The Tin Can Tree

1

After the funeral James came straight home, to look after his brother. He left Mr and Mrs Pike standing on that windy hillside while their little boy wandered in circles nearby, and the only one who saw James go was Joan. She looked over at him, but she didn't say anything. When he was a few steps away he heard her say, 'We have to go home now, Aunt Lou. We have to go down.' But Mrs Pike was silent, and all James heard for an answer was the roaring of the wind.

Going down the hill he took big steps-he was a tall man, and the steepness of the hill made him walk faster than he wanted to. It was too hot to walk fast. The sun was white and glaring and soaked deep in through the mat of his black hair, and his face felt slick when he wiped it with the back of his hand. Partway down the hill he stopped and took off his suit jacket. While he was rolling up his shirt sleeves he looked back at the grave to see if the others were coming, but their backs were still turned towards him. From here it seemed as if that wind hardly touched them; they stood like stones, wearing black, with their heads down and their figures making straight black marks against the sky. The only thing moving was little Simon Pike, as he picked his way down through the dry brambles towards James. Simon looked strange, dressed up. He had always worn Levi's and crumpled leather boots, but today someone had made him put his suit on. That would be Joan. Mrs Pike had looked at nothing but the ground for two days now, and couldn't notice what Simon wore. Joan would have polished those white dress-shoes that Simon was getting all grass-stained, and taken out the last inch of cuff on his sleeves so that they could cover his wrists. There was a thin faint line above each of his cuffs where the old hem had been; James could see it clearly when Simon came up even with him. He stood staring at the cuffs for a long time, and then he shifted his eyes to Simon's face and saw Simon frowning up at him, his eyebrows squinched into one straight line across his forehead and his mouth held tight against the wind.

‘I’m coming too,’ he told James. His voice had a low, froggy sound; he was barely ten, but in a year or two his voice would begin to change.

James nodded and finished rolling up his shirt sleeves. There was a band of dampness beneath his collar. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, and then he began walking again with Simon beside him. Now he went more slowly, bracing himself against the steepness of the hill. Each time he took one step Simon took two, but when he looked over at Simon to see if he was growing tired, Simon ignored him and walked faster. He wasn't sweating at all. He looked cold. James wiped his face on his shirt sleeve and followed him down between the rocks.

'Getting near lunchtime,' he said finally.

Simon didn't answer.

'Want to eat with Ansel and me?'

'Well.'

'Don't worry about your mother. I'll tell her where you are.'

Simon said something to his shoes, but James couldn't hear.

'What's that?' he asked.

'I wouldn't bother.'

'We'll tell your cousin Joan then,' said James. 'Soon as she gets back.'

The wind was so hot it burned his face; it made lulling sounds around his ears so that he couldn't hear his own footsteps. He pushed his hair off his forehead but it fell into his eyes again, hanging in a tangled web just at the top of his range of vision. Beside him, Simon was letting his hair do what it wanted. He had greased it down with something (it needed cutting, but Joan had been too busy with her aunt to see about that) and now it ruffled up in thick strings and stood out wildly in every direction. When James turned to look at him he nearly smiled. With his face sideways to the wind the roaring sound was quieter, so he kept looking in

Simon's direction until Simon grew uneasy.

'What are you staring at?' he asked.

'Nothing,' said James. 'Some wind we got.' He looked straight ahead again, and the roaring sound came back to hammer at his ears.

The ground they were treading was wild and weedy, with rocks sticking up here and there so white they might have been painted. There was no path to follow. Below them was the whole town of Larksville – the main street hidden by trees, but the outlying houses and the tobacco fields laid bare to the sun. At the foot of the hill was the white gravel road where Simon and James both lived. They lived in a three-family house that looked like only a long tin roof from here. No houses stood near it. James's brother Ansel said whoever built their house must have been counting on Larksville's becoming a city someday, but Larksville was getting smaller every year. When anyone went away to college it was taken for granted they'd never be back again, not for any longer than it took to eat a Christmas dinner in the house they'd started out in. Yet the long crowded house sat there, half a mile from town as a bird flies and a mile by car, and its three chimneys were jumbled tightly together with the smoke intermingling in wintertime.

The sight of that green part of town was cool and inviting; it made James think of cold beers in the tavern opposite the post office. He looked down at Simon, but Simon was hunched into the jacket of his suit and he still seemed cold.

'Do you like sardines?' James asked him.

'Not much.'

