“Something happened,” I said. I had a fork in one hand (God knows where that came from, too), and I was poking my swollen upper arm with it over and over again. Blood was beading up from at least a dozen pricks. “Something. Happened. Something happened. Oh Mother, something happened. Something, something.”

I told myself to stop, but at first I couldn’t. I wasn’t out of control, exactly, but I was out of my control. I thought of Electric Jesus trundling across Peaceable Lake on a hidden rail. I was like that.

“Something.”

Stab.

“Something happened.”

Stab-stab.

“Something—”

I stuck out my tongue and bit it. The click came again, not beside my ears but buried deep inside my head. The compulsion to speak and stab was gone, just like that. The fork tumbled from my hand. I unwrapped the makeshift tourniquet, and my forearm began to prickle as the blood rushed back into it.

I looked up at the moon, shivering and wondering who, or what, had been controlling me. Because I had been controlled. When I got back to my room (grateful not to be seen with my wingwang dangling in the breeze), I saw I had stepped on some broken glass and cut my foot quite badly. It should have awakened me, but hadn’t. Why? Because I hadn’t been asleep. I was sure of it. Something had moved me out of myself and taken over, driving my body like a car.

I washed my foot and got back into bed. I never told Jacobs about that experience—what good would it have done? He would have suggested that a gashed foot suffered on a little midnight stroll was a small price to pay for a miracle cure from heroin addiction, and he would have been right. Still:

Something happened.

 • • •

Closing Day at the Tulsa State Fair that year was October tenth. I arrived at Jacobs’s Bounder around five thirty that afternoon, in plenty of time to tune my guitar and tie his tie—a thing that had become a tradition. While I was doing it, there was a knock at the door. Charlie went to answer it, frowning. He had six shows to do that night, including the final one at midnight, and he didn’t like being interrupted beforehand.

He opened the door, saying, “If it’s not important, I wish you’d come back la—” and then a farmer in bib overalls and a Case cap (a pissed-off Okie if ever an Okie there was) punched him in the mouth. Jacobs went staggering back, got tangled in his own feet, and went down, narrowly avoiding giving his head a good whap on the dinette table, which might have knocked him unconscious.

Our visitor barged in, bent down, seized Jacobs by the lapels. He was about Jacobs’s age, but a lot bigger. And he was in a rage. This could be trouble, I thought. Of course it was already, but I was thinking of the kind that ends with an extended stay in the hospital.

“You’re the reason she got took in by the police!” he shouted. “Goddam you, she’ll have a record that’ll follow her around for the rest of her life! Like a tin can tied to a puppydog’s tail!”

I didn’t think, just seized an empty pot from the sink and bonked him briskly on the side of the head. It wasn’t a hard blow, but the Okie let go of Jacobs and looked at me in astonishment. Tears began leaking down the grooves on either side of his considerable beak.

Charlie scooted away, propped on his hands and propelling himself with his feet. Blood was pouring from his lower lip, which was split in two places.

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” I asked. Hardly reasoned discourse, I know, but when we find ourselves in that sort of confrontation, how the schoolyard comes back.

“She got to go to court!” he shouted at me in that out-of-tune banjo Okie accent. “And it’s that sucka’s fault! That sucka rah-chair, scuttlin like a dadburn crab!”

He said dadburn. He really did.

I put the pot on the stove and showed him my empty hands. I spoke in my most soothing voice. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, and I’m sure”—I almost said Charles—“I’m sure Dan doesn’t, either.”

“My dotta! My dotta Cathy! Cathy Morse! He told her the pitcher was free—because she got up onstage—but it wa’nt free! That pitcher has costed her plenty! Rooned her dadburned life is what that pitcher did!”

I put a cautious arm around his shoulders. I thought he might clobber me, but now that his initial fury had been vented, he only looked sad and bewildered. “Come on outside,” I said. “We’ll find a bench in the shade and you can tell me all about it.”

“Who’re you?”

I was going to say Mr. Jacobs’s assistant, but that sounded like pretty weak tea. My years as a musician came to my rescue. “His agent.”

“Yeah? Can you gi’ me compensation? Because I want it. The lawyer’s fees alone are ’bout to half kill me.” He pointed a finger at Jacobs. “On account of you! Your dadgum fault!”

“I . . . I have no idea . . .” Charlie wiped a palmful of blood off his chin. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Morse, I assure you.”

I had gotten Morse as far as the door, and I didn’t want to lose the ground I had gained. “Let’s discuss this out in the fresh air.”

He let me lead him out. There was a refreshment stand at the edge of the employees’ parking lot, with rusty tables shaded by tattered canvas umbrellas. I bought him a large Coke and handed it to him. He slopped the first inch out on the table, then drank half of the paper cup in big swallows. He set it down and pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead.

“I never learn not to take a colddrink like that,” he said. “Puts a nail in your head, don’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, and thought of standing naked in scant moonlight, poking the tines of a fork into my blood-engorged upper arm. Something happened. To me, and, it seemed, to Cathy Morse, as well.

“Tell me what the problem seems to be.”

“That pitcher he give her, that’s the goddarn problem. She walked around with it damn near ever’where. Her friends commenced on to makin fun of her, but she didn’t care. She tole people ‘That’s how I really look.’ I tried to shake the notion out of her one night and Mother tole me to stop, said it would pass on its own. And it seemed to. She left the pitcher in her room, I dunno, two days or three. Went on down to the hairdressin school without it. We thought it was over.”

It wasn’t. On October seventh, three days previous, she had walked into J. David Jewelry in Broken Arrow, a town southeast of Tulsa. She was carrying a shopping bag. Both salesmen recognized her, because she had been in several times since her star turn at Jacobs’s midway pitch. One of them asked if he could help her. Cathy blew past him without a word and went to the display case where the most expensive geegaws were kept. From her shopping bag she produced a hammer, which she used to shatter the glass top of the case. Ignoring the bray of the alarm and two cuts serious enough to warrant stitches (“And them will leave scars,” her father mourned), she reached in and took out a pair of diamond earrings.

“These are mine,” she said. “They go with my dress.”

 • • •

Morse had no more than finished his story when two wide boys with SECURITY printed on their black tee-shirts showed up. “Is there a problem here?” one of them asked.

“No,” I said, and there wasn’t. Telling the story had finished venting his rage, which was good. It had also shriveled him somehow, and that wasn’t so good. “Mr. Morse was just leaving.”

He got up, clutching the remains of his Coke. Charlie Jacobs’s blood was drying on his knuckles. He looked at it as if he didn’t know where it had come from.

“Siccin the cops on him wouldn’t do no good, would it?” he asked. “All he did was take her pitcher, they’d say. Hell, it was even free.”

“Come on, sir,” one of the security guys said. “If you’d like to visit the fair, I’d be happy to stamp your hand.”