“King of the cowboys. I decided to duck work today. D’I wake you? You’re still in your bathrobe. Guess it’s only seven something.”

I let him inside.

“You found the loathsome one,” he said.

The sleeves of his shirt were rolled on his brown arms. He looked sun-tinged and he seemed more inhabited than he had before.

We stood uneasily, both staring at Raf.

“Say what you will, that boy can surely sleep,” Raymond said. “I gotta make a smoke run. You care to ride along?”

We took the Firecat, which Raymond wanted to drive.

“Well, I’m glad you caught up with him. How awful was it?” he asked me.

“I suppose it could’ve been a happier reunion, but at least he wasn’t bumping anybody at the time,” I said, and saw Raymond wince.

“I should be more careful with my phrasing,” I said.

“Whew,” said Raymond.

“It was nice of you to fall by.”

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t.”

He drove under the Loop into West University—a leafy neighborhood of old brick homes. The yards here were mostly rust-colored soil, but where there was grass it appeared a livid green.

“Magnolia Street,” Raymond said. “See that house with the arch?”

He meant a tidy one-story where a shadowed front porch had, strung under its arch, an empty parakeet cage.

“Woman lived there worked for my family for twenty years. Ida Consuela Nightingale. Half black, half Mex. She died just a year back.”

“Nightingale?”

“Ugly as her name was beautiful,” he said. “But her old man Harold loved her like life and breath. Harold’s probably inside there now, mourning. You know there wasn’t a day he didn’t deliver her to us. And then he’d be there to collect her. Always a little early. He didn’t want her on no bus and didn’t trust her to a cab, so he’d take time off work to chauffeur her. Forty-some years of marriage and they never were apart, except for their jobs. I kinda think that’s it, don’t you? The thing itself.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know, Raymond.”

“Well, I would,” he said.

He pointed at a checkerboard place with a neon script sign: “The Panaderia.”

“Best bakery in Houston. But back on what I was saying, what I want is like that, and nothing less. I don’t see the sense of anything less.”

We shared the last cigarette in his pack, taking puffs and passing it to each other.

Over a closed dry cleaner’s, on a plywood sheet, nineteen worn Michael Jackson posters were pasted. They were black and white with life-sized figures of Michael Jackson, and in splashing red “BAD” was printed nineteen times.

Vivaldi, my father had listened to. And Scarlatti and Handel. Bach, of course. Those composers had gone right with the magnitude of Mario’s sculptures.

Everything with him was hard and deductive and serious, but inflamed.