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the same way it was about that last car. We argued with him till we were blue in face and he says yes, yes, it’d take some thought, can’t rush into nothing, reckon we really can’t afford to buy no car, sliding away from you like water all the time, and then he goes and spends every cent of the money on a broken-down bunch of junk that don’t run a month.
    “He’s going to the pen, Mitch. All his life he’ll in the pen, and now we won’t even have Mexico.” She began crying very quietly in the darkness and Mitch reached out and took hold of her hands, feeling awkward and foolish because she was his sister and raging inside because there was nothing he could do.
    She quit after a while because she wasn’t much given to crying and because she realized she was just making Mitch feel worse.
    “Do you think he did it. Mitch?”
    “Did what?” he asked.
    “All those horrible things they said he did. Do you think it’s true? You knew him better than anybody else. Do you think he held up people and shot at the police and beat up people for gamblers? What do gamblers want people beat up for? And if they had to, why didn’t they do it themselves and not get Sewell mixed up in it? Do you think he did those things?”
    “Yes,” he said. She’d know it if I tried to lie to her, he thought.
    “But why? Why, Mitch?”
    “Jessie, I don’t know.”
    “He used to make wagons for me. At Christmas. With wheels sawed off the end of a round sweet-gum log.”
    I reckon an argument like that wouldn’t hold up in court, he thought, but it would take a long time to explain to her why it wouldn’t.
    “Do you remember the wagons, Mitch?”
    “Yes,” he said, dropping the cigarette on the ground and looking down at the red coal. “I remember.”
    “And the rawhide harness he made for Mexico to pull the wagon with? That was just one year. I was too big the next year for Mexico to pull me.”
    It’s fine, Mitch thought, when you’re as tough as Sewell and they can’t hurt you. Sewell’s so stinking tough nobody can hurt him.
    * * *
    After Jessie had gone out Joy lay on her back in the dark room in her bed, across from the small one Jessie slept in, and wondered if it was going to happen again tonight. For some time, and especially the past few weeks, she had had trouble in the dark. It would begin with the gradual appearance before her, whether her eyes were open or closed, of a bust of herself something like the one there had been in the high-school library of Shakespeare or maybe it was Daniel Webster or some other famous writer, except that it was unclothed and somewhat more comprehensive as to detail below the neckline and a little longer to include a full view of her breasts. Then the horrifying part of it would start. It wouldn’t matter that she had looked at herself, or this much of herself, quite searchingly and thoroughly in the mirror not an hour ago, just before she went to bed. It would still happen. The breasts would be leathery and sagging, and her face would be lined, not really wrinkled like that of an old, old woman, but just faintly tracked across by time, like the face of a woman in her late thirties or forties in too strong a light. It would be the same face, there would be no mistaking that, with the little brown beauty mark of a mole just beyond the corner of the slightly pouting red-lipped mouth, but there would be now the revealing evidences that flesh has weight and can fall, and the skin would be coarser and all the pathetic camouflage of make-up would not be able to hide entirely the pitiless erosion of the years. Then would begin the panicky urge to fly from the bed and turn on the light to look in the mirror and drive it away. She would lie perfectly still and try not to think about the mirror, the way a man with bladder trouble would try not to think of the bathroom so far away down the hall. It’s not true, she would tell herself. There’s no sign of it. And then she would start to hear