Hunts in Dreams (10 page)

“No one ever said I was gold inside,” said Joan.

A moth landed on the glass while they sat eating walnuts and drinking. The room was on the seventh floor, high for a moth to fly. It was not drawn to the light, because the light was off. It was a large moth with feathery antennae. The papery brown wings closed and opened in the slow rhythm of respiration. It would be too much to say that they would not have gone ahead without this reminder of indifferent nature. People looking for a sign will find one soon. But once the moth had landed, they began to kiss, and then to undress. Joan untied the white cord of her robe, pulled it slowly from its loops, wrapped it loosely around a fist, dropped the terry coil on the table. She wondered what day it was. They moved to the bed. Their clothes were on the carpet, in city light. She wondered why it should all seem so inevitable, as if they were inside the funnel again, spinning down. His hands touched her skin and she let go of the memory. It was always this way, and always would be.

An hour passed, an hour and ten minutes. The night passed. Joan and the doctor dressed and went down to the lobby. If they felt shame, no one could have known. Joan showed the doctor the harp and strummed its strings, although she could play only the piano. They crossed a red and gray carpet with their heads held high and went out the revolving doors. The doctor offered his arm, and Joan took it. A panel truck came down the street; a bundle of newspapers landed on the sidewalk. When the truck had passed, the doctor raised the fibrous blue band that held the bundle together while Joan knelt to pull a newspaper free. They walked on, looking at dazed mannequins in the windows of a store, and when they reached the end of the block they turned the corner.

Sunday

9
◆
Lyris

I
T WAS AFTER
MIDNIGH
T
. How had it gotten so late? S
he must have slept. Car lights moved toward them in lonely pairs on a
narrow road between ditches. Lyris had no idea where they were
or where they were going. Follard was telling her about an
old friend who had driven so drunk sometimes that she
would see two pairs of headlights for every car; all
she could do was steer between them. “Lucky to be
alive,” he said. Follard had seen too many people ruined by liquor. Lyris admitted she had
tried the spiked chocolate. The headlights did not look double
to her, but they vibrated.

Follard took her to see a big grain operation out in the country. Boxcars were lined up on the rail siding, and Lyris thought of Charles's talk of grain, making its way to the river. He seemed to want to know more about agriculture than he did — as if it were his duty, being from farm country. Follard circled the towering silos, his tires throwing gravel, until Lyris grew dizzy and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw an old watchman crossing the parking lot with a baseball bat over his shoulder.

“Here comes somebody,” she said.

“I see him.”

Lyris waved at the man slowly, as if her hand were under water.

The watchman returned the wave of the
girl in the car as if conceding the harmlessness of her adventure. He
returned to the office, where he leaned the bat in a
corner next to a refrigerator, from which he
took a quart of beer. He uncapped it and drank. One of the
cats had walked on his game of solitaire and mixed up the cards;
there would be no getting it back.

“That's just great,” he said to a cat gnawing its toes on an old leather chair. “Is that right?” he said. “Then who was it?”

The old man squared up the cards and shuffled. His son was a bartender who every once in a while would drop by the elevator on his way home from work. Once he had brought two dancers to see the elevator, and the old man had run corn into the pit from overhead for their amusement. The women were amazed by the force of it and by the tumbling nails that were mixed with the corn because it was salvage grain. ­Sixteen-penny, the old man had estimated. So polite they were, like college students. They called him sir and said that earlier in the night his son had ejected from the bar a man who was as big as Sinbad the Sailor.

The watchman dealt and played a new hand. Then he walked through the feed room, where the big potbellied grinder was shaking corn kernels to dust. White powder caked the grinder, drifted from the rafters. The watchman crossed the alleyway to a metal shed. Inside was a mound of salt pellets many times taller than himself. He sighed and began shoveling pellets into a large paper sack with a hand scoop. When the sack was two-thirds full, he lifted it onto a portable scale, read the gauge, and added pellets until the pointer floated at sixty pounds. Then he tied the sack closed with string and carried it to another part of the storeroom.

There would be no end to the work. He felt that he could shovel and weigh and tie for the rest of his years, not so many now, and the mountain of salt would not get one pellet smaller. Strange, how it took so much to make so little.

“Sinbad the Sailor,” he said.

