“Wouldn’t Annabel do a double take,” Berry-berry said, “if she knew I was running a whorehouse?”

“Yeah, she sure would. Boy, she really would all right. How have you got it? Divided up in little cubicles?”

“You’ll see.”

But neither of the brothers made any move toward the house. They just stood there, under the light rainfall, separated by a dozen paces of rich black earth. Each of them seemed to be engaged in a desultory study of his surroundings. Occasionally their eyes met.

“Berry-berry?” Clinton said.

“What?”

“Why are there people? Anyway.”

“You mean in the world?” Berry-berry said.

“Yeah.”

Berry-berry thought for a long time. He stretched his arms and took a deep breath of air. Then he held one hand out in front of him, and looked at it, its fingers extended. He let the rain fall on it and watched it get wet. As he did this, there was a startled and innocent look on his face; to Clinton, the entire scene was like an illustration from a children’s book: Berry-berry, a man-child, lost in a forest, examining some precious treasure, his own hand. “I don’t know,” Berry-berry said at last. “I guess for screwing.” And then he smiled and made a series of big sounds that were almost like laughter. “Come on,” he said; and he led the way into the little farmhouse.

Clinton felt, at the first moment, like an intruder in the domestic peace of some poor and respectable family. Paper drapes from the ten-cent store hung at all the windows and wrinkled lace doilies sagged on the back and arms of a badly worn davenport. There were a rocking chair, a big old-fashioned radio, a false fireplace with a gas heater dusty and cold on its hearth; there were pictures on the walls, including a calendar that still showed April, with an illustration of two angels at the tomb of Christ, depicting Easter Sunday.

Agricola, a fat and swarthy black-haired man of forty-five, had been asleep in an easy chair when the brothers entered the house. But he came instantly awake and studied their faces with his black, dying-tiger eyes. Then his mouth opened and his tongue, like some eyeless red creature in search of its own lips, popped out and began to dance about over the surface of his mouth.

“Jeez! I could’ve swore that was real.”

“You shouldn’t sleep down here, Vinnie. You ought to go upstairs to sleep,” Berry-berry said.

“D’you ever have a dream where it’s so goddam real you say to yourself, ‘Christ, this is just like a dream, only it ain’t?’ And then you wake up and it is?”

Berry-berry said, “Anything going on?”

But Vinnie was still absorbed in his dream. “I even half woke up like; and I heard some noise in the kitchen. It must’ve been her out there.” A nod of his head indicated a lighted area beyond the small dining room. A woman sat on the kitchen table, eating a piece of salami and reading a magazine; her bare legs swung back and forth nervously.