"I'm not sure. Selling pots, maybe."

"Pots?"

"Flowerpots. You know, like that one I made for you last week. The one I stenciled with little roses." She paused. "You remember, don't you?"

"Of course I remember."

"You don't."

(She was correct. My short-term memory had been dulled by domesticity.) I covered with a yawn. "Pots sound splendid," I told her. "And I'm sure you will add to your fortune one hard-earned nickel at a time."

"So you think-"

"Turnover may be slow."

Mrs. Kooshof thought about it for a time. "Well, I could sell other stuff too. Scarves. Jewelry."

"Oh, indeed?" I said, then quickly reminded her that the town was already equipped with a satisfactory jewelry outlet, the very establishment in which we had not long ago purchased an absurdly overpriced engagement ring. "Which brings up another subject," I continued briskly. "You can tear up that IOU. What incredible nerve."

"But you're the male, Thomas. You're supposed to-"

"Male?" I snorted. "Do I call you Dutch?"

"I'm not Dutch. Besides, I don't see-"

"Dutch or no Dutch," I said, "we go dutch. Engagements rings and all."

Mrs. Kooshof made an inscrutable sound in the back of her throat. "Either way," she said, "I still need to do something with myself. And it has to be-I don't know-something meaningful."

"Selling pots?"

"I'd make them, Thomas."

"And then what?"

She shrugged. "Open a shop. Rent space."

"Fine. But the last I heard ... Surely you don't plan on staying in Owago?"

She rotated her jaw defiantly. "All I know is this: I won't be one more miserable housewife. I've been down that road. Never again."

At that point I pushed to my feet.

"Do what you must," I said, and stood looking down at her. "For what it's worth, however, I do not intend to squander the remainder of my life in this little one-hen town. I'm here to settle a few scores, nothing else."

"Scores? What are you up to?"

"That's my affair. But I suggest you consider selling pots in some other part of the world."

"Such as where?"

"Fiji," I said, and departed.

Dead town, dead time.

Example one: A night out at The Coliseum. Turquoise tie clasps.

Example two: A "sauerkraut feed" at the National Guard Armory off Windom Street.

Example three: An operetta staged by the League of Women Voters, complete with ...

Why bother?

The town of Owago amounted to a sanitarium of sorts, a dull and altogether dulling magic mountain of the prairie (minus any hint of elevation). Now and then, through Ned and Velva Zylstra, I would hear word of Lorna Sue, who was doing well in her new life, and of Herbie, who by all reports was also thriving in the carcinogenic Florida sunshine. Plainly, my efforts at subversion had produced no lasting results. (Hence the need for more explosive methods.) The tycoon still bounced along in Lorna Sue's well-worn leather saddle; Herbie remained the brother-in-waiting, biding his time, no doubt preparing for that moment when he would do unto the tycoon that which the tycoon had once done so maliciously unto me. (Why else follow her to Tampa? Why else lie panting at her feet like an orphaned puppy?) So let me be very clear. I had not recovered from Lorna Sue. I still grieved. I raged. At times I found myself talking aloud to her, responding to criticisms, reasoning with her, asking such fundamental questions as these: Who quit and who did not? Who slipped instantly into a new bed, new arms, new everything? Who remarried? Who shifted loyalties? Who lives in Tampa? Who lives in limbo? Who cannot forget? Who, in fact, loved whom?

She will never answer me, not directly.

Instead, in my addled thoughts, she will whisper, "Tom, I showered you with love."

She will whisper, "You made me leave."

As if she had no volition of her own.

As if she were innocent by reason of sloth.

On certain sleepless occasions, in the dead of night, I would slide out of bed and get dressed and stroll the hundred yards to Lorna Sue's old yellow house. The purpose of these wee-hour pilgrimages eluded me. Reconnaissance, of course-that was how I justified it-but it also involved some sort of obeisance to history, a reknotting of certain long-loosened ties of the heart. Stupidly, not really sad, not really anything, I would peer up at the darkened attic windows, behind which Lorna Sue used to play with her dolls, and soon I would find myself wondering how love itself could vanish like last month's joke. Along the east side of the house, in shadows, I would stop before a small, gnarled apple tree, never very productive, almost barren, in whose limbs I had once been cradled as a little boy, sometimes with Herbie, sometimes with Lorna Sue, doing whatever it is children do in the branches of an apple tree. Amazing ourselves. Making believe. (It was up in that tree, on a summer afternoon in 1952, that Herbie had first proposed manufacturing bombs out of mason jars and gasoline.) For all three of us there had been a sense of safety up there, a kind of coziness; we felt hidden from the world, and above it. The Magic Tree, Lorna Sue had called it, and somehow I had believed this.

