Hunts in Dreams (4 page)

“Hey, Suzanne,” said Follard.

“Suzette.” The girl slid backward on the hood of the car.

“Now you both lost something.”

The girl folded her handkerchief and put it in the pocket of her jacket. “Scat, you big old alley cat,” she said.

Lyris waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. All she could see were the six square windows, dimly gray, over the barn doors. She kicked the shoes from her feet, and they landed with sharp quick sounds like those of a small animal. Best not to think of small animals. She stepped on something, lost her balance, bumped a toolbox, sent it crashing to the floor. She shut her eyes so that pinwheels of light turned slowly behind her lids. She tried to take off the dress, but the train was snagged and her efforts only pulled her backward. She was a little afraid, breathing too fast. The dress pulled free, pitching her into a sawhorse, over which she fell, headlong, shielding her face with her hands. Her wrist hit the engine housing of an electric generator, and she calculated at once that the bruise would be deep and lasting. The fallen sawhorse dug painfully into her belly and shins. She lay panting for a long time, got up, and moved to the doors. They were locked and would not give. A metal rod ran the length of each door, below the windows. She jumped once and then again, caught the rusted rod in her hands, and pulled herself up until she could see through the glass. It was only then that she realized what had closed the barn doors. Her experiment in thought transference had not done it — it was Micah, who stood on the grass before the doors with his fingers in his ears, his eyes glinting like a cat's.

“Let me out of here, you little fuckhead,” she cried.

“I can't.”

She dropped and felt around for the handle of a sledge or an axe. “You better think of a way,” she called, her hands sweeping the dirt floor in even arcs. “Actually, you migh's well not,” she muttered, “because I am going to hurt the hell out of you one way or another.”

Eventually her right hand closed over the mud-crusted handle of a spade. Her breath came in harsh bursts, as if she had been sprinting. “Open the door,” she screamed. She stood, set the point of the spade in the space between the doors. Of course they did not fit tightly together; nothing did in this place to which she had been assigned. “Get out of the way, Micah.”

Lyris lifted the handle of the spade to her shoulder, as an archer would raise her bow, thrust the point between the doors, and with her bruised hands swung the handle hard and to the left. The spade shaft bowed and a band of pressure stretched the width of the barn. Wood creaked and splintered, the doors broke open, and Lyris staggered into the open. The moon shone through a maze of clouds. She flung the spade down so hard that it stood in the driveway. Micah wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his head in the velvet front of the dress. He spoke words she could not understand. Against her will she found herself rubbing his narrow back so that he almost disappeared in the sleeves.

“It's all right, boy.”

Micah lifted his head. “I couldn't help you, Lyris. I locked you in but I couldn't unlock you. I don't know why.”

“It's all right,” she told him. “I'm going to get you, but not when you're expecting it.”

“It's all my fault.”

“It sure is.”

He took the dress in his hands. “You'd better put this away before Mom gets home.”

Lyris shushed Micah, thinking someone was near.

Follard had drifted away from his path in order to trace the submerged shape of an old garbage dump. All the farms used to have them, but the county had issued an edict years ago requiring that they be graded over. The metal detector went crazy when you were on top of one. In Follard's experience these sites were not especially worth digging into, unless you were obsessed, as many were, with blue glass bottles of no value, but still he found it interesting simply to know where they were. He could tune the detector to screen out worthless metals, but usually he didn't. In his mind he was developing a junk map of the lower county.

He had heard smashing and yelling, which told him he was coming up to someone's place. He crossed the railroad tracks and stood in the yard watching the interesting show: the boy standing hypnotized, the doors cracking open, the young woman stumbling out in a long dress. Now he made his entrance, with the hat pushed back on his head, the metal detector slung over his shoulder.

“Hello,” he called. “I'm a little lost here. My car must be down the road. My name is Follard.”

The girl moved to the back porch and turned on a light. She looked him up and down. Her short blond hair was slick with sweat, and the folds of the green dress were gathered in her hands.

“I look for metal,” said Follard, to break her silence.

“We don't have any.”

“In the ground, I mean,” said Follard. “I find metal in the ground. Look what I got tonight.” He opened his hand to re- veal the steel jackknife with the pheasant painting.

“It's pretty,” said the girl. “I thought so.”

“What is it?” said the boy.

“A knife,” said Follard. “I'll give it to your sister and she can do with it as she sees fit.” To Lyris he said, “You look like you've had a rough day. Your dress is torn, if you don't mind my saying it.”

The girl gave no encouraging sign, but she did take the knife, as he expected she would.

3
◆
Joan

T
HE MAN IN
CHARG
E
of the gas station wore a green button that said

Jim

I Am Empowered

To Serve

You.

This made Joan think, as she had more and more lately, that something was happening to the country. It no longer had the solid feel of any place she was used to. Just the other night a man called the house to say that Joan's family had been chosen from many potential applicants to receive a loan with which to pay down their debt. She pointed out that her family did not have any debt to speak of and that a loan, which was itself debt, could not be very accurately said to pay debt down. The caller replied that he was only reading what was put before him and that he did not wish to argue about the wording, which was not his.

