Hunts in Dreams (3 page)

“They play the same songs we played,” said Charles idly.

“I know it.” Jerry put the car in gear. “There's no sense of musical progression.” The car rolled out of the woods and down the slope toward the party, yellow light revolving.

“Stay away from your cars,” said Charles into the bullhorn, but there was no amplification.

“You've got to push the button. And say
vehicles
.”

“Stay away from your vehicles.” Now Charles's words echoed over the meadow to the opposite hillside. “Do not start the engines. Do not drive away.”

The lazy party flared to life. Kids ran, doors slammed, headlights cut yellow swaths through the darkness. Dust rose as the fishtailing caravan hit the road. It was good to create so much panic, but at the same time Charles suspected that the young people were having more fun than he was.

Jerry rode the brakes, giving everyone time to get away. He parked the car, and they both got out and took a handcart from the trunk. The kids had abandoned the keg in a ring of matted grass. Charles lifted the cold aluminum barrel onto the cart, Jerry cinched the cloth straps, and they took turns pulling the cart uphill to the car.

“I wonder why they left it,” said Charles.

“You know kids,” said Jerry. “Always in a hurry.”

2
◆
Lyris

L
YRIS REMEMBERED THE
SIGN
in the orphanage cafe­teria:
AND HAVING FOOD AND RAIMENT, LET US BE THEREWITH CONTENT
. This made a certain amount of sense. She tried to remember more — the cheap forks and how easily they bent, the gallery from which the headmistress watched the orphans, the oppressive hairnets of the cooks — but found it hard to do so with clarity. She felt too young to be forgetting.

She stood in her bedroom watching the road as Joan drove off for the gas station. Charles had gone somewhere with Jerry. Micah was downstairs playing a video game called El Mono, in which a monkey ran and jumped to evade an army of flying skulls. Lyris could hear the shrill monotonous cries of the monkey.

The corncob doll was in her backpack. What she'd said about throwing it out was untrue. She retrieved it now and lay down on her bed. The beads and cloth and Styrofoam head tore away easily. So much for the doll. The red of the bare shelled cob was not the same as any red she had known. It was like the color of blood but rustier. Maybe dried blood. That could be it. It was nearly as light as air, this dried, natural thing. A few yellow kernels remained, probably a dozen in all. Their placement seemed random but significant, with a meaning she could not read.

She played around with the corncob for a while. She lobbed it from hand to hand, scratched her temple, brushed her hair. It was a novelty to her. She spoke into it as if it were a microphone.

“It's moonlight,” she said.

The phrase came from a roller rink where she used to go with her foster sister Lorna. Lorna was the daughter of her first and best foster parents. Lyris and Lorna had gone round and round the rink holding hands. It turned out, however, that skating was easier if you did not hold hands. So after falling several times, they let go. The rink was lit by white floodlights that sometimes shut down dramatically, leaving only the dark glow of blue spotlights to play over the thin wooden strips of the floor. Then, in a glass booth above the skaters, the man who played the music would lean close to the microphone and say, “It's moonlight.”

It ended with Lorna's parents because their clothing store went bankrupt.

The parents in her second foster home were an older couple who were basically looking for someone to work around their house. The man had a spot on his forehead that looked like a map of Florida. Sometimes Lyris thought the placement people had allowed him to become a foster father only because they wanted to show they were not put off by that spot. Lyris was there for part of the year she turned twelve. The state took her back after she broke her arm carrying an air conditioner down a flight of stairs.

The third couple with whom Lyris lived would have to be considered the most affluent. They had several recreational vehicles and liked to go out in the country to drive their Jeep on the rough ground below the power lines. The fun of this escaped Lyris. It felt like being in a can that someone was kicking. She would later wonder if her inability to enjoy the off-road experience had contributed to the couple's decision to stop being foster parents.

Last before Charles and Joan had been Pete and Jackie. They were the ones who were found with bomb materials. Lyris had her ups and downs with them. When she became convinced, after having a dream in which she saw Lorna riding a wolf, that her former foster sister had died, they tried to help. After doing all they could to convince her that dreams reflect worries rather than realities, Pete and Jackie took Lyris to see Lorna. The visit did not go well. The family had moved, they were no longer bankrupt, and they seemed to want nothing to do with their old life. Lorna was with a group of friends who looked at Lyris as if to say, “What's this supposed to be?”

