The Tin Can Tree Read Free Page B

have to find something else for him to do.
    Ansel said, “Now the olives, Simon.”
    “I don’t think I like olives.”
    “Sure you do. Olives are good for the brain. Will you look at your shirt?”
    Simon looked down at his shirt and then shrugged.
    “It’ll wash,” he said.
    “Your mama’ll have a fit.”
    “Ah, she won’t care.”
    “I bet she will.”
    “She won’t care.”
    “
Any
mother would care about
that,
” said Ansel. “Makes quite a picture.”
    “Pictures,” James said suddenly. He straightened up. “Hey, Simon. You seen my last photographs?”
    “No,” said Simon. “You get another customer?”
    “Not in the last few days, no. But I took a bunch on my own a while ago. When you’re done I’ll show you.”
    “Okay,” said Simon.
    “Olives,” Ansel reminded him.
    James went over to the back window and looked out. There was the Pikes’ Nellie, burrowing her way through a tangle of wild daisies and bachelor’s buttons. He had been planning to pick Joan a bunch of those daisies, before all this happened. They were her favorite flowers. Now he couldn’t; the house would be stuffed with hothouse funeral flowers. And anyway, he couldn’t just walk in there with a bunch of daisies in his hand and risk disturbing the Pikes. The daisies would have grown old there, waving in the sunshine on their long green stems, before he could go back to doing things like that again.
    The pizza was in the oven. Ansel slammed the door on it and wiped his hands and said, “
There
, now.”
    “How much longer?” Simon asked.
    “Oh, I don’t know. Fifteen-twenty minutes. We’ll go out where it’s cool and wait on it. You coming, James?”
    James followed them out to the living room. It seemed very dark and cool here now. Ansel settleddown on his couch with a long contented groan, and Simon went over to Ansel’s window and stood watching the road.
    “Anybody seen those people?” he asked James.
    “What people?”
    “My mama and them. Anybody seen them?”
    “No, not yet.”
    “Well, anyway,” said Simon, “I reckon I’ll just run on over and have a look, see if maybe they haven’t—”
    “I think we’d have seen them if they’d come,” said James. “Or heard them, one.”
    “
Still
and all, I guess I’ll just—”
    “You two,” Ansel said. “Do you have to stand over me like that?” He was lying full length now, with his head propped against one of the sofa arms. “Kind of overwhelming,” he said, and James moved Simon gently away by one shoulder.
    “I almost forgot,” he said. “You want to see my pictures?”
    “Oh, well I—”
    “They’re good ones.”
    “Well.”
    James went down the little hallway to his darkroom. There was a damp and musky smell there, and only the dimmest light. He headed for the filing cabinet in the corner, where he kept his pictures, and opened the bottom drawer. The latest ones were at the front, laid away carefully (taking pictures for fun wasn’t something he could afford very often), and when he pulled them out he handled them gently, examining the first two alone for a minute before he returned to the living room.
    “Here you go,” he said to Simon. “Your hands clean?”
    “Yes.”
    His hands were covered with tomato sauce, but he held the pictures by the rims so James didn’t say anything. The first picture didn’t impress Simon. He studied it only a minute and then sniffed. “One of those,” he said. James grinned and handed him the next one. Neither Simon nor Janie Rose had ever liked anything but straight, posed portraits—preferably of someone they could recognize, which always made them giggle. But when James wasn’t taking wedding pictures, or photographs for the Larksville newspaper, he turned away from portraits altogether. He had the idea of photographing everyone he knew in the way his mind pictured them when they weren’t around. And the way people stuck in his memory was odd—they were doing something without