Annalee is sorting through a box of seed packets. She has a swollen lip; her boyfriend punched her this morning because she had run out of bacon. She walks over to Wynn’s truck and inspects her lips in the sideview mirror. “It’s really strange to have somebody hit you,” she says. “When I was in high school, a boy hit me once and I remember thinking, If he hits me again I’m going to kill him. Then he hit me again and I didn’t do anything.”

Last year, when I was twelve years old, my mother married her pen pal, Bennett Jensen, who was in the Wyoming State Penitentiary for holding up a gas station. She had gotten Bennett’s name from an ad in the newspaper. He and my mother got married in the warden’s office on a Friday morning, while I was in school, and on Saturday afternoon I went with her to the prison, which was almost two hours away, in Rawlins. The three of us ate lunch in the visitors’ room. My mother had brought sandwiches wrapped in heart-shaped napkins.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Holly Parker’s son, Owen, climbed to the top of the Venus water tower. There were three people in the field below—two junior high school boys playing football, and a middle-aged woman jogging—and Owen yelled down that he was going to jump.

Some of the subjects covered during Gamal’s hour of talk: the great friendship they will have; the difficulty Gamal has accepting Ib’s name—he prefers to call him Ibrahim; the movies of Kaleemt Ishtwud; the language of Arabic, which Gamal will make Ib speak like one good Arab Man, which Gamal says is the language everyone in the world knows; felucca rides on the Nile; the English language, the greatest language on earth, which Ib will teach Gamal to speak like on good English Man; this great beauty the singer Paula Abdul, but what is she a servant of (abdul means “servant of”) and how can we make her visit our house which we will build together near the Pyramids; the Pyramids, which Gamal feels one moment are the great monuments of the world we know, the next moment, garbage heaps, where bad people sell bad things that do not make Egypt look good; the right of a man to marry a woman for a few weeks, a very necessary right, men are much stronger and fairer this way, men grow beards more quickly, men walk in straight lines.

Gamal says, “Here’s a joke. Anwar el-Sadat sees an American oil geologist making his one allotted phone call from Hell. When he’s done, the American has to pay one million dollars for a five-minute call. Sadat is shocked and terrified. ‘Well, I’ll just talk for a few seconds,’ he says to himself. ‘I can’t afford much of anything these days.’ But Sadat, being Egyptian, of course gets carried away and talks for half an hour. When he hangs up he asks, fearfully, how much he owes. ‘Twenty-five piastres,’ the clerk says. ‘For half an hour! Why so little?’ Sadat asks. ‘It’s a local call,’ the clerk says.”

She turns to Gamal, all business. “I have spoken with the authorities. A driver will take you to the prison. The government say they have nothing to hide. But they do not apologize for keeping you waiting. You realize that you are being used. Your status as an outsider, yani, a member of a very small minority, as well as a Christian, is the only reason you’ve been called on to do this interview. You are expected to interview the prisoner, but you are also expected to twist his words and make him look ridiculous. We will not hold this against you. I am surprised they chose you. I am not surprised you accepted this assignment. You can’t resist this strange stage. Meet your driver in front of the hotel at midnight. He’ll recognize you. Your friend is welcome to join you if he wishes.”

Every thing I own save the poor Beasts is in a heap here in the center of this room and if I mean to keep it whole I must before I sleep cover all against the leaking, rake old tins & leavings outside the door, burn a camphor stick against vermin, set my few mouse traps along the walls. And hope for better Weather & Strength in the days coming. I have put out in the night the 2 boys I found here, they had taken up living in the empty house. Those were Troubles I could not borrow, as I am scarce likely to make my own living in this poor place and coming West I have seen idle men Everywhere abut in La Grande and Boise and Missoula and in the Papers woeful news of the falling price of Wheat & Cattle both. They were polite & forebearing, for which reason I am sorry.

She went a little way along the edge of the line of brush, up the steep hill toward the trees. She held the gun in both hands, shaking, putting her bare feet down with care. She had had the gun from her mother’s brother when she was thirteen. She had killed a lot of things with it, snakes and sage hens and hares. Once a coyote. It had been a good gun once, a handmade L.B. Settlemeier with an engraving of pheasants on the breech. But it had been used badly before her uncle got it, the mahogany stock gouged in a couple of places and the finish worn off, the barrel pitted from poor storage. Sometimes now the hammer stuck. She doubted it could kill anything of size—almost certainly not all at once.

They played euchre and five-card, betting with matches. Generally Jack could win two out of three at euchre—he had taught it to the kid without teaching him any of its secrets—but Harley kept even on the poker. They traded matches back and forth and neither of them ever went bust. They played outside, sitting on the grass under a tree when it was hot. When it rained they played inside on a blanket spread out on the dirt floor. It was what they mainly did. It was how Jack remembered it afterward—that summer he spent with Harley Osgood, playing for matches and waiting for neither of them knew what.

…he didn’t do it the clean way. He stepped out onto his front stoop where I could see him, cocked his shotgun, the one his daddy had given him, and aimed at me. I am trying to think that the reason my daddy fired over my head instead of into it is that he loved me so much.

“You smell like a girl,” Johnny said, smiling.

“I know,” I said, and I smiled, too. And when he saw that I didn’t care, he didn’t care either, and he would press closer to me. Sometimes his nose would be in my hair, and his breath would be like warm water all over my head, and that felt good, as if it was what ought to be even though I knew it was something that God saw wherever it happened, and remembered and sent to hell not everybody it happened to, but everybody who liked it.

It’s women’s work I do. On hot summer days when all the other boys are swimming or playing baseball or going howling-wild in the woods and fields which are running distance from anywhere in town, I slip away behind my grandmother’s washhouse and arrange funerals. I spend long hours making caskets out of cigar boxes—humming somber but hopeful hymns. Since the time I discovered I wasn’t a girl, but gave up anyway trying to join the race of boys, I have buried things. Dignified burials I give to frogs car-smashed in the street at night. Beetles, killed by DDT which is sprayed all over town by the county health department to keep down mosquitoes, rest in ground which only my imagination has hallowed.

The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.

In business, so entrenched has extortion become that the Bombay High Court recently ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a legitimate business expense. Extortion is a form of tax. Since there is a parallel justice system, there have to be parallel taxes. It used to be that there was only one gang—Dawood’s. But now that there are multiple gangs operating, as soon as the businessman pays one, all the others line up for their payments, so he finds himself paying four or five gangs at once. He might even be paying freelance extortionists, people who pose no real threat. The implicit or explicit tradeoff in the protection racket—you give me money, I give you protection from myself and others—no longer applies. The gangs are powerless to afford protection against the others. It is less a protection racket now and more like a simple mugging: You give me your money or I’ll kill you.

The narrative principles that propel the plot are alien to those of, say, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I spent two years. I entertain myself by imagining what would happen if the script were put up in workshop. My contribution to the script is minimal at best. I propose an idea that departs from the standard Hindi film formula. Vinod thinks about it. “We can’t do it because if we put it in the film the audience will burn down the theater. They will rip out the seats and burn down the theater.”

I withdraw the suggestion.