The sweep of the sun lengthened. Windowpanes were lacquered with refracted fire. Sumac fronds hung wilted and benumbed as the whores and smellsmocks rose bedewed from the foxglove and nightshade. Strange creatures, averse or unused to so maledictive a sun, they were heir to a curious fragility, as if left to the depredations of the sun, their very flesh would sear and blacken, their limbs cringe and draw like those of scorched spiders.

Then I asked him how long it took him to compose those lines that scattered my mind and squeezed my chest. “Oh, however long it took me to set it down,” William answered. I called bullshit. And he said, “No. I hung drywall by day when I wrote that book, and I composed whole pages in my head while hanging boards.” Then he confessed that he had a photographic memory for words on pages. Even from other writers’ books. I drove in silence for a mile or two. Considering this man in the passenger seat.

When, short weeks after he died, I read the handwritten manuscript of The Lost Country, what pages had been found by then, and I came across the paragraph that included the book’s title, that time, too, my heart stumbled and I cried for the loss of my friend.

On one of our trips the bed and breakfast the college had lined up for us was, well, dainty, and heavy on the pastels. William went into his room and came right back out again. Didn’t even put down his bag. “Can we go to a motel? I’m afraid I’ll be swarmed and smothered in my sleep by butterflies.” We left. Found a handy motel where I thought up some story for our hosts.

We couldn’t blame our wrong turns on whisky. I never once saw William Gay drunk, co-piloting or not.

But he and I did belly up to a bar now and again. Like the night in Nashville we were parked on stools when three young women came to stand right beside us. They ordered drinks and scanned the room, blessing the barroom’s ambience with their centerfold looks. When they left in a swirl and sway, fifteen minutes later after one round of cocktails, I said, “Did you see that? I mean, those girls were clearly looking for somebody to play with and they did not even glance obliquely in our direction!”

William didn’t look up from his beer when he said, “I guess you ain’t checked your expiration date lately, have you?”

Another night, this time on Beale Street in Memphis, it was obvious how poorly we two fit into the scene when William said to me, “I’m ready to go anytime you are. This looks like a damned dress rehearsal for the bottom level of hell.”

William would always hang with me when we were out in some town. Never would he run off with a better offer to some livelier place when I was content to be that older guy and keep it low-key. He and I and Suzanne Kingsbury sat at a table together in the afternoon’s late sun in Jekyll Island, Georgia, during a weekend’s literary conference, and his editor came up to our table. She told William, “The car is here. It’s time to go.”

William said to me, “Come on, Sonny, let’s go.”

“Your friend can’t come with us,” the editor said. She did not look at me.

“We came together,” William said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She told William it was, of course, okay for him to bring the lady. There were people expecting him, she said, and they really should get going. William settled back in his chair and told his editor he was not going, and took up the conversation where we’d left off. He didn’t speak further to her. Neither did he look at her.