Читать книгу The Easter House - David Rhodes - Страница 9

AND THE STORY OF C

And so it may be imagined that C Easter, on the supposedly unmysterious death of his father, after the expenses of the burial and the more than adequate fee charged by attorneys for extricating the actual man Ansel Easter from his partnership with Johnie Fotsom while retaining his name for possible printed material in the future, had little more than enough money to rent a small basement apartment in Iowa City, enroll in the University with the intention of going on to law school, eat moderately, live as though each moment was a new one and might fool him into remembering those things he wanted to forget, and be secure that this way of life might last five and three quarters years until the money ran out. And C intended to do that—run his money out. He was just under twenty, shy, reticent, and fearful of things he couldn’t see or identify. He believed the world was hostile—that if in any way it could direct misfortune and calamity toward him, it would. His own mental image of himself was one of victim. Nightmares filled his sleeping. He did the things he had to do by living in a sense of routine: this thing now, that thing at five thirty. If he could go through a whole day without emotion, it was a success. Everything he did had a plan. Going to the University amounted to giving himself time, five and three quarters years, in which to discover a friendly attitude toward living. If at the end of that time there was no change—still the same gnawing hope that it might improve—then he would let the trickling out of his money be the end to everything, and have no more moments that might ever again fool him.

With an enforced serenity and one thin carpetbag, C said goodbye to Sam and went away to school, not so that he might learn, but to nullify all the rest. Apartment hunting nearly finished him, and though he finally succeeded in finding one, it was a meager success. The rhetorical lectures at the University were a comfort to him. He studied late into the night in his basement, a gaudily furnished, L-shaped, concrete room with pole lamps, a space heater, pictures of musical instruments, and everything that a non-student might imagine a student wanting in his place. The only change he made in this arrangement (after obtaining with difficulty an approval from his upstairs landlady) was to streak black and white brush-width stripes along the walls and across the ceiling, converging on the outside corner of the L at the spot in front of and slightly above the top of his study desk. In this way he changed a kitchen-living-room-bedroom-dining-room space into an area for work, and the means for forgetting. The stripes could not be ignored. There was no place in the entire apartment where he could rest his eyes without their being led to his desk. And at this place the moral questions of the day neither disturbed nor distracted him from studying for long hours until sleep, and he would crawl off into his “Hollywood bed” and wait/ sleep until morning.

The months rolled by. The only break in the routines he set up was the operation of setting up new ones, registering for new classes and fitting into different time slots. So each semester varied his life only that much. For instance, he might be getting up at eight thirty instead of nine o’clock. Everything else was the same. He took summer courses in the summer. The seasonal changes passed almost without notice. His professors’ names he forgot after the first two weeks of their classes. The other students he never talked to or looked at, in the halls looking at his feet and sitting at the lectures taking volumes of notes. And when the professor would make a joke and the room would roar with laughter, he would write it down: Joke made here, about how ancient culture seems like ours today. Years went by.

His upstairs landlady thought he was not right and probably for that reason fetched him upstairs whenever she could bring herself to impose on his solitude, to eat dinner, lunch, and breakfast with her four children. She’d never had a renter stay so long, and she felt this was a kind of intimacy, at least compared to the few students she’d had before whose lives were so erratic that they’d be here one day and breaking leases another with no regard for any responsibility.

C dreaded her children. He dreaded eating with them. He dreaded eating. After two and one half years he still dreaded living. And then what he dreaded most of all and knew would happen happened on a dreaded afternoon in winter. Mrs. Sorenson, his upstairs landlady, had slipped silently into the apartment. She often did this and would sit—C did not know for how long—watching him work at his desk (he imagined for hours) until he finally turned around or got up for a drink of water. At first this so distressed him that he made a point of turning around every ten minutes in order to catch her (he could not bring himself to lock the door). His studies suffered. His plan suffered; and he finally turned the desk around so that he sat with his back toward the wall. Even with this she managed, despite her lumbering size, to enter without being noticed. This particular afternoon she did not wait to be caught, but spoke out from her seated position on the Hollywood bed.

“How did you get a name like C?” she asked.

“My father,” C said and did not look up from his books.

“Your father called you C?”

“Yes.” He looked at her now—dreading. “That is, he called me Cecil and my mother didn’t like that because it was too long.”

“Then your mother named you C,” she concluded, with satisfaction, and crossed her heavy legs.

“I suppose so.”

“I’m not old enough to be your mother,” she confessed and re-crossed her legs the other way.

Dread, thought C, staring into the pages of his book, through the desk, through the cement, and into the ground—hoping she would think he was reading.

“I’m only thirty-six.”

“Your children,” said C.

“No; we’re a very liberal family. I have made it a point for my children to be completely used to their bodies and mine. There’s nothing dirty about it.”

“I can understand that,” said C, “for you.”

“You too, C. You study too hard. Come upstairs and let me stick you between my thighs and shake something loose.”

He’d expected it might come in that way, nothing but the terrible facts of the desire. There was no other way for her. It was her attitude. Dread, thought C . . . but he believed then, and always, that relationships between people were like nothing else—that somehow it was partly his own responsibility for his landlady feeling the way she did, and because he was partly responsible for agitating this desire, then it would be wrong not to help her satisfy it. Dread, he thought. Involvement, maybe, but like this, now . . .

“Can’t you think of anything else to do?” he asked himself, “like shopping, or laundry, or working, or . . . no, I don’t suppose you can.” And he got up and they went upstairs and upstairs again and into her room, where he stood nervously next to the door.

“First time, ain’t it?” she said, pulling her sweater over her head, beginning to let her full self out. “Come over here,” she said, stretching her arms out to him. “Don’t be shy.”

“I’m not,” he answered.

“Come over here,” she cooed.

“I can manage,” he said and quickly removed his clothes, giving himself more time with the socks as he noticed she was having some difficulty in undoing her bra and finally peeled it off downward.

“Must have been rusted,” he said.

“Come here,” she said, and he saw that outside the window was rain, slush, snow, ice, and wind, and this made him feel smaller somehow. He walked over to her as gracefully as he could and she laid hold of him and sat him down on the bed with one of her hands around behind his buttocks and the other already stroking and pulling at his shrunken penis.

“That’s better,” she said. “You’ll be all right.” C had his eyes closed and was concentrating on intellectual theories—names and dates. Mrs. Sorenson wrapped her legs around him, pressed him neatly into her with the backs of her calves and heels, rocking him gently with her hands on his shoulders. The front door opened and closed. Feet clambered up the steps and into the room. C’s soul slipped to his feet.

“Mom, where’s Benji?” asked the seventh-grader, soon joined by his younger sister.

“I don’t know. At the neighbors’ . . . maybe Mrs. Myers let him in the house again. Why don’t you go look?” C had stopped and was looking at them, apologetically, fearfully, hatefully. Mrs. Sorenson began rocking him again with the tremendous power of her legs. “And tell Dennis to turn down the radio or turn it off.”

“Did you have a good day, Mommy?” asked the smaller one.

“It’s been all right. Now run along and don’t go wandering off before dinner . . . and take off your boots,” she called after them. They left.

“You have very liberal children, Mrs. Sorenson.”

“Don’t think about them now,” she said and closed her eyes.

AFTER SOME TIME C WAS ALLOWED TO ROLL OVER ONTO A MORE SPACIOUS part of the mattress and Betty trotted off to the dresser drawer. She extracted a large manila envelope and carried it over to the bed. C had sat up and was watching the summing up of the afternoon outside.

“Look at these,” said Betty. “These were taken at Lake of the Dells—at night, of course.” And she lifted out a clump of photographs and spread them out on the bed . . . pictures of her in the nude standing beside pieces of furniture, trees, lying in the grass, eating candied apples, playing a guitar . . . “My husband took them.”

“Where is your husband, Mrs. Sorenson? Is he dead?”

“No. He was in the reserves and in 1949 volunteered for active duty in Korea, and stayed there.”

C looked outside again.

“Here’s one taken at Okoboji on our first vacation. That’s Jack,” she said, pointing into a black-and-white picture. C got off the bed and went over to his neat pile of clothes on the floor, and began putting them on.