'Or cold cuts?'

'No.'

They stepped through a tangle of briars, with the thorns making little ripping sounds against their clothes. 'I could eat a pizza,' Simon said.

'You better talk to Ansel, then. He makes pizzas.'

Simon tripped and caught himself. He looked down at the small rock that had tripped him and then began kicking it ahead of him down the hill, swerving out of his course to recover it every time the rock rolled sideways. Grey streaks began to show on his shoes, but James didn't try to stop him.

When they reached the gravel road they turned right and began heading in the direction of the house. Simon's rock rolled into a ditch; he left it lying there. It looked as if they might get all the way home this way – not talking much, and not saying anything when they did talk, just as if this were an ordinary walk on an ordinary day. That suited James. He had been thinking too much, these last two days -turning things over and over, figuring out how if just some single incident had happened, or hadn't happened, things might have been different. Now he ached all over, and thinking made him sick. He was just beginning to feel easier, ambling along in silence beside Simon, when Simon turned and began walking backwards ahead of James, fixing his frowning brown eyes on a point far down the road. He opened his mouth and closed it, and then he opened it again and said, 'James.'

'What.'

'How far down in the ground before it starts getting cold?'

'Pretty soon,' said James.

'How soon.'

'Pretty soon.'

'I'm just thinking,' Simon said.

To keep him from thinking any more, James said, 'But then it gets hot again, down towards the centre of the earth. That's beyond digging distance.'

'Six feet under is stone, stone cold,' said Simon.

'Well, yes.'

'Good old Janie Rose, boy.'

'Now, wait,' James said. 'Now, Janie Rose don't feel if it's cold or it's not, Simon. Get that all straight in your mind.'

'I know that.'

'Get it straight now, before you go bothering your mother about it.'

'I know all about that,' said Simon. He spun around and began walking forward again, still ahead of James. Strands of his hair rose up and floated behind him, like the tail plumes of some strange bird. 'You don't get what I mean,' he called back.

'Maybe not.'

'Now, you know Janie Rose.'

'Yes,' said James, and without his wanting it the picture of Janie Rose came to him, sharp and clear – Janie Rose looking exactly the way he thought her name sounded, six years old and blonde and fat, with round pink cheeks and round thick glasses. He hadn't been planning to think about it. He said, 'Yes, I know,' and then waited for whatever would follow, keeping part of his mind far away.

'She just hated cold,' said Simon. 'Playing "Rather" in the evenings after supper – which would you rather be, blind or deaf; which would you rather die of, heat or cold -she chose heat any day. She had a twenty-pound comforter on her bed, middle of summer.'

'I already said to you -' James began.

'Well, I know,' said Simon, and he started walking faster then and whistling. He whistled off-key, and the tune was carried away by the wind.

When they reached their house, which stood slightly swaybacked by the road with its one painted side facing forward, James stopped to look in his mailbox. There was only a fertilizer ad, which he stuck in his hip pocket to throw away later. 'See what your mail is, why don't you,' he told Simon.

Simon was walking in small neat circles around the three mailboxes. He stuck out a hand toward the box with 'R.J. Pike' painted on it and flipped the door open, and then made another circle and came to a stop in front of the box to peer inside. 'Fertilizer ad,' he said. He pulled it out and dropped it on the roadside. 'Letter for Mama.' He pulled that out too, and dropped it on top of the first. 'She'll never read it.'

James picked the letter up and followed Simon along the dirt path to the house. Halfway through the yard the path split into three smaller ones, each leading to a separate door on the long front porch. Simon took the one on the far left, heading toward James's door, and James took the far right to deliver the Pikes' letter. The Pikes' part of the porch had a washing machine and an outgrown potty-chair and a collection of plants littering it; he had to watch his step. When he bent to slide the letter under the door he heard a scratching sound and a little yelp, and he stood up and called to Simon, 'Your dog wants out, all right?'

'All right.'

He opened the door and a very old, fat Chihuahua slid through, dancing nervously on stiff legs as if her feet hurt her. 'Okay, Nellie,' he said, and bent to pat her once and then stepped over her and continued down the porch. On his way he passed the Potter sisters' window and waved to Miss Faye, smiling and shaking his head to show her he couldn't come in. She was sitting behind closed glass, full face to the window and as close to it as she could get, and when James shook his head the corners of her mouth turned down and she slumped back in her chair. Neither she nor Miss Lucy could climb that hill to the funeral, and they were counting on James to tell them about it.

