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shoot your balls up in your throat!” He pulled out his own weapon. “Now get the hell outta that window!”
    Porter hesitated for only a second, before turning the barrel of the shotgun toward himself—or trying to. Its length made it difficult; his drunkenness made it impossible. Struggling to get the right angle, he was suddenly distracted. He leaned his shotgun on the window sill, pulled out his penis and in a high arc, peed over the heads of the women, making them scream and run in a panic that the shotgun had not been able to create. Macon rubbed the back of his head while Freddie bent double with laughter.
    For more than an hour Porter held them at bay: cowering, screaming, threatening, urinating, and interspersing all of it with pleas for a woman.
    He would cry great shoulder-heaving sobs, followed by more screams.
    “I love ya! I love ya all. Don’t act like that. You women. Stop it. Don’t act like that. Don’t you see I love ya? I’d die for ya, kill for ya. I’m saying I love ya. I’m telling ya. Oh, God have mercy. What I’m gonna do? What in this fuckin world am I gonna dooooo?”
    Tears streamed down his face and he cradled the barrel of the shotgun in his arms as though it were the woman he had been begging for, searching for, all his life. “Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it. Just like Mr. Smith. He couldn’t carry it. It’s too heavy. Jesus,
you
know. You know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy? Don’t you see, Lord? You own son couldn’t carry it. If it killed Him, what You think it’s gonna do to me? Huh? Huh?” He was getting angry again.
    “Come down outta there, nigger!” Macon’s voice was still loud, but it was getting weary.
    “And you, you baby-dicked baboon”—he tried to point at Macon–“you the worst. You need killin, you really
need
killin. You
know
why? Well, I’m gonna tell you why. I know why. Everybody…”
    Porter slumped down in the window, muttering, “Everybody know why,” and fell fast asleep. As he sank deeper into it, the shotgun slipped from his hand, rattled down the roof, and hit the ground with a loud explosion. The shot zipped past a by stander’s shoe and blew a hole in the tire of a stripped Dodge parked in the road.
    “Go get my money,” Macon said.
    “Me?” Freddie asked. “Suppose he…”
    “Go get me my money.”
    Porter was snoring. Through the blast of the gun and the picking of his pocket he slept like a baby.
    When Macon walked out of the yard, the sun had disappeared behind the bread company. Tired, irritable; he walked down Fifteenth Street, glancing up as he passed one of his other houses, its silhouette melting in the light that trembled between dusk and twilight. Scattered here and there, his houses stretched up beyond him like squat ghosts with hooded eyes. He didn’t like to look at them in this light. During the day they were reassuring to see; now they did not seem to belong to him at all—in fact he felt as though the houses were in league with one another to make him feel like the outsider, the propertyless, landless wanderer. It was this feeling of loneliness that made him decide to take a shortcut back to Not Doctor Street, even though to do so would lead him past his sister’s house. In the gathering darkness, he was sure his passing would be unnoticed by her. He crossed a yard and followed a fence that led into Darling Street where Pilate lived in a narrow single-story house whose basement seemed to be rising from rather than settling into the ground. She had no electricity because she would not pay for the service. Nor for gas. At night she and her daughter lit the house with candles and kerosene lamps; they warmed themselves and cooked with wood and coal, pumped kitchen water into a dry sink through a pipeline from a well and lived pretty much as though progress was a word that