That’s not all that bad. Woman’s thirst for knowledge. She was the best surgical nurse in northern Michigan and would have become a doctor had she not fallen in love with our hero while a senior in college. She dressed against her beauty when out of uniform, wearing loose fitting sporting clothes and no makeup. She was an ardent supporter of ERA and led a group of like minded women. She despised her vague similarity in looks to Farrah Fawcett and met with anger any fool who commented on it, from humble pump jockeys, to grocers, other nurses, doctors who should have known better. She was bright and graceful to a fault, but her pragmatism frightened her husband who was a Keatsian romanticist. She knew the ways of men and felt it only fair to exercise her own impulses as long as she obeyed the niceties of discretion. Thus at a convention of surgical nurses at the Renaissance Center she bedded a guest speaker in his suite far above the Motor City, in whose streets dope wars raged that would have appalled Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Fu Manchu. She pushed this maven from MIT back on his king sized, mirrored vibra bed, solemnly studied his erect penis until he was nervous, let out a long fugal laugh which was her habit before sex, and sat on it. By dawn he was ready to give up his wife, children, a full professorship. She gave him a peck and said don’t be silly. This was one little item her husband would never know, and scarcely reflected promiscuity on her part. It was simply that every year or two since she was married she would meet an especially intelligent man. She was that rare woman who fantasized about Linus Pauling.

Her mate, Johnny Lundgren, John Milton Lundgren, aka Johnny, aka Warlock to himself, a soupçon of mystery in a heartland so weather-wicked, so banal that in the midst of winter the populace was given to sucking eggs on Saturday night for want of anything else to do. The local Leelanau Peninsula champion, Don Schneck, went through seven dozen one snowy March evening before projectile vomiting set in, much to the amusement of his belching cronies. Eighty-four raw eggs is quite a whoop.

Johnny was a valedictorian. He owned three guns: a .38 pistol, a .35 Remington deer rifle, a 20-gauge shotgun, all gifts from his father and none of them fired in the past decade. He cleaned and oiled them every Fourth of July when firecrackers reminded him of his neglected weaponry. Johnny owned a large head, large hands and feet, large shoulders and thighs, giving the impression that he was larger than he was. His nose, teeth, and eyes were also outsized. He was a goofy fop and terribly intelligent, no longer to any particular effect.