Peculiar, is it not, how the mind works?

Over the years that twisted old apple tree had kept growing in my memory, magnifying itself as the objects of youth often do. And yet, now, in the graying bleakness of my middle age, the tree struck me as scrawny and forlorn and laughable. It held no magic. It meant nothing. It was a tree.

Only two incidents stand out during those empty days in Owago. I bumped into Faith Graffenteen. I became Captain Nineteen.

Faith comes first.

I had last seen her at my high school graduation ceremony, or in that approximate period, but in memory I had carried her through the years as a skinny, hawk-faced, horny little twelve-year-old. Unlike the old apple tree, Faith's growth had been stunted in my head, fast-frozen at that moment when she approached me in my front yard, bent back my thumb, and demanded that I kiss her. (How could I forget? The consequences vis-a-vis Lorna Sue had been considerable. Beyond that, the incident had established a fundamental pattern of my life: i.e., confusion of the romantic and the martial arts.) All considered, Faith had changed very little-still slim, still tough, still predatory. Predictably enough, she had married a solid, stouthearted, and extremely well-off physician, who had provided her with three children and a fancy glass-sided house on Lake Owago. Among her kids, as it turned out, was none other than the precocious young Evelyn, and it was this happenstance that brought about our reunion. Little Evelyn, it seems, had taken to muttering a phrase or two from Shakespeare at the dinner table; her mother could not wholly appreciate the fact that her talented, well-schooled four-year-old had mastered portions of Lady Macbeth's famous "Out, damned spot" soliloquy.

Things began, in other words, on a sour note. I cannot report that Faith actually "stormed" into my classroom on that blustery Monday morning, but it is certainly true that her demeanor was far from friendly.

A few seconds elapsed before we recognized each other.

"You," she grunted. "It figures."

The subsequent conversation need not be transcribed in all its minutiae. Suffice it to say that Faith stuck to her guns, I to mine, and that the dispute eventually reached arbitration in the offices of Miss Askold Wick.

I took the high ground.

"In this classroom," I declared vehemently, "there will be no tampering with art, certainly no butchery at the whim of a tone-deaf housewife." I gave Faith a contemptuous stare. "What would you prefer-'Out, yucky spot?' "

"Let's not get rude," said Miss Wick, who nonetheless eyed me with a shy hint of admiration. (Sterling woman. Paunchy. Wart trouble.) "Anyway, we're talking about four-year-olds."

"Indeed so," I rallied. "All the more reason to set an example."

"Oh, come on," said Faith. "Just change one tiny word." She frowned. "Darn spot? Darn, stupid spot?"

"Ha!" I said.

"Ha yourself. This is a day care center, not some theater for foulmouths."

I smiled menacingly. "Profanity is hardly the issue. You don't hear me suggesting 'Out, cocksucking spot.' "

The debate thus ebbed and flowed.

Acrimony at times. Barbarism up against enlightenment, censorship versus tutorial liberty. In the end, however, we hammered out a covenant by which I agreed to locate less formidable texts for my students. The compromise, I admit, left a painful splinter in my soul-give away Shakespeare, you give away the crown jewels-yet I had managed to salvage, at least to a degree, the principle of academic self-determination. This alone seemed a victory worth celebrating, and as Faith and I exited Miss Wick's office, I issued a cheerful invitation to seal our truce over a drink or two.

Faith begged off.

"Not in a million years," she said, and drilled me with antipathy. "Don't think I've forgotten how you sucked on my nose that day."

"I did no such thing."

"Oh, you did. Disgusting then, disgusting now. Just stay away from my Evelyn."*

Not a week later I debuted as Captain Nineteen.

This was occasioned, as such things often are, by a series of complex and coincidental circumstances, one of those unpredictable chain reactions that, for want of inspiration, Thomas Jefferson once referred to-altogether feebly-as "the course of human events." (Spades are spades. I do not kowtow to celebrity.) Fittingly enough, it began with the precocious young Evelyn. A day or so after my encounter with Faith, near the end of our morning rest period, the tot crawled up on my lap, tugged at my ear, and said, "He's dead."

"Dead?" I said.

"Captain Nineteen. And it makes me pretty sad."

The name did not ring a bell. I did my best, therefore, to redirect our conversation toward more elevated topics, but young Evelyn, being the independent woman-in-the-making that she was, refused to take the rein. "A spaceship wreck," she said. "Captain Nineteen got squashed and he's dead like a bug and I don't like it. I almost cried once." She eyed me. "Maybe I will now."

"Please don't," I said.

"I feel like it."

