what of his personal articles he'd brought down as the night or two he had originally planned to stay back in November stretched into months. He thought it astounding that it was May already. It was a patch of rare evening sun he was sitting in, and he supposed that the buzzing fly had hatched in the incubating May warmth of that Coke bottle, out of the mud and decayed bodies of last year's trapped flies at the bottom. Broken-down deck chairs were stored in the shed, and tools and supplies left over from thirty years ago when the house had been finished: nails, bolts, and screws placed in jars, bits of Sheetrock and plywood, excess plumbing and electrical parts, bundles of copper pipe, coils of wire. His old Huffy bicycle hung from the ceiling.
What was left in the shed had been neatly organized by his father several times, but gradually the layering-on of years' worth of things for which there was no better place, and of dust, bird, and rodent remains, had gained sway. Now Lafleur's things had stacked up on the benches and floor. Sometimes, when he dug down through the debris to the original layer, he found things that made time buckle back: the very lumber crayon he remembered drawing with as a boy, his mother's old hair dryer, a butane burner he remembered his father using to heat steel strapping, and his father's Thompson pistol with interchangeable .45 and .410 barrels, a combination heavy-duty persuader and light-duty snake gun. He'd completely forgotten about the pistol. There was a holster for it somewhere. He'd spent an evening rubbing off the dots of rust with steel wool and oiling the gun until it gleamed, then returned it to the molded cushions in the hardwood case. Illegal because of the short shotgun barrel, the gun was probably a collector's item. He guessed it had become his.
Jones sat facing him and swept her tail back and forth in the dirt. She'd finished eating. In a moment she would bark, demanding to be released from her chain. If Lafleur looked directly at her, she would certainly bark. He looked up toward the house through the ferns and blackberry bushes. The bushes had hard pale-green berries. Besides refurbishing the house for his father and Jewel, he should clean up the shed. At the least, he should trim the trees along the drive and repair the Goods' mailbox before it fell off its stand. He'd become a derelict, almost, disconnected from nearly everything but the rudiments of daily routine and living off the tailings of a previous, more opulent life. His mail went to his father and Jewel and he scarcely looked at it. Most of his meals came out of cans and were contemptuous of nutrition. He got his drinking water from a hose that ran from the stock hydrant at the Goods' stable. He showered at work once or twice a week. He smelled. His toilet here consisted of a canvas outhouse with a ten-gallon can behind the shed. He had to cart the can up to an R-V park to empty it. It was a scatological comedy he engaged in every two weeks, surreptitiously slopping his personal sewage into a public tank and driving around town all day with the stinking can in the back of his pickup.
A horse whinny broke the evening air. It sounded like brass, like a rooster measuring the distance between the tool shed and the Goods' place. Jones barked and whined in response, and curled back her upper lip, displaying her truncated lower jaw, and then let out a string of annoyed, high-pitched barks that rattled in Lafleur's ears. He tossed out his coffee dregs and stood. The dog quivered with excitement as he walked to her. She grabbed up her ten-pound pot and trotted in circles, limping heavily on her bad leg. One front foot twisted crazily sideways, but she could act lame or not as she chose, it seemed. Lafleur considered her a model of adaptation. Adroitly, she jumped her chain each time she went around.
When he reached her, she dropped the pot and nuzzled his crotch, leaving a smear of dog food. The horse whinnied again. Lafleur unclasped the dog's chain and she took off, not limping at all. She crashed through a small opening in the wall of blackberry bushes, heading for the stable. He heard horse hooves thudding rapidly. It was an evening ritual between the dog and mare. He heard a woman shout, which was another ritual: Mrs. Good shouting at his dog. In a moment he heard Jones thrashing in the shallows. He heard ducks quacking. A pair of mallards flew overhead, their wings whistling. Lafleur admired the ducks, their missile-like bodies and deep-set wings, their acceleration. They disappeared into the trees, weaving magnificently.
