And that was that; we were off, or, I should say, I was off. Our food came and I kept talking. While Jim ate his quesadillas, looking at me and nodding while he chewed, I talked over my guacamole about things I didn’t even know I had a thought on, about San Antonio and how city life disagreed with me as much as it concurred; I didn’t like the streets staying lit up at night. Through my bedroom window off Bandera, I told him, came the orange glow of the neon laundry sign across the street. Up in the panhandle there had been nothing but pure night out my window. From my bed, I used to crane my neck and look out past the roof overhang to a spangle of stars. Many nights there’d be nothing, just a blackness so black my lightless room had color to it. I talked about Mahatma Gandhi getting shot to death that year; I mentioned dead Papa, who was always kind; I went on about meanness for a long while, saying how much I despised it, though I don’t recall what precisely I referred to. I do remember ending the point on him, on the way he took a chance for that chico de zapato. Jim was, and is, a very humble man. That was the first time all evening his cheeks got red. He tried to hide it, pointing out how hot the jalapeños were in his quesadillas, but no go, Joe.

This sounds like such a cliché, but it is unfathomable to me that James Suther and I have only been together seven years; I’ve known Jim since he was a babe in another life, I’m convinced. Not a string of cosmic muscle on his bones can have escaped my senses. But, getting back, I made myself shut up by forking guacamole and lettuce into my mouth. I let Jim talk. Not much came out, so I asked him where he got that funny accent that sure wasn’t Texas. Massachusetts is the last place I would have guessed. My notion of this state was Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party and rich Yankees called Brahmins. Guitar Jimmy looked like Montana to me, or Maine perhaps. He said that his father was also gone, killed when a half-built bridge he was pouring collapsed. Four others died with him, their bodies floating underwater all the way down the river to the Connecticut border.

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Sixteen.”