“Clerical vibe to the white garment,” I wrote. I looked at it for a bit, trying to figure out how to take the whole thing: Benediction or curse? Important or not important? I thought of picking up the peel and keeping it as a memento of whatever had just taken place, but my handbag already had too much bullshit in it, too many little rocks and ticket stubs, so instead I went to the café at the entrance to the gardens and wrote down what had happened, sitting at one of the wrought iron tables and whispering my shoes around in the drifts of leaves at my feet. It was a good peel, as well, the practiced, unbroken spiral of someone who has spent a lot of time standing at windows issuing baffling communiqués through the medium of fruit. He timed it exactly, so that it bounced off my shoulder and onto my shoe. We stood there for about thirty seconds, him at his window and me on my sidewalk, and then the business of making sustained eye contact with some kind of sinister holy man got to be too much for me, and I crossed the street so that I was right under his window, at an angle that made looking at each other impossible. I’d been gazing down at them as I walked, gloating over them in a way that was Rumpelstiltskinesque, when I realized someone was staring at me, hard, so I looked up and there was this man, in the pink building across the street, eating his orange with glazed conviction and giving off an aura of Rasputin.

Fomin Botanical Garden a few streets away, and it was early enough in the morning that I had nothing in my head except the thought of how much I loved my shoes. If you would like to picture the scene, you should imagine a man with the same shape of head and beard as Karl Marx, dressed in a high-necked white garment that sits at the intersection of “mystic” and “physician,” eating an orange and staring directly into the tired eyes of a woman who is wearing an ankle-length black coat that makes her feel like a corrupt but dignified old banker and big shiny black shoes that make her feel like a powerful car. Annotated pages from the author’s copy of The Dog of the SouthĪbout a month ago, this man dropped an orange peel on me, deliberately, from the third-floor window of a pink apartment building on Bohdana Khmelnytsky Street in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Charles portis books in order