I felt sort of bad for the guy. I didn’t know if I needed to go talk to Daddy about it or not. I figured the guy was holloweyed, sat in a dark room with his mother watching TV all day long, eating popcorn, and waited for late evening before he started stalking his lusts. I was beginning to get a pretty good mental picture of him already. He was about fifty, with wattley skin around his neck, shaky hands, maybe a dirty cap pulled down low over his eyes and white stubbly whiskers on his jaws, weak chin, bad shoes, one of those belts about ten inches too long for him with the excess hanging loose. Yeah, he was starting to form up in my mind. He was a wimpy sumbitch from back yonder. His had not been an easy life, and he might not have all his mental faculties. He might stand in line at the welfare office every Wednesday, holding his mother’s hand, and she might have cared for him like this since he was a baby. She might’ve had bad love, or love run off, or he might’ve been in the womb too long. They had some little awful house way back up in the woods around London Hill or somewhere, with tin cans out in the yard and mud on the porch, and bleak was a word they didn’t understand, since that was the world as they knew it. She didn’t know why he took off like that in the evenings sometimes, and she’d never recognized that he might have secret needs he was too scared to tell anybody about, or maybe she didn’t even think about stuff like that.

I made one long slow circle through Potlockney and DeLay and came back up through the Crocker Woods, cut through to Paris and back through the Webb Graveyard Road, but I didn’t see a blue Ford pickup parked anywhere. I knew he was back home by then, sitting on the floor in a dark room right in front of the television, his eyes blank, his hand cramming popcorn in his mouth, the lights of the “Bill Cosby Show” flickering across his face, his mother asleep on the couch behind him, unaware of the twisted needs in him, a mindless drooling idiot, someone without enough sense to turn the television off, chewing, thinking about my wife, where to try it tomorrow, a motherfucker you could crush.

Later on that night I wound up at Daddy’s, drunk, as usual, when I went over there, him laying up there all by himself waiting for me, patient, never looking when you walked in like he was even expecting company. We never argued any. I always told him something or asked him something and he gave me some advice and I took it. It wasn’t any different this time.