“Clancy likes to think of herself as the housekeeper, but she’s not equipped to keep any kind of house. But her psychoanalysis is progressing. And she has a job now checking horse piss from the local track. It seems every time they run a race they take urine samples from the first three horses to make sure they haven’t been doped. They also spot-check the losers at random. They run the stuff to Clancy’s lab and she dunks litmus paper in it or something. She says it comes in gallon buckets, which she has to pour into test tubes for the technicians to work with. You should smell her when she gets home! Phenomenal. This is all because her psychiatrist insists on getting paid. The old fraud got her this job and told her it would straighten out her psychic this-and-that, give her more self-confidence. But I’ll tell you, I’m not eating any more of her cooking. She doesn’t bathe or change clothes when she comes home. The lady in the drugstore where Clancy buys her hairnets keeps asking me how her kidney trouble is.”

Sam strummed a chord to dramatize the point. The guitar was scarred and stained at the neck. Sam’s fingers were just beginning to grow calluses; his thumbs were still blistered, and the blisters broke and bled as he played. Twelve Easy Lessons for Twelve-String Guitar lay yellowing beside the record player. I wondered if he could read music.

“You’re a fine one to talk about other people bathing and changing clothes.”

“Oh no. That’s a totally different proposition. I wash my hands, brush my teeth, and put on clean underpants once every week. Besides, I don’t wallow in horse piss. I don’t smell bad, do I?”

“Not bad. A little musty.”

From under Rennel’s feet, I fished out Sam’s unfinished “Wittgenstein: The Effect of Swiss Cheese on Rye.” There were a lot of big words. He didn’t write like he talked.

“You seem more impressed with his diet than with his philosophy,” I mused aloud.

“What?” His expression softened when he saw what I was reading. “It’s just that I’m impressed with his philosophy because of the diet.”

He chuckled then began to strum again. I gave up. Time to go home.

Clancy was sitting in the living room when I went downstairs. She was playing with her chubby fingers. She had a thin face, a big nose, a sharp chin, then an abruptly enormous ass.

“Is he still playing the guitar?” she whined.

“Yeah. Does he do that a lot?”

“He does it all day. Every day. Or all night, I mean. I can’t sleep and I’m working now. My analyst says it’s good for me to get away from this house and have some human contact.”

I didn’t sit down because the cat shit smell was too much.