A Book of Dreams (8 page)

‘Well, Doctor, I’m sure we can find something. You must have hammers, picks, saws, axes….’

I could feel the glow from Daddy’s head. Around his ears it was redder and I knew he was looking at them very hard because one by one their eyes dropped and they shuffled their feet. The pencil went up and down, making a soft noise on the
desk. Nobody said a word. The marshal looked back and tried to smile but then the smile went away and he watched the pencil. Daddy was warm. He smelled like a baby. His red shirt moved with his breathing as he looked at the men.

Sometimes he showed me the way crazy people look. He would suddenly stop and let his face sag and his eyes get dim. His eyes would look off and I would stand in front of them and wave but he wouldn’t even blink. It was scary and I always yelled, ‘Stop, Daddy, stop!’ Then when he stopped, he smiled and said that that is a sign people have gone crazy when their eyes are dim and don’t move. That is why we always do eye exercises. When he is angry his face drops and his eyes drill into you. His whole face gets red and his eyes burn and make you hot, like a fire. He said the only colour painters can’t paint is the colour of a dying fire.

The pencil went
toc
against the desk and the clock over the fireplace went
tic
and sometimes they went
tic
together
toc
. Finally, after a long time, Daddy said; ‘Mr Ross, take Peter and go to the lab. Start dismantling the accumulators. Get some axes out.’ The pencil stopped but his eyes didn’t move. The men still watched the pencil.

Tom nodded. ‘Okay, Doctor.’ He looked at me and nodded to the door. Daddy turned to me. His eyes said, ‘Be brave.’

The side of the truck was hot against my arm but I could bear it.

When we got to the lab we parked the truck and went into the barn.

‘You know where the screwdrivers are, Pete. Why don’t you get a couple?’

He pulled shiny two-bladed axes off the wall while I went to the tool box and got some screwdrivers with clear yellow handles. I got my red-handled screwdriver out of my toolbox and stuck them all in my back pocket and followed Tom out the door.

Tom spread three axes out on the tailgate of the pickup. They glinted. The blade on my axe was smaller because we used it to cut brush in winter and it had been sharpened so much that the blade just got littler and littler. The handle had tape around it at the top because once when I was learning how to swing it, I hit the handle against the tree instead of the blade and it shivered all the way down, like when you hit a baseball with the thin part of the bat. Tom put black tape around the top part so it was okay.

There is a special way to swing an axe that Tom taught me and on this axe it was even easier because Tom said he used my axe for years and years before he gave it to me and the handle was darker and smoother than the other axes and it smelled good.

Tom looked at me from the lab porch.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

He put a tall glass jar on one of the tables and started unscrewing, dropping the screws into the jar.

Tom could unscrew faster than I could. He just flipped his wrist and they came out. I had to turn a lot harder but I could still do it pretty good.

Screws clinked in the jar. Tom already had the door and a side off one accumulator. He leaned them against the wall.

Car noises came through the window. First, Daddy’s car and then the agent’s and Bill’s. They all got out and walked to the lab. All their shadows made the doorway darker.

Bill came over, pulled a screwdriver out of my back pocket,
and helped unscrew. The hardest part was reaching the high hinges, especially if you wanted to watch the men at the same time. I wished I had hidden my gun in case they tried something. The hinges were like silver butterflies holding onto the pale yellow corners of the accumulator. After the screws came out they fluttered into my hand and when I had a whole bunch I took them over to the jar. Everyone was so quiet I was scared.

The three men were standing by the green telescope, looking out of the windows. One of them was writing in a black book. Daddy was walking around, checking boxes and watching us. Tom looked at him.

‘Doctor, where do you want us to take them?’

The men looked up.

Daddy said, ‘Well, gentlemen, do your orders say anything about where to do it?’

‘Uh, no, Doctor.’

