I circled back up the other side and waded out after a while to lie on the sandbar and look up at the stars.

I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn’t sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, labouring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay there on the hard slab of a bed in the heat and wondered when I’d start walking up the walls. Gloria Harper and Sutton kept going around and around in my mind, and a long time afterwards, just before I dropped off, I came back to that other thing I couldn’t entirely forget. It was that bank with nobody in it.

3

THE NEXT MORNING THERE WAS another argument with Harshaw. Just after we opened the office he wanted me to take a cloth and dust off the cars. I was feeling low anyway and told him the hell with it. The other salesman, an older, sallow-faced man named Gulick, got some dust cloths out of a desk drawer and went on out.

Harshaw leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “What’s the matter with you, Madox? You got a grudge against the world?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a salesman. When I want a job cleaning cars I’ll get one.”

“The way you’re going, you may get one sooner than you think. How old are you?”

“Thirty. Why?”

“Well, you haven’t set the world on fire so far or you wouldn’t be here in this place.”

“I wouldn’t argue with you.”

“You can’t sell dirty cars,” he grunted. “You want Gulick to do all the work keeping ’em clean while you skim off the gravy?”

“I’ll take down my hair,” I said, “and we’ll both cry.” I got off the desk and went outside, disgusted with the argument and with everything. I leaned against a car, smoking a cigarette and watching Gulick work, and after a while I threw the butt savagely out into the street and went over and picked up one of the cloths.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, when I started in on the other side of the car he was working on. “I don’t mind it. I like to keep busy.”

He had sad brown eyes, a little like a hound’s, and his health wasn’t good. The doctors had told him to work outside and he’d have to give up a job as book-keeper.

“How long have you worked for Harshaw?” I asked.

He stopped rubbing for a minute and thought about it. He did everything very slowly and deliberately. “About a year, I reckon.”

“Hard guy to get along with, isn’t he?”

“No-o. I wouldn’t say that. He’s just got troubles, same as anybody.”

“Troubles?”

“Got ulcers pretty bad. And then he’s had a lot of family trouble. Lost his wife a year or so ago, and he’s got a boy that—. Well, I guess you’d say he’s just not much good.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.” He straightened and stretched his back. “I always figure there’s a lot of things can make a man grouchy. He may have troubles you don’t even know anything about—.” He acted as if he intended to say more, and then thought better of it and went back to work.

Harshaw came out of the office a little later and got in one of the cars. “Going out in the country for a while,” he said to Gulick. “Be back around noon.”

It was Friday and there wasn’t much activity along the street.