Class had ridden over to Tunica with him to gamble on the riverboats a couple of times, but they had never pulled an allnighter together.

Since Class always took his car when they went together, he could control the time they came home. He had seen him downtown hanging around the square a time or two after Willie had let him go. Usually, Vie was half lit. He was more than half lit the time he’d made the remark about killing Willie. Nobody was with them at the time, and Class had forgotten about it until last night when he had been thinking about the other workers in the plant like I had asked him. I ask if he has seen Vie around town recently, and he says a time or two and tells me where Vie lives.

I tell him I will try to see him later in the week, and walk out to the Blazer, feeling only slightly better about the case. I drive back into Bear Creek and cruise by Angela’s but am disappointed to see that her car isn’t there. I go up to the door and leave a card and write on the back that I’m sorry I missed her. I look back across the street at Mrs. Sure enough, I see the Venetian blinds move in her front window. I wonder if when I leave she will hobble up the stairs to read what I have written.

At ten, tired by the trip home, I collapse into bed, and fall immediately into a hard sleep but am awakened by Angela at eleven. At first I am so groggy that I don’t realize that it is she, but her voice, warm and confiding, is a shot of adrenaline, and I come instantly awake. How like a teenaged boy she makes me feel! Lust but more than that. How can that be? Was our history together as good as I imagine? It seems to me that it was. Whatever the truth is, I seem programmed to respond to this woman, who surprises me by saying she has been given two tickets to the Razorback game with Memphis Saturday afternoon at the Pyramid. Since the game will be shown on ESPN, I think I would rather watch it from her couch under a blanket in her living room, but I tell her that sounds like fan.