“The pump won't work,” she told Jim.

He was sawing open a cardboard box with a utility knife. Whether he was hostile or simply dedicated to his work was not for Joan to decide. Inside the box were cartons upon car- tons of cigarettes.

“When you put the credit card in, pull it out fast,” he said. “That's what most people do wrong. They wait around and nothing happens.”

“I'm paying cash,” she said. “I'm just topping off my tank because tomorrow morning I have to drive to the airport. Can I pay you?”

The man frowned, a carton of Pall
Malls in either hand. “After you pump, you can. Otherwise we don't know how much you're
taking. And that's nothing against you personally, but these days I'm afraid
you have to suspect the worst of everyone. Treat them
all as criminals and hope that somehow you might be
wrong. To pay cash, here's what you do: put
in your card, and the pump will ask you ‘Cash or credit?' and you push
‘Cash.'”

“I didn't bring a card,” said Joan.

“Well, then it's even simpler. All you have to do is push ‘Cash' and then it will ask you ‘Credit or cash?' and you push ‘Cash' and ‘Enter' simultaneously.”

“I did that,” said Joan. “I thought I did.”

“What'd the readout say?”

“What's that?”

“It's the gray thing that gives you instructions.”

“I don't know.”

“Obviously you're not doing it right.” The man shoved the cigarette cartons into slots behind the counter.

“Can you help me?”

“I can't leave the store,” said the man. “There is a toll-free number you can call.”

“Are you empowered to serve me or not?” said Joan.

“Well, I'm not supposed to, but I've seen you around. Just hold on a minute.”

Eventually the attendant pumped her gas and she paid. “Thank you, Jim,” she said.

On the way out of Chesley she saw thin white smoke climbing from the eaves of the house of a physician named Stephen Palomino. A ladder stood against the house, a half-timbered sprawl with a roof of red tile. Palomino himself was hurrying from the garage wheeling a hose trolley. Joan stopped the car in the road and got out.

“What is it, Steve?” she said.

Dr. Palomino parked the hose by a faucet on the side of the house. “I was stripping paint with a heat gun and now I think the house is on fire.” He dropped to the grass and groped for the coupling.

“Go up with the hose,” said Joan. “I'll do this.”

She knelt and screwed the brass fitting onto the faucet as the doctor climbed the ladder. With her right hand gripping the valve of the faucet, she looked up and said, “Here it comes.”

The doctor fired a pistol nozzle at the overhang of the roof, but the spray was too fine.

“Take that off,” said Joan as cold water rained on her face. “Steve! Get rid of the nozzle!”

The hose twisted as the doctor wrenched the nozzle back and forth. “Clockwise, counterclockwise, I have no fucking idea,” he said, as if to himself. Joan was surprised to hear such language coming from a general practitioner, although come to think of it, she had heard him swear before. She looked away, and then the nozzle fell down and struck her on the shoulder.

“Sorry,” yelled the doctor, disappearing in smoke.

Joan rubbed her shoulder, waiting for the cloud to subside. “This is more like it,” said Dr. Palomino. “I'm going to drench the wood thoroughly.”

Joan looked
at her car sitting in the road, lights on and
motor running. She hoped that the fire had not penetrated the walls of the
doctor's fine old house. The heat gun lay on the grass
by the hostas. Her teeth rattled involuntarily. At this moment every­thing seemed
precarious. She wondered why random events sometimes carried so much meaning. Sheets of water ran down
the wall. Then the doctor descended the ladder and helped
her to her feet. He had tucked the end of the hose
into the eaves trough so the water could run unattended.

“I'm glad you happened by,” said Dr. Palomino.
“This is the second time we've helped each other.”

He meant the tornado they had survived years back, when Micah was three. The story made the newspapers because of the way the twister had blown Charles's van, with Joan, Dr. Palomino, and Micah inside, through the wall of a silo. They rarely spoke about this now — it was embarrassing somehow — and Joan decided to think of it some other time.

“Forget heat guns,” she said. “Use chemical strippers.”

He kicked the gun into the plants. “I'm surprised they can even sell the damned things,” he said. “You'd think they'd be looking at a string of liability actions from sea to shining sea, if this is what happens. Of course, you have to use it right. But I can't for the life of me think of anything I was doing that wasn't strictly by the book.”

“Did you get my test results?” said Joan.

He closed his eyes. How many test results did he see on a given day? “I did. I did. And they're nothing to worry about, as we say. Your swollen glands are just that — the temporary result of something.”

“That's what I was hoping,” said Joan. “I can still feel them.”

Dr. Palomino touched both sides of her neck. “Let's get you started on an antibiotic. There are some little blue ones I've been meaning to try. Right now, though, I need a drink. Are you going to be home tomorrow? I'll bring a prescription over. I've always wondered where you live.”

“I'm going away for the weekend,” said Joan.

“Where will you be? I can call, or I can fax.”

She felt odd about naming the city and the hotel but reminded herself that he was her doctor and that everything should be aboveboard. The last thing she wanted was to be overtaken by some illness away from home. No doubt the prescription could be filled at some nearby pharmacy or perhaps at the hotel itself. She told him where she would be.

