A Book of Dreams (3 page)

‘Hey, Ray, where’d you get all the patches?’

‘Well, I got the first ones when my brother was in the army. Then there’s a kid who sells ’em at school real cheap.’

‘I’d like to get some.’

‘Yeah, but you couldn’t put them on your suede jacket, could you?’

‘Oh yeah.’ Maybe I could get Daddy to buy me a denim jacket like Ray’s. After letting Ray off, the bus made a few more stops and then swung back onto the main road for a while before it turned onto our road. I got my jacket and boots together and walked up to the front of the bus when we got near our ranch.

The bus driver was a big strong man with curly blond hair. He looked like the kind of musclemen they showed at the end of comic books, and the muscles in his arms rippled as he steered around the last corner before our place. I leaned down and saw the cluster of pipes from the cloudbuster sticking up between the hard green Palo Verde leaves. The bus stopped right by the gate and instead of opening the door, the driver turned around and looked at me.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you. What is that thing with the pipes?’ The lines around his nose dropped into a sneer around his mouth.

‘We call it a cloudbuster,’ I said, starting down the steps to get off.

‘A clodbuster?’ He grinned. There was a black space between two of his teeth. He turned away, leaned forward on the steering
wheel and looked back at the cloudbuster. From where the bus was he could see the whole truck with the platform on the back, the black square base, the cables leading up to the pipes and the spinning wave on the side of the truck. He nodded. ‘A clodbuster, huh?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘a cloudbuster.’

‘Well, uh, what do they use this clodbuster for?’ He held one hand on the door-opening lever like he wouldn’t open until I told him.

‘Uh, we use it for atmospheric research. Can I get out, please?’ ‘Atmospheric research? Ha! What’s that?’ He grinned.

‘Well, uh, it is for an experiment in weather control.’ I stepped down until I was right in front of the door.

He nodded and grinned again. ‘Oh, I see. That there clodbuster controls the weather, huh? Well, just don’t bust any of my clods. Ha ha!’ His big hand pulled back on the lever and the door swung open. I stepped down into the dust. He held the door open and looked at me with his mouth open. Then he said, ‘Well, take it easy, clodbuster,’ and slammed the door.

The bus started down the road in a cloud of dust and I watched it get smaller and smaller. He made me feel bad. That was why I had to be brave. It was emotional plague.

When the bus was gone, I turned and walked across the rail fence and down the driveway to the ranch. Daddy called it ‘Little Orgonon’ but I didn’t like it as much as Orgonon. The cloudbuster was off to the side of the driveway. Painted on the door was the big red spinning wave that Daddy always talked about. I didn’t understand it but he said it was the key to how the flying saucers worked.

Hobbling on account of the popsicle sticks in my boots, I walked down the driveway towards the house. When I got to the Palo Verde tree next to the kitchen I pulled off my boots and spilled the popsicle sticks into two piles on the ground. Daddy’s car wasn’t there so I’d have time to work before he got back.

I felt around in the sand near the base of the tree until I found the buried metal plate. I dug the sand away from the plate and lifted it up. Beneath it was a small hole in the ground. I reached into the hole carefully, because there might be scorpions, and took out a small bundle wrapped in black banana skins. I laid the bundle on the metal plate and slowly unwrapped the bright green glow-in-the-dark yo-yo. It was a beautiful bright yo-yo and I was sorry I couldn’t play with it. I slipped the loop over my finger to do a few whirls with it but then I remembered that Daddy said it was bad for me. I put it back onto the metal plate and went into the kitchen for water. I poured the water into the hole to loosen up the dirt and then I started digging.

Daddy said I had to bury the glow-in-the-dark yo-yo because the glow stuff was deadly, just like fluorescent light. Glow-in-the-dark light was bad energy and it didn’t mix with Orgone Energy, which was good energy. Daddy was trying to kill the bad energy in the atmosphere. Bad energy came from flying saucers and bombs. The cloudbuster cleaned the atmosphere of the deadly orgone – we called it DOR – and fought the flying saucers. Only we called the flying saucers EAs. It was initials. The
E
stood for something and the
A
stood for something. Daddy told me what it was but I forgot. We had names for a lot of stuff. The EAs’ energy was like glow-in-the-dark energy and it made us sick.

