Problem was, Tillie liked being a whore, just not a whore against her will. I guess it beat wanting to grow up and work as a politician.

Truth of the matter was, Tillie was one hell of a good whore. She was pulling down big change over in Tyler, where the Baptists liked sex good as anybody.

I liked sex too, but Brett wasn’t for it anymore. Not really. Last few times I had felt as if I were having a kind of desperate aerobic workout. You do it ’cause you think you’re supposed to and it’s good for you, but you don’t like it, and you end up sweaty for little to nothing.

I felt as if Brett ought to have a light on, be reading a magazine, have a pair of scissors at hand so she could clip coupons. Making love to her was kind of like I was trying to beat something to death with my pelvis that was already dead.

Frankly, it wasn’t the kind of loving made a man feel hard as steel, or even firm as Greek Age bronze.

Unspoken, we bled sex out of our relationship, and pretty soon we bled the relationship out of it. I had talked to her by phone a few times. She dropped by the plant at dinner break with Kentucky Fried Chicken once, but it was all pretty uninspiring. If I remember correctly, we talked about KFC’s biscuits most of the time. They’re good biscuits, by the way, but they can’t beat Popeye’s, and neither’s biscuits quite match up to a loving relationship.

After that, I saw her once more. Then all went quiet on that front, and I had pretty much decided from here on out it was the bachelor life for me.

Sex and chicken processing. Two of life’s great mysteries.

Leonard drove me around the big chicken plant lot to my car. We did this every night. I parked on one side, he on the other. If we went out the front door, he gave me a ride to my car. We went out the back, I gave him a ride to his. We could have parked side by side, of course, but we liked to add a little adventure to our lives. And it gave us a few minutes to talk about whatever we felt like talking about. Most of it just stupid stuff about the chicken plant, a quick survey of our present lives.