“I’ve got a lot more here,” she said.

“I don’t have time to look at them, Mrs. Sorenson. I’ve got to be going.”

“Back to your studying, I suppose.”

C put on his lost shoe and walked downstairs and then walked downstairs again. Margie, the first-grader, opened the basement door for him and stood watching him descend the open staircase. He looked around his apartment and of course saw nothing but the stripes he had painted. He looked at his desk and went to it and put a paperback edition of a contemporary philosophical position in his back pocket. In the other pocket he put his checkbook. He put on his jacket and left. After the money was gone, there would be nothing.

He walked down Burlington Avenue and into town. He had never been downtown much before except to buy books—so went into the first tavern he saw, on the corner of Dubuque Street. Many of the men and women in the bar turned around as the door opened, but then resumed their private activities after C had securely fastened it—as though they were only concerned with seeing the cold air come in. The bartender was in shirt sleeves and C went across the street to another bar after he refused to accept a check.

C sat alone in a booth and drank and ate until he was sick, and then rented a room in the Roosevelt Hotel and lay down, thinking before he fell asleep that this would not work, that he had only spent twelve dollars, and at that rate . . . well, it would simply have to go faster. The next morning he bought a used car (he could not bring himself to waste money on a new one; no, that would be wrong; but everyone needed an automobile), and drove it around all day, having the oil checked, putting air in the tires, eating four full meals in restaurants, watching two movies, and going finally back to his hotel room with a strawberry ice-cream fizz.

The following few days were like this, except without the food. Then he took the last step, walked into the final phase, and gave his money away—in the manner that his father might have—donating it to needy institutions under his full name: The Reverend Ansel C. Easter, Ontarion, Iowa. Even some to the University.

He was soon without money in the bank and threw his checkbook into a trash barrel outside the telegraph office. And walking down Clinton Avenue, he wondered for the first time how he would die—how the money made any difference at all. He would have to stop eating; and he could’ve done that anyway. Surely something will happen now, he thought, and felt in his pocket—four bits in nickels and dimes. C went inside a drugstore and bought a small bottle of terpin hydrate, signing his name The Reverend Ansel C. Easter and the date, carried it over to a tree in the Pentacrest, sat down, and began drinking it sip by sip, the taste exploding inside his mouth, very badly. There is nothing quite like terpin hydrate.

The cold air bit into him.

A girl came walking through the slush and drizzle across from the drugstore. The wind tried to carry her thin bones away. Once a horn blew at her and she stumbled back to the curb, waiting for the light. Several more people came, talking and laughing, and went into a bar. She did not look up, and pulled her denim coat more tightly around her neck. A large man stopped beside her, waiting for the light, and she turned to him. C saw the man bodily push his way past her, shaking his head and swearing, as though he might have been asked for something he was unwilling to give. She crossed the street and entered the Pentacrest, dragging her feet along in the snow, her uncovered hair wet and streaking across her face like tears. She sat down next to C and lowered her face between her arms and against her upright knees.

“How’s everything?” she asked, out loud, dull, expecting no answer, like someone talking to herself. She sounded young.

“Good,” said C. “Everything’s good. How about you?”

“Good,” she said (but didn’t look up). “Everything’s good.”

“Want some cough syrup?”

“Codeine?”

“Yeah.”

“O.K.” And she took the bottle, swallowed, and shivered from the taste.

“Go ahead,” C said, “kill it.” And she took the rest of the corner in one quick gulp.

“That’s good.”

“You’re welcome.”

These two sat together and the snow and the ice and the cold went on, though they didn’t comment on it, or anything. And it grew darker. Those few cars that trudged down the streets beside the Pentacrest were forced to stop at each intersection by the conspiracy of Iowa City traffic lights, and slid sideways when they began to move, as though they were large gray animals being led home on a long rope.

“You got a place to stay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure, I got a place.”

“I just thought, because you were sitting here, I mean—”

“Right.” And they were quiet again for a while.

“You a student?” she asked.

“No. Not now.”

“You mean you were?”

“Sure. For a while.”

“What’s the matter—run out of money or flunk out or something?”

C almost laughed.

“No. I guess I just quit. You want a cigarette?” He shoved a half-filled pack toward her after his hand had bumped into them inside his coat pocket.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Keep ’em. I think I ought to stop.”

“Thanks . . . non-filters. That’s good.”

“You a student?”

“Me?” She was looking at him in the dark. “No . . . oh, no.”

“I don’t know, I just thought—”

“You sure you don’t want one of these cigarettes?”

“Well, maybe one last one.” She held them out to him, then gave him her own to light from.

“You cold?”

“No, I’m fine. How ’bout you?”

“You haven’t got any more of that terpin hydrate, do you?” she asked, very slowly, stirring the snow around with her high-top work shoes.

“No. But I can get—” Then he stopped. He couldn’t. “Are you sure you’re not cold?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I just thought. I mean, because of wanting some more cough syrup.”

“No. I didn’t want any; I just wondered. I wondered if maybe you were addicted to that stuff.”

“Oh. No, I’m not.”

“Oh.”

“How about you?”

“What?”

“You addicted to that stuff?”

“No. Say, you getting ready to go?” she asked. He could feel her shivering, though he had not thought they were touching.

“Go where?” More shivering. “And you’re cold. What’s the matter with you anyway? Why don’t you get on out of here?”

“Damn it,” she said, half crying. “I ain’t got any place to go. I’m cold, and hungry . . . and I don’t know what the fuck the difference is to you. So why don’t you get on out of here yourself, Jackshit? I can stay in the lobby of the girls’ dorm anyway.”

“In the lobby of the girls’ dorm!” he exclaimed. “Why do you do that?”

“Why? Because it’s free and it’s cold out here. That’s why.”

“You mean you want to go on . . . living like that?”

“Of course not. What do you think, I like it there and wouldn’t want to be in a house or apartment or someplace where the campus police wouldn’t chase me out? Things are tough now, Pigass. No work . . . and some of the girls bring me food back from the cafeteria.”

“Look,” he said, wondering how long he had spent inside, outside of this normal flow of things, away from the streets. “Take . . . well, I haven’t any more money. You see that car over there? The blue one? Well, here are the keys. Drive it down to 718 Jefferson and in the basement there’s an apartment that’s paid for up until next month. If the landlady says anything, tell her that I told you to go there. And then sell the car—and don’t let them give you less than three hundred dollars. The title’s in the glove compartment.”

“Listen. Listen, whatever you think, I ain’t no kept woman.”

“What?”

“Sure, I know, you don’t expect nothing. Except later, when you come bustin’ in that apartment of yours and start deciding then and there that you got something coming. And then maybe it’s better if I don’t, so you can hit.”

“You stupid bitch,” he said, surprising himself with a language that he had until that time only read about in paperback novels. “I don’t give a good god-damn what you do. I’ve given my money away. My father’s dead and he was a shit. I quit school because I wanted to stop studying . . . to stop everything. And my landlady has got over three hundred and fifty pictures of herself in the nude and her children are very liberal, and I’ve had it. . . . Can you understand that? Can you!”

“Fuck off,” she said. “I can’t understand any of that. I don’t know any of those people.”

“In ordinary terms, I’m going to sit here until something happens.”

“You’ll die—that’s what will happen, you jerk.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I just wonder how it’ll happen. I mean, if it will be the cold or the hunger, or what.”

“You got any food in your apartment?”

“Some. A lot. I never got much of a chance to eat it because of the upstairs landlady inviting me up to eat with her fat-faced, liberal, sneering children.”

“Let’s go back and eat,” she said.

“Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“I wasn’t listening. I was thinking.”

“You mean everything would be good with you if you had a place? That’s all? Just those things? What were you thinking about?”

“Food. And of course it would. What else is there? Let’s go.”

“Aren’t you afraid that I’ll want something from you?”

“I was thinking maybe you would. And it doesn’t worry me much. You seem sort of weak, I guess. And I can’t drive anyway, or read street signs. And I don’t know your name to tell the landlady.”

