Mohawk

little to do with choice and probably never would. Had he been able to offer her as evidence in his recent honors seminar in free will, the course would’ve been struck from the curriculum. Or his father, for that matter, who had spent his whole life trying to figure the odds, never perceiving the random nature of things that made horse races horse races and his own life an endless series of completely novel experiences. New teeth every other month, post time every thirty-five minutes. Place your bets.
    Randall sat up in bed and swung his feet onto the floor. The trailer shifted but the girl didn’t stir. He pulled on his Levis and buttoned them from the bottom up. It was a warm night and there was no need to put on a shirt. In the next room, the baby was asleep in her crib, the tiny room smelling of baby and baby powder. Small children always overwhelmed Randall with the sense of life’s possibilities. Amazing, how quicklythose possibilities vanished. Five-year-olds often had personalities as fixed and rigid as their parents, and if you couldn’t tell who’d get killed in the street by a drunk driver, you’d be pretty safe in predicting who wouldn’t grow up to be a surgeon. And anyone clever enough to predict Vietnam surely could’ve foreseen that the boy who’d sat cheerfully on Randall Younger’s chest and punched him in the face would end up in a reddening paddy. Randall’s ending up at the university was part of the same prediction, but what about his dropping out and returning to Mohawk? Maybe that too. Were there clues somewhere in his past, or his mother’s, or grandfather’s, if he looked hard enough? Maybe he’d quit because of something that had happened in the alley behind Harry’s, or in the old Littler Hospital, or in the infield where Price hit grounders at him, or in the park where he discovered his grandfather slumped over on the park bench, staring up at the black, high branches of the lifeless trees as the other man, this girl’s grandfather, retreated. And what did he want with this girl? Not love, surely, though he cared for her. Not lust, though he enjoyed her. Not admiration, though he found her grasp of reality appealing.
    Outside, the night was black, a gentle breeze that hadn’t found its way into the trailer. Randall sat down on the cinder block that served as a step. He carefully rolled a joint and smoked it, the orange inching toward his lips. For some reason he wasn’t startled by the voice, though it was very near; as if he’d been expecting it for a long time.
    “Mather Grouse,” it said.

42
    “Has it occurred to you,” Anne Grouse asked her mother, “how much of our daily conversation is on the subject of worms?”
    “If you’re having a mood, dear, we needn’t talk about anything.”
    “It’s just that we’ve been through it all. You can’t kill the worms without killing the grass. You have to poison the soil.”
    “What I don’t understand is why they came here in the first place,” Mrs. Grouse said. “They’ve come for something.”
    “God.”
    “Well?”
    “We’re still talking about worms, aren’t we. They’re just here, Mother. Can’t we leave it at that? They aren’t causing any harm—in fact they’re
good
for the lawn—and they’ve probably been here all along. You just never noticed. Besides, it’s been a rainy summer. There
are
more serious problems, if you care to talk about them.”
    “Randall said he’d paint the house,” Mrs. Grouse offered. She was dipping her tea bag in and out of the steaming water like a yo-yo. Finally, when the liquid was perfectly brown, she deposited the bag on thesaucer. After adding two heaping teaspoons of sugar, she pushed the bowl toward her daughter, who was drinking coffee, black. “For your disposition,” she said.
    This was as close to humor as her mother ever got. The old woman’s wit always surfaced when Anne was most serious. “I’m not talking about painting, Mother. Painting is the least of our worries.”
    Unfortunately, the subject of house repairs was proscribed. Mrs. Grouse, having completed the canonization of her husband, was seldom in the mood to entertain the blasphemous suggestion that anything at all was wrong with his house. “He left it in
ideal
condition,” she was fond of telling her sister.
    It was typical of their relationship that Anne and her Mother never worried about the same things. With the roof beginning to leak, wetting the attic insulation and