McCracken tightened an elastic ring holding his hair in a pony-tail. One of the girls sitting on the floor rolled onto her side and then stood, as if McCracken’s hair maneuver had been a signal to her. At this point, there’s no way to tell if it had been or not. It happened, and that was that. She was up and ready to go.

I’ll tell you about the limo, because this was when they got in. It was a white-on-white 1985 Lincoln Town Car. Between the back of the front doors and the front of the back doors, an extra six feet of sheet metal had been added by some people in Kentucky. This is the reason the word stretch means something here. The inside of the passenger cabin was done up in leather the color of dried blood. In case there was a nosebleed, or a fight. The Kentucky people had included a television that didn’t receive very much in the way of programming. Who would want that? Would you watch TV with bad reception in a moving vehicle at sixty bucks a show? You wouldn’t. But you’d want to keep your beer cold, and there was a place to do that, under a mirrored lid, of all things.

Romance had been considered, too. There were clear plastic conduits, like IV tubes, strung around the ceiling. They contained a series of tiny light bulbs, so small you could barely imagine them. These were controlled by a dimmer switch, set into a panel that also held the knob for the radio, the knob for the moon-roof, and the knob that raised a carpeted panel which sealed off the driver from the passengers. This last knob was the one that got the most use.

McCracken and the girl were in the back, and they were getting to know the knobs and such. McCracken said the girl’s name was Angela. He also said, “How about stopping at the party store?”

Carl nosed the big thing into a parking lot and opened the door for McCracken, treating him like a celebrity or something. The potential tip made him do it. After loading up on drinks and ice, and some snacks in bags, McCracken said they were going to Jackson to visit some of his people. Jackson was another place altogether. An hour would get them there, and an hour would get them back, and that left four hours. I don’t know any decent people from Jackson. There’re probably some living there, but I don’t know any of them. Carl didn’t know any people there at all, decent or not.

There are no coincidences. Would you believe that on the way to Jackson McCracken saw one of his people and some of her kids in a van driving in the lane next to the limo? These things happen. There she was, one of his people, and McCracken asked Carl to pull up alongside the van so he could wave at this woman, smile at her, and scream out that here he was, in a limo, McCracken, and he was on his way to visit her in Jackson.

But the woman was in no mood for waving at limousines. That much was obvious. What was also obvious was that the three or four kids in the back of the van were not happy, like the woman. One of them was hitting another with a well-worn Barbie. The doll’s hair had stranded into the sort of scalp orchard you might see on the forehead of an ego-pocked businessman. The third or fourth child emitted soundless shrieks, her mouth locked into an upper-case O. Their Dodge van raged down the highway, draping the road with shards of steely smoke, as if it, too, was out of sorts.

The woman wouldn’t look in any direction other than the one in which she was headed. She seemed single-minded in this. After a while, McCracken gave up trying to get her attention. He fidgeted with the knobs and buttons. There was a sense of disappointment inside the big car then. A moment of some kind had been lost there on the highway.