“C,” said C.

“My name’s Cell,” said Cell.

“First,” he said, “you should know I’m not so good with people. It’s been—”

“Let’s go.”

These two, Cell and C, drove to C’s apartment and entered by the least noisy of the two doors. Mrs. Sorenson and her children—from the living room—watched them cross over the hall and into the entry to the basement, noticing particularly the tracked mud and water. They went downstairs and Cell thought that the way he had his apartment painted was not in the best taste, and he twice had to point out to her what spoiled food looked like before she tried to cook it or put it in a sandwich.

C had waited for something to happen. He was unsure, watching her eat, sitting in dry clothes too big for her, if this thing had been enough of a happening to qualify, but he was at least willing to ride a ways on the wave of it—which he felt was better than having a vague hope. And she knew this. Nothing was expected from her.

But I must be careful, she thought: I must plan ahead. She would not be fooled again. She had been once before, when their automobile killed her parents and her safe place was sold for mortgage. There had been no insurance. A kind, sad-faced policeman had taken her to an orphanage, where the civil servants beat her regularly for punishment and sport, sometimes making her pull down her drawers the next day so they could see the marks. At sixteen years old she was let out. That had been two years ago and she had not been fooled about anything since. She began to plan ahead and moved the bed to the place where the desk had been before she put it beside the furnace. So now the striped walls made more sense.

“HOW ARE YOU GOING TO PAY THE RENT NEXT MONTH?” SHE ASKED.

“I can sell the car.”

“And when that money runs out?” she pressed.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t work?”

“No.” And they turned out the light and went to bed. Cell’s body was thin, tight, and tough. C imagined in a moment of frenzy that he was in bed with some kind of smooth-skinned animal. It was also exciting to have so much to do for himself.

Afterward, exhausted, he sat on the bed, leaning against the converging stripes, and Cell brought coffee for them with so much sugar he couldn’t drink it. “Well,” she said, “how are we going to get some money?”

“We aren’t,” he said. “I’m not going to spend my life making money. I won’t do it.”

“But when the rent runs out. We need a place.”

“I’ve got a house. My father’s house. We could stay in there.”

“Your father.”

“Don’t worry, he’s dead. But if all you want is a house, then we’ve got one.”

“Where is this house?”

“In Ontarion.”

“Well, we’ll go there. But not until the rent’s gone here. It’s not right to waste. So later we figure out about food.”

“O.K.,” said C.

“What’s your last name?”

“Easter.”

“Easter!”

“What’s with you?”

“Nothing,” she said, and smiled. “I was just thinking how good things are, and how funny for you that Cell Easter is such a better name than C Easter, and somebody even named you.”

She might be right, you know, thought C, as though to someone else; then went to sleep, hoping that what he feared wasn’t true—that everything was going too fast.

I hope he doesn’t expect too much from me, thought Cell, because I can always go back to the dormitory and maybe get a job in a laundry or something; then went to sleep, a broken, fretful sleep with a stranger.

C sold some of his books to a used-book store with a little room in back of it. They didn’t pay him much for them and he had to sell most of those he owned in order to get enough money for gasoline, oil, a sack of bologna sandwiches with lettuce and mustard, and several gallons of fruit juice. They drove to Ontarion. Cell was asleep in the back seat when they arrived. They knew each other hardly better now than they did before they met. The snow had all the sounds and wouldn’t let them out. Very, very quiet.

“You mean that’s it?” she said, her sleepy voice nearly cracking, rolling down the coupe’s back window.

“That’s it,” he said, and turned the car off. Buttonweeds had overgrown the lot and stood up through the snow, brown and dead. Rabbit tracks went among them. Mice. The windows were still whole, untouched by small ruffians.

“It’s so big,” she said, and added, “But it sure is a fine house . . . it sure is a fine house.” Her voice trailed off and came back again. “You sure this is your house?”

“Yep,” he said and got out of the car.

“Sure is a big house,” she said and followed him, carrying the half-filled pillowcase of bologna sandwiches up out of the weeds.

“Who was your father anyway?” she asked, when they had reached the porch.

“A nigger.”

“A nigger!” she said and set the bag down on the snow on the porch floor.

“I mean he was everything as unpleasant as that word. I meant nothing ethnic by it.”

“You mean he wasn’t black.”

“That’s right, he wasn’t.”

“He musta been a lawyer, or some great man, if this was his house. Unless he had it for a hotel.”

“He was a preacher.”

“Preacher!” she said with more surprise than she had with the other word. “They don’t have houses like this.”

“I know,” said C and unlocked the front door with some little trouble. A current of snow swept in and across the wide boards of the hall.

“Hurry,” said Cell, rushing in with her sack. “Shut the door, and don’t let any more of that in here. God, this is a big house. Where’s all the furniture?”

C had noticed that too . . . there were only a few pieces left, scattered around the house as though they’d been caught in a whirlwind and thrown to the edges of the rooms, upside down and in corners. Sam, thought C, must have sold the rest—might have sold the house (he didn’t tell this to Cell, who brought together two chairs into the hall, set them upright, dusted them off, sat him down and handed him a bologna sandwich, took one herself, and sat across from him, her feet not touching the floor). “This sure is a fine house.” And ate into her sandwich.

They found some beds on the third floor and picked out the biggest one. C groped down into the basement, threw the master switch, turned the water pump on—surprised that there was still current—lit the oil furnace, and went upstairs to wait for the ice in the lines to melt so that he could begin to run the rust out and open the drains. He listened to the popping of the iron casing of the furnace as it expanded. Cell was collecting all the furniture from several of the downstairs rooms into one room at the foot of the open staircase, in order to have a regular-looking place.

“Forget it,” said C. “We’re not going to keep that stuff.”

“It’s all we’ve got,” said Cell.

“We’ll get some more.”

“How? We haven’t got any money. We haven’t got—”

“Shut up,” said C.

The boards creaked from the warmth, frost formed on the windows. The walls groaned and stretched in the middle, then everywhere, as the house woke from the dead.

“YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN GHOSTS, DO YOU?”

“Not his,” he answered.

The electric lights tunneled out into the yard. The ice melted in the water pipes in the basement and C turned on all the faucets, letting the rust empty into the sinks. They dismantled the bed and carried it down to the first floor, and were asleep before C had time to think about not going on another day, or Cell had time to decide to go back to the dormitory.

C KNEW THAT HE WOULD BE DISCOVERED, AND THAT BY NOW EVERYONE knew that someone—probably him—was living in the gray house. That morning he got up and walked down to the bank. Cell watched him leave and got out of bed thinking, He better not say shut up to me again—just for a little mistake. This goddamn snow, thought C.

The bank was closed when he arrived. C sat on the bench outside and waited for Merle Wood to come back and talk to him. Merle would be eating lunch at his mother’s house. C looked out into the street. Tire tracks in the snow, making no noise. Snow swallows sounds. He knew he’d only been away a little this side of three years, and knew that that wasn’t enough time to really change anything, and was enough time to change many things a little . . . If they could only have forgotten about my father. A short, squarish figure stepped out of Merle Wood’s mother’s house and stood for a minute adjusting his gloves and coat collar before venturing out onto the street and toward the bank. Even from that far away he could tell it wasn’t Merle. Rabbit! thought C. That’s Rabbit! And Rabbit, Merle’s son, stepped down from the porch and came toward him in the slow, lumbering gait of his father, his squinted eyes darting up and down the street, noticing not only C, but that his coat was worn about the elbows and that his skin was not healthy—had not been exposed enough to the weather . . . taking this all in at a glance and seeing that nothing else had come or gone.

“Hello, Rabbit,” said C, leaving his arm on the top of the bench.

“Hello, C,” said Rabbit. “Good to see you home again.”

They looked at each other.

“Good to be here.”

Rabbit took out a shining bunch of keys and opened the bank. Then he stood in the doorway, waiting.

“I heard you were going to school. The University, I heard.”

“That’s right.”

“Almost three years, summers too. Graduate?” His fleshy hands played with the keys.

