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to get pregnant – so that all the men on the road used to tell Nevin that they would come down immediately and help him out. But after all the doctors made all the tests, and they becamereconciled to the fact that they would never have a child, Vera became pregnant.
    Antony came in and looked at them a moment. “I’m having one hell of a hell of a time,” he said quickly.
    “What’s wrong?” Nevin asked.
    “Oh, I been talking to that Ivan,” Antony said as he sat on the corner of the couch, “and I think I’ll have to move outta the house and move in with him – to straighten him around – for if I don’t straighten that man out, he’ll be dead.”
    “Dead,” Nevin said.
    “All he wants to do now is party – out partying all the time – while he has a retarded girl sitting in her apartment twiddlin her thumbs.”
    Then Antony, who if anyone in the world had asked him when he was walking down the path what he was going to say would not have been able to tell them, sighed and moved his sapphire ring about on his left hand.
    “Why – what’s going on,” Vera said.
    “He slaps the snot out of her and everything else like that there,” Antony said. “And she as pregnant as a butterball. I told him – I told him, yer diggin yer own grave, making yer own bed, if you’re going to hear the music you have to pay for the tune, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and lie down with dogs you’ll wake up with fleas – but he listens to nothing.”
    Vera and Nevin still believed that Antony had been in the war – and a war hero – as he told them when they first moved here. He fought “the Dieppenamese,” as he had told them, and had been wounded. “At Normandy – a hunk of times.” He walked into Brussels in 1944 where he was “shot and left for dead.”
    When they had first moved here, he had been the first to visit them. Because of his advice, they wouldn’t buy mackerel from one fellow, or have their garbage picked up by another. “Don’t buy mackerel from that son of a bitch,” he would say. “He’s out every day robbing other people’s nets. Garbage – I guess he picks up garbage, and he has a dump filled with chemicals and all of that that is killin us all off – it’s in our well and I hadda rush Valerie to the hospital to have her stomach pumped up. Garbage,” he said suspiciously, “I guess it’s garbage – well, you know yerself I ain’t saying nothin new under the sun.”
    So they paid Antony to pick up their garbage and bring them mackerel.
    “Is there anything we can do to help?” Vera said.
    “Ha – is there anything we can do,” Antony said, as if suddenly angry with them both. “What do you guys think I been trying to do? The priest is no good whatsoever – he won’t listen to reason – balded me out – Ernie and I went down to see him about it – the other night, as a matter of fact.”
    “What did he say?”
    “Well,” Antony said, “he just told us to get off his property–”
    “I don’t care for priests,” Vera said. “How can they counsel anybody?” Vera liked to think she had a more humanistic vision than the one offered by the Catholic church.
    And, sensing this about her, Antony said, sighing, “You think I do? Most are fruits.”
    “I didn’t know you were having a bad time,” Nevin said apologetically, “or I wouldn’t have bothered you about the money.”
    “Bad time,” Antony said. “Don’t worry, boys and girls – it’s nothing more than I went through all my life with no one to help me out, so I can manage once again, don’t worry about me.” And he laughed good-naturedly here because he suddenly believed everything he had just said.
    “I brought you yer money back,” he added, looking into his huge black wallet.
    Nevin looked at him, then over at Vera.
    “Well look, why don’t you give us what you can and keep what you need,” Vera said.
    “Well – I can give you all except fifty to seventy-five dollars,”