I smiled, barely. Vern looked over.

"So when's your next bout?" he said.

"I'm retired. I want to get out now. No lingering Ali decline."

"He retired and then declined. But you took less punches. And that guy was no hack. Hey, Jack, he was the heavy favorite. An upset. Bookies hate it when this happens."

"Yeah, right. Hit him in the eye by accident. I don't even ... The whole thing is crazy."

I shook my head, felt almost like crying, which would have been awkward. Vern cleared his throat, then reached up to wipe a porthole out of the fog on the inside windshield. Goddamn feeble defroster. Goddamn friggin' town.

"Hey, Jack, don't be so hard on yourself," Vern said, his sympathetic face turned toward me. "It isn't like it was your fault or anything. Guy picked a fight. You weren't hitting on his wife or mouthing off or whatever. Whaddya supposed to do? Stand there and let some meat-head punch you out? Guy could have killed you, you know? It's true."

"It sucks anyway."

"Suck a lot more if you got all your teeth knocked out. Try that on the Review dental plan."

"There isn't one."

"Right. Hey, come on. You won. What's the matter with that?"

I shook my head and looked toward my window. It was foggy and I wiped it with my hand. The hand was cut on the knuckles. Vern reached out and squeezed my shoulder, then popped the door and swung out. The pep talk was over. The windshield was fogged. Myrtle's bathroom light came on, then the light in Vern's living room. I'd only been in his place once or twice, just a quick stop while he put on his jacket. It was neat but in a transient sort of way, with a chair, a table, a bed, books in wooden crates. That's all I'd seen.

For a friendly guy, Vern was very private.

I sat in the car and ... just sat. The pizza box, white with grease spots, was on the passenger seat. I opened it and pulled out a piece of pizza, which was thick and cold and oily. I took a bite, then another, and with the rest of the piece clenched between my teeth, put the car in gear and drove down the block. At the corner, by the Androscoggin Elementary School, I turned right and headed back through downtown, left on Route 108, and then on into the darkness beyond the glare of the mill.

Four or five miles out, on the outskirts, where the house trailers were in darkness, I tossed the crust of pizza into the box and let out a long sigh that ended as a shudder.

10.

When I woke up, Roxanne was kneeling beside the bed.

"What time is it?" I said.

"What happened to you?" she asked.

"Why aren't you at work?"

"I called and told them I'd be in at noon."

"Cushy government job."

I closed my eyes and a bell rang in Roxanne's kitchen. She left the bedroom and I eased my way out of bed and went to the bathroom. I peered in the mirror at the scabs on my upper lip and the scrapes on my forehead and left cheekbone. My neck was sore to move and there were dark brown bruises on my upper legs and knees. There was a crusty cut on my scalp but that wasn't sore to touch.

My scalp burned when I stepped into the shower so I kept my head out of the spray. I stood and let the hot water run down my neck and back, moving my head in a circle until I could feel the muscles loosening.

I'd make a lousy linebacker.

The fight didn't seem real. Not here, in Roxanne's bathroom, with the dried flowers on the back of the toilet, the dappled Renoir poster, the herbal shampoos and conditioners lined up on the side of the tub. Things were nice here. Safe. Soft. A different world.

I brushed my teeth with Roxanne's toothbrush and found a pink plastic razor in the cabinet. It was dull, and by the time I detoured around the scrapes, it wasn't worth doing at all. Still looking like hell, I searched for my clothes and couldn't find them. I went out into the kitchen in my shorts and stood there like an invalid while Roxanne, still in her bathrobe, finished scrambling eggs, grabbed English muffins from the toaster oven, and pulled the coffeepot from under the machine.

She put a plate down on the table.

"Don't tell me you want an invitation now, after barging in here in the middle of the night," she said, grinning and pulling her robe tie tighter.

"What time is it?" I said.

"It's nine-thirty, and your watch is on the counter where you left it. What the hell happened to you?"

I sat down and she waited. I drank most of the glass of orange juice and put butter and jam on a muffin. Lots of butter. When you might be beaten to death any day, you don't worry about cholesterol. I took a bite and chewed. Roxanne was still waiting. I took another bite and she waited some more.

"I got in a fight," I said, reaching for the juice. "In a bar."

Her jaw didn't so much drop as sag.

"That's it. A fight. A guy tried to punch me out. This big guy."

I drank the juice. Started on the eggs.

"Why do you go to bars like that? You're not in college," Roxanne said, then cut herself off.

I kept eating, trying to chew without moving my upper lip. It slowed me down, but not by much. Roxanne watched me and sipped her coffee.

"You're proud of yourself, aren't you. Men."

I shrugged.

"What'd you do, knock him out or punch his lights out?" she asked.

I smiled. Vern said it. Cormier was no pushover, and I'd won. For a second I pictured him with his hands over his eyes and the blood running down his chin like glaze on a doughnut.

"I don't know what's going on, Jack, but this isn't what I thought I was getting myself involved in. Is this what you do, or is something really wrong?"

I put down my fork. Felt worse instead of better. In the kitchen, there were teal-blue plates on a narrow shelf under the cupboard. Pottery stuff. Spices in jars and a nightlife section of the Casco Bay Weekly stuck on the refrigerator.

Normal.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Roxanne said, speaking more softly.

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe we'd better."

I talked for a half-hour and had the rest of the coffee from the pot. Roxanne nibbled a muffin and listened. I minimized the damage to the house and the shock of being in a fight.

