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around and I thought he wouldn’t be so obsessive. Sleep with him a few times and it’s the same thing over again. Men.
    The Jeepster looked away. Blackbirds rose from the field in a fury of wings and their pattern shifted and shifted again as if they sought some design they couldn’t quite attain. He thought about Aimee and men. He knew she’d slept with at least one man for money. He knew it for a fact. The Jeepster himself had brokered the deal.
    What you get for taking up with a son of a bitch old enough to be your daddy.
    I see you’re still the same. The hot shit macho man. The man with the platinum balls. You’d die before you’d ask me to come back, wouldn’t you?
    You made your bed. Might as well spoon up and get comfortable.
    Then I want to borrow a gun.
    What for?
    I’m afraid he’ll be there tonight when I get off work. He said he was going to kill me and he will. He slapped me around some this morning. I just want him to see it. If he knows I’ve got it there in my purse he’ll leave me alone.
    I’m not loaning you a gun.
    Leonard.
    You’d shoot yourself. Or some old lady crossing the street. Is he following you?
    He’s broke. I don’t think he’s got the gas.
    I hope he does turn up here and tries to slap me around some. I’ll drop him where he stands and drag his sorry, woman-beating ass inside the house and call the law.
    Loan me the pistol. You don’t know how scared I am of him. You don’t know what it’s like.
    The loop tape of some old blues song played in his head: You don’t know my, you don’t know my, you don’t know my mind .
    No. I’ll pick you up from work. I’ll be there early and check out the parking lot and if he’s there I’ll come in and tell you. You can call the cops. You still working at that Quik Mart?
    Yes. But you won’t come.
    I’ll be there.
    Can I stay here tonight?
    You come back you’ll have to stay from Escue. I won’t have him on the place. Somebody will die.
    I’m done with him.
    The Jeepster looked across the field. Water was standing in the low places and the broken sky lay there reflected. Rain crows called from tree to tree. A woven-wire fence drowning in honeysuckle went tripping toward the horizon, where it vanished in mist like the palest of smoke.
    Then you can stay all the nights there are. He said.
    The murmur of conversation died. Folds in the General Café looked up when The Jeepster slid into a booth but when he stared defiantly around they went back to studying their plates and shoveling up their food. There was only the click of forks and knives, the quickstep rubber-soled waitresses sliding china across Formica.
    He ordered chicken-fried steak and chunky mashed potatoes and sting beans and jalapeno cornbread. He sliced himself a bite of steak and began to chew. Then he didn’t know what to do with it. Panic seized him. The meat grew in his mouth, a gristly, glutinous mass that forced his jaws apart, distorted his face. He’d forgotten how to eat. He sat in wonder. The bite was supposed to go somewhere but he didn’t know where. What came next, forgetting to breathe? Breathing out when he should be breathing in, expelling the oxygen and hanging on to the carbon dioxide until the little lights flickered dim and dimmer and died.
    He leaned and spat the mess onto his plate and rose. Beneath his T-shirt the outlined gun was plainly visible. He looked about the room. Their switchblade eyes flickered away. He stood for an awkward moment surveying them as if he might address the room. Then he put too much money on the table and crossed the enormity of the tile floor and went out the door into the trembling dusk.
    So here he was again, The Jeepster back at the same old stand. On his first attempt he’d almost made it to the chapel where she lay in state before a restraining hand fell on his shoulder, but this time they were