ON THE Monday and Tuesday after Easter he stayed home from school. He sat in the backyard on the grass and it was quiet. But on Wednesday it turned cool, and he went back to class, and then later the hearse idled in front of the house.

Carly sat in front. Louden was her boyfriend. He opened the small window between the front and back. Terry sat in the rear seat, as wide and long as a bench in the bus station. They passed a joint. Ashes tipped at the front, and Carly dusted them off. Terry thought about her hips, wished to put his hands there. He thought about her bare stomach and the brass snap on her jeans, thought about ghosts in the wide casket space over his shoulders, how many cries the hearse knew. He felt the road change and the cold past the open windows, and the red metal of the hearse run fast through the night. Louden pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, pistons sputtering, then slowed, belts smacked loose on the metal. Terry saw then it was very dark outside.

The band practiced in a cinder block, white painted house with a septic tank at one side, shaped round like an ornament for a Christmas tree. There was a steep drop down to a parking lot behind. The spaces drawn at the lot below were faded, blacktop split by weeds. There were two shops built at the back of the lot; dance hall, paint store, windows boarded with knotted shanks of pine. They got out of the hearse and walked up to the house. Carly pecked at gravel with a shoe toe, and then she opened the door.

In the front room people sat on a long yellow couch and in lawn chairs and on the floor. There was a hole in the floor, near the middle of the room. One of them finished a cigarette and thumped it there; it kept burning, put arms of smoke in the room, and then someone threw another one to the pit. Cold air shot through and drafted the room. Some people’s breath fogged. Louden went over and looked down into the pit. Carly and Terry stood back some, like they expected a fireball to leap out.

That’s a fire waiting, Louden said.

One of the kids nodded.

It’d help, Louden said. This cold damn place.

He opened the door on a woodstove in one corner, poked coals with a fire-blacked hanger, balled a section of newspaper from the floor and put a match on it. The paper caught, and then he tossed it into the stove. The flame hissed and rose. Louden shut the door and fixed the latch, flame jumping behind a jagged fist-size hole in the stovepipe. There was a record player at one side of the stove, two cabinet speakers at either side. The music from the speakers was loud and fast, garbled like a fistfight. There was a glass pipe, a spoon they called it, colored blue and green and orange, passed to all of them, the head a deep bowl. There were many wallets with long chains attached, and a mannequin in one corner missing both legs and one arm.

Isaac Calendar played a beat Strat knockoff, stickers pasted to the neck and body of the guitar over pieces knocked out. He had a large silver paper clip stuck through his left earlobe. He sat the guitar flat on his lap and rested a beer on top. The tattoo artist set up a drum kit. It was small; bass, torn, snare, brass metal crash, white tape patched crosses on top.