— Stop!
— What?
— I said wait a minute…!
— No you said…
— Where’s that money you, you stole.
— I what? Oh. Oh, hi.
— Where is it!
— In that paper bag, that? That was our class money.
— It was Miss, Mrs what’s her name…
— Joubert, Mrs Joubert. That’s my class, six J.
— Well where is it!
— The money? his shoulders hunched in the shift of books, a black zippered portfolio, a newspaper and mail in assorted sizes from one arm to the other. — I told you, I had to hurry up to class from that rehearsal thing with it, he said stooping for a dropped envelope, pausing down there to add a knot to the lace in his sneaker. — You can ask her.
— You… you’re sure?
— Sure ask anybody. Hey wait, I mean you’re not mad are you hey? Books and papers threatening to right and left, he trotted up beside Bast. — Where you going.
— Home.
— Oh. You live out this way?
— Yes.
— Up the main road?
— Yes but…
— I’ll walk you.
— I’m in a hurry.
— That’s okay. He hurried along bumping Bast’s thigh with his armload. — How far up do you live, past that big corner?
— Right off it.
— Like across from where they’re building this here new shopping center, right?
— They’re not building anything.
— I mean like where they’re going to.
— Going to what. Who.
— You live in that big old place right after that old empty farmhouse if you turn left, right? This here old house with these little pointy windows and this like big barn in back by the woods? with this big high scraggly hedge out front like?
Bast’s steps had slowed as a small clearing opened abruptly on their right where mangled saplings and torn trunks and limbs still bearing leaves engaged a twisted car fender, a split toilet seat, a chair with one leg and a variety of empty tin cans surrounding a sign Clean Fill Wanted with a telephone number. — How did you know that.
— That’s the only place up there, right? And like right across from it where that guy that raises flowers which used to live in the farmhouse, where he has all those flowers that’s where they’re having this here new shopping center, you know?
— No. Who told you that.
— It’s right in the paper here about the zoning change… and in his effort to keep stride and dig into that armload, everything went. — I… oh, thanks. You don’t have to help me, I mean I just wanted to show you…
— Damn it!
— What. The mud? It brushes off when it gets dry. I just…
— Whose is all this? said Bast stooped, picking up Gem School of Real Estate, Amertorg International Trading Corp., Cushion-Eez Shoe Company, National Institute of Criminology, Ace Match Company, — this mail.
— It’s today’s. I just went to the post office.
— This is yours? your mail?
— Sure, you just send away, J R said without looking up from the skidding surfaces of the magazines he was pulling together, Success Secrets, Selling, Success, the abrupt appearance of a bared breast crowding a full page, — it’s mostly free, you know? He gathered in the breast without a glance, and stood.
— What are those magazines? Bast said, staring.
— Just things where you get to send away, you know? Like I thought I had the town paper here but it’s the wrong one, about zoning this improved property and all.
Bast stood slowly, cleared his throat muttering — improved! and kicked an empty catfood can at the twisted fender.
— Like all they need here is fill and they, hey wait up… J R dug in a pocket, came up with the handkerchief wad, the pencil stub. — They pay like seven dollars a yard for clean fill, you know hey? he said looking at the sign, scratching the pencil stub on a magazine margin. — Have you got a pencil?
— No, and here. Bast handed over the mail and turned away. — I’m in a hurry.
— But just, okay but sometime could we, hey…? J R stood by the mangled clearing biting at the point of the pencil stub, trying it for a mark, biting again. — Hey Mister Bast? he called, and Bast half raised an arm without lifting his eyes from his lengthening steps toward the main road opening ahead, where the voice barely reached him as he crossed its unkempt shoulder. — I just mean like maybe we can use each other some time, okay…?
Pursuing nothing, unpursued, a police car appeared, sheared past him, its siren tearing the day to pieces out of sight beyond the firehouse and the crumbling plaza of the Marine Memorial behind him as he turned up the highway and crossed, stepping over ruts, tripping against cragged remnants of sidewalk in block lengths allotted by rusted poles still bearing aboveground indecipherable relics of street signs that had signaled a Venetian bent real estate extravaganza in the twenties, until even those limbs of rust lay twisted to earth and naked of any sign of place, of any suggestion of the tumbled column and decollated plaster Lion of St Mark’s moldered smooth there in the high browned grass where he turned in, any memory at all but these weeds recalled by the aged as Queen Anne’s laces lining ruts which led back into the banks of oak, no cars but those seeking seclusion for the dumping of outmoded appliances, fornication, and occasional suicide, and those far fewer and on foot who knew it for a back entrance to the Bast property.
— Those woods were filled with people that summer, ’twenty-five was it, Julia? or ’twenty-six? You recall Charlotte was just back from Europe, men dressed up in gondoliers’ hats they actually had a gondola too, down at the creek at that little bridge. A white pitched bridge going absolutely nowhere and how she laughed, she had just come from Venice.
— She stopped when she saw James out in the midst of it, selling waterfront lots to those poor people. They’d been brought out from town on special trains free.
— Waterfront…?
— They were told it would be waterfront, Stella. With docks for ships coming in from Europe and canals like Venice, and they believed it.
— I don’t think James tried to deceive them, Julia. James took it all as rather a lark.
— A lark? People losing their whole life’s savings? Most of them had been domestics, they could hardly speak English.
— Is this Uncle James? here, in this hat? Stella asked absently, mirrored in the picture’s glass, her back to them in a simple curve of gray tailored to the grave decline of her shoulders.
— No, James, James didn’t put on one of those getups. The gondolier’s hat and all the rest of it, none of that was his idea at all. He was simply selling lots on commission for Doc what was his name, when he went to jail…