Avril made a distended gesture. 'Stuffed. Huge lunch with a set of parents not three hours ago. I've been staggering around since.' Looking at the apple like she had no idea where it'd even come from. 'I'll probably pitch this out.'

'You will not.'

'Please,' rising from the desk's edge without seeming to use muscles, apple held out like something distasteful, cigarette down at her side where it would be putting a hole in the smock if lit. 'You'd be doing us both a favor.'

'This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.'

Orin and Hal's term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It's like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her. Orin and Hal had this bit, during Family Trivia sometimes: 'Please, I'm not using this oxygen anyway.' 'What, this old limb? Take it. In the way all the time. Take it.' 'But it's a gorgeous gorgeous bowel movement, Mario - the living room rug bowel movement, Mario - the living room rug needed needed something, I didn't know what til right this very moment.' The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot. something, I didn't know what til right this very moment.' The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged. Hal despised the way he always reacted, taking the apple, pretending to pretend his reluctance to eat her supper was a pretense. Orin believed she did it all on purpose, which was way too easy. He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9 mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

The Moms held the red binder out to Hal without moving. 'Have you seen Alice's new packets?' The apple was good-sour but perfumy from the pocket of the Moms's smock, and it stimulated a torrent of saliva. The binder had different little informal and action photos from the waiting-room walls, and offprints of clippings, and three rings for the packet of guidelines and Honor-Code pledges, all done up by Moore in a Gothic ital.

Hal looked up from the binder, indicating C.T.'s office with his head. 'You're taking the girl around yourself?'

'We're encouragingly short-staffed. Thierry and Donni won their qualifying round at Hartford, so they're staying over.' She leaned way forward and looked in at C.T. so he could see she was out here. She smiled.

Hal followed her look. 'The girl's name's Tina something and she'll come up to about your knee.'

'Echt,' Avril said, looking at something on a printout.

Hal looked at her while he chewed. 'You don't like her already?'

'Tina Echt. Pawtucket. Father apparently some sort of unleavened baker, mother a public relations person for the Red Sox A.A.A. baseball there.'

Hal had to wipe his chin as he smiled. 'Triple-A. Not A.A.A.'

Avril was leaning forward at the waist with the binder to her breast the way females hold flat things, still trying to catch the Headmaster's eye.

Hal said 'Troeltsch finally has some compet.i.tion in the repulsive-last-name department.'

'Lord she is a small one isn't she.'

'I can't see her being more than maybe five.'

'Oh golly let's see: age seven, high I.Q., somewhat impoverished-looking M.M.P.I., played out of Providence Racquet and Bath in East Providence. Ranked thirty-first in Eastern 12's as of June.'

'She can't be much taller than her d.a.m.n stick out there, when she plays. Scht.i.tt's going to keep her here what, twelve years?'

'The girl's father has been calling about admission for her for over two years, Charles said.'

'He was doing that thing about taking skulls apart and she yelled b.l.o.o.d.y murder.'

Avril's laugh's onset was high-pitched and alarming and distinctive, so now at least C.T. would for sure know the Moms was out here waiting and would wind things up and maybe get to Hal so Hal could go get high in secret. 'Well good for her,' Avril said.

The orbit took him around Lateral Alice Moore's desk in a kind of thick ellipse. Every time his left foot came down he either dipped down or raised up briefly to tip-toe, flexing the ankle. 'Ten years here and she'll lose her mind. If she starts at seven she'll either be ready for the Show at fourteen or by fourteen she'll start getting that burned-out look that makes you want to wave your hand in front of her face.'

There was the sound of Tavis's squeaky right Nunn Bush pacing faster, which meant real conclusion. 'I'm going to predict it's probably hard to see yourself as a great athlete at this stage, Tina, not being able to see over the net yet, but possibly even harder to see yourself as providing entertainment, engaging people's attention. As a high-velocity object people can project themselves onto, forgetting their own limitations in the face of the nearly limitless potential someone as young as yourself represents.'

