One day his craze for meat was gone, and the craze for gin returned. He was steadily drunk for two nights. I could hear him stumbling about, kicking bottles and talking to himself. Then he went away. He was gone another night. When he returned, his pension cheque was spent, and he had somehow somewhere, he did not remember it, bought a car. We went behind the hotel and looked at this car. It was a huge Packard more than twenty years old. It stood there like a hearse, the tyres worn, the cheap black paint bubbling in the hot sun. Somebody down on Main Street had sold it to him. Now he was broke, with a big Packard on his hands.

‘You want to buy it?’ he said.

‘Hell, no.’

He was dejected, his head bursting from a hangover.

That night he walked into my room. He sat on the bed, his long arms dangling to the floor. He was homesick for the middle-west. He talked of rabbit-hunting, of fishing, of the good old days when he was a kid. Then he began on the subject of meat. ‘How would you like a big thick steak?’ he said, his lips loose. He opened two ringers. ‘Thick as that. Broiled. Lots of butter over it. Burned just enough to give it a tang. How would you like it?’

‘I’d love it.’

He got up.

‘Then come on, and we’ll get one.’

‘You got money?’

‘We don’t need any money. I’m hungry.’

I grabbed my sweater and followed him down the hall to the alley. He got into his car. I hesitated. ‘Where you going, Hellfrick?’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’

I got in beside him.

‘No trouble,’ I said.

‘Trouble!’ he sneered. ‘I tell you I know where to get us a steak.’

We drove in moonlight out Wilshire to Highland, then out Highland over Cahuenga Pass. On the other side lay the flat plain of the San Fernando Valley. We found a lonely road off the pavement and followed it through tall eucalyptus trees to scattered farmhouses and pasture lands. After a mile the road ended. Barbed wire and fence posts appeared in the glare of headlights. Hellfrick laboriously turned the car around, faced it towards the pavement from which we had detoured. He got out of the front seat, opened the rear door, and fumbled with car tools under the rear cushion.

I leaned over and watched him.

‘What’s up, Hellfrick?’

He stood up, a jackhammer in his hand.

‘You wait here.’

He stopped under a loop in the barbed wire and crossed the pasture. A hundred yards away a barn loomed in the moonlight. Then I knew what he was after. I jumped out of the car and called to him. He shushed me angrily. I watched him tiptoe towards the barn door. I cursed him and waited tensely. In a little while I heard the mooing of a cow. It was a piteous cry. Then I heard a thud and a scuffle of hoofs. Out of the barn door came Hellfrick. Across his shoulder lay a dark mass, weighing him down. Behind him, mooing continually, a cow followed. Hellfrick tried to run, but the dark mass beat him down to a fast walk. Still the cow pursued, pushing her nose into his back. He turned around, kicked wildly. The cow stopped, looked towards the barn, and mooed again.