These days Rodney found himself coming close to hating everyone. Still, he never allowed himself to recognize it, or call what he felt toward certain people genuine hate. He preferred to call it differing degrees of dislike, an emotion with two sides like a coin, which was constantly spinning in his mind. Sometimes it landed, in his brain, heads up, signifying a certain affinity; sometimes it landed tails up, signifying a slight distaste or perhaps a major objection to a single person and his attitudes. He refused to dislike absolutely because, he felt, dislike was uncomfortably close to bigotry and Rodney knew too many different people to be a practicing bigot. Sometimes, very frequently in fact, he disliked Willie immensely. On the other hand, he sometimes felt a bit of admiration for the fellow and, occasionally, footnoted that admiration by purchasing an extra beer for him. This gesture served to stamp those rare moments onto his memory, a reminder that, because he had done this on enough occasions in the past, there would always be a rather thick prophylactic between how he really felt and how Willie assumed he felt.

Talking to Willie was informative and amusing to Rodney up to the point when Willie began to smile and to seem to know that what he was telling Rodney had some value. After he could see when that point was reached in Willie’s face, Rodney was not amused any more. Sometimes he was annoyed and sometimes, when Willie smiled confidently and knowledgeably and condescendingly, Rodney began to almost hate him. He felt the same about Lynn and her panties and her bay-bee and the loose ways she had, Rodney assumed, picked up from living among whites for too long. Sometimes she made him feel really uncomfortable and scared. He began to say bay-bee, bay-bee to himself in the shower. Thinking about it, he suddenly realized that he felt exactly the same way about Charlie Pratt.