“Okay.” Morgan unwrapped it, stuck it in his mouth.

“You’ve got to bite the end first,” Jones said. “Or just nip a piece off with this. Just enough to draw air.” He pulled a penknife out of his baggy trousers, handed it to Morgan.

Morgan sliced off the end like he was cutting a carrot and stuck the cigar in his mouth. “I don’t think I have any matches.”

“I figured.” Jones slid a gold lighter across the table. Expensive and old.

Morgan lit the cigar, puffed. The smoke went to his nose, hit the back of his throat hot and rough. He coughed.

“Don’t suck it in your lungs. Just puff slow and easy. It’ll last a while if you don’t suck it too fast.”

“Okay.” Morgan puffed again, blew out a cloud of blue-gray smoke.

Jones closed his eyes, ran a hand over his freckled, bald head. He breathed deep. “Boy, that takes me back.”

Morgan was getting the hang of it, not inhaling too deep. “Let me know if I can take a few shots of bourbon for you or run some call girls in here.”

The old man chuckled.

“This could be a poem,” Morgan said.

“You write it.”

Morgan was already juggling the syntax in his head, listing words that might go in the poem. Surrogate seemed too formal. The tone would have to be nostalgic, sweetly sad. He looked around for a pen, found one, and scratched a note to himself.

“Bob doesn’t smoke for you?” Morgan meant the ever-hungry giant who chauffeured Jones and ran his errands.

“Asthma,” Jones said.

Morgan flicked the ashes into a half-empty coffee cup. “Why poetry, Mr. Jones?”

“Because I don’t paint.”

Fair enough. “I’ve noticed a sort of submerged theme in your work. It’s reoccurs quite often.”

“What do you mean?”

“Easier to show you. Once I point it out, I’m sure you’ll see.” He pulled two of Jones’s poems from the stack, turned them around, and slid them side by side in front of the old man. “Read these and think about them thematically.”

Jones didn’t read them. “What the hell you talking about? Two completely different poems. This one’s about an arsonist and this other one is a man who kills people with piano wire.”

“Geeze, these things are so violent.”

“So what?”

Morgan shrugged. “In any case, those are just the vehicles,” Morgan said. He kept the cigar in the side of his mouth as he talked. He was beginning to like it. “Let me show you something.” He stood, scanned the bookshelf in his living room, and came back to the table with The Collected Works of Wallace Stevens. “Listen.” He read a poem:

“What’s going on in the poem?” Morgan waited, puffed the cigar.

Jones turned the book toward him. He read again silently, his lips moving. “This jar is changing everything just by being there. It’s making itself the center of the world.”

“But is it really?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it really doing anything? It’s just sitting there, right?”

Jones thought for a long time. Morgan didn’t mind. He was enjoying the cigar. He thought a cold beer would go well with the smoke, but it was still before noon and Morgan had recently set some new rules for himself.

He was getting his shit together.

Jones leaned back in his chair, rubbed his chin. “You know what I think?”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s both,” the old man said. “I think it’s doing nothing and everything at the same time. I think it’s only perception that makes it seem like it’s changing everything. Then again, maybe perception is all we got, right? So changing perception is like changing reality.”

Morgan took the cigar out of his mouth, looked at Jones.

Jones scanned the poem again. “Jesus. That’s a pretty fucking good poem. Once you figure it out.”

“Yes.”

“Got any more like this?”

“You can borrow the book.”

“Thanks.”

Morgan said, “That’s pretty smart, Mr. Jones. Not a lot of people get it right off.”

“Thanks, but I’d trade being smart for being able to smoke that cigar.”

The phone rang. Morgan set the cigar across the top of the coffee cup, excused himself, and picked it up in the kitchen.

“Morgan, is that you?” Louis Reams’s voice was edgy and hushed.

“It’s me.” Morgan hadn’t spoken to the professor since the bicycle incident.

“Have you seen Pritcher? The big faker is walking around campus wearing this ridiculous neck brace. He’s been asking a lot of very pointed questions too.”

“I think you need to consider that he might really have been seriously hurt,” Morgan said.

“Ha. I know better. He’s out to get me. Yes, I admit it was a lapse in judgment, a bit juvenile.”

“A bit.”

“But now he sees his chance. If he can prove I did it, he’ll have me by the balls. That’s just what he wants, the son of a bitch. Morgan, you didn’t mention what happened to anybody did you?”

“No.”

“I need you to keep it under your hat. You wouldn’t tell would you? That would be playing right into his hands.”

“I said I hadn’t mentioned it.”

“You won’t will you?”

“I’ll keep quiet.”

“Good man.” Reams sounded relieved. “I knew I could count on you. I’m going to pay you back.”

“That’s okay.”

“Really. I want to show my appreciation.”

“Reams, I don’t want you to pay me back.”

Reams didn’t hear. “I know a fellow down at San Gabriel College in Houston. They’re going to need a one-year poet next fall.”

Now Morgan was listening. He’d sent out at least thirty applications for next fall and had turned up nothing. Securing a job for next year would take a big load off his mind. And he wouldn’t have to track down Ellis for the ridiculous poetry reading. Wouldn’t have to be under Whittaker’s thumb.

“I’m listening,” Morgan said.

“Not now,” Reams said. “Got to go. Got to keep an eye out for Pritcher. Can’t stay in one spot too long.”

“Reams-”

He’d already hung up.

Morgan returned to the table. “Sorry.”

“You’ll let it go out.” Jones pointed at the cigar.

“Right.” He stuck it back in his mouth, resuscitated the glowing tip with sharp puffs.

“You know what that jar poem made me think of?”

Morgan kept puffing but arched his eyebrows.

“When I was ten years old, my father took me camping way back in the Catskills,” Jones said. “It wasn’t like it is now. You could find a forest, go back in there for days.”

“Did you fish?”

“No. Just hiking. I liked to build campfires, cook over the wood coals. For some reason a hot dog tastes better in the woods. You get away from the city and you can really see the stars.”

“I like to fish,” Morgan said. “Supposed to be some good trout streams over the line into Arkansas.”

“I’m in the middle of a fucking story here.”

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“Anyway I’m hiking pretty far. Dad and me had been hiking all day and it was starting to get dark and we’re way gone into the woods, deeper than we’ve ever been before. I’m thinking maybe we’re walking in a spot where nobody’s ever been before. Maybe we’re the first people ever. You ever think that when you were a kid?”