“Oh God,” I say, surprised at the surprise that everyone’s been able to sneak up on me lately. “Has everyone on earth heard about it?”

“No, no. Not everyone,” Herk assures me. He makes contemplative, arithmetical gestures with his fingers, as if the numbers are too high to calculate without aid. “Drop the nine, carry the one...”

“All right, all right,” I say. “Funny.”

“What are you looking at so hard in there? Nudies of Queen Latifah?”

Herk is big. Really big. His big mouth often gets him into fights, and he often gets out of them by standing up. That’s the size of his size. I mean, he has loom. One time at the Snug Bar some guy tried to start something with him. Standing up and blotting out the light from the bulb overhead didn’t discourage him, so when the guy started pushing Herk, he enclosed the guy’s hand in his. Gripping a beer bottle, the guy’s hand inside Herk’s was so small it looked like a child’s grasping a sippie cup. “You’re about to make a very bad mistake,” Herk said, smiling. “Why don’t you just go on home?” But the guy wouldn’t be discouraged. He unwisely cocked his other arm and started launching a punch that never got off the runway. Herk, still smiling, just squeezed and: smash. He shattered the bottle by crushing the guy’s hand over it. Beer and shards of broken glass went everywhere, but primarily into the fleshy parts of the guy’s palm.

If Herk ever gets tired of pulsing, I always tell him, he’d make great muscle.

Anyway, probably because of his own impractically enormous body Herkimer only admires larger ladies. Tall is good, sure—he has pics of Gabrielle Reece all over his locker—but big and tall both? Now you’re talking. His number one is Queen Latifah. He has an ongoing crush on Mrs. Hulk Hogan. Ditto postmenopausal Elizabeth Taylor. It’s part of the regulations that Charlie cannot ever meet Herkimer, but I have shown Herk a million pictures of her, and he thinks her build—all cheekbones and slenderness and whippetlike muscle—is laughable. “Pretty cute,” he said, “for a splinter with tits and hair.”

“Yeah,” I say now, unwilling to tell even Herk about the sailboat. “Sort of.”

I pop a couple of tabs of dendrotoxin, just for the nerves. Herk sees it but doesn’t say anything. Like everyone else, he thinks my method is weird, but he’s not one to talk. He’s a devotee of some kind of Taoism that I’ve never heard of. He thinks that saliva is the “Golden Elixir” of life and that by swallowing it a thousand times a day it will increase his resistances. He engages in “testicle breathing” and thinks that body hairs are antennae that receive signals from the universe around them. “Gotta lubricate the receptors,” he’ll say as he consumes his lunchtime avocados and Spam. “Don’t laugh. It’s follicle food, son. Why do you think your hair pricks up when there’s trouble? What do you think goose bumps are, man? They’re God’s Distant Early Warning system.”