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had got the woman to kill Roland, nobody in the family seemed surprised.
    Elvin was saying now, “This is a pretty street, you know it? Look at those palm trees. Those are the tallest palm trees I ever saw.” He said, “I wouldn’t mind living over here. It sure beats the shit out of Delray Beach.” He said, “Summer I’d go back to the Glades, though, get me an airboat.” He said, “Not too much traffic now, huh? The snowbirds’ve all gone home. I don’t know why anybody wants to live up north. I go even as far as the Georgia line I get a nosebleed.” He said, “Go on over to Ocean Boulevard and turn south.”
    Now they were riding along next to the Atlantic Ocean, black out there all the way to the sky.
    Elvin said, “Nice public beach but no place to park. So it becomes a private beach for all the rich people live along here behind their walls. It’s interesting how rich people fuck you and you don’t even know most of the time they’re doing it, huh? I had a cellmate my last year at Starke name of Sonny? Cute boy, use to work for a rich doctor. He’s still rich, only he isn’t a doctor no more. They took his license away.”
    Dale said, “Right there’s where Donald Trump lives.”
    Elvin said, “Is that right? Who’s Donald Trump?”
    Before they ate and were driving around West Palm, Dale had pointed out the building Barnett Bank was in, its shiny black glass rising above old structures around it, and said, “You know what they call that building? Darth Vader.”
    And Elvin had said, “Who’s Darth Vader?”
    Dale could see how he might not have heard of Donald Trump in prison, but everybody in the world knew who Darth Vader was. Either one, though, was hard to explain, so Dale let it go. Elvin wasn’t interested anyway. He wanted to drive down to Ocean Ridge.
    “What for?”
    “The doctor I mentioned?” Elvin said. “He lives there,” and began telling about Dr. Tommy Vasco and Sonny, who was his cellmate up at FSP his last year.
    “Actually it wasn’t quite a year. Couple of weeks before my release I sold him for two hundred dollars. Sonny had this blond hair you could see clear across the yard. I could’ve got more, but I let a buddy of mine have him.”
    Dale stared at his headlight beams on the two-lane blacktop, trees now closing in on both sides. He could feel his uncle, the size of him, sitting there in that cowboy hat. Dale set his tone of voice to be casual, uncritical, saying, “Well, I ain’t getting into any of that. I’ll tell you right now.”
    Elvin said, “I know cons that remain virgins, I’m not telling you it can’t be done.”
    Dale shook his head at the road. “I won’t even talk to a queer.”
    “Listen to me,” Elvin said. “I’m a person was never married on the outside. But you get in there, something happens to you. Soon as I was put in with the population I started looking for a wife. Generally speaking, you poke or get poked. They’ll fight over your skinny butt or you’ll fight to keep it your own. It’s got nothing to do with being queer, it’s how it is. Sonny come along toward the end there, I kicked out this puss I had and said that one’s mine, the cute blond. Don’t nobody even look at her. It was okay with Sonny. He’s the type goes along with whatever… Is this Ocean Ridge?”
    “Manalapan,” Dale said. “Ocean Ridge is next.”
    “Anyway,” Elvin said, “here’s this boy has to do a mandatory twenty-five on a life sentence and he’s I mean depressed, doesn’t think he can hack it. He needed somebody like me to cheer him up. See, he’d keep house, tend to my wants, and I’d take good care of him.”
    Dale said, “What’d he do?” watching the road, seeing condos and big homes now.
    “He killed a woman. Beat her to death and got first-degree.”
    Dale said, “Was this in the newspaper?”
    “It musta been, was about a year and a half ago. At the time, Sonny was living with this Dr. Tommy Vasco, being his little