The apple generated tremendous amounts of saliva. 'He'll put her in the Show before menses, there'll be another enormous fuss and high-rental cartridges of a girl no larger than her racquet beating up on hairy Slavic lesbians, and then by fourteen she'll be like old coal in the bottom of a backyard grill.' Some old military joke about apples kept running through. Eat the Apple, f.u.c.k the Core. Hal couldn't remember what it was supposed to signify.

The Moms was snapping her fingers silently and working her forehead. 'There's some term for coals reduced to residue after all day in a grill. I'm trying to think.'

Hal hates this. 'Clinkers,' he said instantly. 'From klinker klinker low German and low German and klinckaerd klinckaerd old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard ma.s.s formed by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.' He hated it that she could even dream he'd be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, and then that he's always so pleased to play along. Is it showing off if you hate it? old Dutch, to sound, ring, nominated to substantive around 1769: a hard ma.s.s formed by the fusion of the earthy impurities of like coal, iron ore, limestone.' He hated it that she could even dream he'd be taken in by the aphasiac furrowing and finger-snapping, and then that he's always so pleased to play along. Is it showing off if you hate it?

'Clinker.'

'A grill wouldn't have clinkers. Charcoal's refined to burn right down to dust. Clinkers are sort of metallic, I think. See for example the ring-dash-sound etymology.'

'I like to suspect this is why so many of our older players like to project me into this carnival-barker persona with tiny balance sheets revolving in my eyes, that I'm up-front with every incoming addition to our family that this is where the resources come from for professional tennis, and for the North American junior development system for gifted children who want to scale the heights to professionalism or to a compet.i.tive college career, and so ultimately for an Academy like this one's considerable operating expenses, and for scholarships like the partial one we're so happy to be able to offer your parents for you.'

'So then perhaps you'd care to join us for dinner. We'll also have Ms. Echt if she can stay up that long.'

The core made a very-m.u.f.fled-cymbal sound in the bottom of Lateral Alice's wastebasket. 'I can't get out of dawns. Wayne and I are supposed to play Slobodan 221 221 and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Auburndale right after lunch.' and Hartigan at some corporate-spectacle thing at Auburndale right after lunch.'

'Have you had Barry speak to Gerhardt about the ankle not getting better?'

'The clay'll be good to it. Scht.i.tt knows all about the ankle.'

'Well best of British luck to you both.' Avril's purse looked more like soft luggage than like a purse. 'May I lend you the key to the kitchen, then.'

It's always the Moms's left shoulder Hal looks over, whenever he orbits, and his plans emerged between Avril's invitations to accept some sort of politeness-act. 'The Darkness and I were going to blast down the hill and grab something if and when I ever get out of here.'

'Oh.'

Then he wondered with dread what Stice might have said to her on her way in, re supper. 'Maybe Pemulis too, I think Pemulis said.'

'Well do not, under any circ.u.mstances, enjoy yourself.'

Echt and Tavis were both standing, now, in there. Their handshake looked, for the first split-second he looked, like C.T. was jacking off and the little girl was going Sieg Heil Sieg Heil. Hal thought he was maybe starting to lose his mind. Even the meat of the Granny Smith smelled like perfume.

Three months later, earlier today, before being again summoned, at the dentist's, the dentist's office had had a weird sharp clean sweet smell about it, the olfactory equivalent of fluorescent light. Hal had felt the cold stab in the gum and then the slow radial freeze, his face ballooning to become one of the frozen c.u.muli against the aftershave-blue of the dental wallpaper's sky. Zegarelli D.D.S. had dry dark green eyes that bulged above his mint-blue mask, as in like olives where eyes should be, as he leaned in to proceed, his dental overhead light's corona giving him one of those malperspectived medieval halos that seem to stand on end. Even masked, Zegarelli's breath is infamous - E.T.A.s forced for the first time by their E.T.A. Group Plan to recline below Zegarelli are counselled on how to respire, to inhale when Zegarelli inhales and exhale right back out with him, to avoid doubling the amount of suffering Hal's already gone through, just today.

