Among Larry’s pastimes, lowriding was the favorite. That’s what he called it, anyway, and what it meant was driving around, most often alone but sometimes with a friend, without any errand or destination, in the twilit hour of the day he called “the gloam.” He’d climb into his truck and from his driveway head right or head left, depending on his mood or his whim or where the big pinkening sky of the Yocona river bottom looked most inviting. The route stuck to back roads, never coming near the bustle of Oxford, about ten miles northwest of his homeplace. He drove slowly—so slowly, in fact, that his own mother used to complain about getting stuck behind him; she’d gun the engine and shake her fist at him as she passed. The truck was always a comfortable mess inside: a scree of cassette tapes on the passenger seat and floorboards, empty cigarette packs atop the dash, a book or two wedged somewhere. Sometimes he’d throw a small cooler of beer in the truck bed; at other times he’d stash a half-pint of schnapps up front. If he was alone, he’d ride around and think, engaging in a kind of county-road meditation, chewing his mental cud until the sun petered out.