From The Heart in Winter, which will be published this month by Doubleday.

On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a motley of rags and filthy buckskin, wild tufts of hair sticking out the ears, the eyes burning now like hot stars, now clamped shut in a kind of ecstasy, and he lurched and tottered on broken boots like a nightmare overgrown child, like some massive obliterated eejit child, and he sang out his wares in a sweet clear lilting—

Pot-ay-toes?

Hot po-tay-toes?

Hot pot-ah-toes a pen-ny?

His verse swung across the raw naked street and back again, and was musical, but he had no potatoes at all. Tom Rourke turned and looked after the man with great feeling. To be old and mad and forgotten on the mountain—was it all laid out the fuck ahead of him?

It was October again. Rourke himself approached the street at this hour in suave array and manic tatters. He was nine years climbing the slow hill of Wyoming Street and there was not a single medal pinned to his chest for it. He marched into the cold wind. His body was tense and his mind abroad. He was turned first one way, now the other. He walked as calamity. He walked under Libra. He was living all this bullshit from the inside out. Oh, he scathed himself and harangued and to his own feet flung down fresh charges. But there were dreams of escape, too—one day you could ride south on a fine horse for the Monida Pass.

In truth he was often a bit shaky at the hour of dusk and switchable of mood but there was more to it this evening. Somehow his dreams were taking on contour and heft, and the odd stirrings that he felt were deep and premonitory, as at the approach of a dangerous fate.

Now a train eerily whistled as it entered the yards of the Union Pacific and he was twitching like a motherfucker out of control.

By Park and Main the darkness had fallen. He looked in at the Board of Trade for a consultation. He took a glass of whiskey and a beer chaser. He slapped the one and sipped the other. The bad nerves fell away on a quick grade to calmness and resolve. He gathered himself beautifully. He took out a pad and a length of pencil. He looked to the long mirror above the bar and spoke without turning to Patrick Holohan, of Eyeries, County Cork, a miner of the Whistler pit—

Object matrimony, he said.

Holohan in turn considered the mirror warily—

Go again, Tom?

It’s what we say early on. It’s cards on the fucken’ table time. Show that you’re not playing games with the girl. What’s it her name is anyhow?

Holohan with native shyness slid a letter along the bar top. Tom Rourke unfolded the letter and briefly read—you’d need a heart of stone in this line—and he began fluently at once to write.

This’ll only be a rough go at it, he said. See if we can strike some manner of tone. Reassure the girl.

Moments passed by in the calm of composition. Looking up, briefly, in search of a word, he saw Pat Holohan in the mirror observing the work with guilt. There was terror in the man’s eyes that he might have a measure of happiness due.

Dear Miss Stapleton—Rourke spoke it now as he read over the words—or Margaret, if I may be so bold. It is my enormous good fortune to have the opportunity today to write to you, and if the marks on the page are not my own, you will know that the words are, and that they are full in earnest.

Oh, that’s lovely, Tom, Holohan said, his face unclenching. More of it, boy.

I write to you in the hope, Margaret, as desperate as it may be, that you will consider a path west from your present situation in Boston and come join me here in the most prosperous town to be found upon the high plateau.

Upon the fucken’ what?

Mountain, Pat.

He finished the beer and signaled for a shot. Slapped it as it landed. He spun the pencil urbanely in his hand—How’s the health, Patrick?

Holohan considered the dreary slopes of himself and jawed on his bottom lip and laid a hand to his swollen gut—

Jesus, he said.

Tom Rourke put pencil to the page again—

My object, Margaret, is matrimony, and I wish to state here that I am in as hale and eager a condition as any man might be, at least given the usual reverses a hard working life can bestow.

He had it within himself to help others. He made no more than his dope and drink money from it. He had helped to marry off some wretched cases already—they could all be brought up nicely enough against the white field of the page. Discretion, imagination, and the careful edit were all that were required.

Do you think she might come, Tom?

