Leonard and I looked at him.

“I mean, I watch it sometimes,” he said. “I got nothing else on tape, you know. Now and then.”

We kept looking at him.

“Jeez, guys. I’ll quit. Promise. Really.”

I took a couple days off from work, enjoyed being a hero for about fifteen minutes. Me and Ella May. I wondered how she was doing. Probably still cussing and wanting to fight.

Night it happened I was so wired I didn’t sleep, and the next day I was still wired, and the next night too. I was not only wired, I hurt too. I felt as if I had been wrapped in duct tape and rolled down a rocky mountainside into a brick wall with my nuts in my teeth.

Friday some of it passed and I got a good night’s sleep, slept in late without the bad dreams, and was a lot less sore. Saturday morning, near eleven, I was up in my sweat pants, T-shirt, and bare feet, making coffee.

My new place was in town, a duplex. It was upstairs with a connecting kitchen/living room, a small bedroom, and a bathroom with a toilet that sagged into the floor when you sat on it. I figured some morning I’d be in there taking my morning constitutional and find myself flying through space, down to the bottom floor, having firemen dig my corpse out from under busted ceramic and a pile of shit.

There was some good news. The duplex was cheap. Mostly because the bottom floor was burned out. Before I moved in, according to the landlord, some drunk had left a frying pan on the stove and it and the grease and the chicken leg floating in it caught on fire and the blaze spread through the kitchen/living room like a yeast infection. The drunk had been sleeping on the couch at the time. He was in some kind of burn center, probably wishing he’d just opened a box of crackers and pulled the tab on a can of beanie weenies.

The place wasn’t going to be rented for a while, not until the landlord fixed it up, so he let me store some stuff down there in the only rooms that weren’t burned, the bedroom and the bathroom. Long as there wasn’t someone under me, the duplex wasn’t so bad, though now and then the burn smell would come up through the floor and stink the place up, make my eyes water, wake me in the middle of the night, and I’d get up to make sure I hadn’t left something on the stove myself.