Evening settled over the southern Indiana countryside. Linda and I sat on our back porch watching our almost three-year-old granddaughter chase fireflies. Linda and I had been fighting over some little thing—I don’t remember what, but now we were sitting close on the porch swing watching little Amy stumble after the glowing bugs. She’d see the blink of one and go after it, but she’d never get there before the bug dimmed, or got too high, drifting above her little arms just out of reach; or she’d get distracted by a fresh light and spin in a new direction, only to topple in the soft high grass, only to get up again immediately, all giggly, her blond head of curly hair bobbing in the last of the twilight.

“She’s tenacious, isn’t she?” Linda asked. “Do you think her arms are too short?”

“They’re just right,” I said.

“If she catches one and squishes it, do you think she’ll be sad?” Linda asked.

“Were you?”

“I don’t remember,” Linda said. “I remember being gentle, and having them crawl on my hand. I remember the tickle of them as I’d coax them into the mason jar with the holes ice-picked into the lid.” She squeezed my thigh.

“I guess I squished a few in my fingers,” she said a moment later. “Just to see.”

“Just to see what?” I asked, but Linda didn’t answer.

“Amy, time to come here now,” Linda called. Hurriedly and happily Amy came. She nestled in Linda’s lap. Linda put her bare heels on the porch and began to rock us. Inside of a minute Amy was asleep.

“Should I take her up?” I asked.

“Not just yet,” Linda said. She slowed the slow rocking of our swing. Over the distant chirp of crickets, we could hear, faint but clear, the squeak and sigh of bedsprings. That was our daughter Annie upstairs with her husband Tom. Their little bedroom was above our porch.

I knew what Linda was thinking. I ought to oil that bed, but I didn’t mind the sound; I found it comforting, the rhythms now slow and easy, now fast and urgent, then irregular, or rushed, or silent. At one point we heard a sharp giggle, Annie’s, and it made my throat catch. Any other sounds were too muffled to come through the walls and window.

Tom was working at the quarry now, long hours, hard work—it’d been six months since he’d been laid off by the tractor place. At least Annie was happy for the moment—she was painting again.

Now that it was quiet, just the distant crickets, I said, “Suppose I ought to oil those bedsprings...”

“No,” Linda said, “It’s a good sound, good to hear.” I took her hand.

We sat for a few more minutes, Amy shifting once easily in her sleep, and then Annie came out onto the porch. She wore a man’s white dress shirt, hardly buttoned, maybe nothing else. I wondered if it was one of my old ones.

“I just put Tom to bed,” she said. “He’s a tired boy.”

“And here’s a tired girl,” I said, meaning Amy. I got up from the glider and lifted Amy from Linda’s arms and presented her to Annie. “She’s such a honey bunny,” I said. “So sweet.” I kissed Amy’s head. I kissed Annie’s nose.

“You’re sweet, too,” I said. She did smell sweet. Slightly of turpentine, slightly of something else.

“Night, Dad. Night, Mom,” she said.

“Love you,” Linda said. “You coming back?”

“I don’t think so,” Annie whispered. “Pretty tired.” Annie carried Amy in.

I sat back down next to Linda. We held hands for a while.

“Why’d you ask that about whether she was coming back?” I said after a few minutes had passed.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Linda said. “It’s a nice night, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I answered.

We watched the night, the lawn and sky, the quiet glow almost gone.

“It might be a nice night to suck your cock out here, mightn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said again.

“But tell me a story first. Tell me a story while I do it.”

“Marcy-Ann’ll whoop the tar offen your boy Charles.” The old man spoke low but that’s the way Dan heard it. The other old man spat, and sipped his beer, and the first old man flicked the blade of his knife against a chubby spindle of soft pine, sending the curl of wood somersaulting through the air. It landed on the bare earth a few feet from Dan’s tattered sneakers.

Dan knew Marcy-Ann. He was afraid of her, and he was sure she could whoop the tar off of somebody. But why would they have tar on them? Tar, that’s the stuff they put on roads, made out of bugs all squeezed to juice in a big black bucket. And who was this Charles? Looking over the picnic grounds, Dan didn’t spot any kids named Charles. He saw Marcy-Ann. She was eleven, two and a half years older than Dan. Her daddy had died in the war. Buried at sea, back when Marcy was a newborn, and Dan wasn’t anything. It didn’t quite make sense not to be anything. Marcy said it was like clouds after the rain. And her daddy was up in heaven. Only his body was at the bottom of the sea, like Grampa said frogs were in winter, only with no hope of ever coming up again. The clouds sat up there, big snow-white ones floating slow. Dan’s daddy had died, too, and his mother, too, but not in a war, and Grampa hadn’t said anything about heaven.

