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didn’t, and we drove out of there. The rain had died out and everything,even the crummy little town, looked better than before, spit-cleaned by nature. We hadn’t gone a mile before we looked back and saw Gadget had gone to sleep in the backseat, her belly full, and maybe, for a moment, satiated.
    Of course, there was that hairy old cocaine monkey, and when she woke up, it was sure to chatter and show its ass.
    I tried to tell myself we had done all we could do. What Marvin had asked. But somehow I didn’t feel satisfied that we could say “job well done.” I kept thinking about what Tanedrue had said, about what Gadget had said. About how we didn’t know what we had done and that hell was coming.

11
    When we got back to LaBorde, Gadget was still sleeping. We drove through the wet town on out into the country where Marvin Hanson stayed. He lived there with his daughter and his wife. They had once been a very close family then Marvin’s pecker had gotten excited about a young woman; the same young woman I had liked. She was dead now, and Marvin had gone back to his family and I had gotten over my feelings of wanting to skin him and nail his hide to the side of a barn and throw knives at it. Got over it long ago. Me and him and Leonard had gone through a lot, and we were bonded, as they like to say.
    Marvin and his wife, Rachel, had gotten back together, and they were doing all right. But during that time, their daughter, JoAnna, had gone through some stuff, and then she had a daughter of her own, Julie, aka Gadget, by the guy who had run off. I didn’t know that until Marvin told me. I knew I had never met him, but then again, much as Leonard and I liked Marvin, his family didn’t hang with us, didn’t even send us a Christmas card. They could have had three more kids, and close as the three of us were, we might not have known.
    Now they all lived in a small two-bedroom house out in the country, trying to pull everything together and live happily ever after.
    The house was off a rain-slick red clay road, and we started down it just as Gadget awakened and sat up in the backseat.
    “If you hadn’t had such a bad day,” I said, “I’d have made you wear your seat belt, and I should have anyway.”
    “You’re not my daddy,” she said.
    “No,” Leonard said, “and from what I’ve heard, your daddy, whoever he is, isn’t claiming you either. You weren’t nothin’ to him but a hump and a squirt.”
    Gadget crossed her arms and sat back in her seat and looked mad. I gave Leonard a look that could have paralyzed a chicken at twenty paces. If it bothered him, struck a nerve anywhere inside that hard black hide, I didn’t notice it.
    We drove up to Marvin’s house and I got out and opened the back door of the truck. Gadget got out with her arms still crossed and walked briskly toward the house. I tried very hard not to notice that from the rear in those very short shorts she had what might be a championship butt. If not, it was certainly a top contender.
    Marvin came out on the porch with his cane, and Gadget walked by him like he wasn’t there, went inside and slammed the door. Marvin looked back at her through the screen. I could see his shoulders slouch. JoAnna, Gadget’s mother, came out on the porch. She looked at us and tried to smile, then went back inside. I heard her call out for her daughter.
    We hadn’t moved away from the truck. We leaned against it and waited. Marvin came out and nodded at me. “Thanks.” He looked at Leonard. “Thanks.”
    “We didn’t have anything else to do,” Leonard said. “Me and him, we usually save this day for a little Bible study, but all the dirty parts we’ve read so much they don’t do anything for us anymore.”
    Marvin ignored Leonard, as was often his custom, looked at me, said, “You got her back, but other than that, how did it go?”
    “Let me see,” I said. “We went to the trailer, and the guy you beat with the cane was playing with his balls,