I groaned.
“Where yuh from boy? What rural—see, sober now—precincts miss you?” “Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name’s Hodge Backmaker.”
“Well now, that’s friendly of you, Hodge. I’m George Pondible. Periodic. Just tapering off.”
I hadnt an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying to understand made my head worse.
“Took everything, I suppose? Havent a nickel left to help a hangover?”
“My head,” I mumbled, quite superfluously.
He staggered to his feet. I slowly sat up, tenderly touching the lump over my ear with my fingertips.
“Best thing—souse it in the river. Take more to fix mine.” “But ... can I go through the streets like this?”
“Right,” he said. “Quite right.”
He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk, who murmured unintelligibly. With the other he removed the jacket, a maneuver betraying practice, for it elicited no protest from the victim. He then performed the still more delicate operation of depriving him of his shirt and shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome collection of rags not fit to clean a manurespreader. The jacket was torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the ears of a dog; the shirt was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless fragments of leather with great gapes in the soles.