Rooster Joe was driving Daryl to meet up with Kalene after work. Rooster Joe was being home schooled. He was always uncomfortable. They had half an hour to kill before she got off work. Rooster Joe drank his beer. It was a soft spring night. Even in his discomfort, he was feeling expansive. He was talking about all the friends he had who were police. "I tell you what, I call any of those boys and they come over. They come over like that." He snapped his fingers. Daryl looked over but then went back to making dents in a ketchup packet with his fingernails.

They pulled into the parking lot of Taco Casa. "I can call them and they'd drive by someone's house with the sirens on just to scare them-you want to get back at someone? They can do it." They got out of the car. Daryl squeezed the ketchup from one end to the other.

They sat on the steps by the back door. They could smell the rain from the afternoon. Daryl dug his heels into the mud. He saw Kalene through the window. She was talking to a middle aged man in a gray baseball hat. The air started to sting him. He felt everything in the parking lot snag him-the dumpster, the scraps of a blown out tire, the brown Chevy, the ragged shrub. All of the object under the washed out sky fishhooked into him and pulled.

"There was a deer trapped in Kroger's. She was running all over the place. The boys had to take her down," Rooster Joe said.

Kalene smiled at the man in the gray baseball hat and gave him his change. Daryl smashed the ketchup packet into the mud. He looked at his hands and thought, "I am made out of mud." Dusk fell on them like ashes. Kalene came out and Rooster Joe greeted her with a police story. She nodded and brushed Daryl's bangs out of his face. Daryl hated his muddy forehead. He felt her silky fingers. Her eyebrows arched like perfect handwriting. Her eyes were watery against the gold light of the sun falling back into the dusk. Daryl stopped being mud. He became silk and beautiful handwriting and water. He put his hand under her shirt, on top of her rib cage. He dug his fingernails in.