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shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. Why might be a better question.
    Well, you certainly outdid yourself. I suppose you know what this means. We’ve got the son of a bitch. We’ve got him in a way nobody’s had him before, and it’s going to cost him.
    I’ll tell you what, Corrie. You’ve got him. Not me. I want nothing whatever to do with him. I don’t want to talk to him, to see him, to ever hear his voice. I don’t even want to know he’s in this world. I’ve seen some sorry things, but Jesus.
    I do. I want to watch his face when I tell him.
    He didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. She was studying the pictures clinically, one at a time, laying them aside. Watching her face by the lamplight, he thought she looked somehow fevered, her rapt eyes fired by something akin to religious frenzy. Sister of some secret sect, perusing its dark devotional. Prayers offered to a horned deitysquatting just beyond the rim of firelight. Watching her so he was touched with pity. She’d come up hard. A childhood that passed with an eye’s blinking. Stepping over sleeping drunks on the way to school. With girlhood came the whistles and catcalls on the schoolyard. Hey, Corrie, how about a piece of that? You’ve done it with everybody else, how about me? He’d fought over her and he remembered the coppery bright taste of blood in his mouth. She tried to be like everybody else. To be one of the freshfaced town girls with their air of entitled confidence. She wore the same kind of clothes the other girls wore but somehow without the right flair, and ultimately all her efforts underlined the fact that she was just another piece of the puzzle that did not quite fit.
    Why are you looking at me like that?
    I was thinking I’ve known you all my life, and yet I don’t know you at all.
    There’s nothing to know. I get up, I work, I do the housework. I cook, I go to bed. Then tomorrow I get up and do the same thing over again.
    He didn’t answer.
    I don’t know you. I don’t know where you go when you’re wandering around. What you think. No one’s ever known what you think. You get what you think out of a book. It’s like you hardly ever talk and when you do it’s in some foreign language. Some language nobody even speaks. But one thing you can know about me is that I’m going to shove the knife in Fenton Breece and twist it. That’s the main thing about me right now.
    I wish you’d forget about Fenton Breece. He’s like that card on the wall, the invisible listener at every conversation, the guest at every meal. You may develop a taste for him. He’s going to put us on Easy Street.
    This is absolutely crazy as shit. There is just no way he’s going to smile and start counting hundred-dollar bills into your hand. Just no way.
    Hellfire, Kenneth, what can he do? Run to the law? There’s nothing he can do but pay up. Try to put yourself in his shoes.
    I don’t want in his shoes, Tyler said. And if I was I’d cut my throat.

    During the last few years of his life Tyler’s father would reacha certain stage of drunkenness during which he used to sit and watch Tyler with a peculiar speculation, as if he’d see what manner of beast this was he’d sired. Tyler walked a narrow line those years, it didn’t take much to set the old man off.
    When Tyler was twelve or thirteen he took to sleeping in the attic. It was quieter up there, and quiet was at a premium, for the house was ofttimes full of drunks by turns convivial and quarrelsome. There were two doors between the attic and the ground floor and on one of these Tyler had installed a lock he’d come by. He liked the slope of the dark oaken rafters over his iron bed, and there was a window you could open to the weathers in the spring and summer. This window faced the back of the house and looked out upon a stony field sloping toward the cedared horizon. There was a hiding place in the boxing over the door for books he chanced upon. The old man