“So what’d you do?” Malatesta said.

“Well,” Leo said, “like I said, what I did was sober up. Which maybe would’ve been a good idea earlier, when I wasn’t so tired and then maybe I never would’ve gotten myself in this mess where I drowned my own car like a cat. What am I, a United States Senator or something, I drown my own car? But it was not such a hot idea, because I decide I can charm a dog off a meat wagon and I am gonna think up this story that’ll explain the whole thing. When I am finished, the cop is probably gonna be cryin’ his eyes out and put me in for an award, I was such a quick-witted citizen when this emergency hits and I probably even saved the guy’s life. The worthless little piece of shit he is that started the whole thing inna first place.”

“What’d you tell them?” Malatesta said.

“I told them,” Proctor said, “I told them I was, I was standing there inna water up over my ankles, I sort of waded over to where I saw the headlights, and I would’ve been freezing my balls off except it was summer and anyway I was so shitfaced I was probably good for about twenty below, and honest to God, Billy, I must’ve thought I was Winston Churchill or something. Here is this cop. I saw something once that was also alive and was just as big, but it was grey and it couldn’t talk and it had a very long nose and I saw it in the circus when I took the kids the Garden and it cost me about seventy bucks and there was this guy that had on a silver suit and made a tiger jump on the back of this thing with a long nose and then the guy jumped on the tiger’s back and rode the two of them around the room and that big grey thing was an elephant. That’s how big this cop was.

“But he could talk,” Leo said. “He could talk and he did talk. What he said was impressive, but he did not say as much as I did, which was my mistake. My ninth and tenth mistakes for the night, a little over my usual quota, maybe, but not that much over, and I told him that the tire blew and I steered it in the pond so I wouldn’t hit nobody that was alive.