Story opens, Mr. Redding is coughing in a café by the Yocona River, really whamming it out between his knees. He’s got on penny loafers with pennies in them, yellow socks, madras shorts, a reversible hat, and a shirt that’s faded from being washed too many times. His wife, Flenco, or Flenc, as he calls her, is slapping him on the back and alternately sucking her chocolate milkshake through a straw and looking around to see who’s watching. She’s got a big fat face, rollers in her hair, and she’s wearing what may well be her nightgown and robe. Fingernails: bright red.

“Damn!” Mr. Redding coughs. “Godamighty … damn!”

Flenco hits him on the back and winces at his language, sucking hard on her straw and glancing around. Mr. Redding goes into a bad fit of coughing, kneels down on the floor heaving, tongue out and curled, veins distended on his skinny forearms, hacking, strangling, and the children of the diners are starting to look around in disgust.

“Oh,” he coughs. “Oh shit. Oh damn.”

Mr. Redding craws back up in the booth and reaches into his shirt pocket for a Pall Mall 100, lights it, takes one suck, then repeats the entire scenario above. This goes on three times in thirty minutes.

Customers go in and out and people order beers and drink them at the counter on stools, but Mr. Redding lies back in the booth while his wife mops his feverish forehead with wetted paper towels brought by a waitress from the kitchen, along with another milkshake just like the last one. The hair on Mr. Redding’s forearms is dark and scattered, like hair on a mangy dog just recovering, and his sideburns sticking out from under the reversible cap are gray. Twenty years ago he could do a pretty good imitation of Elvis. Now he’s washed up.

“Oh crap,” he said. “Oh shit. Oh hell.”

Flenco mops him and sops up his sweat and sucks her big round mouth around the straw and looks at people and pats him on the back. Truckers come in with their names on their belts and eat eggs and ham and wash down pills with coffee and put their cigarettes out in their plates, stagger back outside and climb into their sleepers. Flenco looks down the road and wonders what road she’ll be on before long.

“Oh shit,” Mr. Redding wheezes.