Simon was standing at James's door, his hands in his pockets. 'Why didn't you go on in?' James asked him, and Simon just shook his head.

'I reckoned I'd wait,' he said.

'Ansel'd let you in.'

'Well, anyway,' said Simon, and stood back to let James open the door for him.

The inside of the house was cool and dim. It had unvarnished wooden floorboards, with no rugs, and when Simon walked in he clicked his heels sharply against the wood the way he did when he was wearing his boots. Walking that way, swinging his thin legs in heavy, too-big strides, made him look younger, like a small child entering a dark room. And he didn't look to his left, although he knew James' brother would be on the couch where he always was.

'Ansel?' James said.

'Here I am.'

James closed the screen door behind him and looked toward the couch. Ansel was sitting there, with his back very straight and his feet on the floor. Usually he spent the day on his back (he had anemia, the kind that never got much better or much worse so long as he was careful), but today he had made a special effort to be up. He was wearing his Sunday black suit, and he had slicked his pale hair so tightly down with water that it was the same shape as the narrow bones of his head. Probably he had thought that was the least he could do for Janie Rose. When James came in Ansel didn't look in his direction; he was watching Simon. He waited until Simon finally turned around and faced him, and then he stood up and stooped toward him in what looked like a bow. 'I hope this day wasn't too hard on you,' he said formally, and then sat down and waited while Simon stood frowning at him.

'We got back before the others,' James said. 'I promised Simon lunch.'

'Oh. Well I doubt that he – Here, you want to sit down?'

He patted the couch where he sat, which meant that he was extending special privileges. Ordinarily he didn't like people sitting there. After a minute Simon shrugged and clicked his heels over to the couch, and Ansel moved aside to give him room.

'I haven't really talked to you since the, uh – It's been quite a few days. But I wanted to say -'

'I been busy,' said Simon.

'Well, sure you have,' Ansel said. 'I know that.' He was sitting forward now, placing the tips of his fingers together, gazing absently at the floor with those clear blue eyes of his. It made James nervous (Ansel had been known to get too serious at times like this) but before he could change the atmosphere any, Ansel had begun speaking again. 'Uh, I wanted to tell you,' he said, 'I been meaning to say to you -sheesh! James, will you close the door?'

James gave the inner door a push and it clicked shut.

'Too much wind,' Ansel said. 'Well. I been meaning to, um, give you my condolences, Simon. And tell you how sorry I am not to go to the funeral. James said I shouldn't, but you don't know how I -'

'You didn't miss much,' said Simon.

'What? Well, I just wish I could've come and paid my respects, so to speak. That's what I told James. But James said-'

Simon sat tight, his hands pressed between his knees and his eyes straight ahead. When James started into the kitchen Simon half stood, with that squinchy little frown on his face again, so James stopped and leaned back against the wall. He wasn't sure why; always before this it was Ansel that Simon followed, leaving James to Janie Rose. But now Simon sank back in his seat again, looking easier, and began kicking one foot lazily in the direction of the coffee table. Ansel rambled on, his speech growing more certain.

'I had never been so shocked by any news,' he said. 'I was saying to James. I said, "Why, she and Simon were over here not but a while ago," I said. "Why, think how Simon must feel."'

'I feel all right,' Simon said.

'I mean-'

'I feel all right.'

Ansel rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked over at James, and James straightened up from his position against the wall. 'Mainly he feels hungry,' he told Ansel. 'I promised him lunch.'

'Why, sure,' said Ansel. 'If he wants it. But I doubt he does. You hungry, Simon?'

'I'm starved,' Simon said.

'You going to eat?'

'I reckon I am.'

'I see,' said Ansel.

Simon stood up and came over to James. When he got to James's side he just stood there and waited, with his eyes straight ahead and his back to Ansel. 'We going to get that pizza?' he asked.

'Anything you want.'

. 'Pizza?' Ansel said, and Simon turned then and looked up at James.

'That's what I promised him,' James said.

'Why, Simon-'

'Hush,' said James. 'Now, Simon, we got three kinds of pizza mix out there. Sausage, and cheese, and something else. I forget. You go choose and then we'll cook it up. All right?'

'All right,' Simon said. He turned and looked back at Ansel, and then he went on into the kitchen. When he was gone, James came over and sat down beside Ansel.

'Listen,' he said.

