“Why?”
“Because that’s what I’m going to do.”
“What’s what you’re going to do?”
“Run the junk yard.”
“Why, C?”
“Cell, listen . . . don’t talk. Listen. We are going to live because people will trade us things that we need for things we don’t need.”
“We don’t have anything we don’t need.”
“Quiet. Listen. Just listen. We can trade this car—”
“WE NEED THE CAR!”
“—for a bunch of junk—bring it here and leave it in the yard—sort of display it.”
“C—”
“People will trade food for it too. People will do anything to get something secondhand.”
“But—”
“And my father would turn over in his grave if he could know about his house being surrounded by junk. Antique buyers will tear their eyes out when they can’t buy what they want . . . and those kinds of people never have anything to trade. . . . I’ll be back.” And he threw on his clothes and ran out of the house.
Cell’s eyes filled with water. She pulled the corners of the sheet up over her shoulders and tried to fall asleep. They’ll fool him, she thought. How young he must be to not know that the world fools people who think like that—think that something can be made out of nothing—that happiness can come just because you decide it should—yes, and that the meek will inherit; children’s thinking. I would never have come with him, she thought, if I’d known he was that stupid; and now I can’t leave him, can’t tell him because children never believe, and have to stay and watch him crack open and watch his childhood drain out of him. I’ve been so careful not to be fooled this time from one direction that it has come up behind me. C . . . C . . . C . . . And she fell asleep completely covered, her head jammed in between two pillows.
These pillows protected her later on from hearing noises in the front yard next to the street. And by the time she finally got out of bed, wrapped the sheet around her, and walked to one of the huge windows, she saw C standing in the middle of the dreary afternoon yard, standing beside a man in overalls and a tremendous pile of lumber, metal pipes, two oil drums, a stack of half a hundred pieces of ceramic tile, enough fire bricks for a fireplace, holding three giant brown paper bags wedged in between his two arms . . . standing and talking.
Cell stared out of the window. No, she said to herself, it’s not natural. He wouldn’t have done it . . . he couldn’t have done it—not this quick; not in a town this size.
The man in overalls got into his pickup and drove away into the snow, pulling C’s car behind him with a chain fastened not to the bumper, but the frame. C, still holding the food bags, walked around the beginning of his yard, noticing carefully the condition of the fire bricks and ceramic tile, not caring much over the lumber, which he knew a man could get anywhere, even steal off an isolated barn . . . if he wanted it badly enough. It began to snow and settle on the top of these things. He went inside.
“You traded the car,” said Cell from inside the sheet, thinking, YOU TRADED THAT CAR!
“Here’s some food,” said C, and set down the bags of frozen vegetables, meat, potatoes, spices, apples, peaches, flour, butter, eggs, and one half-gallon of milk. “We can keep it outside until someone brings a refrigerator.”
“That was the only thing we had that was worth anything. Three hundred dollars! We could’ve had three hundred dollars for that.”
“But we’ve got some other stuff instead,” said C, meaning both that they had been better off in the exchange, and that he didn’t want to talk about it any more; and stood in the bay window and watched the snow fall on his new pile of junk.
Cell was quiet. The size of the house . . . the size of the rooms and the windows . . . frightened her a little. A hundred people could hide in here, she thought—maybe more, if they were employed and made money. She carried the bags to their one furnished room and separated out enough for them to eat—raw carrots, radishes, green onions, butter, and bread. The rest she put out on the back porch in a cardboard box, put this in the corner and threw an old single mattress from the basement over it as disguise so that no one would steal it in the night, being careful to step only on the aisle of porch next to the wall where the thin film of snow had not reached. We can eat better, she thought, when someone brings a stove to trade, and then cursed herself: Idiocy, plain idiocy; I will simply wait, and after the food is gone—after we’ve made a fire in the basement, or cooked the meat in the furnace—after no one comes and he finally begins to see things are not like he thinks they are . . . then we’ll do something to get on, something normal.
IN FEBRUARY THEY GOT A STOVE THAT C BROUGHT INSIDE, DESPITE HIS reluctance to take anything out of the growing collection in the Yard except furniture, which now decorated three of the downstairs rooms. People traded, and every once in a while, on top of what was already in the bargain, C would say, “We could kind of use some food,” and obtain another bag, which was split between the inside and the back porch. Cell wanted a gun in order to be able to shoot anyone trying to steal food from under the mattress. But she didn’t tell him.
She watched all this—this dealing in the snow—out of the windows, each time half not believing it, and half trying to guess, from the dress of the man, what in God’s name he wanted from the growing heap of trash. “More than equal size and weight,” said C, when asked what he wanted for a piece of this or that, keeping the prerogative to refuse even this exchange if he didn’t care for the proposed item. In March they obtained a refrigerator and set it inside. “You skinned me on this one, Easter,” called the man after him, as he and Cell wheeled it inside. “But next time it’ll be different.”
“I’ll be here,” said C, and the two laughed; then Bill Wooly and his boys lifted a bathtub with feet up onto a flatbed. Two of the older boys hopped up with it and steadied it from shifting as their father eased the truck over the ruts in the road toward home.
“Oh, C,” shouted Cell, “we’ve got a refrigerator! This is becomin’ just like a real house. Before long all those downstairs rooms will be full of furniture.”
“What’s more important,” said C, “is that Bill Wooly is from up around Tipton, and there’s plenty of traders up there, shrewd traders, with lots to trade.”
“Things are good, C,” said Cell. “What with this refrigerator, we can live the way people were meant to live . . . good people were meant to live.”
“With refrigerators?” asked C, smiling slightly.
“Don’t tease,” said Cell and set about cleaning out the refrigerator and ordering food inside it from the back porch, being happy despite herself. . . despite her knowing, sensing clear back inside her, that something wasn’t right, that people shouldn’t live in a happy, easy way without money, with others taking care of them—knowing that something would come along, something was bound to happen—like a blinding arrow of lightning—and break everything apart; and the better they got on, the higher they rose, then that much heavier the fall would be, maybe even enough to kill C; and in order that that should not happen, Cell worried, and watched, and waited, suspicious of everything in order that they would not have so far to fall . . . at least her half. C could tell. “Remember?” he asked. “Remember that a place and food is all? That’s what you told me. We’ve got those.” She smiled, but waited.
Their food, which could no longer be hidden by a single mattress, began to rot—the three fourths of it Cell couldn’t jam into the refrigerator that said GENUINE FRIGIDAIRE on the inside of the door and woke her up for the first few weeks every time it turned on. Near the end of April, C got another one, but