“Lampson, what are you yelling about?” wheezed Harry Bohn.
“I’m Camper,” said the fisherman as he introduced himself.
“I shouldn’t have let him out,” said Camper’s wife.
“But all of us had a hand on him,” laughed a squatting welder.
“Why didn’t you stop him, then?”
“Slipped away,” said the welder.
One boy, one Mexican, and the white haired linesman who had flown slowly from north to south in bird ways and built transit barracks on the plains, lifted their eyes to a woman’s golden quarters and felt, smiling or silent, their white ribs. They had sucked the saguaro in the desert and bred fungus in the bottom of their shoes. They pulled each other’s teeth with strands of unraveled hemp. Their helmets lay upturned at their sides in wait for another softening of the earth or for news of waters gathering again at the head of the river into which, years before, they had waded stripped to the waist and ears still loud with the clattering of Thegna’s iron.
“It’s too late now. But,” stooping low to another face, a woman searching the hordes on litters, “where would he go first?”
“Not far, lady, but none of us dared follow him too close.”
“You,” quickly to the next, “where would he go?”