He doesn’t either want to get in a jailhouse and feels the press and cluster of an excisement only partial, ragged in his body as he moves about the homestead. He is shy of the porch and the steps and the rooms filled with the smell of fatback and corn mush and the smells of women and he is shy in the yard where they have set out wild rose bushes in buckets and shy too even in the backhouse where an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue serves as paper. He sidles away, drifting along a line of diminishing notification, and finds a little spot among myrtle bushes back behind the house where he feels most safe and sits on the grass there thinking. He can think about anything and so he thinks of the Gulf and the wide world beyond it and he’s done this before even though the cons told him not to but this time it seems close enough to touch almost. Space. That’s where they keep it. So get down to the Gulf. His heart beats faster than usual and he knows already his loneliness has extended out into the world, following him like a dog. It is still there. I am a common man, he thinks, and on this day I am free to walk around loose but I am still lonely and maybe there is no cure for it. He wonders what Milo is doing, if he is alive, and Ralph Curry and Peaches and Still Run Siems and Bony and Carl and the preacher and his minions. He leans over his knees with his hands gripped together as the worshippers do and says a few words about the wideness of the world and finding a place in it, just general commentary and wondering. He is still tired but a new energy has poked up in him like a fresh growth. He is tapping along like a blind man, looking for a way to open up. The sun streaks his shoulders with a softening light. He begins to cry and he lets himself go with this until he hears himself making noise and stops. He leans over his knees and presses his hands flat on the grass and holds them there like he is holding the world down. Or gripping it by the handle. Nobody comes along and tells him to move on.
