think you’re the first genius to come up with it.
Eventually, slowly, as the blood supply choked o=, it
all shriveled up and fell o= like a scab. Charlie crept
around the pasture for a week as if it were a mine-
>eld, terri>ed of seeing one or—worse—feeling one
squash under his boot. Lucy caught him at it one day,
when he had squatted to examine what turned out to
be a black walnut lying in the dust. Don’t be a baby!
she called across the fence, laughing at him. Besides,
you’re never going to find one. The rats get them practically before they hit the ground.
The days were not quick—the fat sun heaving
itself along above them. He thought of the buck,
dragging its tire on the chain. Nothing on the place
was quick—except the does, and only when they
knew you wanted to catch them. Give the thing a
chance, he thought. Give it a break. Just yesterday,
hadn’t it stood for a second? He started to >ddle with
the radio, avoiding her eyes, ?ustered, his hands
shaking. The antenna snapped o= in his hand. He
looked at it, dumbfounded.
“What are you doing with that?” Lucy snapped.
“What the hell does it look like? Trying to >x it.”
“Fix it? Looks to me like you just broke it.”
Charlie felt his ears and then his cheeks burn red.
He looked up to meet her eye. “Well, goddamn! It’s
like everything else around here. If someone hadn’t
nigger-rigged it!”
Later, he regretted it. He regretted saying it
and also what he did next, which was to turn and
hurl the radio against the side of the barn. He regretted it because it was something Darryl would say and
something Darryl would do. But mostly he regretted
it because of the look on Lucy’s face—that look of
shock and superiority—the ammunition he’d given
her for the case against him. She thought he was just
another dumb redneck, didn’t she? Well, he had
news for her. She didn’t know what the hell she was
doing. She couldn’t see past the end of her own nose.
Always ?ipping through those stupid fashion magazines. Not even eating proper food. Making him
sleep like an animal in the barn! And couldn’t she
see that there might be more than one way to do
things? Was it really going to kill the goats if he fed
them a half hour later than usual, or put the hay in
three hay racks, instead of four? Maybe if she would
ever just stop for a minute and try to see something
from someone else’s point of view, she would realize
she didn’t have it all >gured out.
The next morning, when she left to pick up a load
of hay, he followed her out to buy groceries at the gas
station. If I only had the money, he thought, bumping down the long driveway, I would just keep going.
I’d be gone so fast my sparks would set the >eld on
>re! But then a panicky feeling came over him. The
thought that it might take more than money. That it
would take something that he did not have and could
not earn, borrow, or steal.
He crossed the cattle guard with a jolt. From a distance, it looked like there was nothing keeping the
goats in at this gap in the fence—and when you got
close, all it was was a shallow ditch covered with
loose metal bars spaced several inches apart. How
does it keep them in? he asked Lucy when he arrived.
If they try to cross it, she said, they’ll break their legs.
And what if they break their legs? They won’t try. Why
won’t they try? Because, she sighed impatiently,
because they’re terrified of it.
Down at the gas station, he saw something that
made him burn with jealousy: a boy and a girl in a
truck with out-of-state plates, the back loaded up
with furniture and boxes. The girl stepped out of the
truck with a German shepherd on a leash, looked
around with disapproval, and walked the dog along
the grass behind the phone booths. The boy leaned
against the hood with a map for a while. Then she
kissed him, and they climbed back in the truck. The
dog jumped in after them, and they pulled out for
who-knows-where. Charlie stood there, watching the
bend in the road where they had disappeared, thinking, that should be my dog. That should be my girl.
That should be me!
“You gonna buy something?” the old man behind
the register >nally barked. “Or you just gonna stand
there and fog up my window like that?”
When he got back to the farm he went straight
to the milking parlor and pulled a pail from a stack
with a sound like a sword being pulled from a scab-