‘So.’ Daddy walked out onto the porch and looked out across the meadow towards the cloudbuster. Then he turned and looked the other way into the sun. The road forked. The tar part went up the hill and turned right towards the observatory. The other part was the tractor road that Tom uses to get to the back field. I like mowing with Tom except once I fell off. The sun was shining on the grassy place where the two roads made a V. ‘Ahem.
AHEM
ahem. Mr Ross?’

‘Yes, Doctor.’ Tom went onto the porch, dropping a handful of screws into the jar along the way. The jar was almost full. They stood on the porch for a minute then Daddy pointed to the hospital field and they came back in.

Tom said, ‘Come on, Pete.’

He grabbed the side of an accumulator and started out the door. I grabbed a top and followed him. Bill stayed in the lab, watching the men. We walked up the road lugging the pieces and then crossed onto the grass, where tractor tyres had worn the grass away. Tom walked down the tractor road a ways and then off into the little clearing between the two roads. He set his piece down in the middle of the ‘V’ between the road to the observatory and the road to the fields. I laid my top on top. On the way back we passed Bill, carrying more sides. Daddy was on the porch, waiting. The three men came out too, to watch the pile grow.

Inside, two accumulators were left so I took my red screwdriver and started unscrewing them while Tom and Bill made more trips to the pile in the ‘V’ in the middle of the two roads, which got bigger and bigger. Then they helped me and the three of us finished the last accumulator and carried it outside together.

The three men moved closer and stood together next to the pile, squinting into the sun.

Tom walked over to the pickup and took the axes off the tailgate. He gave one to Bill and one to me.

We stood in front of the pile holding the axes and then Daddy came off the porch. He walked slowly across the grass, looking hard at the three men. They stood together and stretched their necks in their collars and pulled at the neck of their shirts.

‘All right,’ said Daddy. ‘Go ahead.’

The way Tom taught me to swing an axe is that I put my left hand close to the bottom and then slide my right hand up at the same time I swing the axe over my right shoulder. Then, quickly, I pull down with my left hand, sliding my right hand all the way down the smooth wooden handle until it meets my left
hand. All the while rolling my right shoulder and swinging my hips to the left, following the pull.

The blades flashed in the sun and sank deep into the Celotex, steel wool and tin, leaving big gashes in the sides of the accumulators. Tom and Bill were swinging too and then we were all swinging together in the sun.
Chung, chung, chung.

The wooden moulding on the sides split easily and after a while some of the panels fell apart under the
chung, chung, chung
of the axes.

I stopped to rest for a minute. Daddy was still watching the men. He didn’t even see us. He was watching them.

We had to chop for a long time so that each panel had a big hole in it or was split. When we were done, Tom walked around the pile, pulling panels with his axe to look for parts we missed. Bill walked over and stood next to Daddy, facing the three men. I walked over to Daddy too, and for a while we all watched Tom picking through the pile, except for Daddy, who was watching the men.

Daddy said, ‘That is enough, Mr Ross.’

Tom walked off the pile and stood next to me. The pile was crumpled and broken, and steel wool was hanging out of the panels, all frothy and grey.

Daddy’s voice was loud, almost a shout, but instead of being loud, it was hard and sharp.

‘Well, gentlemen. Are you satisfied?’

He waited for a minute. It was perfectly quiet except for some crows on the maple tree next to the barn.

‘Would you like us to burn it now?’

The marshal took his hands out of his pockets.

‘No, Doctor, I think that will be sufficient.’

‘Are you sure?’ His cheeks were red and his eyes burned.

‘Yes, Doctor, I think that is plenty.’

‘We have gasoline! It would make a nice fire, no?’

‘I think we’d better go now, Doctor. We’ve done what we were supposed to do.’

The three men started to walk around the pile to the black car. Daddy left us and walked up to the first man, looking at him hard all the time.

‘What about books? Not all the books are in New York! There are some here you can burn too! Why not?’

‘No, Doctor. Please.’ The men tried to walk away from him but then they would have walked right into the woods so they kind of walked sideways to their car. One of them took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. He looked at the sky. The other man licked his lips. The marshal kept trying to look at Daddy but his eyes kept dropping.

