“Twelve or fourteen pounds, maybe, if you talking about bass,” Noah told him. “I got some bigger catfish, but not bass.”

“He got a mess of them yesterday, I know that,” Taylor said. “And all I been hearing all summer is how bad the fishing is.”

“Could be they just beginning to bite,” said a younger man with a stubble of a beard and a sun-brown face.

“Could be,” Marshall Hawk, who had the look and heritage of an Indian, agreed, and he began the talk of how peculiar fish could be, feeding on everything from worms to dough balls to grains of corn at certain times of the year, then snubbing every kind of bait a man could offer at other times.

“Harder to figure out a fish than a woman,” Marshall said.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” another countered. “No need to give fish a bad name.”

And the men laughed the laughter of men when joking about women.

The talk drifted lazily, bringing argument about fish and bait and fishing times and certain habits of certain fishermen such as Littleberry Davis. Noah listened with amusement, having heard the debate many times, and he knew the arguments would eventually lead away from stories of fishing to topics that had the nature of jest in them. With men, it usually had something to do with women or cars or some game like baseball.

And he was right. Marshall said he needed to be leaving to go into Hayesville to buy new tires for his car, and Whitlow Mayfield suggested the reason he needed new tires was from driving too fast.

“If you drove like Howard, you could go a lifetime on a set of tires,” Whitlow observed, and the men laughed, making Noah realize that Howard Reynolds had a reputation for being a slow driver.

“Beats walking,” Howard said.

“Not by much, if you behind the wheel,” Whitlow countered, and the men laughed again.

The talk of cars and trucks filled the store porch with noise, louder than needed. And though he was with them—bodily with them—Noah felt distant, removed, somehow suspended above them, watching. It was like the view a bird would have of things, the view he had from the ladder while painting the store. It was a sensation he had felt before, something as mysterious as tricks he had seen stars play on clear, winter nights, when stars seemed closer to Earth.

He listened, making his nods, as Taylor told of his first car—an old model-T Ford—and of running it into a creek when chased by a dog. How the dog had stopped at the creek bank, braying loudly, probably thinking it had run the biggest fox on earth to water. His father had hitched a trace chain to the car and pulled it from the creek with a pair of mules, giving an opinion that motor cars would never replace good mules. Not even good goats.

And then Whitlow told his story of having ridden in a Pierce Arrow during a visit to Atlanta, told it in a way that left his listeners knowing the truth had been lost somewhere in the distance between Atlanta and the Valley of Light. It might have been a Packard but not a Pierce Arrow.