“Nope.” C came into the bank. “I went over to the house last night and noticed that a lot of the furniture was gone. I thought that what probably happened—”

“Sam sold it. We helped out—as we could—but there was just some of that stuff that no one could use.”

“About the house, Rabbit. I was thinking that maybe Sam had—”

“He borrowed seventeen thousand dollars on mortgage. That was six months ago. Every month he sends money from Springfield, Illinois.”

“O.K.”

Rabbit Wood sat down on the top of the desk and lit a smoke.

“Your father, Merle, I guess he—”

“He retired and moved to Quincy with his new wife. I noticed you’re not alone. Married?”

“I guess. Yourself ?”

“Not yet,” said Rabbit. “Not until June.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Ester.”

“Oh?” He didn’t know her very well, but knew Rabbit had been going up to Dubuque to see an Ester Willams since way before he left. He had brought her down occasionally and once introduced her, but he’d forgotten.

“Yep,” said Rabbit, and smiled.

“So you and Ester. When’s the wedding?”

“June.”

“You’re lucky.”

Rabbit smiled.

“How are you going to live?” Rabbit asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something, or something will happen. It’ll work out . . . now that the house is still ours.”

“You better get a job, C. Men shouldn’t live without work. It isn’t right.” He was still playing with the keys, but what he said was serious.

“That’s probably true. I got to be getting back now. Nasty weather.”

“Say,” said Rabbit before he closed the door. “I saw you come in last night. So I called Ralph and got him to turn on the current for you.”

“Thanks,” said C. “I wondered.” Then he shut the door and began walking back home.

CELL WAS EATING A BOLOGNA SANDWICH. “WHAT’S THE MATTER?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“We have to leave, don’t we?”

“No. But Rabbit Wood runs the bank, and he’s this prudish kid that used to be in my class in high school.”

“So you wish you could be like that?”

“No. I don’t think so. But maybe I wish I could if I could all the way; I mean be like that. It might be better.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, he said everyone should work . . . that it isn’t right not to. He even said that it isn’t right to live if you don’t work.”

“He didn’t.”

“That’s what he meant.”

“So what?”

“So I guess I feel that way too, only I have no intention of working.”

“You want me to leave, don’t you?”

“No. Why did you think that?”

“Because of saying things that sound bad that I can’t understand—like maybe you would be better off without me.”

“Well, that’s not it.”

“Then we can’t stay here. That Rabbit said we couldn’t.”

“He didn’t.”

“Then there’s nothing,” she said, with a satisfied finality and sat down on her favorite chair in the living room. C sat down too, and they stayed there for two or three days, wandering about the house, while Cell became increasingly aware that every time the furnace clicked on and the warm air swooned into their room, they had no money to pay for it. She turned the thermostat down, and made C read in the same light that niggardly lit her own book. He won’t stay here long, she thought. He’ll go out and find work. He’ll get tired of sitting around. It isn’t healthy. He’ll start hating; everyone does. Everyone hates.

“Don’t you hate things?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“What most?”

“Bologna sandwiches.”

“They’re almost gone.”

“Good.”

“No. Most,” she insisted.

“Iowa City water.”

“None of that here.”

“I can remember it.”

“I mean not things, but conditions.”

“I don’t know. How about you?”

“Worrying.”

“IS THAT YOUR REAL NAME, CELL?”

“Sure, if yours is real.”

“It is. But it was originally Cecil.”

“Oh.”

“What was yours?”

“A long one.”

“What?”

“Cassandra, I think.”

“Better that both of those names are gone.”

“Yes.”

“We got no more sandwiches.”

“Good.”

“C . . .” Then she turned away and went upstairs.

She is like a dark, ancient animal, he thought.

Upstairs, she was looking out at the car, trying to remember everything she had ever noticed about what it took to drive one. I am being tricked, she thought. These days’ll bring something from the worry. Something’s not good here. I have been tricked.

“I HATE PEOPLE WHO BUY ANTIQUES BECAUSE THEY COME INTO PLACES where other people live,” he blurted out, “real people who use things the way they were meant to be used . . . they come in and give them money for the things that they use, and take them back home and put varnish on them, and refurbish their houses with them.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Cell.

“Not if you think of things that you can use as dead. If you think that they’re alive—when they’re being used—then people who buy antiques are killers—killers who pay money to kill.”

“I never thought of them that way,” said Cell, and added, with her eyes cocked to the side, “and I never wanted to.”

That night they made love until they both hurt. Cell was glad when it finally ended and C rolled over, facing the wall. The house seemed frighteningly strange to her, moreso in the dark when she could only sense it, and though she knew C wasn’t asleep, she couldn’t speak to him. There was a barrier as surely as something she could touch. From where it arose, him or her, was no concern—only its realness. In the basement she heard rats chewing on wood, making noises like tiny hammers. She put her hand on her right breast and quickly took it away, it seemed so small and close to the bone when she was on her back. Any curiosity she ever had of her body always ended in the same kind of rejection. He’ll never penetrate into me, she thought. He’ll never really know me . . . or want to. The wind outside rattled the eave pipes. There was a fence around the orphanage, she remembered, that sounded a little like that, but not nearly so close. C’s leg jerked of its own accord. He seems so old, she thought. We both do. Tomorrow, if something doesn’t happen, I’ll leave: I knew this wouldn’t be any good. And once again she felt as though she wanted to cry—forever wanting to join the simple ways of normal living, forever being shut outside.

“Cell.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just wondered if you were asleep.”

. . . But C doesn’t want that, she thought. Any common sense that he’d had before had been rooted out and so entirely jumbled by the University that although he appeared to be normal—physically normal—he was virtually nothing more than a mad vegetable.

Cell had once been told by her mother, though she could not remember when and often wondered if maybe she hadn’t dreamed it (even down to what her mother looked and sounded like because it was one of the few vivid memories she was able to retain through the years with the juvenile home in between), that if she lay still in bed before going to sleep, and did not think about her troubles, they would rise to the surface and float away and be gone by morning. This memory comforted her and she fell off to sleep, confident that in the morning she would know what to do. Periodically the furnace turned on with a vooroom sound and ran an almost imperceptible tremulation up through the spine of the house.

But C woke up first. He slipped quietly out of bed and went up to the third floor and looked out across the yard. The moonlight was being filtered first through a layer of clouds and then through a low-hanging fog bank, leaving an eerie, almost blue light to trickle into the town. Through this C saw the upstairs light in Rabbit Wood’s house turn on. He’s getting up now in the dark to get ready for work, thought C . . . now when it’s still night he’s getting ready to go to work, and, God save him, he enjoys it. It was cold on the third floor and C rubbed his tired hands together and felt once, automatically, in his empty pajama pocket for cigarettes. And then as though some magic was working through Cell’s sleep into his mind, into his thinking, and into inspiration, he understood that it was these Rabbit Woods that not only ruled the world, but should, and that same evil that had been in his father—that distaste for life and the normal activities in it—was in him. He shuddered from the cold and leaned with one hand against the window frame.

I’ve come here, he thought, to be on the third floor looking out into the yard as though without moving. . . . I have been a part of the whole way things are, like a child complaining of beets or his mother’s milk. From now on what I have will be mine and what I do will be me. My father is dead. No one cares what I do any more, except her. I’m free. I’ll have to watch myself and not make any mistakes. If I fall, it will be because I have stumbled, not because of loose stones on the ledge.

I KNEW IT, THOUGHT CELL, LYING IN THE EMPTY BED . . . HE’D LEAVE me here and take the car and go away. I knew it . . . all along I knew he’d do it and I came anyhow. She stared at the floor over the edge of the bed, making ringlets in the dust with her finger. I knew . . . and I knew he’d do it at night—crawl away in the middle of the night after the food was gone, with the car, without me, like a rat . . . leaving me for the police to come and find and . . .

Then she heard him coming downstairs, and did not wonder if it was someone else because of his way of walking down sideways, making always a loud thud followed by a smaller clump in rapid succession.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good,” she said and stretched into a seated position and then out of the bed, holding her open arms out to him, who walked into them and carried her back. Like magic they were fitted together and Cell screamed softly, “Love me, C. Love me.” And C thought, I will surprise you.

