Read The Wapshot Scandal for Free Online Page B

down the street and took the still inert form away on a stretcher. She learned that evening that he had been instantly killed. Some children had given the alarm. But why hadn’t she? How could she account for her unnatural behavior? The general concern for security seemed to be at the bottom of her negligence. She had not wanted to do anything that would call attention to herself, that would involve giving testimony or answering questions. Presumably her concern for security had led her to overlook the death of a neighbor.
    Coverly would have had some difficulty explaining to Leander that while he had been trained as a taper and sub-programmer, he had been switched to public relations when he was transferred from the Remsen to the Talifer Site. This was a mistake, made by one of the computations machines in personnel, but there was no appeal. They lived in a mixed neighborhood. Betsey wanted a shelter and Coverly had applied for a transfer to another neighborhood but the government-operated real-estate office was swamped with such applications and anyhow Coverly was not unhappy where he was. Ginkgo trees had been planted along the sidewalks where children roller-skated, and song birds had nested in the trees. Sitting in his back yard before dinner he could watch the sere and moving mountain twilight—that sour and powerful glow—beyond the distant gantries. They had a little garden and a grill for cooking meat. The house on their right was owned by a man named Armstrong, who was in the World Relations Department. Armstrong had developed a dry, manly and monosyllabic prose style for ghosting the chronicles of astronauts. The house on their left was owned by a gantry-crew man named Murphy, who got drunk and beat up his wife on Saturday nights. The Wapshots did not get along with the Murphys. One morning when Coverly was at work the signal board indicated that there was a telephone call for him. He left the security area to take the call. It was Betsey. “She stole my garbage pail,” Betsey said.
    “I don’t understand, sugar,” Coverly said.
    “Mrs. Murphy,” Betsey said. “The garbage man came this morning, he always comes on Tuesdays, and when he took away the garbage she took that nice, new, tin, galvanized garbage pail of mine and carried it right up to the back of her house, leaving me with that cracked, plastic old thing they brought from Canaveral.”
    “Well, I can’t do anything about it now,” Coverly said. “I’ll be home at half-past five.”
    Betsey was still excited when he returned. “You go right over there now and get it back,” she said. “They’ll fill it up with garbage and claim that it’s theirs. You should have painted our name on it. You go right over there now and get it away from them. There he is, he’s cutting the grass.”
    Coverly left the house and walked to the boundary of his lot. Pete Murphy had just started up his lawn mower. The distant mountains were blue. The time of day, the sameness of the houses, the popping noise of the one-cylinder engine and the two men in their white shirt sleeves gave to the scene some unwonted otherness, as if Coverly were not about to accuse his neighbor, or his neighbor’s wife, of theft, but was about to remark that merchandising indices showed in their uptrend the inarguable power of direct-mail advertising. In short, their reality and their passions seemed challenged. The distant mountains had been formed by fire and water but the houses in the valley looked so insubstantial that they seemed, in the dusk, to smell of shirt cardboards. Coverly cracked his knuckles nervously and signaled to Pete with a jerk of his head. Pete pushed the lawn mower directly past him and muffled Coverly’s words with noise of the motor. Coverly waited. Pete made a second circle of the lawn and then throttled down the motor and stopped in front of Coverly.
    “My wife tells me you stole our garbage pail,” Coverly said.
    “So what?”
    “Are you in the