It could work, but everything had to go right. Longstreet was six hours down the river. We did two hours that night and anchored behind the point of a sandbar. I hadn’t shaved since we left St. Paul, and the beard was coming on.

“There’re too many white whiskers in it,” LuEllen said. “Writers have white beards; painters are supposed to have black. I’ve never seen a movie where the painter had a white beard.”

“I look like Hemingway,” I suggested. “Except taller and better-looking, of course.”

The next morning I added to the effect with my artist outfit: tan baggy-assed shorts, Portuguese rope sandals, a New York Knicks T-shirt, and a broad-brimmed canvas hat. LuEllen admired the outfit extravagantly. During the final run down the river she fell into periodic bursts of the giggles. I put it down to stress. We arrived at Longstreet at eleven o’clock and eased into the ramshackle marina I’d seen on my first trip down.

The marina operator wore a cap that said “Port Captain.” He had an easy, sun-lined face that hadn’t seen much of anywhere and didn’t much care.

“How y’ doin’?” he asked cheerfully. He took a quick look at me and a longer one at LuEllen. LuEllen was wearing a beige sundress that had a pattern of small rectangular holes across the bodice. There was no indication that she was burdened by a brassiere.

“Pretty good,” I admitted. “You got hookups?”

“Sure do,” he said. “Y’all planning to stay awhile?”

I hopped up on the dock. “Maybe a week, maybe two, it depends,” I said. Up in the town I could see the tops of Victorian-era clapboard houses lapping around the edges of the business district. “I’m a painter. Last time I came through here, I saw some nice landscape.”

As soon as I said the word painter, his eyes shifted, and I figured we’d be paying in advance.

“I’m sure there is,” he said.

“How about if I give you a week in advance? If it works out, we’ll give you another week.”

My stock went back up. He hadn’t had to ask for the money, and we had avoided an awkwardness. “That’d be fine,” he said. “It’s fifty cents a foot, up to twenty dollars a day, with another dollar for every person over four?”

There was a question in his voice, and LuEllen said, “There are only the two of us.”

“So that’s twenty dollars a day for seven days; that’d be a hundred and forty dollars,” I said. I took out a pad of traveler’s checks. “Do you take American Express?”

At the Memphis meeting, we’d talked about how we’d bring ourselves to the attention of the mayor in the most natural way. Harold suggested that we catch her during lunch.