“You reckon?”

“At this point anything is possible.” The dark man lay back in his shirtsleeves and grimy suspenders while smoke drifted from his mouth.

That evening after the beans and cornbread Simon laid out his possessions carefully, each one in exactly the same place whether he was sleeping in the storage room of J. A. Fenning’s Public House in Victoria or a crowded army tent on the Rio Grande. He placed his good Kentucky hat on top of his rucksack, laid out his razor and comb on the box and covered them with a handkerchief, and stored his tuning fork, rosin, and extra strings in the case along with his expensive and precious Markneukirche fiddle.

“And so my name is Damon,” the dark man said. “Like a demon.” His skin was bluish pale, colorless. He was tall and narrow in the shoulders, his long feet stuck out into their tent space in two different shoes. “Damon Lessing.”

Simon shifted on his hardtack box, cocked his head. He regarded Damon with a drawn, spare face, no expression.

“Simon Walters. And leave my rucksack where it is.”

“Well now, I thought I’d lay out a hand of cards on it.”

“I said leave it alone.”

Damon glanced at him and parted a deck of cards into two halves. “You have a dangerous look on your face, fiddler. The sergeants make sharpshooters out of men like you. ‘Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore . . .’ Very well. I am reduced to the Missouri Shuffle.” Damon made the cards snap together, rolled another cigarette, and handed it to Simon. “Calm down, son.” Simon thanked him and smoked it, and so they were nominally friends, or at least not ready to shoot each other.

Simon wore the regulation forage cap pulled down over his forehead and left his good hat in the tent. He formed up for drill with the others on the flat sandy stretches while enormous towering clouds built up over the Gulf and sailed inland carrying, it seemed to him, secret messages about blue storms and pirates and tales of giant unknown fish.

Every evening through the months of April and May the wind came up out of the Gulf at nine o’clock like a transparent armada set loose on the world of deep south Texas. Simon could hear the Rio Grande River just beside camp where the Mexican women came to wash their white laundry in the brown water. He could hear the bells of churches on the other side. The wind bowed the thick stands of carrizo cane and the horses ate slowly. Egrets rose up with long leisurely strokes of their wings.

They were all badly armed; they were assigned old Springfield smoothbores of Mexican War issue and the dark man with the pennywhistle had only a percussion revolver made by Dance and Brothers that he kept in his rucksack. Simon loaded, knelt, and fired with the others and his cap flew off with the recoil. They drilled there in the bright, cauterized desert, learned the manual of arms, to the rear march, and dress right dress. Simon had trouble with the last and behind him from the ranks came yells of “Other arm! Other arm!” The sergeant tried to get Simon to play his fiddle for marches. At morning drill the sergeant shouted his name.

“Walters! Front and center!”

Simon was staring out over the river cane, watching the plumed heads bend to the western wind.

“Walters!”

Damon jabbed him in the kidneys with a knuckle. “Simon. That’s you. Apparently.”

“By God it is me. Yes, sir?” He stepped out to front and center.

The sergeant asked him to get his fiddle for the drill.

“No, sir, I will not.”

The sergeant looked him up and down with a raking glance. A short redheaded fiddler with square shoulders and a trim waist, pale skin burnt a dusty brown, a mutinous expression on his face. The sergeant considered. Discipline was slipping; desertion throughout the entire Confederate Army was growing by the day, so the sergeant did not have him stripped to the waist and tied to a buckboard wheel and beaten. Instead he said in a painfully conciliatory voice, “But I’m ordering you to. Why not?”

“Why not. Because it’s not a march instrument. Because I can’t march and bow at the same time. Because sand will ruin my fiddle. It’s everywhere.” Simon jammed his tattered Confederate infantry cap down over his nose.

“Well, you had better do something,” said the sergeant. “Musically.”

Damon had a D whistle and a C and a big low G, but he had great trouble getting a good sound out of the G. So Simon borrowed the G whistle and learned it in a fairly short time. It had six holes and played in two keys. The trick was to cover the bottom hole securely. The dark man showed him how to pour boiling water down it to keep it clear of spit. The man had trouble with it because his right-hand fingers had been injured and he couldn’t reach all the holes, even in a piper’s grip.

“Caught it in a sheave block,” he said. “At one time I was conscripted into the ironclad Yankee navy in New Orleans.” But he could be burning hell on the smaller D whistle and once in a while in the evening as the cookfire died down he would sing in a rich bass voice. These fleeting charms of earth, farewell, your springs of joy are dry . . . while Simon sat with his arms around his knees and his shirt open to the evening breeze, his fine reddish hair sticking up like twigs, following the complex phrasing of that old song with his mind in a state of timelessness. He saw thin stars rise out of the unseen ocean, out of the distant east, and a world changed, a world burnt down with themselves held harmless from it all. If they were lucky, if they could continue to be lucky. I’m a long time traveling here below to lay this body down . . .

At drill they played the usual marches: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Rose of Alabama.” They guarded the trains of cotton bales that came in one wagon after another, crossing over to Mexico to be sold. Simon heard talk that the officers pocketed a good deal of the cotton money. Men gambled, told stories, walked out into the shallows of the river in their drawers or naked to drench themselves. They squashed their shirts and underwear in the thick water, laughing and throwing water at one another, and traded for chinguirito, a kind of blistering cane rum, with people from the Mexican side. The sergeant told them that the French were on the other side of the river. Why the French were there the sergeant didn’t know. Maybe they were buying the cotton. It was a strange gathering of immobile armies at the end of a world of desert and ocean and a slow brown river.

Simon worried about his hearing; someday this goddamned war and all its insanity would end and he would have to make a living with his music. He was likely to lose part of his hearing, the high tones at any rate, with this perpetual target practice. Jeff Davis had already been captured and was in jail, so what was the army’s reasoning on this matter? Lee had cashed it in a month ago at Appomattox. Lincoln was dead at the hands of a demented actor. Why were they all still here?

“Nobody tells us lowlifes,” said the bugler.

“Of course not,” said Damon. “They have forgotten about us. Let us not remind them.” They sat sweating in the shade of the cane-and-canvas tent. The mindless talk, the endless talk, wore on Simon’s nerve ends. He felt like his brain was being sandpapered.

“Who has got wax?” Simon got to his feet. “Where can I get an apple?”

“Oh, oh, an apple!” cried the bugler. “And a chess pie and a diamond stickpin!” He sat and sawed off the legs of his drawers with a penknife so they would be cooler.

“Do you not know,” said Damon, “that people in hell want ice water?”

“I wasn’t aware.”

Simon stood up and stepped out into the blazing white-hot heat. He sauntered off to the cook’s wagon. How he managed to come back with a greasy candle end and a withered apple he never said. He broke off bits of candle for wax balls for his ears, cut up the apple, and shared out all but two slices, which he wrapped in bits of muslin and laid inside his fiddle case, then snapped it carefully shut. The apple slices would give a bit of humidity to the inside of the case and keep the delicate woods of his fiddle from drying out and cracking.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the bugler. “That’s clever.”

“Stop swearing. You’re too young to swear,” said Damon in an exhausted voice.

“Be damned if I am you son of a bitch,” said the bugler. “I been swearing since I was six months old.”