“I’M GOING TO START A JUNK YARD,” HE SAID. “I’VE DECIDED THAT WE’VE got to have a junk yard that in years will cover this whole yard.”

“What kind of a junk yard, C?”

“One with everything in it.”

“Like cars?”

“Cars, books, planes, stoves, refrigerators, railroad ties, nails, chains, sledge hammers, oil cans, lumber, window frames, insulation . . . everything.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what I’m going to do.”

“What’s what you’re going to do?”

“Run the junk yard.”

“Why, C?”

“Cell, listen . . . don’t talk. Listen. We are going to live because people will trade us things that we need for things we don’t need.”

“We don’t have anything we don’t need.”

“Quiet. Listen. Just listen. We can trade this car—”

“WE NEED THE CAR!”

“—for a bunch of junk—bring it here and leave it in the yard—sort of display it.”

“C—”

“People will trade food for it too. People will do anything to get something secondhand.”

“But—”

“And my father would turn over in his grave if he could know about his house being surrounded by junk. Antique buyers will tear their eyes out when they can’t buy what they want . . . and those kinds of people never have anything to trade. . . . I’ll be back.” And he threw on his clothes and ran out of the house.

Cell’s eyes filled with water. She pulled the corners of the sheet up over her shoulders and tried to fall asleep. They’ll fool him, she thought. How young he must be to not know that the world fools people who think like that—think that something can be made out of nothing—that happiness can come just because you decide it should—yes, and that the meek will inherit; children’s thinking. I would never have come with him, she thought, if I’d known he was that stupid; and now I can’t leave him, can’t tell him because children never believe, and have to stay and watch him crack open and watch his childhood drain out of him. I’ve been so careful not to be fooled this time from one direction that it has come up behind me. C . . . C . . . C . . . And she fell asleep completely covered, her head jammed in between two pillows.

These pillows protected her later on from hearing noises in the front yard next to the street. And by the time she finally got out of bed, wrapped the sheet around her, and walked to one of the huge windows, she saw C standing in the middle of the dreary afternoon yard, standing beside a man in overalls and a tremendous pile of lumber, metal pipes, two oil drums, a stack of half a hundred pieces of ceramic tile, enough fire bricks for a fireplace, holding three giant brown paper bags wedged in between his two arms . . . standing and talking.

Cell stared out of the window. No, she said to herself, it’s not natural. He wouldn’t have done it . . . he couldn’t have done it—not this quick; not in a town this size.

The man in overalls got into his pickup and drove away into the snow, pulling C’s car behind him with a chain fastened not to the bumper, but the frame. C, still holding the food bags, walked around the beginning of his yard, noticing carefully the condition of the fire bricks and ceramic tile, not caring much over the lumber, which he knew a man could get anywhere, even steal off an isolated barn . . . if he wanted it badly enough. It began to snow and settle on the top of these things. He went inside.

“You traded the car,” said Cell from inside the sheet, thinking, YOU TRADED THAT CAR!

“Here’s some food,” said C, and set down the bags of frozen vegetables, meat, potatoes, spices, apples, peaches, flour, butter, eggs, and one half-gallon of milk. “We can keep it outside until someone brings a refrigerator.”

“That was the only thing we had that was worth anything. Three hundred dollars! We could’ve had three hundred dollars for that.”

“But we’ve got some other stuff instead,” said C, meaning both that they had been better off in the exchange, and that he didn’t want to talk about it any more; and stood in the bay window and watched the snow fall on his new pile of junk.

Cell was quiet. The size of the house . . . the size of the rooms and the windows . . . frightened her a little. A hundred people could hide in here, she thought—maybe more, if they were employed and made money. She carried the bags to their one furnished room and separated out enough for them to eat—raw carrots, radishes, green onions, butter, and bread. The rest she put out on the back porch in a cardboard box, put this in the corner and threw an old single mattress from the basement over it as disguise so that no one would steal it in the night, being careful to step only on the aisle of porch next to the wall where the thin film of snow had not reached. We can eat better, she thought, when someone brings a stove to trade, and then cursed herself: Idiocy, plain idiocy; I will simply wait, and after the food is gone—after we’ve made a fire in the basement, or cooked the meat in the furnace—after no one comes and he finally begins to see things are not like he thinks they are . . . then we’ll do something to get on, something normal.

IN FEBRUARY THEY GOT A STOVE THAT C BROUGHT INSIDE, DESPITE HIS reluctance to take anything out of the growing collection in the Yard except furniture, which now decorated three of the downstairs rooms. People traded, and every once in a while, on top of what was already in the bargain, C would say, “We could kind of use some food,” and obtain another bag, which was split between the inside and the back porch. Cell wanted a gun in order to be able to shoot anyone trying to steal food from under the mattress. But she didn’t tell him.

She watched all this—this dealing in the snow—out of the windows, each time half not believing it, and half trying to guess, from the dress of the man, what in God’s name he wanted from the growing heap of trash. “More than equal size and weight,” said C, when asked what he wanted for a piece of this or that, keeping the prerogative to refuse even this exchange if he didn’t care for the proposed item. In March they obtained a refrigerator and set it inside. “You skinned me on this one, Easter,” called the man after him, as he and Cell wheeled it inside. “But next time it’ll be different.”

“I’ll be here,” said C, and the two laughed; then Bill Wooly and his boys lifted a bathtub with feet up onto a flatbed. Two of the older boys hopped up with it and steadied it from shifting as their father eased the truck over the ruts in the road toward home.

“Oh, C,” shouted Cell, “we’ve got a refrigerator! This is becomin’ just like a real house. Before long all those downstairs rooms will be full of furniture.”

“What’s more important,” said C, “is that Bill Wooly is from up around Tipton, and there’s plenty of traders up there, shrewd traders, with lots to trade.”

“Things are good, C,” said Cell. “What with this refrigerator, we can live the way people were meant to live . . . good people were meant to live.”

“With refrigerators?” asked C, smiling slightly.

“Don’t tease,” said Cell and set about cleaning out the refrigerator and ordering food inside it from the back porch, being happy despite herself. . . despite her knowing, sensing clear back inside her, that something wasn’t right, that people shouldn’t live in a happy, easy way without money, with others taking care of them—knowing that something would come along, something was bound to happen—like a blinding arrow of lightning—and break everything apart; and the better they got on, the higher they rose, then that much heavier the fall would be, maybe even enough to kill C; and in order that that should not happen, Cell worried, and watched, and waited, suspicious of everything in order that they would not have so far to fall . . . at least her half. C could tell. “Remember?” he asked. “Remember that a place and food is all? That’s what you told me. We’ve got those.” She smiled, but waited.

Their food, which could no longer be hidden by a single mattress, began to rot—the three fourths of it Cell couldn’t jam into the refrigerator that said GENUINE FRIGIDAIRE on the inside of the door and woke her up for the first few weeks every time it turned on. Near the end of April, C got another one, but by then most of the food on the porch was too far gone and under no circumstances, he told her, was he going to bring another refrigerator into the house and live with three, despite her worries. She accepted this cheerfully, thinking to herself that because she’d been told not to worry, then she didn’t have to and couldn’t be blamed when the blow came.

The warm weather drew C out onto the porch in the daytime, where he sat in a rocking chair looking over the Yard. Cell read magazines and books and listened to the radio, and finally (with C’s approval) got a part-time job working in a fabric shop in order to keep from going stir crazy and to pay the electricity and oil bills. They had a blood test and were married.

In the beginning of the warm weather only those few young men that had been C’s close friends before he’d gone to Iowa City came over in the evenings when the light was still out and sat on the front porch or around the Yard with him, talking and laughing. Midsummer, however, saw the porch and Yard filled with people sitting and talking; just enough shade to keep the sun off, and enough to talk about to last at least another hour.

