Hunts in Dreams (8 page)

“Is it broken?” she said.

“It was broken a long time ago.”

“I gave you a clout, didn't I?”

“Let me see that coat hanger.”

She handed it to him, and he held it up to the light. The arms were curved and smooth, and the bottom rail was chamfered in with Phillips-head screws.

“They ain't made the coat that will fall off this,” he said, giving it back. “You ever play softball?”

“No.”

“You ought to take it up.”

“I ought to call the police, if I had any sense . . . I did used to play tennis.”

“You got the swing for it.”

“Listen, I remembered something about that gun,” she said. “You know how you said you didn't have any right to it? Well, it turns out you do, in a way. I hate to say it, but I've always told the truth.”

He lowered the ice. “How do you figure?”

“My husband lent your stepfather sixty dollars while hold- ing the gun as surety. That's how we got it. So pay me the money and take the gun and we'll say we're even. I never want to see you again, but I'm sure I will.”

“I always thought he just gave it to him.”

“That's not how it happened.”

“Well, you know better than me.” He stood up and got out his billfold, and gave her ten extra for the slit screen. She opened the freezer and stuffed the bills into a coffee can.

“Come,” she said, and they went back into the living room, where she took down the gun Charles had brought to her house. Then she turned and saw the other gun lying on the davenport. “Wait a minute.”

“I can explain this,” said Charles, and he did.

“Did you think I wouldn't know the difference?” She held the shotgun and looked from one gun to the other. “Actually, I might not have.”

“I tried for
a match. The one I brought is a larger gauge
and it has the checkering on the stock. My stepfather's
is older, and you can see that in the way
the wood's gone sort of honey-colored. And his has the thumb
safety, behind the barrels.”

“Which is which?”

“The one you've always had is on the davenport. The other one you can keep, if you want something over the fireplace.”

“That's not necessary.”

“Well, no, but I'm just saying. I've got extras.”

Charles left the house through the door
, with a shotgun in each hand. The stars were bright, with
an airplane crossing beneath. He imagined what the people in the
plane were doing. A woman was running away, a man was
blowing his nose, a child was reading a book upside down. Meanwhile,
the pilot tried to remember a song he used to know. Whatever
people did down here, they were doing up there. And then
they were gone. Unlike Joan, Charles could see no patterns
in the stars: no heroes, no animals. Only a random pelting
of space.

“I'm here,” he said. “Where are you?”

And by
you
he did not mean Joan, and he did not mean Lyris. He didn't know who or what he meant.

He'd always realized too late the ones he wanted and what it would take to keep them.

Farina Matthews sat up long after Charles had gone. The dream that set the record straight about the gun had brought back memories of her dead husband. She sat in the chair where Charles had sat, holding a poem in a frame. It was called “Everything Comes” and had been written by Thomas Hardy about the house in England, Max Gate, that had given her house its name:

The house is bleak and cold

Built so new for me!

All the winds upon the wold

Search it through for me;

No screening trees abound,

And the curious eyes around

Keep on view for me.

Driving up to a roadhouse called
the Clay Pipe Inn, Charles saw Jerry's car.
He pulled in, but the tavern door was locked.

“We're closed,” said someone behind the door. “Everybody went home.”

“You got my brother in there.”

“Charles?”

“Yeah, it's me.”

“Oh, Christ, hold on.”

The bolt shook free and the door opened. Jerry was sitting at the bar rattling dice in a cup. He turned to look when his brother came in. “What happened to you?” he said.

Charles told him all about it. He offered to go get their stepfather's gun from the pickup to show Jerry, but the bartender said guns were not allowed in the tavern, which seemed reasonable, in the abstract.

The phone rang in its cubbyhole beneath the liquor bottles, and the bartender answered. “We're closed,” he said again.

Jerry held up his hands to indicate that he was not taking calls. Kenny, the bartender, smiled. “Yeah . . . he's here.” He set the phone on the bar facing Jerry and ducked under the cord.

“Hello?” said Jerry. “What's up?” He put down the cup of dice and picked up a felt-tip pen. Cradling the phone with his shoulder, he wrote
Octavia P
in bleeding blue letters on a paper napkin. “Listen, honey, I understand that and I'm sorry, but you shouldn't be calling me. The bar has locked its doors. By rights I shouldn't even be here . . . No, that's true. Have you tried that thing I told you about? Just put your foot flat to the floor . . . Well, how do you know if you haven't tried it? . . . No . . . I'm saying no . . .” Staring into space, Jerry covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Would you guys move off or something? Give me some privacy.”

Charles took up the
pen and drew a donkey on the napkin, and then he and the bartender
went to play pinball. Jerry leaned close to the wooden rail of the bar and
spoke into the phone while shielding his mouth from their eyes. A handprinted sign on the
wall above the pinball machine said:

If merely “feeling good” could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

— William James, Psychologist

“You know what he's doing?” said the bartender. He drew back on the plunger of the game, the theme of which was the adventures of Oliver North. Painted on the glass façade, Fawn Hall slipped documents into her boots.

Charles shook his head.

“Talking her to sleep.”

“No lie.”

“I wish it was. I've seen it before. It's the saddest thing imaginable.”

“What's he supposed to be, her boyfriend?”

“She calls him and he tells stories into the phone, and beyond that I ask no questions.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It ain't natural, whatever it is.”

Jerry hung up the phone and sat for a moment before coming over, waving the paper napkin. “What's this you drew — a dog?”

“It's a jackass,” said Charles.

