The way the bar’s made, there’s a little enclosed porch you come into before you get into the lounge. There’s a glass door where you can stand inside and look outside. God, it was hot out there. There wasn’t even a dog walking around. The sun was burning down on the parking lot, and the car the kid was crawling into was about what I’d expected. A junky-ass old Rambler, wrecked on the right front end, with the paint almost faded off, and slick tires, and a rag hanging out of the grill. It was parked beside my truck and it was full of people. It looked like about four kids in the backseat. The woman who was driving put her arm over the seat, said something to the kid, and then reached out and whacked the hell out of him.

I started to go back inside so I wouldn’t risk getting involved. But Harry didn’t have my brand and there was a pack on the dash. I could see them from where I was, sitting there in the sun, almost close enough for the woman to reach out and touch.

I’d run over a dog with my truck that morning and I wasn’t feeling real good about it. The dog had actually been sleeping in the road. I thought he was already dead and was just going to straddle him until I got almost on top of him, when he raised up suddenly and saw me, and tried to run. Of course I didn’t have time to stop by then. If he’d just stayed down, he’d have been all right. The muffler wouldn’t have even hit him. It was just a small dog. But, boy, I heard it when it hit the bottom of my truck. It went WHOP! and the dog—it was a white dog—came rolling out from under my back bumper with all four legs stiff, yelping. White hair was flying everywhere. The air was full of it. I could see it in my rearview mirror. And I don’t know why I was thinking about that dog I’d killed while I was watching those people, but I was. It didn’t make me feel any better.

They were having some kind of terrible argument out there in that suffocating hot car. There were quilts and pillows piled up in there, like they’d been camping out. There was an old woman on the front seat with the woman driving, the one who’d whacked hell out of her kid for coming back empty-handed.