But it wasn’t C who brought them. No one ever said, “Let’s go over to visit C.” It was always, “Let’s go over to C’s place.” Sometimes the women would come too, but Cell mostly watched by herself out of the windows or beside C on the porch, thinking to herself: “They’ve come like vultures. People don’t come to a junk yard just to be.” But they did; and later Cell still thought of them as vultures. Even Rabbit, after he was married, came over and sat heavily on one of the front steps in his shirt sleeves and smoked cigars and looked at everyone out of his tiny, squinched eyes.

“Rabbit,” said C. “I haven’t seen you.”

“In a long time,” said Rabbit. “No, I guess you haven’t.”

“Brought your new wife, I noticed,” said C.

“Yes. She’s gone inside . . . to talk to your new one.”

That bastard, thought C.

“I noticed everyone coming over here.” Rabbit gestured out toward the two or three groups of people milling around out in the Yard, sitting on pieces of broken machinery and drinking soda pop or beer they had brought with them. “Thought that maybe there was something more here than a growing pile of junk.”

“No, that’s about it,” said C.

“I see,” said Rabbit, and tossed a cigar butt away from the house. “You got any insurance?”

“Insurance?”

“In case anything happened to you, or to your house.”

“No,” said C, standing up and leaning against one of the front pillars, watching a blue sedan drive up and stop. “Did you see those plates?”

“Might’ve been Missouri,” said Rabbit.

Two men got out of the car, one older than the other but possibly related, thought Rabbit, because of the protective way the older man acted toward the younger. It was more in the way they moved than anything else—sort of a carry-over from the two men remembering the childhood of the younger man, but only one of them remembering the childhood of the older. Rabbit’s eyes were the only ones good enough to be that sure from that distance.

“A man ought to have insurance,” said Rabbit, “in case something happens.”

“Nothing’s going to happen. . . . Look at them. There’s some real traders.”

Rabbit looked again at the two as they walked along through the junk, talking quietly to themselves, looking over the lumber and angle iron, touching a piece here and there, the way a husband will accompany his wife in the grocery store . . . over to three men from Ontarion sitting on an old tractor drinking beer from bottles. One of these three nodded over toward the porch and Rabbit noticed that the two did not look then—did not follow the nod, but marked it carefully so that later they could take a long, studied look.

“I wonder what they want,” said Rabbit.

“How do you know they want something?”

“Because people act like that when they come into the bank, if they want something.”

“Curious,” said C. “I didn’t think it was at all the same thing. . . . It isn’t.”

“Just the same, you ought to get some insurance. What does your wife think about it? What’s her name?”

“Cell . . . you’ve seen her in the drygoods store. If I could only know what they wanted before I talked to them. She wouldn’t want insurance and has a very idealistic attitude about the world. Everything’s always fine with her. And with me. We don’t need any insurance.”

“How about health insurance?”

“Don’t need it. Damn, Rabbit, if you want some, or some more, why don’t you get it?”

“It’s not right . . . living like this,” said Rabbit. “How about when you have children?”

“Children!”

“I suppose you don’t . . . well, you know.”

“Christ, Rabbit! Besides, she’s got one of these things that keeps her from getting pregnant. It’s a thing that shoots water up inside her and runs all the sperm out. It’s kind of a neat gadget. Do you want to see it?”

“No!!!”

“Well. So we aren’t going to have any kids,” said C.

“Why don’t you go out and see what they want?”

“Give ’em too much advantage—thinking I’m curious. Better if they come up here.”

“It’s odd,” said Rabbit, mostly to himself. “Set ways of doing things—procedures, everything like a real job, like real work, but not any money. Your father would have called that evil . . . something that appears to be like other, natural things, but isn’t.”

“Maybe you better go in and get a pop; you’re looking hot and thirsty.”

Rabbit got up and ambled toward the door, turned and looked again at the two men, who had by this time pretty much covered the entire Yard, walking easily, not stopping longer in any one spot than another. Then he told C something that C had suspected was true but couldn’t be sure of even after Rabbit said it: that everyone had forgotten about his father because even though it’d happened, it was too bizarre to believe, too fantastic for the memory to hang on to—there was no place to put it. “For instance,” said Rabbit, “how long can you remember a nightmare?” Then he went inside to find Ester and have a pop.

C sat on the steps and waited, called Jimmy Cassum over to talk to him, and lit a cigarette. The two out-of-state men finally walked up to the porch as though they had just happened to be passing that way, would have been passing that way if no one was there at all, if there was no Yard, no porch, no house—just walking in the fields.

“Hello,” said the older man.

“Hello,” said Jimmy.

“Do you own this place?”

“No. But he does.” He indicated C sitting beside him.

“You have some nice things here,” said the younger man.

“Real nice things,” added the older man.

“Thanks,” said C.

“Kind of young to be owning all this, aren’t you?”

“Kind of,” answered C.

“Do you sell?”

“Trade.”

“Good . . . good.”

These guys are great, thought C, asking me all this that they already know . . . as if their car wasn’t full of things to trade; as if they didn’t know what they wanted before they came here. Maybe all the way from Missouri.

“Do you see anything here that you like?”

“Well, not really.”

“Well, if you do,” said C, and pinched off the lit end of his smoke and put the rest into his shirt pocket. Nearly everyone in the Yard was at least keeping some kind of notice of them, though several of the original crowd had gone back home, and several more—townspeople rather than farmers—were coming in, chewing tobacco and playing horseshoes in the mud pits beside the road, looking back at the porch every couple of throws. The Yard, with rusted metal and a band of red sunset stretching from the horizon clear to the corn elevator standing at the end of the lot next to the field, seemed to be glowing of its own accord.

“I could use a couple of good oil drums,” said the man whiskered in steel wool.

“Good,” said C, and they walked over to where the oil drums were. They don’t want oil drums, thought C; this is just a preliminary, something to warm up on; he hopes to be able to get what he wants for almost nothing . . . maybe asking me to throw it in on a deal for something else he pretends to want.

The two out-of-state men turned the drums over several times by rolling them with the bottoms of their kangaroo shoes and pulling them up onto their tops by grabbing hold of the hand pumps. “Those are good pumps,” said C.

“The pumps don’t make no difference to us,” said the younger man. “All we want them for is to make a barbecue grill.”

That was good thinking, thought C, shrewd; these are real traders. “They’d be good for that,” he said.

“Probably be better to make it out of something else. These would be hard to cut.”

“True.”

“What do you think you might take for them anyway?”

“Probably something that was at least as big and weighed at least as much. Probably nothing that you could have brought with you—or I’d see it sticking out of your car from here.”

“That’s a rough deal,” said the younger man. “Very few things are that big and weigh that little.”

“Metal things, at least. Maybe a couple of kitchen tables.”

“Measured how?”

“Occupied space.”

“Then a table would be too small.”

“No, I meant two for one barrel.”

“That’s a rough deal.”

“Maybe a lot of small things, then,” said C.

“Is that the way you always trade?” asked the older man.

“Generally,” said C. “Sometimes for food. Sometimes for tobacco. Other things that I need.”

“Oh. Well, what’ll you trade that tool box for?”

They don’t want that either, thought C, but they’re getting ready. The three walked over to the tool box, an oak rectangular-shaped carry-all with a smooth, round dowel across the top, fastened to bell-shaped ends. Several of the horseshoe players went home and a couple more took their places. These replacements were not such good pitchers and Rabbit from clear inside the house could hear the occasional sproinginging of the shoes, on end, striking the stake and springing off.

“I don’t know,” said C. “Probably I wouldn’t take anything for it. They’re pretty hard to come by, and if I ever get together some tools, then I’ll need it.”

“I see,” said the old man, pulling out his pocket watch, holding it up to his ear and winding it. “Then there’s some of these things here that you won’t trade. Like that birdbath top, for instance.”

“Do you mean that sundial?”

“That thing over there”—he pointed—“that you put on top of birdbaths in the lawn. . . . Maybe it’s a manhole cover.”

“That’s a sundial,” said C, thinking, They don’t want that either, but they’re getting ready. Probably the next one. If I guess right, I can end up with everything they brought to trade. “It just doesn’t have the pointer.”

