Amador drove up a mountain two-track, stopping when the trail became too treacherous for the car. They sat in silence for an hour with Cochran lighting one cigarette with another, listening to the ticking of the heat fading from the motor. Amador turned on the car radio and they were amused to pick up in the high altitude a New Orleans country music station aimed at truckers. It made Cochran homesick until he realized he had no home. Next to Miryea he missed his daughter terribly and he doubted his emergence from the gaps, the holes that he tore, or had been torn, in the fabric of his life.

After dinner the Texan invited Cochran to accompany him to a whorehouse but he declined saying he’d feed, walk and water the horse. “Strikes me you had a big day and some poontang might ease your mind.” “Nope. Killed a man I hated today and I don’t want to mix my pleasures. I want to lay in bed and think how good it felt.”

Years later Nordstrom pondered the degree of accident in human affection as do all intelligent mortals. What if it hadn’t rained that Friday? How tentative and restless an idea: he ended up marrying Laura because it rained one Friday afternoon in May in Madison, Wisconsin. The rain led directly in specific steps to the Sunday afternoon which began in a light rain and a drive in her car into the country with a half gallon of red Cribari wine. Then the rain lightened and it became warm and muggy and they walked through a woodlot into a field of green knee-high winter wheat. At the far edge of the field he spread his trench coat at her insistence and they sat down and drank the wine. She wore penny loafers, no stockings, a brown poplin skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. Sitting there while she laughed and talked he felt totally lucky for the first time in his life. Her legs were brown because she had gone to Florida for spring vacation. She stared upward at a marsh hawk. He stared downward at her legs and the skirt slipping upward a bit while she leaned back to gaze at the hawk skirting the field in quadrants. He was transfixed and wanted to lay there until the green wheat grew through him. “You’re looking up my legs,” she said. “No I wasn’t.” “If you’re honest you can kiss them.” “I was.” He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine.

Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways. He bloomed as much as perhaps he ever would and they were married to the mild disgust of her ambitious parents and the delight of his own the week after graduation.