Hunts in Dreams (16 page)

Follard relayed his symptoms while his uncle pulled the sleeves of his shirt. The doctor listened, stealing glances at the new line of hard-soled moccasins.

Octavia Perry gave Lyris a ride home from school. Along the road they stopped to watch someone combining. Five spears of gleaming silver combed through cornstalks, which vibrated in their grip. In the combine's wake, the ground was shorn and brushy. Lauryn Hill sang on the radio about “that thing, that thing, that thing,” but then the combine drowned her out, harvesting the rows nearest the road.

Octavia took a manila envelope from above the visor. “I want you to give this to Jerry,” she said. “I know that nothing really stops you from opening and reading it, but I don't think that you will.”

“What's it all about?”

“He'll get it,” said Octavia.

Lyris put the envelope in her backpack. “Will do.”

Octavia curled her hair behind her ears. “If you have to know, my parents found out about the setup.”

“Jerry Tate?” said Lyris. “My uncle.”

“I call him Mr. Postman,” said Octavia.

“You have a setup with Jerry Tate?”

“It began at a chess exhibit at the state fair. It turned out both of us loved the game. My mother is livid. She says, ‘I'll state-fair
you
.'”

Octavia looked out the window. The red combine had stopped beside a green wagon. She seemed peaceful with her decision, whatever it might be.

“That is a bangin' combine,” she said.

The farmer opened the cab door and climbed down the metal stairs. He was a young man, but his hair was shaggy and streaked with gray.

“I know him,” said Octavia. “It's Albert Robeshaw.” She and Lyris got out of the car and crossed the ditch, batting weeds from their way. The farmer removed cinched leather gloves and held them bunched in one hand as he leaned an elbow on a metal-capped post of the fence.

“I used to baby-sit you,” he said.

“And you weren't ever going to farm,” said Octavia. “That's what you told me. You were going to travel all over the world and never be a farmer.”

“I did travel some. Made it to Thailand.”

“Albert, this is Lyris.”

Albert and Lyris shook hands. He smiled and looked into her eyes until she blinked. His eyes were brown and kindly mocking. He slapped his gloves against his palm. “I'm going to run this out and then you can go along with me a round or two if you want.”

Albert went back up the steps and cranked the combine so corn began pouring from the hooded spout in a uniform yellow spiral that hissed and clattered into the wagon. Dust rose, swirling and thinning in the blue air.

When the wagon was full, Albert, Octavia, and Lyris climbed into the cab of the combine, and Albert eased it into gear. He seemed glad to have company. “The corn's standing good this year,” he said, loud enough to be heard over the engine and the augers. “Some years it gets broke over. But this way you can run the snoots high and it makes it easier going.”

“Snoots?” said Lyris.

“These big silver things that you see up front, pulling in the corn,” said Albert. “Some years you have to run them so low they catch in the dirt. It can mess you up pretty good.”

Albert aimed the blades between the cornrows, where they yanked the stalks violently down. The ears of corn boiled up to the hopper.

“Did you like Thailand?” said Octavia.

“It was good. The Buddhists there I hadn't known much about. This idea of lighting your own lamp. I saw the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. There's a place of great peace. When I ran out of money, I came home.”

Lyris looked out across the country, which sloped to a distant valley and climbed again to the horizon. The geography of farming was inescapable, the striped pattern of crops harvested and crops standing, the patchwork of fields and pastures and water. Power pylons ran down the trough of the valley, and vehicles flashed on distant highways.

“Is all this corn the same?” she said.

“No,” said Albert. “Some does better in wet, some in dry. Some matures in a hundred days, some in a hundred and eight. The long-maturing ones yield better, but not if you get an early frost. What you're doing by planting four, five varieties, see, is limiting your risk.”

“You sound like a farmer to me,” said Octavia, pressed against the glass in the corner of the cab. Plowbirds with V-shaped wings darted and dove, following the combine.

“This is the best time of year, really,” said Albert. “All the stuff we've done so far isn't worth anything until you pick it. With planting and spraying, you know you're doing it, but it don't look much different anyway. But this here, as you go across, it's gone, so you can watch yourself going.”

Later a pheasant flew up
in front of the combine with a hard clipped beating of wings and
coasted low into a thicket. Albert said that some farmers let hunters
stand at the end of the rows, waiting for the pheasants to come
their way, but he did not care for anyone shooting while he was
riding high in a glass box.

