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sure …” His voice dwindled away, and he let go of her hand.
    “Shit, you just miscalculated, that’s all,” Theodore said. “Anybody could have done that.”
    “What the hell am I gonna do now?” Roy said.
    “You could always run,” Theodore said. “That’s the only smart thing to do in a situation like this. I mean, fuck, what you got to lose?”
    “Run where?”
    “I been sitting here thinking on it, and I figure that old car would probably make it to Florida if you babied it.”
    “I don’t know,” Roy said.
    “Sure you do,” Theodore said. “Look, once we get there, we sell the car and start preaching again. That’s what we should have been doing all along.” He looked down at pale, bloody Helen. Her whining days were over with. He almost wished he had killed her himself. She had ruined everything. By now, they might have had their own church, maybe even been on the radio.
    “We?”
    “Well, yeah,” Theodore said, “you gonna need a guitar player, ain’t you?” For a long time he had dreamed of going to Florida, living by the ocean. It was hard to live the crippled life surrounded by all these lousy hills and trees.
    “But what about her?” Roy said, pointing at Helen’s body.
    “You gonna have to bury her deep, brother,” Theodore said. “I put a shovel in the boot just in case things didn’t turn out like you expected.”
    “And Lenora?”
    “Believe me, that baby will be better off with the old lady,” Theodore said. “You don’t want your kid growing up running from the law, do you?” He looked up through the trees. The sun had disappeared behind a wall of dark clouds, and the sky had turned the color of ash. The damp smell of rain was in the air. From over around Rocky Gap came a slow, faint rumble of thunder. “Now you better start digging before we get soaked.”
    WHEN EARSKELL CAME IN THAT NIGHT , Emma was sitting in a chair by the window rocking Lenora. It was nearly eleven o’clock, andthe storm was just starting to ease off. “Helen told me they wouldn’t be gone but a couple hours,” the old woman said. “She only left one bottle of milk.”
    “Aw, you know them preachers,” Earskell said. “They probably went out and got on a good one. Hell, from what I hear, that crippled boy could drink me under the table.”
    Emma shook her head. “I wish we had a phone. There’s something about this just don’t feel right to me.”
    The old man peered down at the sleeping infant. “Poor little thing,” he said. “She looks just like her mother, don’t she?”

4
    WHEN ARVIN WAS FOUR YEARS OLD , Willard decided that he didn’t want his son growing up in Meade around all the degenerates. They had been living in Charlotte’s old apartment above the dry cleaners ever since they had gotten married. It seemed to him as if every pervert in southern Ohio was located in Meade. Lately, the newspaper was filled with their sick shenanigans. Just two days ago a man named Calvin Claytor had been arrested in the Sears and Roebuck with a foot of Polish sausage tied to his thigh. According to the Meade Gazette , the suspect, dressed only in ripped coveralls, was caught brushing up against elderly women in what the reporter described as a “lewd and aggressive manner.” As far as Willard was concerned, that Claytor sonofabitch was even worse than the retired state representative the sheriff caught parked along the highway on the outskirts of town with a chicken stuck to his privates, a Rhode Island Red that he’d purchased for fifty cents from a nearby farm. They’d had to take him to the hospital to cut it off. People said that the deputy, out of respect for the other patients or maybe the victim, had covered the hen with his uniform jacket when they marched the man into the ER. “That’s somebody’s mother the bastard was doing that to,” Willard told Charlotte.
    “Which one?” she asked. She was standing at the stove stirring a pot of spaghetti.
    “Jesus, Charlotte,