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 habit of helping yourself to other people’s property?” Coverly was more perplexed than angry.
“Listen, chicken,” Murphy said. “Where I grew up you either helped yourself or you ate dirt.”
“But this doesn’t happen to be where you grew up,” said Coverly. It was the wrong tack. He seemed to be footnoting the dispute. Then, confident of his rightness he spoke sternly and in a full voice, marred by some old-fashioned or provincial haughtiness.
“Would you be good enough to return our garbage pail?” he asked.
“Listen,” Murphy said. “You’re trespassing. You’re on my land. Get off my land or you’ll go home a cripple for life. I’ll gouge out your eyes. I’ll break your nose. I’ll tear off your ears.”
Coverly swung a right from the hip, and Murphy, a big man and a coward, it seemed, went down. Coverly stood there, a little bewildered. Then Murphy came forward on his hands and knees and sank his teeth into Coverly’s shin. Coverly roared. Betsey and Mrs. Murphy came running out of their kitchens. Just then a missile left its pad and, in the dusk, shed a light as bright as the light of a midsummer’s day over the valley and the site, throwing the shadows of the combatants, their houses and their ginkgo trees blackly onto the grass, while air waves demarked the earth-shaking roar so that it sounded like the humble click of track joints. The missile ascended, the light faded with it, and the two women took their husbands home.
Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
The computation and administration center where Coverly worked appeared from a distance to be a large, one-story building but this single story merely contained the elevator terminals and the security offices. The other offices and the hardware were underground. The one visible story was made of glass, tinted darkly to the color of oily water. The darkened glass did not diminish but it did alter the light of day. Beyond these dim glass walls one could see some flat pasture land and the buildings of an abandoned farm. There was a house, a barn, a clump of trees and a split-rail fence, and the abandoned buildings with the gantries beyond them had a nostalgic charm. They were signs of the past, and whatever the truth may have been, they appeared to be signs of a rich and a natural way of life. The abandoned farm evoked a spate of vulgar and bucolic imagery—open fires, pails of fresh milk and pretty girls swinging in apple trees—but it was nonetheless persuasive. One turned away from this then to the dark, oil-colored glass and moved into another world, buried six stories beneath the cow pasture. It was a new world in every way. Its newness was most apparent in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and usefulness that seems lost to most of us today. To observe that the elevators sometimes broke down, that one of the glass walls had cracked, and that the pretty receptionists in the security office had a primitive and an immemorial appeal was like burdening oneself with the observations of some old man, pushed by time past the boundaries of all usefulness. The crowds that went to and from the computation center had a look of contentment and purpose that you won’t find in the New York or Paris subways, where we seem to regard one another with the horror and dismay of a civilization of caricaturists. Leaving his office late one night Coverly had heard Dr. Cameron, the site director, ending a dispute with one of his lieutenants. The doctor was shouting, “You’ll never get a Goddamned man onto the Goddamned moon, and if you do, it won’t do you any Goddamned good.”
Oh, Father, Father, why have you come back?
