THE DEVIL IS A BUSY MAN
Plus when he got something that was new or if he cleaned out the machine shed or the cellar oftentimes Daddy would find he had a item he didn’t want anymore and had to get shed of and as it was a long haul to truck it to the dump or the Goodwill in town he’d just call up and put a notice in the Trading Post paper in town to give it away for nothing. Shit like a couch or a freezer or a old tiller. The notice would say Free come and get it. Yet even so it always took some time after it run before one soul even called up and the item would sit around in Daddy’s drive pissing him off until one or two folks in town would finally come out to his place to look at it. And they’d be skittery about it too and their face all closed up like at cards and they’d walk around the thing and poke it with their toe and go Where’d you all get it at what’s the matter with it how come you want shed of it so bad. They’d shake their head and talk to their Mrs. and dither around and about drive Daddy nuts because all he wanted was to give a old tiller away for nothing and get it out of the drive and here it was taking him all this time jickjacking around with these folks to get them to take it. Then so what he up and starts doing one time he wanted to get shed of something is he puts his notice in the Trading Post paper and he puts in some fool price he just makes up there on the phone with the Trading Post fellow. Some fool price next to nothing. Old Harrow With Some Teeth A Little Rusted $5, JCPenny Sleepersofa Green And Yellow $10 and like that. Then oftentimes folks called up the first day the Trading Post run the notice and up and come out from town and even would haul in from further out in some little other towns that got the Trading Post and pull up spraying gravel and scarce even look at the item and press on Daddy to take the 5 or $10 right away before any other folks could take it and if it was something heavy like that one couch I’d help them load it up and they’d up and haul it off right then and there. Their faces was different and their wife’s faces in the truck, fine and showing teeth and him with a arm around the Mrs. and a wave at Daddy as they back out. Tickled to death to get a old harrow for next to nothing. I asked Daddy about what lesson to draw here and he said he figured it’s you don’t try and teach a pig to sing and told me to go on and rake the drive’s gravel back out of the ditch before it fucked up the drain.
THINK
Her brassiere’s snaps are in the front. His own forehead snaps clear. He thinks to kneel. But he knows what she might think if he kneels. What cleared his forehead’s lines was a type of revelation. Her breasts have come free. He imagines his wife and son. Her breasts are unconfined now. The bed’s comforter has a tulle hem, like a ballerina’s little hem. This is the younger sister of his wife’s college roommate. Everyone else has gone to the mall, some to shop, some to see a movie at the mall’s multiplex. The sister with breasts by the bed has a level gaze and a slight smile, slight and smoky, media-taught. She sees his color heighten and forehead go smooth in a kind of revelation — why she’d begged off the mall, the meaning of certain comments, looks, distended moments over the week-end he’d thought were his vanity, imagination. We see these things a dozen times a day in entertainment but imagine we ourselves, our own imaginations, are mad. A different man might have said what he’d seen was her hand moved to her bra and freed her breasts. His legs might slightly tremble when she asks what he thinks. Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. She is, he thinks, the sort of woman who’d keep her heels on if he asked her to. Even if she’d never kept heels on before she’d give him a knowing, smoky smile, Page 18. In quick profile as she turns to close the door her breast is a half-globe at the bottom, a ski-jump curve above. The languid half-turn and push of the door are tumid with some kind of significance; he realizes she’s replaying a scene from some movie she loves. In his imagination’s tableau his wife’s hand is on his small son’s shoulder in an almost fatherly way.