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almost put on his coat, but thought better of it. It would be best to save its warmth until he settled down for the night; digging out a place for himself in the haystack, like walking, would warm him. In any case, he was only cold on the surface—his skin merely a size or so too small—not bone-cold.
    On the south side of the haystack most distant from the house he began to dig. About a foot above the ground, he burrowed into the faint warmth of it, into the slow, sweet fire of its rot and fermentation. When at last he was done, he turned around, eased himself in feetfirst, and covered his lower body with hay. He spread his coat over him and heaped as much hay as he could upon it, and at last drew the paper sack under his head and rested the base of his skull on the bottom of the cooking pot inside it. “Ahh,” he said and wished only, and belatedly, for another taste of the moonshine tucked away inside the sack and for a smoke, but he made no move to get them. He looked straight up at the stars and the pale moon, which, as it rode in the cold night sky, seemed to smoke faintly around its rim. Wrapped in the warm, musty sweetness of hay, he was drifting toward sleep when some rattletrap of a car or truck passed on the highway below him. He listened as it went on toward Valle Crucis. No, it had paused to idle where the wagon road from the shack emptied into the highway. No, he heard a grench of gears and the slower growling of the motor. The goddamned thing was climbing the wagon road toward the shack. He could hear the gravel crunch, the jolting as it negotiated the ruts. The motor idled, shuddered, stopped. He heard the thump of a clutch pedal released from the pressure of a foot, a metal door squawk open and slam shut. Why didn’t that knothead of a dog bark? he wondered, and knew at once it was because the dog recognized who had arrived. Hellkatoot, he thought, and looked wildly about, taking stock of the pasture, the uneven line of woods a few hundred yards above him, the ghostly remains of the garden below. None of it seemed to offer any real cover. He felt ridiculously trapped, as though someone had dropped a haystack on him and pinned him on his back, but then the steps and breezeway of the house grumbled woodenly underfoot, and at last a door opened and closed. He sighed, realized he had been holding his breath. “Shitass,” he said and squeezed his crotch. If it hadn’t been for the icy air upon his face, he would have gotten up and scouted out the shack, but he was warm and his eyes were grainy with fatigue. All right, he thought, what the hell, so someone came in behind me.
    His nose was cold and drained a thin, watery liquid upon his upper lip. He sniffed. What’s the man gonna do, he asked himself reasonably, come out and check his haystacks? Why, hell no, he thought, and carefully, moving one part of his body at a time, he turned on his side without loosing his covering of hay. Still, in some corner of his mind, he was bothered that the place was not so settled in for the night as he had thought, although it did not keep the warmth from soothing him or the whiskey and milk from working on him like a potion.
    Nevertheless, he did not know he’d been asleep when, some time later, he became aware of two things simultaneously: a cold wet spot on his forehead and an intense pain in his ear where the weight of his head seemed to mash his ear against the tin pot as cruelly as between the jaws of pliers. The moon, too, seemed excessively bright even through the slits of his eyes. Slowly, more asleep than awake, he began to turn to his other side, realizing as he did that something had touched his forehead moments before, that it was standing now at his back, that indeed there were two figures behind him where there had been none.
    He leapt broad awake and bolt upright, flinging off both coat and hay in a sudden eruption. The dog sprang back. The man said, “Easy, cousin,” and pointed a pistol exactly where