Mostly the cadavers did not hold cards in their hands, mostly. But when they did, Santiago no longer needed to knock them free with his walking stick. Instead, Joad easily reached the cards and extracted them from the corpses’ hands. And John collected the cards until he had a complete deck. As they wound their way along the meandering trail, Two-Dogs-Fucking intermittently stopped and rested in the shade of the bloodwood trees. He napped and drooled and unconsciously groped at his dick. When done with his catnaps, he would step off of the trail and cut across the desert to intercept the others again on the path. And after several hours without Two-Dogs-Fucking, the men happened upon him snoozing on the ground in the shadow of a bloodwood tree, his bath towel hanging as a circus tent on a fat and short center pole. A lynched man swayed gently in the breeze above him. John sat with his back to the tree, looking up at the swinging corpse. Up ahead on the trail, the sharp yips of a dirt-rat colony called out to Santiago.
