“Is that a question?”

“No. I wasn’t in the service. I don’t know about those kinds of issues. What I was saying is we’re done here.”

“Then why did you make it sound like a question?”

“I was trying to be polite.”

“The mamasan lives on my fire escape now. Sometimes I leave a cup of tea on the windowsill for her. Look right over your head. There’s her teacup. Are you laughing at me, Waylon?”

“No.”

“If you’re not laughing at me, who are you laughing at?”

“I’m laughing because I get tired of hearing you guys talk about the war. If it was so fucking bad, why did you go over there? Give it a rest, man. I read about a guy at the My Lai massacre who told a Vietnamese woman he was gonna kill her baby unless she gave him a blow job. Maybe that was you, and that’s why your head is fucked up. The truth is, I don’t care. Pay your marker or lose your building. Can you fit that into your head? You killed a mamasan? Good for you. You killed her kids, too? Get over it.”

Clete could feel a constriction in one side of his face that was not unlike an electric shock, one that robbed his left eye of sight and replaced it with a white flash of light that seemed to explode like crystal breaking. He knew he had hit Waylon Grimes, but he wasn’t sure where or exactly how many times. He saw Grimes crash through the fronds of a windmill palm and try to crawl away from him, and he saw the appraiser run for the foyer, and he felt Alice Werenhaus trying to grab his arms and wrists and prevent him from doing what he was doing. All of them were trying to tell him something, but their voices were lost in the squealing of the hogs and the Zippo-track rolling through the hooches and the downdraft of a helicopter blowing a rice paddy dry while a door gunner was firing an M60 at a column of tiny men in black pajamas and conical straw hats who were running for the tree line.