Old Dr. Longshank dutifully rose to shake hands, taking my manuscript with a certain flair of gentility and then laying it to the side, no ostentation or ceremony in him today, only a deep sigh I took to be a sigh of satisfaction, and nothing more than his flat, square face staring at me from behind great swirls of pipe smoke.

He sat back down and again took up the manuscript, looking at it for a good long while before tapping it therapeutically with his pipe-stem.

“Well, Emberly, my boy,” said he at last. “More here than I’d anticipated. The way you get right into the thick of the story—that’s the real trick, isn’t it?”

I glared at the old fraud. “Trick? Is that all? Some kind of goddamn trick?”

He fell away with a start, knocked silly by my abrupt assault, though not for long. He laid his pipe aside and looked at me a bit curiously, as though meditating my dire and irrevocable fate.

I had often been disappointed by his criticism, to say nothing of his diagnoses, and was mainly coming in for my monthly supply of tranquilizers. So I sure didn’t want to throw him off his game. I needed those pills badly. The Grunt always liked to see the stories. A big help to him when it came to figuring out whether he had done a good job with the psychoanalysis. He looked at me again, still a little stricken by my unaccustomed show of sarcasm and incivility.

“Sorry,” I told him. “It’s just that everything is so damn hard. And I’ve got these palpitations now…”

Old Longsshank mumbled something I did not quite catch, then cleared his throat and came around to the front of his desk. I guess he would have felt terribly let down to know I no longer regarded him as one of the town’s most eminent critics. Not a single word from him about any of my previous stories.

He looked again at the manuscript, lifting his pipe with a mild show of relish. “Yes, my boy. I can see that you do have a real knack for getting right into your subject.” He stuck the junk papers behind him on his desk.

“Ain’t finished.”

He turned back to the manuscript, looking mighty troubled, frowning, tickling his nose with his pipe stem. “Hmmm, I thought we were to have a completed copy this time. Finishing the work, isn’t that part of the discipline we talked about?”

He began to read again, but my only thought was to get out of there. It was like my good friend Brandt Akers always said, “How the hell does a goddamn shrink get away with passing himself off as a literary critic?”

I went to the window and glanced down over the town to the waterfront. Lynchburg, Virginia, set high above the James River. An old place full of antiquated buildings, each street terraced into the side of the hill, which ran straight down to the water. My first real fling at the craft of newspapering.

Back in Carolina, I had worked for a couple of years as an organizer for the state Labor Federation, carrying the good news of Union Forever to migrant farmers, textile workers and hundreds of other laborers in a state that had never much cared for the idea. Union history down there had been one of riot and murder in the early days. My own history was a little different: plenty of time on the road, a good expense account, lots of sleazy women in bad hotel rooms.

As I stood there I found myself wondering again how I had ever found myself in this lost part of the world. Sometimes I felt like a sojourner on the Trail of the Lonesome Pine. But, of course, I knew only too well why I was there. Loftin Gray, an old soak I had befriended during his days as one of Carolina’s top sportswriters, had kept in touch after coming north to take a job as news editor for the Lynchburg morning daily. Now I was there, at his insistence, persuaded that, as a recent college graduate, labor organizer and despoiler of fallen women, I could make a real name for myself and go right to the top of the profession.

I looked back down at the river and noticed the wind had picked up greatly. To the north, over the hills of Amherst County, it had begun to look like snow. Longshank came over and stood a little behind me. I kept wondering if we were to have another of slightly unsettling conversations that had occurred during my previous visits.

On my most recent visit I had been sitting in front of his desk in a blaze of bright winter sunlight. He had looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Remarkable? The hair on your arm. Like…well, I will declare, almost like spun gold!”

Breathing right heavy, he was, and busy shutting the door to his secretary’s office all the time he was admiring my “spun gold.”

I didn’t need to hear any more. I knew right then I sure didn’t much care for the way the conversation was going or for the way he kept trying to adjust the blinds so as to get the sunlight to fall on me in a certain way. He got caught up in quite a fit of excitement before I could get out of there.

“Now! That’s it. Yes. Is that better?” He’d been talking about the blinds, pretending he only wanted to get the sun out of my eyes. I guess he was only wanting to show off the spun gold at its best, like a horticulturalist at a flower show.