Mr. Aaron was quietly benevolent. He never said anything. You as a stranger could say hi to him and he’d just grunt. He was my kind of people. I got a small green glass Coke for my whiskey toddy, and I settled on the bench. I had part of a pint in my game bag. Before long he brought around a hot Budweiser and we toasted each other silently. He despised all the needless words that people said. It was his store and he didn’t like loudmouths. Our darker brothers he especially turned a deaf ear on. Once I saw a darker woman pull up outside and want her air checked. He checked it. But it took him about thirty minutes. When she left, all four tires were very low.

He had a Mitsubishi TV we were watching with the sound turned off. My boots were thawing out beside the stove and water was puddling on the floor. Mr. Aaron brought a mop and swabbed and never said a word about the mess. He kept his beer in the candy case, hot. If kids came in giving him any shit he ran their asses off. I was almost swooning with delight. I knew he was ready with a war story.

“By God, I miss your daddy,” he said.

I was on my back, flat, drink on my belly. I didn’t even have to coax him sometimes. It was warm in there and I took off my coat. Here was a man who never turned down a drink of whiskey.

“By God, it was rough, too. Your daddy knowed how it was. I seen him in Germany one time he was riding on a tank with a machine gun in his lap. Stopped the tank and he had a bottle of brandy and we got drunk. Run that tank through some woman’s wash line and through a post office. Course that was after the worst fighting was over. In France them French girls run to meet us holding their dresses up, was so glad to see American soldiers instead of German. They was probably not a one of them over twelve years old had not been raped by Germans at one time or another.”

I felt like getting the crying jags over my father and him. But the whiskey will make you want to cry after it makes you want to laugh. I could have stayed with that old man forever. He had seventeen hundred silver dollars. He had two cars but he never went anywhere, and he ate Vienna sausage off the shelf. Had done it for thirty years.