“Jesus Christ,” Hogg said, with another bark of laughter, “you bastards must have just about croaked the old lady, it looks like.”

“Well, she walkin’,” the nigger said. Which cracked him up laughing. The wop started laughing pretty hard too.

Hogg was grinning.

And Jimmy just looked nervous.

“Naw,” the nigger went on, recovering, “she ain’t nowhere’s near croaked. Too much fight. You seen her—”

We were halfway to the truck. But from inside the store, that rasping roar came again, rough and loud as if she was a foot away. Hogg cracked up this time. “Hey, nigger, you got the chains—”

“Aw, man, I left ’em in the back!”

“You a real fuck-up,” Hogg said. He turned around, went back up the driveway, went in the door. It swung slowly closed. The blade of light narrowed across the gravel.

Thirty seconds later, Hogg came out, carrying them—he came in a sort of gingerly hurry.

“What’d they do?” the wop asked, grinning.

Hogg looked practically surprised. “Nothin’. They wasn’t in too much shape to do nothin’.”

“Well, she sure didn’t look like she was,” the nigger said, and started laughing all over. “You guys—” That was to Denny and me—“if you guys gonna be in this profession, you got to learn to be a little rougher.”

Jimmy’s lips were just about covering all his teeth when we reached the truck cab. And one hand was sort of rubbing up and down on one hip.

As he was climbing into the cab, the nigger looked back at Jimmy: “Don’t worry. You seen her, she ain’t dead.”

“If she was dead,” Jimmy said, “it wouldn’t make me shed no tears.” But it sounded a little funny. “Naw, after what that bitch done to—”

“Go on,” Hogg said. “Get your ass up there, man. And shut your face.”

“Yeah. Sure, yeah.…” Jimmy climbed up right after me.

Hogg came around up the other side.

It was pretty crowded. I sat on the wop’s lap. Denny sat on the nigger’s, with Jimmy wedged down between. Hogg started the motor. We were pretty quiet. I guess because there was a stranger, we didn’t fool around. I really wanted to bend over and stick my head under Hogg’s elbow and take out his dick and suck it. But I didn’t.

While I was wondering about everybody being so quiet, Jimmy said: “Well, I guess everybody’s got their reasons for what they do.” He had his hands on his thighs and was looking at his lap. He still sounded nervous. “Take you guys. Now you probably got your reasons for doin’ a job like that … Yeah, how’d you get into something like this anyway?”

“What you wanna know for?” Hogg asked; but he was sort of grinning.

“Well,” Jimmy said. “I just bet it would be a story.”