What wretchedness! Warlock barely made the house before another double entendre struck with ponderous violence, as if in its flip-flops his body was rejecting all of the amplitude beneath the skin. Why was there flu on earth? Hot tears of injustice fell on his bare thighs. And there should be laws against the drugs that dropped one so violently from so high a perch. It was like a fucking airplane crash. Perhaps Rabun was mad as a hatter; he was certainly eccentric past acceptable bounds. Dad used to say that one half the population was always peeing in the pool that the other half had to swim in. It anyway would be a good while before he could face another pheasant.

By midnight his system had calmed down enough to allow him to take out his briefcase and sort the new batch of information. His concentration was shaky so he studied his favorite book of all, the Rand McNally road atlas. There was Florida hanging like a cumbersome dick down into the ocean; the association was unpleasant, but back in the old high school library some joker always defaced the Florida map into a dick. The girls would shriek when they hit that page, likely with false modesty as most of them were farm girls. There was an image of the most winsome girl in his 4-H group leading her heifer out to a tethered bull who was bellowing and blowing snot out of his nose, his ruby flag at full mast.