Follard drove carelessly, turning every so often, with no apparent route in mind. Eventually they arrived at a little bridge on a twisting gravel road. They stepped from the car and stood with their hands in their coat pockets. Lyris recognized neither the road nor the iron frame of the bridge. The river moved along, tight whirlpools forming on its surface. The moon shone above the lacing of cottonwood branches.

“Is it true you burned your parents' house?” The question was too loud.

“Who, me?”

“That's what my father said.”

Follard looked out over the river. “The court ruled it was an accident. People forget the evidence. They brought in a fire marshal who testified that a kerosene heater might go off that way if it was not maintained. And believe me when I say ours was not maintained.”

“Did they die? Your parents, I mean.”

“No. She shot him, but he lived. I can tell you this much: if you want to see a miserable backbiting spectacle, try bringing two fire marshals into court with differing opinions.”

“Who shot who?”

Follard gripped the iron bars of the bridge and rocked back as if trying to pull them down.

“My mother. Shot my father. The fire was just a coincidence. I jumped out of the house when I heard the shooting, and there was no fire at that point. Or if there was, it hadn't come up to the second floor. I'm not saying I didn't smell smoke. But I knew that whatever was going on in the house was something to get away from. The county attorney couldn't accept that no one would get jail time out of such a mess. They acquitted my mother on self-defense. They acquitted me because their theory of arson required me to be in two places at once. My father had been shot and burned, so I guess the judge figured probation and a restraining order were enough for him.”

Lyris began climbing the ironwork of the bridge. “Where are they now?”

“My mom moved
to Michigan and my old man ended up in New Mexico. For a while he
wrote letters saying I should come out there because of the sky or something. Then he stopped writing. I was supposed to live with my
aunt and uncle, but they were decent enough to set me up in my own place.”

A metal plate about two feet wide ran along the top of the bridge. Lyris lay down on it on her back, feeling the round caps of the bolts through her clothes. To her left and nine feet down was the road; to her right and twenty feet down was the river.

“You can't go by what people say,” said Follard. “They always believe the worst thing. It's like when you broke out of that barn the other night. A common response would be ‘Well, there must be a reason she's in there. Maybe she deserved to be locked up.' But I didn't think that.”

“I was wearing my mother's dress,” she said.

“Regardless of whose dress,” said Follard. He climbed halfway up the bridge and rested his arms near the crown of Lyris's head. She could not see him but could hear his voice close to her ears. He spoke softly. “Be careful Baby Mahoney doesn't reach up and take you by the leg.”

“I don't know who that is. I've only lived here since summer.”

“I can fill you in,” said Follard. “Twenty years ago,
on this very night — that's how you tell
it — a baby named Mahoney fell into the river.
The parents got careless and lost their baby.”

Lyris turned over and cupped her face in her hands. “You lie.”

“Well, yeah, I lie. 'Cause it's only a story.”

“I don't like it.”

“Just listen. The baby swam or floated for miles and crawled out of the river into the woods. There might have been an animal that helped him. I don't tell it as well as some do. But he grew up in the wild and never learned anything about human beings. To him our ways are a mystery.”

Lyris heard her own voice as if it were coming from across the road or up in a tree. “So why would he grab my leg?”

“He's older now,” said Follard. “Remember, this was twenty years ago. But he always comes back to the bridge. He lurks around, with feelings he doesn't understand.”

“I have to get home.”

“Well, I would take you, but the car's out of gas. Or it's thrown a rod, or the key's in the trunk, or there is no car. This is another story that I'm telling now, and this one is true. He wanted to take her home but could not, and therefore, with nothing better to do . . . You see where I'm going.”

Lyris pushed up onto her knees. She swayed, a little drunk, a little afraid, a little mad. “You can't make me stay.”

He kept his arms folded on the bridge. He didn't seem concerned or angry. Moonlight reflected in his eyes. “Look around. You don't even know where you are. If you had a map, it would not help you. You have no point of reference.”

She climbed down the outside of the bridge and stood on a narrow ledge. It was not a far drop to the river; it might even be a pleasant jump in the summer. Follard descended too, but on the inside of the bridge. They eyed each other through a lattice of iron bars.

“Be careful,” he said.

