I tried a burlesque and imagined myself a man of leisure, but everyone in the street was working at a plan, and I would not be a market for their enterprise. I rushed downtown and called in on the old boardinghouse, inquiring for mail. No one knew me. I headed across Park Row and there, by mistake, found myself confronted with the bloody banners of Eckerd's play. Of course I turned away.

The oyster bars were open before noon and I ate a good two dozen, observing how they shrank from my lemon juice, curdling in horror from their fate. I chewed them without desire, while my own gray matter shrank back from the awful fact that I had no purpose on the earth unless it be to embrace a pretty woman, to raise her off the mattress with my arms beneath her spine and cause her an hour of pleasure before she set to paint again.

I headed out along Downing Street, treading carefully amid the shit on the broken banks of the Manetta Water, and by the time I was in the stand of red sumac by the back gate of Mathilde's house I was admitting to myself that I missed the company of Olivier de Garmont. I never thought I would think such a thing in all my life. When I came into the kitchen I discovered that the old lady had produced a mighty stew. The rich vinous fumes made my stomach growl as always, but I was not as always, no longer the Parrot who had left that morning. I was some poor wretch who has lost his station, returning home with a misery he cannot share.

MATHILDE HAD AN EYE, and you could normally rely on her to notice the light in my eye, or where I looked as I chewed my food or changed my mind. But she was living deep inside her tar-pit paintings and arrived at table with that wild and startled look you see in artists when surfacing at dusk. She wore tall fuzzy socks up to her sweet round knees. She had not brushed her tangled hair. The skin around that eye was bluish, taut, her pupils very large.

I knew she had not washed her hands for she was still wearing fingerless gloves-the kind market women wear to count the change-chrome yellow and ultramarine marked her nails and nose. She smiled at me, showing me her rosy gums, the tiny imperfect incisor with the pointy end.

I smiled but at the same time I was thinking, She only dares do these things because someone else is paying for her. I meant those frightening canvases which no one could expect to praise except a lover, or some genius from another star. To paint like this was to shove an unacceptable fact beneath my nose.

Soon I discovered her removing her paintings from their hiding place. I inquired if she had a buyer.

"I am making money," she said. "Don't you worry, monsieur."

"Monsieur?"

"Monsieur my darling."

I touched her little woolly hand and felt her icy fingertips.

"How are you making money?" I asked.

"Come to the theater on Friday night," said she, "and I will tell you then."

By theater, of course, she meant the business set up by the Jew, and I felt so sad I could have cried.

"You'll come? You promise?"

"I promise," I said. Then I thought a rum and milk might improve my horrible mood, so it was out the back gate, through the rusty sumacs, up onto the bridge, and into the Bull Inn where I was confronted with about fifty roaring men-merchants from the Tontine, clerks, loungers, racetrack touts, reporters-all squeezed in and shouting and writing in their notebooks or on butcher's paper, pressed against the next chap's back.

To the publican, I said, "So what is this?"

Said he, "It is the packet Waterloo released by customs." And he nodded beyond the crowd where the smoke-yellowed windows had been thrown open to reveal the busy wharf, the windy river.

"But what are these men doing?"

"What are they doing?" He was a big cheeky red-haired Irishman with hard-used cheeks. "They are getting the news from England. That chap there is from the New York Sentinel." He listed the names of all the newspapers, and as he spoke I spotted the tall stringy fair-haired lad I had last seen strangling pigeons. He was not seated but had one knee rested on a chair and a little stub of pencil between two big fingers. At a certain moment he looked up from his labors and caught my eye and gave me an indication that he would be with me in a tick.

The blood-cheeked Irishman was very happy to keep me tippled while I waited. I asked him could he get me paper and pencil which he very cheerfully provided, and for a while I occupied myself making a picture of the scene.

I wish I could tell you all my old skills returned or, better, that new ones had developed in the years I slept, but of course that is not true. I had made nothing useful of my life.

Soon enough the pigeon boy returned, depositing himself heavily, laying his inky hands flat on the table.

"Hello friend," said he.

For that, I purchased him a sour mash whiskey.

Then we sat turned sideways, his back to Greenwich Street, his pale scuffed yellow boot resting along his bench. Generally, the shine had gone off him-that is, he had swapped his gray suit and waistcoat for denim and coarse wool, and there was a much harder set to his mouth and a glint to his eye which made his high nose flinty and warlike, although I was sure he never meant to convey that particular expression.

"Back in the pigeon business?" I inquired, for I had not forgotten how he got his stock prices from the English newspapers and flew them up to Philadelphia.

"I'll be quitting soon enough," said he.

I was about to inquire as to his brother but changed my mind. "Then back to Georgia," I suggested.

"Ah, you remember."

" Cass County and Paulding County," I said.

"That's all sold," he said.

"Good price, I hope?"

"No one ever paid more than I did," he said. And then he told me how he and his brother Dirk had traveled to Georgia as they had intended, taking up the lot in Paulding County which was very pretty in its situation-black fertile land, a little swampy, but excellent for cotton (as was the opinion of other holders moved there recently from Louisiana). Among their neighbors, the family of O'Grady had been very hostile at the get-go but when the men had all wrestled they became friendly and the O'Gradys were soon ready to teach the business of cotton as they understood it.

They had settled only two weeks when, without having had the time to sin against another human, they and the O'Grady wives and children were set upon by savages, and although they were well fortified in the O'Grady household, with logs driven five feet down into the earth, and although Dirk shot more than five Creeks and Peter himself a certain three, they were finally overwhelmed and men and women were slaughtered and children had their brains bashed out. Dirk had been pinned to the ground with a spear but instead of murdering him directly the savages cut the soles off his feet, and the last time his brother saw him he was running tied behind an Indian horse and screaming Lord-give-me-mercy.

"Dear heavens," I said, wondering how Peter had been saved but never asking.

"I will see them all in Hell," said he. I supposed his brother must be dead.

"So you are back in the pigeon business."

He looked at me directly, and I wondered if his eyes were bulging more than a month before. He was mad or sad or frightened, which I could not tell.

"I was ignorant," he said. "Now I have been studying up on the savages. I wish I had known this before, but they are not all the same."

"There are different tribes I've heard."

"Quite so." He nodded his head. "The government of Texas will give you what they call a parcel, about one hundred thousand acres, so they say. One hundred thousand acres and no trouble."

"That seems an awful lot."

"It's a different country," he explained. "There are tribes there who are peaceable. Not all, but some. The agent says this is much easier doing than the Creeks."