“Does your son ever swim in the reservoir?” I ask her, and she nearly hacks up a lung.

“He don’t know how.” She pounds her chest, loosening whatever’s rattling around there. “Sorry. I worked over at Optimal for fifteen years. That’s why the cough.” She lights a cigarette.

“Is that why you left?” I ask.

“Didn’t leave. I got fired.”

My heart sinks: any good defense lawyer will blow holes through her story, claim she’s looking for revenge and a payday. Still, I persist. I kind of like Carolina Dawes and her polka-dot stretch pants.

“You have well water, don’t you?” I ask her, and her expression folds up around her cigarette, like she’s trying to suck herself down it, not the other way around.

“We should,” she says. “But how things been going…this is the third year straight running with a drought…” She taps her ash angrily onto the porch. “So I figure why not take a little something free?”

Suddenly I understand. The PVC piping, the hoses rigged like laundry lines in the backyard: she’s been tapping the reservoir.

“But that’s when Coop started having all those problems, when we decided to try and give the well a rest…”

“Do you have pictures of his rash?” I ask her, and she grinds the cigarette out into the railing, exhaling a long plume of smoke.

“I can do you one better,” she says, and then turns her head to shout. “Coop. Coop! I know you hear me, so get your little butt down here. He’s a little shy,” she adds, as someone moves in the darkness behind the screen door. “And all that itching and nonsense ain’t helping none, let me tell you. Come on, Coop. It’s all right. This nice lady’s here to help.”

A little boy, maybe five or six, edges carefully into the light. He is unexpectedly beautiful: big blue eyes, blond hair, perfect features. Cherubic. Half his face is still in shadow; half his face glows in the sun.

He steps right up to the door and places a hand to the screen. Then he turns and leans his cheek against it, and the sun catches the scabrous raw sores on his cheek and jaw and neck, the desperate marks where he has scratched his way through the skin.

“It itches,” is all he says.

Chapter Seven

What do I remember?

—Kaycee Mitchell narrowing to a long dark shadow, moving down the road, whacking at the corn with a blunt stick, teasing out the rats, sending a blur of dark bodies across the road.

—Misha Dale, smile as wide as a fishbowl, standing by the bathroom sinks when I pushed out of a stall. How I almost crawled back into the toilet. How I wanted to flush myself away. You know there’s operations for ugly now, she said, cocking her head. I bet we could even raise donations. Kaycee was putting on lipstick, drawing the lines in real thick. Unexpectedly, she turned around. They’ve got operations for being dumb, too, she said to Misha. But once they can cure bitch I’ll let you know. A warning in her eyes when she looked at me, a subtle tic: Go.