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my leg back into the nest to see what next.
    The mule buckled dead-kneed in its traces as Lonny came off the ship with an ax. The pale-faced men in prison blues shackled at the wrists looked from John and the mule to Lonny coming at them with the ax, and they leapt out of the buckboard and fled to the creek.
    Hey!
shouted Lonny after the prison-shackled men,
can any of you cook?
but the shackled men did a three-armed creek swim and scrambled up the far shorebank.
    John held the mule up by its throat and opened its chest with his fillet-nailed hand, entrail and offal spilling onto the sand, dressing the animal out. Lonny started chopping up the wagon for firewood and kindling even as the Idiot sat in it, inching away from the hacking blade.
    Come on out
, said Lonny as he swung.
    It’s an idiot
, said John, stripping off the mule hide into a wet cloak.
    Can it cook?
said Lonny.
    It’s an idiot
, said John, stripping the leather reins from the harness, fashioning a crude belt for his crude cloak.
    What does it take to cook?
said Lonny, grabbing at the Idiot to get him out of the cart.
    You have always seemed real particular
, said John.
How do you like my new coat?
    Get this idiot out of the cart
, said Lonny.
    John ripped the sheriff’s bright star off the sheriff’s patched pocket and pinned it to the peak of the Idiot’s cap. Hoisting the sheriff’s corpse on his shoulder, he clapped his leg and whistled; the Idiot came loping behind like a puppy.
    The man who played with string they called Ira Dench, and Ira Dench brought down to where Lonny cooked the butchered mule a wicker basket trimmed in red-and-white checkerboard. They put seared slabs of bloody meat on china plates and passed them to the crew that John had gathered from their ship, the man who said
Fuck
and the chief engineer and his two boiler monkeys. Just the appearance of the chief engineer and his two boiler monkeys did much to frighten the red-rimmed drunkard’s band of cratered lake women with their concealed lead sticks and clubs, their knives honed to razors. I had seen chief engineers and boiler monkeys before and I was not frightened, but these were particularly scorched and blackened, as if they had been living in a soot box or cinder bin. They could have just come up from hell itself and found the upper earth foul and disagreeable with its fresh air free of smoke and steam and fume.
    I saw one thing. I saw John heap a plate with mule meat and send it to the wheelhouse with the darkened windows and welded hatches. I never saw the meat go but later I noticed that the plate on the catwalk had been licked clean.
    I can’t say whether the Idiot’s wandering started off the looting and pillage. It was the noise the Idiot made that was the first alarm, the Idiot made a noise like amule braying, and I say this because the Idiot’s mule noise was so like a mule braying that for a moment, when they first heard it, John and his crew stopped in mid-chew to consider the slaughtered carcass head buzzing with flies beside them. I think the Idiot must have come into where the cratered lake people were gathered lunching on their pilings, and the Idiot wanted the figurine fetishes the people were shaking at him to keep him away. He would reach out for a cornhusk doll dressed to ward off the evil eye and a woman would shake the doll at the Idiot and then withdraw it as he approached. It was a game at first that went bad, when the Idiot stamped around in fury, turning around and around on his muddled head the cap bright with the pointed sheriff’s star. I could see the red-rimmed drunkard considering a club to use on the Idiot but thinking better of using the snake stick we used to pin down the heads of the water moccasins when they crawled up the pilings from the creek. The red-rimmed drunkard stepped up and jabbed at the large Idiot with the stick that was forked with sharp ends, and the Idiot snatched it from him, and in a rage of mimicry poked it back at the