The ladder came down as he let the rope slide slowly through his hands. He heard Carlson’s heels as the man crossed over to his house. He heard Fred coming up the cement walk, heard him mounting his porch, heard his screen door open …

Unable to restrain his voice, Newman turned his head and said, ‘Hya.’

Fred had the screen door open, and looked through the screen at Newman, his foot on the threshold. His puffed eyes were reddened, his cheeks relaxed by the beer. Newman watched with alarm as he slowly moved his head forward until his nose was bent against the screen. Then smiling idiotically and without focus, he muttered hoarsely, ‘Had a couple …’ With a swaying attempt at entering his house erectly he struck the doorjamb with his shoulder and disappeared inside.

That night, lying in bed beside his open window, Mr Newman looked at the moon, for he could not sleep. Fred’s nose bent down against the screen hung in his mind. Had that meant something, the way he had done it so methodically? A bent nose … And yet he had said a rather friendly thing immediately after. And too, he had been drunk. But why was he acting so peculiarly?

The hours moved by quietly and they left him silent and alone. After a while he got up and went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and stood a long time looking at his face in the mirror. There were no thoughts, no plans, not even fear. He seemed unable to feel anything any more.

In the morning he opened his front door and stepped out on his porch, and his right foot hesitated a moment before coming down to the brick floor. His garbage pail was lying on its side in the middle of the gutter. On his lawn its contents were carefully spread out. He looked up and down the street. All the other cans, with the burlap bags full of paper, were standing at the curb, covered.

Chapter Ten

MR FINKELSTEIN was still a young man, but as a Jew he was very old. He knew what was going on. He could hardly help knowing. Twice in the past three weeks, when he had come out of his house at six in the morning to open his store he had found his garbage can turned on its side, its contents kicked all over his sidewalk.

So when, on this Monday morning, he came out of his house at six o’clock and found his garbage can again turned over, with grapefruit rinds thrown up to his very front porch, he hesitated hardly a moment, and proceeded to gather the garbage together again with two stiff pieces of cardboard and dumped it back into the pail. He was smiling all the while. Whenever he was frightened and angry in this particular way, he smiled. It was like an old joke that had been repeated and repeated to him all his life, and all he could do now was to smile at the idiocy of the teller. He smiled too, however, because-he had an instinctive feeling that from one of the houses across the street somebody was watching him gathering up this garbage.