After swimming he had stopped at Clete’s to say hello, and the vulnerability of his hangover, in addition to all the recent violence, had made him feel weak and strange. He found Clete standing with bow and arrow beside his crystalline spring fed trout pond. The trout were fed on pellets and couldn’t be caught on flies and worms because flies and worms didn’t smell or look like pellets. Clete would throw pellets to bunch up the trout, then shoot an arrow attached to a string into their midst.

“Want a shot?”

“Nope. No thanks.”

“You look like you been boiled in shit.”

“Thanks. I’m not at the top of my form.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I’m going to change my life.”

“Good idea.”

“Why?”

“You’re not doing anything. Not hard to improve on a vacuum.”

“You got a point. I’ve got some ideas.”

“Every time I pass the cemetery on the way to work I get the feeling we don’t live forever.”

“You’re probably right.”

They ate fried trout and some homemade bread and butter washed down with glasses of George Dickel whiskey. Warlock offered up a long keening explanation of his life but stopped when he noted Clete was dozing. In the summer Cletis worked up to sixteen hours a day as a block layer and had a tendency to doze when not immediately engaged. Then he raised one eye with a quip.

“Don’t you know everyone’s life is shit? You’re smart enough to do something about your own. Don’t be such a drag-ass.”

On the way home it occurred to him he didn’t want to be a drag-ass. Advice of any sort had always been particularly difficult for him in that there seemed such a tremendous abyss between the wisdom of advice and reality. In grade school he always confused reality and realty, staring in silent confusion from the back of their two-tone ’47 Chevy, as his father drove past a realty office.