Charles Tavis is not a buffoon. The thing that's keeping things so tensely quiet out here amid all this waiting-room blue is that there are historically at least two Charles Tavises, the three older boys know. The openly cross-sectional and free-a.s.sociating and arms-waving-on-the-perspectival-horizon dithering hand-wringing Total-Worry persona is really Tavis's version of social composure, his way of trying to get along with you. But just ask Michael Pemulis, whose sneakers have been on Tavis's carpet so often they've left an unvacuumable impression in the checked Antron: when Tavis loses his composure, when the integrity or smooth function of the Academy or his unquestioned place at the E.T.A. tiller is G.o.d forbid threatened, Hal's openly adjustable uncle becomes a different man, one not to be f.u.c.ked with. It's not necessarily pejorative to compare a cornered bureaucrat to a cornered rat. The danger-sign to watch out for is if Tavis suddenly gets very quiet and very still. Because then he seems, perspectivally, to grow. He seems, sitting there, to rush in at you, dopplering in at a whisper. Almost looming over you from across the huge desk. If s.h.i.t meets administrative fan, kids coming out of his mandible-doored office come out pale and rubbing their eyes, not from tears but from this depth-perspective skewing that C.T. suddenly effects, when there's s.h.i.t.

Another alert is when Lateral Alice Moore gets formally buzzed to bring you and the others in, instead of the office doors ever opening from inside, and when she gets up and edges over to show you in like you're some sort of hat-holding salesman, without once meeting your eye, as if there's shame. One big family.

The diddle-check seems like it's degenerated into the girls all getting very excited and exchanging data on what kinds of animals members of their own biologic families either imitate or physically resemble, and Avril's out of sight and silent and apparently letting them go with it for a while and vent stress. Hal keeps checking for jaw-drool with the back of his hand. Pemulis, in a cyrillic-lettered T-shirt, takes off the hat and looks around himself and makes reflexive tie-straightening movements, taking one last look at his lines on the printout while Axford stands there needing three tries to work the outside door's k.n.o.b. Ann Kittenplan, on the other hand, wears an expression of almost regal calm, and precedes them through the inner door like someone stepping down off a dais.

And it also seems somehow sinister that she's apparently been in here all this time, this Clenette person, one of the nine-month temps from down the hill, pretty-eyed and so black she's got a bluish cast, with hair ironed straight and then pinned up and the standard E.T.A.-custodial teal-blue zip-upable jumpsuit, emptying Tavis's personal bra.s.s wastebaskets into her big cart with its gray canvas sides. The way she stares at a point just to the side of Hal's own stare as she and her cart wait at C.T.'s inner door for Hal and the others to be ushered sideways through by Lateral Alice Moore. The cart, like poor Otis Lord's own game-master's cart, has a crazy wheel, and clatters a bit even buried in s.h.a.g, trying to maneuver around Moore as she reverses back along the vestibule's wall. Neither Scht.i.tt nor deLint is in here, but from the hiss of Pemulis's inhale Hal can tell that Dr. Dolores Rusk is in the room even before he takes his eyes from a C.T. who's sitting pulsing with swollen proximity in his seagra.s.s swivel-chair and almost done coolly bending a giant paper clip into a sort of cardioid or else sloppy circle: Tavis's window-lit shadow now reaches all the way past the StairBlaster to the red-and-gray-fabric ottoman along the east wall, in which sits sure enough Rusk, her hose laddered and face betraying nothing; and then next to her is poor old Otis P. Lord, the Hitachi monitor still over his head like the sallet of some grotesque high-tech knight, slumped and with his sneakers pointing at each other in the blue and black s.h.a.g, hands in his lap, two crude eye-holes cut into the black plastic casing of the monitor's base, Lord not meeting Pemulis's eye, and wicked hanging shards of gla.s.s from the screen he fell through pointing - some nearly touching, even - his slim neck and throat, so he has to hold his head very still, despite the heavings of his shallow chest, with the day-shift E.T.A. nurse standing behind him and inclined over the back of the sofa to hold the monitor very carefully in place, the incline producing cleavage which Hal would gladly choose to be the sort of person not to note. Lord's eyes move to Hal and blink dolefully through the holes, and he can be heard sniffing moistly in there, complexly m.u.f.fled; and Pemulis is just finishing moving his feet precisely into their familiar impressions in the office carpet when C.T., seeming direly to rise from his chair without getting up, quietly asks the room's last occupant - the scrubbed young b.u.t.ton-nosed urologist in an O.N.A.N.T.A. blazer, severely underdue at E.T.A., seated back in the shadow of the open inner door in the room's southeast corner, so he's hidden right behind them from the start and there's the opportunity for this stagy incriminating-type whirl-and-kertw.a.n.g-face from Axford and Hal as they hear Charles Tavis addressing the urine expert behind them, asking him very quietly please to close both doors.

