More than that, though: the long-simmering nothingness of the fields beyond the edges of the towns in which they set up; bluegrass and timothy and planted hay and corn dried to a brittle song; the endless, almost needless horizon. They came from that, both men, two years of passing town to town.

The kid was begging and he agreed to take her. Simple as that. Later, he had to see it that way.

Zip was halfway through a bottle of gin. The workday was done and most of the roadies were lounging about the campers, smoking, mulling. A bit of corn had lodged between his front teeth, and he was working his tongue against them, taking pleasure in the effort, unwilling to use his fingers except as a last resort. He’d made a kind of testimony to himself this evening—working at the corn—about some things he had done a few towns back, in Pennsylvania; some things was how he thought of them, although if he wanted he could conjure up exact memories: break-ins of houses in the afternoons when most suburban folk were off earning their two-income keep, jimmying a door or kicking in a basement window and lowering himself into the damp, cobwebbed basement of some sodbuster’s estate. In Ohio—two years ago—he copped a couple of off-the-cuff fondles in the bushes; he could remember the wet mouth beneath his palm as he pushed hard to smother the words trying to come out. Working at the corn in his own mouth he began to speak to himself—as he often did—in his own manner: a few tidbits of biblical cadence and phraseology—thou arts, therefores—blended in with what the other guys called Zip-speak, because he had his own particular way of talking.

Don’t know likely what the bejesus you’d be doing to be doing what you are is a good example. Or: Fuck that fuck I’m gonna fuck him until he wishes he were fucked.

Now he held his head back, way back, and let a little moan slide from his gullet. The gin was settled into the base of his gut, not enough to warm him but enough to make more necessary.

Yeah, there are myths about this kind of thing, and one wants to avoid stereotypes—plenty of good folk working the road even to this day, the very beginning of the century, anachronistic as hell but there, smoking, trying to work out the general situation. So be it. This is his story. This is what happened in this particular incident.