Plainsong by Kent Haruf

house.
    Who’s in here?
    It was the old man’s voice, high and whining, crazy. They didn’t answer. They glanced wildly at the window.
    Here now, he called. You hear me? Who’s in this goddamn house?
    They could hear him coming across the front room and then he stood in the doorway looking at them, the old man from next door in his dirty overalls and high-topped black shoes and his worn-out blue work shirt, his eyes red and maddened, watery-looking, and his cheeks covered with a two-days’ growth of whiskers. In his hands he was waving a rusty shotgun.
    You little sonsabitches, he said. What you think you’re doing in here?
    We were looking, Ike said. We’re leaving now.
    You got no business coming in here. You goddamn kids coming in here breaking things.
    We’re not doing nothing, the other boy said. It’s not your place either, is it? This don’t belong to you, mister.
    Why, you little smart sonofabitch. I’ll blow your head off. He raised the gun up and leveled it at the boy. I’ll blast you to hell.
    No, wait now, Ike said. It’s all right. We’re going. You don’t have to worry. Come on, he said.
    He pushed Bobby out ahead of him and pulled the other boy by the arm. When they passed the old man he smelled of kerosene and sweat and of something sour like silage. He turned as they passed, following them with the shotgun raised up in his shaking hands.
    Don’t you little shitasses ever come back in here, he said. I’ll come in a-shootin next time. I won’t ask no questions first.
    We weren’t doing a thing in there, the other boy said.
    What’s that? the old man said. By Jesus, I got a mind to blow your shittin little head off right now. He raised the gun again, dangerously, waving it.
    No. Now look out, Ike said. We’re leaving. Wait a minute.
    The boys went out of the house back through the weeds onto Railroad Street. The old man came out onto the porch and watched them. They turned and looked at him one time and he was still there on the porch standing in the lowering sun in his dirty overalls and blue shirt, still holding the gun up. When he saw them stop in front of the house he pointed the gun at them again, like he was taking aim. They went on.
    When they had walked far enough down the road so that the old man couldn’t see them clearly, the other boy said, I got this much anyhow. He stopped and withdrew a candle stub from his back pocket.
    You took that? Bobby said. You shouldn’t even of touched that.
    What’s wrong with you? It’s a candle.
    That doesn’t matter, Ike said. It wasn’t yours. You didn’t see her.
    I never had to see her. I don’t care a turd about her.
    You didn’t see the way she was that night.
    Oh, I seen lots of them without their clothes on. I seen their pink titties, lots of times.
    You never saw her, Ike said.
    What of it.
    She was different. She was pretty, wasn’t she, Bobby?
    I thought she was pretty, Bobby said.
    I don’t give a rat’s ass. I’m keeping this candle.
    They started back along the dirt road toward the house. At the gravel drive the other boy went on by himself toward town, but the two brothers turned and went back past their empty house toward the lot where the two horses were standing dozing by the barn. They went out to the corral to be in the place where there were horses.

Victoria Roubideaux.
    One night when she had finished washing dishes at the Holt Café and afterward had eaten her own supper sitting at the café counter, she didn’t go back to Maggie Jones’s house immediately. Instead she walked about town by herself with her coat buttoned up to her chin and her hands pulled up into the sleeves.
    She made the call from a pay phone on the highway out at the town limits of Holt where there was a short turnout for cars and where a summer picnic table was set out under four scrubby and leafless Chinese elm trees. Cattle buyers used the phone during the day, leaning over the hoods of their dusty pickups while they talked, carrying the