“I was young once. I can’t chase pussy with gout. No man can fuck when his foot hurts that bad. It’s a known fact.”

“Not even for Ava Gardner?”

Warlock mentioned the butcher’s favorite, along with Angie Dickinson of Police Woman. It was amazing how often Angie came up in northern Michigan. Despite all the youth propaganda it was a forty-seven year old mother who loomed larger than any playmate in minds and peckers of American manhood.

“Johnny, Ava might turn me around but it’s doubtful she’ll show up here. The fun’s over for old Frank.” The butcher’s face turned so bleak that Warlock felt a melancholy empathy. Then the young, pretty wife of a stockbroker pushed her cart up beside him. She was damp with sweat and wearing a yellow tennis outfit, with little cotton tassles on her shoes. They stared at her so blankly she became flustered and blushed. Warlock grabbed a package of turkey legs.

“You’re pretty,” he said, not waiting for a reply.

Back home in the kitchen he interrupted a fantasy about the woman in the yellow dress to pour a glass of wine and ponder the problem of turkey legs. He drank deeply. What the fuck am I going to do with turkey legs? He had looked at her brown, damp legs and grabbed a package of turkey legs. Perhaps a nourishing soup. Something simple that would calm Diana after a long bloody day of passing weapons to stud butchers. What would she look like in the back of his Subaru in that yellow outfit without undies? Please, Johnny, I need you, she said pointing a Converse skyward. Hot soup it would be.

Unfortunately he fell asleep and the soup boiled down into what luckily bore a resemblance to gravy. He rubbed the sleep from his face and made a cup of coffee. What could he do with a quart of gravy? Why was he sleeping twelve hours out of twenty-four? Shit. He stared at a largish rutabaga Clete had given him from his well stocked root cellar. He felt a sudden surge of creativity.