unhearing. There was no telling the things he knew. He was alone in the far fields of his life. The rain fell on him, he did not move.
There are animals that finally, when the time comes, will not lie down. He was like that. When he kneeled he would get up again slowly. He would rise to one knee, pause, and finally sway to his feet like an old horse.
“Feller in town with all the hair…” he said.
Billy’s fingers made black marks on the bread.
“The hair?”
“What’s he supposed to be?”
“I think a drummer,” Billy said.
“A drummer.”
“He’s with a band.”
“Must be with something,” Harry said.
He unscrewed the cap from a battered thermos and poured what looked like tea. They sat in the quiet of the tall cottonwoods, not even the highest leaves were moving.
They drove to the dump, the sun in the windshield was burning their knees. There was an old cattle gate salvaged from somewhere, some bankrupt ranch. It was open, Harry drove in. They were in a field of junk and garbage on the edge of the creek, a bare field forever smoldering. A black man in overalls appeared from a shack surrounded by bedsprings. He was round-shouldered, heavy as a bull. There was an old, green Chrysler parked on the far side.
“Looking for some pipe, Al,” Harry said.
The man said nothing. He gave a sort of halfhearted signal. Harry had already gone past and turned down an alley of old furniture, stoves, aluminum chairs. There was a sour smell in the air. A few refrigerators, indestructible, had fallen down the bank and were lying half-buried in the stream.
The pipe was all in one place. It was mostly rusted, Billy kicked aimlessly at some sections.
“We can use it,” Harry commented.
They began carrying pieces back to the car and put them on the roof. They drove slowly, the old man’s head tilted back a little. The car swayed in and out of holes. The pipe rolled in the rack.
“Pretty good feller, Al,” Harry said. They were coming to the shack. He lifted his hand as they passed. No one was there.
Billy’s mind was wandering. The ride to town seemed long.
“They give him a lot of trouble,” Harry said. He was watching the road, the empty road which connects all these towns.
“There’s none of that stuff much good out there,” he said. “Sometimes he tries to charge a little for it. People feel like they ought to be able to carry it off for nothing.”
“He didn’t charge you.”
“Me? No, I bring him a little something now and then,” Harry said. “Old Al and me are friends.”
After a while, “Claims to be a free country, I dunno…” he said.
The cowboys at Gerhart’s called him the Swede, but he never went in there. They would see him go by outside, papery skin, dangling arms, the slowness of age as he walked. He may have looked a little Swedish, pale- eyed from those mornings of invincible white, mornings of the great Southwest, black coffee in his cup, the day ahead. The ashtrays on the bar were plastic, the clock had the name of a whiskey printed on its face.
It was five-thirty. Billy walked in.
“There he is.”
He ignored them.
“What’ll it be, then?” Gerhart said.
“Beer.”
On the wall was the stuffed head of a bear with a pair of glasses on its nose and a red plaster tongue. Above it hung an American flag with a sign: NO DOGS ALLOWED. Around the middle of the day there were a few people like Wayne Garrich who had the insurance agency, they wore straw rancher’s hats rolled at the sides. Later there were construction workers in T-shirts and sunglasses, gas company men. It was always crowded after five. The ranch hands sat together at the tables with their legs stretched out. They had belt buckles with a gold-plated steerhead on them.
“Be thirty cents,” Gerhart said. “What’re you up to? Still working for old Harry?”
“Yeah, well…” Billy’s voice wandered.
“What’s he paying you?”
He was too embarrassed to tell the truth.
“Two fifty an hour,” Billy said.
“Jesus Christ,” Gerhart said. “I pay that for sweeping floors.”
Billy nodded. He had no reply.
Harry took three dollars an hour himself. There were probably people in town would take more, he said, but that was his rate. He’d pour a foundation for that, he said, take three weeks.
There was not one day of rain. The sun laid on their backs like boards.
Harry got the shovel and hoe from the trunk of his car. He was tall, he carried them in one hand. He turned the wheelbarrow right side up, the bags of cement were piled beneath on a piece of plywood. He flushed out the wheelbarrow with the hose. Then he began mixing the first load of concrete: five shovels of gravel, three of sand, one of cement. Occasionally he’d stop and pick out a twig or piece of grass. The sun beat down like flats of tin. Ten thousand days of it down in Texas and all around. He turned the dry mixture over upon itself again and again, finally he began adding water. He added more water, working it in. The color became a rich, river-gray, the smooth face broken by gravel. Billy stood watching.
“Don’t want it too runny,” the old man said. There was always the feeling he might be talking to himself. He laid down the hoe. “Okey-dokey,” he said.
His shoulders were stooped, they had the set of labor in them. He took the handles of the barrow without straightening up.
“I’ll get it,” Billy said, reaching.
“That’s all right,” Harry muttered. His teeth whistled on the “s.”
He wheeled it himself, the surface now smooth and shifting a little from side to side, and set it down with a jolt near the wooden forms he’d built—Billy had dug the trench. Checking them one last time, he tilted the wheelbarrow and the heavy liquid fell from its lip. He scraped it empty and then moved along the trench with his shovel, jabbing to fill the voids. On the second trip he let Billy push the barrow, naked to the waist, the sun roaring down on his shoulders and back, his muscles jumping as he lifted. The next day he let him shovel.
Billy lived near the Catholic church, in a room on the ground floor. It had a metal shower. He slept without sheets, in the morning he drank milk from the carton. He was going out with a girl named Alma who was a waitress at Daly’s. She had legs with hard calves. She didn’t say much, her complaisance drove him crazy, sometimes she was at Gerhart’s with someone else in a haze of voices, the bark of laughter, famous heavyweights behind her tacked on the wall. There were water stains near the ceiling. The door to the men’s room slammed.
They talked about her. They stood at the bar so they could see her by turning a little. She was a girl in a small town. The television had exhibition football coming from Grand Junction. They were thinking of her legs as they watched the game, she was like an animal they wanted. She smoked a lot, Alma, but her teeth were white. She was flat-faced, like a fighter. She would be living in the trailer park, Billy told her. Her kids would eat white bread in big, soft packages from the Woody Creek Store.
“Oh, yeah?”
She didn’t deny it. She looked away. Like an animal, it didn’t matter how pure they were, how beautiful. They went down the highway in clattering steel trucks, wisps of straw blowing clear as they passed. They were watched by the cold eyes of cowboys. They entered the house of blood, its sudden bone-cleaving blows, its muffled cries. He didn’t spend much money on her—he was saving up. She never mentioned it.
They poured the side of the house that faced Third Street and started along the front. He thought of her in the sunlight that was browning his arms. He lifted the heavy barrow and became strong everywhere, like a tightened cable. When they finished in the evening, Harry washed off everything with the hose, he put the shovel and hoe in the trunk of his car. He sat on the front seat with the door open. He smiled to himself. He lifted his cap
