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large handfuls. He has done it before in hotel rooms and on private ranches. Albert Kale is familiar with his pharmaceuticals, but he has no need for them now. He wants his system to be clean when they dredge this river outside his hometown, the river where all the kids used to swim and pitch bottles at passing boats until some girl on water skis took a Heineken in the eye and the cops started patrolling the shore.
    Albert Kale remembers his friend Jonah telling him it didn’t hurt to drown. He told him it was like drifting off to sleep, like suffocating in a dream, like falling forever. Albert Kale believed Jonah because they were nine years old and Jonah was from Austin and his Mom never went to church. Albert Kale believed him because Jonah claimed he had once fallen off a fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico, back when his Dad still lived with his Mom and they had two televisions in the house. As he drifted below the water, Jonah claimed, the fish followed him down from the surface. Their silvery shapes began to spell out his name as his chest filled with water. Jonah said it didn’t hurt, not until after. It was one of the Mexican labourers on the boat who pulled him out, who pushed the water out of his lungs and brought him back to life. Afterward, Jonah’s father told him all the splashing scared away anything worth catching.
    Jonah called sometimes from halfway houses on the Louisiana coast. He called asking to speak to his old friend Albert Kale. He called because Albert’s ads were all over TV down there, pictures of his benevolent face radiating calm, collected understanding. Albert Kale understood. He understood why a man might hit his wife, why he might cheat on his taxes, steal from his neighbour, or even bury his own child in the backyard without a marker to signify the crime. Albert Kale understood the weak and weeping masses that poured into his holy church on the second and fourth Sundays after the welfare cheques came out. He understood them all.
    The water begins to burble around Albert’s mouth and he considers undoing the seatbelt, but his hands are too cold. Jonah said they were still running the church’s ads alongside reports about Albert’s crimes, about the money that disappeared and all those people he promised salvation for a dollar ninety-five a day. Jonah called because all those sermons seemed to drip with the same words he told Albert—back when they were kids, back when Jonah couldn’t spell methamphetamine and didn’t like the taste of cold medicine. Albert hung up on him, but Jonah did not stop calling. He wanted Albert Kale to know about the two years in juvenile detention, about solitude and ping-pong and what it meant to be alone, surrounded by men with old teeth, new wounds and no fixed address.
    Albert Kale wants to keep breathing, but the water continues to slip through the cracks of his Camaro. He wants to rethink his options, reapply whatever twisted logic forced him to plunge his vehicle into the water this cold November. He wants to emerge from this enlightened, but the pressure keeps the doors shut. The locks have shorted out and his arms are so tired. His wife will not forgive him for this. She will smile because that is what she does, but she won’t forgive him.
    Albert Kale has no ID in his wallet. He can’t reach his back pocket to check, but he knows it isn’t there. It’s on a nightstand somewhere with all his old receipts. Albert Kale wants someone to remember what his face looks like before it bloats beneath the water, before all the fluids in his body begin to turn to gas. His face won’t look like it does on the billboards scattered throughout the Midwest, the ones staggered up and down the back roads and the highways through dead and depleted towns. His face in these ads is clean-shaven. His chins are tucked beneath a bright white collar. It’s his eyes though that cause motorists to pause, that cause men and women in motels without bibles to dial the