CASS: Yeah. Okay.

BRO: Yeah. North of Redding. She’s got twenty acres and a house and all. I do everything around the place, kind of a hired hand who don’t get paid. I steal from her. Small amounts.

CASS: Wow. Retarded? Well—so, uh—

BRO: And—I do screw her.

CASS: Well—

BRO: Yes, I do. Sometimes…I just haul off and screw her.

CASS: Oh my Lord.

BRO: She sort of seems to forget about it afterward.

CASS: Is it—mainly just you and her—?

BRO: Yep, just the two of us. It beats logging. (Pause.) I haven’t seen you since before I got arrested that time. Where you been?

CASS: Me? Right here in Ukiah till a couple months ago.

BRO: Yeah? And then where?

CASS: I was back in Texas. Texas ain’t there no more.

BRO: Shit. Did Mexico finally get it back?

CASS: What are you here for?

BRO: It’s my town. Ukiah is my home.

CASS: What are you doing here? Is it the wedding?

BRO: I’m terrible.

CASS: You’re going to the wedding?

BRO: I’ll just sit there quietly.

CASS hides his face and moans.

BRO: She’s the love of my life.

CASS: Do you even know her?

BRO: I was married to her. I was her first husband. Her first love. Her first lover. I was the first hombre to ride that little filly.

CASS: I mean…now. Hasn’t it been about ten years since you two split up?

BRO: Eleven years. One-one. Pair of aces.

CASS: Split up after a lifelong union that lasted around two months?

BRO: June one to August thirty-one. Nineteen eighty-nine.

CASS: A legally binding summer romance.

BRO: It is a lifelong union.

CASS: Bro…Suzanne ain’t much, you ask me.

BRO: She ain’t perfect, but perfection is not the basis of what I’m talking about. I don’t understand why I’m even discussing it with you. You’d hit eighteen in a blackjack game.

CASS: Yeah? You got witnesses?

BRO: You’d hit twenty-one. You’d hit blackjack if they let you. Ain’t nothing perfect enough.

CASS: No, there ain’t. Because look at your hands and your fingers and everything else. We are so…Feel your skin! We’re made so…

BRO: So what.

CASS: So there.

BRO: Aaaaaah—

CASS: So beautifully. We should be turning over blackjack every deal. Nothing short of that is gonna do it. That’s what we deserve is blackjack, blackjack, blackjack. I go along with Grandma on this one…Bro, I do. The most logical outcome of the whole enterprise is Heaven.

BRO: I like the way you stir around your concepts. You got the casino of the universe and the whole God-the-croupier thing. You always had the gift of gab.

CASS: I been on a strange journey through the desert wastes. Also the wetter part of Texas. A strange journey.

BRO: We oughta buy you some time on the religious channel. You know what’s happening to you?

CASS: I’m trying to know.

BRO: You’re turning into him: Dad. You are becoming Oliver Wendell Homes Cassandra.