Roland and Adam had discovered themselves and had learned to value one another.
Adam was small, frail, inhibited. Rash when heckling and his strong words sounded high pitched. But so brave that he was unyielding. A real tank of about sixty pounds. Roland: an immature and frustrating scoundrel, a game of gallows that would end between four walls or between four boards. Promised from birth to the meanest and desperate existence. A future all traced in a furrow of trouble and beatings, crawling in the mud without the prospect of standing one day―to be standing, it was necessary to be born. On the face of it; for if one scraped the oozing crust of pus that stuck to his skin, and if one ignored the pride he displayed with arrogance, one could feel much more than the smell of the dregs in which