PRE-DAWN AND DAWN, 1 MAY Y.D.A.U.

OUTCROPPING NORTHWEST OF TUCSON AZ U.S.A., STILL.

'You can't say it's only a U.S. thing,' Steeply said again. 'I went through school when multiculturalism was inescapable. We read about the j.a.panese and Indonesians, for example, having a mythic figure. I forget its name. Oriental myth. It's a woman covered with long blond hair. Entirely. Her whole body with blond down all over it.'

'This type of pa.s.sive temptation, part of it seems to include a felt lack. A perceived deprivation. Orientals are not bodily a hairy culture.'

'These multicultural Oriental myths always had young Oriental men happening upon her by some body of water combing her body-hair and singing. And they have s.e.x with her. Apparently she's simply too exotic and intriguing or seductive to resist. Even the young Oriental men who know of the myths can't resist, according to the myths.'

'And are rendered paralyzed with stasis by this intimate act,' Marathe said. When now he dreamt of his father, it was of the two skating, young Marathe and M. Marathe, at a St. Remi-d'Amherst outdoor rink, M. Marathe's breath visible and his pacemaker a boxy bulge in his Brunswickian cardigan.

'Killed outright, usually. The pleasure's too intense. No mortal can stand it. Kills them. M-o-r-t-s. M-o-r-t-s.'

Marathe sniffed.

'The a.n.a.logous part is how even the ones who know the pleasure of it will kill them, they go ahead anyway.'

Marathe coughed.

Some of the insects flying had multiple pairs of wings and were bioluminescent. They seemed very intent, flying past the outcropping and darting jaggedly off on a course, on their way to something urgent. The sound of them, the insects, made Marathe think of playing cards in the bicycle spokes of the bicycle of a boy with legs. Both men were silent. This is the time of false dawns. Venus moved east away from them. The softest light imaginable seeped into the desert and spread into the strange tan vistas around them, something heating just below the ring of night. His blanket of the lap was covered in burrs and small spiked seeds of some species. The U.S.A. desert began to rustle with life of which most remained hidden. In the American sky, the stars fluttering like banked flames above a low-resolution seepage of glow. But none of the pinkening of genuine dawn.

Both the U.S.A. Office of Unspecified Services and les a.s.sa.s.sins des Fauteuils Rollents les a.s.sa.s.sins des Fauteuils Rollents looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with Marathe's betrayal, despite language. looked forward to these meetings of Marathe and Steeply. They accomplished little. It was their sixth or seventh. Meeting. Steeply had volunteered to be liaison with Marathe's betrayal, despite language. 222 222 The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. According to Steeply, Steeply's B.S.S. superiors did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this fact back from his superiors. It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one's superiors, Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Quebec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney 'the G.o.d' Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both. The A.F.R. believed Marathe functioned as a triple agent, pretending to betray his nation for his wife, memorizing every detail of the meetings with B.S.S. According to Steeply, Steeply's B.S.S. superiors did not know that Fortier knew that Steeply knew he (Fortier) knew Marathe was here. Steeply held this fact back from his superiors. It satisfied some U.S.A. desire to hold some small thing back from one's superiors, Marathe felt. Unless Steeply was deceiving Marathe about this. Marathe did not know. M. Fortier did not know Marathe had reached the internal choice that he loved his skull-deprived and heart-defective wife Gertraud Marathe more than he loved the Separatist and anti-O.N.A.N. cause of the nation Quebec, making Marathe no better than M. Rodney 'the G.o.d' Tine. If Fortier knew of this, he would understandably drive a railroad spike through Gertraud's boneless right eye, killing her and Marathe both.

