“Hey William,” he said. “I was just telling Sonny about you,” and clapped me on the shoulder.

I don’t know what I was expecting. First-time author, maybe a young college type. No, this writer had some miles on him. Older than me, I guessed. And with long hair, kind of curly. I couldn’t see his eyes. But something about him drew me in.

“Hey, Sonny.” His slow Tennessee voice was musical and had a kind of smile in it. He was wearing jeans and a rumpled black velvet-looking sport coat with broad lapels. Out of fashion.

Pretty quick I found myself sitting in a booth with the man. Just the two of us. And we fell into an easy conversation about editors. William’s heavy drawl was the real version of the fake thing that actors foist on moviegoers in hillbilly movies. It belied his mercurial intelligence and an English professor’s vocabulary. I asked him what he did besides writing. “I’ve hung some sheetrock,” he said. His wit shone a light you could read by in a dark corner. I decided I liked this guy a lot.

And like two men shooting pool, we took turns across the table. Him then me. Me then him. Ratchet-jawing like drunken sailors on leave in Barcelona, Spain. A pattern we’d follow in the years to come that would distract us in the car and make us miss our turns. Like overshooting a ten-acre clean, well-lighted interstate exchange, I-95 south off I-10 eastbound, that we didn’t catch until we saw the Atlantic Ocean in Jacksonville. I asked how in the hell did we do that? William did not like to drive, didn’t like to merge or go over bridges, and I had the wheel on all our road trips. William said, in matter-of-fact monotone, “I reckon we were talking.”

But our talking was not trifling gossip. It was on our New England trip that William explained to me why Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” was a perfect short story. Said if you removed or added just one word from it, you’d damage it.

Same ride I quoted by heart to him a paragraph from his The Long Home:

Morning. A hot August sun was smoking up over a wavering treeline. Such drunks as were still about struggled up beneath the malign heat slowly as if they moved in altered time or through an atmosphere thickening to amber. The glade was absolutely breezeless and the threat of the sun imminent and horrific.