Free Hunts in Dreams by Tom Drury Page A

smiled as she followed Charles and Micah into the main building. There was something she liked about Charles, although he knew so little about lobsters.
    The three of them walked up a set of wide and uneven stairs and came out at the top of an old wooden auditorium, semi-circular in design. The bleachers descended steeply, in ever tighter arcs, to a dirt pen two or three stories below.
    â€œImagine building this,” said Charles. “We had trouble with them simple doors.”
    The bleachers were half full of farmers. Some talked, some smoked, some held radios to their ears. They wore wide-legged pinstriped overalls and cloth hats crushed down on their heads. The auctioneer stood at a raised platform at the back of the pen. The wall above his head had hand-painted signs for feed companies, well drillers, implement dealers, veterinarians, and banks. The biggest sign of all was a disclaimer: ALL GUARANTIES ARE BETWEEN THE BUYER AND THE SELLER WITH NONE MADE BY THE AUCTIONEER . Lyris felt she’d happened on some ancient place.
    They walked down an aisle and took seats as the next sale was beginning. A door opened beside the auctioneer’s stand and five hogs sauntered into the pen, ringed noses testing the air. They were followed by a man slapping a wooden slat against his thigh and calling, “Suh! Suh!” He wore knee-high boots of black rubber with terra-cotta soles. Lyris expected the auctioneer’s speech to be hypnotic, nonstop, and indecipherable; she was ready for a torrent. Instead he said calmly, in a drawl more occupational than regional, that these were American Landrace barrows certified by the seller free of cholera and Bang’s disease and mange.
    After the hogs were sold, the man with the flat stick and high boots bowed to the bleachers and herded the animals back through the doorway in the wall. Charles asked a group of farmers sitting below them when the goats were expected to go on the block, or had they already gone?
    The farmers laughed. An old man wearing round eyeglasses asked what Charles had said. When it was repeated to him, the old man craned his neck to see who had asked such a thing. “Why, the goddamned dummy,” he said.
    â€œSaturdays are hogs and cattle only,” explained another farmer. Using a blunt-nosed pencil, he was writing figures on a scrap of brown paper.
    Charles gave the old farmer a wary glance. “What day are the goats?”
    â€œThey don’t get a day,” said the writing farmer. “It’s not an auction animal. Not that I know of, anyway.” He turned away. “Skel! This fellow wants to know about goats.”
    Skel stood up and looked around. “We haven’t had a goat, geez, going on ten years.”
    â€œLet’s go, Daddy,” said Micah.
    â€œThere’s no money in it,” said Skel. “I can tell you from sad experience, you’re better off with cattle.”
    â€œLet’s go.”
    â€œYou’re telling me they don’t auction goats,” said Charles, hemmed in, it seemed, by everything they knew and he didn’t. “That it isn’t done.”
    It wasn’t really clear whom he was talking to, but the farmer with the scrap of paper folded it and put it in the pocket of his green down vest. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “I could believe it happens somewhere.”
    â€œThey don’t auction goats in this county!” said the old man, as if the county’s honor had been called into question.
    â€œThey’re more suited to hill country,” said Skel. “You’ve come to the wrong place, son.”
    Charles lifted his chin proudly, surveying the farmers arrayed against him. “Watch me,” he said. He got up and walked down the aisle to the pen, where he pushed open a gate and strode through. He stepped onto the platform and addressed the auctioneer, who listened impassively, as auctioneers will.
    â€œWho is he,