At the house Sophie and Nathan were embroiled in combat just outside the door of my room. I heard their voices clear on the summer night, and saw them battling in the hallway as I walked up the front steps.

'Don't give me any of that, you hear,' I heard him yell. 'You're a liar! You're a miserable lying cunt, do you hear me? A cunt!!'

'You're a cunt too,' I heard her throw back at him. 'Yes, you're a cunt, I think.' Her tone lacked aggressiveness.

'I am not a cunt,' he roared. 'I can't be a cunt, you dumb fucking Polack. When are you going to learn to speak the language? A prick I might be, but not a cunt, you moron. Don't you ever call me that again, you hear? Not that you'll ever get a chance.'

'You called me that!'

'But that's what you are, you moron — a two-timing, double-crossing cunt! Spreading that twat of yours for a cheap, chiseling quack doctor. Oh God!!' he howled, and his voice rose in wild uncontained rage. 'Let me out of here before I murder you — you whore! You were born a whore and you'll die a whore!'

---

'Nathan,' she cried. 'We need each other. Don't go!'

'Need?" he retorted, turning back toward her. 'Me need you? Let me tell you something' — and here he began to shake his entire outstretched hand at her, as his voice grew more outraged and unstrung — 'I need you like any goddamned insufferable disease I can name. I need you like a case of anthrax, hear me. Like trichinosis! I need you like a biliary calculus. Pellagra! Encephalitis! Bright's disease, for Christ's sake! Carcinoma of the fucking brain, you fucking miserable whore! Aaaahooooo-o-o!' This last was a rising, wavering wail — a spine-chilling sound that mingled fury with lamentation in a way that seemed almost liturgical, like the keening of a maddened rabbi. 'I need you like death,' he bellowed in a choked voice. 'Death!'

---

'You're from the South,' he said. 'Morris told me you were from the South. Said your name's Stingo. Yetta needs a Southerner in her house to fit in with all the other funnies.' He sent a dark glance back toward Sophie, then looked at me and said, 'Too bad I won't be around for a lively conversation, but I'm getting out of here. It would have been nice to talk with you.' And here his tone became faintly ominous, the forced civility tapering off into the baldest sarcasm I had heard in a long time. 'We'd have had great fun shootin' the shit, you and I. We could have talked about sports. I mean Southern sports, like lynching niggers — or coons, I think you call them down there. Or culture. We could have talked about Southern culture, and maybe could have sat around here at old Yetta's listening to hillbilly records. You know, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff and all those other standard bearers of classical Southern culture.' He had been scowling as he spoke, but now a smile parted his dark, troubled face and before I knew it he had reached out and clasped my unwilling hand in a firm handshake. 'Ah well, that's what could have been. Too bad. Old Nathan's got to hit the road. Maybe in another life, Cracker, we'll get together. So long, Cracker! See you in another life.'