The old days crawled out from under a rock. Gene Sparkman reached into his shirt pocket for the soft pack of Camels. Tapping the end two cigarettes teetered, with a swipe he managed to get one lit and the pack back in his pocket. Scratching his nose with a yellowed fingertip he coughed.

The scotch swirled smoky in the jelly glass in his other hand.

"Sort of a mess, huh?"

"Things tend to get that way," she replied. Whenever she glanced into his hazel eyes a fireball burned her. Instant incendiary. "So what happened anyway?"

"What happened? What usually happens?" He brushed that stray lock of hair off his forehead and took a long drag. The smoke seemed to swirl out of his nostrils like San Francisco fog, illusive and sexy.

"Did you find the answer to your question?" Caroline's hands caressed her wine glass. The edge was smudged with red lipstick and Beaujolais. The smoke from his camel mixed with her perfume. The night enveloped them as they sat hip to hip on the wooden porch. Fireflies cavorted, the dance macabre of summertime prisoners

"What question?"

"Whether you're a success or a failure?"

"I promised myself long ago that.." Sparkman replied.

" That?" she was so tempted to move closer. The heat of his thigh nuzzled the thin summer cotton skirt she had worn that night. Her hand reached up to touch his cheek and hesitated midair as he stubbed out the butt and reached for another camel. The silence didn't seem to bother him but rather knotted up the loose ends of his days and evenings.

"Smoke bother you?"

She shook her head, and held out her hand, some sort of invitation. He handed her the pack. Slowly she withdrew a cigarette and put it out to him. He took his own cigarette and rolled the glowing end around in the green colored glass ash tray, till it glowed like a hot pointed poker, a glowing spearhead destined for some sadistic torture on the milky white skin of the inner thigh of a young boy. He matched the ends tip to tip, lighting her cigarette. There was a movement inside, which was visible in the light from the kitchen window. Just a shadow presence, he noticed but ignored. He was used to people watching. People who just watched, and never did anything with their lives. His smoker's cough swallowed the amber liquid emptying the glass. She inhaled her cigarette as well as his smoky cough. He reached down to the bottom step and refilled the Johnny Walker.

"And I kept that promise," his mouth whiskey whispered.

"So tell me what sort of promise you kept."

**

It was 4:35 am, a cold March morning in Iowa. The kind of cold that makes nostril-snorting dragon-breath just from walking from the back door to the car, but sixteen-year-old-know-alls don't care about the cold, not when they have their own chevy and a job that puts gas in the tank. The car was mostly red, except where the bondo and grey primer painted the rear right panel. A little mishap with a tree stump. The car started after two cranks. The radio bellowed,

"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small,
And the ones that Mother gives you don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall."

He gave the chevy a bit of extra gas, because he needed to connect to the car. The air was March air, still winter-cold in Iowa, and spring in other places east of the Mississippi. The road was paved ribbon that threaded its way from one small town, if you could call it a town, to the next. In between, and pretty far in-between were farm houses and some just plain houses, where men got up early to drive for an hour to work in some factory or insurance agency, and other men got up even earlier to drive for days trying to sell some sort of product out of an old leather-brown suitcase. He didn't much care about the men and what they did or didn't do, mainly because he never saw much of them. He just delivered glass-bottled milk to their houses, where their wives and children spent their lives. The bottles jiggled in the cold in their metal bins. And on really cold days, such as this particular March morning, the whole milk and cream separated - the cream pushing the easy pull tabs up like frozen icebergs or free ice cream. This morning he had plenty of tall quarts of whole milk, with their blue and red paper easy pull tabs, and couple dozen or so pints and half-pints of cream in the back seat of his car. The empties were rattling around in the trunk, somewhat cradled in used feed-bags like old women's breasts milkless, excepting these milk bottles would be re-filled and re-used. His car raced up and own those hills chasing nothing but the clock in an effort to get the job done and the milk out of his car as soon as possible. Last house was on the last rise into town. Mrs. Forbes lived there, no children, husband - a salesman. Eugene shut the motor and coasted to her front stoop. Reached out his window, puffed on his cigarette, and opened the milkbox.

Inside the milkbox was an empty quart with a rolled note stuck in it. He grabbed the glass quart and exhaled a cloud of smoke into it, like reverse of a genie granting a wish in a bottle. Then he put 2 cold pints of cream in the box and an un-erected quart of whole milk and let the lid drop softly. He grabbed the perfumed note with his teeth, mixed with the cigarette smoke, it smelled like bedroom sex to Eugene. He inhaled deeply of it, then took a gulp of air and puffed the paper onto the dash.

"And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall,
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call.
Call Alice when she was just small."

He opened the car door a little and jumped out to give it a push down the hill, without having to start the motor, "he had business to take care of in town, then he'd be back for some monkey shine! "

He laughed in his head at his own joke as he slid back in the chevy, on the slick gray and red vinyl bench seat and coasted into town right down in back of Porter's General Food and Merchandise Store, Township no. 157, Porter, Iowa.