I stopped driving around the square but parked near it and walked back down the alley to my home away from home. The place was nearly deserted. Two drunks, on two stools, and the bartender was the only one who didn’t have his head on the bar.

I sat down and ordered a drink. I asked the bartender where everybody had gone to and he said a big party out in the county at a private lake and lakehouse. Some high roller had come in and invited the whole place out to his place, all drinks furnished, barbecue and hamburgers, swimming pool. The bartender was positive that everybody out there, most of them women, would get naked and lay in a pile.

I sat there. The bartender picked up a paperback Tom Clancy and took a powder. One of the drunks was on his way to the floor if nobody helped him pretty quick. Nobody helped him. He crashed over and laid on the floor, trying to go to sleep. It made me realize that there was a whole lot to be said for staying at home.

I kept sitting there, drinking, smoking a cigarette, looking at the guy on the floor. He might have been somebody’s daddy. I felt pretty bad about everything. I got into these funks about once a year and wound up in jail or running into a deer or running off into a ditch. Once in a while I’d tie a rope around my neck and go lie down in the river and let the fish nibble on me. I’d lie there in that cold, muddy current with those slick, muddy banks all above me and think about Daddy slogging through the mud of Europe, snipers crouching in hollowed-out transformers shooting fire down on him while he talked on the radio and reported their positions, rows of telephone poles jumping off their stumps when they blew them all in line with det. cord, the big deer he killed in Germany and the cold and awful snow. How we fished when I was a child. I wanted him back and I never got over missing him and I never told any of my friends how lucky they were that their fathers were still around. I never said, Be glad, buddy, you still got him.