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the development of Pearl’s land. Now that her stubborn resistance was no longer a factor he could at last get started. Pearl had inherited the place from her uncle the pig farmer—the house and ninety-nine acres of land.
    No, watch it, the slant still isn’t quite right. Small took a firmer grip on his pen.
    He had tried to make her see it as a bonanza, prime real estate, ripe for intelligent development. Especially with Meadow-lark Estates going up next door, setting a high tone for a neighborhood that had once been a rural slum, with third-rate malls and sleazy discount stores and pig farms like her Uncle Charley’s. But poor old misguided Pearl, she’d insisted on seeing her ninety-nine acres as some sort of natural paradise, a haven for wildlife. Small’s pen trembled as he remembered the look on Pearl’s face when she reached down and touched the soil under her feet, compacted by the hooves of a thousand pigs.
    Come on, Fred, be careful, don’t let the letters run downhill.
    She had talked wildly about the trees she was planting, pines and birches, mountain laurel and hemlocks. Pheasants would find cover in her shrubbery, Pearl said. Rabbits and foxes and deer would hide in her woodland. She had shown him the red-tailed hawk perched on the very top of the tallest of his gravel-sorting towers. “Someday,” she had said dreamily, “that hawk’s descendants will perch in my white-oak trees.” Goddamnit, Pearl! Why couldn’t you see the opportunity? Why couldn’t you get it through your thick head ?
    But she didn’t see. No matter what he said to her, no matter what he did to her—and he’d done plenty—no matter how many times he showed her the developer’s figures, she still didn’t get it, she just sulked and turned her head away. She was stupid, that was the trouble.
    Well, it was no longer a problem. Pearl was out of the picture. He could go right ahead. Any day now he’d pull that red-hot iron out of the fire and strike it a mighty blow.
    Unfortunately, the second iron was rapidly growing cold. His sand-and-gravel company was on its last legs. It had already been in trouble on the day he ran into Pearl for the first time. There she had been on the other side of his chain-link fence, a pretty girl with yellow wisps of hair peeking out from under her kerchief. She had been planting trees along the southern edge of her property—a lovely girl with yellow hair and ninety-nine acres of land!
    Pearl had wanted to know at once how long the conveyor belts and sorting bins and rusty towers were going to remain right there beside her wilderness , her wildlife refuge , her bird sanctuary.
    â€œOh, not long at all,” he had told her, enchanted by her fairytale prettiness. “I’m selling out. It’s all coming down, everything, even the asphalt plant.”
    The truth was, Fred Small had no choice. He merely leased the land on which his sorting towers stood, with their crushers for six-inch boulders, their hoppers for pea-sized and half-inch gravel, their screening decks and belt-driven conveyors. The owner of the land wanted to sell. And anyway the site was exhausted. The ground had been scraped clean of sandy topsoil. Sooner or later Fred would have to dismantle all the rigs and move them to New Hampshire, even the asphalt plant, which had at last begun to break even.
    It would cost millions. All the more reason to carry through with the development of the old pig farm! Couldn’t Pearl see that? Then, for an instant, Small’s hand stopped its exercise in penmanship on the paper in front of him. He remembered something he had read a thousand years ago, a story about sailors turned into swine. Maybe all the pigs in Southtown had been human once. Now the poor creatures were long gone, turned into sides of bacon and a thousand miles of sausage.
    Before long their old stomping ground would be turned into house lots,