I puzzled over it and puzzled over it and drove for nights on end looking for that blue pickup, but if there was one in the country I didn’t see it. I took back roads and side roads and pig trails that buzzards couldn’t hardly fly over when it rained, and I decided he’d done decided to take his goober-grabbing on down the road somewhere else. By then I wasn’t even mad and just wanted to talk to him, tell him calmly that he couldn’t run around doing stuff like that. I was sure by then that he’d been raised without a father, and I could imagine what their lives were like, him and his mother, eating their powdered eggs, and I couldn’t imagine how we could spend 1.5 billion dollars on a probe to look at Jupiter and yet couldn’t feed and clothe the people in our own country. I wanted a kinder, gentler world like everybody else, but I knew we couldn’t get it blasting it all off in space, or not providing for people like him. Who was to say that if he got cleaned up with some fresh duds, a little education, some new Reeboks, he couldn’t get a blowjob in Atlanta? Hell. Why not educate? Defumigate? Have changes we could instigate? Why couldn’t everybody, the whole country, participate?

Then I saw his truck.

It was backed up between some bushes on the side of the road. A cold feeling washed over me, made me lose all compassion. I said, Here this sick son of a bitch is sitting by the side of the road waiting for some innocent woman like my wife to come along and have car trouble, and instead of helping her change her tire he’s going to run out in the road flonging his dong, whipping his mule, and it gave me a bad case of the creeps. I said, I’m fixing to tell this son of a bitch a thing or two. I thought of Boo Radley, how sweet he turned out to be. But I knew this wasn’t nothing like that. I went on up to the end of the road and I turned around and came back. My shotgun was loaded. I pulled it over next to me. It was warm, the stock smooth—like Shane said, a tool only as good or as bad as the man who uses it—and I wondered if I could kill that man for what he’d done to my wife.