He mashed the pedal of his Toranado and the cold wind howled through the ripped holes in its canvas top.

Mary lived down in south Memphis, in a house built from her husband’s million-seller, “Dark End of the Street.” A song about a cheating man who can’t face his lover in the light of day. Clyde didn’t write it, two white boys did, but he sang it like it was his damned life story. Porter had heard it so many times he wanted to throw up, he thought, while pulling into the circular drive.

The house was one of those places designed in weird geometrical patterns and shapes. Huge plate glass windows, doors made out of circles of brass, and sharp triangle edges at every corner. He could see a white-frosted artificial tree in the window decorated with red balls and green blinking lights.

Clyde would be in there somewhere passed out. A ghost in his own home wearing that mind sickness like a cape.

Sometimes Porter didn’t know why he and Mary even bothered.

As Porter rounded the corner, he could see someone sunk down into the seat of Clyde’s old Lincoln Continental. The black one he drove into a lake in Mississippi about three years ago. Man had it pulled from the scum and mud of the lake, fish flopping off his seats, to have it rot in his front yard.

Porter glanced down in the car and saw Clyde huddled on the floorboard like a child, a bottle of cheap rum in the driver’s seat. His face was wet and his eyes red and he was making sounds like that time he had to be pulled off stage at the Apollo. Sounded like he was going to choke on his own tongue.

Porter reached through the window of the tarnished car for his hand but Clyde crawled deeper in the floorboard and closed his eyes. It was almost as if he was willing Porter to disappear. Porter could feel him slipping through the small space and into the cloudy lake bottom where they’d found the car.