up Dexter Avenue toward the old State Capitol building. Whenever he needed a respite from the concentrations his job demanded, he would lift his eyes up Dexter to the exact spot under the front portico of the Capitol – a spot marked with a bronze star – where Jefferson Davis had stood to take the oath of office for the presidency of the Confederacy on February 18, 1861, some one hundred and three years ago. Then he would leisurely wander his mind down the width of the avenue, by the state office buildings and bustling shops that lined either side, to the ornate Italianate fountain which spread across the plaza at the bottom of the street, like some great sprawling birdbath come there to settle, that the pigeons and mockingbirds might frolic in its gushing turrets and spires. Biblow coveted his window with a nervous apprehension that he might at any time be dispossessed of it by some jealous superior, and indeed, it could certainly be argued that even though the office was tiny in size, the location and view it afforded was much above what might be considered commensurate for a thirty-three year old loan auditor with a mere four years tenure. But Bradley Biblow had come into possession of his office fairly and squarely and serendipitously, and he thought it most unjust that someone else might be able to wrest it from him by so simple and unfair a ploy as pulling rank. So as he sorted through his files, he fretted away many hours in angst over the prospect of losing his prized location, even though no one had ever so much as suggested that they would like to have his office or that he might have to move to make room for a more vital employee of the Farmers and Merchants.

One beautiful April morning as a placid breeze alive with the sweetness of pollendust and birdsinging stirred the papers on his desk, a pensive Bradley Biblow stood at his window, easing his way down Dexter. When his eyes reached the plaza, they fixed upon a curtain of flowing black hair that spilled down the back of a young girl seated on the fountain’s stone base. Some of the faces milling about the plaza were familiar to him, but he had never seen this girl before. She wore a white blouse and a dark-colored, full-length skirt decorated in floral patterns and cut from a lightweight fabric that the wind sculpted into ripples. She looked out through thin-gauge wirerimmed glasses to a paperback that she held in one hand while resting the other against the fountain’s base. Her profile held Biblow’s gaze and he studied the delicate structure of her face as she absorbed herself in the book. He felt a comforting softness in her appearance – a suggestion of innocence and purity that he found pleasing to contemplate. As he watched her delicately turn a page, his musings were interrupted by the familiar footsteps of Nash, the loan officer, in the hallway outside his office. He turned anxiously toward the door as Nash entered without a knock.

“Morning Biblow,” he growled in a gravelly baritone. “Fine morning it is too, huh?”

“Yes sir. It is a fine day, sir,” said Biblow, scrambling into his deskchair.

Nash’s bull-like heft pressed tightly against his smooth white shirt. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows and his tie loosened. His wide forehead glistened with a mist of perspiration even in the cool spring air, and above his forehead, thin locks of oily hair were spread carefully across a bald spot of crown and appeared to stick there as if pasted. He held an unlit cigar between his fingers which he brought to his mouth as he settled into a chair across from Bradley.

“Nothing like a fine spring day to lift up your sprits, son. Am I right?”

“Couldn’t agree with you more, sir.”

Nash shuffled his large frame about in the chair and propped an ankle over a knee. He twirled the cigar over his tongue and then removed it from his mouth.

“I’ll get right to the point Biblow. I’m here about that LeMaster Chevrolet account.”

“Got that file right here,” Biblow said nervously, picking up a thick folder and spilling a sheaf of papers from it.

“Aw shit, Biblow. I don’t need to see the damn file. I just wanna talk to you about the loans. Make sure you unda-stand all you need to know about this last refinance I did for ‘em.”

“Well … aahhh … you know Mr. Nash, there are some things … some … you know … irregularities … that I noticed in going through the file. Now nothing, I think, that can’t be fixed, you know, but…”

“Now hold on there, Biblow,” Nash bellowed as Biblow fumbled through the spilled papers like a hapless schoolboy searching for a lost homework assignment. “Now there ain’t nothing wrong with this loan that you need to go worrying about. Aw, there might be some little nit-shit technical slip-ups in the paperwork. But that loan’s solid as the Rock ’a Ages. I been lending money to Jason LaMaster for twenty years and … and goddammit,” he banged his fist against the desk, rattling the miscellany strewn across it, “his credit’s as solid as any at the bank.”

