IT TAKES SONNYBOY three years to find the Buyer again. But since this truck stop looks, smells and sounds just like all the others--especially on a snowy night like this--he feels as if he never left. He's bigger now, though he carries his weight well, looks like he can put it wherever he wants: the end of his fist or the steel toe of his boot. His Levis have lost their knees, and his leather jacket its luster, not to mention its fit. His beard grows in dark, uncombed tangles.

The Buyer sits alone in a corner booth, thick in the arms and chest, hairless from head to toe, sleeves rolled to the elbow, meaty hands spread on the table top. Damn, if he doesn't look exactly the same. And the empty shoeboxes are there, too, stacked next to him on the bench.

Sonnyboy sits across the aisle at a table for two, and being so close to the Buyer makes his heart pound hard. The knife in his right boot makes him itch, but he likes to think he won't need it. He's taken down men bigger and faster in places much, much worse than this.

A trucker sits across from the Buyer, knob-knuckled hands slowly chafing. He's a boot-and-belt-buckle type, not Sonnyboy's kind at all. Sonnyboy listens close as they speak.

"Five hundred dollars," says the Buyer, his voice as smooth as a freshly graded gravel road.

"For what?" says the trucker.

"To write it down."

"You put them in some book?"

"They're just for me."

"Why?"

"Paying you not to care."

"But five hundred dollars...."

"Events aren't worth as much as people. Yours goes for five."

"Hell."

Sonnyboy tries to relax as he watches through the corner of his eye. The trucker takes an ink pen from the Buyer's big fingers, takes the small sheet of paper the Buyer slides to him, and writes. Sonnyboy watches the trucker's wrist bend tight, and he remembers it was Skynyrd's Freebird playing when it was himself on that bench three years ago. Today it's some kind of Seattle grunge, and he can't tell the songs apart because they all say the exact same thing. He remembers the smell of the paper: a mother-of-pearl sheaf of pulp. He remembers the pen: the name of some forgotten Midwestern bank fading down the side, the cap chewed. He remembers the wad of cash the Buyer paid him: three thousand dollars he never spent. It bulges in his pocket right now, like a pale green tumor.