Light Action in the Caribbean (18 page)

I’m wondering—could I ever send her out? Maybe to help? Would you spend a few days with her?”

“I’d be glad to speak with her,” he said, after considering the question. “I’d train her, if it came to that.”

“Thank you.”

He began squaring the maps up to place them back in the drawer.

“You know, Mister Trevino—Phillip, if I may, and you may call me Corlis—the question is about you, really.” He shut the drawer and gestured me toward the door of the room, which he closed behind us.

“You represent a questing but lost generation of people. I think you know what I mean. You made it clear this morning, talking nostalgically about my books, that you think an elegant order has disappeared, something that shows the way.” We were standing at the corner of the dining table with our hands on the chair backs. “It’s wonderful, of course, that you brought your daughter into our conversation tonight, and certainly we ‘re both going to have to depend on her, on her thinking. But the real question, now, is what will
you
do? Because you can’t expect her to take up something you wish for yourself, a way of seeing the world. You send her here, if it turns out to be what she wants, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you, or I or anyone, knows how the world is meant to work. The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark. We’re lighting candles. Those maps—they are my candles. And I can’t extinguish them for anyone.”

He crossed to his shelves and took down his copy of
The City of Geraniums
. He handed it to me and we went to the door.

“If you want to come back in the morning for breakfast, please do. Or, there is a cafe, the Dogwood, next to the motel. It’s good. However you wish.”

We said good night and I moved out through pools of dark beneath the ash trees to where I’d parked the car. I set the book on the seat opposite and started the engine. The headlights swept the front of the house as I turned past it, catching the salute of his hand, and then he was gone.

I inverted the image of the map from his letter in my mind and began driving south to the highway. After a few moments I turned off the headlights and rolled down the window. I listened to the tires crushing gravel in the roadbed. The sound of it helped me hold the road, together with instinct and the memory of earlier having driven it. I felt the volume of space beneath the clear, star-ridden sky, and moved over the dark prairie like a barn-bound horse.