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hot day and night. Lee puts a hand over it and it scalds, has its own heartbeat. He cannot feel his face; in the mirror his face is shiny and fat, but if he could not see it in the mirror he would believe it is not there. A rare sip of air sneaking down his strangled throat and into his lungs is a great pleasure. Wakes in the mornings with little silver bugs in his eye feeding off the thick pink-green discharge. He is sweaty, feverish. —Let me see, his father says, taking Lee’s chin in his and tilting up his grotesque little face toward his own. —Look at that! Getting better!
    In the mornings before school, Lee traipses around the kitchen and living room in the darkness of dawn, bending down to pick up his father’s empty bottles with cigarettes in them and bring them to the trash. When his father appears on the stairs with his rifle and camouflage heading out to hunt, he makes fun of Lee. —Uh-oh, it’s the cops. Do you have a warrant officer?
    One night Lee wakes up in bed smelling smoke. Calls out for his father but he does not answer. He goes through the smoke to his father’s room and sees his father in his bed, asleep. He calls to him but he does not wake up. Goes into the kitchen, it is on fire. His father left a burner on. Lee stamps out the flames with the lid of a pan, and when his father wakes up hours later—having slept too late to hunt—he asks Lee why it smells like smoke, but Lee shrugs and never tells him how he saved both their lives.
    He and his father are at Safeway a day or two later for more meat. Lee’s eye is dripping slime. His father has given him a straw to stick between his lips so he can breathe. People are staring. His fatheris red-faced, muttering to Lee that they all need to mind their own damned business.
    â€”Poor little boy, a woman says.
    His father smiles falsely and says, —He’s okay, just a little infection, it’ll clear itself right up.
    â€”I don’t know, she says, —it looks horrible.
    â€”Looks worse than it is. He ain’t in pain, and he can see out of it just fine. Still grinning he turns, the smile vanishing. Lee keeps lagging behind. —Come on, now, Lee, walk. You have to get the blood circulating otherwise your system won’t fight off the infection. Christ, you must think you’re the first buckaroo ever to get himself a little pinkeye. Come on, we’re successful homesteaders, let’s start acting like it. If this were the range, we’d have put you in the stockade for being so damned difficult. We’ll get some sunlight today when we’re working on the farm, that’ll help. Sunlight is the best disinfectant—ain’t you ever heard that before?
    They go straight to the meats and fill the basket with beef. Every trip to Safeway is mechanized, because his father hates Safeway and believes maybe, if he is mechanized, Safeway will somehow know that he hates it. In and out in ten minutes flat is the goal. No cart—a hand basket provides greater maneuverability for darting around the old ladies standing about clogging the aisles, nothing to do with their lives, he says, but peruse a daggone grocery store, picking things up and putting them down and fussing and fretting over every trivial little thing and getting in men’s daggone way. — These people are cattle, they’re sheep. They’re sheeple, is what they are, he says. The word sticks in Lee’s brain and never leaves. His father carries the gun on his hip. The sheeple glance at it, give him space and respect, think he must be a police officer, which he likes. At the checkout he is sweating. He smiles through his sweat at the teenage cashier.
    â€”Howdy, li’l darlin’, he says. He seems to forget Lee is there. —My you’re pretty. Though you’d be a lot prettier if you smiled a little bit.
    She acts like she has not heard him. She is looking at Lee, his eye. —Whoa, she