She sat stark naked on the ground and watched him go, calling various names after him, none his.

He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up.

SPOILER His body was shipped to the state medical school at Memphis. There in a basement room he was preserved with formalin and wheeled forth to take his place with other deceased persons newly arrived. He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and his brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrailes were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations. At the end of three months when the class was closed Ballard was scraped from the table into a plastic bag and taken with others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and there interned. A minister from the school read a simple service.

All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He'd often heard men say as much.

All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught, said the black.