‘I have more instruments!’ Daddy’s voice was sharper and made them wince. ‘Yes, gentlemen. Instruments. Scientific equipment. Would you like to see that on the pile too? No?’

The marshal and one of the men walked around the far side of the black car and got in quickly. The other man, the driver, tried to walk around to the door but Daddy was in front of him. He stood in front of Daddy with his head lowered. Daddy just looked at him. After a long time, the driver raised his head and looked at Daddy and then he dropped his head again.

‘Excuse me, Doctor. Please.’

‘Yes, I’ll excuse you. Of course.’ He stepped aside and the man twisted past him and got into the car.

Daddy walked around and looked at him in the window. The driver leaned out. His face was white.

‘Doctor. I … I’m sorry.’

‘Yes. You’re sorry. Of course. Aren’t we all. Goodbye, gentlemen. Someday you will understand.’

GAS WAS IN my eyes in sweet and swirling colours. They were speaking French again but I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand anything except that the dream was frightening. Waking up I cried because something that happened in the gas was sad. I felt alone and lost in the French hospital.

The young doctor looked at me apologetically and said they had still not been able to get the shoulder back in. This would be the last time, he assured me. He said they were getting more nurses and more attendants and this time they would get it.

Waiting for the others to come and help, I lay back sweating
on the table, confused by being afraid of what I had dreamt and at the same time hungry to get back to it. Somehow, by some great mental crossing of the wires deep in the smoky phantasmagoric gas, I had crossed the line between two worlds. The dreams I could not remember were so close to me and yet I could not understand them. It was something as close and fine as the line of a shimmering horizon separating earth from sky. Sometimes on the tractor with Tom, the closeness between those things hypnotized me. Bumping along on the fender while Tom drove, I used to study the skyline and treetops. During the day it was all one picture of trees and sky. Then as dusk gathered and the sound of the mower fell lower and lower, the leaves and branches lost their detail and became a mass of darkness. All trees were etched against the sky until there were only dark trees and pale sky separated by a bright line. And on the tractor, I was sure there was an upside down, another side, another world from which another little boy could watch a world where the sky was solid and real and the earth was empty. Sometimes I saw him on the other side of the bright line riding the tractor, staring. One day, riding the tractor with Tom in the sunshine, I suddenly keeled off the fender and fell into the newly mown grass onto my right shoulder.

And now that same shoulder was in this same dream in this gaseous hospital. Like the sky and the trees, these dreams were pressed together, but I could only see one at a time; enough to know that some other life ran parallel to this one but it was not here. Two stories ran together and mingled their reality. Lying in the cold French hospital, I felt unalive, a reflection. I had seen another life in the gas, and now the nurses were preparing me
for death. Three nurses wrapped another sheet around me while the doctor explained: Three nurses would pull on the sheet as if I were in a horizontal hammock, while two doctors pulled on the shoulder to pop it back in the socket. The gas would cushion the muscular agony but oh, my God, what pain and I had cried coming out of the dream because I realized the two realities were not parallel at all, but were aimed to meet at some point in the future.

The mask was snug against my face again over my nose and mouth and I still had to find out what happened to that other person in the dream. The hissing began and I breathed deeply, sucking hard on the gas. When it began to spin, my forefinger began a slow circle. I had to remember everything. The mask was softer and softer and pressed against my face, making my face softer and softer, losing its shape, melting. But remembering everything. My hand dropped. Everything in the left finger then, holding it up to tell them wait, and then waiting to remember, my mouth and nose growing longer and longer, extending into the mask going after the gas down the pipe like
a deer a deer a deer a deer a deer

Dull white globes hung over study hall throwing vague shadows out beneath the thirty-five boys, all uncomfortable in neckties, sitting in shuffling silence at rows of old-fashioned wooden desks. Some of the boys were studying. Others tried to sleep. Reflected in the black window, Blackman scribbled away at his algebra in front of me. MacGregor was drawing pictures.
Hershberger was slouched in his chair, trying to read. I was looking at myself. Mr Hannaford looked up from his desk and then looked away. I looked back at Eutropius.