Pete made it easy for the police to learn of his involvement with bombs, even going so far as to name his dog after an ex- plosive. “Here, Cordite,” he would call, with darkness settling on the suburb where they lived. “Come home, Cordite.” The dog, a strong and dim-witted Dalmatian, would run all over the neighborhood, dragging his muddy stake on a rope.

What a scene it had been when the police raided the house. They smelled something burning and believed the place might erupt in flames at any time. It was really just an old iron that Lyris had plugged in, intending to press her jeans. Two men came crashing up the stairs, grabbed her away from the ironing board, and carried her down so that her feet never touched the ground. She would always remember the racket of their shoes on the stairs. Over the banister she got a look at her wrinkled jeans.

That night she was interrogated by both the police and the Home Bringers. She got to eat at a desk while they asked questions.

“Do you go to school?”

“Do I come across as someone who does not?”

“Were you ever asked to deliver a package to someone and you didn't know what was inside?”

“No sir.”

“More fries?”

“No, thank you.”

“Would you like to live with your mother?”

“Who is she?”

“An actress.”

“Would I have seen her in anything?”

“She was fired from a play the fall before you were born. That's as much as we've been able to find out. Playing a pregnant woman.”

“You mean that at the same time —”

“Ironical, isn't it?”

Lyris dropped the corncob beside the bed and moved her hands above her in graceful patterns that she thought might be “of the ballet.” In the orphanage the counselors had stressed the worth and sanctity of the body, as if the orphans were not discarded children but athletes in training. Tumbling was mandatory, twice daily; there were many proficient tumblers. Days were full and nights were free. What peace there could be at the orphanage once the lights were out, breaths slowing until they became one sound.

Was it so bad?
she asked herself now.
All in all, no, not so bad.

One of the good
points of Lyris's room at Charles and Joan's house
was that she could walk out the window onto the roof
of the boot room. She did this now and straddled
the ridge. It was nearly dark, but she could still make
out the shapes of the open country and of the trees
around the house. Through the windows of the barn she saw
a light. It could be that elf Micah with a flashlight. He
adored Charles, but he did everything possible to bug him.

When she went downstairs she found Micah still there, hypnotized by El Mono, who was trapped in a tree.

“I'm going outside,” she said. “Boy! Do you hear me?”

He nodded slowly and shifted his weight on the davenport. An apple core rolled slowly over the cushion. Lyris picked up the core. “Look at this,” she said.

“You can finish it.”

“How will I ever repay you?”

“You don't have to.”

She ate the core and stem on the way to the barn. Inside, the last rays of the sun were striking the brass fittings of a steamer trunk and reflecting on the walls. She turned around to look outside. A blanket of blue-black clouds had compressed the evening light to a deep yellow band on the horizon. She threaded her way through wooden boxes and stout-handled tools and coiled chains to the trunk, which was pushed against the back wall of the barn. It was not locked. Inside were hats, shoes, dresses, and coats from Joan's acting days. Lyris was wearing cutoffs and the middy blouse, and over these she pulled on a green velvet dress with full, floating sleeves and a black collar. Yellow fabric lined the sleeves and vertical pockets. She sat down in a threadbare upholstered rocking chair and tried on a pair of black fabric shoes. They had high heels and serrated gold leaves woven over the toes. Everything seemed a perfect fit. She closed her eyes and let her head tip back. Perhaps remnants of Joan's line of thinking resided in her old clothes and would seep from them into Lyris's mind. Then she might understand. She breathed deep and waited.
I'll
be okay with whatever it is,
she thought. In time she saw a billboard for suntan lotion rising from waving clover. Children walked through the field chewing the sweet white tips of the flowers. Not very specific. She rearranged the folds of the dress over her legs. Then the barn doors banged shut and the pin rattled down into the lock.

