In Which We Meet Profundo Himself, and Lament the Deplorable State of Floyds' Two

We look in on our hero as dawn slips unnoticed out from within the water barrel, where it has been sulking about for some hours, a doleful moon-faced calf. Shards of cold sun clatter like a spilled alphabet on the barn door, metal ringing out as a sting through fouled off forearms, and inside, the ghost of Profundo curses sotto voce, realizing a night spent on the floor.
An hour passes, slowly, and as the cluster flies shake the torpor from this late September of their numbered days, Profundo warms in a bar of sun, changes from a man cut from thick morning valley mist to a color through a waterfall, to a wafting shade suspended above a teacup, and then disappears completely. The fat late-summer flies flap like grapes at the window, while a hollow sound much like a bicycle leaving its place under the eaves of a shed follows the sigh of the door closing on itself, and the last cicadas' rasp to life, slow fingernails ratcheting across an emery board.

Like the hazy shadow of the long-gone conductor of old number 99, seen filing his nails and setting his pocket watch in the golden suppertime sun of the dark thirty, the teller grows susceptible to the gauzy qualities of these legends not fully passed on. A rear wheel spinning round the corner and out of sight along the olive trees, a rusted jack knife quivering quarter-blade deep in a stump by the trestle; only too well do we know that these men, these objects, did once cast shadows. And if, armed with this historic knowledge of things tangible, we thrill to the feeling of doubting desire and temper our blind logic, do we know surely they do not cast them still?

Facts remain, unpleasant altogether they might be. Peppe Profundo died too soon, and no longer inhabits corporeally the streaking Floyd that Verner fit to his lean frame.

But the pictures remain, as well do the stories, and it is no great effort, upon squinting the eyes, to see once again outlined against the sun, hat turned backward on his head, Profundo's back dipping side to side as he winds up the hill and banks off to the left, off among the goats and the goatherds of the Sardinian countryside.