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5 A.M. My father’s shaving with the radio on. He’s in the bathroom, the Trutone’s in the kitchen. All of us crammed in this crackerbox on Spicer Street, Wichita Falls. The one tiny speaker strains and crackles. The air fattens on Patsy Cline. Ernest Tubb comes on and it starts to wobble. Daddy’s dark face, mirrored back a foot away, half-shrouded in a cloud of Barbasol, cuts through a cirrus of steam. In T-shirt and boxers he’s like a linebacker in a phone booth. But his voice when he arcs out a Bob Wills holler starts near the ceiling and doesn’t level off till it hits Oklahoma. In six months he’ll be dead, his oilfield Cessna accordioned into the flats near Olney. But right now he’s happy, almost completely himself, a half-assed country singer, playing to a packed house. i.m. Richard Gaylon Norwood ...

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