He pushed aside the fat, fresh Free Press with scorn. Fat papers for fat, slack minds. He drew out of his briefcase the single page of terse clean prose he would pass on to Rabun. It seemed too bold in the light of the natural conservatism of morning: while composing it the night before his mind was cold and strident, but now he missed all the emotional connectives. What the fuck. It was too late now. He had barely enough time to shower and shave before dressing for lunch. What appeared now as a sore point was in the last paragraph of the memo. He had begun by complimenting the doctor on the wisdom of the choices in the core of his portfolio. Then he went off on a meandering tangent that centered on fat as a metaphor: the doctor’s “personal holdings” were likened to a mass of inefficient fat on a body, and so on. Warlock was the man to pare the fat. He concluded that his salary be paid against a recovery fee of twenty percent of pretax profits. This followed the obvious notion that books were easily jimmied and a CPA could only deal with the figures given him. How could Rabun determine the actual number of people who actually stayed in his motels, how many people visited his fat clinic, how many boats were stored at the marina? There was room at the bottom of both copies of the memo for their signatures. God, how dare I, he thought with blood rushing to his face. The problem had to be the three whiskeys. Just before he went to college Dad had taken him out to the garage with a six-pack of beer. There were a lot of flies in the garage and Warlock had been instructed to catch five flies with a hand then chugalug a beer. He did both with grace. The second five flies were a little harder but the beer went down easy. At the end of an hour, and the six-pack, he felt like puking and couldn’t catch a single fly. His father, a steady drinker himself, marched off without a word after this curiously Oriental lesson. Warlock had stood leaning dizzily against the workbench thinking, who the fuck wants to catch flies anyhow? What do they make flyswatters or fly sticky strips for? I’m going over to Marcia’s and show her and her sister the old what for by god. Marcia’s burly father, a rural milkman, had immediately tossed him out of the house and called his parents. He puked on their lawn, more in sickness than in vengeance.