A wind from nowhere leaned on the odd trees around the T-EX, combed the grass in the tiny yard, flattened stands of sun-crisped wild flowers.

I zipped down my window. This wind felt hot. The north sky was plum. Overhead, the sky had gone cobalt and there were brushstroke clouds, furry clouds.

I said hi to the pregnant girl in lime green. Her arms were folded above her big stomach and she was walking, aimlessly it seemed, up and down the yard.

Raymond swung out of the store now, clutching an un-bagged carton of True Blues and a webbed six-pack of diet sodas. There was a snap to his hips as he walked. He had no more waist than I and he carried a lot of shoulder. The sun shone on his blond, metal-bright hair. I hadn’t seen anything quite so good on the hoof since the diving pool lifeguard when I was sixteen.

I considered the next car—the guy’s red underpants trophy; and the pregnant child roaming the T-EX yard there. I decided the rank steam heat of this city must knock its people sideways.

Riding back, Raymond said, “That was exaggeration about Harold and Ida Nightingale. You believe everything, don’t you?”

“Down here I do. You mean that wasn’t true?”

“Four-eighths true.” He bit the sealing strip of cellophane from a fresh cigarette pack. “I was makin’ a point,” he said.

He said, “You know what Raf was doing when I first met him?”

“Uh, guessing could take a while.”

“It was weird. Weirdest. We were both on the freshman squad there at Princeton. . . .”

“You really were at Princeton? I mean, Raf told me that. . . .”

“But you didn’t believe it. Football,” Raymond said. “They didn’t give athletic scholarships in the Ivy, but they could make things plenty easy for a good linebacker and I was that. ’Course then my pa was an alum, and there’s recruitment quotas—like they gotta have a certain number from the Southwest and so forth.”

“Still,” I said. “You must’ve been a pretty sharp tack.”

Raymond said, “And I was only there two years ’fore they booted my butt out. But so here’s Raf and me and we’re the stars of the freshman team, so we buddied up.”

Raindrops appeared on the windshield and wriggled down in zigzag patterns. Raymond got the wipers clicking.

“So our teammates there had money to throw away, some of them. And what Raf’d do was draw pictures for ’em, for pay.”

“I’ve heard about this,” I said.

“Guy would say, ‘Draw me a chick,’ and Raf would do it, real as any photograph. And the guy’d say, ‘Longer legs,’ so Raf would just erase and make changes. And then the guy would say, ‘Now draw another chick on top of her.’ And Raf would tell him, ‘That’ll cost an extra five, you know?’ ”

“A commercial artist,” I said.