Even given this instructive detour, Lyris got home before Micah, owing to the one-thirty release of upperclassmen. She put her backpack in her room and then went down to clean the kitchen. She began by putting the curtains back up. Their rings hung on dowels with nothing to keep them from falling, but for now they looked like regular curtains in a regular house. She scrubbed the stove with steel wool. She even cleaned the vise grips for the burner with the missing knob. On the table she found the penknife that she would have sworn she had returned to Follard. She threw it in the trash. Shoes and boots, pairs and strays, she lined up by the stairs.

From the kitchen she moved into the back yard, where she folded the lawn chairs and carried them to the barn. Then she walked out along the railroad tracks, picking wild asparagus for supper. The goat was in a ditch, trying to make itself inconspicuous. Asparagus in one hand and the goat's collar in the other, she headed back to the house. Railroad spikes in the grass reminded her of something that had happened while she was living with her foster parents Pete and Jackie. Mail arrived one day with Lyris's name on it. The tract inside was titled
How to Derail
Any Train with Items Found in the Av
erage Home Workshop
. Reading this document, Lyris learned of many shockingly simple methods by which a train could be derailed, including one described in the Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

When Lyris showed the pamphlet to Pete and Jackie, Pete said it was meant for him and must have come to her by mistake. Lyris asked why he would want to derail a train, and he said he didn't but some friends of his were interested in the topic. Lyris then asked why Pete's friends would want to derail a train, and he said he didn't think they did either — their interest was of a more scholarly nature — but if they did, it would be because industrial society was unjust. People could get killed, said Lyris. Pete said that no one was considering derailing a passenger train, and Jackie at this point chimed in to say that Lyris was thinking in the way that society wanted her to think.

Pete agreed. “Look at you,” he said. “You have nothing, you have less than nothing, and yet your first thought is to protect the freight of some uncaring rail monopoly.”

Such thinking was not Lyris's fault, Jackie said. It was something everyone had to work past. Lyris nodded, but her mind would not yield the point. She thought that Pete and Jackie were the ones who had it wrong.

15
◆
Charles

C
HARLES'S LAST
JOB
that day involved water dripping from the ceiling of the music room in the elementary school. Mrs. Harad, the principal, had once bought a field spaniel in a deal brokered by Charles, and this was one reason Charles got the call. Another was that Mrs. Harad wanted to reward the family for Joan's support during the evolution scandal. So it was that the principal escorted the plumber into the music room, where they stood looking at the cracked old plaster as if at the vault of heaven. Charles said they were going to have to pop that ceiling open. He had found that customers liked it when he spoke this way. The room was full of students singing in their light high voices as drops of water fell into a bronze kettle. Micah smiled while hiding his face behind a songbook turned to “The Streets of Laredo.”

“Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,” sang the children. “Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.”

Charles steadied a high wooden ladder and climbed. With a Kafer saw he scored the wet plaster so that it broke and fell, with wet heavy sounds, down to the blue tiles. Mrs. Harad snapped her fingers, and the music teacher waved the children from their seats, through the doorway, and into the hall. They kept singing all the while. The music teacher revised the lyrics with directions on where they were going: “We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly, and bitterly wept as we moved single-file to the cafeteria.”

“What a wreck of a school,” said Mrs. Harad.

Plaster kept falling. When the hole was big enough, Charles put his hand up inside the ceiling. “It's a cold supply line,” he said. The rest of the afternoon was given over to the repair. Charles shut off the water and drained the pipes by running the faucets above and below until they were dry. An elbow fitting was leaking. Charles melted the solder with a propane torch and pulled the fitting off with big-jawed pliers. He cleaned the ends of the pipes and scoured the new piece he meant to put on. From time to time the principal came by to monitor the work, and on one of these visits she asked how Joan was.

Charles looked down from the ladder. “She's gone off and won't be home till spring.”

“That's too long.”

Charles brushed flux onto the copper and fitted the pipe ends into the new joint. “Well, I wasn't expecting it, though maybe I should have been. And Micah's got a cold and Lyris is being pursued by trash.”

“What a fellow ought to do is get drunk,” said Mrs. Harad. Then she told a story about her honeymoon. In a bend in the road, she and her husband lost control of the little Triumph motorcycle on which they had departed from the church.

“They all said, ‘Ride it,'” she said. “You know how it is when people at a wedding get an idea that the bride and groom must do some particular thing. ‘Ride that bike.' We went down on some loose gravel we didn't see until we were in it.”

“And what's the point?”

“Just that things never seem to go right.”