Away from outsiders now, Ansel slumped back in his seat and let his shoulders sag. There were tired dark marks underneath his eyes; he hadn't slept well. 'You're on my couch,' he said automatically. 'Do I have to tell you, James? Sitting like that makes the springs go wrong.'

'Simon's folks are still on the hill,' said James. 'We've got to keep him here; I promised Joan he wouldn't sit in that house alone.'

'Ah, sitting alone,' Ansel said. He sighed. 'That's no good.'

'No. Will you help keep him busy?'

'The couch, James.'

James stood up, and Ansel swung his feet around and slid down until he was lying prone. 'I don't see how he can eat,' he said.

'He's hungry.'

'I wonder about this world.'

'People handle things their own ways,' James said. 'Don't go talking to him about dying, Ansel.'

'Well.'

'Will you?'

'Well.'

There was a crash of cans out in the kitchen. A cupboard door slammed, and Simon called, 'Hey, James. I've decided.'

'Which one?'

'The sausage. There was only just the two of them.' He came into the living room, carrying the box of pizza mix, and Ansel raised his head to look over at him and then grunted and lay back and stared at the ceiling. For a minute Simon hesitated. Then he walked over to him and said, 'You're the pizza-maker.'

'Who said?' Ansel asked.

'Well, back there on the hill James said -'

'All right.' Ansel sat up slowly, running his fingers through his hair. 'It's always something,' he said.

'Well, maybe-'

'No, no. I don't mind.'

And then Ansel smiled, using his widest smile that dipped in the middle and turned up at the corners like a child's drawing of a happy man. When he did that his long thin face turned suddenly wide at the cheekbones, and his chin became shiny. 'We'll make my speciality,' he said. 'It's called an icebox pizza. On refrigerator-de-frosting days that's the way we clean the icebox; we load it all on a pizza crust and serve it up for lunch. You want to see how I make it?'

He was standing now, smoothing down his Sunday jacket and straightening his slumped shoulders. When he reached for the pizza mix Simon walked forward and gave it to him, not hanging back now but looking more at ease. Ansel said, 'This is something every man should know. Even if he's married. He can cook it when his wife is sick and serve her lunch in bed. Do you want an apron?'

'No, 'said Simon.

'Don't blame you. Don't blame you at all. Well -' and he was heading for the kitchen now, reading the directions as he walked. His walk was slow, but not enough to cause James any worry. James could judge the way Ansel felt just by glancing at him, most of the time. He had to; Ansel would never tell himself. When he felt his best he was likely to call for meals on a tray, and when he was really sick he might decide to wallpaper the bedroom. He was a backward kind of person

James had a habit of looking at him as someone a whole generation removed from him, although in reality he was twenty-six, only two years younger than James himself. He was thinking that way now, watching with narrow, almost paternal eyes as Ansel made his way into the kitchen.

'Naturally there are no really rules,' Ansel was saying, 'since you never know what might be in the icebox.' And Simon's voice came floating back: 'Fruit, even? Lettuce?'

'Well, now…' Ansel said.

James smiled and went over to the easy chair to sit down, stretching his legs out in front of him. It felt good to be home again. The house was a dingy place, with yellow peeling walls and sunken furniture. And it was so rickety that whenever James had some photography job that required a long time-exposure he had to run around warning everyone. 'Just sit a minute,' he would say, and he would pull up chairs for everybody in the house and then go dashing off to take his picture before people started shaking the floors again. But at least it was a comfortable house, not far from town, and Ansel had that big front window in the living room where he could watch the road. He would sit on the couch with his elbows on the sill, and everything he saw passing – just an old truck, or a boy riding a mule – meant something to him. He had been watching that long, and he knew people that well.

Thinking of Ansel and his window made James look toward it, to see what was going on, but all he saw from where he sat was the greenish-yellow haze of summer air, framed by mesh curtains. He rose and went over to look out, with his hands upon the sill, and peered down the gravel road toward the hill he had just come from. No one was in sight. Maybe it would be hours before they returned; Joan might still be standing there, trying to make her aunt and uncle stop staring at that grass. But even so, James went on watching for several minutes. He could feel the wind, gentler down here but strong enough to push the curtains in.

