Richard's grandmother in the grass. The wheat flattened where she crawled and in her clenched fists dirt and torn plants and in her eyes the senile fear of having shared a space with death. She looking up at Richard and squinting in the sun and in a voice that lost its composure she told him that the man's in the kitchen and that she didn't know who he was.
 When they heard the gun shot they swam in the river that marks the southeast perimeter of Joe's property. The shots echo ringing across the country and bringing the boys out the woods. Richard's grandmother running out the door in their direction, her arms in the air, was a sight they couldn't quite believe. They road the same horse down to her still soaked in their shorts.
 Elson on the stool with the shotgun across his knees. He rolled a cigarette on the flat of the stock. Next to him the table collapsed into a heap of dark wooden planks. He's in trouble, Joe.
 The man with green eyes crawled to the door. His hair undone and enveloping his head. From his face to the floorboards a tangled mess of hair and blood and saliva and loose skin. From the meat of his throat came a groan that told of a life lived in the margin of people's credulity subverted, of a face that betrayed one moment and turned around and loved the next. A voice that did win the adoration of a people it called its own. It reverberated in the hollow wooden spaces of the house and escaped out the doors and windows of the house into the late afternoon of the country that surrounds this corner of the world that found itself the setting of this man's end that day.
 The man's fingers around Joe's ankles. Joe standing in the doorway half naked, the light coming in crowding him in the doorway and rendering him a dark hazy silhouette to the man. A drop of water fell from Joe's shorts and landed in front of the the man's face. Joe's hand supported his head. Joe pondered on what darkness there was to be found in the man's heart, and if the man had made a mistake, if it were to underestimate the darkness that may be contained in the hearts of others.
 A madness stirring in the thick of the woods. It crept along the ground, shifting the leaves and the twigs and over the fallen logs and gliding over the rivers. Its origins black and capricious and native, the thing itself only the residue of a force whose intentions and influence on man are beyond his ability to decipher, it boiled in the sun sliding into orange and rose from the fields like a mist. It descended on the boys and found an equal in their hearts as they sat astride their horses armed with a rifle each and conspired with the madness against the girls.
 Richard's cigarette aglow in the hue of the late afternoon sky. What if they got their horses tied up there and they make a run north across the fields.
 Thieves don't got horses.
 Why would they go through all that trouble.
 You ever stalked a cat before? They go through all kinds of trouble.
 Richard spat. He said: Well. If they got chickens, there'll be feathers.
 There will.
 I can follow the feathers.
 All right. I'll be at the bridge then.
 What if they're not headed for the bridge.
 They're headed for the bridge. Joe loaded the rifle. These are for their people waiting for them at the bridge. If you hear a shot, set up with a clear view of the field. You'll see me first and then they'll follow. It's easy pickings for you.
 Well shit.
 That's the worst that'll happen. Chances are it's just us against the girls.
 How are you so sure they're headed for the bridge.
 Well. How many chickens they take, a dozen? That's more than a family. The woods across the bridge is the only place to hide that many people. They're looking for wood for the fire now, most likely. Chances are good they don't know anything's happened. Chances are the three or four men they got that can fight are busy with something else. He told Richard to keep his ears open and his rifle on the saddle.
 What if there's shooting to be done.
 Only shoot when you're good and ready to shoot. When you're in a good position to shoot. Don't let yourself get startled into shooting. If you hear a shot, walk into the field and get yourself set like you're hunting deer. Just like you're hunting.
 What the hell. Richard spat on the cigarette and flicked it into the weeds. What do I do if the girls turn right and go north across the fields.
 They won't.
 But how do you know
 They're clever. They're too clever to try making it across open country. They never go back the way they came. They cover their tracks. When they reach that line of trees they're gonna make a left to lose us and cross the bridge. Keep the rifle in the saddle and the bullets in your pocket. Keep your head.
 The timber bridge a reminder to the forest of man's supposed mastery over it. It was made by the hands of Joe's father and will fall to decrepitude and disrepair at his passing. It lays across the banks of the river in the shade of the woods, its truss and darkened basswood cover giving it the look of a train car abandoned to return to the elements man summoned to comprise it.
 Joe stood in its entrance with the rope in his hand. He felt them coming when they were about a hundred yards north east down the river. Their footsteps vibrating in the body of the bridge, the more dainty and sensitive instruments of the forest anticipating the arrival of something human and desperate and clumsy. The girls ran out the forest into the prairie to make a straight run for it when Richard arrived at their heels. Their rhythm quick and awkward and Richard's horse maintaining a relaxed trot a quarter of a minute behind. When they got near he heard richard's horse increase its pace and the number of girls running cut to one. He walked out into the prairie and finally heard their voices.
 People-hunting in the heat and the haze of the insects and the pollen and the plants of the wheat fields. The older sister's high kneed galloping in the grass. Fowl under her arms, her hair in a black sinewy trail behind her. If she noticed Joe she gave no sign of it. Her sister a ways back among the pounding hooves of Richard's horse. She writhed in the dirt in awe of the animal with the veined marble muscles and the black coat that absorbed the sun and gave back a bluish reflection of the moon. It reared and buckled over her like she was a small demon to the horse. Richard struggled to control the animal with shotgun in hand. In his eyes the frustration of a hunter kept from his kill, of a sheriff, of a killer. The girl got to her feet and swatted at the horse's face and the beast froze in fear without all of its hooves on the ground and toppled over in the wheat. Richard's shotgun released a cartridge into the prairie, and when the older sister turned around at the sound of it, Joe lunged forward with the rope lassoed and it was wrapped around her waist before she turned back around. She tried to swing him but only swung herself to the ground. Joe put her on her stomach and placed his knee on her back. He passed the rope between her ankles and then around them and under the dress out the collar and back to her ankles and tied it off. Her little sister tried to clear them both in a courageous lunge but Joe's hand was there to grab her and she soon lay next to her sister with her hands tied behind her back with the remainder of the rope.
 Richard tried to stand the horse but Joe yelled to make it lay. He said it broke its leg and if they make a splint for it now they can save the horse.
 Shit. Richard bent over with his hands on his knees. There's something wrong with my shoulder. On that side blood dripped from his elbow. His face was red and wheat covered his back. He said he needed to sit for a while.
 The two chickens that had been under the older sister's arms recovered from the ordeal, and having realized the seeds in the dirt, picked at the ground beside their sisters silent and half dead in the girls' hoop skirts.

