Roy Sturtevant was returned thus from time to time from the dark valley into which he had sunk, by these improbable, lavish, even cruel caresses coming from the man who lay beside him.

Roy kept saying from time to time: “You’re Sidney, ain’t you?”

“Whoever I am, I am yours. I am all yours.”

“Then why, if you are him,” Roy would repeat after him as if they had both learned these lines, did not understand them, but had to keep repeating them, perhaps for a tape recording in some unknown prison, “why, why did it take you so long then?”

“I don’t follow you, Roy . . . What is it you mean?”

“I said, what took you so long . . . ? All the time you have waited to tell me it wasn’t hate you had for me after all.”

“All I know is I have you now, Roy. You’re mine. That’s all I know.”

“But you’re stoned, so maybe it ain’t real after all, or won’t be tomorrow.” He drew back the upper lids of Sidney’s eyes as he said this, and looked into them. Then taking his head in his hands he kissed Sidney on the mouth solemnly.

“It’s real now, Roy, real also in an hour or so, and ’twill be real tomorrow to boot. Hear?”

“I don’t have no tomorrow,” the scissors-­grinder said. “I’m finished.”

The hinges of the door creaked, the door opened, and there stood Gareth with his rifle.

“The state troopers are on the way,” he spoke thickly, sullenly. “It’s on the radio downstairs . . . They discovered the robbed grave . . .”

Gareth had spoken possibly before he had quite taken in what was happening in the bed.

“So then,” he began, but stopped, whirled the gun about and placed it over his shoulders, “so my suspicions were not too ill-­founded . . .”

Gareth walked over closer to the bed where the two men held one another in close embrace, their lips half-­opened against one another’s face.

“Hey now,” Gareth whispered, going very close to the men, and then kneeling down as if he were looking into a keyhole. “You never kissed me that good, did you, Sidney De Lakes . . . You never was that tender.”

“You go downstairs, Gareth. Roy and I have a lot to talk about.”

“No, I won’t go downstairs neither. I’m going to watch this, goin’ to memorize by heart what I’m seeing.”

They all heard the sirens coming closer to Sturtevant’s property now, then they heard the brakes and tires scream and squeal, and a man cursing. After a few minutes the searchlights moved over and into their room, catching Gareth in the eyes.

Then they heard loud profanity and outcries as the troopers discovered Brian’s body.

Rushing to the window, and lifting it up fiercely so that he almost tore it from its frame, Vaisey stuck his head out into the descending night, and shouted oaths and foul language, threats and vituperation against, it almost seemed, everybody who had ever lived or breathed.