Free Set This House on Fire by William Styron

hell with it,” I said, starting the motor. “You kids get the hell out of here.”
    “Oh, there’s Cass!” I heard Poppy say. “Children, here come Daddy and Peggy. They caught up with us.”
    I halted, turning. Up the road hand in hand with another child came Cass Kinsolving, who was singing a song:
    “Oh, we went to the animal fair,
    All the birds and the beasts were there;
    Carleton Burns was drunk by turns
    And so was Alice Adair.”
    A poisonous black cigar protruded from his mouth even as he sang; with his free hand he clutched a half-empty bottle of wine, uncorked for use. Over his shoulder was slung a knapsack stuffed with what appeared to be wet bathing suits, and the sack was dripping. In dungaree pants and nondescript sport shirt, a smudged beret aslant over his forehead, he approached us with a freewheeling, jaunty, nautical stride, still singing—
    “Mangiamele with the luscious belly …”
    —and nearing us now, seeing the mutilated car, ceased his song and stopped in his tracks with a slow, wondering, half-whispered “ Ho-ly Jesus!”
    “Mr. Levenson hit a man on a motorscooter,” Poppy said.
    “Wow!” Cass said. “He sure did!”
    “And knocked out his eyes and broke his legs and cut off two fingers and they don’t know if he’s going to live or not.”
    “Wait a minute—” I began to mutter angrily. “And the name’s Leverett.”
    “Jesus. You poor guy,” Cass said to me. It was the sympathy I had been waiting for and I turned to him gratefully, introducing myself as Mason’s friend. He took a pull from the wine bottle and propped his hands on his hips, surveying the car with a bleak, mournful expression. Sunlight glinted in white disks from his spectacles, giving him an owlish look, and one peculiarly out of place in view of the rest of him, which conveyed at once a vigorous outdoor expression of strength, even of brawn. He was not tall but everywhere solidly muscled, and now as he leaned slightly forward with his look of intent and sensitive concern he appeared like some stevedore turned scholar, or perhaps the other way around. He was thirty or a little more, but lines that looked like marks of trial and labor were like small lacerations on his face. “You must have really cold-cocked him,” he said. “You can see the poor bugger’s ass-end still printed in your radiator. A bloody amazing intaglio. It’s a wonder you can still get the car up these hills. What did you do to him?”
    He nodded solemnly, sucked on his cigar, and gave satisfying little grunts of commiseration as I briefly told him what had happened. The littlest boy, Nicky, played nearby at the side of the road, but Poppy and the other children had climbed part way up the slope through the lemon grove. “Here’s one!” “Here’s another!” I heard them cry, in far-off chirrups of delight and discovery.
    “You poor, thrice-crossed, luckless bastard,” he murmured finally, when I had finished my recital. He spoke with such fellowfeeling and compassion that I wanted to embrace him on the spot.
    “It’s just unbelievable,” I went on bitterly. “They don’t license these jerks, you know. They let some half-wit with half his eyesight gone get on one of these machines, and that’s it, buddy. None of them has any insurance and even if it’s their fault you’re up the creek if they’ve smashed up your car. God knows I’m sorry I laid him out like I did, I don’t want him to suffer any more than his crazy old grandmother does, but after all I’m no millionaire and every time I think of this peasant smashing my front end like this—I’m not insured for that kind of damage and God knows what it’ll cost me—every time I think of that it burns me up!”
    What he said next was not precisely sanctimonious, but its touch of reasoned mercy did not at all harmonize with my resentment. I felt somewhat betrayed.
    He stroked his neck and sighed. “Yes I know,” he said, “it’s mighty tough.” Then