The thread bound notebook under the chair. Her hand patting the floorboards for it. In the notebook, passages from books sold to her by men who stood in her doorway in suits worn thin and slack and beheld her with eyes tired and besieged with sweat. She records her favorite passages and by the window. Out there the plane of millet and wheat and sunflower interrupted by three distant figures. She closed the notebook and placed it there by the bowl of sweets. In her advancing years, Virginia has come upon the habit of chewing sweets and her life has become the story of the flavor and texture of one candy after another.
 Through her telescope, a man with two women in outsized dresses in the silence of the fields seemingly walking in place. They found the road and raised a cloud of dust behind them.

In her advancing years Virginia has come upon the habit of chewing sweets and her life has become the story of the flavors and textures of one candy after another. She records her favorite passages and folds the caramel over in her mouth and looks out the window. Out there the plane of millet and wheat and sunflower interrupted by three distant figures. They find the road and raise a cloud of dust behind them.
 Through her telescope, a man and two women in outsized dresses in the dust and the mirage and the silence of the field seemingly walking in place.
 She drops another caramel and consides
In her advancing years Virginia has come upon the habit of chewing sweets, and her life has become the story of the flavors and textures of one candy after another as she sits by the window and reads.
 Out there the plane of millet and wheat and sunflowers interrupted by three distant figures. She closed the notebook over the magnifying lens and placed it there by the bowl of sweets.

