I went outside and got in my truck and got out of town quickly. I hated to think about my old dog lying there in the yard, unburied. I thought I might ride around for a while and think about him, and Mildred, but I didn’t know what good it would do. I had considered sending off for one of these pump-up penis deals but I thought they might be dangerous or at the least would not work.

Within ten minutes I was away from town and out on a back road that didn’t have lawmen patrolling it and I felt free there to open another suds I had iced down earlier. I knew that Mildred would want me in the bed beside her as soon as I got home, and I wasn’t looking forward eagerly to that. I felt like all our ministrations to each other were headed to a dead end and that nobody would care fifty years in the future what we had gone through. It left me feeling a little bit depressed and fearful, and I kept drinking, faster.

I rode for quite a while. I saw some cows loose from a pasture and weaved in among them. The locusts had crawled out of the ground after thirteen long years and when I stopped to pee on a bridge I thought my truck was still running because of them. They were beyond any loudness of bugs I had ever heard.