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Dear Gracie Mae [he wrote from Germany],

How you? Fine I hope as this leaves me doing real well. Before I come in the army I was gaining a lot of weight and gitting jittery from making all them dumb movies. But now I exercise and eat right and get plenty of rest. I’m more awake than I been in ten years.

I wonder if you are writing any more songs?

Sincerely,

Traynor

I wrote him back:

Dear Son,

We is all fine in the Lord’s good grace and hope this finds you the same. J. T. and me be out all times of the day and night in that car you give me—which you know you didn’t have to do. Oh, and I do appreciate the mink and the new self-cleaning oven. But if you send anymore stuff to eat from Germany I’m going to have to open up a store in the neighborhood just to get rid of it. Really, we have more than enough of everything. The Lord is good to us and we don’t know Want.

Glad to here you is well and gitting your right rest. There ain’t nothing like exercising to help that along. J. T. and me work some part of every day that we don’t go fishing in the garden.

Well, so long Soldier.

Sincerely,

Gracie Mae

He wrote:

Dear Gracie Mae,

I hope you and J. T. like that automatic power tiller I had one of the stores back home send you. I went through a mountain of catalogs looking for it—I wanted something that even a woman could use.

I’ve been thinking about writing some songs of my own but every time I finish one it don’t seem to be about nothing I’ve actually lived myself. My agent keeps sending me other people’s songs but they just sound mooney. I can hardly git through ’em without gagging.

Everybody still loves that song of yours. They ask me all the time what do I think it means, really. I mean, they want to know just what I want to know. Where out of your life did it come from?

Sincerely,

Traynor

1968

I didn’t see the boy for seven years. No. Eight. Because just about everybody was dead when I saw him again. Malcolm X, King, the president and his brother, and even J. T.. J. T. died of a head cold. It just settled in his head like a block of ice, he said, and nothing we did moved it until one day he just leaned out the bed and died.

His good friend Horace helped me put him away, and then about a year later Horace and me started going together. We was sitting out on the front porch swing one summer night, dusk-dark, and I saw this great procession of lights winding to a stop.

Holy Toledo! said Horace. (He’s got a real sexy voice like Ray Charles.) Look at it. He meant the long line of flashy cars and the white men in white summer suits jumping out on the drivers’ sides and standing at attention. With wings they could pass for angels, with hoods they could be the Klan.

Traynor comes waddling up the walk.

And suddenly I know what it is he could pass for. An Arab like the ones you see in storybooks. Plump and soft and with never a care about weight. Because with so much money, who cares? Traynor is almost dressed like someone from a storybook too. He has on, I swear, about ten necklaces. Two sets of bracelets on his arms, at least one ring on every finger, and some kind of shining buckles on his shoes, so that when he walks you get quite a few twinkling lights.

Gracie Mae, he says, coming up to give me a hug. J. T.

I explain that J. T. passed. That this is Horace.

Horace, he says, puzzled but polite, sort of rocking back on his heels, Horace.

That’s it for Horace. He goes in the house and don’t come back.

Looks like you and me is gained a few, I say.

He laughs. The first time I ever heard him laugh. It don’t sound much like a laugh and I can’t swear that it’s better than no laugh a’tall.

He’s gitting fat for sure, but he’s still slim compared to me. I’ll never see three hundred pounds again and I’ve just about said (excuse me) fuck it. I got to thinking about it one day an’ I thought: aside from the fact that they say it’s unhealthy, my fat ain’t never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain’t never complained.