COME UP, LESTER, SAID THE dumpkeeper.

Ballard was coming, he didn’t need asking. Howdy Reubel, he said.

They sat in the sofa and looked at the ground, the old man tapping his stick up and down, Ballard holding the rifle upright between his knees.

When we goin to shoot some more rats? said the old man.

Ballard spat. Any time you want, he said.

They about to carry us off out here.

Ballard cut his eyes toward the house where he’d seen a half naked girl cross in the gloom. A baby was crying.

I don’t reckon you’ve seen em have ye?

What’s that?

Hernie and that next to least’n.

Where they at?

I don’t know, said the old man. They cut out, I reckon. Been gone three days.

That fairheaded one?

Yeah. Her and Hernie. I reckon they’ve took off with some of these here jellybeans.

Well, said Ballard.

I don’t know what makes them girls so wild. Their grandmother was the biggest woman for churchgoin you ever seen. Where you goin, Lester?

I got to go.

Best not rush off in the heat of the day.

Yeah, said Ballard. I’m goin to walk out thisaway.

You see any rats, why, just shoot em.

If I see any.

You’ll see some.

A dog followed him out the quarry road. Ballard gave a little dry whistle and snapped his fingers and the dog sniffed at his cuff. They went on up the road.

Ballard descended by giant stone stairs to the dry floor of the quarry. The great rock walls with their cannelured faces and featherdrill holes composed about him an enormous amphitheatre. The ruins of an old truck lay rusting in the honeysuckle. He crossed the corrugated stone floor among chips and spalls of stone. The truck looked like it had been machine-gunned. At the far end of the quarry was a rubble tip and Ballard stopped to search for artifacts, tilting old stoves and water heaters, inspecting bicycle parts and corroded buckets. He salvaged a worn kitchen knife with a chewed handle. He called the dog, his voice relaying from rock to rock and back again.

When he came out to the road again a wind had come up. A door somewhere was banging, an eerie sound in the empty wood. Ballard walked up the road. He passed a rusted tin shed and beyond it a wooden tower. He looked up. High up on the tower a door creaked open and clapped shut. Ballard looked around. Sheets of roofing tin clattered and banged and a white dust was blowing off the barren yard by the quarry shed. Ballard squinted in the dust going up the road. By the time he got to the county road it had begun to spit rain. He called the dog once more and he waited and then he went on.