“He could wear hats. He could wear an assortment of hats of different shapes and styles. Boater hats, cowboy hats, bowler hats. The list went on. Pork-pie hats, bucket hats, trillbies and panamas. Top hats, straw hats, trapper hats. Wide brim narrow brim, stingy brim. He could wear a fez. Fezzes were cool. Hadn't someone once said that fezzes were cool? He was pretty aur ether had. And they were. They were cool.”

“In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.”

“All the men were driving home from work, wearing railroad hats, baseball hats, all kinds of hats, just like after work in any town anywhere.”

“I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.”

“It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?”

“Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake," he said. "That's a deer shooting hat.""Like hell it is." I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. "This is a people shooting hat," I said. "I shoot people in this hat.”