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
