They occupy a modest aluminum trailer at the drive-in theater, where they are grounds keepers. What's so striking about this story, like the other stories in the collection, is Dennis Must's ability to define character through dialect, incident, and individualizing trait or gesture. Several other stories are set in Hebron or Niles, but from other points of view. In an odd turn of events, his wife, in a fit of anger and revenge, cuts off the one finger that would allow him to return to playing his Hammond B-3. The fate of Buddy Hart in his movement out of Niles into a classier life elsewhere isn't all too certain.
Class is a marker.
Of the stories set outside Hebron or Niles, perhaps the most intriguing is Big Whitey. Here, Cyrus Quinn, a philosophy major who's looking for work, must write an essay as part of Bell Telephone's extensive job application process. During this process, Quinn meets a man who, without apparent provocation, becomes bent on Quinn's destruction. Quinn immediately flees the Bell premises after writing the essay and then imagines he's escaped, for good, in the anonymity provided by his White Castle job, yet he mysteriously re-encounters this miscreant early one morning at a White Castle restaurant. Quinn is as incapable as Axel Heyst of Conrad's Victory to escape the dark, absurd forces.