The auction was in a kind of old warehouse-barn-like building with used excitement everywhere on Saturday afternoon. It smelled like the complete history of America.

The auctioneer was selling things so fast that it was possible to buy stuff that wouldn’t be for sale until next year. He had false teeth that sounded like crickets jumping up and down inside the jaws of a skeleton.

Whenever there was a box of old toys put up for auction, the kids would bother the hell out of their folks until they were threatened with the strap if they didn’t shut up, ‘Stop pestering me or you won’t be able to sit down for a week.’

There were always cows and sheep, horses and rabbits waiting to get new owners or a farmer sombrely contemplating some chickens while blowing his nose.

It was great on a rainy winter afternoon because the auction had a tin roof and there was a beautiful wet closeness to everything inside.

An ancient case made out of dusty glass and long yellow wood like a pioneer’s moustache contained boxes of stale candy bars. They were fifty cents a box and really stale but for some kid reason I liked to gnaw away on them and would work up a quarter and find somebody to go in with me on a box and I’d end up with twelve stale candy bars in 1947.

The Armoured Car

For Janice

I lived in a room that had a bed and a telephone. That was all. One morning I was lying in bed and the telephone rang. The window shades were pulled down and it was raining hard outside. It was still dark.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Who invented the revolver?’ a man asked.

Before I could hang the telephone up my own voice escaped me like an anarchist and said, ‘Samuel Colt.’

‘You just won a cord of wood,’ the man said.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘This is a contest,’ he said. ‘You just won a cord of wood.’

‘I don’t have a stove,’ I said. ‘I live in a rented room. There’s no heat.’

‘Is there anything else you would want besides a cord of wood?’ he said.

‘Yeah, a fountain pen.’

‘Good, we’ll send you one. What’s the address there?’

I gave him my address and then I asked him who was sponsoring the contest.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘The pen will be in the mail tomorrow morning. Oh, yes, is there any particular colour you like? I almost forgot.’

‘Blue would be fine.’

‘We’re all out of blue. Any other colour? Green? We have a lot of green pens.’

‘All right, green, then.’

‘It’ll be in the mail tomorrow morning,’ he said.

It wasn’t. It never came.