For a long time now, wind would make him think of today. He had climbed that hill behind all the others, and seen how the wind whipped the women's black skirts and ruffled little crooked parts down the backs of their hairdos. And when the first cluster of relatives had taken their leave at the end, stopping first to touch Mrs Pike's folded arms or murmur something to Mr Pike, the words they said were blown away and neither of the parents answered. Though they might not have answered anyway, even without the wind. The day that Janie Rose died, when James had spent thirty-six hours in the hospital waiting room and finally heard the news with only that tenth of his mind that was still awake, he had gone to Mrs Pike and said, 'Mrs Pike, if there's anything I or Ansel can do for you, no matter what it is, we will want to do it.' And Mrs Pike had looked past him at the information desk and said, 'Just falling off a tractor don't make a person die,' and then had turned and left. So James had let them be, and went home and told Ansel to keep to himself a while and not go bothering the Pikes. 'Not even to give our sympathy?' asked Ansel, and James said no, not even that. He hadn't liked the thought of Ansel's going to the funeral, either. Ansel said he had half a mind to go anyway – he could always rest on the way, he said – but James could picture that: Ansel toiling up the hill, clasping his chest from the effort and gasping out lines of funeral poetry, calling out for the whole procession to stop the minute he needed a rest. So James had gone alone, and quietly, and had promised to report to Ansel the minute it was over. The only one there that he had spoken to was Joan; the only two sounds he carried away with him were Joan's low voice and the roaring of the wind. He thought he would never like the sound of wind again.

Out in the kitchen now, Janie Rose's brother was talking on and on in his froggy little voice. 'I never saw peanut butter on a pizza,' he was saying. 'You sure you know what you're doing, Ansel?'

'Just wait'll you taste it,' Ansel said.

James left the window and went out to the kitchen. 'How's it going?' he asked.

'It's coming along,' Ansel said. He was swathed in a big checked dishtowel, wrapped right over his suit jacket and safety-pinned at the back, and on the counter stood the almost finished pizza that Simon was decorating. The kitchen was rippling with heat. James took his shirt off and laid it on the counter, so that he was in just his undershirt, and he opened the back door.

'Aren't you hot?' he asked Simon.

But Simon said, 'No,' and went on laying wiener slices down. On the floor at his feet were little sprinklings of flour and Parmesan, and the front of his suit was practically another pizza in itself, but the important thing was keeping him busy. It was too bad the pizza-making couldn't go on for another hour or so, just for that reason; they would have to find something else for him to do.

Ansel said, 'Now the olives, Simon.'

'I don't think I like olives.'

'Sure you do. Olives are good for the brain. Will you look at your shirt?'

Simon looked down at his shirt and then shrugged.

'It'll wash,' he said.

'Your mama'll have a fit.'

'Ah, she won't care.'

'I bet she will.'

'She won't care.'

'Any mother would care about that,' said Ansel. 'Makes quite a picture.'

'Pictures,' James said suddenly. He straightened up. 'Hey, Simon. You seen my last photographs?'

'No,' said Simon. 'You get another customer?'

'Not in the last few days, no. But I took a bunch on my own a while ago. When you're done I'll show you.'

'Okay,' said Simon.

'Olives,' Ansel reminded him.

James went over to the back window and looked out. There was the Pikes' Nellie, burrowing her way through a tangle of wild daisies and bachelor's buttons. He had been planning to pick Joan a bunch of those daisies, before all this happened. They were her favourite flowers. Now he couldn't; the house would be stuffed with hothouse funeral flowers. And anyway, he couldn't just walk in there with a bunch of daisies in his hand and risk disturbing the Pikes. The daisies would have grown old there, waving in the sunshine on their long green stems, before he could go back to doing things like that again.

The pizza was in the oven. Ansel slammed the door on it and wiped his hands and said, 'There, now.'

'How much longer?' Simon asked.

'Oh, I don't know. Fifteen-twenty minutes. We'll go out where it's cool and wait on it. You coming, James?'

James followed them out to the living room. It seemed very dark and cool here now. Ansel settled down on his couch with a long contented groan, and Simon went over to Ansel's window and stood watching the road.

'Anybody seen those people?' he asked James.

'What people?'

'My mama and them. Anybody seen them?'

'No, not yet.'

'Well, anyway,' said Simon, 'I'll reckon I'll just run on over and have a look, see if maybe they haven't -'

'I think we'd have seen them if they'd come,' said James. 'Or heard them, one.'

'Still and all, I guess I'll just-'

'You two,' Ansel said. 'Do you have to stand over me like that?' He was lying full length now, with his head propped against one of the sofa arms. 'Kind of overwhelming,' he said, and James moved Simon gently away by one shoulder.

