Miles Standish Pickerel lived with his mother until he was thirty-six. After brief engagements as an adulterous husband, a neglectful father, and a larcenous employee, he unsuccessfully impersonated a cardiologist, a cattle rustler, and a visiting dignitary from Guyana. Currently he is at work on the century's first compendium of Mexican mechanics. He lives anonymously in an unnamed city south of the twenty-fifth parallel.