David’s Reviews > The Thicket > Status Update

Red: To some extent I find sin like coffee. When I was young and had my first taste of it I found it bitter and nasty, but later on I learned to like it by putting a little milk in it, and then I learned to like it black. Sin is like that. You sweeten it a little with lies, and then you get so you can take it straight. I just didn't want to do it all the way. I wanted to keep a little milk in it.

[Jimmy Sue].. "Just a year ago I kept thinking this ain't fair, the way things have turned out for me. Then it come to me clean as spring rain. Life is just what it is, and it ain't fair at all."
"Can't we make it fair?"
"You can try, but all that other unfairness keeps seeping in."

"Are we good folks?" I [Red] asked.
"Well, now," Winton said. "If you could lay out on a board side by side with them that was killed, and we took a measurement of the good and the bad in each, and long was bad and short was good, our size might be longer than we'd like but a lot shorter than theirs. Life isn't just black or white, here or there; it's got some mud in it, and we're some of the mud".

Chapter 15 tells the backstory of one of the many members of this crew. This is another shout-out to the story of Cynthia Ann Parker and reads like an incident from Empire of the Summer Moon : Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.

Apparently I was premature to assert that all of the members have been assembled, as now the sheriff who stinks and the jailer who mops the floor has now been added to the rescue party. Also, and I don't mean this to be a spoiler, but the scene is set up for a conflict to be resolved by violence.

All of the members of the fellowship of the ring have now been assembled -- the protagonist, the hog, the large black man, the short dwarf, and a prostitute. Whom, it turns out, Grandpa was a regular. A member of the gang has been captured and is now being tortured for information about the whereabouts of Lulu.