Follard's fingers came through the bridge and caught her wrist. His purpose was uncertain, since the spaces were too small for him to pull her through. His fingernails pressed into her skin, but his eyes stayed tranquil. He slid his free hand through the next higher space and transferred her wrist to it. He repeated the maneuver; she saw her hand rising, as if it were no part of her. Evidently he hoped to pull her up and over the top of the bridge. She bit his knuckles, and he called her a crude name. She jumped from the bridge, pushing back, raising her arms, hitting the water with a glassy crash. The depth of the river was unknown to her, and drifting down, she did not touch the bed. What a world it was underwater, ringed by cold and darkness. When she broke to the surface, treading water, Follard was coming down the ditch from the bridge. The current carried her, and she angled to the bank on the side away from him. Follard lifted fence wire and bent under it. Lyris pulled herself from the water, using the branches of a fallen tree.

“Come back, Lyris,” he said. “If you'd just hold still, I would take you home.”

The air glowed with moonlight. It shone on the blue sleeves of his coat and on the river between them. He did not enter the water — maybe he was afraid — but turned and hurried back up to the bridge. She climbed the steep and muddy bank. The thin dead branches of the tree scratched her face. Follard crossed the bridge. In a moment he would be on her side of the river.

Lyris ran — away from the road, parallel to the water. Follard called after her. He said this was crazy, she would get lost, don't make him chase her. When she could not hear him any longer, she rested under a tree where its trunk fanned into roots. She untied the laces of her shoes, removed them, and peeled off her socks. Her hands were shaking. She wrapped her bare feet in the lining of her coat, kneading toes and soles. Leaves rustled; the moon laid silver stripes on the ground. An owl glided down a corridor of trees, pulled up short, and settled on a branch. On and on the river ran. Lyris told herself not to be afraid. A mile of walking in any direction would bring her to a road. Charles had explained the grid. The river would bring her to a road. The river might be the longest way, but she would not move in a circle. Anyone lost must not move in circles. She left the wet socks beside the tree. Shivering, she put on her shoes, her coat. She rested her back against the tree before going on.

Soon the owl overtook her, flying low beneath the branches with one of her socks snagged in its talons. Its body hung like a weight from the yoke of its wings.

Lyris came to a wooden cabin on a rise above the river. There were matches in a Band-Aid tin above the fireplace, and kind- ling in a crate. She built a fire and sat before it. A plaque had been set into the fieldstones:
THIS HOUSE IS FOR THE COMMON USE OF THE HUNTERS AND HIKERS OF THESE WOODS. LEAVE IT AS YOU WOULD FIND IT. IN MEMORY OF SPRAGUE HEILMAN B.
1877
D.
1949
BY SON MELVIN AND DAUGHTER JANICE
. She laid more wood on the fire and got up. In a chest of drawers she found coveralls and wool socks to wear. On a table she found a box of crackers. The coveralls bunched around her wrists and ankles. The table had been vandalized. People had carved their names into the planks.

He may find me,
she thought. She took a metal shovel from the fireplace and put it near her feet under the table.

When someone did come, it was not Follard but Leo, the fox hunter. Lyris didn't know him. He walked in and closed the door and rested a gun against the wall near the fireplace. He rearranged the burning wood with his boot and stood rubbing his hands. “Hello,” he said. “The key bird is out tonight.”

Lyris did not understand. “I'm lost,” she said. “I'm trying to get home.”

The man came over to the table. “What's your name?”

“Lyris Darling.”

He ran his hand over his mouth. “One of that bunch,” he said softly.

“What is the key bird?”

“That's a joke,” he said. “It says — its call would be — ‘Key, key, key-riste it's cold.' You see? The way you'd say ‘Christ, it's cold' if your teeth were chattering.”

“Oh, very good.”

“And chattering they are.”

“I fell in the river, but I don't even know what one.”

“The North Pin,” said the man. “Some call it Sprague's

Creek.”

“Didn't seem like a creek to me.”

“Well, no, it wouldn't, in it. It's
misleading. What happened?”

“I was on the bridge,” she said. “And this guy held my wrist and he wouldn't take me home. He was pulling on me.”

“Who?”

“Follard. I don't know his first name.”

“The arsonist?”

“He claims not.”

“I would not put great stock in what he claims.”

“It was stupid to let him drive me.”

“Yes, I think it was.” The man took out a wooden game call and blew into it. “What's that sound like to you?”

“I don't know,” said Lyris.

“It's supposed to sound like a dying rabbit.”

“I've never heard a rabbit die, so I wouldn't know what it sounds like.”

“Me either.”

“Do you have a car?”