“Y-You don’t love me, Mistah Nick . . .”

I told him he was god-danged right about that, a thousand per cent right. What I loved was myself, and I was willing to do anything I god-dang had to to go on lying and cheating and drinking whiskey and screwing women and going to church on Sunday with all the other respectable people.

“I’ll tell you something else,” I said, “and it makes a shit-pot-ful more sense than most of the goddam scripture I’ve read. Better the blind man, Uncle John; better the blind man who pisses through a window than the prankster who leads him thereto. You know who the prankster is, Uncle John? Why, it’s goddam near everybody, every son-of-a-bitch who turns his head when the crap flies, every bastard who sits on his dong with one thumb in his ass and the other in his mouth and hopes that nothing will happen to him, every whoremonger who thinks that piss will turn into lemonade, every mother-lover supposedly made in God’s image, which makes me think I’d hate like hell to meet him on a dark night. Even you, particularly you, Uncle John; people who go around sniffing crap with their mouth open, and acting surprised as hell when someone kicks a turd in it. Yeah, you can’t help bein’ what you are, jus’ a pore ol’ black man. That’s what you say, Uncle John, and do you know what I say? I say screw you. I say you can’t help being what you are, and I can’t help being what I am, and you goddam well know what I am and have to be. You goddam well know you’ve got no friends among the whites. You goddam well ought to know that you’re not going to have any because you stink Uncle John, and you go around begging to get screwed and how the hell can anyone have a friend like that?”

I gave him both barrels of the shotgun.

It danged near cut him in two.

15

What I wanted things to look like was that Uncle John had shot Tom with his own gun and then Tom had got the gun away from him and shot Uncle John. Or vice versa. Anyways, when I got to thinking about it afterward, it seemed to me that people weren’t going to see it that way at all. Which meant that they were apt to start looking for the real killer. And for a spell there, I was pretty worried. But I didn’t need to be. As plumb crazy as it was, with Uncle John getting killed almost two days after Tom and with both of ‘em obviously dying almost the instant they was shot, it turned out no one thought anything of it. They didn’t wonder at all about how one dead man could’ve killed another.

Of course, both bodies were wet and muddied up, so you couldn’t say offhand just when they’d died; and we just ain’t equipped to do a lot of scientific examination and investigation here in Potts County. If things look a certain way, folks usually figure that’s the way they are. And if they’d had a mind to kick up a fuss about anyone, it wouldn’t be Tom Hauck or Uncle John.