"You can't walk," Caroline said.

"Then," Dixie said, "there was that rare-book collector in Philadelphia who bought Napoleon's penis."

"Caroline," Nicole said, "Dixie's talking about Napoleon's penis again!"

Jack finished his drink and poured himself another brimful glass.

"It'll dehydrate you," Caroline said.

"It'll help kill the pain," Jack said.

"You already had three Percodan," Caroline said.

"My roommate at Deerfield collected Tijuana bibles," Dixie said. "Pornographic satires of comic strips. Blondie and Dagwood. Blondie has the biggest bosom of any cartoon character."

"I should go home," Jack said.

"Bigger than Tootsie," Dixie said.

"You should go to the emergency room," Caroline said.

"Art, rat, tar," Dixie announced.

Jack, Caroline, and Nicole looked at him.

"All have the same three letters," Dixie said.

"Dixie," Nicole said, "you're drunk."

"And you're getting drunk," Caroline said to Jack. "It's not smart to drink with painkillers."

"It's been weeks since I've done anything smart," Jack said. "Years." He took a slug of the bourbon. "My whole life."

"I'll get you some coffee," Caroline said.

"My wife," Dixie said, "came from the last generation of women to travel with hatboxes."

"I'll get it myself," Jack said.

Jack hobbled across the room to the sideboard, which held a twelve-cup coffee urn.

"Coal chutes and straw on blocks of ice," Dixie said. "The scissor man and the junk-dealer's horse-drawn cart," sounding like Jack, when he was trying to convince Caroline he was too old for her.

"For God's sake, Jack," Nicole said, "take a towel with you."

"You're all in Technicolor," Dixie said.

"You'll ruin the rug," Nicole said.

"I live a black-and-white life," Dixie said.

Jack put a cup under the coffee spigot and depressed the handle. The cup filled. When Jack pushed the handle back upright, the coffee kept pouring.

"There's something wrong," Caroline said, getting up.

Coffee spilled over Jack's cup.

"The spigot's broken," Caroline said, trying to help Jack stop the flow. "It's burning your hand."

Caroline grabbed Jack's cup out of the way.

Nicole watched horrified as the coffee urn emptied itself onto the Kurdistan rug.

Jack said, "You people are nuts!"

He stomped from the room, slamming out the front door.

"Jack," Caroline called.

She ran to the door. Opened it.

But Jack had flagged down a car and was climbing into it.

Inside the house, Dixie was saying, "I don't think I want to be cremated after all. I want a headstone."

Caroline watched the car pull away. Heard the change in pitch as the car changed gears.

She closed the door behind her and came back into the living room.

"Now, see what you've done?" Caroline said to Dixie and Nicole. "You've driven him away."

"Did you notice the back of Jack's head?" Dixie said. "The low bulge? Above the middle part of the cerebellum? Phrenologically speaking, that indicates philoprogenitiveness. Jack will make a good father."

2.

Fuck them, Jack thought as he settled in the car he'd flagged down.

"I almost hit you, standing in the middle of the street like that," the guy driving said. A wiry man in jeans and white T-shirt. The right sleeve was folded up over a pack of Camels. His short red hair stood straight up.

"What happened to your leg, man?" the driver asked.

"My girlfriend bit me," Jack said.

"Cool," the driver said.

When Jack saw the pistol angling out of the driver's belt, the driver said, "Don't worry, fella, I got a carry permit. You don't think I'd of picked you up if I was traveling light, do you?"

With his left hand the driver reached across his body and unfolded the pack of cigarettes, which he shook, held up to his lips, plugging a cigarette into his mouth.

"Want a smoke?" he asked.

"No thanks," Jack said.

The driver tossed the pack onto the dashboard. From his pocket, he took a lighter with a picture of a bathing beauty on its plastic side.

When the lighter was upside down-as it was in his hand-the bathing beauty was naked. Her flesh the color of a baby's pacifier. The driver turned the lighter right side up. A white one-piece bathing suit slid over the naked body. He lit the cigarette, slit his eyes as he inhaled.

"Don't sit on the Windex," the driver said.

Jack moved the plastic Windex bottle from behind him, where it was half tucked into the seat.

"Wiper fluid used to be ninety-nine cents a gallon," the driver said. "Now, it's five times that. Why not save a little, using Windex, until winter?"

As they passed Big Pig Bar-B-Q, smoke from the outside pit billowed across the highway into the car.

It smelled to Jack like Robert's burning body.

3.

Jack climbed out of the car a few blocks away from Bix's one-story cottage. The fifty-year-old rust-colored asphalt shingles were stripped away from under the front window, revealing the tar paper beneath.

Bix's truck wasn't parked in the driveway. Two clunkers were on the lawn.

The wind dropped. The electric wires, which had been singing in the breeze, went silent.

Jack hobbled up the walk to the house, his cut pant leg flapping.

Jack opened the door. Bix never locked the house.

Bix wasn't home.

The house smelled of old bacon grease.

Jack stumbled into the living room and eased himself onto the couch.

He figured he'd just remove Caroline from his life. Bit by bit. Like shrapnel.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

1.

At dawn, Jack sat bolt upright on the couch in Bix's cottage. Wide awake.

His pant leg-the previous night, he'd flopped down to sleep without getting undressed-was crusted with new blood. The couch cushion was also crusted, so thick, it flaked when Jack moved.

From outside, Jack heard a Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings song. That must have been what woke him up.

Aching, light-headed from loss of blood, Jack eased himself up from the couch and took a few loping steps to the door of the cottage, which he opened.

Rays of green shot from the horizon into the dawn sky, like an opening fan.

In front of the shack, Jack's brother, Bix, was smashing the windshield of one of the clunkers-a battered Chevy.

The music had changed to "The Night Hank Williams Came to Town."

"County fair's next week, little brother," Bix said. "Got to get ready for the demolition derby."

"I'm too old," Jack said.

"You wasn't too old last year," Bix said, eying Jack's bloody pant leg and newly battered face.

"You got to get yourself a new hobby," Bix said, nodding at Jack's injuries.

"This year," Jack said about the demolition derby, "you ride solo."

"We ain't never missed a year since you was nineteen," Bix said.

Bix swung the crowbar backhanded and left a spiderweb crack in a side window.

"I got another crowbar," Bix said.

"I need a gun," Jack said.

"You got a gun," Bix said.