Poorhouse Fair by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

it not? But it takes many years."
    "More years than I likely can wait."
    Conner good-naturedly held his peace. It seemed a draw. Over by an open window of the west whig a nurse laughed. The tops of the walnut trees were beginning to switch. Hook coughed. "In my boyhood, now, the almanacs would predict the entire weather for the year, day by day. Now they think it bold to venture to say what will come within the next hour. The reports in the paper seem concerned more and more with yesterday's weather."
    "Perhaps the weather is more variable than it used to be."
    "Yes well: the bombs."
    Conner nodded quiescently. He was sleepy; he rose at six, after perhaps five hours sleep--he never knew precisely, the near boundary of insomnia was vague. He hated beds; they were damp and possessive, and when he lay down, words, divorced from their objects, floated back and forth, like phosphorescent invertebrates swaying in the wash of the sea. Day came as a reprieve. This had begun recently with Conner, in the last few years. In his sleepless state, then, he was susceptible to the contagion of his companion's pacific mood.
    The figures on the front lawn, at some distance, moved in soothing patterns, silently bumping and pausing. Legs made x's when two passed each other. The activity was as ill-planned as that of an ant colony, but for the moment it did not exasperate Conner to watch. In the frame of mind of an old man idling beneath a tree, he was grateful for slow spectacles. Hook relit his cigar, now short. His eyes crossed in a look of savagery behind their magnifying lenses, and the gasps of his sucking lips assumed, in the enveloping hush, high importance. Moisture walked out from his mouth along the skin of the cigar; the nipple burned; smoke writhed across Hook's face and was borne upward.
    Standing so close, and, due to Hook's eyesight, unobserved, Conner could examine the old man's face as intimately as a masterpiece in a museum: the handsome straight nose; the long narrow nostrils suggesting dignity more than vigor; the dark, disapproving, somewhat womanish gash of the mouth; and the antique skin mottled tan and white and touched with rose at the crests of the cheeks, stretched loosely over bones worn by age to a feminine delicacy. It was not the same person--compact, jaunty, busy, menacing--Conner had watched from afar, from above.
    "Mr. Hook, have you seen a cat on the grounds?"
    Hook's head moved not at all. In time he pronounced, "A cat with the one eye missing."
    "Missing or shut. That's the one. It looked as though a car had struck him."
    "Ah, isn't it a judgment, though, the way these highways are extermi-nating the wildlife? By the time you are as old as I am--not that I would wish such a fate on any-body-- the sight of a rabbit or squirrel will be as rare a treat as the glimpse of a passenger pigeon in my boyhood."
    "How did the cat get within the wall?" Hook gave no evidence of hearing. "By rights, it shouldn't be alive at all. Pathetic-looking thing."
    "They cling to life extra-ordinarily. My father had a female, Becky, whose hind legs were removed by the mower, yet she lingered another six months and furthermore bore a litter of kittens. But indeed I don't believe her suffering was worth it."
    "That's my feeling."
    Gregg, unnoticed, had come back from the kitchen with meat scraps wrapped in orange paper. Quick to see Conner, he hid the parcel behind a post of the porch and joined them, overhearing that they were talking of the cat. He had to brave it: "What's this about my cat?"
    "Why yours?" Conner asked.
    Then Hook hadn't told who had brought it within the wall.
    Hook said serenely, "The animal has made a get-away."
    "Have you seen it, Mr. Conner?" Gregg asked politely, and continued, less politely, "I guess the damn thing was coming to the fair."
    "Yes, I saw it by the wall, and it ran past me. Someone, I think, should put it out of its misery."
    "Or else put a tag around its neck," said Gregg, alluding too subtly to