I used to write stories that had lakes, that had deep blue waters shelled by the sky; water mucky and full of disease; I wrote stories where people used to break down and cry unbidden, unprovoked, just because of the way a stone looked when it was wet, or the way the wind ruffled the grass; the people in those stories might jump to violence unprovoked; they wore teal windbreakers and rolled packs of cigarettes into their T-shirts; some swore up and down to God Almighty and drank slugs from tail-boy beer cans (those were the same ones who might kick a mutt unprovoked, even kill it, the sharp snap of a dog’s jaw breaking, the sound of a wooden chopstick being pried apart). I had characters who walked alone in dust-moted houses, plains pressing like gaping mouths against the windows, while they considered how to cope with abuses; furnaces popped on in basements, and there was always the sickly smell of fuel oil that saturated everything. I used to produce characters, American loners, who kicked walls and acted in deranged ways. I used to write with a raw, tight-lipped wonder at the way some folks stood their isolation on end and made long lazy afternoons into festivals of despair and desperation. And I never wondered where a story was going because it was always going to the same place, that little plot of land on the lake, lifting high with yellow weeds, and the smell of lighter fluid starting a barbecue next door where things were better and people partied with the kind of gusto that stunned, destroyed, obliterated; boats crashed on the lake in the dark, folks lost arms and limbs, yet in the morning light rising over the flat dead water there was always some solace; a flank of geese wedging south, the end of summer, some russet colors to the leaves, the seasons making headway; for in my stories there was always that much, at least, to go on. In some of these stories the smell of pine sap prevailed and there were stony backgrounds; nights were long and cold and characters rolled in discomfort; some of these cold folks wore double socks and rubbed their hands together frantically trying to generate enough friction, as if they hoped to start a fire of their own flesh. Others felt the cold steel of a snub-nosed gun against their inside waistband, or the fine edge of a carbon blade as it came out of leather, knowing damn well I’d make use of that later because no matter what, they bowed to me and to me only when it came down to endings and resolutions and those swooping lines that plots are supposed to draw. And if the grace of God came into things it was stupid luck, blind luck, a car pulling to the shoulder in time.