“It doesn’t bother me much now,” Ryan said. “But every once in while I know it’s there.”

“Well, you don’t have to go in the service.”

Ryan spooned his Jell-O, not looking up. “I don’t know, I thought maybe I might like it.”

“Well,” Mr. Majestyk said, “the service is all right if you like that kind of life.”

As they were finishing, one of the beer drinkers from No. 11 came in, knocking first on the screen door, and asked Mr. Majestyk if he could cash a check. Mr. Majestyk said he’d be glad to and the guy from No. 11 wrote one out for a hundred dollars.

Ryan watched Mr. Majestyk go into the living room. He watched him open the cabinet above the desk and take out a metal box. He watched him count out several bills, then close the box and turn the corner into the hall.

“You always think you’ve brought enough,” the guy from No. 11 said, “but you always need more.”

“That’s right,” Ryan said.

The guy from No. 11 was looking into the living room.

“You got a nice place.”

“If you like purple,” Ryan said.

He remembered Mr. Majestyk saying his daughter from Warren had picked out everything. The place wasn’t decorated like a house in the north woods at all. There was purple-looking carpeting, only lighter. Purple and yellow and gray drapes. A purple-and-black-striped couch with silver streaks, or threads, in it, and two matching chairs. On the table in front of the window there was a lamp made out of driftwood. There were prints on the walls of streets that were probably supposed to be in Paris, with white frames. There was a hunting dog picture, too, over the black marble fireplace. There was a white portable Sylvania TV and facing it, Mr. Majestyk’s chair. It had to be his chair, a black vinyl Recline-O-Rama, because Ryan could see Mr. Majestyk sitting in it in his undershirt watching TV with a picture pillow of the Mackinac Bridge behind his head. His daughter from Warren, Michigan, may have decorated the house, but Mr. Majestyk himself must have added all the signs on the built-in cupboard doors and other places:

And over the desk the miniature red carpet with the gold crest.

The signs were all right, but they didn’t seem to go with the furniture. That was it, the place looked like it should be in Detroit, not up here. He should have, like, maple furniture you could put your feet on and a stone fireplace with the white stuff between the stones, the mortar.

Ryan watched Mr. Majestyk come into the living room from the hall. He opened the metal box again, taking a roll of bills out of his pocket.

“I don’t want to put you out,” the guy from No. 11 called in.

“No trouble at all,” Mr. Majestyk said.

There was a piece of vacant frontage next to Mr. Majestyk’s house. It wasn’t owned by Mr. Majestyk, but he told Ryan to police it up anyway and bury all the debris. It was close to the Bay Vista and looked lousy with the beer cans and what was left of beach parties. Ryan fooled around with it, picking up cans and throwing them into the brush where the V.C.’s were dug in. He’d have to get the bulldozer to clear the heavy stuff, the charred logs and stones, and to dig a hole with. Come across the beach with the blade high, as a shield against the V.C. automatic weapons. Imagine doing that, cutting the machine gun lanes while the mothers were shooting at you.

He picked up a beer can, took two half steps, and threw it on a line into the brush.

“Nice arm,” Mr. Majestyk said. He was at the edge of his front lawn; Ryan hadn’t seen him come up.

“I used to have one. I don’t know where it went.”

“What’d you play?”

“Third mostly. Three summers in Class C. Then two summers I didn’t play because of my back. I tried out again in June; my back felt okay and I figured I could make it.”

“Yeah?”

“But just two years out of it, sitting around, made a difference.”

Mr. Majestyk grinned. “You feel it already. Just wait, buddy.” He looked up at the sky and said then, “It’s going to rain. When it starts to blow like that.”

Ryan looked up. “The sun’s out.”

“Not for long,” Mr. Majestyk said. “You might as well go into town and get the paint; you won’t be able to work outside.”

“What paint?”

“Paint. What do you mean, what paint?”

“How do I know what paint you’re talking about?”

“I’ll tell you,” Mr. Majestyk said. “How will that be?”

Dumb bastard. He was right about the rain, though. Ryan had the windshield wipers going before he was halfway to Geneva Beach. By the time he was in town and had found a place to park, the sky was overcast and the rain was coming down steadily.

There was more traffic for a weekday, more people with the same idea: in town because there was nothing to do. People, mostly kids and teenagers, running for stores and standing in the doorways, the cars creeping along and stopping double-parked to let them out or pick them up. It was funny how people didn’t like to get wet. Ryan walked, he didn’t hurry; and if he got wet, so what? What was wrong with getting wet?

He got the paint, then stopped in the drugstore for cigarettes, a bottle of Jade East, and the new issue of True. Coming out he saw the sky was clearing, brightening, with the sun beginning to show. He put the paint in the back of the station wagon, got in, and started the engine. A little sooner maybe, or later, he probably would have missed Billy Ruiz, but there he was coming toward the car, running hunch-shouldered and grinning. Billy Ruiz got in and slammed the door.

“Man, I thought you left!” He was touching the seat and the edge of the dashboard. “You got a car!”

“The guy I work for.”

“Work-where you working?”

“A place out the Beach Road.” Ryan hesitated, watching Billy Ruiz and seeing the surprise and the grin still on his face. “The Bay Vista.”

“Sure, I know where that is. You work there, uh?”

“Since yesterday.”

“Man, pretty soft.”

“I’m not staying there, I work there.”

“Yeah, with all that stuff walking around in the bathing suits, uh?” Billy Ruiz’s grin stretched wider. “Don’t tell me, baby.”

“It beats picking cucumbers.”

“Anything would beat it.”

“You almost got them in?”

“A few more days,” Billy Ruiz said. “They bring out these nice boys from Bay City and Saginaw as pickers yesterday? Christ, they can’t pick their nose. Half of them don’t show up this morning.”

“More work for you.”

“I got enough. Hey, you didn’t hear about Frank?”

“What’d he do now?”

“He got laid off.”

“Come on, you’re shorthanded.”

“I mean it. He’s been drunk all the time, you know, with the money? He don’t show up yesterday. He don’t come out this morning, so Bob Junior fires his ass and tells him to get out.”

“What’s he drinking for?”

Billy Ruiz frowned. “Because he’s got money, what do you think?”

“Dumb bastard.”

“Sure. Tell him that.”

“Did he go home?”

“He say his truck won’t make it to Texas.”

“All he’s got to do is get on a bus.”

“You can’t tell him anything, that guy.”

Ryan drove Billy Ruiz to the migrant camp-to the road leading into the camp-dropped him there and headed back to Geneva thinking about Frank Pizarro and his slick hair and his sunglasses and his big mouth. Frank Pizarro was a mistake. He’d remember him with all the other mistakes he had made and promised never to make again. It was easy to make promises, but, God, it was easier to fall into things.

He turned at the Shore Road and at the last second turned left again at the first block and came up behind the IGA store. There were so many cars in the parking lot he had to drive in to get a look at the throwaway stack of boxes and cartons near the door. And when he saw it, it was a pile of boxes like any pile of boxes. It could have been the same pile that was here Saturday-except that he didn’t see a red Stroh’s beer case.