He set the pot in the doorway of the shed, then moved to the bed of his pickup, where he had groceries—a loaf of bread, canned chili and ravioli, beer, toilet paper, cookies, a fresh sack of dog biscuits, and a two-pound box of dehydrated milk. He looked up the road toward Ned Blaylock's place. Through the trees he could pick out a dot of gray roof near the bend in the road, that was all, but he'd given the place another hard look as he passed this evening: the big pink house set back from the road, the metal roofs of the shops gleaming out back, around the yard a fence made of yellow poles and chain link, and equipment everywhere, in every corner and nearly engulfing the house. Machinery leaned against trees and had torn through the steel fabric to the ditch next to the county road. The disrepair of the equipment increased the farther it was from the house, so that what Lafleur saw best as he drove by was the leading edge of confusion: heaps of iron, wheels, booms, tangled cables, buckets, plows, disemboweled engines, and thrusting through it all the wild blackberry bushes that refused to be daunted by leaking fuel and oil, or even by the gouging at their immense, tangled root systems. For weeks Lafleur had been picking things out as he passed: the wheel hub of a Mack truck, the tracks of a Caterpillar crawler, the engine block of a Case, even the familiar blade of a grader on which he'd ridden with his father years ago; and today the disarray had played a trick with him. Despite his childhood experience with Blaylock, despite the outrage he shared with Jewel, he was also as old now himself as Blaylock had been in the days of the monkey wrench, haunted by a sense of his own error and of knowing too much about human frailty, and he had discovered in himself a curious, circumspect, wary, and sardonic affection for the old despised one. Maybe it was Gus's method with Blaylock, passing over to Lafleur now, or maybe the prospect of having to work with the man. Maybe it was just the junk.
He liked that junk. Occasionally over the last several months he had seen direct evidence of Blaylock's presence, but never the man himself—sometimes a curl of exhaust coming from a running engine out back, and once the tail section of a pink Continental vanishing behind a descending garage door. Blaylock was too old, maybe, or too busy reconnoitering the carcass of the partnership to keep close charge of his machinery, and too much a pack rat to ship the irreparable out for salvage. Lafleur understood. He had the pack rat in himself, the impulse to allow his nest to become complex. One never knew when one would find just the part one needed in a junkyard, or at least a part that could be used, or maybe a part one had not even thought of wanting but which one wanted in its being found. One might need those things: bolts and clamps, a bit of iron rail or a piece out of a track, a length of hosing, copper tubing, a bearing or seal, a carburetor needle, or maybe a whole transmission to mate to an engine.
He rested his elbows on the edge of the pickup bed and thought about wanting. He thought about wanting and not knowing what one wanted. He thought about need. He thought about yielding. He thought about giving in to the fibers of attachment made out of DNA and memory and time that bound him to his father. He thought about his life, which seemed like a junkyard. He thought about fishing, which was one of the few things he knew that gave the kind of pleasure looking for something in a junkyard could give, and forgetting what one was looking for and getting lost in the yard, just dreaming and looking for whatever one might feasibly want, and slowly finding what one needed that way.
He moved. He picked up his groceries, carried them into the shed, and set them on a bench. He went back for Jones's pot in the doorway. Bending for the pot, he heard the fly again. He wedged the Coke bottle loose from the mud and turned it upside down. The fly dropped out, took off, banged into the wall and staggered in midair, then flew out of sight over the shed. Lafleur went back in and set the pot on the bench, shoving other articles aside. He switched on his gooseneck lamp. Just behind it was a blackberry bush. The roots had cracked the concrete floor and driven up a stalk between the wall and bench. Its leaves clung to a small, dusty window. The lamp cast a pool of light on the filthy floor and seeped to the profound heaps under the benches: cartons and jars, bundles, all manner of things compressing under their own weight. Too much junk here. Or enough junk, maybe, for him to have enjoyed if he had not felt entrenched in it. His cot was piled with soiled clothes. In a corner his tools were scattered and next to them was the small woodburner he'd kept himself warm with during winter. The dangerously cockeyed stove pipe vanished through a hole he had cut in the wall.
Outside, the sun was about to set.