Sidney started the motor. He was even whiter than he had been back at the house, and his hands were shaking.

“Take that rifle from between my shoulders, you dizzy cocksucker. On account of I can’t drive with no gun pointed at my lungs.”

Gareth pulled the gun away.

“Brian McFee is beginning to stink like a bona fide real dead man, if you ask me,” the Vaisey boy said after a long silence in which Sidney drove his car at full speed, with screeching of brakes and punishing of tires and sudden breakneck turns as in a last-­lap car race.

“Oh, it’s only cause the air is getting warm, Garey. . . . I don’t dare look at him again. I looked at him once, and I tell you something . . . I kissed him.” He slowed down when he said this because his hands were shaking again.

“Yeah, you had him fooled too,” Gareth scolded. “He thought you loved him, poor baby . . . And all the time your heart belonged to this scissors-­grinder which to hear you talk was your worst enemy. . . . Well, we are going to see in a few minutes who is in charge here . . . Or the blood will flow like spring freshets, you can count on that. You cheap four-flusher, you God damn low-­down flirt, you . . . I ought to choke you to death right over the steering-­wheel. Supposed to tend and care for me, was you? Made love to me and told me I was your only one, and all the time since the eighth grade you have been slave to this unwashed turd goes by the name of the renderer.”

“He don’t render and never did, and it was you explained it to me first. And he explained it all over to me again. It was his old Grandpa that done it. He ain’t never been in the rendering business and you know it.”

“But it was ’cause he had the stain on him of bein’ a renderer that you never spoke to him all through school, that you held yourself aloof from him which was what drove him crazy in the first place when all the time he loved you from the time he was thirteen years old. Your coyness drove him crazy and you are the cause of it all. . . . Your nailin’ him to the door was the kindest thing you ever done for him. Don’t tell me you ain’t coy, you slick prick-­teasin’ stuck-­up smartass, you have been teasin’ everybody ever set eyes on you from the time you was birthed, you cheap showcase fucking football model, you. You drove all them convicts crazy too in jail I can believe that. I should shoot you here and now and the world would thank me for it, every prison in the U.S.A. would send me a telegram of thanks and appreciation that the coy little flirt of a football hero is plugged and out of service in his coffin . . .”