A boy discovers that he was conceived on the account of a drunken bet between his derelict father and a drinking buddy. They had made a bet that he could seduce a woman: the most primly inaccessible girl they had known back in high school. His father had just enough concentration left in the lobes of his wet brain to seal the deal. It took him three years. He absconded the very morning after, determined to make up for his years lost to sobriety. His mother found out the truth by means of a spiteful little postcard, postmarked from Toledo, in the agitated and slipshod handwriting of the drinking buddy. By that time, she was attached to her pregnancy and decided to go through with it. The boy, understandably, now wants revenge. He tracks his father down to a shack near a gold mine in Venezuela, where he finds him living with a woman who imbibes negligibly less than he does. Discouragedyet wiser, he heads home, reconsidering the issue of his paternity.