Alex Mebane was asleep in the padded rocking chair in the dining room, his head tilted back, mouth open. Foster stepped back into the kitchen and let the quiet door swing shut. He took a tin basin down from a nail in the kitchen wall and carried that and a bar of handsoap from the sink out to the pump where he filled the basin and then on to the cabin. Where he closed the door against the bright light and stood in the dim dull heat and washed himself and then stepped back into his trousers but left his feet and chest bare and lay down on his back on the sleeping bag, sweating again where he’d just washed but thinking he might not smell as strong.

Then he stood again and went to call the dogs in and close the door. He wanted them with him. They came fast as if they’d been waiting for him. Glow circled around up on the tick and lay where his head had been. Lovey, older, wiser, went straight to the hearth and stretched out there, disregarding the snakeskin for the cool old bricks. Foster lay back down, pushing the young dog away, not wanting the heat of her against him. Both dogs speckled with the green triangular pods of beggar-lice. There was a steel-toothed comb in the Chrysler that he needed to run through them. He closed his eyes, a great stripped-down fatigue over him. He felt he should leave the place he was in. He could not get away from the sense of some unknown looming event, some disaster before him. But knew also he was not done here. He did not trust any of this but could not step away from it. It could be the heat. It could even, he thought, be everything all at once come down on him. He was lonely, with a pain that spread out from his chest throughout his body. He laid his hands open on his belly and breathed the closed dread air of the little shut-up miserable cabin, his eyes closed; the room around him burned into him as if he had spent winter nights by lantern light memorizing each split and splinter in the squared-log walls, each pouch and pout of the clay-mud daub between the logs, each smokestain on the stone chimney, each grease stain on the hearth. The air itself he sucked into his lungs, air that had been expelled by those before him: dense, wet, close, only just enough to live on.

When he woke the light through the now open door was pale, quivering with dusk, and he came up startled with her sitting there beside him on the bed watching him and as he cried out in fear he knew who she was. She did not move when he called out, did not shrink from his abrupt fear. Sitting sideways at his waist, wearing a pale green skirt with a white blouse open at her neck where a fine gold chain fell holding a slender gold cross. Glow lying alongside her thigh, the dog’s head up on top of the skirt. Two sets of eyes watching him. His first clear thought how close her sex was to his and how little there was in between and his penis moved inside his trousers and he stayed sitting up, putting his hands down in his lap. His face a foot from hers.