I am sitting under an oak tree at least I think it’s an oak I don’t actually know for sure the leaves have lobes right and there are acorns I mean there are acorns so that is probably dispositive or whatever, it’s an oak, but the point is it’s an oak I’m sitting under as I write this, after I read what you wrote, I read that sitting on the bed in one of the rooms of my mother’s motel which is where Sweetloaf found me, how he does not know or will not say. It’s just the first place I looked he said when I asked him and he shrugged. First fucking place, actually. You know Sweetloaf.

My mother’s motel. She doesn’t own it. She manages it. I think she used to own it or part of it. I’m not really sure of the details but there was a deal a few years ago to sell whatever it was she had to cover some debt so now she just works here taking care of what she used to own and I think she’s even more in debt than she was.

My mother is difficult.

But there is a roof over my head and a bed to sleep in and breakfast in the morning and dinner before I sleep so it’s okay. I’m okay.

I can’t come back.

Please don’t ask me to come back.

It’s heavier for one thing. Heavier and darker and colder when I touch it or cooler at least to the touch I find myself I’ll press my palm against it in the shower even when it ought to be as hot or at least as warm as everything else with all the water but it’s cold, or cool, cooler, cool enough I find myself holding my hand over it my palm against it like I’m warming it taking care of it which is I mean it’s crazy

Right?

“My lord!” and “Majesty!” and “My King!” and “Your majesty” and “My lord” all at once from the lot of them, turned from conversations abeyed, stood up from this or that portion of the sectional sofa out in the middle of that wide room, “Your majesty, what of her majesty?” and a gasp, “The Queen?” and a forceful “No!” and then, “The Perry,” and “The Perry!” and “her arrest, my lord” and he lifts up a hand, his right hand, the hand that is only as brown as his face, and silence, reluctantly, falls. “Her grace,” he says, “was arrested, Thursday of last week, a valid and a lawful arrest, by the appropriate authorities. Her grace did spend a night in the gaol downtown, which, I’m certain, was uncomfortable. It is a gaol.”

“But, majesty,” says the Wulver Hoseason, thick grey mane swept back from his craggy face, “her, her grace, was, our Queen, my lord.”

“And every day, we do honor what her grace has done for this our city – but of which, she is, in the end, a citizen, and as subject to the laws thereof, the rules, and regulations, much as are we all.”

“What law did she break,” asks the Shootist Joaquin, “that insists on such a penance?”

Nude, he pads around the jog of the hall out into the spotless kitchen, the room beyond, empty but for a low white leather couch, the great wide wall of window beyond, overflowing with clouded daylight, white shag yet brilliant beneath it all. A murmur of leave-taking, a footstep, the sound of a door, closing. The big man there, returning, on the other side of the kitchen-space, straining the shoulders of his white dress shirt, his jeans of dark stiff denim, hair the color of iron closely cropped, mustaches a-dangle to either side of lips contemplatively pursed. He holds up in one hand a spidery pair of half-moon spectacles, peering through them at the small glass bottle held up in his other hand, a splash within of something milkily viscous, those lips thinning, pressing skeptically flat, and he sets the bottle on the kitchen island beside four others, all of a size, none even close to a quarter full. “You’re awake,” he says.

“That was a darn good burger, though. Wasn’t it.”

He lifts his head. The darkness about, thickly complete, nonetheless somehow suggests a shadow, small, sat at the foot of the bed.

“Last one I ever ate,” he says, and opens his eyes, head laid back against the one white pillow, blinking his way into the thin grey light of a morning much too early.

Cages sway, chains creak, a scatter of seedfall, feather-rustle and weight-shift clenching step, hunched shadows hulking in the sweeping light of the phone he holds up in one hand, brushing this one, that one, lingering over an empty cage a moment before finding a third, there, in the next to last row. One of the closer shadows leans precipitously and with a pinion-rattling shudder unclamps from about a wooden dowel those talons sharp-limned when they’re caught in the light, cruelly flexing, two above, two below, curled in a shivering fist, and there’s a winking gleam of brass, just there, but the light’s moved on, he’s turned away, ducking out through the door at the end of the porch.

There, under the flight of stairs bolted to the back of the old brick building, a couple of plain cardboard boxes stacked one atop the other, and he hurls up his hands to see them, tips up and back his head, cheekbones hunched to squeeze his eyes in a grimace of anguished frustration. The morning held at bay by watery air too wetly glistening heavy to be considered a fog or a mist but hung about so still, not falling, not even drifting, not a drizzle at all, and the soaked cuffs of his workpants flop about his ankles as he steps up under the stairs to seize the topmost box.

“What?” says Ysabel. The door closed behind her, the deputy stood before it, implacable.

“Do you consent?”

Jo, in the passenger seat, watches through silvery aviator sunglasses, a label still pasted to one lens, UV Protection, as he leans even further forward, peering about. She says, after a moment, “No?”

“Because it was not that fucking,” he says, sitting back, “I mean, it was the same color as your fucking,” taking her in, a cord-handled brown paper bag in her lap, weightily full, it says Fred Meyer in thick red letters, and her short-sleeved shirt of salmon, the wide maroon placket of it edged with white piping. “Huh,” he says, deflating.

“Yeah,” says Jo, hauling up another cord-handed brown paper bag, as weightily awkward, from the floorboard. “Look, if it helps at all, I can hook you up with a room, later. This place is never anywhere near capacity,” but he’s shaking his head, as if annoyed by the very suggestion, “no, seriously,” she says, gathering the cords in one hand, reaching with the other for the handle of the door. “Just come by any time after nine, I’ll get you a key.”

“I ain’t about to start sleeping in a God damned bed, your grace,” says Sweetloaf, with a wince, “there’s not a fucking thing about this fucking situation that calls for that level of, of whatever the fuck. I mention my fucking itinerary because of the implications it might present to your plans for whatever kind of fucking response.”

“I’m not,” she says, letting go of the handle, “going back,” and “I know, boss, I know,” he’s saying, “you made that pretty fucking clear.”