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head clacked a white wet jaw at him as he moved between the pissed-wriggling walls of daddy's house. Cold blood, hell!
    Now that was dreams!
    And another darned thing! Each dead critter was a hot new dollar. And that was no dream! No. He loved metal dollars! But dollars were just, what'd you call 'em? Receipts! Markers for the real wages. Life's true measure was snakes themselves, a growing house of dry and lively skins.
    Soon, the skins in the pictures in his head had filled daddy's place, every wall of it. Then they filled the outside walls, every inch. From porch to turret to bellied roof and chimney, the building writhed in spitting angers. Soon, in his dreams, enough rattling, chattering, flickering snake skins there were to cover every wall of every building on the home place, the hayracks and barn, the tack rooms and stables where daddy's precious horses stood waiting, being born, standing, chewing, crapping, snorting, whatever the hell! Oh for crineoutloud, every wall in Bluffton could have been nailed over by the snakes Ken killed in his head and heart!
    That was a picture to keep and he kept it. In Young Ken's dreams, he had stood sweated and breathless on the edge of Morning Bluff by the Amish fields beyond the Picture Man's castle. The town below danced in sun's heat as daylight touched the colored critters nailed everywhere to every wall. The town quaked in their throes and hissing hatreds, scales flashed spud-russet red, sky blue and eyeball yellow, flicking rings of black and diamond orange winkered, set the whole valley unfolding in color mad summer breeze.
    His doing! The wriggling and thumping snake skinned town, below in the rainbow sunrise. He’d done it eHH . Yes sir!
    He couldn’t remember that picture becoming this cold hourglass and its daily fall of a single grain of sand but, bit by bit, through the blind century, it had. Every day, now, that grain dropped – KERRRR-THUD – a cold, still clock.
    For a while, Ken figured if he could cry, tears might could wash away even blindness. Then there'd be the town again, alive and twitching.
    He couldn't cry, of course. Hell? What was there to cry over? Besides. The town was still there, out in the dark. Even after nearly a hundred years it was there.
    A boy, Ken crossed the town in a few pumps of his legs; a couple of heartbeats and it was gone.
    Took an hour, now, for the Old Rattler to totter from his flop on Slaughterhouse down to Commonwealth. The right turn took a couple, three minutes, then fifteen-twenty for the fifty-two uphill steps to the Restrant, another ten up the steps and to the door, two or three to the booth, the same where Old Ken sat at about the same time for the past how many years? By God, since the day Olaf Tim opened the place!
    Now, that was a story. Olaf Tim had called the joint The White House Restrant, Great American Pies Our Specialty!
    Ken called it the White House, since, or just “the Restrant,” like Olaf had before he lost his brains. Ken knew the place when four fluted columns supported the porch roof. The columns went in the little fire of ’45 and the name had stopped being the White House Restrant before that, ever since the Tim family, Republicans all, put some distance put between their business and THAT man in Washington.
    Through his tenth summer, Young Ken had watched the little bandy-rooster Swede, Olaf Tim, build his Restrant. Now and then, Tim got a town layabout to hold one end of something, while he nailed the other end in place, but, pretty much, he did the whole thing himself.
    Ken had watched the scrawny Scandahoovian crawl all-fours over the building, fitting, cutting, rabbeting, trimming, joining, putting board skin over the skeleton he'd framed out, battening the wide boards, then laying soft layer upon soft layer of wet white paint on dry white paint, taking every crack and seam out of the grainy wood with thick thick white.
    When Olaf took delivery of a fancy sign reading “White House Dinner,