“Well,” he says. “Well . . .”
But then it’s like he doesn’t know how to go on. He looks over across the corral to where the three or four cows I’ve already doctored are pushing one another butt up against the fence, facing him with their eyes rolled back to white and looking like for two bits they’d either bust down the fence behind them, or, if that didn’t work, race him headlong across the corral to that gate he couldn’t figure out how to open, and escape that way. So, for about two minutes, those cows and him are watching one another, staring at one another across that thirty feet of corral space and fresh cow manure that separates them, until all of a sudden that one cow I haven’t doctored yet decides she has to bawl. And then it’s like he’s been jerked hard by the sleeve; he turns back in the other direction, quick, to face her. She’s still caught inside that narrow alley that leads into the chute; you can see her between the alley rails. Her eyes have got plenty of white showing, too, and she’s beginning to get a little antsy from being left by herself, but at least there’s that much—there’s that fence— separating him and her, and besides, crowded into the alley the way she is, she can’t back up enough to collect herself for a good jump, even if she wants to jump over in his direction. Which she surely doesn’t. Only I don’t believe he knows that.
“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “Isn’t there some place else we can talk?”
“Oh,” I tell him, motioning at the cows, “you’ll have to never mind them. They just haven’t seen many yellow pants before. Give them a little more time—they might get used to it.”
He looks doubtful over at the cows again. I have to admit they haven’t changed much. They still look like they flat want to run or fly or get loose somehow. They’re still facing him with their eyes rolled back and their butts jammed up against the fence as tight to it as they can get.
“Well,” he says, turning back to me, “if I can, I’d like to ask you some questions. Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Depends,” I say.
“On what?” he says.
“On what you’re asking.”
So then he asks me, and what he asks shows he’s not even a state farm agent, that he doesn’t even amount to that much. It shows too that yellow pants or no, the joke’s over. Because what he asks is:
“You’re a neighborly sort of man, aren’t you, Mr. Roscoe?”
“I can be,” I say, because I know what he’s driving at now; I know what’s coming.
“I mean,” he says, “you know all the neighbors around here.”
“Maybe. Some of them.”
“Edith and Lyman Goodnough, for instance?” he says. “People tell me you knew them better than anyone else did. That you did things for them. Is that true?”
So there it is. It hasn’t taken him long. And I say, “Didn’t all these people you say you talked to at least tell you how to say their name—while they were telling you the rest of it?”
“You mean it’s not Good-now?”
“No.”
“What is it then?”
“Good-no.”
“Okay,” he says. “Suit yourself.”
Then he reaches behind him again to dig in his back pocket. He draws out a little spiral notebook and writes something into it with that Eversharp pencil he used a little while earlier to flick the cow manure off his shirt. When he’s done scribbling he says, “They used to live down the road from you, didn’t they?”
“It’s still theirs,” I say. “Nobody else has bought it from them yet.”
“Yes,” he says, “and I already know it’s located down the road from you.”