Biblow sheepishly looked away from the red glow of Nash’s face and toward the window. He could not see the fountain from his desk, but he imagined the girl sitting there, book in hand and in deep contemplation of secrets he longed to share. He cleared his throat as he turned back to Nash.

“I’m sure everything will be all right, Mr. Nash, but I … uhhh …don’t really know … is this really proper? Mr. Cravits … if he knew you were talking to me about this…”

“Biblow,” said Nash, motioning him forward with a crooked finger. “Lemme tell you something about Cravits. Cravits is a…” he leaned in and cupped his hand to whisper, “… communist. That’s right, Biblow, a communist.”

“Oh, Mr. Nash. I really don’t think…”

“Now I know what I’m talking about, Biblow,” said Nash, rising from his chair. “You best listen to what I tell you. You listen to me and I’ll look after you. Now don’t go sending nothing to Cravits about any nit-shit technicalities with that loan, you hear. You listen to me and I’ll take care of you.” He opened the door and turned back to Biblow for a parting shot. “Nothing to Cravits about this now. Remember what I told you about him.”

Bradley Biblow watched the door close and then he listened to the footfalls of Nash fade away down the hall. When they were gone, he rose and walked back to the window. The girl had vanished and a couple of plump gray pigeons had taken up residence where she had sat. He raised his eyes to the Capitol portico and began afresh the descent of the gentle slope of Dexter Avenue. He freed his mind to flow among the milling pedestrians and he allowed the slow tug of gravity to pull him downward toward the fountain and to the frolicking birds that played within its waters.

***

Bradley lived with his mother in a modest old Victorian house just a short walk south of downtown – a once stylish area of the city now caught in the undertow of urban decay. His father, who had been a successful salesman for the Capital Typewriter Company, had died unexpectedly three years ago leaving her a little more than an arm’s reach away from her former circumstances. But she and her only child Bradley managed to get along, keeping the bills paid and the old house maintained to something approaching an acceptable appearance.

“That Myrtice Beam,” fussed Mrs. Biblow as she brought a deep dish of squash casserole to the table. “Can you imagine. Bringing that colored couple to church like that. Saints and archangels, what’s this world a-coming to.”

Bradley’s eyes were focused on the silver tea service resting on the sideboard. He was replaying the morning’s conversation with Nash in his head. He wished he had been more assertive with Nash about the deficiencies in the loan documents. Frustrated, he sat reconstructing the conversation over and over in his thoughts, each time firmly explaining to Nash that he would have to bring the matter to Cravits’s attention and that Nash had better not be suggesting that he do otherwise.

“Not that I’ve got anything against the colored folks,” Mrs. Biblow continued, her words flying over Bradley like a gaggle of newly-freed doves. “But they’ve got their own churches, don’t they? Why do they need … here Bradley, have some squash. And take some of those green beans too. You don’t get enough greens and you’re looking a might pale from it.”

“I just don’t know about Nash,” Bradley said to no one in particular. “I’m going to have to set things straight with him.” He spooned some of the vegetables on to his plate. The black housecat slipped stealthily into the dining room and inched its way along the far wall.

“That Myrtice Beam,” Mrs. Biblow continued, reaching for a sprig of freshly cut mint and dropping it into Bradley’s ice tea. “Why would she want to ask them to our church? … Take more of those beans, Bradley … If you ask me, it’s just to make trouble.”

“Yes, I’m going to have to have a talk with Mr. Nash about this,” said Bradley. “He’s interfering in my work and I’m not going to put up with it.”

“I think you’re working too hard, Bradley. Up at that bank all day long and cooped up in that little pen of an office. It’s positively unhealthy. Why, it’s … Magic!” she shouted abruptly, turning on the cat who had suddenly taken to pawing at some invisible disturbance in the carpet.

“I’ll see him first thing tomorrow. I’ll talk to Cravits too, if need be,” his voice now trumpeting confidence.

“I just don’t know what Myrtice Beam is thinking. The idea of it … Bradley, will you please eat your beans?”

That evening, Bradley Biblow, as was his custom, retired to his bedroom at ten o’clock sharp. As he slept, he dreamed of the girl at the fountain. He dreamed that they were standing together by a sparkling lake. They threw bits of bread into the water and there were ducks that swam toward them and ate the bread as it floated on the surface in the girl’s reflection and he dreamed that he was happy and he felt the waves of the lake moving within him like the rushing of blood and the movement soothed him as he rested so that when he woke, he felt refreshed and the girl’s reflection came strong among his thoughts.

