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on.
    â€œCertainly not,” Reggie said. “I am here only briefly, in fact, until this evening, when I fly to Austin, Texas, to visit a friend of mine who is an agent for the CIA. He wants to take me bass fishing. He comes to Utila and goes fishing with me. We are in the same businesses and also we are fishermen.”
    Johnnie swallowed the last of his beer. He’d eaten all he could and stood up to leave. This fellow Reginald San Pedro Sula, Johnnie thought, was undoubtedly telling the truth, but Johnnie had no desire to get into it any deeper.
    â€œIt’s been a real pleasure, Reggie,” he said, extending his hand. “I wish you buena suerte wherever you go.”
    Reggie stood up. He was at least six feet six. He shook Johnnie’s hand.
    â€œThe same to you,” he said. “If you are in Honduras, come to the Bay Islands and visit me. The Hondurans are great friends of the American people. But I have a joke for you before you go. If a liberal, a socialist and a communist all jumped off the roof of the Empire State Building at the same time, which one of them would hit the ground first?”
    â€œI couldn’t say,” said Johnnie. “Which one?”
    â€œWho cares?” said Reggie, grinning.
    Johnnie walked down Iberville Street toward the river. He was eager to get back to his hotel room and read more of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton’s book, the first treatise on the subject written by a layman, had been published originally in 1621 and was still relevant today. As Johnnie turned the corner and headed north on Decatur, he repeated to himself Burton’s definition of melancholy: “A kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.”
    He’d read for a little while, Johnnie thought, then take a nap. It was more likely he’d run onto Sailor and Lula, if they were here, at night, anyway.

HUNGER IN AMERICA
    â€œHear now how leeches is comin’ back into style,” said Sailor.
    â€œSay what?” said Lula. “Honestly, sugar, you can talk more shit sometimes?” She took out a cigarette the length and width of a Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencil and lit it.
    â€œGot you a pack of Mores again, huh?”
    â€œYeah, it’s a real problem for me, Sailor, you know. When I went in that drugstore by the restaurant in Biloxi? For the Kotex? I saw ’em by the register and had the girl throw ’em in. I’m not big on resistin’. So what about a leech?”
    â€œHeard on the radio how doctors is usin’ leeches again, like in old times. You know, when even barbers used ’em?”
    Lula shuddered. “Got one on me at Lake Lanier. Lifeguard poured salt on it and it dropped off. Felt awful. He was a cute boy, though, so it was almost worth it.”
    Sailor laughed. “Radio said back in the 1920s a I-talian doctor figured out that if, say, a fella got his nose mostly bit off in a barfight or somethin’, and he needed a skin transplant there, they’d sew one of his forearms to his nose for a few weeks, and when they took it off they’d slap a couple leeches where the new skin attached from his arm to keep the blood movin’ so the skin’d stick.”
    Lula rolled down her window on the passenger side of the front seat of the Bonneville. They were on the outskirts of New Orleans.
    â€œSailor? You expect me to believe a man’d be goin’ around with a arm sewed to his nose? For weeks ?!”
    Sailor nodded. “How they used to do it,” he said. “Course they got more sophisticated ways now. Radio said the Chinese, I think it is, figured a better idea is by insertin’ a balloon in the forehead and lettin’ it hang down on the nose.”
    Lula shrieked. “Sailor Ripley! You stop! You’re makin’ this shit up and I ain’t gonna sit for it!”
    â€œHonest,