We were all sensitive to strange energy things, especially my sister Eva. Fluorescent light was really bad, and Eva could never understand how people survived in office buildings with dead light energy. The same with glow-in-the-dark watch dials or television. It got so that Eva could tell if someone was wearing a glow-in-the-dark watch just by feeling the energy around him. She could feel TV that way too and it made her sick. She was the one who spotted my green glow-in-the-dark yo-yo. One day when I came near her she felt funny and got a little green herself. She asked me what I was wearing and where I had been. Then I took out the glow-in-the-dark yo-yo and started yo-yoing and she almost fainted. That was when Daddy said I had to bury it.

The wet sand had made a dark slippery pile next to me and I had to reach almost all the way up to my shoulder to reach the end of it. When it was long enough, I hollowed it out for a while to make it bigger and then I moved the popsicle sticks over closer. Just like in the old gold mines in the westerns, I started putting them against the walls and on the ceiling, lining the hole just like a real gold mine. It was really exciting, making the mine and thinking that maybe someday someone would be digging there and find it. It was the kind of adventure that Ray wouldn’t understand at all. After a while I noticed that I was actually starting to feel a little sick too just from being so close to the yo-yo.

Sometimes I thought Eva was feeling too much with the TV sets and the glow-in-the-dark watches, but I’d been observing more and more and I wasn’t really sure.

The first thing Daddy said once he and Eva arrived in Tucson
and I had showed him my new Stetson was that we all had to have an unrigid way of feeling and observing. Like before we used the cloudbuster, we always waited for a while, and looked at the sky to see what was there and what we felt. To use the cloudbuster you had to know how the sky felt and we got pretty good at it. Sometimes, on a day when we all felt bad, even if we were far apart, we found out later that there was an atomic-bomb explosion or an EA attack.

The EA attacks and the atomic-bomb explosions coincided with bad DOR, and we could tell because every time the sky was ugly brownish grey and people felt bad and looked bad, we found out that there had been a bomb. The cloudbuster made the atmosphere and people feel better. Sort of like the accumulator, only bigger. And we were the only people who knew about it.

Just as I put the last popsicle sticks into the tunnel, I heard a car and Daddy drove up. He parked in front of the house and walked over to where I was working.

‘Hi, Peeps,’ he said. ‘What are you doing? Did you have a good day?’

‘Yeah. I’m burying the yo-yo, like you said.’

‘Good. It is very dangerous to have that around. You must be careful of toys like that. This happened before, don’t you remember?’

‘But I still don’t understand why I have to
bury
it,’ I said, putting the yo-yo, rewrapped in banana skins, all the way to the end of the gold-mine tunnel.

‘I have told you, Peeps, that the glow-in-the-dark paint has a negative charge. It is like fluorescent light. Do you know the glass bulb I have in my car?’ Taped to the back window of his
car, Daddy had a small glass vacuum bulb with a little vane-like propeller in it. On one side the vanes were white and on the other side they were black. He said it was a miniature model of an Orgone motor. I nodded. ‘Well, you know that Orgone Energy makes the propeller turn around. DOR slows it down. That is why it turns faster on bright days and slower on bad days. But it won’t turn at all under fluorescent light or the kind of glow-in-the-dark light of your yo-yo. Rather than giving off energy, it draws it away, absorbs it, from living things.’

‘How come the other kids don’t get sick then?’ I began patting the dark wet sand mud into the hole, sealing the glow-in-the-dark yo-yo forever.

‘But they are, Pete. They are tightly armoured against feeling the deep effects of DOR sickness. They fight it off with toughness and dirty jokes but the sickness still eats them away inside. Their faces become tight and the jaws get rigid because they no longer feel. When they get older, they die of cancer. Sometimes I see armouring in you and that is why I give you treatments.’

‘All their bellies are hard?’

‘Yes. And their way of achieving things is a hard-bellied way. Do you remember the movie we saw with John Wayne, in which he falls and becomes crippled?’

‘The one where he plays a navy officer? Yeah. He fell down stairs at night and the doctors told him he would never walk again.’