***

The next morning and every morning following for the next week, a forlorn Bradley Biblow stood at his office window scouring the plaza about the fountain with a hopeful eye. Up and down Dexter he went but she was nowhere to be found. Slowly, he resigned himself to the reality that she had been no more than a passer-through – the object of a destiny diverging from his own but for that one brief temporal intersection when he watched her among the fluttering birds and cascading waters. He tried to put her out of his thoughts and focus instead on the problems with Nash and the LeMaster loan which he had done nothing about despite his nightly resolutions to address the matter. He knew that Cravits would soon be asking for his report on the file and he debated with himself about how big an issue to make of the defects for which he knew Nash would be held accountable.

It was a week later when he spotted her again. He was lowering his window in order to lock it for the evening. Her posture and position, the small details of her appearance and movement, were all as before and he stood lost in his thoughts, admiring her in the brightness of the slow spring afternoon. He tried to make out the title of the book she held, but the distance was too great to allow his eyes such a trespass. He watched her for several minutes until he began to feel silly and self-conscious standing there alone, as he was. Then he took the elevator to the ground floor and set out on a path home that would take him across the plaza. She was there, turning a page of her book, as he passed. He slowed his pace, thinking perhaps to stop, maybe even speak, but he could not think of what he would say, so he walked on.

She appeared there every day for the next week and so he made a daily ritual of this walk across the plaza, each time yearning to speak to her but never finding the words. Once, she looked up as he passed and for a fleeting moment, their eyes brushed. Bradley’s chest surged and he quickly looked away, afraid that his face might betray what churned within him.

It was purely by chance that they finally spoke to each other. It was a Saturday afternoon; Bradley was standing with his mother at the grocery checkout. Suddenly remembering the empty bottle of Milk of Magnesia in the medicine cabinet, he turned back to remind her that it needed replenishing. And there she was, studying the tabloid rack, her fine coal-dust hair tumbling almost to her waist. He looked away, stunned at seeing her, and then he looked back again. She turned and they were suddenly face to face. She smiled and uttered a soft “hello” which he returned. That was all. That was enough. Bradley floated out of the store, oblivious to the constant chatter of his mother’s voice as they made their way to the parked car and then, on toward home.

The next Monday as he left his office, he saw her again at the fountain. They exchanged greetings; he ventured a comment on the beauty of the afternoon. She nodded and smiled in agreement. He passed close enough to steal a glimpse of the book she was reading: Thoreau’s Walden. He thought the Lee Street Bookcellar would still be open so he circled the block, doubling back out of her view. Finding the shop abuzz with customers, he entered and purchased his own copy of Walden.

He crossed the plaza each afternoon, passed a bit closer to her each time and each day spoke a few more words, much in the way that a wild bird picking up the scatterings from a human hand will, day by day, inch closer to the source of its bounty. He began reading Walden each night before bed, staying up long past his regular hour, and he found in the book ideas and thoughts that he had reflected upon before in the depths of his own private existence and he thought how strange and wonderful it was that someone had thought to write them down in so clear a way and to make a book of them.

