waited on a sunny piling. A hundred writers in one
spot. I don't know, he thought. He envied the pelican. Learn as much as
you can, he told himself.

The school had rented space in a community built on a barrier island
that separated the Gulf from a wide bay. "You're a day early. Let's
see--your unit is ready. We can let you in." The woman behind the
registration counter gave him a key and a paper pass. "Show this at the
gate," she said.

"Gate?"

"Across the highway, over there." She pointed through the front
windows.

Joe drove across and held the pass out the car window. A security guard
motioned him through, and he followed a blacktop road along the edge of
a golf course, passing clusters of houses that had been built at the
same time from the same ten designs. Expanses of grass were broken by
strips of pine trees and mounds of tended shrubbery. He stopped and
checked the map he'd been given. Two older men bounced low drives down
a fairway. They followed their balls silently, dragging golf bags
behind them on two wheeled carts with long curved handles.

Joe's "unit" was empty and impersonal. First come, first served, he
decided. He hung his shirts in the master bedroom closet, spread the
rest of his stuff on the bed, and fled.

He walked past landscaped ponds and drainage canals to the conference
center where they were to eat and attend readings. Joe introduced
himself and was told that meals would begin the following morning at 7
a.m. Books written by the faculty were for sale in a room arranged as a
temporary store. He picked up copies of writing by each of the other
workshop groups.

His preference for housemates was not honored. Walter, a lawyer from
California, and Jamie, a newly retired military officer from New
Hampshire, arrived the next day. Walter had been expensively educated,
but his mother was a singer and he had inherited her talent. After
graduation, he toured for years with a rock band before settling down
to appellate work and raising a family. He was determined to write a
novel, to lead another life. Jamie was a sensitive type who hid behind
a thick layer of masculinity. "We call him 'Leather Man,"' one of the
women later told Joe derisively. She was good looking. The good looking
ones didn't trust Jamie.

Jamie was masculine. He had been shot in Vietnam, had trained for
Special Forces dirty missions, and had flown carrier jets. He was good
at games, in shape for his forties, dressed fo