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talk about his family. He had a jug-eared stepson named Gary who smoked marijuana and made D’s in school and spent his money on trashy phonograph records. The boy also spent a lot of his time and money at an amusement arcade downtown and Jack said he had ugly sores in his right eyebrow from many hours of pressing his eye against the periscope of the submarine game. The thought of this boy and his smart mouth and his teen mustache made Jack angry. But he didn’t hold it against his wife that she had given birth to the unsatisfactory kid and brought him to live in the Wilkie home.
    He poked me with a finger and said, “My wife is just as sweet as pie. Get that straight.” And a little later he said, “I’m glad my wife is not a porker.” He told me she had “firm muscles” and he told me about all the birthday presents and Christmas presents he had given her in recent years. He said she had never locked him out of the house.
    I didn’t see how Jack Wilkie could have a very nice wife and I was tired of hearing about her. He left to get a cheeseburger and I thought about his remarks. The insinuation seemed to be that Norma was not as sweet as pie. When he got back, I asked him if that was his meaning and he said it wasn’t.
    He had spilled food on his knit shirt. I told him that I thought an investigator going on a trip should wear a coat and tie. He didn’t hear me. He was looking at the mounted deer head. He jumped up on the bar and straddled the walkway behind the bar and took the cigarette from the deer’s mouth and flung it down on the duckboards. Then he turned on the bartender. “That’s not right and you know it’s not right,” he said. “That’s not the thing to do. Don’t put another cigarette in that deer’s mouth.”
    The Mexican bartender was slicing limes. With his hooded eyes and his little mustache he looked like a hard customer to me. He was fed up with these antics in his bar, I could tell, and I thought he was going to do something. But he just said, “I didn’t put that one in there.”
    Jack climbed down and started telling me about all the different people who had attacked him while he was just doing his job. Everybody who attacked him was crazy. He pulled up a trouser leg and showed me a pitted place on his calf where a crazy woman in Mississippi had stabbed him with a Phillips screwdriver. Then he raised his knit shirt and showed me a purple scar on his broad white back where he had been shot by a crazy man in Memphis. One of his lungs had filled up with blood and when he came around in the emergency room of Methodist Hospital he heard the doctor ask a nurse if she had the key to the morgue. A close call for Jack! Not everybody was glad to see him!
    Nothing more was said about our business. I left him there drunk on the stool. He said he would see me at breakfast.
    I returned to my room across the street and went to bed and lay with my head under the rubber pillow to keep out highway noise. I couldn’t sleep. After a time I could hear knocking and bumping and voices outside. Someone seemed to be going from door to door. Maybe trick or treat, or the Lions Club selling brooms. Or the dumbest person in the motel looking for his room. My turn came and I went to the door. It was the old man in the big shoes. He was also wearing a white cotton jacket or smock. With his purple face up close to mine, I saw his bad eye and I had the momentary impression that I was looking at Mr. Proctor. But how could that be? Mr. Proctor was snug in his brown shed in Little Rock, eating canned peanuts and watching some hardhitting documentary on television. The man gave me a card. Scriptural quotations, I thought, or the deaf-and-dumb signs.
    â€œWhat is this? What are you doing?”
    â€œI’m just fooling around,” he said.
    It was my guess that he had been a veteran handyman here on motel row, known all up and down