The real Marathe gestured outward at the glowing but unpink east. 'A false dawn.'

'No,' Steeply said, 'but your own francophone myth of your Odalisk of Theresa.'

'L'Odalisque de Sainte Th' erese.' Marathe rarely yielded to the temptation to correct Steeply, whose horrid p.r.o.nunciation and the syntax as well Marathe could never determine for sure either was or was not an intentional irritant, intended to discomfit Marathe.

Steeply said 'The multicultural myth being that the Odalisk's so beautiful that mortal Quebecois eyes can't take it. Whoever looks at her turns into a diamond or gem.'

'In most versions an opal.'

'A Medusa in reverse, one might say.'

Both men, well versed in this, mirthlessly laughed. 223 223 Marathe said 'The Greeks, they did not fear beauty. They feared ugliness. Hence I think beauty and pleasure, these were not fatal temptations for the Greek type.'

'Or like a combination of Medusa and Circe, your Odalisk' said Steeply. He was smoking either his last or one of his purse's pack's last cigarettes - the American's habit to throw the b.u.t.ts off the outcropping had prevented Marathe from counting the consumed b.u.t.ts. Marathe knew that Steeply knew that filters of cigarettes did not biodegrade for the environment. The two men, by this juncture of time, each knew the other.

A hidden bird twittered.

'The Greek mythic personality, it had also pregnancy by rain and rape by fowl.'

'And haven't we come a long way,' Steeply said ironically.

'This irony and contempt for selves. These also are part of your U.S.A. type's temptation, I think.'

'Whereas your type's a man of only actions, ends,' Steeply said, with Marathe could not tell whether irony or maybe not.

The desert floor was brightening by imperceptible degrees, its surface the color of overtanned hide. The saguaro cactus reptile-hued. Potentially young forms in down sleeping bags of coffinous shape were now discernible around the black remains of the night's bonfire. The air smelled of green wood. A tasteless odor of dust. The distant construction site's payloaders were urine-colored and appeared frozen in the middle of various actions. It was still chill. Marathe's teeth had a palpable film on them, of perhaps a paste of dust, especially the front teeth. No sun's top arc was appearing, and Marathe could cast no shadow yet on the shale behind them.

Remy Marathe's resting pulse rate was very low: no legs to require blood from the heart. He very rarely felt phantom pains, and then only in the stump of the left. All A.F.R.s have enormous arms, particularly upper arms. Marathe was left-handed. Steeply manipulated his cigarette with his left hand and used his right arm to cradle the left elbow. But Marathe knew quite well that Steeply was right-handed. The little wens of his fieldpersona's electrolysis were now brightly pink against the pallor of Steeply's face, which appeared both puffy and drawn.

The cloudless sky above the east's Mountains of Rincon range was the faint sick pink of an unhealed burn. The whole imperceptibly lightening scene of the vistas had a stillness about it that suggested photography. Marathe had long ago placed his watch in his windbreaker's pocket, to keep from continually checking. Steeply enjoyed imagining that his interface dictated its own period and time; Marathe had chosen to indulge this.

Marathe realized about himself that some of his pretended sniffing was for the purpose of alerting Steeply to the breaking of a silence. 'You could seat yourself briefly, if you have fatigue. The shoes' straps...' He gestured slightly.

Steeply made a show of looking down and prodding at the tan stone's dust with the toes of his shoe. 'It looks like there might be things.'

'I must soon leave.' Marathe's hand was imprinted with the texture of the Sterling's pebbled grip. 'It has been good to be in the air for a night. Soon I must leave.'

'Crawling around. The skirt, it makes one sensitive about simply plop-ping down wherever you wish. Possibility of things... crawling up.' He looked up at Marathe. He appeared sad. 'I'd never realized.'

0450H., 11 NOVEMBER.

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT FRONT OFFICE, ENNET HOUSE D.A.R.H., ENFIELD MA.

'Didn't know whether to s.h.i.t or shout Dixie after it went off. And the look look on his face.' on his face.'

