"What am I gonna do? I can't tell Mama."

"You have to tell her."

"Then what?"

"Have the baby, or get Aunt Cary to take care of it."

"Take care of it?"

"Get rid of it before it's born."

"I couldn't do that."

"Then you'll have it. And you'll raise it."

"Won't nothing ever be the same again."

"No. But you can live with change. Me and your mama can live through what we're living through, you can live through what's gonna happen to you. And we can help you."

"I did a bad thing."

"I've done a bad thing or two in my time, honey. Some things I don't even talk about. Sometimes, you get like a fever, and it just happens. All kinds of things can happen, and then you got to live with regrets. Some are easier to live with than others."

"I can tell you things I can't tell Mama."

"That's what grandmas are for. Hell, girl. You ain't done so bad. Just followed the path all us animals want to follow. At your age, girl goes into heat, it don't take a lot of persuading. Unlike a dog, we people stay in heat, and it's at its hottest when we're young. Get some pretty fella like Hillbilly saying the right things, it's easy to do something you ought not. Ain't a thing wrong with loving, girl, it's who you love and what they want from you that matters."

"He said I was pretty."

"He didn't lie. You got your father's coloring, your mother's bones. Did he tell you he'd marry you?"

"No. I thought about all that, and he didn't ever make me any kind of promise. Just told me good things about myself, and he touched me, and when he did, I felt like I had to have him."

"Like you wanted to be burned up by him."

"That's right. How'd you know?"

Marilyn laughed. "I haven't always been this old. I ain't been that hot in a time, but I know what it feels like. You keep a memory for it."

"Grandma, I feel like I been put in a sack and shook up and throwed out."

Marilyn took Karen in her arms and held her. "Relax now. We'll figure this out."

"You gonna tell Mama? She likes him, you know. I heard Willie say she kissed him."

"I know she likes him. I don't like that she does. And yeah, you got to tell her."

"I don't know how."

"I'll help you."

That morning Sunset drove over to see Hillbilly in his camp, but the little hut he had built of limbs and leaves and old shirts wasn't there anymore, and neither was he. It was as if he had been plucked up and toted off by the wind. She got out and looked around and found where he had dragged the little hut apart and thrown the pieces of it up into the woods. There was a kind of savage finality to the way it looked.

She drove home.

Back at the tent, Clyde and Ben were out front. Clyde had made coffee and was sitting in one of the chairs by the water pump, drinking a cup. Ben was sitting beside him, Clyde's arm around his neck. When she drove up, Clyde went inside and came out with a cup of the same for her. They sat in the chairs and she sipped the coffee.

After a while, Clyde said, "Hillbilly coming in to work?"

"I don't know."

"Wasn't at his spot, was he?"

"No."

"Could have just moved it, found a better place."

"You don't think that, do you?"

"Nope."

"You hope he's gone on, don't you?"

"Yep. And nope."

"What's that mean?"

"I hope he's gone. But I don't want him to lie to you and make you sad."

Without looking at him, Sunset put her hand on his arm.

Clyde swallowed. He made himself relax so he could feel the warmth and weight of her hand through his shirt sleeve. He took a deep breath. She was wearing a bit of perfume, just enough to sweeten the air around her.

It wasn't much, that hand on his arm, but it was something, a tidbit he could enjoy. Like a blind hog finding an acorn, it wasn't filling, but it fed the appetite.

27.

After his talk with McBride, Rooster went to his office, trembling, his hand aching. It wasn't broken. McBride's strong grip had shifted bones and now they were shifted back, but it was sore.

Rooster thought about what McBride made him do, felt sick about it, felt about two inches tall if he could wear stilts and stand on a stump. There wasn't any need for McBride to do that. He had done it just because he could, the wig-headed sonofabitch.

Rooster got a wash pan, filled it with water, used a thick bar of soap to wash his lips, rubbed with it until they were near raw and the soap taste was in his mouth; he thought he'd gag from it, but determined it was a taste better than the one he was remembering.

After the soap, he took off his hat and put his face down in the pan of water and held it there for as long as he could hold his breath. When he came up, snorting, grabbing for a towel, he didn't feel one bit cleaner.

He marched out on the office steps, looked up the street, stared at the red apartment over the drugstore, felt like he should go in and get the shotgun, trot back over to see McBride. He'd make him suck on the barrel, that's what he would do. Should have bit the bastard's dick off, that's what he ought to have done, tore it out by the roots with his teeth. What a coward he was, doing what he did. Should have let McBride break his hand before he did what he did.

He thought about the shotgun some more, but didn't think he could do it, and if he tried, he might end up with it up his ass, McBride working the pump action, pulling the trigger till it didn't work anymore. It was easy to be tough out here on the steps of his office in the sunlight, but up there in that stuffy room with the little bit of light and all the shadows and McBride in his ugly black wig, that was another thing. And there was the Beetle Man, too.

Rooster thought about getting one of Sheriff Knowles' cigars from the desk drawer, smoking that, to kind of purify himself, clean out his mouth with smoke, but the more he thought about the big fat cigars Sheriff Knowles had smoked, the less he liked that idea.

He walked around the edge of the office and looked to see the colored men still on their line, sleeping, and Plug and Tootie still sleeping as well. The dew had settled on them and Rooster could see it lay damp on Plug's hat and the knees of his pants. Rooster was so angry, he thought he might take it out on them for sleeping, then he thought better of it. He didn't want them up.

