I didn’t know how far this perversion thing had spread, how much word of it had got around. I didn’t want to sit there in my pickup thinking people driving by had already heard of the pervert and might think I was him. I tried to call up that puppy. I got down on my heels and clicked and whistled and snapped my fingers and talked nice to him, hut all he’d do was roll over with his legs up in the air and his tail between his legs, peeing on himself in little spurts. Somebody had ruined him, beat him, stomped him, him roughly the age of an eighteen-month-old baby, in dog years. I knew some Humaner would come by and capture him and take him to the pound. I should have gone on and killed him. How would the gas be any better than a knock in the head to him? That might’ve been Napoleon Bonaparte reincarnated running around there, sniffing coffee grounds.

I took off down the road there and rode around a while. What would have to be wrong with a guy to make him flang his thang out in front of women? It had to be some kind of guy who couldn’t get any pussy, was too messed up in some way to get some from anybody, even for money, wanted some bad, and had developed this overpowering urge to gratificate himself, ergo, like the mirror is to the image, himself twinned in their eyes, what he imagined to be his big penis, his brutal, killing penis, swinging like a nine-pound hammer, suspended out there for all womanhood to draw back and gasp from, which, in his opinion, was what was happening.