I don't want to sound like an elitist, but Trojans were the kind of rubber you kept in your wallet for three years when you were twelve or thirteen because they were so strong and thick. The word was that nothing short of a truck driving through one could put a dent in it. And yes, they were strong, but when the magic moment arrived and you actually used it, it was like screwing inside the Graf Zeppelin.

Lee bent closer to Parker and whispered something long and low in his car. I tried not to pay attention but it was either them or Saxony's eyelashes in the counter mirror.

"'Now if I can only find my goddamn keys I'll drive us both outta here in my bulldozer!'" I assumed that it was the punch line to a dirty joke, because Lee reared up like he'd been stung by a wasp in the fanny.

The two of them had a good laugh, although Lee's was more forced and rough and went on much longer than Parker's.

The Trojans disappeared into a brown paper bag and were paid for with a dirty twenty-dollar bill.

Putting the bag under his arm, Lee got his change and turned toward me. I have a bad habit of judging people as soon as I meet them. Unfortunately I'm wrong about them a lot of the time. I'm also stubborn, which means that if I don't like a person right away – even if he is an angel in disguise – it takes a hell of a long time for me to see that I'm wrong and to begin dealing with him differently. I didn't like Richard Lee. He looked as if he walked around all day in his underpants and took baths on alternate Thursdays. There were gold sleep nuggets in the corners of both of his eyes, which is the kind of thing that makes me want to reach out and wipe them away. Like a crumb on someone's beard that he hasn't noticed.

"I heard that Anna's letting you do the book. Congrats to you!"

My heart melted a little when he stuck out his big mitt for a shake, but then it froze again when I saw him leering at Saxony.

"Why don't you two come over to my house tonight? I can show you pictures of my mother and some other things like that. Why don't you come over and have dinner? I think we got enough for all of us."

I looked at Sax and vaguely hoped that she would come up with an excuse. But I knew that I had to talk to this man sooner or later because of the importance of his mother.

"It's fine with me. Thomas? We're not doing anything, as far as I can remember."

"No. Yeah. No, that's great. That would he terrific, Richard. Thanks a lot for asking."

"Good. I'm going fishing this afternoon, and if we're lucky we'll be having fresh catfish right off the line."

"Hey, that's great. Fresh catfish." I tried to nod enthusiastically, but if my expression betrayed me it was only because I was thinking about the whiskers on catfish.

He left and then Saxony decided to buy the Max Factor. I went to the counter to pay. While he rung it up, Mel the Druggist shook his head. "Personally, I never liked catfish. The only reason they're always so fat is that they eat anything. Real garbage fish, you know? That will be two-oh-seven, sir."

There were crosses on top of crosses. Jesus bled all over the room from fifty different places, each showing him suffering some new kind of agony. The whole house smelled of frying fish and tomatoes. Except for the couch I sat on, which smelled like wet dogs and cigarettes.

Lee's wife, Sharon, had the kind of innocent but odd pink face that you often see on midgets. She never stopped smiling, even when she tripped over their bull terrier, Buddy, and fell down. The daughters, Midge and Ruth Ann, were just the opposite: they slumped around the place as if the air were too heavy for them.

Richard brought out his handgun collection, his rifle collection, his fishing-pole collection, and his Indian-head nickel. Sharon brought out a photo album of the family, but most of the pictures were either of dogs they had had through the years or, for some reason, pictures of the family when they were injured. Richard smiling at his leg in a thick white cast, Midge merrily pointing to an ugly blue-black eye, Ruth Ann on her back in what was obviously a hospital bed, and in apparent pain.

"My God, what happened there?" I pointed to this one of Ruth Ann.

"When was that? Let me think. Ruth Ann, do you remember when I took that one of you?"

Ruth Ann scuffed over and breathed on my head while she looked at it. "That's when I slipped that disk in gym, Daddy. Don't you remember?"

"Oh, that's right, Richard. That one's of the slipped disk she got."

"Hell yes, now I remember. That cost me about three hundred bucks to put her up in the hospital. All they had down there was a semiprivate room, but I put her in anyway. Didn't I, Ruth Ann?"

Tobacco Road-y as they sounded (and looked and were), you could tell that they liked each other very much. Richard kept putting his arm around the girls or his wife. They loved it; whenever he did, they would snuggle up into him with little peeps of delight. It was bizarre to think of this bunch together in their sad white house looking at pictures of Ruth Ann in traction, but how many families do you know that are happy and enjoy each other's company?

"Dinner's ready, everyone."

As guest of honor, I got the biggest catfish, its mouth open in a final rictus. Stewed tomatoes and dandelion greens were there too. No matter how much I cut or pushed the catfish to the farthest corners of my plate, I couldn't lose it. I knew that the battle was lost and that I would have to eat some.

"Have you got a lot of work done on your book?"

"No, we're really just beginning. It will probably take quite a long time."

The Lees looked at each other across the table, and there was a pause of a couple of seconds.

"Writing a book. That's something I'd never do. In school sometimes I liked to read."

"You read now, Richard. What are you talking about? You've got all kinds of subscriptions." Sharon nodded at us as if to reaffirm the truth of what she had said. She hadn't stopped smiling once, even when she was chewing.

"Yeah, well, Marshall sure could write though, huh? That guy had more damned stories in his little finger…" He shook his head and picked up a drooling tomato from his plate. "I think you've gotta be a writer when you've got so many crazy ideas and stories to tell. You'd blow up if you didn't get them down. What do you think, Tom?" He put the whole tomato in his mouth and talked through it. "Some guys got stories, all right, but all they got to do to keep from explodin' is to tell them. Talk them out and then they feel okay again. Like Bob Fumo, right, Sharon? This guy Bob can tell you the damnedest stories all night long and then wake up the next morning and tell you a hundred more. But he just tells them and then he's done. I guess guys like you have got it a lot worse, huh?"

"And a lot slower." I smiled at my plate and pushed some more of the fish around with my fork.

"Slower's right, boy. How long do you think it'll take you to finish off this one about Marshall?"

"It's really very hard to say. I've never written a book before, and there are a lot of things that I'll have to know before I can really get going on it."

Again there was a pause in the conversation. Sharon got up and started to clear the table. Saxony offered to help but was quickly smiled down.

"Did you hear that that Hayden boy that got hit out in front of your place the other day died?" There was no expression on Richard's face when he said it. No concern, no pity.

But I felt a whomp in my stomach, both because I had seen it happen and because it was a little boy who had been happy two seconds before he had been splattered all over the road.

"How are his parents handling it?"

He stretched and looked at the kitchen door. "They're okay. There's not much you can do about it, you know?"