'I almost forgot,' he said. 'You want to see my pictures?'

'Oh, well I-'

‘They're good ones.'

'Well.'

James went down the little hallway to his dark-room. There was a damp and musky smell there, and only the dimmest light. He headed for the filing cabinet in the corner, where he kept his pictures, and opened the bottom drawer. The latest ones were at the front, laid away carefully (taking pictures for fun wasn't something he could afford very often), and when he pulled them out he handled them gently, examining the first two alone for a minute before he returned to the living room.

'Here you go,' he said to Simon. 'Your hands clean?'

'Yes.'

His hands were covered with tomato sauce, but he held the pictures by the rims so James didn't say anything. The first picture didn't impress Simon. He studied it only a minute and then sniffed. 'One of those,' he said. James grinned and handed him the next one. Neither Simon nor Janie Rose had ever liked anything but straight, posed portraits – preferably of someone they could recognize, which always made them giggle. But when James wasn't taking wedding pictures, or photographs for the Larksville newspaper, he turned away from portraits altogether. He had the idea of photographing everyone he knew in the way his mind pictured them when they weren't around. And the way people stuck in his memory was odd – they were doing something without looking at him, usually, wheeling a wheelbarrow up a hill or hunting under the dining-room table for a spool of thread. Old girlfriends of his used to object to being photographed in their most faded blue jeans, the way he remembered them from some picnic. But almost always he won out in the end; the pictures of people in his mind and in his filing cabinet were nearly identical. Joan he imagined in a dust storm, the way he had first seen her (she had come down the road with two suitcases and a drawstring handbag, spitting dust out of her mouth and turning her face sideways to the wind as she walked.) For a long time now he had waited for another dust storm, and last week one had come. That was in those first two pictures, the ones that Simon had barely glanced at. Even when James said, 'That's your cousin Joan, if you don't know,' thinking to make Simon look twice, Simon only raised his eyebrows. It was the third picture he liked. In that one Ansel was lying on his couch, looking up at the sky through the window and absently playing with the cord of the shade. 'Ansel!' Simon said, and Ansel turned his head and looked at him.

'What now?' he asked.

'I just seen your picture here.'

'Oh, yes,' Ansel said.

'Of you on your couch and all.'

'Oh, yes. Here, let me look. 'He raised himself up on one elbow, reaching out toward the picture, and Simon brought it over to him. "That's me, all right,' said Ansel. He studied it for a while, smiling. 'It's not bad,' he said.

'I think it's a right good picture.'

'Yep. Not bad at all.' He handed the picture back and lay down again, staring up at the ceiling and still smiling. 'They're wonderful things, pictures,' he said.

'Well, some of them.'

'Very remaining things, you know?'

'I don't like them other kind, though,' Simon said. 'Dust clouds and all. I can't see what they're for.'

'They're for me,' said James. 'Here, I got another one of Ansel.'

'James,' Ansel said, 'do your legs ever get to feeling kind of numb? Kind of achey-numb?'

'Prop them up.'

'Propping up won't do it.'

'It's what you get for not having your shots,' James said.

'Oh, well. Right behind the knee, it is.' He propped his legs against the back of the couch and slid farther down, so that his feet were the highest part of him. _This couch is too short,' he said. 'Here, Simon. Hand me the next one.'

The next picture had Ansel sitting up, looking self-conscious. When Ansel saw it he smiled his dippy little smile again and brought the picture closer to examine it. _ 'This is one I posed myself,' he said. 'Had James take it like I wanted. James, I believe it's my shoes aggravating that feeling.'

James set the rest of the pictures beside Simon and reached over to untie Ansel's shoes. 'If you'd get the right size,' he said.

'No, it's to do with my illness. I can tell.'

'It's on Wednesdays you get your shots,' said James. 'This is Saturday. That's five times you missed.'

'Lot you care. Listen -'He twisted around, so that he was facing Simon. 'What was I talking about? The picture. That's right. I was about to say, in my estimation this picture is the best of the lot. The one of me sitting up.' He tilted the picture toward the light. 'Heroic, like,' he said. 'Profile to the window and all.'

'The other one's better,' said Simon.

'What other one?'

'The first one. You lying down.'

'That's because you're used to me lying down,' Ansel said. He sighed and tossed the picture onto the coffee table. 'Everyone's used to it. When I stand up they hardly recognize me. Faces change, standing up. Become more bottom-heavy. Pass me the next one.'

