“That’s what I thought.”

“I’ve known Zendo all my life. I’ve known Hillbilly a few weeks. He ain’t near the smart fella he thinks he is. I wanted to know something, I’d ask Zendo before I’d ask Hillbilly. Unless it was how to lay out under a tree.”

“Hillbilly seems bright enough.”

Clyde made a noise in his throat that sounded like someone who had just discovered he had been spoon-fed horse turds, but he decided not to carry on about Hillbilly any more. He thought he probably was making mountains out of molehills. When it came to Hillbilly, he wasn’t the one to be asked an opinion.

“Was it a murder?” Clyde said.

“I think it was. Preacher Willie is looking at the body. It sure didn’t bury itself in that field, but I can’t tell how she died. Body is too worn away. Suppose she could have just died and someone decided to plant her out there like a tater, but I doubt it.”

“Got any ideas for figuring out who done it?” Clyde asked.

“Not a one. I thought I’d write down what I know, look through Pete’s files, see if that would help me.”

“By finding something like it?”

“That’s what I thought too, Clyde. Maybe there’s been something like it before. Well, there has.”

“The baby.”

“Right. But maybe something else kind of like it. Where Pete knew who done it or had some idea.”

“Wouldn’t you have heard about it?”

“Pete didn’t tell me anything. But the bottom line is I looked to see if there were any similar things happened, and I didn’t find nothing.

“Thing I will say, Pete was pretty careful about writing down his constable business. There’s a note on damn near everything. Most of them are brief, and he made them for him to know what he was talking about, so he could look back and remember. Some of this stuff, I don’t really know what he’s saying.”

“You think a person can start over, Sunset?”

“Do what?”

“You know, change their lives. Maybe get something better for themselves.”

“Well, you got this job for as long as it lasts. That beats the sawmill, don’t it?”

“I mean really change? Change themselves.”

“I hope so. Yeah. I think so. I swear, Clyde, you been around a hell of a fire. You’re making my eyes water.”

“What’s that?”

“I said you smell like a campfire.”

“I smell like it cause I burned my house down.”

Sunset’s mouth fell open. When she cranked it back up, she said, “My God. How did it happen?”

“I used a match.”

“You did it?”

“Yep.”

“On purpose?”

“Purposeful as I could.”

“Where will Hillbilly stay?”

The question was like an arrow in his heart.

“I don’t know. Not with me. Hell, I don’t give a damn where he stays.”

Sunset’s face soured slightly. She said, “Are you having trouble with Hillbilly?”

“Just a little.”

Ben barked, then Hillbilly appeared, pushing a hanging blanket aside. Sunset looked up at him. Clyde watched her face light up like a kerosene lamp in a dark, windowless house.

“Clyde burned his house down,” Sunset said. “On purpose.”

“Yeah,” Hillbilly said. “I heard.”

Karen slipped in beside Hillbilly. She said, “He did what?”

Sunset said what she had said before.

“Clyde,” Karen said, “why would you do such a thing?”

“Starting over, honey,” he said, “and burning out rats.”

“That’s funny,” Karen said, and she smiled big. “You burned your whole house down to get rid of rats.”

Clyde watched Sunset study Karen’s smile, and thought, Yeah, that rat thing isn’t that funny, is it? And that smile she’s got, it’s the first big one she’s had since before her daddy died. I know it, honey, and you know it. And I think I know why, and though it’s great she’s happy, and I can tell you want to be happy for her, if I’m right, it’s wrong why she’s happy, cause she’s just a kid, and Hillbilly, he’s such a liar. You big beautiful redheaded gal, do you even suspect? Have you got any idea?

Course not. You’re blind as Karen on account of that sonofabitch. Man, I can smell the heat coming off of you and her, coming off you for him. All hot and wet and willing, and here I am, wanting you, loving you, and you ain’t even seeing me.

And maybe I’m the one who’s full of it. Maybe he and Karen ain’t got nothing going, except maybe he’s like a daddy to her, and they were just walking in the dark part of the goddamn woods, and that’s all there is to it, and maybe I’m jealous of you and Hillbilly, how you feel about him. Yeah, that could be it or part of it.

Hell. Of course it is.

The big truck rumbled along and now and then coughed black smoke. The hood rattled where it was tied down with a strand of baling wire and the body listed to one side where the shocks were wore out. It had big side boards and inside the bed were five men and three women and a kid, a boy about thirteen. The man driving was a red-faced guy with a cigar growing out of his teeth. He didn’t have anyone sitting in the truck beside him, and wouldn’t let anyone ride there, not even one of the wore-out women.

He had picked them all up earlier that day at the cotton gin in Holiday. Folks gathered there regularly looking for work, usually not finding it, and he knew he could pick up day labor by just showing up and promising a dollar a day to work his fields, which were way out of town, out in the low, damp lands between the trees.

Now that his crew was finished working, were hot and sweaty and worn out, he was supposed to take them on into Camp Rapture so they could look for work at the sawmill, and it was time to pay up.

He let out the clutch as he shifted to a lower speed to take a hill, didn’t feed it any gas. The truck bunny-hopped and died. He pulled on the parking brake, got out, went around to the rear.

“I got some trouble,” he said.

There was a slight groan from the folks in the truck, and one of them, wearing an old suit coat that was so damn thin you could almost see the green stripes on his shirt through it, sat up, took hold of the side boards and looked through them.

He was a big fellow, strong-looking, gone a little to fat. His hair had that look red hair gets when it goes gray.

“You just worked the clutch wrong,” the man in the coat said.

“Well, it was that, but there’s something wrong with it. I’ve had it happen before. I want everyone to get out and give me a push and maybe I can jump the clutch and start it.”

“Get in and try it again. It’ll catch.”

“Naw, you’d think that, but it won’t. It don’t run right. I’ve had it happen before. Y’all get out now and push.”

“When are we going to get paid?”

“When we get to Camp Rapture.”

“Why don’t we do it right now? I don’t know why we got to go there to get paid. We want to go there to look for work. We don’t have to go there to get paid. You can pay us right now.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” said another of the men.

“I hear you,” said the driver, “but I want to get the truck going first. That’s not much to ask. I got to go there to get the money.”

“Why?” said the man in the suit coat.

“I don’t, you don’t get paid, cause that’s where I got my money.”

“A place like that got a bank?”

“No. But the store there, they keep some money for people. They ain’t like a bank. They’re better’n a bank. They hold it and you got to buy some things there for holding it, but they don’t bust like a bank and they don’t have interest, just something you got to buy now and then, something you’d buy anyway. Flour, maybe.”

“They’re not going to be open time we get there.”

“I think they will, and if they ain’t, I know the owner. It ain’t a problem.”

Slowly, everyone piled out. The red-faced man tongued his cigar to the other side of his mouth, said, “Now, y’all get at the back, and when I tell you, push. Stand kind of to the sides, so if it rolls back, it won’t run over you.”