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pull the last bolls off the stalks, but the bottom’s dropped out because foreign rayon’s ruined the market. He guesses that somewhere across the big pond, little Japanese girls are sewing pants together and getting off from their jobs and meeting boyfriends for drinks and movies after work, talking about their supervisors. Maybe they’re eating raw fish. They did that on Okinawa after they captured the place and everything settled down. He was on Okinawa. Mr. P. got shot on Okinawa.
    He reaches down and touches the place, just above his knee. They were full of shit as a Christmas turkey. Eight hundred yards from the beach under heavy machine-gun fire. No cover. Wide open. They could have gotten some sun if they’d just been taking a vacation. They had palm trees. Sandy beaches. No lotion. No towels, no jamboxes, no frosty cool brewskies. They waded through water up to their necks and bullets zipped in the surf around them killing men and fish. Nobody had any dry cigarettes. Some of their men got run over by their own carriers and some of the boys behind shot the boys in front. Mr. P. couldn’t tell who was shooting whom. He just shot. He stayed behind a concrete barrier for a while and saw someJapanese symbols molded into the cement, but he couldn’t read them. Every once in a while he’d stick his head out from behind the thing and just shoot.
    He hasn’t fired a shot in anger in years now, though. But he’s thinking seriously about shooting a hole in the screen door with a pistol. Just a little hole.
    He knows he needs to get up and go down to the bam and see about that cow, but he just can’t face it today. He knows she won’t be any better. She’ll be just like she was last night, not touching the water he’s drawn up in a barrel for her, not eating the hay he’s put next to her. That’s how it is with a cow when they get down, though. They just stay down. Even the vet knows that. The vet knows no shot he can give her will make her get up, go back on her feed. The vet’s been to school. He’s studied anatomy, biology. Other things, too. He knows all about animal husbandry and all.
    But Mr. P. thinks him not much of a vet. The reason is, last year, Mr. P. had a stud colt he wanted cut, and he had him tied and thrown with a blanket over his head when the vet came out, and Mr. P. did most of the cutting, but the only thing the vet did was dance in and out with advice because he was scared of getting kicked.
    The phone rings and Mr. P. stays on the couch and listens to it ring. It’s probably somebody calling with bad news. That’s about the only thing a phone’s good for anyway, Mr. P. thinks, to let somebody get ahold of you with some bad news. He knows people just can’t wait to tell bad news. Like if somebody dies, or if a man’s cows are out in the road, somebody’ll besure to pick up the nearest phone and call somebody else and tell him or her all about it. And they’ll tell other things, too. Personal things. Mr. P. thinks it’d probably be better to just not have a phone. If you didn’t have a phone, they’d have to come over to your house personally to give you bad news, either drive over or walk. But with a phone, it’s easy to give it to you. All they have to do’s just pick it up and call, and there you are.
    But on second thought, he thinks, if your house caught on fire and you needed to call up the fire department and report it, and you didn’t have a phone, there you’d be again.
    Or the vet.
    The phone’s still ringing. It rings eight or nine times. Just ringing ringing ringing. There’s no telling who it is. It could be the FHA. They hold the mortgage on his place. Or, it could be the bank. They could be calling again to get real shitty about the note. He’s borrowed money from them for seed and fertilizer and things and they’ve got a lien. And, it could be the county