Under the chair for a thread bound notebook. In the notebook, passages from books sold to her by men who stood in her doorway in suits worn thin and slack and beheld her with eyes tired and besieged with sweat.
 She places her magnifying lens there in the page and closes the book.
 Next to the book a bowl of sweets. In her advancing years Richard's grandmother has come upon the habit of chewing sweets and her life has become the story of the flavors and textures of one candy after another. She records her favorite passages and folds the caramel over in her mouth and looks out the window.
 Out there the plane of millet and wheat and sunflowers interrupted by three distant figures. They find the road and raise a cloud of dust behind them.
She finds her telescope and drops another caramel in her mouth.
A man and two women in outsized dresses in the dust and the mirage and the silence of the field seemingly walking in place. They stop and the man addresses the two women who follow before they start again.
 The fabric of his shirt in the breeze and the women keeping up with him, their heads tilted at the ground in front of them. He wears a hat.
 She drops another caramel in her mouth. She considers the situation. She fondles the sweet with her tongue and considers possibilities given to a mind uninhibited from reason by boredom and decrepitude.
 The woman regards the interior if her home. Its appearance and the purpose of the parts of it they built that have become mundane characters in their lives and their value to the strangers.
 She holds the loose leg and drags the table to the center of the living room. She finds three chairs and a stool and arranges them about the table. The contents of the dusty cupboard removed and returned in search of three identical glasses.
 The pump well black and iron and it squawks like an agent of the revolution burrowed out the ground to announce its presence. It wakes Elson but he watches her work the pump arm from the back porch with half closed eyes. Her pale and fleshy arms in the sun and the heat. The wire handle of the water bucket in its crease in her hand.
 The man with green eyes squats in the road. He draws the house and the road in the dust and makes an arch from the road around to the back of the house. He draws a line straight from the back of the house at a right angle to the road. He tells the girls not to go south down the road to get back, but to go west and when they get to tree cover and from there to go south along the river until they get to the bridge. He tells them he may be there or he may not. The girl's face streaked with tear marks and her cheeks pink where her sister slapped her. She doesn't know how to squat without showing her underwear. Her sister takes her by the hand and adjusts her hoop skirt and tucks her own breasts in. He tells them that at no point should they start to run and she says yes, mister.
 The man with green eyes looking over the house and the fields beyond and the houses that populate the country into the warping embrace of the mirage that contain the generations of an animal called man that pulls a living from the fields and holds them accountable to his offspring to be born and to die under the sun rising and falling. His dark skin and and his dark mustache and his green eyes that express an affection not contained within his heart. The dark skinned people he comes from and their insistence to propagate a brood of thieves and hustlers who win what they have from the estate of man in games of deceit and live like lords of the squalor and never stop moving. When he walks there is a rhythm in his step and a musical quality in the way he moves. He liked to dance since he was a boy and he seeks adoration from his mark and his clan all the same.
 She surprised him when she opened the door before the knock and he forgot the story he had prepared. She asked him where the girls who were with him are at. She held a glass in her hand. The two gazing on each other in the heat and the hushed whistling of the wind in the fields. She saw that he wore a turban.
 Are you from the far East?
 He drank down the water and watched her with one eye. When he finished he wiped his mouth. He got down on one knee. He presented the empty jar to her. He began.
 Elson feigns sleep and watches the girls unhook the door to the chicken coop. He watches them entering slowly and the chickens running out between their legs and the younger one falling over herself after them. The older sister looked at the man to make sure he slept and then turned to the fowl. She hovered over one, kneeled down until it disappeared under the umbrella of her hoop skirt, and when she stood the chicken was gone. She adjusted herself and moved onto the next.
 The two sisters taking ownership of a flock of fowl like an unclaimed product of the Earth they came upon by accident. The little one mangling the chickens into the wire hooks hanging from her hoop skirt and her sister performing feats of illusion.
 Well, time to end it. Elson went inside where the cartridges stand on their ends on the shelf. The girls watched him remove the engraved shotgun from its mounting on the wall and begin to load it. The older one took the chickens away from her sister. She looked at Elson like he was robbing them. She took her sister by the hand and lead her west across the fields.
 What the hell, she said. She took in the scene of dead chickens and blood and feathers. She stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth: There was a fella with them.
 The man with the green eyes had unfurled his turban on the table and lay the silver wear on it to be rolled up. His black hair pulled back tightly and rolled into a bun, his slender neck and his stately jaw line.
 Elson walked to the center of the room and stood between the man and the door and leveled the shotgun at his middle.
 Well.
 The man with the green eyes abandoned the silverware and turned to face Elson. He looked on Elson. He looked at his wife. He leaned back against the counter. He breathed. In his gaze a calm that originates in the nucleus of every creature that forgives its own nature and in its circadian tasks of living never doubts the purpose it gave itself at its conception or deviates from the tracks laid down in its rearing.
 Don't shoot, she said.
 Shut up, Ginia.
 The man crouched low to the floor with his elbows on his knees. He found Elson to be more alive than he had been lately. Elson's eyes bright and smiling and his jowls lifted at the corners of his face.  The man with the green eyes brought his head back against the counter and a faint thud could be heard.
 He thinks I won't shoot. He thinks I'm kind hearted. Elson pulled back the hammer behind the right barrel. The reflection of the gun's engraving on the wall twitched. The man looked at the wall and back at Elson.
 You ain't gonna die, but you ain't gonna win.
 Elson pulled the trigger and sent the lead shot into the man's shin bone and fore arm and cheek meat and eyes. The man lay on his back on the kitchen floor like a spider curled up in abandonment of life. His chest heaved with his breathing but the man neither moved or made a sound.
 Bird shot, Ginia.