That Friday’s overcast sky held the promise of rain and a cool, storm-charged wind blew from the hilltop and down the avenue toward the plaza. People scurried from shop to shop along Dexter’s broad sidewalks, carrying raincoats and unopened umbrellas and looking apprehensively over their shoulders at the gathering thunderheads above the capitol. Leaving his office, Bradley approached the girl with a fresh self-assurance and the courage to broach a subject beyond the weather. She responded, and soon he was seated next to her on the fountain’s base and they were talking of their jobs and their backgrounds. Her name was LaStella Marconi. She worked in a boutique a block off Dexter, a small dress shop owned by her second cousin. Her home was Boston and she’d come to Montgomery to “experience the southern culture” and work with civil rights organizers. As they talked, Bradley studied her unmade face with the scrutiny of an auditor, measuring the length of her delicate eyelashes, the width of her narrow brows and the fragile curvature of her china-doll cheekbones. He marveled at the strange sandalwood smell of her perfume, her soft New England accent, and the way her earrings dangled against her skin. The first raindrops had dotted their reflection in the fountain’s surfacewater before he ever felt the wetness against him. He looked at the sky, holding his palm upward, then he looked back at her and she was smiling and the rain was beading across her glasses. They got up and she took his hand and told him to follow. Across Dexter and toward the river, toward the warehouses; then up a small alley with narrow sidewalks and weather-hewn brick walls and the rain coming harder upon them; then around a corner and through a screen door and they were standing in a dimly-lit room full of tables and chairs and the air was brimming with a medley of cooking and spices and stormwhipped air. She led him to a table and they sat while a large black man brought them water and a wrinkled cardboard menu in handwritten ink. The man called her Stell and asked her how she’d been and handed her a handtowel which she used to dry her face and glasses before passing it to Bradley. Chairs skidded over splintered hardwood with a grating sound and he noticed, as his eyes adjusted to the light, that the room was stirring with people. Looking around, he saw that the patrons were all black and that he and LaStella were the only white people in the room and he felt a nervous shudder pass over him that he tried to conceal. Then he felt her hand against his arm and their eyes met and he relaxed in the comfort of her smile. They ordered supper, chicken for him, a vegetable plate for her, and drank iced tea from large Mason jars. She introduced him to the waiter – a man named Henry Fellman who also owned the café – and he reached tentatively for the meaty black hand and shook it firmly once he felt the other’s grip.

They finished their meals and got up to leave, stopping at a small counter by the door where he paid the check. The rain had quit and the streets were shrouded in thin vapors and the dusk smelled of a spent rainstorm. He walked the quiet streets with her to the bus stop on Madison. A church bell pealed six times as they waited. When her bus came, he helped her on board and then stood and watched it as it climbed and crested the hill. His mother, he knew, would have supper waiting when he got home and would want to know where he’d been. “Had to work late,” he rehearsed in his head. “Busy, busy time at the bank now,” he would tell her. “Feeling a little spent too. Not really up to supper tonight.” Then he would retire to his room and continue with his reading of Walden.

***

“These all appear in good order, Bradley,” Cravits proclaimed with his usual immaculate enunciation, his eyes studying the last file of the stack through silver half-moon glasses. His expansive mahogany desk was cluttered with all manner of calendars, pictures, paperweights and whatnots. Behind him, the massive oil portrait of C. Malone Townsend, the bank’s founder, stared down at Bradley from within a baroque gold frame whose swirls and curlicues meandered merrily about in marked contrast to the drab, melancholy tones of the painting. The portrait was hung so that the steely gleam in C. Malone Townsend’s eyes focused directly upon whoever happened to occupy the chair where Bradley now sat – a circumstance much apparent to Bradley as he waited for what he knew would come next. “But…” said Cravits predictably.

“But what, sir?”

“I notice on my list here that you’ve had that LeMaster Chevrolet file in your office for some time now. Are there any problems there?”

“Oh, no sir. Just haven’t gotten to it yet sir. I’ll get right on it.”

“Promptness in these matters is essential, Bradley. We are a team here, each of us a cog in a larger machine and with our own job to do. If any of us neglect our work, even for a day, this bank cannot function with the smooth efficiency that our customers have a right to expect. Do I make myself clear, Bradley?”

“Very clear, sir. And I’ll get right on it.”

“Have it on my desk by tomorrow then. That is all.”

The flood of light outside the dark-paneled office brought a squint to his eyes. The adrenaline swelled through him. He knew that the problems with the LeMaster loan were much more serious than what Nash had represented and that his audit of the file would mean real trouble for Nash. And given the hierarchy and office politics of the bank, what meant trouble for Nash was bound to mean trouble for Bradley Biblow. Back in his office, he gnawed at his fingernails as he considered the dilemma. He decided he had no choice but to make his report to Cravits and let the chips fall where they would as far as Nash was concerned. But it was nearly lunchtime, so he decided to postpone the work on the audit until the afternoon. He walked to the open window hoping to catch a glimpse of LaStella, but she was nowhere to be seen and so he let his thoughts wander where they would and soon he was thinking of Walden and she was there in his mind with him and they were watching ducks swim toward them as the sunrays pirouetted on the wavecrests and flashed diamond sparkles up to their faces.

