I had no idea what she meant. "A caulking gun? An angle drill? A battery-head cleaner?" Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view. "The Washington Monument?" I said. This set Lou Ann off again. If there really had been a law against laughing, both of us would have been on our way to Sing Sing by now.

"Oh, Lordy, they ought to put that on a Valentine's card," she said. "I can just see me sending something like that to my Mama. She'd have a cow right there on the kitchen floor. And Granny Logan jumping and twisting her hands saying, 'What is it? I don't get it.' She'd go running after the mailman and tell him, 'Young man, come back in here this minute. Ask Ivy what's supposed to be so funny.'

"Oh, Lordy, Lordy," Lou Ann said again, drying her eyes. She put a chip in her mouth with a flourish, licking each of her fingers afterward. She was draped out on the sofa in her green terry bathrobe and blue turban like Cleopatra cruising down the Nile, with Snowboots curled at her feet like some insane royal pet. In ancient Egypt, I'd read somewhere, schizophrenics were worshiped as gods.

"I'll tell you one thing," Lou Ann said. "When something was bugging Angel, he'd never of stayed up half the night with me talking and eating everything that wasn't nailed down. You're not still mad, are you?"

I held up two fingers. "Peace, sister," I said, knowing full well that only a complete hillbilly would say this in the 1980s. Love beads came to Pittman the same year as the dial tone.

"Peace and love, get high and fly with the dove," she said.

Chapter 7 How They Eat in Heaven

A red Indian thought he might eat tobacco in church!" Lou Ann had closed her eyes and put herself in a trance to dig this item out of her fourth-grade memory, the way witnesses at a holdup will get themselves hypnotized to recollect the color of the getaway car. "That's it! Arithmetic!" she cried, bouncing up and down. Then she said, "No offense to anyone present, about the Indian." No one seemed offended.

"Oh, sure, I remember those," Mattie said. "There was one for every subject. Geography was: George eats old gray rutabagas and picks his-something. What would it be?"

"Oh, gross," Lou Ann said. "Gag a maggot."

I couldn't think of a solitary thing George might pick that started with Y. "Maybe you haven't got it quite right," I told Mattie. "Maybe it's something else, like 'pulls his yarn.' "

"Plants his yard?" offered Lou Ann.

"Pets his yak," said the dark, handsome man, who was half of a young couple Mattie had brought along on the picnic. Their names I had not yet gotten straight: Es-something and Es-something. The man had been an English teacher in Guatemala City. This whole conversation had started with a rhyme he used to help students remember how to pronounce English vowels. Then we'd gotten onto spelling.

"What's a yak?" Lou Ann wanted to know.

"It's a type of very hairy cow," he explained. He seemed a little embarrassed. Lou Ann and I had already told him three or four times that he spoke better English than the two of us combined.

We were flattened and sprawled across the rocks like a troop of lizards stoned on the sun, feeling too good to move. Lou Ann's feet dangled into the water. She insisted that she looked like a Sherman tank in shorts but had ended up wearing them anyway, and a pink elastic tube top which, she'd informed us, Angel called her boob tube. I'd worn jeans and regretted it. February had turned mild again right after the frost, and March was staying mainly on the sweaty end of pleasant. Lou Ann and Mattie kept saying it had to be the warmest winter on record. The old-timers, somewhere down the line, would look back on this as the year we didn't have a winter, except for that freeze God sent on Valentine's Day so we'd have green-tomato pie. When the summer wildflowers started blooming before Easter, Mattie said the Lord was clearly telling us to head for the hills and have us a picnic. You never could tell about Matties version of the Lord. Mainly, He was just one damn thing after another.

We'd come to a place you would never expect to find in the desert: a little hideaway by a stream that had run all the way down from the mountains into a canyon, where it jumped off a boulder and broke into deep, clear pools. White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts. A ring of cottonwood trees cooled their heels in the wet ground, and overhead leaned together, then apart, making whispery swishing noises. It made me think of Gossip, the game we played as kids where you whisper a message around a circle. You'd start out with "Randy walks to the hardware store" and end up with "Granny has rocks in her underwear drawer."