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