This week in the saga

Tuesday night in Philadelphia the duel finally happens, and it does not go the way the first one did. She turns to face him across the floor; he answers a question about a small Ohio town with a sentence that leaves the building and never comes back — they are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats. By midnight he has declared it the best night of his life, three against one. By Thursday the challenge has been reversed into a refusal: fighters demand rematches when they lose, and he is not losing. Sunday morning he is still fighting the singer who endorsed her, in capital letters, at a quarter to eleven. Ninety minutes later a rifle barrel is found resting in the fence line of his own golf course, five hundred yards from where he is playing. A weapon, a bag, and a man who was gone before anyone saw a face. It is sixty-four days since Butler.