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she just runs out of gas. She seems a lot older than she really is.
    This was meant as a warning and Edgar heard it that way, maybe. He settled in his side of the truck and shut up for the ride back to his house. It was early but late, the streets just lining up with college drunks and Layla out there somewhere among them. RL had been awake since six and didn’t understand why all the yelling, the drinking, the driving around in cars. Though he remembered the moment when the boat had tipped over the lip of the dam with a great pleasure. Dangerous fun. But fun.
    What did you do?
    Edgar’s wife stood in the porch light like she wasn’t going to let him in. A drooly little toddler girl watched from the living room behind her, scared. Then Amy turned to RL.
    What did you do to him? she said. Why does this garbage always happen when he’s out with you?
    It’s not his fault, Edgar said.
    I didn’t say it was, she said. You’d better come in.
    She stood aside in the doorway and watched RL sideways and angry. He wasn’t fooling her. Edgar inside with his daughter in his arms and then Amy closed the door on him and RL was alone on the porch. He could hear the fight starting up behind the closed door. A nice night, finally cooling off, insects buzzing in the shadowsand RL alone again. The yellow light of the living room spilled out onto the lawn, warm—a promise of family, a life inside, a place to go.
    He made his way back to the truck and drove to his own empty house. The message light was blinking red on the telephone but RL ignored it in favor of one last beer on the deck. And possibly a cigar. Definitely a cigar. He’d pay for it in the morning, but he couldn’t sleep right now anyway. RL was restless, restless. The town spread out below him, a bowl full of lights, headlights, streetlights, little lights spilling from warm little houses and always the cars on their way to somewhere. Who was that on the phone? RL didn’t really want to know. He sat back and watched the lights and sipped his beer and watched the late Northwest flight out of Minneapolis line up on the airport across the valley, miles away. The runway lit up as the plane approached, twinkling in the night air. He lit his cigar and sat back in his lawn chair to watch. Man, drink, deck, summer night, cigar.
    RL took a basic pleasure in big engines, jets and graders and locomotives, a pleasure that was carried over from his Ohio boyhood. He used to take Layla to the overpass at the north end of town and together watch the trains underneath their feet, sometimes feeling the diesel heat, the clangor of boxcars run together, the screech of metal brakes. Something about him that women didn’t trust, that they didn’t like exactly. It wasn’t just the broken bones, the trouble that followed him. It wasn’t the guilty fact of him sitting with a drink in his hand at midnight when he had to be up at five, the toy pleasure of watching the big jet land across the way. They still flew the old three-engine 727s in and out of the valley, one of the last places they could fly them, too noisy for almost anyplaceelse, but they could punch through an inversion layer like nobody’s business.
    No, it was something else they didn’t trust, something intangible. The fact that he liked this day, that he felt alive in the face of it. Something happened, nobody died. Boredom was held at bay. Mission accomplished. Not a woman alive, at least none RL had met, would have followed this logic. Maybe they were right. Maybe let the women run the world for a change, if they weren’t already. But RL felt a deep conviction that he was right about this. Prudence could be carried only so far before it became cowardice, and cowardice was a dead end.
    He looked forward to explaining this position to Edgar’s wife.
    Across the valley, the 727 followed the bright beams of its landing lights down, a long shallow glide that circled the valley and then straightened in alignment with the runway.