'I think the pizza must be done,' said James. 'Hey, Ansel?'

'Well, take it out. This one of Mr Abbott-I'd be insulted if I was him. Troweling up the garden plot with his back to the camera and his rear end sticking out.'

James got up and went to the kitchen. The pizza-smell filled the whole room, and when he opened the oven he thought it looked done. From a hook on the wall he took a pot-holder and then hauled the pizza out and set it on the counter, burning one finger on the way. 'Ansel!' he called. He came to the living room doorway. Ansel was just bending over a picture, rocking slightly back and forth and frowning at it, and Simon was sorting through the rest of them. 'Ansel, 'James repeated.

'This one here,' said Ansel, 'ought not to've been included.'

'Which one?' Simon asked.

'I'm ashamed of James. You ought not to see it.'

'Well, I just saw it,' said Simon. 'What's the matter with it?'

'Nothing's the matter. I'll just set it aside.'

He pulled himself up and lay the picture face down on the back of the couch, looking over his shoulder to make sure Simon hadn't seen. 'Shamed of James,' he said.

'Well, for heaven's sake,' James said from the doorway. 'What's all that about, Ansel?'

'It ought never to've been included, that picture.'

James crossed the living room and picked up the picture. It was a perfectly ordinary one – he'd done it as a favour for Miss Faye, who wanted her screened back porch photographed now that her nephew had spent half the summer building it. She had led James way behind the house, deep into the wild grass that grew there among scattered piles of rusted stoves and old car parts, and she directed him to photograph the whole long house so that her people in Georgia could get an idea how the porch was proportioned. 'I think this is too far, ma'am,' James told her, but she insisted and this was what had come of it – a wild, weedy-looking picture, with the house rising above a wave of grass like a huge seagoing barge. Miss Faye's porch was only a little bump sticking out along with a lot of other bumps -Janie Rose Pike's tacked-on back bedroom, the woodshed under James and Ansel's bathroom window, and the rusted old fuel barrel on its stilt legs beside the middle chimney. He hadn't shown the picture to Miss Faye yet, for fear of disappointing her. But it wasn't all that bad; he couldn't see what was upsetting Ansel.

'I don't get it,' he said.

'Well, never you mind. Just give it back.'

'What are you trying to pull, Ansel?'

'Will you give it back?'

James handed it across, but before Ansel's fingers had quite touched it Simon reached out and took it away. He swung away from the couch, avoiding Ansel's long arm, and wandered out into the middle of the room with his eyes fixed frowningly on the picture. Ansel groaned.

'You see what you done,' he told James.

'Ansel, I don't know why -'

'Then listen,' Ansel said. He leaned forward talking in a whisper now. 'James, someone departed is in that picture -'

'Where?' Simon asked.

'Oh, Lord.'

'Well, I don't see.'

'Me neither,' said James. 'What're you up to, Ansel?' Ansel stood up, supporting himself with both hands on the arm of the couch. When he walked over to Simon he walked like a man wading, sliding his stocking feet across the floor. He poked his finger at one corner of the picture, said 'There,' and then waded back again. 'I'm going to lie down,' he said to no one in particular.

'Ah, yes,' said James. 'I see.'

'I don't,' Simon said.

'Right here she is.'

He pointed. His forefinger was just touching the Model A Ford that stood behind the house, resting on cinder-blocks that were hidden by the tall waving grass. All that could really be seen of the Ford was its glassless windows and its sunken roof- it had been submerged in that sea of grass a long time – and in the front window on the driver's side, no bigger than a little white button, was Janie Rose's moon-round face. She was too far away to have any expression, or even to have her spectacles show, but they could see the high tilt of her head as she eyed James and the two white dots of her hands on the steering wheel. She was pretending to be some haughty lady driving past. Yet when James drew back from the picture he lost her again immediately; she could have been one of the little patches of Queen Anne's lace that dotted the field. 'I don't see how you found her,' he told Ansel.

'No trouble.'

Simon stared at the picture a while and then tilted it, moving Janie Rose out of his focus. 'She just blurs right in again,' he said. 'She comes and goes. Like those pictures in little kids' magazines, where you try and find the pig in the tree.'

The what?' Ansel said. He raised his head and looked at Simon, open-mouthed.

'But it's here, sure enough,' said James. 'Isn't that something? I never saw her. Not even when I was enlarging it, and I looked it over right closely then.'

