I take my hands off the wheel and grab the little cocksucker. I am gonna beat the piss out of him. I don’t have to take this kind of shit from some little pisspot like that, that I am doing a favour for that is Clinker’s friend anyway and I don’t even know him. But I forget, of course, that I am right then doing eighty miles an hour in a car that I am the guy that’s supposed to be steering it, and I will tell you this: I am very glad this is the Mass Pike in Weston around three inna morning when there is much of nothing around on either side of me and it’s not like I’m down on Gallivan Boulevard there on a weekday afternoon doing the same thing when some big fat nun starts marching a whole buncha second-graders across the street so they can sing at Benediction, all right? Because I got him all right and belted him right into Labour Day, but at the same time I sort of went off the road some. Into this little pond they got there.”

“Jesus,” Malatesta said.

“It was all right,” Proctor said. “It wasn’t really a pond, actually. Well, it was a pond, but it wasn’t a very deep pond. The water just came up about, when you open the car door, all right? It came in the car then. It wasn’t too deep, and the bottom was all mud or else you could’ve driven through it like you would any other puddle that was just about as deep, only about a mile across, and the car stopped in the mud and I opened the door and the water came right in. Right up to about the bottom of the front seat, you know? If I’d’ve been able to keep going, I could’ve gone right across it. It was a little higher’n the seat, actually. Went all over the console and my tapes, but what the hell, huh? And I took out a few of them little trees on the way in. But, I never did like that Monte Carlo anyways. Lousy car. Lousy on gas. This guy Carter got any idea what he’s doing, you think, on the gas thing? Jesus, first he makes me, I can’t use nothing that burns the stuff with lead in it and then he tells me I can’t use none of the stuff that hasn’t got lead in it and when I do I can kiss my house goodbye. What the hell is he doing? You got any ideas?”