Robert Tanenbaum: Absolute rage

When he was able to breathe again, he said, "Does this mean you've decided to be nice to me?"

"It could be. Or it could be I am planning to plumb new levels of cruelty and this is the softening-up phase."

"I'm betting on the latter. When are you splitting?"

"Now. You're the last soul in McCullensburg I will see, forever."

"You can't leave without telling me what that Chinese writing on your shirt means."

"No. It says zhi si bu wu, meaning roughly 'unable to understand until death.' It's from a Tang-dynasty story about a hunter with a pet deer who gets along with the hunter's own dogs. The hunter warns it that not all dogs are like his pals, but the deer doesn't listen. It runs off, meets a strange pack of dogs, and gets eaten, without ever understanding why. It's an idiom used to refer to an incorrigibly stubborn person."

"You got that part right. So… will I see you in Boston, or what?"

"Oh, yes, I certainly hope so. But I don't know how long I'm going to stay in school."

"What will you do instead, and will they need a computer geek?"

She laughed. "I don't know. I'll let you know when I find out."

"So we just, you know, go on like this? Necking? And, you know, raising the tension to the heart?"

"I hope so. I'll understand, however, if you feel the need to consort with women of easy virtue."

"You'll wait there patiently, like a stained-glass window, huh?"

"Yes, until you ask me to marry you, at which point I will say yes."

"What if I marry someone else? One of those easier-virtue ones?"

"Then I'll dance at your wedding and stifle my disappointed tears, and then join the Ursulines. But if you wait, I will show you delights beyond the range of your adolescent fantasies. We will have to honeymoon at the Mayo Clinic, you'll need IV tubes, to replenish your bodily fluids, which I will have sucked from your pulsing flesh."

"You are such a lunatic," he said, after which she did suck a little fluid from his mouth.

She then leaped to her feet. "So long and God bless you, Dan Heeney, until we meet again." She ran out of the yard.

He stood up and watched her. Later, that was how he most often remembered her: running down the narrow lane to her truck, with her long legs, and those floppy shorts and the clunky boots kicking up the gravel, and the grin she gave him over her shoulder, and the head of the great black dog hanging out of the window as the truck pulled away.