He repeated the name of the hotel — the Astrid — and said that he had never stayed there but had heard good things. She found his endorsement a little annoying. And then, as she turned to her car, he said the oddest thing. At least she thought he did, because she did not quite catch the remark, but it may have been “Oh, Joan, when are we going to get it on?” When she glanced back at the doctor he was turning the crank of the trolley to take up the slack in the hose. Joan drove away, puzzling over his comment, but realized with a reassuring laugh that what he had probably said was “Ah, Joan,
how
are we going to get
along
?” He must have been referring somehow to the unpredictable world in which they lived — a world in which small fires were ignited by accident and put out in haste and confusion — and nothing more.

When one is going away, it is normal to make some fleeting effort to help one's partner. Even if nothing comes of it, the attempt settles the mind a bit for the departure, cleans the slate on which independent adventures may be written. So it was that Joan swung by Charles's mother's house in Boris after helping the doctor put out the fire in his eaves trough. That she suspected some token of intimacy had passed between herself and the doctor only made her more determined to act on Charles's behalf. Then they would be even, although Charles would know about neither the possible remark nor its resolution in her mind.

Joan knocked on Colette's door and watched through the glass as the old woman made her way across the room. Her hair was wild and white, and she carried a small iron dumbbell in one hand. Colette was known for having had three husbands die, as if this gloomy coincidence had brought her to a rare plane of existence, which maybe it had.

She's the real thing,
thought Joan, although she did not know what thing she meant.

“Come in,” said Colette. “I spent the day pulling up tomato plants and laying them on the brush pile, even though they've got the order on me not to.”

“Who does?”

Colette gestured vaguely with the hand that held the weight. “The town. They say it's unsightly. But you can't get anybody to come in here to take away brush. You can call them, and they say they'll come, they'll take a look, but they never do, why would they.”

“Charles and I would.”

“Why don't you come tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow's no good.”

“Well, make it soon. I'd like to get shook of it.”

She returned
to her armchair and began raising and lowering the
dumbbell. She asked if Joan had seen farmers in the fields on her way and then
reminisced about how the combine had done away with the practice of
tying corn into sheaves. The older women of the towns still measured their years by what the
farmers were doing. Often there was a farm in their family
history, and nearly as often that farm had disappeared into
bigger operations. Abandoned houses were common, leaning toward the ground. These women
must have known, as everyone did, that the towns had been cut loose
from this condensed vitality, that the sowing and reaping
taking place a mile away could be situated in the fields of
California for all the good it did the towns. But
Joan guessed they just chose not to think about it. And
this made sense in a way, for by the time
the towns were gone, these women would be too.

Joan
said a prayer in her head: “Let the light fall
equally on Colette as on her son and grandson and on Lyris, too. Let me underestimate not a
single one, nay, let my faults be as visible to me as if they were under klieg
lights. Grant that Meals on Wheels shall not be phased out but shall
receive generous underwriting in our handful of days under the sun. Amen.”

Joan
steered the conversation away from farming and gradually toward the
gun that had belonged to Charles's stepfather. Colette recounted the saving of
the minister's son. This was an old story to
Joan, but she listened again. Colette could not understand after all
these years how she had managed to catch up to the
rolling car without slipping on the snowy street and falling
under the wheels. She had put herself in danger, but it
had been nothing more than she hoped anyone would have done
for her children, Jerry, Tiny, and Bebe.

T
iny had been Charles's nickname until eight years ago, when he had decided to put childish things
aside. (It had to be eight years, because Micah was seven.) Joan
had helped him choose which form of his given name
he would use in this mature phase of his life.
It seemed to Joan that in few decisions of such
importance does the individual have complete freedom to choose, and so she
had bidden him to take his time. Chuck was too stark, Charlie sounded like someone younge
r, Chas was out of the question . . . Charles it would be. And it was
not long after Charles took his new name that Joan
became pregnant with Micah. Experts would discount the connection, but Joan
didn't care, she considered nomenclature of the utmost importance.
My
name is Legion: for we are many
.

Colette was still talking. There was a misunderstanding of how Charles had come to be called Tiny in the first place. This Joan had not heard before, and she told Colette to hold the story while she made coffee, as her eyes had chosen that moment to begin to ache for the want of caffeine.

Colette put down her weight and offered to make it herself, but Joan insisted, for she knew from experience what thin coffee her mother-in-law brewed. Colette could not help it; she had been born during the Depression, and lived still with remnants of a harsh childhood spent on the plains. A thirteen- ounce can of coffee lasted her weeks and weeks.

Joan went out to the kitchen to make the coffee. By the time she returned, Colette had fallen asleep. Joan touched her arm, and Colette stirred, ready to take up her story.

Charles's stepfather had been drinking whiskey that night. He wandered outside to look at the sunset, leaving his glass half full on a TV table. When they found Charles, he was sitting on the floor beside three rubber lions and the empty glass. He was four years old at the time. Colette picked up the glass and asked Charles if he had drunk from it. The boy reached for the lions and said, “Family,” because he saw the three animals as mother, father, and cub.

Colette knelt beside Charles. “Did you drink from the glass?” she asked again.