RED MADE me get out and paint the truck another color once we’d crossed the state line. His voice to me seemed always to have those worms in it that eat you once you’re dead and still. His voice always wanted to introduce me to them waiting worms. He had a variety of ugly tones to speak in and used them all at me on most days. He whipped off a skinny country rock road and dove the truck down a slope of plain young weeds towards a creek that slobbered and swung under some trees for shade and parked. Glenda, which was my mom, rolled between him and me in the cab, smelling of her “tea,” as she called her rum and colas, and last night’s sweat and this morning’s perfume, her head pretty often soft on my shoulder and her breaths going up my nose. The weather had looped around to where it was good again, too good to last long, and had prompted blossoms to unclench and wild flowers to pose tall and prissy amongst the weeds, plus it brought forth song birds and bumble bees and all the likewise shit of spring. The tree patch we’d swung under blocked the eyesight of any decent folks who might pass along on that rock road and gain a curiosity about us if we were available to be seen. Our ways often required us to not be seen. Red had pulled something fairly wrong in a white truck down in Arkansas and wished to be driving a blue one back in Missouri.

“So hop your fat ass out, boy, and start tapin’ those newspapers over the windows. I’ve showed you how before.”

“And I learned it when you showed it.”

“Well? So set your flab to wigglin’ and get out there and go at it, boy.”