doors with a two-pronged shovel and was loosening the earth around one of his half shrubs, hoping that the sun's warmth would get through to it and make the cancerous side blossom and start to flourish. Across a low fence, he saw his thin-chested neighbor and told him about the dogs. "They wait for me each night," he explained. With frail wrists, the man drew from his wallet a commissioner's badge and said, "I was very powerful when I had my health. I was able to get stop signs put up. Forget the dogs. I'll take care of them. Do you want to get me around a little to the east...." Stern shifted his neighbor around, hardly able to suppress his joy; he was thrilled to have commissioner-type power on his side and wanted to hug his neighbor's thin chest with delight. Actually he was a little afraid of him now, convinced that as a onetime commissioner he had weapons nearby and probably knew judo holds, ones you could deliver despite a thinness at the wrists. Stern looked forward to swift action, but the dogs continued to slip through the night to Stern's side until he decided the man had done nothing after all. To get any action out of him, Stern imagined his neighbor would have to be carried to the police station and placed before the chief.

The man's wife was of little help. A short woman who wore loose-flowing Alpine dirndls, she had a garbage problem and was always carrying a bagful out to a wire basket in front of her house to burn it. "I don't know[Pg 32] where it all comes from," she would say to Stern as she made her endless pilgrimage to the basket. Often, on her way back for another load, she would see Stern across the fence, working silently to bring life back into his halves, and say, "I can remember when your house was really beautiful." Once she invited Stern and his wife into her own home. She took them into the kitchen and said, with arm extended, "This is my kitchen." Then she took them into the living room and said, "This is my living room," and so on through the house. She pointed to her husband, who had been placed in front of a fishbowl, and said, "This is my husband." Then she bid them goodbye, saying, "There was a time when your house was so lovely." She never asked them in again.

[Pg 32]

Since the summer had been cruel to him, Stern looked forward to cold weather, when he would at least not have to bother with neighbors and to face the half shrubs each day. In the winter your shrubs were not supposed to be beautiful, and Stern watched with delight as the grass faded and the leaves dropped and his half shrubs fell in with the bleakness as though their black cancer shapes were the fault of 

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