Get that light out of my eyes, will you officer?

If you were as funny as you think you are you’d be something else. If you were as anything as you think you are you’d be a worldshaker.

He was silent. He drank the rest of the orange juice and slid the carton into the floorboard. He glanced covertly at her when she stopped for a redlight. The car had a straight shift that was awkward for her. She missed low gear when the light changed, the car jumped and died. Well shit, she said. A wisp of ash hair had straggled from beneath her scarf, curled onto her forehead, she blew it away. She looked angry.

I was at the library, he said. For a while. Then I just wandered around. I was in that bar awhile, the one on Central.

She did not reply, showed no evidence of placation.

They were in an older section of town, driving past mansions of splendid opulence, immaculate lawns where the grass looked as if it had been trained to grow some precise height and then cease. Rococo statuary arrogantly watched their covert passage, the battered old car did not linger long midst this splendor. The old mansions fell away, the houses grew ever smaller, tackier, as if they adhered to some abstract rule of diminishment that would render them infinitesimal should they continue long down this way. They drove on, like water that sought its own level.

This was Memphis, Tennessee, the middle of April in 1955, washed-out sunlight running on the storefront glass like luminous water. She was driving down a series of sidestreets in these steadily degenerating neighborhoods. What winos and such streetfolk were as yet about seemed stunned by this regenerative sun and so unaccustomed to such an abundance of light that they drifted alleyward as if extended exposure might scorch them or sear away their clothing. Bars and liquor stores contested for space on these narrow streets and both seemed well represented. They had a stunned vacuous look to them and their scroll-works of dead neon waited for nightfall.

She glanced across at him.

God, I hate the way you dress, she said. I’m going to have to buy you some clothes.

Edgewater was wearing a Navy dungaree shirt and jeans held up by a webbed belt the buckle of which proclaimed us navy. I’m all right, he said. I’m waiting for the loincloth to come back into fashion.

Listen. You’re going to have to bear with me on this. Just hang in there no matter what happens, okay?

Wait a minute. What does that mean, no matter what happens? I thought we were just picking up your motorcycle.

Well, you know. They were my in-laws, after all. There might be a few hard feelings.

Here were paintlorn Victorian mansions where nothing remained of opulence save a faint memory. Rattletrap cars convalescing or dying beneath lowering elms. Shadetree mechanics stared into their motors as if they’d resuscitate them by sheer will or raise them from the dead with the electric hands of faithhealers. There were unkempt grassless yards with dump-replevied lawn chairs blown askew by spring winds and derelict automobiles entombed, parts-robbed, on cinder blocks.