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“I don’t know.” Grace shrugged, the blithe gesture of a child responding to a question that didn’t concern her; then she cut her eyes toward him and for an instant she became visible in the way she had back in Klamath Falls—a clever spirit with unguessable motives. “There’s one thing I do know. You think you-’n’-me’s jus’ about me givin’ you sugar, and you takin’ care of me. But I’m gon’ be doin’ my share of takin’ care of you from here out.”

The cloudy coast was breaking up into islands and floating castles, and the sky was separating into bands of color—a broad swath of scarlet behind the peaks edged by a narrow strip of paler red, bordered in turn by a still narrower strip of orange, then the thinnest stripe of peach, and above all that a reach of aquamarine, a color with the sort of mineral purity that you can see behind the clouds in museum paintings of old Italian angels.

Entranced by this evolving masterpiece, Grace said, “You always pokin’ fun at things I say. You like to tell yourself the only reason you ever ask me anything is so’s you kin get a laugh. But you hear what I’m sayin’. I kin tell. People get close, they bound to change one another. They make each other weaker or stronger. That’s why the preacher don’t say for better or worse or in case things stay the same.” She rested her chin on her drawn-up knees, still gazing at the sky which was developing a cinematic symmetry, balconies of gaudily colored cloud arrayed against a backdrop dominated by great blades of sanguine light—a majestic sight that seemed to bear slight relation to the shriveled-up ball of fire that had produced it. “You’n me, we gon’ be strong!” Grace went on. “We gon’ shake things up. Know why? ’Cause I ain’t lettin’ you be weak. You gon’ be my strength, but I’m gon’ be your heart.”

She continued talking, but the conviction ebbed from her words and her speech grew increasingly fragmented, disconnected. Soon she stopped altogether, and Madcat, who had been lulled and persuaded by her voice, felt that he had been hurled from a place in the sky to a cold boxcar floor. The heavy silence of the yard made him think everything was listening, watching, and uncomfortable in the sight of God, he shifted about, trying to restore his psychic equilibrium. Grace settled back against the wall and let out a sigh that seemed to express the recollection of some sad certainty. Then she pointed to the sky and said, “I reckon it mus’ be California that way.”