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thought she said. So we have lots of time. Shoes?”
    They drive up to Troy, then cut east toward Bennington. It’s a flawless autumn day, the blue of the sky either absolutely deep or absolutely without depth. Billy’s put on
The Magnificent Gigli,
and at least Deke’s not complaining. They take a side road north, past barns and tractors, through intermittent odors of manure. Billy passes on his tractor lore: red for Farmall, green for John Deere, gray for Ford, orange for Case, Allis-Chalmers and Massey-Harris. And they make up a tractor game: Deke gets a point for every red one, Billy for every green, and points for gray and orange go to whoever spots them first. Deke’s ahead four to two when they stop at a field with a beach umbrella, an aluminum chair and a PUMKINS sign.
    There’s nobody here, just rows of pumpkins ranked by size and a tackle box with a three-by-five card reading HONOR SYSTEM: LG $5, MED $3, SM $1.
    “Can we get a big one?”
    “But of course,” Billy says in his French accent.
    “But I feel sorry for the little ones.”
    “So we’ll get some little ones too, for decoration. The little ones are the ones they make pies out of.”
    “Can we make a pie?”
    “We can think about it.”
    “But can we?”
    “Yeah, why not? I guess we could figure it out.” One of his mother’s cookbooks must have a recipe, though they’re probably all based on canned pumpkin. Which must be more condensed, so therefore … something. Whether Deke’s budding housewifeliness ought to be encouraged is a whole other question. But here’s Billy encouraging it.
    When he opens his wallet, he finds only three singles and a couple of twenties. The tackle box has two singles and three quarters. Hmm. Deke’s walking through the big pumpkins, crowing “Look at this one—no, look at
this
one!” Billy steps into the road. That must be the house, way up there on the opposite side. A tall, pointy-roofed farmhouse with two-over-two windows, weathered gray. Not a place where he’d ordinarily knock on the door. If he left a twenty and took the two singles, they could get three big pumpkins and three little ones. Except he doesn’t
want
three big pumpkins. And he doubts you need three little ones for a pie, even if the stuff’s not condensed.
    “Come here quick!” Deke calls.
    “You find one?”
    “You have to
see
this.”
    Billy walks over. Deke’s sitting beside a knee-high pumpkin, classic pumpkin-shape on one side, the other side flattened, with diseased-looking patches of brown.
    “A
wright,
” he says. “Good choice.”
    “We can just turn the bad side away,” Deke says.
    “Absolutely.”
    “So we can get it, right?”
    “If I can lift it.”
    “I’ll help,” Deke says.
    They wrestle the monster into the backseat, then pick out three small pumpkins. Billy puts a twenty in the tackle box and takes out the two ones. Five for the big pumpkin, buck apiece for the three little ones, ten dollars for the entertainment. He backs around, noses onto the blacktop, looks both ways and decides to drive on past the farmhouse instead of turning around and appearing to hightail it out of there. He points at the chickens pecking in the front yard and a small black-nosed sheep chained to a car wheel lying in the grass, and misses a Farmall tractor out by the barn.
    “Can we listen to Barney?”
    “Sure,” Billy says. “You like that song ‘The Old Brass Wagon’?”
    “I guess so.”
    “I’m really into it, for some reason.”
    Deke looks at him and narrows his eyes, as if he’s suddenly been dealt one
more
crazy adult. “How come
you
like it?”
    “Just something about it. I guess I like how you don’t really know anything about the Old Brass Wagon. It’s just, there it is. The Old Brass Wagon. Deal with it. You know what I mean?”
    Deke looks out the window.
    “What do
you
like about it?” Billy says.
    “I don’t know, it’s good.”
    Billy says, “Tell me something. Are you actually a