Hunts in Dreams (2 page)

“What happened to your elbow?” said Joan. “Oh, Charles, why do you have to roughhouse with him on the very night before I go away?”

“He fell off his bike,” said Charles. “Don't read things into it that aren't there.”

“And who ends up dressing the wound?”

“Stop arguing,” said Micah.

As a rule, Charles and Joan did not let their seven-year-old tell them what to do, but they disagreed often enough lately that they sometimes forgot to remind him of his lack of authority.

Charles sat in a chair, shoving the tin of walnuts with a steel-toed boot to clear space for his feet. The ice of his drink had melted to wafers.

“I would be glad to put a Band-Aid on Micah's arm,” he said diplomatically, knowing that Joan would never give up the chance to doctor her son when she was on the verge of going away for the weekend. She was the executive director of a league of animal shelters headquartered in Stone City, and would give a speech at the regional convention on Saturday night.

Joan led Micah upstairs. Charles took the opportunity to raise the lid of her suitcase. Her blouses and skirts, her black swimsuit, lay carefully folded, and under them he found the white Bible with her maiden name printed in gold. He un- zipped her flowered cloth makeup bag and removed silver and gold tubes of lipstick, an eyelash curler that looked like some ungodly surgical scissors, and a paintbox for the eyes. Cosmetics bothered Charles. He did not want Joan going to the city with any more makeup than that which was on her face when she left. He did not want her dolling up for strangers in a strange place. Either the men would fall for her or they would not, and she would be left standing alone, with paint masking her pretty features. He buried the makeup in the laundry basket and filled the flowered bag with walnuts and a nutcracker from the tin beneath the table.

Her blouses moved him. Their insubstantiality and frail collars seemed to correspond to something tenuous in Joan's na- ture. People did not realize what an effort it required for her to simply appear normal, an inhabitant of the regular world. The things she did for work were much more than Charles could have managed. She sat in meetings in clothes unfriendly to the skin. She spoke civilly to people who would just as soon see her fall out of a window so they could take her place. She visited factories, seeking donations, admiring forklifts. She rarely dealt with animals anymore.

Her work life corresponded less and less with her home life. If her board of directors could see this kitchen — the moths that flew from the cupboards or the molasses congealed on the shelves of the refrigerator — their eyes would open wide. “What sort of people live here?” they might ask. But maybe their houses were the same.

A swimsuit,
he thought.
Where does that fit in?

Lyris came home at suppertime. After three months, she still entered the house gravely. She leaned forward, looking for something.

She had arrived on the eleventh of July with a small suitcase of her own. She'd set it down, picked it up, turned it around, considering whether to stay. Charles wondered what she had left behind in the culling of her possessions.

She had her mother's blond hair, chopped short, as if the beauty parlor responsible had been on a boat on the rolling sea. Her eyes were small but did not seem so because her irises were big and dark.
The father's eyes,
Charles had thought, with some jealousy, and just as he was thinking this, Lyris's eyes had met his, and he looked away. With her, that first time, were a man and a woman from the Home Bringers, the organization that had found her in Illinois, informed Joan and Charles of her existence, and brought her home.

Joan had seemed as amazed as Charles by the advent of Lyris. Joan had once been an actress, and she had the requisite ability to set aside the past in favor of any given scenario. She seemed to believe some things that were not true more than she did some things that were. Charles figured this was why she was so susceptible to religion. Once she had told Charles of a problem with the elevator in the building where she worked in Stone City. The car, it seemed, would stop between floors, and the doors would open, revealing the wall of the elevator shaft. It was only later that he found out the building had no elevators. When he pointed out this fact, she said that he had misunderstood, that she had only been telling him what someone else had told her, about another building, in another place. But he knew what he had heard, and he remembered how convincingly she had described the cables and rivets and grease of the shaft. No, she said. He was wrong.

At times like these, Charles thought, it was as if Joan were changing scripts. It took her a moment, but she would go on.

