I went inside and got another beer and went out to the porch again and breathed as deeply as I could of the warm summer air, clear and sweet and soft, and tried to smell every small thing the smell of summer contained: cut grass and clean hair, smoke and the gentle, close smell of the sky as it crept lower in the dark, and the hard sharp smell of starlight, a cold light for you there in the warm darkness, and gasoline, and honeysuckle, and beer. I sat down and breathed deep of the summer night and took away the ten or twenty things I could identify and still smelled the one or two thousand things that I did not have a name for and never would.

I summoned up all the smells I remembered from childhood and the dark time that seemed to come before childhood, before everything else: the smell of lemon and Osage orange, of red Texas dirt, of desert wind and cactus flower, of the salt flats, of pitaya and prickly pear fruit and all the things the desert bore up when there was nothing else to be borne, of the water that flowed deep beneath the sand, of wild honey; of all the wild honey, sweet and thin and dark with desert spice, that I had ever eaten, in every state, every city, every stretch of badland between one rich deep vein of money and another; of perfume and blacktop under the sun and hotels and motels and wallpaper and all the various flowers in the walls of those abandoned places, the flowers of mattresses and carpets and walls that had all been as real to me as any real thing: honeysuckle, sweet jasmine and woodbine, calla lily and catalpa and bird of paradise and all the things so varied and beautiful I did not have a name for them, not then or ever; I thought of the scents of all the places I had known before, of the places and the flowers and the deserts and the women, and the men.