Charles had not really blamed himself for Joan's decision. All that drove her lay inside her, he thought. He would have a hard time leaving the house, leaving Micah and Lyris. But this might be laziness, not honor. Life mattered more to Joan than it did to him. She thought there was a meaning she must track down. Maybe he should have bought her that tourmaline solitaire he had seen in Stone City. Maybe he should have married her on Main Street and not in the back room of a drugstore. Long ago he had stopped believing that his acts could move her, but he could be wrong.

He picked up Micah
after school and together they went to the gun shop. On the way, the boy told Charles about the “self-esteem car wash” his class had had that da
y. No cars were involved, only children pretending to be cars. Each kid walked a
gauntlet of classmates, who had been directed to call out whatever
they considered to be the student's strong points.

“What'd they say about you?” said Charles.

“That I'm a good reader,” said Micah. “And I don't abuse drugs.”

“Well, they're right,” said Charles. “You know, it reminds me of the sticks, which we had when I was a kid.”

“What's that?”

“There were six or seven of us who walked home from school together. We'd go down the alley between the restaurant and the bank, past a big pile of sticks. I don't remember how it started, but it became a tradition almost that everyone would pick up sticks and throw them at one of us, who had been picked beforehand to be the victim.”

“Did the person know?”

“Usually not,” said Charles, “because it wouldn't happen every day. And lots of times you would have been told that someone else was going to be the one. But sometimes you did know. You could just tell.”

“Daddy, that's pathetic.”

They had come to a high gravel crossroads, and Charles could see that no one was coming. He hit the gas. The van jumped the crown of the road and crashed down on the other side.

“It wasn't that bad,” said Charles. “Even when all your friends were throwing sticks at you. Getting hit by sticks is not as painful as it sounds. And the minute you picked up a stick and turned to throw it back, they all ran. We weren't that serious about hurting each other.”

Charles and Micah got out at the gun shop, and Charles took his stepfather's shotgun from the back of the van. The brother and sister who owned the shop were sitting in director's chairs, watching the Weather Channel. Clear and cold was the forecast. Charles wondered how much of their day must be spent doing nothing. It wouldn't be easy.

“Here's that gun I was telling you about,” said Charles. “The one that a few days ago I thought I would never get.”

“Good for you,” said the brother. He took the shotgun and looked it over. “I've never seen anything quite like it.”

“We're not buying just now,” said the sister.

“I thought you'd be interested,” said Charles. “Not to buy it, just, you know, professional curiosity. And I need a couple boxes of four-ten shells.”

“We've got a special on Winchester seven and a half,” said the brother.

“I'll bet I know someone who would like a gun safety coloring book,” said the sister.

Charles purchased three boxes of shells, and they all went outside to try the gun. There was a mowed field behind the shop. The brother had a trap mounted on the back of a pickup so that he could sit on the tailgate and fire the clay targets. He took one from a cardboard box in the bed and cocked the trap as Charles stood and loaded the gun. Charles missed, and missed again. He cracked open the barrels and pulled out two spent shells the color of tomatoes. The smell of the burned powder came up. There was a time when the misses would have bothered him, but not today. The terra-cotta disk of the third clay spun flat over the field. He swung through it, pulled the trigger, and followed up clean. The target broke apart, pieces tumbling into the grass.

“Sporting clays,” said the sister.

They took turns with the gun. The sister was a better shot than Charles, and the brother was best. The siblings called “Pull” in bland voices. Very likely they went to events. But even the brother missed sometimes.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said, handing the shotgun to Charles.

“Sweet little gun,” said the sister. “I like it with a four-ten, because it's not easy.”

“I know,” said the brother. “I had forgotten.”

“Let me try,” said Micah, who had been sitting in the open door of the truck, looking at the coloring book and the shooting. He took his turn, with Charles's arms steadying his own.

When twilight was coming on, Charles walked back to the van with Micah and the shotgun.

“Do you think Joan will be home yet?” said Micah.

Charles shook his head. “I told you, buddy. It's going to be a while.”

“Cross your fingers.”

So Charles drove home with crossed fingers riding the rim of the steering wheel. Micah turned in his seat and put his feet up on the edge of the door.

“My feet are closer than they appear,” he said.

Jerry came over for supper that night. He
chopped carrots with a serrated blade while Lyris opened the creaking oven door from time to
time to look at a casserole. Micah sat at the
kitchen desk coloring a picture of a game warden by the
light of the green glass banker's lamp. Charles set the
table with chipped white plates. He and Jerry had drinks and talked about the truck-mounted trap, and why more things weren't
truck-mounted, and how whoever came up with such an idea was
probably raking in the scratch. Then they all sat down to
eat.