Mr Craft, my Latin teacher, had managed to dig up a Latin text for which no pony existed. I didn’t like Latin and I didn’t feel like doing it. Reaching into my bookbag I pulled out my OROP desert notebook and turned to the last entry: ‘Oct. 26, 1957: Heavy clouds. Some DOR. Feels like EAs’.

I wrote: ‘Oct. 27. cloudy. Less DOR’. I kept a record every day.

I looked at the clock. It was 7.50 and in ten minutes we were all going to the assembly hall for a special meeting. Blackman said he heard that Mr Hutton was going to announce no school for a few days because of flu. I had already had the flu. Maybe if there was no school for a few days I could go down to Lewisburg and visit Daddy again. I saw him on 5 October and he said he wanted to give me a secret formula to memorize in case something happened to him. He told me to be brave and I said I would be.

Blackman turned around and quickly dropped a note on my desk. I looked at Mr Hannaford but he hadn’t seen. The note said, ‘Schwartz says Hutton is just going to give us a sleepover, not close school’.

At least a third of the campus, about seventy kids, were in the infirmary or at home. I was in the infirmary for two weeks with Davis. The only time we laughed was when we threw water down the steps to the nurses’ office. I told them I couldn’t take regular medicine because my father was a special kind of doctor and didn’t want me to have regular medicine but they gave me a shot anyway.

I unfolded the last letter I had from Daddy. He said there was a chance he would be parolled on 7 November and he would come to school and we would have lunch at Howard Johnson’s. I hoped he would come during study hall so I could look out the windows to the road and watch his big Chrysler 300 drive up the long shaded drive. It would feel good to run out and hug him. The last summer we were together in Maine we had gone for a walk and came back to the lower cabin. He told me that the biggest battle was coming and I had to be very strong because he might have to go to jail. Then he stopped by the back door and he said, ‘Peter, if I go to jail they will think it is a victory for them. But in the end we will win, I am sure of it. But I want you to know that if I have to go to jail I might not come out alive. Do you understand?’ I nodded. Then he reached into a little cubbyhole cut into the side of the cabin next to the door and he pulled out his .45. ‘Peeps,’ he said, looking at me very seriously, ‘I want you to know that I am hiding this gun here.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘If it gets really bad, I might shoot myself. But it will be all right – I don’t know if I will have the courage to face prison.’ There were tears in his eyes and his hand squeezed my shoulder. ‘Peeps, sometimes it is so hard.’ His eyes were very soft and when I hugged him, he cried.

Once he cried in Washington, too. He lived at Alban Towers, a big hotel, and used another name, Walter Roner. It was good to sleep close to him and smell his oil and sometimes we talked in the dark and I watched car lights move around on the ceiling. Actually I liked going to Washington because we went to see things and went to movies a lot. He bought me clothes and model airplanes. He wanted me to go to the Air Force Academy
because he said they would look out for me. One night I woke up very late and he wasn’t in bed. I heard the typewriter in the study and went out. He was sitting there writing. He looked at me and said, ‘Peter, they are going to have to come and take me in chains. I won’t give up.’ And then he pulled me close and cried on my shoulder. His hair was soft and white and I patted it for a long time.

The bell rang and everyone jumped up. Blackman waited for me while I folded the letter and then we went to assembly. Everyone was there. ‘They even called study hall off for the girls,’ said Blackman. ‘I bet it’s going to be an important announcement.’

‘Yeah,’ I said as we put our books under our seats, ‘I’m glad I already had the flu, too.’

The whole student body, what was left of it, slowly crowded into the assembly hall and rumours passed up and down the rows. Metal chairs squeaked and groaned as students leaned forward whispering what they heard.

Mr Hutton stood up on the stage and cleared his throat. ‘As you all know, we have been hit pretty hard by the flu. The doctors tell us it is going to get worse before it gets better. Therefore, I’m here to tell you that there will be no classes tomorrow.’