'It's funny,' Simon said.

'You hungry, Simon?'

'I guess.' But he went on staring at the picture. He seemed not so much to be looking at Janie Rose as turning the whole thing over in his mind now, holding the picture absently in front of him. With his free hand he was pulling at a cowlick over his forehead.

'When our mother died,' Ansel said suddenly, 'I was beside myself.'

Simon looked over at him.

'I couldn't think about her. I couldn't think her name. Yet people are different these days. I see that.'

'Oh, well,' Simon said. He returned to his picture. 'James, is there such a thing as X-ray cameras? Could you take a picture of our house, like, and have the people show up from inside?'

'I don't know,' said James. 'I doubt it.'

A fly buzzed in, humming its way in zigzags through the room, and Ansel followed it with his eyes. When the fly had disappeared into the kitchen he lay back again, gazing upwards. 'I'm doing all my dying in one room now,' he told the ceiling.

'Oh, stop that,' James said.

'It's true. I'm getting contained in smaller and smaller spaces. First it was the whole of North Carolina; then this town; then this room. Soon no place. We all got to go.'

'Look, 'James said. 'I know of one stone-cold pizza in the kitchen. What do I do with it? Throw it out?'

'Well,' said Ansel. He sat up and peered over at Simon. 'Why do you keep looking at that picture?'

Simon put the picture down. He looked from Ansel to James, and then he stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets. 'When I come to think of it,' he said, 'I don't want no pizza.'

'Well you don't have to eat it,' said James.

'I think I'll just pass it up.'

'All right.'

'It's hard to say what's happening to people,' Ansel said. 'They don't seem to realize, no more. Don't think of themselves being dead someday; don't mourn no more. It's hard to say what they do do, when you stop and consider.'

'Don't die of anemia no more, either,' said James.

'What do you know about it?'

Simon was tilting gently back and forth, from his toes to his heels and his heels to his toes, with his shoulders hunched high and his eyes on a spot outside Ansel's window. He didn't seem to be listening.

'Nobody's perfect,' Ansel said. Janie wasn't exactly a pink-pinafore type, I admit it. Rattling through her prayers in purple pyjamas; Deliver us from measles. But she's under the earth like you'll be someday, have you thought of that? You in that clay, and your survivors calling you a pig in a tree?'

'Ansel, there's not a thing in this world you do right,' James said.

But Ansel waved him aside and sat forward, on the edge of his couch. 'What will you do about me? he asked. 'How about that, now? When I am -'

Simon was crying. He was still rocking back and forth, still keeping his hands jammed tightly in his pockets, but there were wet paths running through the flour on his cheeks and his eyes were frowning and angry. 'Well -' he said, and his voice came out croaky. He took a breath and cleared his throat. 'Well, I reckon I'll be getting on home,' he said.

'Oh, now,' said Ansel.

But James said, 'All right. It's all right.'

He crossed over to open the door and Simon went out, stumbling a little. James followed him. He stood on the porch and watched Simon all the way down to his end of the house, hoping Simon might look back once, but he never did. He walked stiffly and blindly, with his sharp little shoulder-bones sticking out through the back of his jacket. When he reached his own door he hesitated, with his hands on the knob and his back still toward James. Then he said, 'Well,' again, and pulled the door open and went on in. The screen door slammed shut and rattled once and was still. James could hear Simon's footsteps clomping on across the hollow floor of the parlour.

The aluminum porch chair was still beneath the window, where Ansel had been sitting in it to watch the funeral go by. After a minute James went over and sat down on it. He let his arms rest along the arms of the chair and the metal burned him, making two lines of sunbaked heat down the inside of his forearms. Behind him was the soft sound of the mesh curtains moving, and the sleeves of Ansel's rough black suit sliding across the splintery windowsill. 'Hot out,' Ansel said.

James squinted toward the road.

'I wish it was the season for tangerines.'

There were no people passing now, only the yellow fields across the way rippling in the wind and one grey hound plodding slowly through the yard. In the house behind James were the soft, humming sounds of other people, murmuring indistinct words to one another and moving gently around. James closed his eyes.

'Hey, James.'

He didn't answer.

'James.'

'What.'

'James, I told you he wouldn't eat.'

The wind began again, and James rose from his chair to go inside. He didn't want to sit here any more. Here it was too still; here there was only that wind, rushing over and around the house in its solitary position among the weeds.