“Well, Foster Pelham,” she said, “don’t you trust me?”

“No.”

She laughed then and he liked her laugh. Heard the sadness in it and liked that too. She said, “It’s not many boys are honest.” Her voice dropped down. “You just keep it like that.”

She drove through the downtown with a smoothness and precision that calmed him. The town was silent in the warm night but for the cicadas ringing off in the trees. Past the spare downtown blocks she turned off and they were in the night then, leaving the pale tangerine streetlamps behind. They crossed the river over a low bridge of heavy uneven planks with railroad tie railings, the whole bridge heaving piece by piece under the motion of the automobile. Then twisted up through tight uncobbled pitted streets past shack houses set tight one against the other, random with the uneven fall of land. Daphne twisting the wheel with an expert slide of open lank wrist. Some of the houses dark and others showing the glimmer of lantern light behind pulled shades. But people on the street. Children and adults, men and women both, all throwing tilted glances at the slow-moving churn of the automobile. All colored. The children in rag shirts and pull-over dresses. Long naked legs moving like shadows against shadows in the dark. The eclipse of headlight-caught eyes turning away. The men some in suits and some in overalls, some of each bareheaded and some in porkpies or even hats of a finer block. The women also some fine and some in everyday wear. But all tilted back along the side of the street as the car passed. Watching it pass by averting their heads. Looking away, off to the other side. But he could feel them. Not their eyes so much as their minds, tightly focused on the Chrysler as it came abreast of them and moved on.

“Fishtown,” she announced. “What we’re after is a man what will sell me some bottles of beer. A little liquor. It’s corn liquor clean as a whistle, I swear. Can you take a drink of liquor, Foster?”

“I can.” Thinking he could twist around in his seat and reach back under the backseat and lift out a bottle of bonded scotch probably better than anything she’d ever tasted and was proud of himself that he did not. The best he could hope for at this time, right now, was to let this blond self-declared crazy girl lead him through the night. The air washed over him warm as a bath and the people around him scared him and he did not want to be anyplace but right where he was.