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