***

Bradley turned in the audit to Cravits as requested and waited in daily angst for the fallout. Each afternoon, he met LaStella at the fountain and the trials of his job quickly melted in the softness of her voice over the bubble and spray of the waters. They talked long into the evenings about things he had never discussed with anyone – of man’s place in nature, of breaking with the conventions of society, of race relations, civil disobedience and so much more. He mainly listened at first, asking questions now and then, trying to make sense of this whole new way of looking at the world that was opening before him.

That weekend, he borrowed the car that he shared with his mother and took her to a Saturday matinee at the Capri. It was a love story about an American ex-patriot in pre-war France that ended in the tragedy of Nazi occupation. She told him that the movie was about searching for an internal freedom in a world where choices are imposed by customs and taboos that suck the free will from humanity and that ultimately breed its destruction.

“But how can we survive without our customs and laws,” he asked her. “Doesn’t that lead to chaos?”

“Do you consider yourself an enlightened man,” she asked him. “A man intelligent enough to choose how to provide for your own needs without having those choices imposed upon you?”

“Of course,” he answered.

“And you do not see it as chaotic for you to pursue your own needs as you see fit and without being told how you must go about it?”

“No, but…”

“But other people are told every day what they must do, how they must live, how they may and may not go about providing for the necessities of life. Some are told in words having the force of law, but others are enslaved more subtly. By social conventions that rob them of their independence without them even realizing it. And these, Bradley, are the most enslaved of all.”

“And am I one of those people? One who has lost his freedom without knowing it?”

“Ah, Bradley,” she said, putting her hand gently on his shoulder. “That is for you and you alone to sort out.”

They drove to her apartment, an upstairs, one bedroom affair in a substantial old brick quadraplex on the east side of town. She got them apple juice and set a bowl of grapes on the coffee table and they sat on her couch and she talked to him of her beliefs about vegetarianism and how she abhorred the idea of eating animal flesh. He asked how her bones could stay solid without eating meat and she laughed, shaking her head, and her long hair fell across her smile and down over her breasts and Bradley could not help but to reach up to brush it away. Gently, she touched his hand and he took hers and their eyes were each within the others and then he felt the depth of her gaze winding through him and he let himself fall slowly toward her closing eyes and met her lips. They held each other there in the long sunlight of the afternoon and then she was leading him to her bedroom and there was a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead as she slipped her skirt to the floor in one prolonged flow of motion and then pulled up her blouse and released her firm bare breasts to the muted bedroom light. He took her in his arms, their naked bodies touching at a thousand tingling points, and then he felt her heat, felt her smooth, flat stomach against his own and the deep glow of her eyes washing over him, and the smell of perfume on her skin was strong in his head. They sank to the bedsheets and floated there upon them and she was like nothing he’d ever imagined and he felt himself above her and within her and their breathing came in heavy unison as they struggled in shared ecstasy under the slowturning fan until they could stand it no longer and their cries came together in the explosion of their release.

There are many ways for an existence susceptible of consumption to be devoured. After that Saturday afternoon, Bradley became the willing captive to a pleasure he had never known. LaStella was his shepherdess. He came to her whenever he could withdraw from his other world and they made fevered love in the dragging, fan-twisted air of her bedroom and they drank from each other’s passions like children with unquenchable thirsts.

She introduced him into her circle of friends where the tabooed and forbidden were the norm. There was Henry Fellman and six or eight others, blacks and whites alike, and they dressed in clothing that was unusual to his eye and they talked in a new way and of different ideas that he did not fully understand. He sat with them on the long Sunday afternoons at LaStella’s apartment and they spoke openly about themselves and about love and freedom and sometimes he felt as though he had stepped through a looking-glass into a world where up was down and what had once been right and natural was now in a state of crumbling decay. She played records while they visited, a music foreign to his ear with disharmonic chords and with melodies that climbed haplessly toward a resolution they never seemed to reach. Sometimes Henry would bring records for her to play and the raw sounds of the guitar and the gravel-throated voices of the singers would rasp against his overmatched ear like an angry locomotive. Some brought handrolled cigarettes of an acrid, burned-rope odor, to pass among the group and when he inhaled the smoke he felt the vibrations of the floor and walls around him and the music came to him in strange new ways that gave him a pleasurable understanding of its disharmonies and unresolved melodies.

