When they got down to Sidewinder they would arrive with sixty dollars and the clothes they stood up in. Not even a car. Even if Sidewinder had a pawnshop, which it didn’t, they had nothing to hock but Wendy’s ninety-dollar diamond engagement ring and the Sony AM/FM radio.  A pawnbroker might give them twenty bucks. A kind pawnbroker. There would be no job, not even part-time or seasonal, except  maybe shovelling out driveways for three dollars a shot. The picture of  John Torrance, thirty years old, who had once published in Esquire and who had harboured dreams – not at all unreasonable dreams, he felt – of becoming a major American writer during the next decade, with a shovel from the Sidewinder Western Auto on his shoulder, ringing doorbells …  that picture suddenly came to him much more clearly than the hedge lions and he clenched his fists tighter still, feeling the fingernails sink into  his palms and draw blood in mystic quarter-moon shapes. John Torrance, standing in line to change his sixty dollars into food stamps, standing in line again at the Sidewinder Methodist Church to get donated commodities and dirty looks from the locals.