“Let’s give it back,” he said after the third house.

“What?”

“Give it back and run.”

“And spend the rest of our short fucking lives looking over our shoulders for Dandy or Smoke or some other broke-down nigger with a gun and nothing left to lose? Where you think we’d hide, Country? Two colored bucks on the run?”

Luther knew he was right, but he also knew it was eating Jessie up as awful as it was eating him.

“We worry about that later. We—”

Jessie laughed, and it was the ugliest laugh Luther’d ever heard from him. “We do this or we dead, Country.” He gave him an open-armed, wide-shouldered shrug. “And you know that. Less you want to kill that whale, sign you and your wife’s death warrant in the process.”

Luther got in the car.

The last one, Owen Tice, paid them in cash, said he wouldn’t be around to spend it no way anyhow. Soon as his Bess passed, he was going to get his shotgun and ride that river with her. He’d had him a raw throat since noon and it was starting to burn and without Bess there wasn’t no fucking point to it anyway. He wished them well. He said, sure he understood. He did. Man had to make a living. Wasn’t no shame in that.

Said, My whole fucking family, you believe that shit? A week ago we all in the pink, eating dinner ’round the table—my son and daughter-in-law, my daughter and son-in-law, three grandchildren, and Bess. Just sitting and eating and jawing. And then, then, it was like God Hisself reached through the roof and into their house and closed his hand ’round the whole family and squeezed.

Like we was flies on the table, he said. Like that.

They drove up an empty Greenwood Avenue at midnight and Luther counted twenty-four windows marked by Xs and they parked the cars in the alley behind the Club Almighty. There was no light coming from any of the buildings along the alley and the fire escapes hung above them and Luther wondered if there was anything left of the world or if it had all gone black and blue and seized up with the grippe.

Jessie put his foot on the running board of his Model T and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in a stream toward the back door of the Club Almighty, nodding his head every now and then, as if he heard music Luther couldn’t and then he looked over at Luther and said, “I walk.”

“You walk?”

“I do,” Jessie said. “I walk and the road is long and the Lord ain’t with me. Ain’t with you neither, Luther.”

In the time they’d known each other, Jessie had never, not once, called Luther by his Christian name.

“Let’s unload this shit,” Luther said. “Yeah, Jessie?” He reached for the straps that held Tug and Ervina Irvine’s hope chest to the back of Arthur Smalley’s car. “Come on now. Let’s get this shit done.”