NOVEMBER THEY ditched for a pool hall close to noon. He sat with Alice Washington in a booth at a back corner, and they watched old men and old women at the bar smoke cigarettes and lean over their drinks. Lightning caught up in far off clouds through the tall windows. The tables in the place were silent, chairs keyed at four sides, cues racked on the walls, and the air old chalk in the table lights.

He said how he liked to watch a storm come up. He said he liked how all the trees got caught and leaned, and how the stiff neck pine shook tall in a storm, how it reached. He told her how he saw lightning take a bird in flight, the white line come up from the ground and the bird, not dropped, or split, just gone. He told her a bird was as much a part of the sky as a cloud. He said, the sky takes things back, just like the water, or the ground. He said, all of them want something lost.