“You seemed like you would. You didn’t fight it until after the last minute. My job is to tell you what the choices appear to be. Your job is to make them. Either reorganize your life so you make all the payments, all the time, on time, and even have some way to demonstrate that you’ll be able to keep it up…”

“Like what?”

“Like a job with a paycheck. Or an annuity.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Or, you figure out how to pay it off. All of it. Or you lose.”

I surprised myself. I said, “I’m not going to lose.” And I sounded to myself like I meant it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ROAD KILL

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?

In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill?

You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep…”

RAYMOND CHANDLER, THE BIG SLEEP

I’D HAD THREE MORE CALLS from Maddie. None of which I answered. She told me of her woes again and again. On my answering machine.

Once, long ago, when I was young, in love, full of lust, and casually adulterous, with a lovely Puerto Rican girl with liquid eyes, the kind of eyes you could fall into, like Homer’s wine-dark sea, I got death threats on my answering machine from her husband. My assessment was that if he was actually going to kill me, he wouldn’t go out of his way to establish a record of it before the fact. It seemed a good rule of thumb to doubt the accuracy of what people say when they know they’re being recorded.

That reflexive restraint, like so much else, seems to be fading in the age of social media, selfies, Tumblr, tattle, Twitter, uberhorny, and maturesforfuck. Yet with Maddie, I had the expectation that certain veneers of dishonest civility would have remained.

I still didn’t call her back.

—

I went to breakfast. I read my New York Times. Two obituaries caught my attention. Jimmy Johnson had been one of the Swampers. Back in 1969, they’d opened Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in an old coffin warehouse. He’d played with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Dylan, Duane Allman, Leon Russell, the Rolling Stones, and Willie Nelson.

Robert Mugabe, the president for life of Zimbabwe, was the other.

The white man had made great soul music. The black man had run his country into the ground. It seemed like a significant racial reversal. But no one said so.

I finished my coffee and headed back home.

A car pulled out behind me and followed. There’s only one street that runs all the way through town, and if you’re headed west to Mount Tremper, Phoenicia, Margaretville, Big Indian, or any of those places, there aren’t a whole lot of ways to go, so it didn’t necessarily mean anything. But it was a large silver Lexus.

—