'One of the times for me was I'm in some bar in Lowell with some guys I'm crewing around with and we were there with some other guys, just f.u.c.king Lowell knuckleheads, your young drunks that are just getting to be your young working-type drunks that stop off after work for just a couple and don't make it home til closing. Just putting away boilermakers and playing darts and this and that. And this one guy on the crew starts making moves on this one guy's girl, this real ordinary-looking guy's in there with his girl and one of our guys starts saying this and that to her, trying to pick her up, and her date got p.i.s.sed off, you know, who can blame him, and there was words exchanged and so on and so forth, and we was all there with this first guy, in our like group, he was the one talking the s.h.i.t to this guy's girl but he was our boy, we're all in the crew, so we all crew up on this girl's date and push him around somewhat, you know how it is, say he's talking s.h.i.t to our boy, he gets a little bit of a beating, dope-slaps, nothing like extreme or blood, and we kick his a.s.s around a little bit and toss him out of this bar and get this girl to drink boilermakers with us and the one guy that was making the moves on her in the first place gets her to start playing strip-darts, like taking off bits of clothes for points in darts, which the keep isn't too like thrilled but these boys are his customers, it's like family. We're all real drunk and playing strip-darts.'

'I get the picture. Sounds like a real nice picture.'

'Except when I got a little smarter later I learned you never in a neighborhood bar fu- you don't ever mess with a local guy with a girl and make him look small in front of the girl and then stay there where it happened if he leaves, because it's this kind of guy always comes back.'

'You learned to leave.'

'Because this guy like a half-hour later on he comes back packing. Packing Packing means there's a Item involved, now, see.' means there's a Item involved, now, see.'

'Item?'

'A gun. This wasn't a big one, I'm remembering a .25 somewhat, in that range, but in he comes and comes straight over to the dart game and the girl that's down to her slip and pulls it out and without saying nothing up and comes right over and shoots our boy, that'd taken his girl and made him look small, shoots him right in the head, right in the back of the head.'

'Boy was crazy as a s.h.i.thouse rat.'

'Well Joelle he'd got made small in front of his girl, and we stayed, and he came back and plugged him in the back of the head.'

'And killed him dead.'

'Not right away he didn't die. The negativest part for me is what we do. All us guys with the guy that was shot. We are all very f.u.c.ked up by this point in time. I remember it not seeming real. The keep's busy calling the Finest, the guy drops the Item and the keep grabbed him and covered him with the bar piece and called the Finest and kept the guy back behind the bar, I think mostly now to keep us from eliminating his map right there, out of payback. We're all blotto-zombie drunk by this juncture. The girl, there was blood all down the side of her slip. And here our boy's shot in the head, the guy'd shot him right through the back of the head from the side, and blood's all over. You always maybe think of individuals bleeding in this one way, like steady. But your serious bleeding comes with the pulse, if you didn't know. It like shoots out and dies down and shoots out.'

'Don't have to tell me.'

'Well I don't know you, Joelle, am I right? I don't know what you seen or know.'

'I saw an old boy cut his hand off with a chainsaw cutting back brush back of the c.u.mberland when I was fishing with my Daddy. Like to have bled to death right there. My Daddy had to use his belt. Before he got it tied off the blood came like that, with the pulse. My Daddy got him to the hospital in his car, like to saved his life. He'd had some training. He could save lives like that.'

'I tell you, what still gets me is we was so drunk we didn't even somehow take it seriously, because everything seemed like a movie when I got real drunk. I still wish we'd thought to take him to the hospital right away. We could of piled him in. He wasn't dead yet even though he didn't look good. We didn't even lay him down, we got this idea, one of the guys started walking him around. We all walked him around in circles like some kind of O.D., thought if we could keep him walking til the wagon came he'd be OK. By the end we was dragging him, I think then he was dead. Blood all over everybody. The gun wasn't more than an old .25. People was yelling at us to pile him in and take him to the hospital, but we'd got this walking-him-around idea into our heads, to hold him up and walk him in circles, the girl's screaming and trying to put her stockings on and we're yelling to the guy that'd shot him how we were going to off with his map and so on and so forth, till the keep called an ambulance and they came and he was dead as a stick.'

'Gately that's really bad.'

'Why are you even up, don't have to work.'