Peden, the junkman, is a Baptist lay preacher who plays the electric violin too loud. He lives in a shotgun house at his junkyard, somewhere not far from Eagle Lake, near Vicksburg, Mississippi. Cars and religion are his obsessions, cars being to him 'like whiskey to an Indian', although he's not a teetotaller either. Peden drives a Comet, 'a thing out of the age of Sputnik':

When he was drunk and driving it, he imagined he was riding a hydrogen bomb to Los Angeles. But when Peden was sober, he was apt to wonder if there was a god, or not simply a divine wind of oratory investing man, and this divine wind was blind and deaf and cared not in whom or at what time it manifested itself.

LRB 29 November 2001 | PDF Download