At work, he found it increasingly difficult to focus and the pressures of the matter with Nash boiled within him. Then word came of Nash’s resignation, under pressure it was rumored, and afterwards whenever he talked with the other loan officers, they seemed guarded and distrustful of him. It occurred to Bradley that the loan officer’s position would probably be filled from within the bank and he gave fleeting thought to seeking the position himself, even to the point of making discreet inquiries to his supervisor about the matter, but the supervisor wasn’t encouraging and his ambition to pursue the advancement soon dwindled.

As spring gave way to summer and summer to fall, his relationship with his mother became strained and contentious and he found himself continually lying to her concerning his whereabouts. He felt guilty about the lies and considered moving out and finding his own place. Many days he would sit at his desk, scanning the yellow pages of the telephone book for realtors, but whenever he would start to place a call, something would distract him and off he would go in another direction and the call was never made.

It was an early October afternoon when she came to see him at the bank. It was the first time she’d visited his office and when he saw her, his heart jumped and he knew that something was amiss.

“Henry’s been arrested,” she told him between rapid breaths. “We’ve got to bail him out.”

“Arrested for what?” he asked.

“Why does it matter ‘for what’? Arrested for being Henry. For speaking his mind. We’ve got to help him.”

He’d never been to the city jail before and the smells of human confinement and bad cooking and antiseptic concrete and steel overwhelmed him and he felt waves of nausea tumbling inside of him. A uniformed woman led them through hallways filled with officious bustling to a police captain who sat behind a desk looking at them with the eyes of a leopard stalking its prey. He asked them a lot of questions and then tossed a form down on the desk and showed Bradley where to sign. They waited in steel-back chairs in the stale-aired hall until Henry was finally brought out. He had bruises about his face and his eye was swollen shut. They took him home and helped clean him up and when they were sure that he was all right, they left. He watched the tears drip slowly down her cheek as he drove her back to her apartment.

That evening, they sat in the swing on her screened porch and looked out through the trees over the dimly lit street. The night was cool and quiet, except for an occasional passing car. He could not see the features of her face in the dim light, but he knew there was a distance in it that he had not known before and he felt a despair gently falling through him.

“Is there nowhere a person can go and find freedom?” she said to the night as much as to him.

“But we’re free here. How much more freedom do you need?”

“You were brought up to think that you are free. But look at you, Bradley. Consider your life. Free to go into your bank at eight o’clock sharp each morning? Free to wear that stiff white shirt, that tie? Free to go home to your mother every night and put yourself at her whim and disposal? You’re not free, Bradley. Why, you’re less free than Henry who can’t even eat in a white man’s restaurant. Who can’t even drink out of the same water fountain. Can’t even piss in the same pot as you because of the bigoted fears of the fools who make the laws you order your life around. Henry is a freer man than you. His life is constricted by an outside world that doesn’t have the sense or compassion to shed its tyrannical customs. But you, Bradley, are the warden of your own prison. One that you have built around yourself and that you don’t even see. Your life is a clockwork of order. You are trapped within it and you have not the slightest idea of how to escape. You read the words of Thoreau, but you do not hear his voice; it does not sing in your heart.”

He looked at her; she looked at the floor. The swing creaked. In the distance, an ambulance’s siren. He could feel her tears in his heart.

“I don’t know what you mean. Do you want to run away? To live in the wilderness?”

“Not the wilderness.”

“Then where?”

“Boston.”

He felt a lump rise within him as the weight of her answer settled.

“This is not my home, Bradley. I can’t continue living here. I never intended to stay this long.”

“When … when will you…”

“I don’t know … Soon … I’m not sure.”

He walked to the screen and leaned against the framing. It occurred to him that he’d never considered how this all might end. He wanted first to ask her to stay and then he wanted to ask if he could go with her and then he didn’t know what he wanted or how to give words to his jumbled emotions and so he stood looking into the vague form of the sycamore tree that shaded the porch and on through its branches into the night beyond.

He stayed the night with her and clung passionately to her and when the empty dawn broke, he left her there sleeping. He phoned her time and again from work that day, but there was no answer. In the evening, he drove by her apartment and stopped on the street in front, but no lights were burning and he didn’t get out. For two days he tried in vain to reach her and on the third, he drove to the apartment again and banged against the door until a neighbor came out and told him she had moved the day before. He went to the restaurant and found Henry, moving among the tables in a stained apron. “Left yesterday. Going back to Boston,” he said, wiping off a tabletop with a wet towel.

