It was there in the morning when I got up bright and early and found Old Bull and Dean in the back yard. Dean was wearing his gas-station coveralls  and helping Bull. Bull had found a great big piece of thick rotten wood and was desperately yanking with a hammerhook at little nails imbedded in it.  We stared at the nails; there were millions of them; they were like worms.
"When I get all these nails out of this I'm going to build me a shelf that'll last ia thousand yearsi!" said Bull, every bone shudder- ing with boyish excitement. "Why, Sal, do you realize the shelves they build  these  days  crack  under  the  weight  of  knickknacks  after  six months or  generally  collapse? Same with houses, same with clothes. These bastards have invented plastics by which they could make hous- es that last iforever.i And tires. Americans are killing themselves by the millions every year with defective rubber tires that get hot on the road and blow up. They  could make tires that never blow up. Same with tooth powder. There's a  certain gum they've invented and they won't show it to anybody that if you chew it as a kid you'll never get a cavity for the rest of your born days. Same with clothes. They can make clothes that last forever. They prefer making  cheap goods so's every- body'll have to go on working and punching timeclocks and organiz- ing themselves in sullen unions and floundering around while the big grab goes on in Washington and Moscow." He raised his big piece of rotten wood. "Don't you think this'll make a splendid shelf?"
It was early in the morning; his energy was at its peak. The poor fellow took so much junk into his system he could only weather the greater  proportion of his day in that chair with the lamp burning at noon, but  in  the morning he  was magnificent.  We  began  throwing knives at the target.  He said he'd seen an Arab in Tunis who could stick a man's eye from forty feet. This got him going on his aunt, who went to the Casbah in the thirties. "She was with a party of tourists led by a guide. She had a diamond ring on her little finger. She leaned on a wall to rest a minute and an Ay-rab rushed up and appropriated her ring finger before she could let out a cry, my dear. She suddenly rea- lized she had no little finger. Hi-hi-hi-hi-hi!" When he laughed he com- pressed his lips together and made it come out from his belly, from far away, and doubled up to lean on  his knees. He laughed a long time. "Hey Jane!" he yelled gleefully. "I was just telling Dean and Sal about my aunt in the Casbah!"
"I heard you," she said across the lovely warm Gulf morning from the kitchen door. Great beautiful clouds floated overhead, valley clouds that made you feel the vastness of old tumbledown holy Ameri- ca from mouth to mouth and tip to tip. All pep and juices was Bull. "Say, did I ever tell you  about Dale's father? He was the funniest old man you ever saw in your life.  He had paresis, which eats away the forepart of your brain and you get so's you're not responsible for any- thing that comes into your mind. He had a  house in Texas and had carpenters working twenty-four hours a day  putting on new wings. He'd leap up in the middle of the night and say, 'I don't want that god- dam wing; put it over there.' The carpenters had to  take everything down and start all over again. Come dawn you'd see them hammering away at the new wing. Then the old man'd get bored with that and say,'Goddammit, I wanta go to Maine!' And he'd get into his car and drive off a hundred miles an hour--great showers of chicken feathers fol- lowed his track for hundreds of miles. He'd stop his car in the middle of a Texas  town just to get out and buy some whisky. Traffic would honk all around him and he'd come rushing out of the store, yelling,'Thet your goddam noith, you bunth of bathats!' He lisped; when you have paresis you lips, I mean you lisps. One night he came to my house in Cincinnati and tooted the horn and said, 'Come on out and let's go to Texas to  see Dale.' He was going back from Maine. He claimed he bought a house--oh, we wrote a story about him at college, where you see  this horrible shipwreck and people in the water clutching at the sides of the lifeboat, and the old man is there with a machete, hackin at their fingers. 'Get  away, ya bunth a bathats, thith my cottham boath!' Oh, he was horrible. I could tell you stories about him all day. Say, ain't this a nice day?"
And it sure was. The softest breezes blew in from the levee; it was worth the whole trip. We went into the house after Bull to meas- ure the wall for a shelf. He showed us the dining-room table he built. It was made of wood six inches thick. "This is a table that'll last a thou- sand years!" said Bull, leaning his long thin face at us maniacally. He banged on it.
In the evenings he sat at this table, picking at his food and throwing the bones to the cats. He had seven cats. "I love cats. I espe- cially like the ones that squeal when I hold 'em over the bathtub." He insisted on  demonstrating; someone was in the bathroom. "Well," he said, "we can't do that now. Say, I been having a fight with the neigh- bors next door." He told us about the neighbors; they were a vast crew with sassy children who threw stones over the rickety fence at Dodie and Ray and sometimes at Old Bull. He told them to cut it out; the old man rushed out and yelled something in Portuguese. Bull went in the house and came back with his shotgun, upon which he leaned demure- ly;  the  incredible  simper on  his  face  beneath  the  long  hatbrim,  his whole body writhing coyly and snakily as he waited, a grotesque, lank, lonely clown beneath the clouds. The sight of him the Portuguese must have thought something out of an old evil dream.
We scoured the yard for things to do. There was a tremendous fence  Bull had been working on to separate him from the obnoxious neighbors;  it  would  never  be  finished,  the  task  was  too much.  He rocked it back and forth to show how solid it was. Suddenly he grew tired and quiet and went  in the house and disappeared in the bath- room for his pre-lunch fix. He came out glassy-eyed and calm, and sat down under his burning lamp. The sunlight poked feebly behind the drawn shade. "Say, why don't you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some  juice  in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!" This was his "laugh" laugh--when he wasn't really laughing. The orgone accumula- tor is an ordinary box big enough for a man to sit inside on a chair: a layer of wood, a layer of metal,  and another layer of wood gather in orgones from the atmosphere and hold them captive long enough for the  human  body  to  absorb more  than  a  usual share.  According  to Reich, orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms  of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones. Old  Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood he used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse. It stood there in the hot, flat yard, an exfoliate ma- chine clustered and bedecked with maniacal contrivances. Old Bull slipped off his clothes and went in to sit and moon over his navel. "Say, Sal, after lunch let's you and me go play the horses over to the bookie joint in Graetna." He was magnificent. He took a nap after lunch in his chair, the air  gun on his lap and little Ray curled around his neck, sleeping. It was a pretty sight, father and son, a fat............