The warm weather drew C out onto the porch in the daytime, where he sat in a rocking chair looking over the Yard. Cell read magazines and books and listened to the radio, and finally (with C’s approval) got a part-time job working in a fabric shop in order to keep from going stir crazy and to pay the electricity and oil bills. They had a blood test and were married.
In the beginning of the warm weather only those few young men that had been C’s close friends before he’d gone to Iowa City came over in the evenings when the light was still out and sat on the front porch or around the Yard with him, talking and laughing. Midsummer, however, saw the porch and Yard filled with people sitting and talking; just enough shade to keep the sun off, and enough to talk about to last at least another hour.
But it wasn’t C who brought them. No one ever said, “Let’s go over to visit C.” It was always, “Let’s go over to C’s place.” Sometimes the women would come too, but Cell mostly watched by herself out of the windows or beside C on the porch, thinking to herself: “They’ve come like vultures. People don’t come to a junk yard just to be.” But they did; and later Cell still thought of them as vultures. Even Rabbit, after he was married, came over and sat heavily on one of the front steps in his shirt sleeves and smoked cigars and looked at everyone out of his tiny, squinched eyes.
“Rabbit,” said C. “I haven’t seen you.”
“In a long time,” said Rabbit. “No, I guess you haven’t.”
“Brought your new wife, I noticed,” said C.
“Yes. She’s gone inside . . . to talk to your new one.”
That bastard, thought C.
“I noticed everyone coming over here.” Rabbit gestured out toward the two or three groups of people milling around out in the Yard, sitting on pieces of broken machinery and drinking soda pop or beer they had brought with them. “Thought that maybe there was something more here than a growing pile of junk.”
“No, that’s about it,” said C.
“I see,” said Rabbit, and tossed a cigar butt away from the house. “You got any insurance?”
“Insurance?”
“In case anything happened to you, or to your house.”
“No,” said C, standing up and leaning against one of the front pillars, watching a blue sedan drive up and stop. “Did you see those plates?”
“Might’ve been Missouri,” said Rabbit.
Two men got out of the car, one older than the other but possibly related, thought Rabbit, because of the protective way the older man acted toward the younger. It was more in the way they moved than anything else—sort of a carry-over from the two men remembering the childhood of the younger man, but only one of them remembering the childhood of the older. Rabbit’s eyes were the only ones good enough to be that sure from that distance.
“A man ought to have insurance,” said Rabbit, “in case something happens.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. . . . Look at them. There’s some real traders.”
Rabbit looked again at the two as they walked along through the junk, talking quietly to themselves, looking over the lumber and angle iron, touching a piece here and there, the way a husband will accompany his wife in the grocery store . . . over to three men from Ontarion sitting on an old tractor drinking beer from bottles. One of these three nodded over toward the porch and Rabbit noticed that the two did not look then—did not follow the nod, but marked it carefully so that later they could take a long, studied look.
“I wonder what they want,” said Rabbit.
“How do you know they want something?”
“Because people act like that when they come into the bank, if they want something.”
“Curious,” said C. “I didn’t think it was at all the same thing. . . . It isn’t.”
“Just the same, you ought to get some insurance. What does your wife think about it? What’s her name?”
“Cell . . . you’ve seen her in the drygoods store. If I could only know what they wanted before I talked to them. She wouldn’t want insurance and has a very idealistic attitude about the world. Everything’s always fine with her. And with me. We don’t need any insurance.”
“How about health insurance?”
“Don’t need it. Damn, Rabbit, if you want some, or some more, why don’t you get it?”
“It’s not right . . . living like this,” said Rabbit. “How about when you have children?”
“Children!”
“I suppose you don’t . . . well, you know.”
“Christ, Rabbit! Besides, she’s got one of these things that keeps her from getting pregnant. It’s a thing that shoots water up inside her and runs all the sperm out. It’s kind of a neat gadget. Do you want to see it?”
“No!!!”
“Well. So we aren’t going to have any kids,” said C.
“Why don’t you go out and see what they want?”
“Give ’em too much advantage—thinking I’m curious. Better if they come up here.”
“It’s odd,” said Rabbit, mostly to himself. “Set ways of doing things—procedures, everything like a real job, like real work, but not any money. Your father would have called that evil . . . something that appears to be like other, natural things, but isn’t.”
“Maybe you better go in and get a pop; you’re looking hot and thirsty.”
Rabbit got up and ambled toward the door, turned and looked again at the two men, who had by this time pretty much covered the entire Yard, walking easily, not stopping longer in any one spot than another. Then he told C something that C had suspected was true but couldn’t be sure of even after Rabbit said it: that everyone had forgotten about his father because even though it’d happened, it was too bizarre to believe, too fantastic for the memory to hang on to—there was no place to put it. “For instance,” said Rabbit, “how long can you remember a nightmare?” Then he went inside to find Ester and have a pop.
C sat on the steps and waited, called Jimmy Cassum over to talk to him, and lit a cigarette. The two out-of-state men finally walked up to the porch as though they had just happened to be passing that way, would have been passing that way if no one was there at all, if there was no Yard, no porch, no house—just walking in the fields.
“Hello,” said the older man.
“Hello,” said Jimmy.
“Do you own this place?”
“No. But he does.” He indicated C sitting beside him.
“You have some nice things here,” said the younger man.
“Real nice things,” added the older man.
“Thanks,” said C.
“Kind of young to be owning all this, aren’t you?”
“Kind of,” answered C.
“Do you sell?”
“Trade.”
“Good . . . good.”
These guys are great, thought C, asking me all this that they already know . . . as if their car wasn’t full of things to trade; as if they didn’t know what they wanted before they came here. Maybe all the way from Missouri.
“Do you see anything here that you like?”
“Well, not really.”
“Well, if you do,” said C, and pinched off the lit end of his