Snag was sixteen or seventeen, with the face of a seventy-five-year-old beach bum. He had long hair that was clumped together with scalp oil, real oil, dirt and old vomit— what was left over from the old dreadlock thing he used to have. His eyes, if looked at long enough, solidified into something along the lines of ice cubes; in them one found the stiff coldness that comes from all the drugs, combined with the beatings his old man had given him. His arms were long and thin and brittle with track marks. If asked, he says he doesn’t use drugs. Never has. And there is something about his story— the wide claims he makes— that rings true with the other guys. He hasn’t used drugs. If anything, the needles have shot him up. The crack had to burn someplace, and it picked his pipe.

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Twilight bled over the trees in his backyard. In the orchard, past the stone wall, a dog was barking, the bark wrapped in silence because the road through the trees— normally a busy hiss at this hour— was closed to traffic. His neighbor, Congers, was having his house moved; the old monstrosity lumbered down the center of the street, scraping the upper reaches of trees, at four miles an hour, the paper reported the next day, but Sloan figured it must’ve been three miles an hour because it took more than two hours to get the house to the new lot, which was six miles away.

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