‘Ja. You see, when he was sitting in bed, looking down to the end of his cast, watching his toes, he resolved to walk again. And he said, over and over again, “Gonna move that toe, gonna
move that toe, gonna move that toe.” You see, that is the rigid way of overcoming things.’

I patted the last of the mud over the tunnel, placed the metal plate over the opening, and spread dry dust over the top. Then I stood up and walked with Daddy toward the house.

‘But in the end he walked, didn’t he?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but you see, to overcome obstacles that way, by force, so-called willpower, that is communist. It is the rigid, mechanistic way of accomplishing things. He had to make himself so tight and hard to force himself to walk again that he forgot how to love and be kind.’

‘And it would have been better if he had had Orgone Therapy, right? Then he would have walked and still been a good person.’

‘Ja, very good, Peeps. The best way is just to breathe, and relax, and let it come naturally. Never force anything, just let it be natural, and it will always be okay. Okay?’ He smiled at me and I nodded.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘how would you like to go to the Green Lantern and have some special swordfish for dinner?’

‘I’d love it,’ I said.

I ran in the house and washed my hands. Daddy was waiting in the car and as we drove out the driveway I remembered the bus driver.

‘Daddy, I have to make a report.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well, today, coming back on the school bus the bus driver made a bunch of funny remarks about the cloudbuster. He called it a clodbuster and laughed at me when I told him it was for atmospheric research.’

Daddy looked serious. ‘Don’t let him get to you, Pete. He may be a spy trying to find out what we’re up to, or he may just be a sick person. Whatever you do, just be brave and remember that his type are the killers, the real carriers of emotional plague. You will run into them wherever you go. Did you tell him anything else?’

‘No, I just told him that it is a cloudbuster and we use it for weather control. He just called it “clodbuster” and told me not to bust any clods.’

‘He sounds like he was just being afraid. Don’t worry about him. Many people are afraid, like those television people who came here and took movies about the cloudbuster for a newsreel. They were interested at first because we spoke about weather control and rainmaking and then, mysteriously, the film was ruined. There are many mysterious things happening….’

‘But the grass isn’t mysterious,’ I said, looking out the window at the desert on the road going in to Tucson. ‘They’ll see when they really see the grass.’

‘Ja,’ said Daddy, ‘today I drove nearly sixty miles out into the country around Tucson, talking to farmers and cowboys. They all say that they have never seen such nice rich grass growing in a long time. Yes, they won’t laugh when it rains in the desert and makes grass grow.’

The Green Lantern had a big organ sitting on a platform near the mirror-backed wooden bar, and red, yellow and green lights went around in circles over the organist, making his face change colours. The spotlight shone through coloured disks and its light reflected in the bar mirror across the dining room as if it were shining on me and Daddy, sitting in our favourite
booth. Daddy was smiling at me as he sipped his favourite drink, a Manhattan.

‘Do you want the cherry?’ He stirred his drink with it, holding it by the stem. It blurred as it went around and around. Daddy always remembered to give me the cherry from his Manhattan.

‘Yes.’ He handed it to me and it was sweet and strong, and made my breath feel heavy. Daddy motioned to the waitress who usually served us and she came over to take our orders. She was pretty and had bright eyes and she always made a fuss over me. She leaned over and tousled my hair, laughing. ‘Hi there, how are you tonight?’

My face got hot. I looked away ‘Oh, all right, I guess.’ She smiled and looked at Daddy.

‘He is so cute,’ she said.

Daddy laughed and nodded, and then he said, ‘I’ll have shrimp and Pete will have swordfish.’

She took it down and went away, in a wind of perfume and organ music.

Daddy finished his drink and looked at me.

‘Do you have a girl friend?’ he asked.

He always wanted to know if I had a girl friend and if we kissed or touched each other. He always said, ‘Don’t be afraid to talk to me.’ So we talked a lot about why I wasn’t circumcised and what other kids were like. There was a girl at school who was very pretty and we looked at each other in a secret way sometimes, but we hadn’t kissed.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is a girl I like but we don’t go out or anything.’ It made me embarrassed to talk about it, and actually, I had a lot of fun on road patrol and playing yo-yo.

‘Daddy, I was talking to my friend Ray today and I told him a little bit about the cloudbuster. That’s okay, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but you must be careful not to say too much.’