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only barely slipping by, so every hiccup turned into a problem. They’d get furloughed from the catfish works for a week or two, and there me and Desmond would be at the door to repossess their bedstead or relieve them somehow of cash they didn’t have. It was a sorry state of affairs to be caught between Kalil and decent, luckless people. And me and Desmond without much appetite for Armagnac and Tab.
    We weren’t three months into supervising when it all came to a head. Kalil had sent me and Desmond out after a washer-dryer. The people only had a couple of payments left, but they couldn’t come up with the cash, and the boy Kalil sent out first had only brought back washer hoses.
    So me and Desmond rode out. They lived on Black Bayou halfway between Leland and Greenville. Their house wasn’t much, but the grass was cut, and there was hardly any junk in the yard. They were out where we could see them, the whole family, I guess. The mother and father, a couple of kids. They were all gathered around a swing set, a brand-new one the man of the house was finishing tightening up with a wrench.
    When he gave them the high sign, the kids swarmed the thing. Two girls. One tall and slender, the other half her size and chubby. They parked on the swing seats, and their father pushed them. Their mother, pregnant, sat on an upturned joint compound bucket and watched.
    â€œProbably sold the washer,” I told Desmond.
    He’d decided the same himself.
    The girls laughed. The skinny one jumped out at the height of her arc and rolled through the grass.
    â€œWhat do they owe?” Desmond asked me.
    I checked the invoice. “Forty-seven ten.”
    Desmond fished out his cash. He counted out fifty. This was something we’d promised each other we’d never do. Or never do again, anyway. We’d let a woman sway us with a pitiful story about her stomach tumor, and we’d pitched in together on her overdue payment, pretended it had come straight from her.
    I remember the three of us standing there, me and Desmond and Kalil. Kalil checked the invoice. He looked at the money. He eyed me and then Desmond and me again. He smiled that way he sometimes does.
    â€œShow you her scar?” he asked us.
    It was all he ever said about it. It was all he ever needed to say.
    This was different, we told ourselves. Then we told it to each other. We had plenty of money and a better sense of who exactly the shitheads were, so if we wanted to bail out a guy who’d sold off his washer to buy his girls a swing set for the yard, then that’s exactly what we’d do.
    Kalil knew somehow. He always knew. He studied Desmond’s money.
    â€œWell, all right” was all he told us and dropped the cash in his money drawer.
    We redeemed ourselves not a full week later by scuffing up four Lynches at once. Desmond started with the one who’d shouted though his locked door, “Fuck all y’all. Go on.”
    Then a trio of cousins had come rolling into the yard to get all mouthy with us, so we ended up with a full quartet of Lynches in a battered pile. They were still making threats against us, even semiconscious, which we felt gave us license to keep on kicking them until they shut the hell up.
    The initial Lynch owed on a TV. He owed on a PlayStation. He owed on a laptop. He owed on a side table. We hauled it all back into the shop and set it down in the middle of the sales floor.
    â€œRenting to a Lynch?” I asked Kalil.
    Kalil gave us both his gassy smile.
    â€œWell, all right,” Desmond told him, and we were even after that.
    *   *   *
    So me and Desmond could stop saying, “Taking time off,” when people asked us what we were up to. We got to be regular again. We got to go around unnoticed. We had somewhere to be on the way to. We had somewhere to be coming from.
    In fact, I was cutting across from a job when I met Tula Raintree’s cruiser. People in the