ell from the way she filled up the doorway that
she was big. I could make out the white blur of a cigarette in her
mouth, and when she struck a match to light it--on her thumb-nail,
like a man--I saw that she was fairly young and not bad-looking in a
tough, sullen sort of way. The wind was blowing in my direction and it
told me she'd had a drink recently, gin, by the smell of it.

"This is none of your business, mister," she said. Her voice was
Southern like the boy's but with all the softness ground out of it
from living on the Florida coast where you hear a hundred different
accents every day. "Let the boy alone."

She was right about it being none of my business. I went on into the
trailer I shared with Doc Shull and left the two of them waiting for
Charlie together.

Our trailer was dark inside, which meant first that Doc had probably
gone out looking for a drink as soon as I left that morning to pick up
a job, and second that he'd probably got too tight to find his way
back. But I was wrong on at least one count, because when I switched
on the light and dumped the packages I'd brought on the sink cabinet I
saw Doc asleep in his bunk.

He'd had a drink, though. I could smell it on him when I shook him
awake, and it smelled like gin.

Doc sat up and blinked against the light, a thin, elderly little man
with bright blue eyes, a clipped brown mustache and scanty brown hair
tousled and wild from sleep. He was stripped to his shorts against the
heat, but at some time during the day he had bathed and shaved. He had
even washed and ironed a shirt; it hung on a nail over his bunk with a
crumpled pack of cigarettes in the pocket.

"Crawl out and cook supper, Rip," I said, holding him to his end of
our working agreement. "I've made a day and I'm hungry."

Doc got up and stepped into his pants. He padded barefoot across the
linoleum and poked at the packages on the sink cabinet.

"Snapper steak again," he complained. "Roy, I'm sick of fish!"

"You don't catch sirloins with a hand-line," I told him. And because
I'd never been able to stay sore at him for long I added, "But we got
beer. Where's the opener?"

"I'm sick of beer, too," Doc said. "I need a real drink."

I sniffed the air, making a business of it. "You've had one already.
Where?"

He grinned at me then with the wise-to-himself-and-the-world grin that
lit up his face like turning on a light inside and made him different
from anybody else on earth.

"T