ALLIE LOOKED LIKE A KID. Her hair was clean and straight. She wore no makeup, and she sat barefoot and cross-legged on the bed, wearing one of my clean shirts, like a dress, with the sleeves rolled.

“I could step out for a while,” I said. “Get me a drink. Let you folks talk.”

Virgil shook his head. So I sat on a chair in the corner of the room and was quiet.

“You run off,” Virgil said to Allie.

“I was ashamed,” she said.

“You sick at all?”

“No, honest to God, Virgil,” she said. “I haven’t got nothing.”

“All this time you been whoring?” Virgil said.

“I know, but I been lucky. I haven’t caught nothing.”

Virgil nodded.

“You been whoring since you left.”

Allie nodded slowly.

“Mostly,” she said. “I had to live, Virgil.”

Virgil nodded.

“You did,” he said.

There was nothing in Virgil’s voice. The single oil lamp next to the bed lit Allie pretty good, but it left most of the room sorta dark. The silence that hung between them seemed heavy.

“I was ashamed,” Allie said. “And after Everett shot Bragg, I was scared.”

“Of what?” Virgil asked.

“You,” she said. “That you’d find out about me. Me, maybe, maybe I was scared of what I was.”

“What were you?” Virgil said.

“I was an awful woman, I wanted everything, and being a woman, alone, out here in this country with no rules…”

“I had rules,” Virgil said.

“And I was breaking them, Virgil. Only way I knew to get what I wanted, feel like I wanted to feel, be how I wanted, only way for me was to fuck somebody.”

“Fucked a considerable number of somebodys,” Virgil said.