Drive around awhile, he told her. Out of town somewhere. I’ve got to have some air.

They were not out of town before she commenced on him, as if it had taken her some time to gather her forces. She had many things to tell him. He listened absentmindedly, watched out the glass.

What do you have to say for yourself? she finally asked.

He opened his eyes. Not much, he said.

You son of a bitch. How do you plan on paying this money back? That was a big chunk of my motorcycle money.

He didn’t say anything.

You beat anything I ever saw.

Edgewater dug out the crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes the jailer had returned to him. He pulled one out and straightened it and lit it from the dash lighter. He turned and watched the sliding landscape. Houses thinning out, Memphis falling away at last, a weight lifted from his shoulders. He didn’t know where they were going but the countryside was slipping past, field and stone and fence, cows like tiny painted cows in a proletariat mural. A dreadful flat sameness to this western world. It went rolling away to where the blue horizon and bluer sky were demarcated by windrowed reefs of salmoncolored clouds.

She had never been so humiliated, she told him. She would never have treated him in such a fashion. She would not have done a rotten dog that way. She’d had no sleep, her job was in jeopardy, he was ruining her life.

They rode in silence for a time, getting into the country now.

You wouldn’t even have called me. I had to go looking for you in that terrible bar and hear about you picking a fight with some war veteran. What’s the matter with you? I should have just let you rot there.

He seemed not to have heard. Beyond the windowglass a man clutching the handles of a turning plow went down a black field so distant he seemed in some illusory manner to be pushing plow and mules before him. Edgewater wondered what his life was like. What his wife said to him when he came in from the fields, what they talked about across the supper table. He would have two children, a boy and a girl. Later he would tell them a story as their eyelids grew heavy and sleep eddied about them like encroaching waters. A flock of blackbirds tilted and cartwheeled and spun like random debris the wind drove before it.

I never sent for you, he finally said.

I know as well as anything you did it deliberately. Set this whole thing up. You couldn’t just walk away like anybody else. You have to get yourself locked up and ruin the nice dinner plans I had made and waste all that money.

Is there much more of this? he asked.

I’ve just about had it with you. And on top of everything else you’re the coldest human being I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some cold ones.

Well, I guess I could have left you a note. But people kept coming at me with blackjacks.

You invite it.