She couldn’t find but one clean plate, so she used one slightly soiled. She polished a couple of forks with a dry cloth.

He filled his plate with fried hominy, covered it with fried meat and doused it with molasses. He stuffed his mouth full of dry bread, then packed meat, hominy and molasses on top of it.

She looked at him with disgust. “You can get the boy out the country, but you can’t get the country out the boy,” she philosophized, eating her meat daintily along with bites of bread and holding her fried hominy between the first finger and thumb, according to etiquette.

He was finished first. He got up and looked at the peaches. A core of ice still remained. He picked up the whisky bottle and measured it with his eye.

“You want some grog mixed with peach juice?” he asked.

She gave him a supercilious look. “I don’t mind if I do,” she said in a proper voice.

He looked about for a receptacle to hold the mixture, but not seeing any, he squeezed the rim of the can into a spout and poured the peach syrup into the whisky bottle. He shook it up and took a swallow and passed it to her. She took a swallow and passed it back.

Soon they were giggling and slapping at one another. The next thing they were on the bed again.

“I wish that man would hurry up and come on,” he said, making one last effort to be sensible.

“What you want to go looking for an old Cadillac in this weather for, when here you is got me?” she said.

“Let’s stop here and walk back,” Coffin Ed said.

Grave Digger coasted to a stop beside the entrance to the Alley. It was a dark gray morning, and not a soul was in sight.

They alighted slowly, like decrepit old men.

“This jalopy looks as though it’s been to the wars,” Grave Digger lisped.

His lips were swollen to such proportions it looked as though his face were turning wrong side out.

“You look like you’ve been with it,” Coffin Ed said.

“Yeah, let’s hope there’re no more jokers in this deck.”

He started to lock the car doors and then saw the naked front wheel, the battered rear end and the hole in the windshield, and he put the key into his pocket.

“We don’t have to worry about anybody stealing it,” he lisped.

“That’s for sure,” Coffin Ed agreed.

They picked their way along the uneven brick pavement, avoiding slick ice and stepping over frozen rats and cats. Garbage trucks couldn’t get into the Alley, and residents piled their garbage in the street the year around. Now it presented an uneven pile of mounds along the walls of the carriage houses, composed chiefly of hog bones, cabbage leaves and tin cans. They saw one lone black cat sitting on his haunches gnawing a piece of bacon rind frozen hard as a board.