BENJAMIN WEBBER rented a silver family van, boomerang antennae on top, wood panel at the sides. At the rental office, he pulled the two seats shaped like small pews from the back and left them there, cleared box space, and then at the house he stacked their things inside, cardboard flaps sealed with clear postal tape, and labeled with red pen marker. There wasn’t room for Terry inside the van. Benjamin Webber gave him five dollars for gas, to drive himself and a few other boxes he couldn’t fit into the van. He left a gift on the kitchen block table, a plastic radio with an antenna and a tape player on the front. He took it from the break room at Hardwick after it sat for two weeks with no claim. His own father, July Webber, brought things home from the landfill where he worked; a Belgian made sixteen gauge pump action shotgun, shell pin pulled so the chamber carried five shots instead of three; headboard from a dark finished poster frame bed; phonograph missing needle arm; box kite made from dowel rods, yellow wind cloth the outside skin; brass latched specimen box, shaped like a small briefcase, grasshopper and locust needle pinned to the wood inside, genus and phyla writ card labels beneath; iron woodstove, hole torn at the creosote resined flu pipe; garden spade; gray stone cast of the Buddha; mannequin torso; dark union field coat from the states’ war, thick navy wool, gold buttons big as light bulbs, crossed rifles graved at them; iron fireplace grate; pine box nailed shut, tulip bulbs laid to wood shavings inside; none of these remained.

Come on when you get ready, Benjamin Webber said.

Terry nodded, put the bill to his shirt pocket. The radio had a handle on top, like a lunch pail. Terry picked it up from the table and held it in front and studied it.

He sat in the driveway for an hour and played a tape in the radio. Sometimes he looked at the house.

Terry got on the interstate near dark, after five miles there unhitched the knife and thought of the policeman holding it to him, and then he felt hungry, put a hand flat against his belly and held it there. Curtis Rigby said his cousins, ones on his mother’s side, they killed wild forest pigs with knives like that, cornered them a circle in the row pine, the sawbrier and bracken, deepstuck the blade to a big artery in the right shoulder flank; with this the boar fell down, and died; then the tick dogs lapped blood. These pigs had mohawks on their heads and on their backs, Curtis Rigby said, tusks, white as piano keys, from the sides of their mouths that diced calves and shins and knees to ribbon shred; they weighed five hundred pounds, sometimes more; they were not scared of people, guns or dogs. Terry never thought of a pig that way; there was a pink one in a book that talked with a spider webbed to a barn rafter; later the pig became the father of its babies after the spider was dead; afterward the pig cried often. Terry thought about a woman’s stomach with a baby inside it stretched a drum skin, and then he thought of breakfast, cereal and red jelly sandwiches; he touched his belly, again, remembered, in the park downtown Issaqueena, watching a young, steep-haired woman sitting at a lawn chair, coarse green leaves from the box elders shingled near her feet; Terry heard a baby cry, then another; wet spots formed at her shirt front. She looked down, covered flat palms at her breasts, pulled her jacket tight over her chest and held it closed; when he told Curtis Rigby the next day, standing toe curbed, waiting after last bell for a ride, he got hungry, again, and then he wondered if he always would when the woman from the park reared in his head; Curtis Rigby pulled a book from his knapsack, the one they used in biology, turned it to the index and scrolled his index finger at a column; here, he said; he stopped near the front, past the appendices and periodic table, past the color pictures of rock and mineral, leaned over close at a diagram; the insides of a man and woman, line drawn, organs labeled at the white margin space. He mumbled the words while he read the paragraph beneath, told Terry a woman, like many other mammals, could lactate, spontaneously, upon hearing a baby cry; says it right here, he said; Terry told him he didn’t understand, and Curtis Rigby said, Look, it’s simple, you know how you smell, like, something that smells like weed, or somebody else smoking weed, and then you want to smoke it? Terry nodded. Same thing, Curtis Rigby said.

Terry held the knife blade up the whole way, fingers tight on the wood-grained handle, butt end resting on the dash. He looked for wild pigs on the side of the road, heads poked from the trees, mean black hair, grinning bull horn.