three ninety-nine. What's the matter with that? Who cares where it comes from?”
“Con. The Japanese—”
“I know about the Japanese. You think I don't know about the Japanese?” He pointed at her with his fork. “The war is over, right? All over. You could get on an airplane today and fly to Japan. You could take your vacation there. But you”—he shook his fork at her—”you'd rather spend four times as much on a radio because it was made by some stranger in Philadelphia.”
“I'm not buying any radio, Con,” she said. “No one's buying any radio.”
“No. Just toys that knock the hell out of a ten-dollar bill.”
“Con—”
“This is the thinking that gets us into trouble.” He looked at Billy and Susan. “This is the thinking that keeps us broke. We pay triple for things because we don't like the guy who's making them cheap. We're Americans. We don't want a Japanese radio. We want a more expensive American radio. But toys. Hey. We want German stuffed animals. We want Italian shoes that cost five times as much as American. Never mind about Hitler and Mussolini. I want to tell you something.” He shook his fork at Billy now. “Your enemy isn't the Japanese. Your enemy is whoever charges you too much. That's it. That's what you need to know about friends and enemies.”
“Right,” his mother said, so softly she could barely be heard. “That's a fine thing to teach them. Oh, very nice.”
She had switched to her tiny voice. When she spoke in that voice she seemed to be addressing someone who lived inside her, an invisible friend who shared her belief that the world was great and wide but finally too exhausting for anyone to live in it.
After dinner, Billy lingered near his father. He didn't let himself get too close. His father sat in his chair, watching television. Billy played with his farm animals along the rug's opposite edge. He slipped away into the nowhere that hummed around the edges of everything. He arranged his pigs inside the plastic corral. He placed the pigs nose to nose and brought in the rust-colored horse that refused to stand straight on its plastic hooves.
In the kitchen, his mother rang the plates and glasses on the drainboard. With a rag she made squeakings that were the sound of cleanliness itself. She moved cleanly through the world; his father scattered spoor. Wherever he went he left hairs behind, threads of tobacco, limp pungent socks. In hot weather he stripped, massively hairy, to his undershorts and left his sweaty silhouette on the upholstery. Although Billy's mother mopped and vacuumed and nearly rubbed the skin off the furniture with her dustcloth, she couldn't expunge his father's intense, all-pervasive ownership.
The plastic horse fell again and again. It refused to stand, though Billy could not stop trying to force it. If he tried just a little harder, if he refused to give up, the little horse would finally straighten from the sheer size of his will. He bent and bent the legs until suddenly, with a crisply final sound, one snapped off at the knee. He held the severed leg, disbelievingly, in one hand and the crippled horse in the other. The leg was thin and articulate, its hoof edged in a ragged seam.
He set the leg down, carefully, as if it could feel pain. Still holding the three-legged horse, he walked to his father's chair and stood nervously until his father looked over at him.
“Uh-huh?” he said.
Billy couldn't speak. His father's knees showed a hint of their knobbed complexity through his thin gray slacks. His thighs, big as the hulls of boats, reflected light along their upper surfaces and, on their undersides, carried ragged shadows into the green depths of the chair. Billy stood inside his father's circle, breathing the sour particles of sweat and tobacco, the sweet underlayer of after-shave. “What is it?” his father asked.
Billy shrugged, and his father frowned in annoyance. “Speak up.”
“I need a new horse,” Billy said finally.
“Huh?”
“This horse is broken.” Billy was surprised by the sound of tears in his voice. “Its leg broke off.”
“You need something else?” his father said.
“It broke,” Billy said.
His father nodded, gathering his calm and his kindness. “The horse is still good,” he said. “This guy has just got hurt in a fight. He's basically okay. Three legs is plenty for a horse.”
“No it isn't,” Billy said. He realized he would cry soon. He was mortified, but helpless to prevent it.