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looked at baseball there were sixteen teams in the two major leagues and now there were hundreds. He started clipping things out of the newspapers—disaster stories or funny headlines (“Action on Building Bribes Delayed by Lack of Funds,” for instance, from The New York Times )—and all he managed to do was cut the dining room tablecloth with the scissors, and glue his fingers together.
    The old man didn’t know it, and nobody would tell him, but it turned out his hobby was looking for hobbies. It was certainly keeping his mind active and his blood circulating, and if he was actually out in the park now with a homemade kite then maybe it was also keeping him young. “Yeah,” Jerry said. “Maybe I’ll stop over there before lunch.” He finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink.
    His mother looked at him. “No breakfast?”
    â€œI got a special pickup this morning.” He kissed her on the cheek. “See you later.”
    â€œIf you see your father,” she called after him, “tell him dinner at six. Not six-thirty, quarter to seven. Six .”
    LATER THAT MORNING …
    â€œThey look like they’re taking a crap,” Frank McCann said.
    â€œIt’s a fart contest,” said his brother Floyd. “They’re standing around trying to give out with the biggest fart.”
    Frank and Floyd were in Frank’s sunny kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table on which stood four gold-painted green-eyed Dancing Aztec Priests, hopping on their left legs amid a rural scattering of excelsior. The wooden box marked A was on the floor beside the table, with its top ripped off.
    Frank’s wife Teresa, who was also Jerry’s sister, looked over at the table from where she was chopping carrots on the drainboard and said, “Maybe they’re dancing.”
    â€œYeah, they’re dancing,” Frank said. “The green apple two-step.”
    Floyd said, “So what do we do? Throw them out?”
    â€œWe’ll put ’em in the closet,” Frank said. There was a closet in the basement, behind the bar, where they kept things that might be valuable but for which they had not as yet found the right customer. Skis, for instance; there were a lot of skis down there.
    Floyd said, “Let’s see what else we got today.”
    So they put the four Dancing Aztec Priests and most of the excelsior back in the wooden box, and then turned to the mail sacks and packages and boxes that were Jerry’s regular harvest from the airport. They slit open the canvas mail-bags, punched open the cardboard cartons; crowbarred open the wooden boxes, and quickly separated the wheat from the chaff. All registered letters were opened, and cash was put in one pile, stocks and bonds in another. Small registered packages were likely to carry jewelry, which went onto a third pile. While Teresa went on preparing today’s minestrone the loot heaped up on the kitchen table, with the discarded boxes and bags and envelopes and letters scattered around the floor.
    The reason Frank was home during the day was that he was a member of a backstage theatrical union. The union required so-and-so many members be hired for every Broadway and Off-Broadway production, whether that large a crew was needed for that particular show or not. Frank, a pale-skinned, pot-bellied man of thirty-four, with thinning red hair and a thickening red face, had been with the union twelve years and had pretty good seniority by now, so he generally got himself hired by shows where he was redundant and didn’t have to put in an appearance hardly at all.
    Floyd McCann, a younger and somewhat thinner version of his brother, was in a construction union and so also had a lot of time off. If they weren’t on strike—and they were usually on strike—then something else would happen, like the city running out of money or the contractor failing to get all the right permits. At