If he wasn’t alone, of course, he’d spend the ride talking. It was the best kind of talking, because unlike at the bar, or even back at the house, there were no interruptions or competing voices. There wasn’t any rush, no need to get to the point; you weren’t going anywhere to begin with. He’d talk about his writing, his reading, his family, the letters he’d received that day, the bushhogging he’d done or needed to do. He’d play new music he’d bought or been sent (musicians were always sending him their albums). He’d spy a coyote in someone’s field and stop the truck to gawk at it, as excited as if he’d discovered a new species. But always, at least with me, he’d narrate the landscape. Larry always expected me to move out that way, when and if I ever settled down, so occasionally his narration was like that of a Realtor: pointing out land and houses that could be had for cheap, quiet-looking places where one could write unbothered. But mostly he just told stories about passing landmarks, essentially dropping narrative pins on a private map of Lafayette County. The Dumpster on Delay Road where some dude used to jump out and expose himself. The bend on Old Taylor Road where a car chase once paused so that a sleeping dog in the road could rise, stretch, and dodder off, the sheriff’s deputy and his quarry resuming the chase the moment the dog was clear. The stretch of road, skid marks long faded, where two boys in a car doing ninety hit a tractor-trailer broadside, where it’d been up to Larry’s fire crew to extract their almost-decapitated bodies. The abandoned house on a scraggly pine ridge that he bequeathed to his fictional Jones family, in the novel Joe, so they’d have somewhere to squat.

Larry didn’t navigate the way other people might, on a relaxed joyride. He didn’t take a road to see where it led. He knew where every road led. He knew where to slow down because certain dogs had a thing for chasing cars. He knew whose fence it was that had a break in it, and that he ought to call him later to make sure his cattle hadn’t escaped. He knew, for the most part, who lived in the houses and trailers he’d pass, and more important, he knew their stories: what they’d done and had done to them. And he let those stories go drifting into his.