“Oh well . . . But just for a few moments. I lost me too much blood to do anything like that.”

Sidney put his mouth over the renderer’s sex and kept it covered, sucking and kissing and licking obediently, until Roy pulled away from him.

“Not now, not now!”

“That was strong medicine you had in that bottle in the commode, Roy,” Sidney spoke after a while. He was resting his head on the renderer’s bosom.

“I sure feel it, Sidney, and that is a fact.”

“Do you want more?”

“By and by, yes.” The renderer’s hand plunged then into Sidney’s curls. The football star shivered and shook, and the renderer twirled the curls into fine little threads like gold yarn.

“You’ll pull through and be as good as new,” Sidney said.

The hot fluid that suddenly fell on his face as he spoke he mistook for a second for more hemorrhaging, but instead he saw it was tears falling on him. They were hotter than blood.

“Put me in those pajamas I never wore and that are in the top drawer of the bureau.”

“You have everything you want in the drawers of commodes and bureaus, don’t you,” Sid said.

It took quite a while to get Roy into his nightclothes, and both the pajama shirt and the trousers were soon stained from all the bleeding which had started up again once he had been moved.

“What time o’ day is it getting to be?” Roy said after a long time had passed.

“I’ll have to get up and go downstairs to see, Roy. I ain’t sure.”

“Oh, don’t bother. I can see it’s afternoon by the way the light falls.”

They heard the police sirens in the distance.

Sidney remembered how not too long ago, as a matter of fact, once in prison he had gone into the shower room and had unexpectedly run into a man in there alone, a man he had never liked before and who, to put it bluntly, always smelled like a dog after it has been bathed. But in the dim light of evening, this same man looked like a prince (he had actually murdered five people), his eyes flashing baleful messages of beauty and desire, his body like a bronze statue that breathed and moved almost imperceptibly in its grace. Sidney had gone unasked and taken the man in his arms. They had fallen to the floor and had one another all that night. He had lied to Vance, you see, that “terrible things” had been done to him in prison, or rather he had failed to say that he himself had initiated the “terrible things.”

Remembering prison then, he felt he was transported back there, and that the man he had loved so devotedly that evening was again by his side. There was no renderer, or son of a renderer, no scissors-­grinder or cistern cleaner or tree surgeon or any of the other vocations attached to his enemy’s name, and there never had been any Sidney De Lakes, a football star and gasoline station attendant, for he felt he was back thousands of years ago with this “eternal” lover or husband or sweetheart, whatever name, on whom he now poured out all his love.