“Nonsense, my hands are registered throughout the Midwest….” He tried a weak jest.

“Don’t care about your hands, son. I ain’t being responsible for no guest going to no barbecue shack. I’ll go back and sneak in the kitchen and make you a nice sliced cucumber and mayonnaise sandwich. I even cut the crusts off.”

“Here’s a fucking cucumber for you, gramps.” He passed the old man a fifty when something less would have done. Warlock got the address.

On the way to West Palm Beach he reflected there was a great deal of Gone With the Wind shuffle to local blacks. Up until the late fifties, Laura said, the blacks towed tourists around in the hot sun in rickshaws. In the cities of the north it was best to be ubiquitously polite. How strong and bright and healthy the rich were; throw in obtuse, venal and paranoid to complete the picture. Marilyn’s father had ranted ad nauseum about the lazy poor to the extent that one imagined them encircling his Bloomfield Hills palace like a wagon train. Spread the goodies or you get it in the gizzard, his university poli sci teacher had said, a rowdy harbinger of the hip teachers of the sixties, who later peopled the religio-ecstasy cults of the seventies, and now were at the forefront of the wood stove revolution.

The blacks of West Palm Beach were of a different, more surly color. In the half-filled restaurant a drunk had pointed a finger and yelled bang bang bang. Warlock lit a cigarette and concentrated on the menu. There was a definite stiffening in the atmosphere and he wondered if he weren’t simply bothering these people for no good reason. Except hunger. The waiter-cook was built like a sumo wrestler, a wonderful specimen, and there was the urge to follow the man’s example. He ordered beer, beef and pork ribs, hamhocks and greens, baked beans and a side of raw sliced onion.

“You don’t fuck around, do you?” the man said.

“Love has stolen my energy. I haven’t eaten in recent memory.” The drunk in the corner repeated louder bangs. “That man doesn’t like me.”

“He thinks you’re a cop. You want your sauce mild, hot, hotter?”

“Hotter. Tell him I only bust businessmen.” He wouldn’t have worn the Haspel drip-dry and silk tie, but he intended to make a pass at the motel.

“William, shut your face,” the waiter roared. “This man only busts businessmen. I’m the only one here so ease up.”

The food was wonderful, he thought, during a long, almost vain attempt to find the motel. There was a streak of sauce on his tie but he fancied it resembled an abstract design of some sort.