Now the dealer was lost in his thoughts. He felt put upon. It seemed to be raining in his heart. He thought about his trip to Ireland the summer before. One dawn while his wife slept, he left the hotel and accompanied an old man on his horse-drawn milk run. He had felt wonderful lifting the cans of fresh milk onto the wagon.

“Get out of here, you crazy fucker,” the dealer had said in an Irish brogue that came out of the walls.

“Just remember, Subaru is going to leave you guys eating shit for years to come,” Lundgren had replied—simply “Lundgren” at the time because it was another month before he would regain Warlock by virtue of a dream.

As he stood at his Subaru door in the yard of their rented farmhouse certain doubts arose. How did one maintain the purity of vision, say as an anchorite gives himself to Christ forever and forever, let alone the almost science fiction job of changing your own future? He looked up at the spreading maples and noted how quickly the pastels of May enriched themselves into the deep greens of June. The alfalfa field next to the driveway was a din of bees. Staring at the impenetrable shield of leaves above him he thought how in the movies of his youth the crown of a sorry battle-torn coconut tree could hide a Jap sniper. Battle weary Sgt. Luke Fisk of Lawrence, Kansas, would amble by the tree and get his brains blown out despite his cumbersome helmet. Warlock’s father had told him that Japs could hide in these trees because their heads looked like coconuts. Any fool knew that. After the movie they always had a chocolate soda at Bonsal’s drugstore.

It would take some concentration he thought, sliding into the car. The human mind is not easy to push around. For instance, standing in the yard and thinking about how to change the future his brain had lost itself in maple leaves, then on to World War II and coconuts. He still didn’t like coconut in any form. Diana did a certain form of Oriental meditation up in her attic hideout, her private place. Her old college friend, Gretchen, had started her on it, along with a preoccupation with some truly nasty health foods. The door to the attic was, not incidentally, kept locked. The first time in their seven year marriage that she had slapped his face was when he had quite drunkenly teased her about keeping a “date with a dildo” in her room.