“Music! I am a man of music. I am just like Carl Perkins. Carl Perkins went to a dance, heard a boy tell a girl, ‘Don’t step on my blue suede shoes,’ came right home and took three potatoes out of a sack, and wrote the world’s most famous song right on the side of that grocery bag. Did you know that?”

“My mama took her pocketbook to the grocery store and she never came back,” said the little boy.

“Me and Carl Perkins,” said the man. “I see something, I hear a song. I can’t help it. I’m a man of music.”

We rode along for a little while then without talking, past weedy fields scrubby from drought, pecan groves, house trailers, and every now and then an old homestead with a crumbling chimney sticking up out of a thicket of leggy azaleas, and a Confederate rose in the side yard, full of frilly pink blossoms. Midway came and went—a little, closed-up town and some trash in the road, but it wasn’t much of a day for traveling and nobody else got on the bus. The little lady began to read a book of advice on how to live a noble life, one suggestion for each day of the year. The old man across from us slumped in his seat with his cheap acrylic sweater rucked up under his arms, gazing out the window, but no matter what went by, he didn’t look at anything. The Man of Music twitched in his seat and drummed an elaborate beat with his feet on the floor, heel and toe. Every now and then he would come out with a volley of thumps on the seatback and a snatch of a phrase: “…but uh-uh, honey, lay offa them shoes.”

After Choctawhatchee the countryside flattened out into miles and miles of farmland and planted pines. We had changed to a new time zone on the long bridge over the Apalachicola River; it was an hour earlier, and the soporific scenery and the low sun shining in through the windshield made it seem as if that late-fall afternoon were riding along with us on the bus and would just last forever.

The bus driver began telling us how, as a twelve-year-old boy, he had fallen under the influence of Governor George Wallace at a rally in Opp, Alabama. “I was mesmerized by Governor Wallace. I just had to see him again, so the next day I got on the bus and rode up to Montgomery to the governor’s mansion.”

“Knock me down, step on my face,” sang the Man of Music.

The little lady marked her place in her book with a velvet ribbon, closed it in her lap, turned to me, and said, “You may be wondering why I’m wearing these short white gloves.”