Every possibility.

But do you think she’ll know what kind I am?

Hard to from a few letters. She might know enough to chance it. We just have to make sure you come across as genuine and not out for the one thing only.

Holohan blushed like a boy and drank up his beer. He signaled to the keep and a brace of shots appeared. The men slapped them and considered first wordlessly and then with a sense of growing warmth their ludicrous situation.

On Galena Street he walked the stations of the cross again. The lamps burned a mournful electric yellow above the drifting crowd and the girls of the line cribs called out in brash and intricate detail the index of their arrangements. Tom Rourke picked his way along the street avoiding the muddier stretches in favor of his tan Colchester boots. He was this season denying himself the bodily release of the cribs and he ignored with a disdain almost priestly the flashing thighs and moaning lips of the commerce. Crossing onto Broadway he carried that weight of weird knowledge or clairvoyance. There was the whisper of a foretelling but he could not make out the words.

He looked in at the Collar & Elbow and sold an eighth of dope to Jeremiah The Chin Murphy there. He looked in at the Graveyard and slapped a shot with Danny the Dog-Boy who was dying of the chest, it was confided, though Dog-Boy had by now been some-and-twenty years in the dying. He was halfways down a glass of strong brown German beer at the Alley Cat and thinking about death and the poetic impulse in youth when he was informed that he was no longer tolerated on the premises on account of misdemeanors incalculable and here once more was a miscarriage of fucking justice.

Midnight kind of direction he had his knife taken off him by a volcanic Mancunian named Shovel Burgess at the Big Stope bar and he took a blow to the nose which bled theatrically. Next he was turned away from the Chicken Flats on account of dope money that was owed and had been spent instead on tan Colchester boots.

He looked in at the Southern Hotel. He looked in at the Cesspool. He gave a broad berth to the Bucket of Blood which was for newspapermen and touristic types only, was his opinion. He denied himself once more the line cribs though he considered briefly a proposal of marriage to Greta of Bavaria at the Black Feather. It was three in the morning. He drank and smoked and moved his feet. Then the black haze descended. Then the music all stopped. Then he felt himself aloft suddenly. He was at an elevation. He was upon the fucking air. He was carried from the Open All Night and deposited arsewards to the street. He crawled the breadth of the street on his fours. There was little dignity to it. He rose with grave uncertainty and stumbled away into the night and he carried yet the great burden of youth.

He lost his faith in God around half four in the morning. Now he believed in everything else instead. He believed in spells and enchantments. He believed for sure he could put a spell on the horse. He clamped one eye shut to keep her in focus but she danced about madly before him. A nervous animal, of golden aura, it was mostly palomino in her. She kicked at the frozen ground and a petulance of tiny stars flew up in sparks.

Ah go handy, he said, wouldn’t you? My head is fucken’ openin’ here.

The horse kicked and whined and her eyes flared with violence—

No call for that business, he said.

He tried to get on his feet for the stance of authority but failed it and slid the wall of some old shanty onto the bone of his butt again. Jesus Christ, the cold would go through you these nights.

Who the fuck’s are you anyhow? he said.

The horse stilled herself utterly and fixed the lashes of the long stare on him and he was bound. There was a wretched pain in her someplace.

He rose and wavered on woozy legs. He was operated by an inept puppeteer. He opened a hand to the horse. She flinched a little and stepped back but only by a few dancing steps. He was flirting with her now. She lowered her stare again and he put a hand before her face and he felt the hot sick breath on his palm and he locked onto the lash-wide stare.

Closer, he said, and he began tunelessly to sing, working out the words of it as he went—

Oh, palomino palomino

Sing a song for me

Oh, pal-o-mee sweet pal-o-mino

Nothin’ comes for free

At that the horse buckled onto her knees as if gunshot and rolled onto her side and onto her spine and kicked at the air and showed her crazy teeth and the pain was no more or at least not so she could feel it.

I’ll be seein’ you, he said.