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By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.

When the ferry berthed at Picton, the American was to purchase two one-way tickets back to Wellington; one under Healey’s name and one under his own real name; he was at present travelling under a false name. He would pass over both these tickets to Healey and then disappear for good. Healey would deposit the American’s ticket in a rubbish bin on board. Then at a certain point in the voyage, when it was dark and they were towards the middle of the Strait—this was important, the American had told him, because of the currents which might easily drag a body far out to sea—Healey was to raise the alarm that he had just seen a man jump overboard.

The ferry would most likely be stopped and Healey would have to take a role in looking for the missing man. He would have to be ready to indicate how the figure fell and from where exactly, what he was wearing, what he looked like, and in none of these details should he be too precise. It was dark. No one else was on this part of the deck when it happened and Healey himself was on an upper deck and saw it more or less out of the corner of his eye. No, the man did not shout or make any noise as he jumped.

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

How fat I used to be

Maybe he pictured just the nail,

the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised

the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill

and sank it with a single blow.

Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder

than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof

or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,

a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.

Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,

turbos throbbing in the labored

dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing

pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,

smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though

he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,

snowy lights below. There might have been

freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know

I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,

glanced again at the two feathered props

out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.

But freed all at once from months of killing depression,

elated strangely, almost uplifted.