Generals sought his advice on military matters, he and Blackjack Pershing had been just like that. (Taking the chalk of Pershing’s uncertain fingers, turning to the green chalkboard, signifying with dots and dashes the movement of troops across terrain contested by the maimed and the dying: No, the Germans’ll expect you here. If you’ll…) Had it not been for a crooked business associate he would have been a millionaire a hundred times over, for he had invented Coca-Cola. The formula had been stolen and sold out from under him.

“I bought one for a nickel in Topeka, Kansas,” Weiss said. “In a drugstore. It was my drink, right down to the secret ingredient. I could have wept.”

“I imagine so,” Winer said. “Did you ever see your partner again?”

“As a matter of fact I did,” Weiss said. “I saw him on State Street in Chicago in I believe it was 1922. He was driving a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost and he had a blondhaired woman with him who would have altered your heartbeat. Moseby just threw up a hand at me, casual, how do you do. And kept on going…but that woman. I’d have taken her on the White House lawn had the opportunity ever presented itself.” He fell into a ruminative silence. “Or any other reasonable place of her choosing,” he said after a time.

Weiss and his wife subscribed to several magazines and once a month or so they’d bundle them up and give them to Winer. Sometimes they’d give him books they’d accumulated. Once Weiss’s wife, Alma, gave him a new copy of Sandburg’s Complete Poems. Winer’s mother viewed this habit with suspicion, she kept thinking the gifts would be held out of the boy’s pay or someday they would be tallied up and retroactively accounted for, annihilating an entire paycheck.

Another habit Weiss had that the boy liked was that about nine thirty he looked at his watch and said, “Well, let’s drink one,” and they walked to the porch of Weiss’s house. Weiss opened the old icebox he kept stocked with Coca-Cola and homemade wine. He opened Winer a Coke and poured himself a glass of strawberry wine.

Winer studied his Coca-Cola, the slow rivulets of icewater sliding down the green bottle. “Did you bottle this one?” he asked innocently. “Or just buy it at the grocery store like everybody else?”

“What?”

“I thought maybe you just ran off a batch every two or three weeks.”

Weiss studied him above the rim of the upraised wineglass. He drank lowered his glass. “Respect for your elders is a trait not to be sneered at,” he told Winer after a time.

“You might amount to something someday if you didn’t work so damned hard.” Weiss told him that morning. “A man works as hard as you do doesn’t ever have time to make something of himself.”

“Do you want your money’s worth?”

“I’ll get my money’s worth. You go at every job as if it were the last one and you’re trying to finish up. You’ve got to get out of that. There isn’t any last job. You finish one and there’s another one waiting for you. You’ve got to pace yourself.”

Winer leaned on his spade, resting. Through the screened window the sky had darkened, clouds arisen in the west.

“Most folks around here are a little different,” Weiss was saying.