“How’s your leg?” I said. I always asked him about his leg. Most people who carried on their commerce there didn’t even know about his leg. I did. All the shrapnel had gone into the bone where they wouldn’t cut for it. There was a perfect circle of scar tissue on his calf that looked to me like a grenade ring.

He waved the question away with his hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “They’d might near have to cut my whole leg off to get rid of it. It’s pitiful what the world’s going to now.”

Somebody stopped beside the gas pump and waited five minutes for him to come out.

“I ain’t getting up again,” he said, then got up immediately for another beer from the candy case. He brought me back a pack of pigskins and threw them in my lap. The car pulled away.

“Damn niggers,” he said. “Think you ought to wait on em hand and foot. But you look at all this shit. Reason the government ain’t got no money right now is cause they shooting it all up in space. What damn good’s it do to beat the Russians to the moon? I ain’t going to the moon. Ain’t nobody in his right mind would even want to go to the moon. I don’t even think they been up there. I think they just took a buncha pictures over in Africa or somewhere.”

I was standing outside the Kream Kup in Oxford the Sunday afternoon Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We all looked up there. That was before I’d ever had any nooky. But by that afternoon in Mr. Aaron’s store, I’d had plenty.

I must have fallen asleep. There was a long period when nothing was said. I tried to raise up and I couldn’t raise up. I heard a rhythmic noise. The front door was shut and the lights were off. In my socked feet I could sneak. From behind the curtain behind the counter came the rhythmic noises. They stopped. I peeked.

Mr. Aaron was pulling a big one out of a lady who lived down the road. It looked like he might have hurt her with it the way she was taking on. I was back on the bench conked seemingly out when Miss Gladys Watson came through adjusting her white Dixie Delite uniform. Soon as the door slammed shut I raised up and said: “Who’s that?”