CHICKEN: If you get on the roof tomorrow, it’ll be Chicken, not Jesus, that gets you up there.

MYRTLE: It’ll be both. Knock wood. Is this a pan of French fries?

CHICKEN: Help yourself, I’ve eaten.

MYRTLE: Thanks. I’ll take a plate up to Lot soon’s I’ve had some myself. I made a resolution to cut out fried foods and sweets but I guess I’m weak natured. I can’t sit in a room with French fries and not have some. Memphis is famous for its French fries.

CHICKEN: Is that what it’s famous for?

MYRTLE: I used to work at a place called The French Fried Heaven, in downtown Memphis.

CHICKEN: I guess that’s why Memphis is famous for its French fries.

MYRTLE: Well, I’ll go up and see how my little boy is, and try and coax him to have some of these French fries.

CHICKEN: Hurry back down. I want to talk over the situation with you.

MYRTLE: I’ll be right back.

[Myrtle climbs the stairs above the proscenium. While she is up there, Chicken turns up the lamp and crosses with it to the back wall where he has tacked up a colored nude photograph of a girl. He freezes before it and the photo seems to blaze out of the wall. Myrtle comes back down after no more than a minute]

[Returning to the kitchen.] He wouldn’t touch those potatoes so I ate ‘em myself. I can worry about my diet after the flood.

CHICKEN: You got bigger worries right now.

MYRTLE: That’s the truth, I have. He was sitting up there panting like he’d just run a foot-race and all he’d say was, “Chicken thinks I’m dying.”

CHICKEN: I don’t think it, I know it. In that Memphis hospital they let the air out of one his lungs to spare the other, but now the other is going, one lung gone and one going. I guess they let him out because they knew they couldn’t do no more for him.

MYRTLE: He sure deceived me about it. I hate people to deceive me. He deceived me about his condition and the seriousness of this flood.

CHICKEN: I got to make up my mind what to do when the floor-water gets here.

MYRTLE: You mean how to keep it from coming in the house?

CHICKEN: There’s no way to stop that. But I got a decision to make. I never figured that Lot would get married and leave a widow. But that’s what he’s done, and maybe now this witnessed and notarized paper, this agreement leaving me the place when Lot is dead, would be no good. Now what I got to decide is whether or not to get you up on the roof when the house is flooded or leave you down here with Lot.