“Oh. Then you probably wouldn’t think of trading that either. In case you got a pointer.”

“I’d practically give that away; for something that weighed about as much.”

“Oh. But you probably wouldn’t want to trade the cider press.”

That’s it, thought C. “I might. I’d have a hard time getting another one, though, around here. They’re scarce and people hold on to ’em.”

They walked over to it, a devious distance of about twenty-five yards.

“But you might—for, say, three lawnmowers.”

“Well, most likely not. It depends, though.”

They began walking again, over toward the car, past many more pieces of things that these out-of-state men might have wanted. By the horseshoe pits they stopped and watched the game for a while, neither party speaking. That game was finished and another one begun with two other men. C watched as the challengers—obviously better—roared into a lead of six to zero and then threw a double ringer on top of a single one and won nine to zero . . . a skunk game. “Must be depressing,” said C.

“It’s only a game,” said the old man, and they walked over to their automobile.

“Missouri,” said C, indicating the license plates on the back bumper.

“That’s where the car’s from, at least,” said the younger of the two out-of-state men. The other lifted two partially broken lawnmowers out of the back seat and down onto the grass.

“Do they work?”

“No, they’re broken. But they could be fixed.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“No good,” said C. “That press is worth more than that. Twice as much. I thought you said you had three.”

“That’s a rough deal,” said the younger out-of-state man.

“True.”

“How about some water pipe?”

“Galvanized?”

“Sure.”

And the two began pulling pieces of pipe from the back-seat floor, ranging in size from several inches to five feet. After they had drained their car of this, making a pile in the grass as big as a man, on top they put two collapsible lawn chairs. They shut the door and looked at C.

“That’s good,” said C. “That makes up the difference. Almost.” I’ve got them, he thought; all this for a cider press.

“It should,” said the older man, took out his pocket watch, and handed it to him. A nice one with a train on the back.

“Good. I’ll even let you have that sundial too—if you want it.”

“Sure. I guess we’ll take that too.”

The three went over to the sundial, past the horseshoe players, and through a large group of town men sitting and talking in what little was left of the sunset, then back again toward the car, the dial between the two out-of-state men, carrying it like a stretcher, followed by three or four of the town men. They set it down and leaned it against the car.

“That’s almost as heavy as a manhole cover,” said C.

“Seems to be,” said the young man, and opened the trunk. Inside was a solid foot and a half of prize junk—old bottles, metal screws, scaffolding nails, doorknobs, pieces of chain, and children’s baseball equipment, tools and gears, pulleys and brazing rods. They placed the sundial on top of this and the back of the car sank another half-inch onto the overload springs. The two men looked at this trunkful of prize junk that C didn’t get, and looked at C, and then away.

“It should be,” said the old man. “It’s solid silver.” And he scraped away a tiny line of the tarnished metal with a penknife blade, revealing a thread of silver. “I’d heard that you had this; that Turner had got a hold of it and brought it up here to trade for some tractor part, not knowing that it came from the Stafford estate in Knocksville.”

The town men looked at the men from out of state, then at C, thinking, You poor sucker, too bad you didn’t know . . . that much silver’s worth as much as this whole Yard put together. Poor bastard.

Damn it, thought C. They would have traded that whole trunkload too. I didn’t know they wanted that.

“You can keep the cider press,” said the younger man, climbed inside, and they drove away.

One of the town men picked up a piece of pipe and looked through it like a gun barrel—pointing it up toward the light; then set it down.

“It’s too dark,” said Jimmy Cassum, and the horseshoe game broke up and the players went home. In five minutes everyone went home—out of the Yard and into the darkness beyond the streetlight and C’s vision. He walked through the Yard to the house and met Rabbit and Ester on the steps.

“Going home?” said C.

“I’m a working man,” said Rabbit. “This night air’s hard on the kidneys.”

“Goodbye, Ester.”

“Goodbye,” she said, and left. C watched them walk down the Yard and by the pile of water pipe, Rabbit looking at it very carefully. Then C sat down in the rocking chair and brushed the mosquitoes away from his face and arms in regular movements. He watched the light go on in Rabbit’s house. Cell came out and sat carefully beside him on the wooden chair, waiting to see if it would collapse, trying to be ready if it did.

“Another chair,” she said.

“One more,” he said, thinking, Those guys were some real traders.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Nothing important. Just that everyone thinks I’m an idiot or poor fool or something for not knowing that this sundial I had was made out of silver. But it’s just a sundial to me and I don’t care . . . except that they had more stuff I could have gotten.”

“You mean it was silver? Real silver? Could you get it back—if you called them up and told them it didn’t really belong to you and that you had no right to sell it?”

“No . . . it’s just that look on their faces when they thought they’d outwitted me. And they did. If only I’d known.”

“It’s hard to tell how people feel by what they say,” said Cell, thinking, Silver!

They sat, brushing mosquitoes away from their arms and listening to the buzzing of junebugs as they came careening across the porch and bumping into the screen, trying to penetrate through into the light. Small animals crawled silently through the rubble in the Yard. The forest of moonlight covering Ontarion was diluted by rain clouds moving northeast, finally letting down what seemed to C like thin silver strands of rain, beginning at the top of his streetlight and extending toward the ground. “Mist,” he said.

“C,” said Cell, “do you think we could maybe get some inshoorance?”

CONFLICT. CELL NEEDED THIS, AND IF THERE WAS NOT ANY PRESENT, then she imagined that some was coming. In this manner she was like a professional fighter who, when he isn’t fighting, is preparing. Of course this cost her, and her body remained at a tough eighty-seven pounds and C could almost cover her tight little buttocks with one hand and get a good bit of one of her hard-nippled breasts into his mouth. There was hardly enough loose skin on her stomach for him to squeeze, and her thighs were barely larger than his arms at the place where they joined his shoulders. Cell secretly enjoyed this size because she felt that, unlike other women, her husband knew her better because there was less of her and each place could get more attention. Yet she knew he could not penetrate into her innermost thoughts, or even their periphery, for that matter. So when the time of the month of her periodical bleeding came and went without anything happening, he not only didn’t know, but she didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t until just after missing her third period in a row, after her weight had teetered the scale over to near ninety pounds and she felt queasy in the morning, that she began to wonder if maybe that rubber-and-plastic gadget she had found in a cardboard box full of kitchen utensils C had traded for might not be foolproof. Even though she had used it every time afterward (as much for the sensation of cool, rushing water as for the clinical benefits). And as soon as the idea came to her, she knew it was true. She tested it with her consciousness. She could feel it. She began thinking the way she was sure pregnant women thought. She noticed that her fingers were getting fatter. She waited for when she might have dreams of crabs or fish. She weighed herself several times a day, every time sure that the scale was not accurate enough to record her changes. Things tired her out more quickly. She was sure the other people at work—even the customers—knew.

This is it, she thought. This is the way it will come. Things has been good up till now; but now it comes. Now we’re going to pay for all this. It ain’t right, being the way we’ve been, and now it comes—the splitting open and destruction, the screaming and crying. It was meant that it should happen—that even the water couldn’t wash it away. We going to be held to it now, C and me. We going to be thrust back to the real world like we was flung from the sky.

By the fourth miss there was no doubt in her mind. She weighed ninety-eight and a quarter pounds, a lifetime record, and she no longer bothered to weigh herself after that. C’ll know before long, she thought. He can’t help but notice, he knows me so well; and as soon as she thought this, she became anxious that he should notice. Especially when I’m on top, she thought, he should notice.

But he didn’t notice at first. At first he noticed that whenever he lay down, his wife would crawl on top of him, many times just to lie there, as though trying to sink into him, sometimes in the morning when neither of them had any inclination at all, despite his erection, which was a phenomenon that always bewildered him to the point of a prolonged astonishment . . . much more bewildering because, he reasoned, it was himself that was doing it, no outside forces were operating, and to no purpose or end. Sometimes she climbed on top of him when he was lying on his stomach. This is curious, thought C, and nothing else.

“WHY ARE YOU THROWING UP?” ASKED C, LOOKING DOWN AT CELL kneeling over the toilet, her face red.

