You drive them to it. What’s the matter with you? All that money thrown away. Besides having to go up there and sign your bond for assault and battery with them making fun of me behind my back. They wouldn’t have let you out at all if I hadn’t been on the police force.

He had no words to say.

What do you have to say about all my motorcycle money gone?

I guess there goes the vinecovered cottage.

Goddamn you, she shouted. Do you think I’ll put up with this shit forever? Do you think I’m going to let this mess start all over again with you the way it was with Clifford? Hell no I’m not. Let’s me and you get some things straight right now.

Stop the car. I’ll get out anywhere along here, Edgewater said.

What?

Let me out of the car.

She locked the brakes and the car slid to the shoulder of the road and sat rocking on its shocks. Edgewater was out and perhaps thirty feet down the road before she realized he was gone. She sat as if undecided what to do.

A car was approaching behind them. He turned and stuck out a thumb. In the sun the car seemed to be warping up out of the blacktop road itself, swift and gleaming and shifting through transient stages as if it had not yet assumed its true form. It shot by without slowing in a wake of dust and roadside paper that rose and subsided gently to earth. He went on. After a time she put the Ford in gear and followed along beside him until he went down the embankment and climbed through a barbedwire fence and started across the field. She stopped the car then and shouted at him then gathered stones and began to hurl them at him. But her arm was poor and the stones fell wide, as did the curses she cast that in the end were just words and he had heard them all so often they had become powerless.

Billy, she shouted.

He looked back as she was getting in the car, the sun on her hair.

He waved her away onehanded without turning. He went on.

He got two rides that put him farther down the line. Just before dark clouds blew in. Ominous lightning flickered briefly luminescent in the southwest, flickered as if in set relay up and down layered clouds. Then thunder rolled hollowly, a premature dusk fell on the land.

Sometime back he had come onto the highway and now he angled toward the woods, gazing about for shelter, scanning the sky for rain. A bleak drizzle displaced out of November began to fall, and in a few minutes he was sodden.

In a bare area near the road he came upon the site of a burned house, blackened rocks and rubble and smoked tin twisted like crumpled and discarded tinfoil. Lightning pointed out a log smokehouse beyond two foundation rocks. Its door hung impotent on strips of rotted leather. Kicking about him he went in, rested on a cardboard box of fruitjars and watched the lightning flash staccato and fierce through the unchinked walls. Cracks showed him a world in tumult, lightning-rendered trees bent and tortured in the wind. It rained harder, pounding on the tin, lulling him soporific. He half dozed.

He dreamed again of his sister, could hear her voice faint with distance, across the miles, Tennessee to California. It had been his sister. The old man had not deigned speak to him.

How is she?

Lord God, Billy. Mama’s dead.