She left the engine running and told him to stay and went in to buy the liquor. Parked alongside a house no different from the others around it, the same dim shades. But a handful of men squatting on their heels on the porch, all watching the car. This time no eyes turned away. Hats tilted back on their heads. In the headlamp light their eyes did not show white but red. Staring hard at him. He could not look back at them. He opened the glovebox and took out the box with the single last of his father’s cigarettes and smoked. The smoke dangling in soft ropes out the open window. He looked at his knee propped up on the dash and watched also for the flash of light that would be Daphne coming out of the house. He felt the men on the porch could ignore him or kill him and either way would take the same pleasure in it. But they did not move. He understood that they were in some ways more afraid of him than he was of them. Which, he guessed, would not stop them from killing him if he stepped from the car.

She had two quart bottles of beer in a paper sack already sweated through and a fruit jar with a screw-on lid of clear corn liquor. They’d gone on through the hill broken apart by the lanes and homes of Fishtown and then were up away from the river bottom and out onto the great rolling pine flats and swaled fields of the Piedmont countryside, Daphne driving faster now with the road ahead open and clear under the moon, a smooth pale swath in the dark land, the even darker hemmed woods.

“You got a opener in here?”

“A what?”

“A opener. For the beers. Someway to prize them open.”

“I can do them against the door handle.”

“Just open one. We’ll pass it back and forth. What you do is sip some of the liquor and swallow some beer to smooth it down. By the time the beers are gone they’ll be warm anyhow but we won’t care then and be happy with the liquor straight.”

Foster said nothing but opened one of the quarts and handed it over to her and unscrewed the fruit jar lid and took a swallow, holding it in his mouth a moment for it to bite against his teeth. It was good, smooth, lacking what his father would have described as “fumey” from being hurried. He took a little more and then passed it over to her and took the bottle she held out. He didn’t like beer and this beer was pretty bad, flat and oily, bitter, but he thought he’d do things her way, this time anyhow. She wanted the beer right back after the liquor and he was happy to let it go. She pressed her dress down between her thighs and nested the bottle in there. He thought it was pretty bad beer to be treated so well. He was glad to have the liquor back.