He felt a flash of anger. “Go to hell,” he said, and shoved himself away from the tree, which just stood there, immovable, locked into a being and purpose that antedated all this, the movement, the hunger, the eating, sleeping, shitting. “I’m going back in the house.”

“Don’t you want to fuck me?” she called, and when he didn’t answer, she let out a long hoarse screech in perfect imitation of Flora Lu’s dead monkey.

Now, draining the last of his beer and rising to his feet in the same motion, he said, “I’m worried about her.”

And Ken, whose attitude all along had been why bother with a neurotic schoolgirl when you had Fanchon and Joanie and Susannah, not to mention all those women in bikinis out there sunning themselves by the pool, laid a hand on his arm. “You and everybody else,” he said.

He was out in the yard one morning two or three weeks later, cutting back the high weeds at the edge of the lawn, glad to be doing his part—pitching in—especially since his contributions to the communal pot had been all but nonexistent in recent weeks, when he was distracted by what seemed to be the sound of a loudspeaker riding in over the treetops. He heard it—static, noise—and then he didn’t. His first thought was that some local politician must be rolling up and down the streets of the village in a convertible broadcasting the usual promises and lies, but then the political season didn’t arrive till fall, did it? Was there a mayoral race going on? He didn’t even know who the mayor was, not that it mattered, as long as he kept clear of the Alte Haus and reined in his police force. But there it was: a loudspeaker, intermittent noise on an otherwise somnolent day, and it was nothing more to him than a curiosity, a minor irritation, like the deer flies settling on the back of his neck or the wasps and poison ivy lurking in the undergrowth. He wiped the blade of his sickle and went back to work.