A cheer went up from the students.

‘In fact, there will be no classes for the next two weeks.’ The assembly roared as students shouted, clapped and yelled.

Mr Hutton waved for silence.

‘When you return to your dorms you may call your parents and arrange for transportation. The school will provide a bus to the four o’clock train tomorrow. Those of you who are unable to
go home may stay here. One dormitory and the dining hall will remain open. Dismissed.’

Hershberger was waiting in line in front of me at the telephone booth in the main dorm.

‘Hey Hershberger,’ I said, ‘you goin’ home?’

He twisted his head sideways and groaned. ‘Aw, I dunno. My dad has to go to a conference someplace this week and I’m not sure I can afford it anyway.’ Ed’s mother had died a couple of years ago and I told him about Daddy being in jail and we were friends.

‘Well look, Ed, if you can’t go home, why don’t you come home with me? I may be going to see my dad but if that parole comes through, I’ll be home most of the time and my mother is a real good cook.’

‘Well …’

‘See what your dad says and I’ll call my mother right after you.’

‘Okay.’

We pushed and shoved until Ed finally squeezed into the phone booth. He had to talk with his finger in one ear because all the fellows behind me were talking and shouting. We pushed and shoved some more until Ed came out. ‘Well, I’m not going back to Ohio so I guess I could go home with you.’

‘Great! Let me call my mother right now.’

After I explained about flu vacation I asked Mummy about Ed and she said, ‘Sure, by all means. I’ll come and pick you up tomorrow afternoon after school. I’ll probably be there around six.’

Upper North was a madhouse as boys raced in and out of rooms, packing and making plans for getting together during vacation. I went into Blackman’s room and watched him pack.

‘If you come to New York City, you can come over to my place. It’s too bad baseball season just ended. I’d like you to see the Yankees play.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You know Hershberger is coming to my house. And then I may see if I can go and see my dad….’

Blackman paused and then nodded. ‘Oh yeah. It would be good if you could see him. When is he supposed to get out?’

‘Well, maybe 7 November if he gets a parole. The whole sentence was for two years. He’s only been in seven or eight months.’

‘Isn’t that an awful long time just for contempt of court?’

I shrugged. ‘I told you, there were a lot of strange things.’ Could I tell him about the conspiracy? He wouldn’t understand about the HIGs or the EAs or the conspiracy; that Daddy even thought they might be putting him in prison to protect him. How much would Blackman or Hershberger understand?

‘Well, didn’t he have a good lawyer?’

‘No,’ I laughed proudly, ‘he didn’t trust lawyers. Hell, the prosecutor was a guy who had even been our lawyer for a while. Daddy called him a Judas.’

Blackman shook his head. ‘It sure sounds weird,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I know. There were all kinds of weird things. They sentenced him for two years for contempt and the sentence for contempt is usually only six months. There were all kinds of strange things.’ And strange things in the prison too. That was why he was going to give me the formula.

The lights blinked, giving us the ten-minute warning.

I stood up just as MacGregor, Blackman’s roommate, walked in. ‘Well, I’m going back to my room. If I can come to New York, I’ll give you a call.’

‘Okay,’ said Blackman.

‘Okay, g’nite.’

‘Nite.’

I lay in my bed for a long time before I went to sleep. My roommate was in the infirmary with flu so I was alone. After a while I got up and went to the window to see if there were any EAs. The night was chilly and there was a cool wind on the lacrosse field behind the dorm. From darkened windows above me and on either side I heard voices as boys finished up last bits of packing by flashlight. Occasionally a proctor’s voice cut the mumbling silence.

Bob Blackman and Ed Hershberger were my friends. It was nice having friends but I really wished I could have stayed in Massachusetts, where Mummy lived. She said she thought it would be better to go to a boarding school. A lot of the kids came from families that were separated or divorced but it was still lonely because I missed the excitement of going to visit Daddy and being in the country. I wanted Daddy to come and get me. I wanted to be with him in the Corps of Engineers. That was more important than Cheops or Eutropius.