Dan decided Charles might not be a kid at all. Maybe he was a grown-up if his dad was that old man. He wondered if Charles might be the new guy, the one who’d hit the softball so far, all the way to the weedy place at the far end of the meadow. Marcy-Ann’s mother and the other women had clapped, and one of the older boys, thin as a reed and dark as a cattail, yelled “Dang-nabbit, that’s the third and last time—now you all go find it.” Right away Marcy and another girl a few years younger, maybe Dan’s own age, had rushed across the field towards the weedy place. “Watch out for snakes,” Marcy’s mother had called, but the girls just kept running, their short skirts fluttering in the sun like butterflies.

Dan had been hoping he’d have a chance at bat, but with the ball gone, the game had petered out, so he’d wandered over to the picnic table where these two old men were whittling and spitting and drinking beer from tall brown bottles.

“What’cha makin, Mister Brock?” he dared ask after watching for a while.

“Why this here is a lioness, a lioness lying stretched out and licking her little cub.”

“Lioness, hah!” exclaimed the other man, the one whose boy might be Charlie. “Looks more like a tent peg to me. Either that or a stiff pecker.”

Mr. Brock held up the stick. “Right here’s going to be the ears,” he said. “Everything starts with the ears. Feel these little points? See how they perk up just a little?” The man pushed the pad of his thumb firmly across the tiny bump atop the freshly cut wood. Dan touched the smooth surface. It was slightly warm. He moved his fingertip over the nub. It tickled a bit, made him shiver. “Everything starts with the ears,” Mr. Brock repeated.

“Still looks like a stiff pecker to me,” the other man said.

“Now you hush, Joe,” Mr. Brock said. “You wouldn’t know a stiff pecker if’n it bit you on the nose.”

The other man laughed and took a sip of his beer, and the two men got up. Mr. Brock stuffed the lioness-stick in his side pocket and they walked over to the horseshoes. Dan wanted to follow, but he’d been warned about getting too close to horseshoes.

“What’cha doing?” Marcy-Ann asked him. She’d surprised him and he jerked a little. She had the softball in both hands. It was big. Bigger than the head of a broken doll.

“Nothing much,” he said. “I’d been watchin’ Mister Brock makin’ a lion.”

“What do you mean ‘makin a lion’?” the girl who was with Marcy asked. She was definitely younger than Marcy, almost a head shorter, and Dan thought she had pretty eyes, big and brown and interested in him, or at least in the lion.

“Want to play catch?” Marcy interrupted. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the ball was flying at him—Marcy had pushed it two-handed from two feet away. He wasn’t ready for it, and it bopped him hard on the nose, bounced off, rolled under the picnic table, and came to rest in a puddle of something.

“He’s too baby,” Marcy-Ann said to her friend. “Watch, I bet he’s going to bawl.” The other girl was crawling under the table after the softball. Her little butt was in the air and Dan could see her underwear. He looked away, trying hard not to tear.

“Shame on you!” Marcy-Ann whispered. “It’s not polite to look when that happens.”

“I know,” he said. The first droplet of blood landed on his canvas shoe.

“Then why’d you look?”

He tilted his head back. White clouds flowed thick and slow. “If she didn’t want anyone to see her undiewear, then she shouldn’t have worn any.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” Marcy scoffed. “And only babies say undiewear. It’s underwear. UNDER. Or panties.”

The blood was coming faster. It felt like floating.

“The ball’s all wet,” the other girl said, climbing out from under the table. “Root beer or something ... It smells like I don’t know ... like sea.” She held the ball in front of Dan’s nose. “Ooh, you’re bleeding!”

“He was lookin at your underpants,” Marcy-Ann said. “When you crawled under.”

“I wasn’t,” Dan said. “I was just looking at the ball.”

“You’d better go put a cold rag on your nose,” Marcy-Ann said. “Otherwise you’ll bleed to death in six minutes. It happens all the time.”

“Does it hurt?” the other girl asked. She put her finger gently under Dan’s nostril.

“Oh, yuck,” said Marcy-Ann. “I’m going to get help. You comin, Linda?”

Dan felt Linda’s eyes watching the blood. But then they moved, they moved into his own.

“I didn’t mean to look at your ... at your underwear,” he said.

“That’s okay,” Linda answered. Then she did a strange thing. She tasted her finger, tasted the finger with his blood on it. And then she said something equally strange. “It’s good,” she said. “Now we’re even. Wait here.” She turned and ran off.