Lyris's father had been an actor; he and Joan had been in a drama workshop together in Chicago back in the eighties. Charles could picture the whole chain of events, inaccurately. Lyris had grown up in an orphanage and foster homes, never finding a lasting situation. There were difficult aspects to her life that the Home Bringers related with apparent joy. Her most recent foster parents had been apprehended with bomb-making equipment; the arrests had brought her to the Home Bringers' attention. So they had delivered her from trouble and given her real mother a chance to correct her mistake. There was no doubt in their minds about being in the right. If there were, they would find another line of work. They were small people, with small hands, representing a movement against what they called artificial families. The only love that counted, they said, was blood love.

Charles thought this was way off. Nonetheless, he and Joan now had two children, although it had once been predicted that they could have none. It made Charles happy when doc- tors and scientists got caught in a mistake. He cheered their miscalculations. Signals arrive from a space telescope, and lo and behold, there are forty billion more galaxies than there were yesterday. An infertile couple winds up having two children. The scientists must have known the guessing game they were playing. Did they laugh derisively behind laboratory walls; did they roll dice to determine the number of galaxies and grains of sand?

He wondered about those scientists.

Now Joan came downstairs saying that the bathroom was becoming a natural spring. She had that right. Water floated the tiles at the base of the toilet and beaded the coupling under the sink, from which the pearly drops made their way in procession down the elbow trap, off the cleanout, through space, and into an overturned hardhat placed on the floor to catch the water. The hat had tire marks on the crown from a time in Colorado when Charles had driven a car over it to see how hard it really was.

“And the carpenter's children shall go without shoes,” said Lyris. She wore a middy blouse and a kilt with a giant safety pin.

“That's
cobbler,
” said Charles.

Lyris at sixteen was just as willowy and high-browed as a princess, and her shape was evident, but Charles looked around it. There were many ways their relationship might go wrong, and he meant to avoid them all. He regarded himself as an innovator with no tolerance for the obvious sins. And Lyris had seen enough of the world's selfish ways. As the song said, she was a poor wayfaring stranger.

Lyris took a head of lettuce from the refrigerator and bit into it as if it were an apple. Charles and Joan exchanged an expression of live-and-let-live. Some of her habits were not what they were used to. She ate raw potatoes, ironed her socks, and drank milk from a bowl.

“How was 4-H?” asked Joan. “Honey? Lyris? Did you make corncob dolls with the rest of the girls?”

Lyris boosted herself up to sit on the edge of the counter. “I feel too old for 4-H. Lots of the kids are nine and ten. I would drop out tomorrow if you would let me.”

“I'm going away tomorrow,” said Joan. “And there certainly are girls your age in 4-H.”

“There's Taffy, who everyone kisses up to. But I can't play that game.”

“Lyris.”

“They do! ‘Look
at my corncob doll, Taffy.' ‘What big eyes you have,
Taffy.' With that name, I can't take
her seriously.”

“It's short for Octavia,” said Joan.

“You should get a goat to raise and show at the fair,” said Charles. “That's where the real benefits of 4-H begin to kick in. With livestock.”

“Could I really have a goat?” said Lyris.

“I don't know why not,” said Charles.

“Do I really want a goat?”

“Health, hands, head,” said Charles. “What's the other H?”

“Heart,” said Lyris.

Micah braced himself on the banister and leaped up in out- rage. Why could she get a goat when he couldn't have a dog, he wanted to know. It was so unfair. He could not believe how unfair it was.

“Goats are like dogs except they don't bite,” said Charles. A German shepherd had bit him once on the knee when he had surprised it in a garage.

“Can we not talk about animals right now?” said Joan. “I'll be doing that all weekend. Now let me think. I'm leaving at six in the morning. That means I have to fill up my tank and check the oil and fluid levels and vacuum the mats tonight.”

“But you're flying,” said Charles.

“To the airport I'm not,” said Joan.

“Where's the doll you made?” Micah asked Lyris. He hung on the railing, his elbow bound in gauze.

