“I’ve got four kids who barely remember me sleeping on the front porch of my father-in-law’s farmhouse. I’ve got a crippled girl with a leg brace that pounds and squeaks when she walks. I’ve got mice in the sofa and toads in the well and right now my financial affairs are a thousand percent more dismal than Dad’s ever were. I’ve spent all my loans and borrowed still more and if my mule dies I’ll be bankrupt. So yes, I need money. I need money bad. Emmett, I’m on my ass.”

I stood up and walked to the sod house where the three braying prostitutes were squirming out of their dresses. “When, Bill?” I asked.

“July.”

Miss Moore had repaired to the Woodward bungalow and Bob rode up there to quench himself. He sat on the porch swing at evening with her, shelling green peas into a tarnished pan, his boots hooked like ears on the back of a spindle chair. The pea vines laced an arched trellis that gated the backyard where he’d tied his horse to a picket ring stamped in the earth. Baked rhubarb pie was cooling beneath a white dish towel that flies were crawling over. The split pods were dropped to a newspaper that was soaking gray at its folds.

“Bleh,” she said, and dropped her paring knife into the pan. “I feel so middle-aged.”

Bob smiled. “Can’t allow that,” he said. “Let’s play a quick game of kick the can. Let’s have a spelling bee.”

She plucked the brown hairs of his arm. “Do you think we could brazenly stroll down the street, like normal people, like lovers?”

“I reckon.”

They took their socks off and walked in lank blue grass to the Woodward depot, then teetered on rails still warm from the sun. They clutched each other and swayed down a road and Eugenia giggled when Bob whispered. An old man with his shirt off snapped hedge clippers at a forsythia bush while his wife watched them, screened by the door, her hands in the deep pockets of her apron.

Eugenia asked, “So when is Pryor Creek.”

“Don’t know exactly but it’s been passed down from higher-ups that it might be July 15th.”

She flipped her loose hair back away from her ear. She felt his biceps flex when they turned to the house. She smelled the soap in his shirt. She said, “I’m going to Silver City on the premise that I’ll be cured of a malady there. Scarcely will I have arrived before Eugenia Moore succumbs to a hideous death. I think I can get Ben Canty to fudge on the certificates and whatnot. Then this winter Bob Dalton can drown in an undertow in the Gulf of Mexico whilst casting for albacore. We’ll have a South American resurrection.”

“That would be dandy,” said Bob.