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