A gap between two buildings that is understood to be a portal to the lives of people whose existence is not to be acknowledged across the dinner tables of people who are given to notions of status.

The hustler, who never said an honest word in his life, has the look on his face that makes you think he always knows what he's doing.

When the old beggar was a young girl and lived in circumstances no different than yours, she was the first one with a joke.

A girl with a backpack and tennis shoes. Hair short, ankles thin, can be no skinnier. She is at one second redfaced and close to tears, the next joking with a passerby. She is charmign and engaging. She was at one point the leader of a gang. The distributor of discipline. When a gang of older boys moved in the gang had left her. She grew out her hair and became a prostitute.

The girl's stages:
  Tomboy leader of a group of small children.
  Some of the children are taken to orphenages, come back.
  Most of them are gone at one point. She is kicked out of her place of sleeping.
  She begins to sleep in a place nearby a gang of young men. By and by she is domesticated by the boys. She meets joe in this stage.

The cat, which may be the incarnation of a god who creates and destroys worlds, drags itself there against your leg. Its hair yokes at your skin.
Its tale betrays its mysterious nature. It whips at the air like a conductor's rod in the rhythm of its clockwork when measuring the possibilities of a room. It taps you on the shoulder as its owner sits on the windowsill, by all appearances distracted.
 As such things go, she has been violated by a mortal, and now carries his swelling brood until her kittens crawl out to repopulate the world with feline grace. Like when she dreamt the story of mankind, like when drops of her milk became the stars.

We love our cruel boys.

Robert Matthews once was a suspect in a case that had gripped the nation in fear. It was a case of an intelligent, anti industrial and ant establishment vigilante anonymously sending things such as anthrax and explosive devices to public figures suspected of undermining individualistic freedoms. He'll show you his FBI file if you don't believe him.
 He speaks in that damn boring voice that makes you think he's speaking

