Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he’s ruined his reputation as one of the South’s preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting might’ve led to a posse of angry politicians on his trail. With the help of his sane and practical potter wife, Raylou, Harp understands that it’s time to return to the mig welder. Yes, it’s time to prove that he can complete a series of twelve-foot-high metal angels―welded completely out of hex nuts―for the city of Birmingham. Is it pure chance that the Elbow Boys, their arms voluntarily fused so they can’t drink, show up in order to help Harp out in a variety of ways? And why did his neighbor smuggle anteaters into desolate Ember Glow? Is it true that there’s no free will? Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he s ruined his reputation as one of the South s preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting might ve led to a posse of angry politicians on his trail. With the help of his sane and practical potter wife, Raylou, Harp understands that it s time to return to the mig welder. Yes, it s time to prove that he can complete a series of twelve-foot-high metal angels?welded completely out of hex nuts?for the city of Birmingham. Is it pure chance that the Elbow Boys, their arms voluntarily fused so they can t drink, show up in order to help Harp out in a variety of ways? And why did his neighbor smuggle anteaters into desolate Ember Glow? Is it true that there s no free will? PRAISE FOR WORK SHIRTS FOR MADMEN "Smackover funny and rare, many of Singleton's laughs come from deep wit and not easy southern eccentricities and the rough-screeching Skoal crowd."--Barry Hannah, author of Yonder Stands Your Orphan "George Singleton writes like a irreverent genius with his finger on the pulse of an American culture gone as absurd as the price you recently paid a dermatologist. But if you happen to be a physician, or therapist, better skip this one . . . or if you wear one of those little American flags in your lapel, better skip this one, et cetera. But if you want a short-time, sentence-by-sentence, explosive pleasure, or a long-time pleasure brought by a story with a beating pulse that you can live inside of for awhile, and remember forever, then take this on over to the cash register."--Clyde Edgerton, author of Lunch at the Piccadilly PRAISE FOR GEORGE SINGLETON "George Singleton writes about the rural South without sentimentality or stereotype but with plenty of sharp-witted humor.... A raconteur of trends, counter-trends, obsessions and odd characters." --Morning Edition, NPR "Singleton is an ace at locating the pathos beneath the deadpan laughs."-- USA Today GEORGE SINGLETON lives in Pickens County, South Carolina, with ceramicist Glenda Guion and their mixture of strays. More than a hundred of his stories have been published nationally in magazines and anthologies. He teaches writing at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. 1   You’d think that, being a saturated and memory-lost drunk, I would’ve been the one who stole the twelve snapping turtles, but it was my wife Raylou behind the entire operation, from original vision to relocation. I didn’t even know she had an interest in the plight of nontraditional lab animals, never mind the moral bridges certain toxicologists were choosing to cross. Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention. Raylou shook me awake from the floor of my Quonset-hut workspace one dawn and told me she needed a steep-sided three-foot-deep pool chiseled into our yard by the time she got home that night. She told me to line it with plastic and the ceramic earthenware tiles she’d fired in the electric kiln a week earlier. She said she had enough for about a 240-square-foot area. I, of course, opened my eyes, tried to remember the past twenty-four hours, and thought about how this was too much math for me to ever remember. Raylou said she’d written out the phone number of her lawyer friend Darren—a man who over the past ten years had bought more than a hundred wood kiln–fired scary-face jugs from my wife—on the To Do list stuck on our refrigerator, should she get caught and need bail money. Raylou would have her cell phone with her, she said, but asked me not to call in case she needed to quietly stake out this female biotoxicologist somewhere between the Lester Maddox and George Wallace boat landings on the Georgia/Alabama border, far from where we lived.              I nodded, but tried to think if “biotoxicologists” really existed. And I pretended to know exactly what she was talking about, seeing as I felt sure she’d told me all about this particular ploy some time within the previous week, month, or year. That’s how I operated back then, mostly. I’m not proud, embarrassed, or ashamed. At the tim