One of the Jokers I’d been talking to earlier had become fascinated with the word “shunt.” It caught his ear when I referred to them having been “shunted off to a bad campsite. He repeated the word with a grin, then went off to play with it for a while. Several hours later I heard him urge another Joker: “Say, man, let’s go into town and shunt somebody.” By four in the morning the word had grown like a tumor in his consciousness and he wandered around the fire, buttonholing people and asking, “What would you do if I said I was gonna shunt you?” Or “Say, man, can you lend me some shunt until
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