A young man named Follard walked through the woods carrying a metal detector. He wore a hardhat with a headlamp that jostled back and forth. Follard liked working after night- fall, because no one else did. Metal detecting had become quite the popular hobby, and Follard regarded his competition with disdain. Mostly they were doing the same thing he was doing, but it seemed reasonable to assume that nightfall separated the metal men from the hobbyists. The very word
hobbyist
made him shudder. He was twenty-two but looked older. There were wrinkles around his eyes. The narrowness of his head seemed likewise to suggest an older man, whittled and honed by the troubles of many years. The metal detector featured a plastic cuff that nearly closed around his right forearm like the fitting of a crutch. Completing the outfit was a folding shovel, obtained from a military surplus store, that rode in a holster on his hip.

He carried his metal detector with a seasoned authority that might have made metal leap out of the ground in his presence. Cows roamed the woods during the day, eating the groundcover between the trees; they made paths that ran in every direction.

Geese passed overhead, faintly calling. Follard could sense their heavy bodies above the branches. Coming over a rise, he saw red taillights across the grass of the old WPA road. He turned off the light on his hat, set the metal detector on mute, and walked up behind a car idling in the road. The couple in- side turned in their seats. Perhaps they had already seen the light. When he opened the driver's door, a dope cloud drifted out with its overpowering, mindless fragrance. Follard disliked marijuana, for it had never given him any feeling other than disorientation. It made him suspicious. He held a low opinion of dopers, who had conversations such as the following, which he'd once overheard:

“When you think about radio — it's just — the waves, I mean — in every corner of the sky — and you can't see them? — and they're all coming through the roof of your house, these invisible . . . hoops or whatever — if you explained it to someone but without using, you know, the word
radio,
they'd go, ‘Not likely.'”

“Like the Declaration of Independence.”

“Exactly.”

“'Cause when you read it to people but you don't say what it is — I seen this once on TV — and they didn't say what it was —”

“I seen that too! They were on street corners.”

“I forget where they were. But no one would sign their name to it. They thought it was a Communist manifesto. Or it might have been something else.”

A boy and a girl from a nearby town stepped out of the car. They knew Follard, and if they were wary of him, they also seemed relieved that he was not a cop. The girl was crying and wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands. She explained that she had lost her class ring at the Elephant. The two had been at a party that was broken up by the police, and in the confusion her ring had slipped from her finger. It was white gold with an amethyst stone.

Other people's troubles tended to aggravate Follard. He was selfish in that way. The girl gestured erratically and the boy just stood there, holding a carved wooden pipe.

“Have you tried looking for it?” said Follard.

“We had to leave,” said the boy. “All these cop cars were swarming down. And when we went back, the keg was gone.”

The girl blew her nose with an embroidered handkerchief. “Why bother?” she said disconsolately. “When we know we'll never find it. It cost a lot of money.” Remembering the price, she began crying again.

“Better to light a candle than curse the darkness,” said Follard.

“My parents will ground me until Thanksgiving,” said the girl.

The boy laughed, and both the girl and Follard looked at him. “I'm sorry
,” he said. “That was inappropriate.” He set the wooden pipe
between his teeth, lifted the girl into a seated position
on the fender of the car, and rubbed her shoulders.

“What the fuck's funny about that, Ronnie?” she said.

Follard let them go back and forth a while longer and then told two stories from his life. He had good stories, full of vio- lence and breakage. The boy and girl had heard these particular ones before, but they listened respectfully, for Follard was older than they were and had lived on his own since the age of fourteen. He had a place in Stone City that the entire high school knew of simply as “the house on the corner.” The first story concerned a fire he had escaped, and the second involved someone he knew chasing people at a birthday party with the leg of a broken chair.

“And look at me now,” said Follard in conclusion. “A life of perfect freedom. I come. I go. I hunt metal all hours of the night if I want. And I do want. I could find that ring.”

“That really work?” said Ronnie.

“Give me something metal.”

The boy dug in his pockets. “I got a quarter.”

“It don't work with quarters.”

“I got a pocketknife.”

“Let me see,” said Follard, turning on his headlamp. It was a brushed steel knife with a flying pheasant painted on the housing. Follard threw it into the trees beyond the car.

He handed the metal detector to the boy. “Go on up there listening for the signal. And don't mess with my settings.”

Ronnie started to say something but then fitted his arm into the cuff and walked away with the disk of the metal detector leading the way. He seemed pleased to be trusted with Follard's device. He would never find the knife.