“Give me a penny,” Laurel said.

“I don’t have any thoughts,” I told her, and she smiled. The radiant explosion of it—it seemed to me back then her smile was like the sun.

“It’s unlucky if you don’t,” she said, and took her hand from behind her back. On her plump palm lay a big lock-blade Buck knife, a beautiful one with brass bolsters and brass-headed screws in the brown hardwood handle. Expensive too—I knew the price, because Terrell had always wanted one and never had the money to buy it.

“I already have a knife,” I said. It occurred to me I had been seeing a few of these Buck knives around the ranch of late. For example, Creamy and Crunchy each wore one, in a black web sheath strapped to her skinny hip. Stolen, I guess, for money was tight. Somebody must have boosted a box of them.

“Oh yeah?” Laurel said, her eyes flashing a challenge.

“Yeah …”

I didn’t hesitate for more than two seconds before I dipped into the bundle I brought when I came. The bayonet was clean, though I hadn’t had the blade exposed since I left San Francisco. I held it bolt upright in my hand, my thumb set in the steel ring where the tip of the rifle was supposed to go.

“Oh, yeah …” Laurel’s eyes had widened, though not for long; I saw her touch her upper lip with the pink point of her tongue. Then she stooped to her side of the bed and pushed a knot of colored scarves off a long flat sandalwood box. Inside was a knife as long as mine, with a rippling blade like water.

A kris, I’d later learn was the name of it. Laurel had pictures of Malays sticking themselves with these things when they danced, possessed by their demons. At the moment I didn’t give a goddamn whatever the thing was called.

Laurel’s eyes glimmered as she stepped around the foot of the bed, striking toward me in slow motion, and I parried, slowly, very careful—I didn’t much care about not getting cut but I did care about not cutting Laurel. The bayonet was sharp enough to shave, I knew, after the hundred hours Terrell had put into the edge.

We were moving around each other, eyes on fire, our lips just parted. Strike, parry, parry, strike. The electric ting of metal meeting metal. My bones were throbbing with excitement—current spouting up to the top of my head through the soles of my feet. D—— had been teaching new uses of fear. She came down overhand with the flat of the wavy blade and I didn’t block it this time, let it reach me, just denting into the top of my left breast. The bayonet swung around lazily to the right and came softly to rest on the skin of her throat. I hadn’t controlled it quite enough or maybe I’d controlled it just perfectly, for there among her cinnamon freckles rose a bright red bead of blood.

Laurel shivered, as if she’d seen the blood bead reflected in my eyes. She touched the spot and raised her finger toward me and I tasted her blood from the whorls of the tip. When we kissed it was like springwater pouring from her mouth to mine. I don’t know where the knives got slung—lucky neither of us was impaled when we fell, when we threw each other onto the bed. Laurel came out of her clothes like a piece of ripe fruit and we were slithering all over each other like a pair of wet squid and I plunged to raise her pearl on the tip of my tongue—

Afterward, I seemed to hear a voice explaining to me why the knives had helped, how they solved the frustration I often felt at the sheer painlessness of doing it with Laurel …

She stretched a languid arm to the floor and came up with the folded Buck again.

“Take it,” she said. “D—— wants you to have it.”

So I did.