Free Poorhouse Fair by John Updike Page B

would be no supper. Lucas never found his appetite until dark, and after Angelo's fooling any pressure on his left gums made it ache above. Still he appreciated that Conner tried to feed them well. His thoughts predominantly were with his morning's purchase, a pint of rye, and the relations it would assume with his pain.
    His wife, who during her recital had fallen behind, was eating rapidly.
    Elizabeth Heinemann said, "Isn't it pretty, the rain? You never feel alone when it rains." Her clean neck elongated to bring her closer to the drumming overhead, which in the first movement of the storm was savage, though she wished it even louder, to clarify her confused inner world of tilting purple tumuli, a pre-Creational landscape fairly windowed by her eyes, the navy blue of a new baby's.
     
    "DIDN'T I see Buddy's twin on the lawn?" an old man at another table asked.
    "Buddy has no twin," Gregg said. "That's just what they say to excuse Buddy for being a moron."
    "No. In a crushed-cap-like."
    What the old man--Fuller--saw dawned on Gregg, and the tension of mischief smoothed the net of wrinkles on his small face. "Driving a truck?"
    "I saw the truck. I didn't see him drive it." Fuller was wary of Gregg.
    "How do you think he got here? Flew? You think fairies can really fly?"
    "No, in a cap with his sleeves rolled up."
    "Buddy's twin. He came up from Newark to see his f.ing brother. It was very touching. Gypsies had split them in the cradle. The only trouble with the twin is he got this job driving a truck and he can't drive a foot. He knocked down a big section of the wall out front."
    At this point Fuller sensed that Gregg was having him on. He looked toward Hook, who he knew would speak the truth, but Hook was saying, "It was re-markable, the way the stone fence gave. You would think, now, that the few end stones would fall away and leave the rest stand. Yet a whole tri-angular section held together, the cracks in the mortar running in a straight line. Indeed it will cost Conner a pretty penny to have it repaired; the stone masons nowadays are used to setting nothing but bricks and the cinder blocks."
    "Who was the young man I saw on the lawn then?" Fuller asked.
    "Buddy's twin he means," Gregg said.
    "Buddy's twin? Buddy's twin is in Ari-zona." Gregg's signals to play along were quite missed by Hook, who turned considerately to Fuller, known as soft in the head, and explained, "That young man drove the Pepsi-Cola truck here, and was nothing like Buddy. Buddy is educated."
    "Educated how to be a pain in everybody's a.," Gregg said.
    Fuller's broad downy eyebrows twisted a bit in perplexity. "Who was it who came from Newark, then, the driver or the twin?"
    "The driver is the twin," Gregg said.
    "The twin is in Ari-zona," Hook repeated, "in the southwest, where they are doing such wonder-ful things with irri-gation."
    "And who fired the shot?" Fuller asked, his soft brain affably manufacturing a third image of Buddy, this triplet holding a rifle, for he knew that around the place the only person willing and permitted to handle a gun was Buddy.
    Neither Hook, whose attention at the moment had been fixed and who was incapable of receiving side impressions, nor Gregg, then buzzing around the motor of the backing truck, knew to what Fuller referred. "The kid, the twin," Gregg answered quickly, "he had a gun in his pocket. He was a tough kid. He tried to kidnap me."
    "A gunshot?" Hook asked.
    "Out back," Fuller said. "It was why I came outside, now that I remember."
    "That wasn't a shot," Gregg told him, "that was just your own head cracking you heard." Ashamed of having said this, he stood up and added, "I'll get dessert." As the youngest and best co-ordinated of the three, it was fitting that he should. He brought back four plastic dishes of peach halves, and ate his and the extra one while his companions were still chopping theirs with spoons.
     
    BECAUSE he had not been naturally shaped for solitude --indeed a native