“Right.”

“Give us a for-instance.”

“For instance, the oil depletion allowance. Or tax loopholes for the rich. They both seem to go on and on no matter who’s in power.”

“And why is that, Mr. Hook? Why do they go on?”

Hook smiled. “Of course, you have no idea.”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

“Then I guess it’s my duty to tell you.”

“Please.”

“Greed, Mr. Douglas. Simple greed. You champions of the poor seldom choose to share their poverty.”

Douglas made a face, as though he were scandalized at hearing such an idea. “Sounds terribly pessimistic,” he said.

“Could be I’m a pessimist.”

“Does that come from being close to the earth?”

Hook looked at Liz next to him and for a change she did not lower her gaze, yet he had no idea what he saw in her beautiful brooding eyes, whether it was sympathy or scorn or merely pain, the anguish of the “dying.”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “For instance, my son Chris lived almost his whole life on the farm. But he wasn’t a pessimist, was he, Miss Madera?” He waited but she did not respond. “No, I think Chris believed that in time we’d make it all come out right in this country. But then, that’s natural in the young, isn’t it, that kind of optimism? They know, they feel, their own strength and health and spirit, and they impute it to the rest of us. But it just isn’t there, is it?” He looked from Douglas to Parnelli and then back again. “Time takes it away from us, so that finally the question we ask isn’t what we can do for other people but what we can take away from them, right?”

Douglas, finished eating, had given Liz a cigarette and taken one himself. Now he lit them, pointedly excluding Hook. “So that’s how it is with you, huh?” he said.

“That’s how it is.”

“And of course what’s true for you is automatically true for the rest of us.”

“Not if you say it isn’t.”

Douglas grinned. “Well, this may come as a big shock to you, friend, but it just so happens I don’t feel obliged to justify myself to you. I’m sorry about that, but that’s the way it is. Tell me about you, though—what is it you’re after? What’s your particular greed?”

Hook did not answer immediately. Finally he said, “My family. Their good name.”

“Bull shit!” It was Parnelli. And as he said it he contemptuously tossed his empty plastic plate across the galley into the sink, where it slowly clattered silent, like a spun coin.

Douglas laughed. “I’m afraid Bo isn’t moved by such old-fashioned sentiments.”

“Not many people are.”

Douglas said nothing then for a time, just sat leaning back in the corner of the booth, blowing smoke rings and smiling to himself. Finally he shook his head approvingly. “Well now isn’t this just peachy-keen. We’re all being so modern and civilized, kind of like an ex-married couple having a pleasant little tête-à-tête together. Or a dog and cat eating out of the same bowl.” He grinned at Hook, in a burlesque of admiration. “Boy, you really took old Bo in, didn’t you? I guess he thought you were just some poor dumb shitkicker farmer. Ain’t that right, Bo?” He winked up at the big man, who was glumly leaning back against a bulkhead, his arms crossed, his face clotted with resentment. Bo said nothing.