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Eyes darting, Papa said, “Somebody’s been here.”
    Junior squinted. He had a headache from the excitement of his day. With a shiver he said, “How can you tell?”
    “I ever been wrong?”
    Junior’s headache felt like a nail in his forehead. “Maybe it was somebody wantin’ a bike fixed.”
    “Maybe.”
    Junior went into the house, and Papa stayed outside to look around. The heat of the day was in the house and mixed moistly with the smells of male belongings. At the kitchen sink Junior thrashed his face with water and dried it in a towel that could have been cleaner. Then he drank water from a chipped mug that may have belonged to his mother. He had no memory of her, though vaguely he remembered playing with her clothes, which his father had stuffed into a box. Those were his memories: a few threadbare dresses, a sweater ruptured at the elbows, a frayed bra deprived of two of its catches, underpants with elastic waists robbed of their goodness. With no photographs to go by, he painted pictures of her in his mind.
    Occasionally through the years he had dreamed of her crouching naked in the kitchen and had awoken with the suspicion that the dream might be grounded in reality. He never dared to ask his father. Nor did he ever ask Clement, who might have told him.
    The only women in his life he could remember were his grandmother, whose breasts were dry biscuits hardly worth stealing a peek at, and his aunt, who was more interesting. She had a squirrel between her legs. Then his grandmother died, and his aunt went off to become a whore — that was what he heard Papa tell Clement. Then his aunt died, and Papa said, We’re the only Rayballs left, just the men. Except he was looking at Clement, not Junior.
    Clement was the hero of the family. Clement finished school; Junior left after the eighth grade. Clement went into the army and sent home a picture of himself in a jeep. Junior still had it. Clement had mysterious jobs and mailed money to Papa. Junior was unemployable, with eyes that seemed channeled inward except when they were charting the movements of girls and women. Clement was special; Junior was a piece of shit.
    Still at the sink, he uncapped a new bottle of aspirin. He always saved the cotton, though for what purpose he could not say, the same way he could not tell why he kept having that same dream about his mother. Through the window he glimpsed a shape in the moonlight. One leg cocked like a dog’s, Papa was taking a leak near the woodpile.
    Junior switched on the light in his little bedroom, where Clement’s army picture was tacked to a wall. The picture was a Polaroid that had faded Clement into a ghost. He sat on the edge of his unmade cot and made a face. The aspirin had left a taste. Kneading his brow, he wished he could pull the nail from it, and he wondered why he had been born instead of someone else, someone bigger and better, like Clement. Then he felt eyes on him. Papa had come in and was peering at him.
    “I bet he was here.”
    “Who, Papa?”
    “The chief. Sometimes I can smell him,” Papa snarled.
    Junior lifted his head, which felt swollen. “I don’t smell nothin’ dif’rent.”
    “That’s ‘cause you ain’t had him breathin’ in your face for twenty years,” Papa said and stood motionless, on the alert, as if the chief might be lurking. Outside, insects were singing their loudest. Inside, a moth attacked the lamp. Papa glared.
    Junior said, “You blamin’ me?”
    “No, I ain’t blamin’ you. You don’t know how to be blamed.”
    Averting his eyes, Junior stared at Clement’s ghost. When he was ten, he had eaten spoiled meat and nearly died. Clement, not Papa, finally took him to the hospital in Lawrence and saved his life. And it was Clement who tried to put sense into his head, but always the assortment of words were too clever for him. Always his skull tightened, and a rage built. That was when he used to hate his own brother.
    He said, “I miss