bring it along, but hurry up,” said John through the screen door. Then he returned to walking impatiently up and down in the yard. This grass needs to be cut again, he thought. I’ve never seen such a summer, an inch a day. An inch a day! A person ought to be able to watch it move.
“Should we bring some paper for starting a fire?” sang out Sarah from inside.
“No . . . yes . . . I don’t care. Hurry up.”
“Don’t shout,” said Sarah, bumping the door open with the picnic basket. “Oh, I forgot the blanket.”
“We don’t need a blanket.”
“Yes we do. Here, hold this.” She hung the basket on his arm and ran back inside. He began pacing again. Sarah returned with a heavy wool blanket, dropped it on the ground and went back for the small canister of cream. John began counting to himself, but at twenty-seven a dragonfly settled on the rim of the basket. It was solid blue, nearly iridescent, and its double wings were tinted the same color, like thinly colored glass, with lines of silver and sun dust. John stood very still. He’d seen many dragonflies, especially when he was little, fishing with his father, stacked up two and three at a time on the end of his pole, but never, so far as he could remember, one this color. It seemed so beautiful to him that even while looking at it he couldn’t believe it. When it flew away he felt as if he just had to have another look at it, dropped the basket and carefully pursued it, bringing the glasses up to his eyes whenever he had a chance to look at it sitting still.
Sarah came out with the cream, saw the abandoned basket of food, a cat within three feet of it, and her husband walking quickly down the road, crossing over a fence, off into a field, looking every once in a while into space with his binoculars. “Get out of here,” she yelled, rescuing the basket and sending the cat off down below the fence. Sarah secretly didn’t like cats and felt they were much too sneaky, and where some people thought they were independent and cunning, she thought they were stupid, vile, insensitive and cowardly. She threw a stick at it and it went across the road; then she looked around quickly for fear Mrs. Miller might have seen her. Satisfied, she went over to John’s Ford, put the basket and blanket in the rumble seat and got into the passenger’s side, easing herself down onto the soft leather. Wearing blue jeans was fun. She tied her scarf more tightly under her chin and just sat. No thoughts came to her, or pictures. She could see her husband coming back down the road, feel the warm sun, smell fall, hear noises and find small prism colors in the windshield; but vacantly, taking a mild pleasure in through all her senses, passively enjoying being alive—taking a vacation from motivation, interest and control.
John got in and started the motor. “What’s up, fat-face?” he asked, easing out of the driveway, smiling inwardly at the sound of his mellow-toned muffler.
“Just sitting,” said Sarah, putting her feet up on the glove compartment and accepting her whole self back. They almost never rode in the old Ford and when they did it was a pleasant novelty. It was a convertible with running boards, mechanical brakes and red paint. It made her feel important to ride in it, and waving at people from it was especially nice.
Still, she couldn’t bring herself to wave at Ronny McClean, who stood in the ditch in front of his parents’ house at the edge of Sharon. John would. She looked into her faded denim knees and put her feet down.
“I wonder what it’s like to be like that,” asked John.
“Don’t talk about it. I’ll get upset.”
“One day he rode his bicycle over to Frytown and they finally found him in Lloyd Brenneman’s fruit cellar, eating a little banquet he had spread out on the floor. That’s the farthest he’s been from home in forty years. That was . . . let’s see . . . thirty or thirty-two years ago.”
“Don’t talk about it, John. It’s awful.”
“No it isn’t. At least, if you grew up with him. He’s never been any different.”
“That makes it worse.”
“It doesn’t. I kind of like him. He’s all right.”
“ You don’t like him. You just say that because you think that’d be good to feel that way—I’m sure you have a secret ambition to be a saint.”
“Sarah, that’s unfair. I only—”
“I know,” she said, and moved over closer to him. “It’s just, you know, how you are. Being bad isn’t so serious.”
“Yes it is.”
“You worry too much.”
“Besides, I do like him.”
“Why can’t you just accept that a madman gives you the creeps? You never learned to accept things and forget them.”
John’s voice rose to nearly an argumentative level. “It’d make more sense for you to learn to accept that there’re people like Ronny, and accept that it’s not so bad if there are. It’s possible to like someone for—”
“John, let’s don’t talk about it.”
“Not talking about it doesn’t solve anything.”
“There isn’t anything to be solved.” Both sat in a gloomy silence. John felt the beginning of what could materialize into a roaring headache. The air seemed too wet, too hot, and his most cherished car seemed made of wood and corrugated fasteners. He drove faster. They turned off the blacktop onto gravel, and the dust flew.
Two hundred feet in the air a large bird looked down on them. At that height the wind covered all the noise from the ground, and he could not hear the muffler or the popping of the gravel against the tires. Only the motion, and the dust stretching out behind the red car like so many giant balloons. He was too high to be hunting, cruising in long circles. He veered slightly to intersect with a lesser angel, the sensation passing through him in all its colors, and quite out of his own control he let out a joyful krreeeee. Below, the car slowed down and stopped, the dust catching up with it and blowing on ahead. Lights flashing: two tiny glass reflections. He swung off toward the west, the hayfields and long-grass pasture.
“It’s a broad-wing! I’m sure of it. Look at him—just look at him! Oh man, can you imagine him up there, the wind and—There he goes. Just look at him.”
Sarah was turned, unhurriedly going through the basket, looking for her own pair of field glasses, wondering if she hadn’t forgotten them.
“Here, take these, quick, look at him!”
Sarah adjusted the left eyepiece one half a digit to the plus side.
“Hurry up!”
She put them to her eyes, couldn’t find the bird, took them down, relocated it and brought the glasses back up.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“He’s too far gone now,” said John.
“I saw him,” she complained.
John put the car in gear and they were off again. Sarah waved at the Brogans sitting in their yard on steel-rung chairs. It seemed the motor was running smoother and he drove more slowly; soon he didn’t think about the rattles, and by the time they arrived at McDuffs pasture