“Did she leave an address? A telephone number? Anything?”

“Not with me. No way I know of to contact her.”

There were the two weeks of accrued vacation time he’d earned and Cravits was more than happy for him to take them. “You just haven’t seemed yourself lately, Bradley,” he said. “I think a short time away from the bank will be just what the doctor ordered.”

He spent the time in an aimless whirlwind of urgent energy. He tracked down the members of her circle. None had heard from her or knew how to contact her. He regularly drove by her apartment, desperately hoping that she might return for some forgotten item, but she didn’t come and soon a new tenant had moved in.

The two weeks leave expended, he returned to the bank and slowly fell back into that ordered world that had once been enough to fulfill the whole of his existence. But now, a newborn hunger smoldered within him and it continued unsatisfied and he felt the vacuum it left around his heart and it invaded every aspect of his being. He made a practice of eating lunch a couple of times a week at Fellmans and he came to enjoy being the only white patron in the restaurant and he would occasionally ask his coworkers at the bank to go with him, knowing that the invitation would bring rejections and nourish furtive whispers about his strange new behavior.

When he resolved to find a place of his own, he broke the news to his mother in a firm and unyielding voice and her tears had not the power over him that they had once held and he considered how this was like a freedom of sorts for him and it reminded him of LaStella and their last conversation. A small rental house on the south side of town would be just the thing for him, he decided, and so he contacted a realtor and began checking the classifieds. He looked at a couple, but neither struck him as what he wanted and so he continued looking.

That December, a notice appeared on the bulletin board announcing that the vacant loan officer position would be filled, and Bradley resolved to place himself in contention for the vacancy. This time, he went directly to Cravits with his intentions, but again, got little encouragement. Still he persisted, polishing up his resume and filing the formal application. He found a challenge in the process that filled some of his emptiness and he relished the new tension it brought to his life. It was early January when Cravits appeared at the door of Bradley’s office – the first such visit with which he’d ever been honored. His spirits rose at the sound of Cravits’s well-manicured voice. “Bradley, I wanted to speak with you personally about the loan officer position. The interest you’ve shown in this job, as well as your diligent work here at the bank, have not gone unnoticed by the management.” His heart began to thump. “Unfortunately, we have decided…”

He didn’t hear the other words about the successful applicant’s superior qualifications or about how he was close, but not yet quite ready, for such an important position, or about how he should be sure to apply again when the next position became available. He didn’t see Cravits leave his office or see him look back with his sympathetic, condescending smile. His eyes were fixed on the opposite wall and his only thoughts were of how he would, once again, walk the several blocks to the old house and, once again, spend the evening listening to his mother’s voice. He got up from his desk and walked to the window, closed now to keep out the winter. The sky was gunmetal gray and the atmosphere pregnant with gloom. Unfamiliar faces milled over the plaza. They walked past the fountain without so much as a glance toward it – as if it were nothing more than an impediment intersecting their most direct route between origin and destination.

He returned to his desk and sat. A newspaper was spread across it, open to the classifieds. As he picked it up, his eyes fell upon the “Ticket” heading. He instinctively read the first entry. “FOR SALE: Plane ticket. Montgomery to Boston. One way. $30 or best offer. Call 272-8461.” He looked at the window, then back to the paper. Then he read it again. He picked up the paper and folded it and held it in one hand and tapped it against the top his desk. He got up and walked back to the window and looked out at the fountain. A small boy stood at its base and behind him, an elderly woman. The boy tossed a coin into the water and turned and smiled to the woman. She handed him another coin and he tossed it into the water. The wistful outline of a smile crept across his face as he turned away and walked to his desk. He opened the paper and read the ad again. Still there, same as before and staring right at him. He put the paper on the desk and studied the number. Then he picked up the telephone and began to dial.

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John Cottle lives on Lake Martin in Central Alabama with his wife Nancy and an assortment of ducks, deer, turkeys, and other critters.

He spends his time (in no particular order) practicing law, drinking Jack Daniels, writing fiction, and playing with granddaughters, McKenzie and Sydney.

He has previously been published in Amaryllis, won a Hackney Literary Award for 2001 (First Place, Short Story), and was a finalist in the short story category of the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition for 2001. Email him at: bama509796@aol.com