"Yes, I'm sure," I said. "I am pleading with you." I rearranged her on my lap, pried her stubby, tenacious fingers from my ear. "Very well. Who is this unfortunate captain?"

"Nineteen!" she said. "Captain Nineteen."

"Yes?"

My bereft little tutee looked at me as if I had been born only yesterday. She had the knack, like most of her gender, for underscoring my inadequacies. (Where do women pick up these tactics? The genetic code? A secret pamphlet?) "He just is who he is," Evelyn said brusquely. "His spaceship crashed. And he's dead. And I want him back."

"Well, I'm very sure we all do," I told her. "But if the man is no longer-"

"You."

"Me?"

The tot's posture stiffened.

"Once in every century," she intoned slowly, "there is born into this universe a special man. With the strength of Atlas. The wisdom of Solomon. The courage of a lion." She eyed me, then saluted. "You are that man. You are Captain Nineteen. Today's man of the future."

I could not help but marvel.

The girl's diction and tone of voice had taken on the properties of a movie preview.

At the noon hour that day I happened to mention the incident to Miss Askold Wick, headmistress and chief administrator, who brought me up to date on the comings and goings of Captain Nineteen, alias Hans Hanson. The man had perished not in a spaceship but in a 1996 Lincoln Town Car: a head-on collision along Highway 16. For many years, Miss Wick informed me, the now defunct Mr. Hanson-a local jeweler by trade-had hosted an afternoon television program for children, a mishmash medley of cartoons and live talent and ancient Hopalong Cassidy films. The program was broadcast over Owago's community access channel, number nineteen on the dial, hence the dead captain's seemingly random moniker. "A tragedy," said Miss Askold Wick. "Hans was a real ... He was someone special."

I looked up with interest. "Handsome, was he?"

"Maybe. I suppose."

"Dashing? Debonair?"

"Well, he did have-"

"Your lover, perhaps?"

Miss Wick blushed. "The man was married!"

"Ah," I murmured, and seized her hand. "Unhappily, I am sure."

Privately, though, my thoughts had now locked upon Captain Nineteen. A kindred spirit, I realized instantly. Who on this earth might have guessed that my doppelganger, my spiritual twin, would take the form of a small-town jeweler and weary space traveler? (A small world, obviously, for it was in Mr. Hanson's downtown store that I had recently purchased an engagement ring that weighed as heavily upon my mind as on my depleted pocketbook.) After work that day, I made a point of switching on Mrs. Kooshof's twenty-five-inch RCA, fluffing up a pillow, and sitting back to enjoy a rerun of The Captain Nineteen Show. Impressive. Very. The late Mr. Hanson, not unlike myself, was a man of conspicuous command presence, rugged and flinty, exceptionally well groomed, with a piercing military gaze that both disciplined and mesmerized his rowdy studio audience (aptly dubbed "the crew"-children of age six and under). The man had plainly seen much of the world; he ran a tight ship; he did not once abuse the word hopefully. On the downside, of course, the show's production values fell far below network standard: an obsolete, altogether seedy spaceship set; a control panel in dire need of updating from analog to digital; a uniform that brought to mind the apparel of a refrigerator repairman, hardly that of a seasoned mariner to the stars.

Still, this was community access television, and I gave credit where credit was due. Rarely boring. Riveting in spots.* During the first few seconds, in a pretaped introductory segment, I soon discovered the source of young Evelyn's oddly portentous oration that morning. As Captain Nineteen gazed resolutely toward the outer galaxies, a beautifully modulated male voice (Hans himself, I assumed) intoned more or less the words that Evelyn had used with me: "Once in every century," et cetera. Granted, the girl had botched the language in spots-which is par from the ladies' tee-but at the same time Evelyn had rather eerily captured the gist of it. I felt a chill, in fact, as the introductory footage rose to its climax: "You are that chosen individual. [Orchestral punctuation.] You are Captain Nineteen-today's man of the future."

I felt called to duty.

It struck me-forcefully, in fact-that Captain Nineteen was just the sort of person who could comprehend the military implications of vengeance, a man who might very well stash a bomb or two in his garage. I turned up the volume.

A half hour later Mrs. Robert Kooshof trudged in with a crate of clay flowerpots. Much to my irritation, she ignored the televised proceedings, prattling on about her new business venture.

Eventually I was compelled to wave a hand.

"If you don't mind," I said sharply, "I'm assessing my own career prospects. I would very much appreciate your silent support."

Mrs. Kooshof glanced at the screen, upon which Captain Nineteen's steely visage had only that moment reappeared.

"Hans?" she said. "I don't follow. He's dead."

"Dead, indeed. Which is precisely the point. I have been asked to replace him."

"You?"

"None other," said I.