"I don't think anybody would kill him over those pictures," Roxanne said. "Not because he took pictures of them. I mean, that isn't their fault. They're victims. They might be mad, and if they caught him in the yard or something, maybe they'd beat him up or call the cops. But what does that have to do with that canal place?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing."

Roxanne shrugged, then got up and put the dishes in the sink and ran water over them. The pipes of the old house shuddered when she shut off the faucets.

"You know," she said, still facing the dishes, "you could just go by the medical examiner's report."

She paused.

"You're not a cop. You forget that sometimes, I think."

"No, I don't."

"Yes, you do. Sometimes."

No, I don't, I said to myself.

"Sometimes," Roxanne said.

She dried her hands on a dish towel and came back to the table. I pushed my chair back and she leaned on my lap and put her arms around me.

"Could you stop remembering you're not a cop long enough to relax for a couple of hours?" she said. "You're not hurt that bad, are you?"

Her hair glistened and her robe had parted enough to show the white skin of her breasts. I parted it a little more. She waited for me to answer.

"I've got to get back and hand out the checks, and I've got calls to make and-"

"You know the old saying," Roxanne said, sliding into my arms. "All work and no play ..."

I kissed her.

"I'm glad they didn't name you Leonard," she said, and kissed me again. "Or Raymond. Or Alex. Or Ronald."

It was later, much later, that I considered the rest of the day. We were up and dressed: Roxanne in jeans and a red cotton jersey, me in my jeans of the day before and a big white T-shirt she said had belonged to her brother. I didn't believe her, but I wore it anyway.

Roxanne suggested we go out for lunch in the Old Port, Portland's gentrified waterfront. They'd pushed the fishermen's bars out and replaced them with shops that sold wicker chairs and antiques and elegant clothes. The stores had names like T. Boothby Ltd. and Snap's. The streets were filled with new Volvos and Saabs and people from L.L. Bean catalogs.

The fishermen weren't missing much.

I didn't say this to Roxanne. She was younger and, like all young people who live in cities, liked little restaurants that served up pseudo-ethnic food. She wanted to go to a place that was supposed to be Caribbean or something and served spicy broiled fish. I could picture us eating broiled Mahi-mahi, drinking Jamaican beer that was fifty cents a bottle in Kingston but four bucks a bottle in Maine. What was wrong with clam chowder and a Budweiser?

It just didn't thrill me, the idea of sitting in some place where all the men were good-looking, the women white and blonde and of obvious good breeding. And then there'd be me, the guy with the cuts on his face, who was wondering where they put all the mothers and grandmothers, much less the poor people.

So I said I had to get back to Androscoggin, which I did. Roxanne looked disappointed but beautiful, and went into the kitchen to mix up some tuna salad for an early lunch. I had mine on whole wheat, with a Labatt's from the back of her refrigerator. Roxanne had hers on a small rye toast. With spring water.

"You see what I mean?" Roxanne said, taking small, surgical bites. "If Arthur's down there and he's killed, it's premeditated because somebody had to get him down there. Like an execution. You don't execute somebody because he takes dirty pictures."

"Not usually."

"He was weird," Roxanne said. "Maybe he was into something else. I don't know. Maybe he did more with these pictures than just look at them."

Well, we knew what something more meant. Blackmail. Get a shot of the guy with his secretary and then squeeze them for cash. But Arthur? What did he want? Certainly not money.

"I just can't picture it. There wasn't anything greedy about him. He didn't want, I don't know, things. God, if you could see how he lived."

"Was it awful?"

"No; you see worse, I'm sure. It wasn't that it was a shack or anything. It was just this back of what had been his business. Like me sleeping in the back of the newspaper office."

"For years."

"Right,'' I said. "It isn't poverty. It's existence."

"It's a different world," Roxanne said.

I finished my beer and nodded.

"You're telling me," I said.

"But it was nice of you to visit," she said, a soft smile bringing back instant images of the morning.

"Sure beats the phone, doesn't it?"

I was halfway to my desk before I realized I was supposed to be in traction or on crutches, or at least battered beyond recognition.

"Jack!" Cindy called, squeezing as much concern into the one word as any Shakespearean actor ever could. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah, fine," I said, but it was too late.

They crowded around, Cindy helping me with my coat, and Paul and Vern and Marion hovering as if to help me to my seat.

"Paul said you kicked his ass-whoops, sorry," Cindy said. "I knew Cormier in high school. He was this big goof, and he went out with this girl I knew, but she couldn't stand him, so she finally dumped him, and then he started seeing this girl from Dixfield, so none of us saw him much after that. Thank God. You're lucky he didn't break your hands or something; you wouldn't be able to type."

I stood there and felt my Roxanne glow drain away.

"Okay," I said. "I appreciate it, the concern and everything, but it really wasn't that big a deal. Really. Nothing. Foolishness I wish I'd never had anything to do with. Thanks, but let's just forget it."

"Come on, Jack," Paul said, tapping me on the shoulder. "It isn't every day the editor of the paper gets in a friggin' fight and actually wins."

"I wish it was no day."

Oh, God. They looked hurt again. I gave them a smile and thanked them for carrying on without me for the morning.

"Any messages?" I said.

"You got a call," Cindy said. "Correction from last week. In the sentences? Guy says we put him down for six months in jail when it should have been six days. He was ripped. And I think maybe he'd been drinking. He said he'd call back."