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now.
    Old T. D. left her to join the three old farts on the patio. She leaned against the wall in the darkening pantry, sensing the past and the future at the same time. It was traumatic, intoxicating. Father? She hadn’t even read the book.
12
The Big Spit
    The swallows were still circling when Slant returned to the patio and went to work tossing steaks around on a grilled fire pit. Millard and Sewey were pleased,but Galon kept coughing and spitting into the fire. He ignored the food except to pick now and then at a plate of tiny figs intended as dessert while Millard and Sewey gnawed at the meat like wolverines and gulped handfuls of fried clams rolled in tortillas. Once they had stuffed themselves, it was on to more brandy and the literary business at hand, with Taya listening from the pantry.
    The conversation was difficult to follow, but about this Buckdown…this transgressing double-dealing viper turd…this venal captain of falsehoods…this polluted forger of truth…this dirty rat…this liar. He should be made to grovel in the pornographic bile of his own sucking counterfeits. Cysts, sties, carbuncles, cavities, slivers, and ingrown horns should come to him as only a partial reward for his salacious frauds. He should be lashed, rib-roasted, larruped, pummeled, stomped, drawn and quartered, and creamed. Something to that effect.
    Galon seemed to be feeling better. He led Millard and Sewey into a righteous frenzy about how they were going to serve that son-of-a-buck Buckdown right. Slant nodded and made cosmetic notes while the tremors of drunkenness rattling up from the patio chased off the swallows for good. Suddenly, Galon lurched to his feet.
    The big spit, he announced, and staggered off.
    Slant grabbed the pause in the conversation and excused himself to the pantry for another bottle and his small silver-plated belly gun just in case.
    Inside he found Taya loading the gun. Her eyes flashed wet and cold at him, like bullets in a shotglass. He asked her for the gun. She shook her head.
    You’re drunk, she said.
    Indeed he was, drunk enough to forget himself and blunder through an explanation of how he was just faking it with the Burgetts and Sewey, and how he had no intention of writing down any of their swill.
    Don’t you see, he said, gesturing for the gun, I’m just putting them on.
    A big mistake and too bad. Framed in the small open window behind them was Galon Burgett, his mouth smeared with vomit, a whip cracking in his bloodshot eyes.
13
Southern Style
    The rape of Melting-Snow-of-Winter-That-Chases-Despair and the castration of Theodosius D’Artagnon Slant took the boys about ten minutes. They accomplished it in what Sewey referred to as southern style. Semi-southern style is closer to the truth, however, since both victims were not conscious throughout, and the idea was always to make each watch what happened to the other. Just ask any Oakie.
    While Galon held Taya, Millard and Sewey gagged old T. D. and hung him by his wrists from the main redwood ceiling beam. He kicked frantically for a moment, running hopelessly in the still air, getting nowhere. Sewey spun him like a field-dressed animal, and he went limp at the end of the twisting ropeas they bent Taya back like a sapling over the desk. Then an almost isometric quiet, broken only by the sound of fabric being torn from her breasts and crotch. Finally, her one and only scream.
    As Sewey and the Burgetts took their turns, Taya strained as if against drowning, counting their thrusts as days, then months. Old T. D. clenched his eyes against the sight of her finely grained skin glistening under their sweat until he sensed that she had passed out, and he looked with hopeless resignation to see them turning their attention to him.
    Sewey said he’d handle it, and he did. Drop his pants for him, he told Millard, and when that was done Sewey grabbed old T. D. by the balls and made a quick swipe with his knife. The scrotum sack and its vein-laced