When the new shopkeeper arrived in the village he aroused great curiosity along with some scorn. He was deemed refined because his fingernails looked as if they had been varnished a tinted ivory. He had a horse, or as my father was quick to point out, a glorified pony, which he had brought from the Midlands, where he had previously worked.
I never knew her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance.
There was no warning. He had a sudden brief awareness of movement somewhere along the street behind him, and he turned his head and looked back the way he had come; and then they were upon him.
“You’re a real one for opening your mouth in the first place,” Itzie said. “What do you open your mouth all the time for?”
It was before sunrise. Hendrik Gonzalez was scrubbing down the little white deck of the boat and she watched him at work. He kept his face averted, shy and young. In his movements was a curious absorption, a completeness as if each action had its precise rhythm, a harmonic of his fundamental living tone.
Every day, in the intense Arizona sunlight, the cars streamed by along the highway, crossing the desert towards California, and the old lady sat in a rocking-chair on the cement porch of the tourist cabin and counted them.
Certainly he was the vainest man I’ve ever known: if he had lived I’m sure he would have made many people unhappy but somehow, from the very first, I felt he wouldn’t live. Or so it seems now. At the time I probably didn’t think about it one way or the other
Riding back to the stockade after the long and leaden day on the road, Dooley sat stripped to the waist on a plank that crossed the body of the truck, looking at the pines, sand and palmettos.
These things happened at a time when that noble virtue, frivolity, still flourished, when today’s relentless struggle for existence was yet unknown. The faces of the young aristocrats and squires were not darkened by any cloud; at court the maids of honour and the great courtesans always wore a smile on their lips; the occupations of clown and professional teahouse wit were held in high esteem; life was peaceful and full of joy.
From a Boardwalk bar-and-grill dance music sweetened the seaweed-stained air. Lev imagined the bar’s cool haven—the beer smell and the happily subterranean, unfunny interior he had begun to frequent with his son, Milton, who was now gone from home for the first time. Lev had been stunned by the boy’s enlistment in the service, and still, after eight months, was unable to figure out why the boy had not at least, at the very least after all the years of comradeship, consulted him.
The picnic was to be held at the hospital farm. The farm was a mile or two from the red brick buildings on the hospital grounds. There was a dairy, and a barn for the cows. And in this barn, in another section, the draft horses were stabled.