The casserole was made of eggplant and asparagus. It needed seasonings they did not have, but everyone ate a fair share. Charles bent to the table, a forearm laid on the edge. He drank water from one glass and whiskey from another. Lyris would put a forkful of food in her mouth and chew mindfully, gazing around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time. Micah had arranged dark red shotgun shells around his plate. Jerry knifed a slab of butter onto a crust of bread. No one talked about Joan. It seemed unfair to her that in her absence everything was so normal. Of course, things could still go very wrong; it was only seven o'clock.

After
the dishes were done, Charles took his whiskey out to the
porch, where he sat with the goat and looked out at
the railroad tracks and the woods beyond. The goat seemed to have adapted to the porch,
and vice versa, since all the things that she might have
become tangled in had been removed by Charles, Lyris, or Micah, or
by the goat herself. Charles drank the whiskey slowly but
steadily, and he realized that he might well be getting
drunk, as Mrs. Harad had advised. But he got drunk so rarely
now; it was nothing like the old days of kicking down
doors, of threats made and carried through or foolishly messed up.
This was more of a composed drunkenness, a receptivity, and he
thought he could almost feel the pulse of the night, as
if his heart were beating to its time.

Micah came out when his homework was finished, and Charles sent him back inside to get a coat on. Together they watched the train come through at a quarter of nine. It was all grain hoppers and boxcars, some open, some closed, clattering and rocking, along tracks known to be rough. Micah wanted to hear the old story of how Charles had hopped a freight out west, only to have it go about a mile before stopping on a siding in the middle of nowhere for the night. Charles had ended up sleeping like a troll under a wooden bridge, or so he told it, playing up the parts that made him seem ridiculous. Micah loved every word.

In the kitchen, Lyris gave Jerry the message from Octavia, and he read her lush handwriting under the banker's lamp:

Meet me at the E. at midnight.

Sincerely,

Octavia

Heading home in the car, Jerry felt both charmed and excited by the message. The “E.” stood for the Elephant, as anyone from around here could guess. The abbreviation seemed like just the sort of endearing feint at intrigue a young mind would concoct. An older person would have written the location out in block letters, breathing with difficulty. And the “Sincerely” was a totally disarming usage.

He stopped at the all-night car wash, a lonely chain of dark bays lit by high, stark electric globes. There was no attendant; whatever washing was going to take place had to be done by the customer. Jerry pulled smashed bills from his pants pockets, smoothed them flat on the hood of the car, and fed them into the change machine. He mopped the car with a drizzle of soapy gray water from a long-handled brush. The rinse cycle was relatively violent. The high-powered nozzle bucked against his hands as if it would fly away. He drove out of the bay and parked by the vacuum cleaner. Whatever happened, his car would be immaculate. He dropped beer cans and cigarette cellophanes and undelivered mail into a trash barrel. With a sodden cloth from a vending machine, he polished the dashboard and door panels until they gleamed as if a quart of salad oil had detonated in the front seat. He even cleaned out the glove compartment. His map of the Midwest was outdated, faded, splitting along the folds. It depicted long-finished highways as broken blue lines that suggested a bright future for driving.

He got back on the road. All this activity, he knew, was partly a means of avoiding the question of what he should do when he met Octavia.

Before he could decide, his car was overtaken by a police cruiser. Although flashing no lights and sounding no siren, it pulled abreast in the passing lane and stayed even with him. Through the windows, Jerry could see Earl the deputy waving sternly at the shoulder. Jerry pulled over, and the cruiser blocked his way. Then the lights came on, turning slowly, red, blue, and yellow. It seemed there were more colors every year. Both men got out of their cars.

“Nice night,” said Jerry.

Earl walked back, shining a flashlight on the ground. “Say, you still got that keg?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“The liquor store's looking for it.”

“I just came from the car wash.”

“Well, that's great.”

“Why don't I take it back when I'm done with it?”

“Look, Jerry, I'm not going to fuck around on this,” said Earl. “All I been hearing about all day's that jackass keg. Turns out the kid come in there this morning or, I don't know, over the weekend, saying he wants his deposit back, since it was stolen through no fault of his own.”

“That's debatable.”

“They don't want the deposit anyway. The whole theory of the deposit is to make sure the kegs come back. Which I would think is a fairly obvious point. What do you mean, when you're done with it? Isn't it getting kind of flat?”