Aggie was our resident necrologist. Every neighborhood has one. From the casual way Norton had of ragging his wife and belittling her (doing it with the contemptuous ease of a veteran matador inserting banderillas in an old bull's lumbering body), I would have guessed he'd be glad to have her gone. If asked, I might even have speculated that he'd show up this summer with a girl twenty years younger than he was on his arm and a silly my-cock-has-died-and-gone-to-heaven grin on his face. But instead of the silly grin there was only a new batch of age lines, and the weight had come off in all the wrong places, leaving sags and folds and dewlaps that told their own story. For one passing moment I wanted only to lead Norton to a patch of sun and sit him beside one of the fallen trees with my can of beer in his hand, and do a charcoal sketch of him.

«Hi, Dave,» he said, after a long moment of awkward silence — a silence that was made even louder by the absence of the chainsaw's racket and roar. He stopped, then blurted: «That tree. That damn tree. I'm sorry. You were right.»

I shrugged.

He said, «Another tree fell on my car.»

«I'm sorry to h-» I began, and then a horrid suspicion dawned. «It wasn't the T-Bird, was it?»

«Yeah. It was.»

Norton had a 1960 Thunderbird in mint condition, only thirty thousand miles. It was a deep midnight blue inside and out. He drove it only summers, and then only rarely. He loved that Bird the way some men love electric trains or model ships or target-shooting pistols.

«That's a bitch,» I said, and meant it.

He shook his head slowly. «I almost didn't bring it up. Almost brought the station wagon, you know. Then I said what the hell, I drove it up and a big old rotten pine fell on it. The roof of it's all bashed in. And I thought I'd cut it up … the tree, I mean … but I can't get my chainsaw to fire up … I paid two hundred dollars for that sucker … and … and …»