Rooster observed a fistful of grasshoppers hanging on the edge of the building, and to quench his anger, he used his hand to smash a couple of them, wiped the waste on the edge of the bricks with a quick scraping motion.

He went back around front and stood on the steps again. He was wiping at his mouth with the back of his clean hand, when a blue car came down the street, veered around the passed-out fat woman, paused with the motor humming. The passenger door opened and Hillbilly got out with a blanket bound up and tied over his shoulder. Rooster strained to see who was driving. It was some man he had seen around town, but didn't know. The car drove on past the office in the direction of the courthouse.

Hillbilly stopped in the road for a minute, studied the fat woman lying there with the precision of a marine biologist studying a beached whale, then came walking toward Rooster. As Hillbilly passed him on the walk, he nodded.

Rooster said, "I thought you was constablin'."

"Sometimes," Hillbilly said. "Today I didn't want to. I don't know I'm gonna want to again. I'm actually a singer and picker. Did some singing last night, and I know that's what I got to do. Got some pay, so I hitched in to look for a guitar to buy. You don't know of any?"

Rooster shook his head.

"Your mouth's all red. You got some kind of hives?"

"No. I do know this, though. That gal, Sunset, who I figure you like . . . you do like her, don't you?"

"Well enough and in certain ways," Hillbilly said.

"She's in for some hell, friend. There's a way maybe you can help her."

When Rooster finished saying this, he felt stunned. It had just leaped from his mouth like a frog.

"I try to mind my own business," Hillbilly said.

Rooster gave him a quizzical look. "You are the law."

"Ain't so sure I want to be any kind of law anymore. I never felt I fit good being the law. Ain't you the law? This has something to do with the law, you're the law. I'm retired."

"I like that redhead," Rooster said.

"Hell, any man likes that redhead," Hillbilly said.

"That's not what I mean. She's got heart. She's got more courage than I got. And she's gonna need it."

"How's that?"

"McBride."

"John McBride?"

"How'd you know?"

"Seen his name on a paper at the courthouse."

Rooster nodded. He saw the fat woman lying in the street move, start to get up. She managed to roll over and get a knee under her.

"I think you're a man that'll play angles," Rooster said. "I'm not sure Sunset is a woman that'll do that."

"What does that mean, I'm a man will play angles? What are you getting at, Rooster?"

"I think you can help her and maybe make some good money quick like."

"Where does it come from, this quick money?"

"Me."

"Tell you what, buddy. I got better things to do with my morning than play at riddles."

"Henry Shelby over at the mill in Camp Rapture-"

"I know who he is."

"-he come up with this idea, you see. He was hunting on land belonged to this colored, Zendo, and he found oil. Zendo don't even know it's his land. Or if he thought it was his land, Shelby fixed that. Day after he found the oil, he went and asked Zendo if he'd sell, telling him he wanted it for the lumber company, and Zendo said no, he didn't want to sell, and Shelby asked him how big his land was, and Zendo didn't know. Just bought him a patch and farms part of what he knows is his patch. A colored, he don't ask a lot of questions when he gets something around here, even if he pays near double for it. Glad to have what he knows to be his, even if he has more and don't know it. Course, he don't know about the oil. That might change his thinking. Surveyors hadn't even bothered to come and stake out the land he bought. Just drew it up on paper, and you got to really study them papers to know what they're about. And Zendo, if he's like a lot of the coloreds around here, he don't even read. So, Henry Shelby, he says, 'Tell you what, I'll pay to have your land surveyed so you'll know exactly what's yours, cause since I can't buy your land, I can buy land next to you.' That's no big thing to Zendo, a free survey, cause now he'll know exactly what he owns."

"And the land got cut up different than it was supposed to be," Hillbilly said. "Yeah, me and Sunset sort of got that part."

They watched as the woman from the street came stumbling by. Rooster thought she looked like one of the women from Dodge Street. She was lurching in that direction. When she passed them and was far enough away, Rooster continued.

"They cut Zendo a bigger piece than he thought he owned, to make him happy about things. But they kept the rest of it, a big chunk, the oil land. Shelby, to make this work, had to have the mayor in on it. He knew him pretty good, see."

"I thought I heard he run off, or something," Hillbilly said.

Rooster nodded. "Or something. Mayor and Henry were card-playing and whore-running buddies. Shelby tells him what he knows, cause he needs the mayor to mess with the papers at the courthouse. Make it official. So he has to cut him in. Then this McBride shows up, and the mayor, he isn't around anymore. I reckon Henry wasn't that big a buddy of the mayor after all."

"Ain't it kind of scary you knowing what you know?"

"They needed me, they cut me in. I don't get a piece of the oil, just get paid, by them. McBride mostly, but I know it comes from Henry. Now I'm in deep. And I'm scared. I don't want to do nothing really bad, and I'm figuring that's what they're gonna want. Something bad. Sometime soon."

"You're trying to keep those maps secret, might not hurt you put a better guard on things at the courthouse," Hillbilly said. "You're gonna be a thief or help out thieves, figure you ought to be smarter."

"They never thought anyone would think to look, Pete dead and all. And if they did look, so what? The original papers were gone. Then Sunset comes up with them. I should have asked for them. She'd have given them to me, wouldn't be no problem."

"Why didn't you ask?"

Rooster shook his head. "I don't never make good choices. I got to get them papers back. For her. And for me. I thought maybe you could do it, for her. It's worth a hundred dollars."

"That's a lot of money right now."

Rooster nodded.