“Well, I ain’t going after that horse. I couldn’t sleep for a month after that job. Thought I had rabies.”

“Come on.” Ralph batted him on the shoulder, knocking off his fedora.

Billsy bent down to pick it up. “You want to resteal something, you ought to think about that kid.”

The chair under Ralph cracked its knuckles. “I done thought about it. Just don’t know how to make that deal work.”

“That job was good money.”

Ralph bent over the table and took another drink. He spread his arms out onto its surface as though it were a giant wheel he was trying to stop from turning. “That job cost me my dog.”

Billsy straightened up and composed himself, as if he knew he had to be careful. “That was some dog.”

“I took a step, that dog took a step. We’d sit out in the woods, he’d come up and bite the flies out the air if they was buzzin’ too close to my head. He’d eat bees before they got a chance to sting me.”

“He was the only pureblood in the family.”

“Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and look around the bed. If the moon was in the window I’d see old Satan’s big eyes in the room lookin’ my way, kind of the color of pine sap, keeping watch on me.”

“I remember him killin’ that pit bull that come at you.”

“That Cincinnati son of a bitch,” Ralph mumbled into the table. “How many policemen you reckon they got in Cincinnati?”

Billsy squinted over at the barmaid, who was wiping glasses with her shirttail. “I’d bet a thousand. They got paved streets and automobiles. Telephones on ever street corner.”

“Damn telephones. If it wasn’t for them, a man could get away with most anything.”

The barmaid called over. “If he’s about to puke, haul his ass outside.”

Billsy looked around for the voice. “He ain’t sick. He’s my brother.”

She didn’t laugh. “Billsy, you drunker’n a rat ridin’ a ceilin’ fan. If he pops off, you got to clean it up.”

“Aw, he’s all right. Give us another drink.” He felt his shirt pockets. “And we out of cigarettes.”

“Don’t sell ’em.”

“Aw, sweet thing, you don’t want us to smoke in here? Scared it’ll make you smell worse than you do?”

The barmaid spat in a glass and rubbed it hard. “You’ll smoke enough after you’re dead,” she told him.

THE NEXT MORNING they woke up and stumbled around in the sunshine outside the big house trying to detoxify, hungry as refugees, smelly and stunned with headache. Ralph fired a big heater in the house and warmed up water for a bath in the galvanized tub. After, he found some tins of sardines in the cupboard and a block of moldy cheese, and at table his head began to clear.

“Tell you what,” he said to Billsy, who was seated across from him in the kitchen with his shirt off, little horns of hair rising from his shoulders. “You stay here and tend the still and keep an eye on things. I’ll go up the country and check out that kid.”

“Leave me money for some eats.”

“All right. That bundle of shingles we fished out the river you could nail up on the roof. It leaks pretty bad.”

“You never complained before. Said it sounded like a waterfall in your sleep.”

“Well, we never found them shingles before, did we? Everything’s getting slimy with mold and the floor’s warped up.”

“I’ll take a look at it.” Billsy pinched up a sardine out of the tin and ate it, sucking his fingers.

“I’ll pack my glad rags. Them light wool pants we got from that laundry in Scotlandville. White shirts and a string tie.”

“Scrape the horse shit off your shoes.”

“I’ll use them new brown boots we got out that house in McComb.”

“Whoa. Nobody’ll know you.”

THEY RODE to the little station in Fault, and Billsy took both horses back. In two days, Ralph was walking the neighborhoods of Graysoner, Kentucky, his thumbs under his suspenders as if he owned the place. It was after nine a.m., when most men were at work, most women busy getting the day’s shopping done before the heat set in. He’d spent an hour down at the farrier’s, getting the information he needed from the old-timers hanging around the forge who told about the trails of ten or fifteen years before, when the automobile had been a thing unknown. He listened to what they said about the hatchet-back ridge south of town and the passes that threaded over it. The next day he walked down the alley behind Acy White’s house and saw what looked like a hired girl in poor clothes and the child rolling a ball in the short grass. When he passed the fence, he tipped his hat and smiled as best he could. The woman, robust-looking with a narrow back straight as a kitchen chair, smiled back at him, and he moved down the street. “Well, now,” he said to himself. “Gray eyes.”

Skadlock went down to a hotel where steamboat men stayed and washed up in the restroom at the end of the hall. He slicked his hair back with oil and put on a fresh shirt. He got a haircut in the shop in the lobby and passed small talk, gradually sliding the conversation around to the woman who worked in the middle of the block on Bonner Alley. He didn’t want to use Acy White’s name. Ralph understood that local barbers knew everything in a small town since chitchat was their stock-in-trade, more so than bartenders and whores. The barber snipped his scissors three times in the air and looked into the middle distance. “That gal lives somewhere down the hill in Ditch Street. I’ve seen her walking that way after seven when she’s finished up at Mr. White’s house. Damned if that ain’t a place for the rats. The tannery leaves its slops out in the canal, and they’re all over in there, up and down.”

“She’s married to that foreman at the tannery, ain’t she?” Skadlock held up his boot and pretended to look at it.

“If she is, I don’t know it. Mr. White says she lives alone in one of those red tarpaper shacks this side of the boiler house.”

Realizing that his hair was being cut by the only barber in town, he changed the subject. “You know, I ate in a café the other day that put sugar in its cornbread.”

The barber quickened to the comment. “I know it. I guess somebody in New York thought it was a good idea. Me, I like the old pie-shaped cornbread with bits of crackling in it, salty as sweat.”

“Yessir. How about dodgers?”

The barber spoke solemnly for five minutes about his grandmother’s corn dodgers and blackberry jelly while Skadlock figured the schedule for the rest of the day.

FROM WHERE HE STOOD between two willow saplings half a block to the north, he saw her leave the backyard gate and enter the alley. He slipped out onto the sidewalk and affected a lazy saunter down the hill in the direction of Ditch Street and soon heard her come up behind him. He imagined she’d want to hurry home and put her feet up after working for the rich folks all day. When she came alongside, he pretended to be startled. “Hey,” he said. “I saw you somewheres today, didn’t I?” Her face was fairly narrow, her chin small, but a tough smartness hid deep in those pale eyes.

She gave him a quick glance, the kind of look she’d normally give a big strange dog, but she slowed down. “I was out behind the house where I work, and you was traipsin’ up the alley.”

“That’s right. You was playin’ ball with a kid had too much clothes on for this heat.”

She began to match his gait. “Ain’t that the truth. Missus ain’t happy less she’s got a week’s salary on that kid’s back mornin’, noon, and night.”

“You her nursemaid or something?”

Vessy raised her chin a bit. “I’m rightly the cook. But I watch the girl some.”

Skadlock stopped walking. “Cook, you say. You cook everday?”