“I’m sick,” said Cell.

“Maybe we should get you some Pepto-Bismol.”

“I don’t think it would help.”

“You’re sick almost every morning. Have you been worrying about something?”

“Worrying? What’s there to worry about? Everything’s fine. I’m just a little sick, that’s all.”

“Oh,” said C.

“Are you worrying, C?”

“No,” he said, and began to leave.

Cell sat down on the floor and put her arms between her legs.

“C,” she said, looking not at him but at the bathroom linoleum, “a wonderful thing has happened. Wonderful. I’m pregnant.”

“I thought you were getting a little heavier.”

“Did you?”

“That’s good,” said C. “That’s very good. Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m over four months into it.”

“That’s good,” said C and there was a grand mal seizure inside his head that drained all the blood from his face, and like a ghost he stole from the room and, half dressed, stumbled outside to sit in the rocking chair. . . . Pregnant . . . pregnant.

For the next five months C had what seemed like a projector in his head that showed a stream of home movies—something that developed by a series of awful scenes, with the only sound being that of C’s own thinking voice—something impossible to turn off but impossible not to notice when it was running. These scenes were in black and white and the characters (usually only two, he and his future child) sometimes just fused into the gray background and disappeared, only to reappear in the same place. C of course was always himself in these, but his hypothetical child began as a normal-ish baby somewhere between one and five, and ended up either a belligerent, brutal, egotistical, raving monster or a cowering, crawling, suffering, pale, pink-skinned animal that whimpered and hid under tables and in corners. For instance: one movie would begin with C in some way setting an example for his child—concluding a successful trade—and would end by his experimental child either hating him for being a cheat and enrolling in a monastery, or following in his footsteps and going on to become the biggest swindler in the country. One of the more dreaded of these movies was one in which C told his son that stealing was wrong. This movie had two endings too: one where his son lies and steals his way into Fort Madison Prison and becomes a punk, the other where he is naked in a barren acreage, cleaned out by all the shrewd traders in the world, who manipulate around him with half-truths. C tried to explain at this time in the film that lies are only bad if they are abundantly self-centered—that half-truths are sometimes helpful. But his son looks back and hates him for being wishy-washy and afraid to take a stand on the vital questions and issues of the day.

Another character was Ansel Easter, who would come shifting into a scene carrying a black belt which he offered to C for use on the child. “Bring welts to them,” he would say, “big blue and black ones that will last forever. Make ’em scream. Teach ’em the Bible and everlasting glory. Teach ’em of repentance and damnation. Teach ’em of God and his infinite wisdom. Teach ’em Hell.” And in these movies C would not only be standing, shaking in revulsion at his reborn character, but searching desperately for the projector, wondering why inside his own mind such a thing could go on, seemingly out of his control.

No, he thought. All fathers are not mine. All fathers are not mine. It doesn’t have to be like that . . . things can be different. Someone can be happier than I was, and than I am. It’s possible. It doesn’t have to be like that—like a living worm that everyone catches from their father—and wishes from then on for the darkness and the warmth and the . . .

But C wasn’t sure of this. He wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t happen all over again, and even when he talked to Cell about how their lives would be changed, and how much joy would come into their hearts, he was watching home movies of what he was sure it would be like. And as Cell grew to well over a hundred pounds, these movies became more frequent and more vivid, many times intruding into his dreams and making his body sweat even outside the covers.

C WAITED WITH HIS WIFE IN THE INDIGENT WARD AT THE HOSPITAL—A large room with many beds and many pregnant and very pregnant women. Cell had insisted that he be there, not during the birth (which she didn’t care about because she figured that if it killed her, well, then it wouldn’t matter), but be there when they carried in the baby, in order that he would have to accept some of the blame, in order that she wouldn’t have to show it to him later, in order that they could be together when the blow fell.

C was glad for the large room, the other women, nurses, orderlies, water canisters, the noise, and the activity. It’s better here, he thought, than I imagined. There are witnesses. There are other fathers.

He sat beside her bed and they waited, watching everyone and everything that moved in the room, not ever taking their complete attention away from the two swinging doors through which a nurse would emerge carrying the baby.

“How wonderful it is,” said Cell, “that we have a baby—a baby boy.”

“A boy,” said C. “They told you that? That it would . . . that it is a boy?”

“Yes. Before I came out of the room they told me.”

“I thought it might be a boy.”

“That’s what we wanted. Isn’t that what we wanted, C?”

“Yes,” he said. “I thought you wouldn’t be conscious then—that they put you to sleep . . . because of the pain.”

“No. I think it’s more natural to be awake . . . and I didn’t want to miss anything.”

That takes courage, thought C. “And you didn’t . . . I mean, it must have been so painful. Did you see it?”

“No. No, I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I wanted you to be with me . . . to share.”

“Do you feel like going to sleep? Are you tired?”

“No. I feel fine. I’m too excited to sleep.” Poor C, she thought, he isn’t prepared for what will happen.

“Oh. Well, maybe you should be. Maybe it’s not healthy not to be. Should I call a nurse?”

“No. It’s the best thing to be excited now—because I’m so happy.”

A nurse walked through the doors in the other direction, away from them.

And another nurse, a young nurse, not small, with telephone-black hair, came through the doors into the thirty-bed-capacity room carrying a bundle and looking down into it. She stood casually, resting on one leg, and looked across the ward, from bed to bed. Some of the others looked up from their lying or propped-up positions and then looked away uninterested. Her search carried her easily down one aisle and up the other, rocking her arms so naturally that her limbs seemed to swing in time to her heart, until she found the frail little woman with colorless eyes peering out of her covers like a frightened bird, her husband sitting beside her in a straight-backed chair looking like a passenger in a very fast car that had just taken off. First baby, she thought; people are so odd . . . such a simple thing, having a baby. But these people aren’t even holding on to each other. She needs comfort now. He should be more compassionate. They’re afraid to be kind. And she carried the bundle over to them.

“Mrs. Easter?” she said, in a voice that came sympathetically, automatically, from way down inside her, clear from nursing school.

The colorless eyes did not leave what she was carrying and there was no answer.

“He’ll probably be getting hungry about now,” she said. “He’s a handsome little devil.”

Still the two didn’t speak and she carefully laid the baby down on the bed between Cell’s spread legs. Then she left, feeling slighted, thinking, Stupid people!

Cell looked at it, and it moved. C looked at it and, as though it might be a butterfly bomb, got up from his chair and stalked around the bed, sliding one hand along the metal frame. Cell wiggled one of her feet, then the other, then both. The baby noticed neither. Later, C sat back down on the chair and lit a cigarette.

“No smoking,” snapped the woman in the next bed. C pinched off the lit end and put it in his pocket. Cell reached down toward the baby with an extended finger and touched its right hand.

Nothing happened. As though taking apart an intricate machine, she pulled the wrapping away. One of its legs moved. C came over closer.

“Aren’t the eyes open yet?” asked C.

The eyes! thought Cell; they will . . . oh, my God; but soon then the baby opened its eyes and looked—at least it seemed as if it looked. And then C touched it and it moved again. Then Cell touched it. After a while it opened its mouth and yawned. Then it made a noise and then it cried.

It’s a baby, thought Cell. It’s just a baby . . . look, C, it’s just a baby. “It’s wonderful,” she said, as though listening to the sound she wanted to say.

“It’s wonderful,” said C, trying this also, thinking, It’s alive, it’s something . . . something different from me. It’s all together.

“It’s wonderful,” they said together and began to laugh, tears running down the sides of their faces. “It’s wonderful.” The baby screamed—C coming over to the bed and being close to Cell— she finally picking up the baby, laughing and crying.

“Keep quiet,” snapped the woman in the next bed. “Don’t you know this is a hospital?” But the Easters did not hear her.

The nurse returned with a paper and wrote down numbers and words from the chart hanging on the bed. Cell was rocking the baby back and forth with the motion of her body, smiling, and C, absent-mindedly, not wanting to take his eyes away from his family, said,

“Glove.”

And she wrote it down.