Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge.

Cora was troubled at night by the thought of the child lying in the cold earth. Had they put it in a box? Or had they merely wrapped it in the flour and sugar sacks used for dishcloths? She wanted to know, but she dreaded to hear what Belle might say. She was shocked too deeply to speak about it, yet she understood in her soul what had happened. Belle had not liked the child. She wanted to forget that it had ever existed.

What would her husband think if he knew that she enjoyed it? Her pains to deceive him relaxed when it seemed clear that it hardly mattered. She had assumed it would end with her pregnancy and was part of a new bride’s remarkable sensations, but with the child born she had felt desire for her husband. That she concealed, of course, scarcely admitting it to herself. She had no way of knowing if Ned was aware of her reluctant-willing collaboration. She feared what might happen if she took the initiative. Now that she was pregnant again he turned on his side and was usually snoring while she brushed her hair. She liked his snoring. What would it be like to have a man who lay snoreless and awake?

There was an old buzka on Luther Street known as the Cat Woman, not because she kept cats but because she disposed of the neighborhood’s excess kittens. Fathers would bring them in cardboard boxes at night after the children were asleep and she would drown them in her wash machine. The wash machine was in the basement, an ancient model with a galvanized-metal tub that stood on legs and had a wringer. A thick cord connected it to a socket that hung from the ceiling and when she turned it on the light bulb in the basement would flicker and water begin to pour.

The elephant was there, waiting in the overgrown lot where once long ago there had been a Victory garden, and after that a billboard, but now nothing but the rusting hulks of abandoned cars. The children grew silent as they gathered to inspect it: the crude overlapping parts, the bulky sides and lopsided rump, the thick squat legs that looked like five-gallon ice-cream drums, huge cardboard ears, everything painted a different shade of gray, and the trunk the accordion-ribbed hose from a vacuum cleaner. They stared back at Budhardin’s eyes looking at them through the black sockets above the trunk. The holes were set too close together for a real elephant and made it look cross-eyed and slightly evil.

Calvin held to the sides of his seat as he felt it begin to whirl. For a moment the seat seemed to pitch backward like a dentist’s chair. His body had flinched as the head appeared to roll into space. He struggled like a dreamer half awakened from a nightmare of falling to regain his equilibrium and breath. The earsplitting screaming made him weak and nauseated: he couldn’t understand how it could continue like a broken record. Where was the audience? Had the projectionist gone mad?

Calvin ducked his head between his knees and clapped his hands over his ears. He entered the world of the smell of the theater floor, the spearmint wrappers, the rancid popcorn oil, old urine, stale sweet wine. Above him it went on as if it would never end.

Still behind him was that damn coyote. A determined critter, he was. He hadn’t caught sight of him for at least an hour, but he felt his presence out there. At first he had feared him. Now he didn’t. If circumstances were different he might have welcomed the company of a coyote on a lonely walk on a snowy night. At best, the coyote’s presence was disconcerting. He was puzzled. Why would a coyote be so determined? Poor animal. It had been such a hard winter for man and beast.

He had got to drinking after Laurene died, he was so torn up about her death, and somebody at the Bureau of Indian Affairs came along and took his kids. Some social worker. By the time he sobered up, and that was several weeks later, he was told he had signed papers giving up his kids permanently and they were in a home near Mobridge, South Dakota. A Catholic home. And he couldn’t go up to visit them. It wasn’t allowed, they told him. He tried once to get in to see these two, a boy and a girl, like the two he had now. He never succeeded. He still wondered about them a lot. He knew they had to be mostly grown by this time, and he wondered if they ever thought about him.

My God, he thought again. Now it is murder. It has gone that far. Before, he was a drunk, sometimes a disagreeable drunk. But he was a drunk who didn’t or hadn’t gone around killing people. Now he had. He was little better than Little Bald Eagle and others like him who he had told Doris Mae were evil and to be avoided. And to think he had bragged to Bennion how all the whiskey and wine in his life had not brought him so low that he had never needed to beg. And now he had gone so much lower and killed a man.

In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.

She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.

Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint—trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston is return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in the chest, and would have emptied his shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.

Edith Goodnough isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there is that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bus Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.

John Roscoe found two of the fingers and one of the thumbs. The thumb was still stuck in the section blades. The two fingers he found in he sand and stubble behind the header, but he couldn’t find any more. Edith held them on her lap on the way to town, sitting the back seat of the old Model T Ford behind her father. They looked like thick bloody sausages in the handkerchief on her lap, except that they had black hair on them between what would have been knuckles and they had fingernails on the ends. There was still dirt under the nails. Edith brushed the sand and wheat chaff off them: the fingers were very stiff. Roy sat in front of her with his head fallen on his chest. He was mumbling to himself, and his bloody hands dripped blood steadily onto the floorboards of the car.

He went on dispensing and displaying his junk, his proof of travel. By the time he had finished Edith looked like a circus gypsy. She was weighted with cheap necklaces, purple scarves, earrings and dangling bracelets—all with city names on them. She gave him in return a hug and a kiss; they were having a fine time of it. Then she took him by the hand and led him around the walls of the living room to examine and explain each postcard he had sent her, and each one reminded him of something, recalled for him in droning detail the days and months he’d spent in each place. Edith was as attentive as a lover. She kept saying things like, “And this one you sent from Cleveland, didn’t you? What happened there?” And he would tell her of course; Lyman didn’t require much prompting. He was full of stories. I watched them from the rocking chair, feeling as out of place as an old maid aunt chaperoning at a kids’ party—they were having such a time.

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

Clarice distributed masks. There was a Clarice-mask for Clarice, an Alvin-mask for Alvin, a Stonecipher-mask for Stonecipher, a Spatula-mask for Spatula. The masks were very good and very lifelike. Clarice made them out of plaster molds and papier-mâché and Reynolds Wrap, in a workshop in the basement. Clarice was in many ways an artist, Lenore thought, CabanaTan notwithstanding. She was particularly good at making things with people’s faces on them. Every year she gave her father, Lenore’s father, cans of tennis balls in which every ball was an eerie likeness of the head of Bob Gerber or Erv Beechnut. Stonecipher Beadsman III loved to play tennis with these balls. Clarice also on the sly made some Stonecipher-Beadsman-III-head balls that she and Alvin batted around from time to time. During a dark period, about a year before, there had appeared a can of Alvin-head balls.

We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve, one or two of her friends standing with towering hairdos off to the side, wary lest they be caught in the ropes of sexual tension that snapped and crackled in the air between Janet and me, the friends watching us, me, for the tiniest error, the Beatles on the record player playing “Eight Days a Week,” and my hands prepared some sort of hors d’oeuvre, what do I mean some sort, a fastened cylinder of bologna on a Ritz cracker, and she declined it, and stared at me kindly, telling me with her eyes that she was willing to play the elaborate and exhausting game, that it was all right, and I put the hors d’oeuvre into my mouth, and the cracker seemed to explode into deserts of dust, and there was meat, and I recall she was talking about the upcoming election, and the unavoidable and untalkaboutably horrible invitation to dance began its salmon’s migration from my intestine up toward the brain, and my hand was in the pocket of my slacks, soaking through the wool, and in a disastrous flash I thought of something witty to say, to delay the invitation, and my heart leapt, and my throat constricted, and I turned convulsively from myself to say the thing to Janet Dibdin, as she stared with undeserved trust into my eyes, and I tried to say the thing, and as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d’oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva in it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin’s nose, and stayed there.