Once I got outside, I dropped the dog’s starched body into a white canvas Providence Journal delivery bag and headed down the street with the bag over my shoulder. Clops was so stiff that all four of his legs stuck out of the bag. Even the limp pecker-leg was now a rigid hard-on.

I crossed the Junction Street Bridge and passed a grim row of window-blackened mills. The stale breath of the river gave way to the fumes of the highway. Climbed a hill and hopped a guardrail to get on Route 95. Pawtucket was experiencing a July heat wave, and by six o’clock the temperature was already in the low eighties. I’d been walking and thumbing for thirty minutes when two middle-aged Italian men in a white Impala stopped.

“How you doing, kid?” the man in the passenger seat asked as I got in.

“Good, thank you,” I said.

He glanced at the legs sticking out of my bag but didn’t show any reaction. “Where you going?”

“Cumberland.”

“Well, we’ll get you about halfway there, buddy.”

We’d driven about a mile when the driver looked in his rearview mirror for the first time, did a quick double take, and glanced over his shoulder at Clops’s legs. “Hey, kid,” he said, “you know yooz got an animal in your bag?”

The passenger said, “No shit, Sherlock. It’s the kid’s dog, you pea brain.”

The driver looked blankly at his friend and then peeked back at the dog feet. “I got some bad news for you,” he said.

I caught his eye in the mirror and raised my eyebrows.

“I think your pooch is dead.”

“You fucking banana,” the passenger said. “You think the kid don’t already know that?” He threw me a compassionate squint. “What happened? He get hit by a car?”

I looked out the window and said, “Yeah.”

“Mind if I ask you a question?” the driver said. “How long you been carrying that corpse around with you?”

“Just this morning. Going to Cumberland to bury him.”

“Why don’t you just dump him in a trash can?”

The passenger told the driver to shut his trap and take me to wherever I was going. They turned off on Route 295 and drove me all the way to Cumberland. I thanked them and climbed out in front of a cornfield. Took me two hours to dig the grave with my hands. Just before I lowered Clops and the bag into the hole, I kissed his head. He didn’t smell dead yet.