“We can go,” said Isaac. He was thinking about the money in his pocket and he looked away from the newcomers. He thought the big blond lumberjack one might say something more but he didn’t.

“Who gives a shit,” said another of the men. “Least they got the fire going.” He took off his pack. He was the smallest and also the oldest, somewhere in his forties, a week’s stubble, a thin nose that was very crooked, it had been broken and never reset. Isaac remembered that Poe had been messing around at practice once without his helmet, taken a hard hit that broke his nose, but he’d just grabbed it and straightened it himself, right there on the field.

The three men looked like they’d been on the road a long time. The older one wrung out his watch cap and set it near the fire and his wet pants clung to his thin legs. He told them his name was Murray and they could smell him.

“Do I know you?” he said to Poe.

“Probably not.”

“How would I know you?”

Poe shrugged.

“He used to play ball,” said Isaac. “He was tight end for the Buell Eagles.”

Poe gave Isaac a look.

The man noticed Poe’s football jacket draped near the stove. He said: “I remember that. I used to change oil at Jones Chevy and we’d watch the games after work. Thought you’d be outta here. College ball or somethin.”

“Nah,” Poe said.

“You were good,” Murray said. “That wasn’t that long ago.”

Poe didn’t say anything.

“It’s alright. Otto over there was Golden Gloves in his younger days. Coulda gone pro but—”

“I was in the army,” said Otto. He was the tall Swede. Most of the people in the Valley were ethnic in some way or other: Poles, Swedes, Serbs, Germans, Irish. Except for Isaac’s people, who were Scottish, and Poe’s, who had been here so long no one knew what they were.