I know. Although…The devil whispered in his ear. I guess I wouldn’t have to clip my toenails anymore.

What a bastard you are. How can you be such a rotten, cheap bastard.

It’s hard. He embraced her from behind, spoke softly in her ear. I’m sorry. He’ll be all right. They’ll fix him up, it happens all the time. People live with it. They go on.

She stood sobbing in his arms, her back against him. He bent and kissed the delicate skin of her neck, the tender flesh below the ears, and murmured in her hair. Please, honey, let’s not talk about it. Think about Sunday. He unbuttoned his jeans, letting them fall to his shanks.

What about Sunday?

The party, beautiful, the party. Our grand opening. Roast goat. Cabrito. Champagne punch, wine, Ritz crackers, four different kinds of surplus commodity cheese. (What a friend we have in cheeses.) The housewarming, honey. All your friends are gonna be here. We have forty people pledged to show up. The social event of the season. We might even, who knows, sell a couple of—paintings? He lifted her big globed breasts in his hands. Hey? Whatta you say? He nudged her against the kitchen table, bending her forward over the edge. He lifted the stiff smock and tugged down on her baggy dungarees.

No, she said, not now. She rolled from beneath him and stalked out of the room, hoisting her pants high around her waist.

Her husband gaped after her with outspread pleading arms—useless. Hobbled by the copper-riveted jeans around his ankles, he made no attempt to pursue. With breaking heart, his rejected aching hard-on twitching high in the air, he whined like a sick hound, Myra…my Myra…my only Myra….

The sound of one door slamming.

Pause.

He looked at his good right hand. Still couldn’t see, after all these years, any hairs growing out of the palm. Nor was he any crazier than before. Masturbation is a lonely art, he reflected, but there’s this to be said in its favor: you do build a good relationship with yourself.

UNDISMAYED and undeterred, Henry Lightcap made his preparations. Saturday morning he bought a young he-goat from a neighbor, one Cipriano Peralta Santiago Morales; after forty-five minutes of friendly haggling he got the price down from $20 to $6.50 with a lead rope thrown in for free. He led the frisky little fella home and tethered him to a dead tree in the orchard. The goat began at once to graze on the dry stubble, the tumbleweed, the old yellowed newspapers and the bark of the tree. It was not a fat goat but big for its age; the little horns were twice the size of Henry’s thumbs.

Taking his spade, Henry dug a knee-deep pit in the soft dirt of what had once been a garden. The goat watched through the slotted pupils of its eyes, perturbed by some image from its racial unconscious, then returned to feeding. Henry lined his pit with stones and filled it with well-cured applewood, stacked log-cabin style to form a well-drawing pyre. He cut and piled more dead applewood nearby. Almost noon by the sun. Henry pulled a whetstone from its sheath and began to sharpen his knife.