Don’t let this chair fool ya.”

“We’ll do it next time, Herb, that’s a promise.”

Mr. Smallwood starts his cab with a loud whooshing and drops it into drive so that the body bucks half a foot forward.

“I don’t know what happens sometimes, Frank.” Herb’s sad blue eyes suddenly fill with hot tears, and he shakes his big head to dash them away. It is the sadness of elusive life glimpsed and unfairly lost, and the following, lifelong contest with bitter facts. Pity, in other words, for himself, and as justly earned as a game ball. Only I do not want to feel it and won’t. It is too close to regret to play fast and loose with. And the only thing worse than terrible regret is unearned terrible regret. And for that reason I will not bend to it, will, in fact, go on to the bottom with my own ship.

I take four quick steps back. “I’m glad I met you, Herb.”

Herb stares at me, his face distorted by unhappiness. “Yeah sure,” he says.

And I am into the boxy, musty backseat of Mr. Smallwood’s Checker, and we shush off down Glacier Way without even so much as a goodbye to Clarice, leaving Herb sitting in the empty street, in his chair, waving goodbye to our tail lights, his sad face astream with helpless and literal tears.

7

Mr. Smallwood is the best possible confederate for my circumstances.

“You look like you could use a pick-me-up,” he says, once we are going, and hands back a bottle half out of its flimsy paper bag. I drink down a good gulp that makes me flubber my lips—it is peppermint and sweet as cough syrup, but I’m happy to have it in me, and take a second big gulp. “You musta had you a time,” Mr. Smallwood says as we hiss past the remnants of a long, charred building on the landward side of the lakefront road. A dismembered line of cabins stands opposite. The big building was once a Quonset hut with a barn built on behind, though snow is piled on its blackened interior timbers, one of which is a long bar. Grass has grown up. No one, apparently, has thought to find a new use for the land. My past in decomposition and trivial disarray.

“These peoples out here’re crazy,” Mr. Smallwood announces widely, steering chauffer-style with one huge hand on the plastic steering knob, the other stretched over the seat back. “Sur-burban peoples, I’m tellin you. Houses full of guns, everybody mad all the time. Oughta cool out, if you ask me. I ain’t been out here in years, couldn’t even figure out which street was which. I used to come out here all the time.” We pull up onto the expressway back toward Big D, invisible now in mossy green clouds that tell of snow and possibly a marooning storm. “Look here now.” Mr. Smallwood catches my eye in the rearview and leans backwards in his driver’s seat for a speculative stretch. “How much money you got?”

“Why?”

“Well, for a hundred dollars I could make a phone call up here at a gas station and the first thing you know, somebody be done made you feel a whole lot better.” Mr.