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for a woman, it was impossible.
    The slap of a screen door brought my gaze back to the house.
    Lonnie was on the porch. Through the screen, the woman behind it was no more than a hint of white behind rusty brown filament.
    After a moment he nodded silently, then strode down the stairs and walked swiftly toward the car, his gait bearing no sign of the dark news he’d just delivered.
    “Well, that’s done,” he said as he pulled himself behind the wheel, hit the ignition, and thumped the car into reverse. “Didn’t say much. Not much of a talker, Lila.”
    I glanced toward the house. Lila no longer stood behind the screen.
    “I told her that we’d take Clayton’s body down to the funeral home in Kingdom City,” Lonnie said as we angled back onto the road. “She said she’d come down and identify the body. You know, officially.” He pressed down on the accelerator, and the shack drifted back like a small boat on a deep green tide. “Didn’t see her mama. I guess her health’s failing.”
    A small, round woman, as I recalled her, curiously voluptuous, though in her forties she had seemed ancient to me at the time.
    We were moving down the road now, jostling along its narrow ruts.
    “As for Lila, she just stood there with her arms folded,” Lonnie said. “You know how she is. Can’t get more than a one-word answer out of that girl.”
    Her voice raced through my mind, fervent, full of spirit, certain that with her the cycle would be broken, all the poverty and blighted hope of those who’d come before her. I’m going to find a way out of Waylord, Roy. You need to find one too.
    Until then, I thought I had.

Chapter Four
    M y father was sitting in his bed when I got back to the house, his hair in its usual disarray, the bed’s one sheet wadded up and hurled into a corner.
    “Where you been, Roy?” he asked sharply.
    “With Lonnie Porterfield.”
    “What business you got with him?”
    “I don’t have any business with him. I just paid a visit.”
    “Mighty long visit.”
    “We got caught up in something.”
    “His wife left him, you know.” My father said it with satisfaction. “Ain’t no woman had nothing to do with him since then.”
    My father’s pleasure at Lonnie’s failed marriage struck me as purely malicious, as if his own unhappymarriage could find comfort only in the knowledge that other marriages had been no less stricken.
    “Probably didn’t give a damn about him by the time she left,” my father added. “Probably raised his hand to her and that’s why she left him.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    “ ’Cause that’s the way they are, them Porterfields.” Before I could respond, he added, “Got a skinny little daughter that works at the Crispy Cone. Wild as hell, I heard.”
    “Who tells you all this, Dad?”
    He appeared to resent the question. “I keep track of things.”
    “The Porterfields in particular, it seems.”
    “What do you care who I keep track of?”
    “I don’t, but—”
    “Just people in books, them’s the only ones you take an interest in.”
    I picked up the sheet, began folding it. “You have any preference for supper?”
    “Preference,” my father said, as if the word were too fancy to be uttered in his presence, lay like a silk shirt on his rough back. He plucked a magazine from the table beside his bed, the tattered remnant of something called Boxing News. “Just a glass of lemonade.”
    For a moment, I peered at him wonderingly, as I had when I was a boy, still vaguely yearning to uncover that part of him that remained deep and unfathomable, and yet sometimes broke the surface, like the black fin of a shark.
    He glanced up from the page. “What is it?” he barked, looking me dead in the eye.
    I shook my head. “Nothing.”
    He returned to his magazine. “Put lots of ice in that lemonade,” he snapped. “And lots of sugar.” With that he rolled onto his side, purposely giving me his back.
    I went to the kitchen, pulled out one of