take was only six gallons a minute. The enormous, costly, and useless house impressed him with the importance of his trade. Water, water. (What happened in the end was that the owner demolished six upstairs bedrooms to make room for a storage tank, which the local fire department filled twice a week.)
Artemis’ knowledge of ecology was confined to water. Going fishing on the first of April, he found the falls of the South Branch foaming with soapsuds. Some of this was bound to leach down to where he worked. Later in the month, he caught a five-pound trout in the stream at Lakeside. This was a phenomenal fish for that part of the world and he stopped to show his catch to the game warden and ask him how it should be cooked. “Don’t bother to cook that fish,” said the warden, “It’s got enough DDT to put you in the hospital. You can’t eat these fish any more. The government sprayed the banks with DDT about four years ago and the stuff all washed into the brook.” Artemis had once dug a well and found DDT, and another had traces of fuel oil. His sense of a declining environment was keen and intensely practical. He contracted to find potable water and if he failed he lost his shirt. A polluted environment meant for him both sadness at human stupidity and rapaciousness and also a hole in his pocket. He had failed only twice, but the odds were running against him and everybody else.
Another thing: Artemis distrusted dowsers. A few men and two women in the county made their living by divining the presence of subterranean water with forked fruit twigs. The fruit had to have a pit. An apple twig, for example, was no good. When the fruit twig and the diviner’s psyche had settled on a site, Artemis would be hired to drill a well. In his experience, the dowsers’ average was low and they seldom divined an adequate supply of water, but the fact that some magic was involved seemed to make them irresistible. In the search for water, some people preferred a magician to an engineer. If magic bested knowledge, how simple everything would be: water, water.
Artemis was the sort of man who frequently proposed marriage, but at thirty he still had no wife. He went around for a year or so with the MackIin girl. They were lovers, but when he proposed marriage, she ditched him to marry Jack Bascomb because he was rich. That’s what she said. Artemis was melancholy for a month or so, and then he began going around with a divorcee named Maria Petroni who lived on Maple Avenue and was a bank teller. He didn’t know, but he had the feeling that Maria was older than he. His ideas about marriage were romantic and a little puerile and he expected his wife to be a fresh-faced virgin. Maria was not. She was a lusty, hard-drinking woman and they spent most of their time together in bed. One night or early morning, he woke at her side and thought over his life. He was thirty and he still had no bride. He had been dating Maria for nearly two years. Before he moved toward her to wake her, he thought of how humorous, kind, passionate, and yielding she had always been. He thought, while he stroked her backside, that he loved her. Her backside seemed almost too good to be true. The image of a pure, fresh girl like the girl on the oleo-margarine package still lingered in some part of his head, but where was she and when would she appear? Was he kidding himself? Was he making a mistake to downgrade Maria for someone he had never seen? When she woke, he asked her to marry him.
“I can’t marry you, darling,” she said.
“Why not? Do you want a younger man?”
“Yes, darling, but not one. I want seven, one right after the other.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I must tell you. I’ve done it. This was before I met you. I asked seven of the best-looking men around to come for dinner. None of them were married. Two of them were divorced. I cooked veal scaloppine. There was a lot to drink and then we all got undressed. It was what I wanted. When they were finished, I didn’t feel dirty or depraved or shameful. I didn’t feel anything bad at all. Does that disgust you?”
“Not really. You’re one of the cleanest people I’ve ever known. That’s the way I think of you.”
“You’re crazy, darling,” she said.
He got up and dressed and kissed her good night, but that was about it. He went on seeing her for a while, but her period of faithfulness seemed to have passed and he guessed that she was seeing other men. He went on looking for a girl as pure and fresh as the girl on the oleo-margarine package.
This was in the early fall and he was digging a well for an old house on Olmstead Road. The first well was running dry. The people were named Filler and they were paying him thirty dollars a foot, which was the rate at that time. He was confident of finding water from what he knew of the lay of the land. When he got the rig going, he settled down in the cab of his truck to read a book. Mrs. Filler came out to the truck and asked if he didn’t want a cup of coffee. He refused as politely as he could. She wasn’t bad-looking at all, but he had decided, early in the game, to keep his hands off the housewives. He wanted to marry the girl on the oleo-margarine package. At noon he opened his lunch pail and was halfway through a sandwich when Mrs. Filler came back to the cab. “I’ve just cooked a nice hamburger for you,” she said.
“Oh, no, thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve got three sandwiches here.” He actually said “ma’am” and he sometimes said “shucks,” although the book he was reading, and reading with interest, was by Aldous Huxley.
“You’ve got to come in now,” she said. “I won’t take no for an answer.” She opened the cab door and he climbed down and followed at her side to the back door.
She had a big butt and a big front and a jolly face and hair that must have been dyed, because it was a mixture of grays and blues. She had set a place for him at the kitchen table and she sat opposite him while he ate his hamburger. She told him directly the story of her life, as was the custom in the United States at that time. She was born in Evansville, Indiana, had graduated from the Evansville North High School, and had been elected apple- blossom queen in her senior year. She then went on to the university in Bloomington, where Mr. Filler, who was older than she, had been a professor. They moved from Bloomington to Syracuse and then to Paris, where he became famous.
“What’s he famous for?” asked Artemis.
“You mean you’ve never heard of my husband?” she said. “J. P. Filler. He’s a famous author.”
“What did he write?” asked Artemis.
“Well, he wrote a lot of things,” she said, “but he’s best known for Shit.”
Artemis laughed, Artemis blushed. “What’s the name of the book?” he asked.
“Shit,” she said. “That’s the name of it. I’m surprised you never heard of it. It sold about half a million copies.”
“You’re kidding,” Artemis said.
“No I’m not,” she said. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”
He followed her out of the kitchen through several rooms, much richer and more comfortable than anything he