 The band actors live like gypsies. Among their ranks lifelong actors, men fallen on hard times, and truly strange vagabonds who are forced into such a life by irremediable flaws of character, the nature of which is not expected of you to understand. Beyond this they are all liars. The stories of their lives began in circumstances too shameful to admit and never ended up any place different. All along their journey, fantasy that made them equal to their destiny persisted, and the forbidden truth all but died in the retelling of it. The band of actors brought together by their proclivity for telling lies. Each submits to the myth of each with the same conviction that he spins his own yarn. One does not look in the eyes of another who does not hold his yarn. Such is the fabric that binds the group of wayward fantasists and degenerates.
 See them file out from their methods of travel in the golden hour of the prairie. See them emerge from the corn like children of the fields in the search for a place to start a fire. They had been looking for grounds all afternoon. They know from years of living such a life that which they necessitate. An animal called human making a house out of a forest. Disarranging that which was organized by a force ambivalent to them to suit them. Chopping the wood and boiling the water. Hunting and killing and preparing food to eat according to their will. On their way to the place they looked for farms to rob.
  See them arrange themselves according to hierarchy around the fire. See the food shared along the lines of alliances between them. So called friendship sustains them in times of lean and binds them in infighting against one another in times of plenty.
 One of the hierarchies denotes rank by degrees of deception. Two of the group bigger liars than the others. Their place in the group anchored by the woman who always plays the lead. They sailed on the same ship with her and he sisters to the east coast and made their way with her across the country into the southwest corner of it. The clowns have never said an honest word. One fat and the other old and thin. They pass a smoked sausage between them.
 A young girl in the business of entertaining the troupe of actors. Her skill with lyric and rhyme a practiced effort to distract. She is accompanied by a young boy on the guitar. The boys hands precise, his mind thoroughly occupied. They are encouraged by the old and the very young. The lead actress and others of her age sit in silence. A vein of dissent runs through the actors of marrying age.
 The old jester claps his hands. His beak casts a shadow across his face. His eyebrows make everything he says humorous. His fat partner's face aglow in the light of the flame. A gaping crescent where his teeth once were.


He smiles a toothless smile and has never been heard to speak a word except in the absence of the other clown. His partner older and very thin. His eyebrows thick and high on his forehead. His beak casts a shadow on half his face. His face


two clowns came on same boat as lead actress and her sisters

the group robs richards granparents with skirts and chickens etc.

richard and joe corner them. they are sisters of the actress.

they have sex with joe to be released. joe follows hem back to the camp. lives with the camp for a few days. has romance with the actress. comes back to dead father.

words exchanged over a fire. inconsequential ideas of rhythm and lyqic fill their heads that distract them from the circumstance of their lives.  men who never said an honest word in their lives. the story of their lives started out as too shameful to admit and never ended up any place different. in the telling of stories they forget their secrets. They do not look in the eye of anyone who doesnt believe their yarn and thusly is weaved the fabric of relations of the band of actors. doesnt hold their yarn

See the band of actors file out from their methods of travel and shelter in the orange evening. See them search for a suitable location and arrange a fire. They share food and affections according to alliances. their seating places dictated by the flow of trust among the group

____ lyric and rhyme occupy their minds against the circumstances of their lives. In the deep orange magic hour of the american southwest, adults at play as innocent children in the prairie. Innocent game of

the young and the old

Different types of liars in the group distinguished by degrees of deception. Two clowns in particular never said an honest word in their lives.

Book three.

In the faces of the people in the street human maladies and psychic diseases.
Betrayed souls. Out of hatred for whom do they become

Hatred for those who betrayed them diseases their souls.
Their souls diseased by hatred for those who betrayed them.

the actress with the boy: carry ___ on my tongue to you. are you ready?


The band of actors live like gypsies. See them filing out of their methods of travel and shelter in the orange magic our of the prairie. Their faces, which in their vocation play witness to imagined , now evoking the simple and honest relief at having found a suitable location. The necessities of a camp ground they know from the experience of living such a life: wood for a fire, shrubbery tall enough to hide them from the owners of the property, a source of water, and a farm to rob. Face aglow in the flame of the fire. The face of one jolly and round, a dark crescent where his teeth once were. His partner's beak a shadow across his face, he claps his hands to the rhythm of a boy playing his guitar. A young girl occupied with the business of entertaining the band. Her older sister, the lead actress, solemn in the shadows out of range of the fire. A vein of dissent runs through those of marrying age.
 The band of otherwise wayward misfits and vagabonds bound together by the proclivity for telling lies. Among their ranks lifelong actors, men fallen on hard times, and truly strange vagabonds forced into such a life by irremediable flaws of character, the nature of which is not expected of you to understand. Men whose stories began in circumstances too shameful to admit and never got any place better. In the invention of myth, tragedy and betrayal were put aside, and in the retelling of it, the forbidden truth was forgotten.