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halfway between Mary Poppins and Jenna Jameson, then why not? It could happen. Look at all those hip-hop millionaires. They weren’t educated. They didn’t get breaks. They took what they wanted, constructed and bent the world to suit them. It took guts. It took will, was all. And Albert had guts. He had will. It took a lot of willpower not to do the things it was possible to do in a place like this, coming from the people he came from.
    He should be fucking proud of himself.
    But he wasn’t.
    He pushed the sheet away from the window, slowly. There was a break in the weather, one of those lovely not-quite-spring-yet days when the streams running down the hillside made a sort of tinkling music and the birds sang loudly, revelling in the possibility of avian romance and the smell of thawing earth was muddy and fecund. Albert put his hand against the glass. Warm, even. Hard to believe it was the same world as last night, when the wind had whipped the voices around the tree trunks as though lashing them to the bark, when the rain had banged on the doors like tiny fists, when the wet had dripped through the roof like tears and the chill had crept in through the chinks like an orphan.
    Albert thought he’d sleep for another hour or two and then get the hell away from the compound for a few hours. Just give himself a mini-holiday. Movement in the clearing caught his eye. Eight-year-old Frank, Lloyd and Joanie’s kid, was near the outhouse. He was still wearing his pyjamas. Blue ones, with flowers on them, hand-me-downs from one of the girls probably. He hit something on the ground with a stick; hit it hard, repeatedly, as if he was trying to kill it, whatever it was.
    Albert let the sheet fall over the glass and fell back into bed with an arm flung over his eyes.

    By two in the afternoon, the temperature spiked, and Albert flung open the cabin door to air out the musty mixture of bacon fat, cigarette smoke, stale beer and his own cooped-up body. He decided to vacate the mountain for the afternoon. No work. No field. No deals. A holiday.
    As he drove through town he hung his arm out the truck window. The air smelled of mucky water and earth and the faint sweet twinge of decay from the clumps of slimy leaves cluttering the storm drains. It was the ideal day to hang out by the river, one of his favourite places—deep in the woods, beneath the old stone bridge, long closed to anything except foot traffic.
    He parked by the road and walked in, boots squelching in the soggy earth. When he reached the river he lay in the sun on a great slab of jutting rock, and watched the swirl and suck of the deep eddies. The sun relaxed Albert’s neck muscles and made his feet tingle and legs twitch and inspired daydreams. It wouldn’t last. Flocks of small sheep-shaped clouds dotted the sky, prophesying more rain on the way tomorrow, but today, who cared about tomorrow?
    Albert rolled his jacket up under his head as a pillow. The dark rock acted as a heat magnet and even in just a T-shirt and sweater, he was warm. He smoked a cigarette. He watched the clouds. He listened to the gurgle and rush of water around the stones. Soon the world would be a humid stinking soup, and the garbage piles on the mountain would fester and swell. Tempers would flare in the stew of summer just as they did in the locked-in freeze of winter. And with meth around, with The Uncles branching out into an entirely new product line, things at the compound were even more dangerous, even more unpredictable. He’d told the kids to stay the fuck away from the trailer. Meth cooks blew themselves up all the time and they often blew up their kids as well. He hated the over-crowded isolation of the mountain, all of them living like rats in a cage, eating their own young.
Don’t think about it.
He flicked his cigarette butt into the river, closed his eyes and tried to let the day be the day, tried to keep the future out.
    He was slipping into a