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.