Sunset smiled as she thought about that. Who had survived to tell this tale? Was it the white man? Wounded, his ass cut off, crawling out of the woods to tell the tale?

Story was, Bull’s land was booby-trapped, and so was his house. He had set it up that way some years ago when Klan members decided he was too uppity. They had rode horseback through the dense woods out to his place to teach him a lesson. One of the horses got in a bear trap and had to be shot on the spot. One of the Knights of the White Carnation fell in a pit and broke his leg, and Bull shot another one in the arm.

The Klan decided that Bull was more than they wanted, and had since let bygones be bygones because Bull had put out the word if he ever saw them again he’d shoot to kill, that he wasn’t impressed by their sheets, had sheets himself, but was smart enough to know they went on the bed, not over your head.

Bull was the only colored man Sunset knew of who could talk that way to white men and get away with it. Partly because he stayed back in the deeper parts of the woods on his booby-trapped property, and partly because he wasn’t frightened of much of anything and was willing to fight back, and partly because a lot of whites wanted to keep him happy and healthy because he was said to make the best whisky in these parts.

Sunset rolled the note up, shoved it back in the bottle. She found a flashlight, blew out the lantern, went to the other side of the tent and looked through her supplies. She found some hardened corn dodgers she had cooked up, took them outside and walked over to the oak where she had last seen the dog.

She put the corn dodgers on the ground, called for the dog. He didn’t come and she didn’t see or hear him. She gathered up the dodgers, went back and undressed, went to bed, the gun by her side.

It was a long time before she finally drifted off, dreaming about the poor baby, about Pete, and why he bothered to bury the child. She dreamed about the Marx Brothers movie, Smoky and the shotgun, the poor dead sheriff, the poor dead mule. Over and over, she could see herself pulling her pistol, really fast, fanning it against the back of Macavee’s jaw, and him going down face first in the mud, then Morgan getting punched by Clyde, falling face forward in what that mule had left.

In her sleep she shivered a little, then chuckled.

Sunset rolled over in bed about daybreak and saw the dog was lying with his head just inside the tent flap. He had his paws under his chin and was watching her.

She slowly got out of bed.

The dog raised his head.

“Easy, boy,” she said.

She inched toward him, her hand extended. As she neared, the dog backed out of the tent.

Sunset gathered up the corn dodgers from the night before, unfastened the flap, went outside. The dog was lying down again, paws under his chin.

Sunset held out her right hand with a corn dodger in it. She held the other dodgers in her left hand.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know what it’s like to lose family. Have em run off. Course, you ain’t never shot any of yours, have you?”

The dog looked at her, turned his head from side to side, eased forward, grabbed the dodger, stepped back, gulped it down.

Sunset held out another dodger. The dog inched over and took it. This time he did not move away. She gave him another. And another. By the time she fed him the last corn dodger she was able to put out her hand and stroke his head.

“Want to be my dog? I ain’t ever gonna run off and leave you. I promise.”

The dog licked her hand.

When Karen awoke, Sunset was dressed and cooking breakfast. Pancakes. She had also poured some molasses syrup into a pan and was heating it on the stove.

The big dog was lying on the floor near Sunset’s feet.

Sunset turned, saw Karen rise up, said, “Be easy. He’s still a little skiddish.”

“Will he bite?”

“Any dog will bite sometimes.”

“Will he bite me?”

“Not if you’re nice. Don’t scare him.”

“He don’t look scared to me.”

Sunset smiled. “Didn’t have no butter. But the syrup is warm. It’ll be on the table in a minute.”

“Are we gonna keep him?”

“Yeah. I promised him. Reckon he’s had enough promises broken.”

“What’s his name?”

“I think it’s Ben. Think Clyde said Ben. I’m gonna call him Ben, anyway. Your daddy never would let me have a dog.”

“I always wanted one too.”

“He’s a big old pretty thing, ain’t he?”

Karen nodded, got up slowly, eased out of bed.

Sunset said, “Stick out your hand, easy like, and come toward him slowly.”

Karen did that.

The dog stood up and licked her hand.

“He likes me,” Karen said.

“There’s a lot to like.”

Karen bent down and hugged the dog. The dog licked her ear.

“Hello, Ben,” Karen said.

“Wash your hands before you eat,” Sunset said.

After about a week on the job, which was mostly sitting around Sunset’s tent, delivering one foreclosure paper and making a drunk leave the Camp Rapture store after a fight, Clyde awoke in his broken-down bed thinking of Sunset. He had dreamed about her, and in the dream she was his, but the truth was he wasn’t ever going to have her. Not with Hillbilly around.

He even had one dream where he killed Hillbilly by beating him to death with a chicken, then buried him in the yard, with the bird. He liked that dream almost as much as the one where Sunset loved him.

Clyde sat up on the edge of the bed and looked around the room. Newspapers, all manner of junk. Just a path from the bed to the door. And all the rest of the house the same way. Worse.

How did he think he could attract a woman when his house was a pile of shit. Hell, he was a pile of shit. You could stack shit any way you wanted, arrange it any way you wanted, but in the end, no matter how you worked it, a pile of shit was a pile of shit.

It never occurred to him to be any other way.

And then, when Sunset killed her husband, he felt the wind from a door being opened-a door he wanted to walk through. One that led to a room with him and Sunset. The possibility had not been there before, but now…

He wanted her. He wanted her to want him. And for the first time in years, he was worried about the way his house looked, the way he looked. And he was damn worried about Hillbilly. The sonofabitch could roll in dirt and come up looking good. He looked as if he had been created for the girls. All lean and handsome, thick hair, no nose, ear or back hair. Hell, his balls were probably smooth.

Clyde pulled on his pants, went through the newspaper path to the room where Hillbilly slept. It was a large room, but it seemed small, as all manner of junk was collected there. Clyde no longer knew what junk it was or why he kept it.

Hillbilly was asleep on a mattress on the floor. Nearby, a big pot was still full of water from the last rain that had leaked through the ceiling. Bugs had died in the pot. It looked real nasty. Clyde hadn’t thought about it looking nasty before. But now he could see it. It was nasty.

“You might ought to go on and get up,” Clyde said.

Hillbilly turned over slowly, blinked his eyes open. “Time already?”

“You go in today. Tell Sunset I got to take some time off, but I’ll be back. I ain’t quitting or nothing. And if she needs me bad, come get me. Take the truck.”

After Hillbilly left, Clyde stood outside and studied the old worn-out house. Finally he went inside and dragged out a tarp he had saved. It was rotten in spots, but mostly sound, and he tied it between trees, moved some other items out of the house he thought he might need, like his guns, ammunition, pots and pans, lanterns, and such, tucked them under the tarp.

He spent half the day doing this, and pretty soon realized he was merely taking what was in the house outside, and therefore solving little to nothing.