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Everything has its place in the sun. Even
he LIZARD
by VICTOR T. KURE
ED SIMMONS hung up the receiver and walked slowly out the back door, forgetting even to brush at the flies clinging to the screen. He leaned his cane against the woodbox, then sat in the unpainted, slanted chair in the middle of the jumble of rocks and bushes that he and Sue called a patio. The realtor hadn't been too optimistic. "Twelve thousand is all they'll go, Mr. Simmons," he had said in a cool voice. "Maybe twelve five. They're driving up from San Francisco to see you now. It doesn't look too good. They want something more — well, new, and modern."
Ed wished he had taken that offer of fifteen thousand last year. Values were coming down, and his place was old, but it was comfortable. He sat there musing in the sun. Be' neath his thick white hair, hght-blue eyes, set in a brown, thin face, played from one familiar object to another. His knobby fingers touched the earth tenderly and intimately. If Sue were alive they'd manage some
how, as they had for thirty years. Never more than one paycheck ahead of being broke, but never really wanting.
He crossed his legs and sighed, and settled back to fill his pipe. The smoke wisped back on the breeze as he sat almost motionless, reviewing the years of work that had not brought them security in their old age: the garden that Sue had bent over every spring to satisfy their vegetable needs; the redwood grove just up the slope, where they had relaxed in the evening and watched the family of racoons gradually be come friendly enough to eat out of their hands.
He leaned over to spit at the bank, but checked himself. Below him he saw the dark, foot'long lizard that usually dozed on the hot woodbox set against the south side of the house. "You've been here a long time too," he said aloud, and stretched out his hand. The Hzard scooted behind the box, then the scaly pointed head poked out from behind it, the black eyes bright and unblinking, the mouth