“I don’t believe he’s feeling real good right now,” he says to her disappearing back. When she goes inside, he watches her heading for the beer coolers at the back of the store and steps closer to the open window of the truck. He studies Mr. Redding from a vantage point of ten inches and notices that his lips are blue and his face is devoid of any color, sort of like, a lot like, an uncle of his who was laid out in a coffin in the comfort of his own home some two weeks before.

“Mister,” he says. “Hey, mister!”

Mr. Redding has nothing to say. Flenco comes rushing back out the door with three quart bottles of cold Busch in a big grocery sack and a small package of cups for whenever Mr. Redding feels like waking up and partaking of a cool, refreshing drink. She eyes the attendant suspiciously and gets in the truck and sets the beer on the seat between them, pausing first to open the bottle and set it between her massive thighs. She leans up and cranks the truck and looks at the attendant who steps back and holds up one hand and says, “Don’t mind me, lady, it’s a free country.” Then she pulls it down into D and roars out onto the road.

Flenco gooses it up to about sixty and reaches over briefly to touch Mr. Redding’s hand. The hand is cool and limp and she’s glad the fever has passed. He’ll feel better now and he’s had a nap, maybe, not be so irritable. Maybe she can talk to him reasonably. His temper’s never been good even when he was sober which hasn’t been much these last twenty years. Flenco wonders where all those years went to and then realizes that one day just built onto another one like with a mason stacking bricks. All those nights in all those beer joints with all that singing and stomping and screaming and women shouting out declarations of desire for the frenzied figure that was him just past his prime blend together in her mind and spin like carousel horses in a fun-house ride. They billed him as Uncle Elvis, and he’s told Flenco a little about his one trip up the river and how they’d hit you in the head with something if you didn’t act right, but those days are long gone and what does it matter now since the cars he stole were transient things and even now probably lie stripped and rusted out in some junkyard bog, a hulking garden of flowers adorning their machine-gunned sides?