“You sure are cured, Gareth. You are well! You don’t need nobody to take care of you or change your diapers anymore. And you know what? I will give you tit for tat, you motherfucking snot, you was never sick at all. I seen through you. It was just an excuse to get my loving and be safe so you could go on using your Ma as a meal ticket and have my good love in the bargain. . . . I ain’t fooled by what Doc calls your psychosomatic malady, hell, no. You are a cheap playactor, and there ain’t an honest hair in your pretty little head . . .”

Gareth put the gun back between his shoulders, but then he removed it almost instantly.

“Never fear, Sid, I am not going to kill you in the car. I want to see how your lover will greet you as you approach him nailed to the barn door. That is, if the nails ain’t drunk all his blood and have fallen out . . .”

“I put more nails in him than he asked for, that’s for sure . . . He seen that I was carried away. . . . But you know something? He wasn’t scared. No, had I started to nail his mouth shut to his brain he wouldn’t have said a word in way of protest.”

“That’s because you’ve been torturing him all your life. As the hero of the football team, the diver and swimmer, the pure American stock back to the Revolution or before, looking down on the renderer’s son like he was some nigger or drunk Indian not good enough to spit on your shoes to shine them. . . . Well the renderer is a thousand times better ’n you and that snot Vance ever was . . . And he had the soul to suffer all these years just like what you have put me through with your no-­account loving. You don’t know how to love. And you will die, you cruddy bugger, you will die by my gun when I am good and ready.”

“Hear him!” Sidney answered.

But there was something to the way he pronounced these two words that indicated he felt satisfaction somehow in what was now happening. At least everything, his entire life, that is, was approaching a showdown, and he felt more exhilarated than had he smoked the best hash or grass. He was at some summit of his own self, and he was, if not happy, at last himself, and then he was also going to take down the man who when all was said and done had loved him the best and who he now believed after all he was in love with. At least he was his “coach,” and he had loved perhaps only his coach who had made him a star. He was sure every so often that the renderer was now able to confer the same glory on him, and bind his brows as a victor over some unknown and unheralded ordeal. See how already he had done a great thing by nailing him to the door when no other human command could have forced him so to act.