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He looked over at Joe Lon. “Musta been that fucking meat we et at breakfast,” he said.

Joe Lon handed him the bourbon. He took a mouthful, gargled, spat it through the window, and then drank long from the bottle, his powerful throat pumping and pumping. When he finished he turned and tried to hand it to Poncy, who had been watching the whole thing from his place crouched in the back. “Want you own sef a drink a whiskey?” said Willard.

At that moment Joe Lon was taking the Porsche through a long slow curve in a power slide that was turning a hundred and ten. Joe Lon was screaming, not with joy, not with anger, just screaming, his thick fine hands locked on the steering wheel. Poncy saw a huge oak tree tilting into their line of vision at the top of the curve and smelled the raw bits of puke clinging to his Banlon shirt and saw the offered whiskey bottle sloshing just there in front of his eyes and although he knew what he was going to do — could not help doing — he bowed his head and puked onto his lap while Willard Miller sucked his teeth and watched dispassionately from the front seat.

Willard said: “This sumbitch in the back seat just thrown up on his self.”

But Joe Lon didn’t hear. He was on a long straight and he had the Porsche up to a hundred and twenty, which was apparently all it would do because he was stamping the accelerator and pumping the steering wheel with both hands. He glanced over at Willard and shouted: “Ain’t had a chance to drive nothing like this since Berenice went off to the U of Gee and given her Vette to Hard Candy!”

Joe Lon drew his lips back in what could have been great happiness, but it was not. Even in the middle of this frantic ride, with his best buddy sitting beside him screaming for him to Screw it on! he felt the weight of a great despair settling in him as solid as bone. It had started in the middle of the workout on the prone press bench and he was not even aware of it until it was on him like a fever. He had gotten up from the bench and, waiting for Duffy and Willard, found himself looking across the road at the old man who had come back and squatted by the end of his Airstream trailer. The twisting tufts of hair stood out like something driven into his skull and across his knees was an open book that he was reading, his finger tracing and tracing the page as he read.

It was a long time before Victor shifted the book and Joe Lon saw it was the Bible. Victor used to take a room on the second floor of their house back in the days when Big Joe used to let rooms to tourists and hunters for the Roundup. Victor never talked of anything but God and snakes and his voice and the look in his eyes always made Joe Lon’s heart jump. His daddy, who had been to meetings at Victor’s church, had told Joe Lon how it was.

“He strings diamondbacks in his hair like a lady strings ribbons. I seen’m kiss a snake and a snake kiss him. He’s been bit in the mouth. He’s been bit everwhere. It ain’t no more’n a kiss from his ma. He follers where God leads him.”

It was Joe Lon’s turn on the bench and he went under the weight in a sinking despair, thinking: What am I doing here on my back? What is this I’m doing? I’m a grown man with two babies and a wife and I’m out here fucking around with weights. What the hell ails me?

When Joe Lon got off the bench the next time, Elizabeth Lilly Well — called Mother Well by the hunters, who gave her buttons from the tails of rattlers — was sitting on a stone beside Victor. She had brought her three-thousand-dollar mosaic called Deer Plus Snake with her. It gleamed in the sun and Victor traced its outline with one bony finger. It came to Joe Lon that she pinned rattles to a canvas relentlessly and with great joy and Victor followed God the same way. What did he, Joe Lon, do? What did he have? He had once had football to fill up his mind and his body and his days and so he had never thought about it. Then one day football was gone and it took everything with it. He kept thinking something else would surely take its place but nothing ever did. He stumbled from one thing to the next thing. From wife to babies to making a place for crazy campers bent on catching snakes. But nothing gave him anything back. So here he was lying under a dead weight doing what he’d done five years ago, when he was a boy. If it had meant anything then, he had forgotten what; and merciful God, it meant nothing now. His life had become a not very interesting movie that he seemed condemned to see over and over again.

“I feel like the end of the world,” Joe Lon screamed above the noise of the whining engine.

“We git up here,” Willard screamed back at him, “we’ll press a little beer to you face, you’ll feel better.”

But he would not feel any better and he knew it.

Poncy, sitting with the little green puddle in his lap, tried to say something authoritative to them about abusing his car, after all he was old enough to be their father and there was no reason for him to take all this and not let them know what they were in for if they wrecked his Porsche or hurt him. But they either did not hear him yelling up at them from the back seat or they simply did not care.

They roared into a clay parking lot and stopped. Joe Lon and Willard got out and closed their doors without ever looking at him. He sat where he was and watched them walk away. His bowels felt loose. He’d been having a lot of trouble with his bowels since he retired, and the ride had not helped. When he was sure he had everything under control, he got out. In the red clay parking lot he shifted quickly from foot to foot, testing the weight of his bowels. Everything seemed to be all right.

The Blue Pines was a wooden building with a tin roof. Various signs were stuck on the walls advertising Budweiser, the King of Beers, and Redman chewing tobacco, and Coca-Cola, pool table, and sandwiches. The hills sloped away in thin, second-growth pine trees. When Poncy opened the door it was so dark he had to stand a moment before he saw Willard and Joe Lon sitting at a round splintered wooden table and another man bringing a pitcher of beer with two glasses.

The man said: “You boys welcome here, but I don’t want no goddam trouble.” He set the pitcher on the table.

Neither Joe Lon nor Willard looked at the man. They poured beer into the glasses and drank. The man stood beside the table. Finally, Willard — still without looking up — said: “Pay’m, would you, Conty?”

“Poncy,” said Poncy, paying the bartender, “it’s Poncy.”

The man stood beside the table with the money in his hand and said: “How’s you daddy’s Tuffy?”

“Tuffy’s good. Great shape,” said Joe Lon.

“He’s old, though,” said the man.

“You put anything down, better be on Tuff,” Joe Lon said.

“Knowing when to git off a dog is smart as when to git on.”

“Suit youself.”

There was only one other man in the Blue Pines, a farmer in overalls and felt hat, drinking whiskey out of a water glass and never looking up. Willard and Joe Lon managed to get through two pitchers of beer before the Winnebago pulled in. Duffy Deeter drank straight from the pitcher to catch up and then proceeded to take Joe Lon and Willard to the pool table in back and humiliate them. During one run he went through two consecutive racks, which did not improve Willard’s humor.

Susan Gender put two quarters in the juke for six plays. She stood prancing on her toes in front of the jukebox for a moment and then cut her sly gaze at Poncy, where he stood trying to act as though he wasn’t watching her pumping hips and the fine vibrating flesh of her belly.

She smiled. “I guess you it,” she said, and came dancing toward him.