"Well I came on one of them in the gutter out front of my house, mewling like a runt piglet with blood coming out of his nose and mouth. And the other one was standing over him with his hamhock fist all clotted up and wet. And one of them was sitting on the curb playing a guitar, and one of them was dead and buried in a nameless cemetery southwest of town, and nobody talked about him much, except he was in everything they said. And one of them was tinkering with a bundle of wires and didn't say anything at all, about dead boys or nothing else. And one of them was holding two babies and two more were on his back, cavorting and capering all around, slapping him in the side of the face and pulling on his ears. And I said, Christ, ain't you all some band of miscreants? And the one in the gutter said, What of it, old man?
I came to know of the one dead boy in the following days, when I took these boys in and fed them and cleaned them up. The one with the wires wouldn't come in the house any and sat outside on the porch, rain or shine, tinkering. And the one with the guitar wouldn't take anything to drink or eat, he just sat playing and looking down at his fingers with his eyes closed. The two that had been beating on each other calmed down some when I got whiskey in them, and they soon was like best brothers, loving on each other and talking about their record, which they'd made, they told me, in the devil's studio. I took that to mean Muscle Shoals, where they make big rock records down to the city, but they told me, no, it ain't there, and the one looked like he'd punch the other one if I said anything to that, so I didn't.
Now, before you ask, the one with the babies was so sweet and kind that nobody could say any wrong word about him, so I gave him my own bedroom and he didn't come out again until it was time to go.
That dead one had shot hisself in the face some time before, and I came to understand that he'd left these other boys with something broken in them, and they was like a record player, skipping and skipping over the same song until they got it right. Like being in hell, if you ask me, but they had that record they were talking about, the two fighting ones, and they said they'd put it on if I had any more whiskey, so I got a bottle and my little tape player and we put it on. It was some dark stuff, mind you, and I had more than one drink listening to it, but there was a kind of fierceness to it, and a kind of earnestness, and also a kind of naivety, like maybe they had heard some of those old records from the radio we used to listen to on Sunday evening after we had got home from church, or if they hadn't you couldn't hardly tell of it, and they weren't scared of it any, and it sounded to me like they had got after the idea of this dead one and worried at him and worried at his death like a goddamn dog until they'd finally and at last by Christ gotten to something about it.
Who are you all calling out to? I asked them, for something to say.
Ain't nobody out there to call to, ain't you heard that yet old man? one or both of them said, I couldn't tell which one any more, they seemed to me like they was becoming the same person, and they were just sitting there on my sofa, smiling like the cat that ate the cannibal. And looking one to the other, the both of them had the same eyes, the same cuts and bruises, and in the same places, and they was wearing the same clothes even. And I stood up, that music was strange, it was making my head do something strange, and I staggered over to the front porch and looked out at it, and the one tinkering on the wires looked up at me, and it was the same face, that same goddamn face, smiling up at me like he knew what I didn't, and the one playing the guitar didn't look up, he didn't have to, I could see that same hair hanging down over his face, all streaked and clotted up with blood, and behind me I heard my bedroom door swing open, and that damn old floorboard that has creaked the same way for fifty years just sang out, and I didn't have to see that clotted up hair on them babies' heads as they shouted out at me. I didn't have to at all. Time to go, old man, they said, time to go, and it was, it was that time and I knew of it then, and I laid right down where I stood and didn't get up anymore."