“I tossed it,” said Lyris.

“I was hoping to put it in my Playmobil prison.”

“You are a cop in your heart,” said Lyris.

“Lyris called me a cop,” said Micah.

“She didn't mean it,” said Charles. “But you shouldn't go around threatening to imprison your sister's doll. As for the goat, you can help with it, assuming we get one.”

“You can put it in a
pen
,
” said Lyris.

Two combines worked a field from opposite sides. Night would fall in an
hour. Charles's brother, Jerry, was driving to Boris
from Pringmar. He passed an irrigation reservoir with a round island of
evergreens in the middle. It occurred to him that the trees' lives must
be like his own in some ways, though not, fortunately
, in others. In town he pulled over by the teen cente
r, where Octavia Perry and some of her friends loitered by the
pay phone. The same Taffy who exhibited model 4-H behavior was now smoking
and standing with her belly thrust forward and one hand
pressed into the small of her back.

“Where's the party?” asked Jerry.

“We don't know yet,” said Octavia. “Wait a minute, Mr. Postman.” Jerry delivered mail for a living. His pith helmet lay on the seat beside him.

“Look what I got for you,” said Jerry. He opened his glove- box and took out a small black chessboard with magnetic pieces. “Pawn to queen four,” he said.

Octavia responded with a mirror move of her queen's pawn. Several moves later, the phone rang in the booth.

“Will he cling to the pawn or let it go?” said Taffy. She wedged the cigarette between her thumb and the tip of her middle finger and fired it into the gutter.

One of Taffy's companions hung up the phone. “The Ele­phant,” he said. “It's at the Elephant.”

This was a traditional party site out in the country, named for a formation of trees whose shape against the sky had once been found to resemble the profile of an elephant. The likeness, if any, had given way to the growth of branches. The party would be in a meadow below the trees.

“Bishop to queen's knight five would be a big mistake,” said Jerry.

“Oh really,” said Taffy. “Look, I don't want to play if you're going to take me for a novice. Are you coming to the party or not?”

“Will there be a keg?” said Jerry.

“Es claro que sí.”

The evening sky had rolled like a bolt of blue cloth over the town. Jerry gazed at the cloudy shine of the little pearls in Octavia's earlobes. “Probably what I'll do is go on home and check out the Discovery Channel.”

“You're an old man,” said Taffy.

“A blanket drawn 'round my shoulders,” said Jerry.

“I'm not in love with you.”

“A cup of cheer, to while away the hours.”

“I'm not in love,” said Taffy.

From the town Jerry drove to Charles and Joan's house. Joan sat on the front porch shining her shoes, and Charles lay on a wheeled wooden slab under Joan's car, the front tires of which were up on steel ramps.

“Evening, folks,” said Jerry.

“I'm going away,” called Joan.

“Joanie, we hardly knew ye.”

“Only for the weekend,” she said, holding a chamois cloth to the fading light. “It's work-related.”

“Then I don't want to hear it,” said Jerry. “Charles, I need your help over home. I got some rock salt that has to go down in the cellar.”

Soon Charles and his brother were speeding down the road with the evening wind blowing bits of paper and dust around the inside of the car. Jerry explained his plan, which had nothing to do with rock salt. He wanted to fake a police raid on the party at the Elephant. As a postman, he had revolving lights behind his windshield; as a volunteer fireman, he carried a bullhorn. Jerry liked to spoil fun; it was his latest hobby. Once Micah had rigged a tent out of old canvas and a clothesline strung between two trees, and Jerry had pulled out a buck knife and cut the rope, sending the heavy canvas thudding to the ground. He had also taken to making bothersome phone calls to people who advertised cars for sale in the classifieds. “Is it a manual or a stick?” he would ask, usually late at night, just to play with their heads.

Jerry pulled off the road and into the trees that constituted the Elephant. Down in the meadow, shadowy figures moved back and forth among the cars. “La Grange” came from someone's stereo.