“I don't see that.” He showed the drawing to the bartender. “What do you think, Kenny?”

“A zebra would have been my guess.”

“You're blind,” said Charles.

“Well, what are these marks supposed to be?”

“Obviously you know nothing about commercial art.”

“Maybe not, but I know a zebra from a jackass.”

“And what does that make Jerry?”

“Oh, well,
he's
a jackass. But this, I would have to say, is a zebra.”

“We're friends,” said Jerry. “You guys don't even know what grade she's in.”

“You, Gerald, are walking on an earthquake.”

“Remains to be seen.”

Charles looked at the pinball machine. Oliver North glared, gap-toothed, patriotic to a fault. “What does she want with a friend like you?”

“I
don't understand all of it,” said Jerry. “People
think she's so together, but she's what you might
call a bundle of insecurities.”

“I'm taking my guns and going.”

The remark reminded them all that it was time to go home. In the parking lot, Charles showed the old shotgun to Jerry, who picked it up and sighted idly along the ridge between the barrels.

“Really this should go to Bebe. He was her dad.”

“I feel like he was mine too,” said Charles.

“Yes, because he lasted the longest. We must have been born under bad stars.”

“I'll tell you who was born under the bad star, and that's Colette.”

“Yes,” said Jerry. “I think you're right.”

Charles went home. He could not resist opening and closing the barn doors to admire the work that he and Lyris and Micah had done. They had made themselves a team; it hadn't gone too badly. Hearing the doors, the goat came down from the back porch and paced in the long grass. She snorted softly, favoring one of her legs.

“I just may have bought myself a lame goat,” said Charles out loud.

Still no Lyris. Her bed was empty under a quilt of green and blue. He called the sheriff's office and left a message and then sat at the kitchen table cleaning the shotgun. He unclipped the barrels from the stock and worked a patch of flannel through each one with a dowel rod. It was five minutes to two. He oiled the flannel and ran it through again. Then he took the cloth and cleaned the breechblock, the triggers, the guard, and the stock. The phone rang. It was Earl the deputy, reporting that Lyris hadn't been in any accidents. Charles thanked him and hung up. The two parts of the gun lay on the table. He wondered if she had run away, but then thought not, given the good day they'd had together. So he figured she must have gone for a ride, and if her absence worried him — as it did — it was a small sample of the worry he had given to others when he was young and even when he was older. Or, while he was on the subject, the worry he must've caused Farina Matthews tonight before she smacked him with the hanger. He thought that Montaigne had got it right: what he did not admire in himself he was in no position to get rid of. It was ahead of him, always, guiding his moves. He made a cup of tea, cut another square of flannel with a pair of rusted scissors, and cleaned the gun again.

7
◆
Micah

E
VOLUTION HAD MADE
A LOT OF TROUBLE
at school. There had been night meetings at which fundamentalists from another state argued that it should not be taught. In the meantime, Micah's teacher had to take down the poster of prehistoric men. The children were not privy to the meetings, but they noted a new sense of purpose in the teachers. The endless days for once seemed to hold an importance to the outside world. Micah's parents had their own opinions. Descended from single-celled organisms or not, Charles said, everyone had to pay the electric bill or lose the house. Since Republicans were against evolution, however, he felt honor bound to be for it. Joan attended one of the meetings, in a long dress and airy perfume, and afterward she said that far from disproving the presence of God, the old changes showed the elegance of his work. Eventually evolution won, and the teacher taped the poster up again, and the children cheered the return of the naked extinct men striding forth, leading with their chins, as they might cheer the football team at homecoming.

Maybe this explains what Micah saw when he woke in
Colette's house. The figures from the poster had come to
life and were walking through her living room. Java, Heidelberg, Peking, Broken Hill,
Solo, Swanscombe. They sang and carried firesticks and flint scrapers. They
lumbered thoughtfully, as if they had miles to go. Of
course, they would not think in terms of miles. Solo Man banged
into a standing brass ashtray, and Micah jumped from the davenport, too late to catch
it. Swanscombe Man looked at the fallen ashtray, stepped over
it, and followed the others out the door. Then Micah's grandmother came into the room, taking her
turn in line as if she were the latest model of human
development. She turned on the overhead light, which shone soft yellow
through a bowl of cut glass.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear singing?”

She stood the ashtray upright. “That's ‘Absterge Domine' on my new sound system.”

“Where's Dad?”

“He had to go do something for someone.”

Micah looked around the room, wondering whether to tell her what he had seen. He decided to go ahead, since his grandmother was at ease with unusual notions. She believed, for example, that people should eat dirt once in a while to maintain their health.

She sat down. “They're ghosts,” she said. “You don't have to worry about them. What they want, they don't want from you. Once in the hallway I seen an old farmer with a box of matches. Another time there was an Indian wearing snowshoes and a red hat with a string on it. Ghosts can't help where they go. This house just gets them. I think at one time it was an important place.”

“I can't sleep.”

She went out to the kitchen and brought back a tray bearing a bottle, a pitcher, two glasses, and some rocks. She gave him one of the rocks to look at.

Micah guessed it was an arrowhead, but his grandmother said more like a knife. She held it in her long, wrinkled fingers. “See all these little hone marks along the blade? That's how you know it was worked by human hand.”

“Where'd you find it?”

“When they dug the sewer line, why, these were just laying on the ground. People walk by this sort of thing every day, but they're not looking.”

“What did they cut with it?”

“Skins, I imagine. Deer and buffalo and so forth. Everybody's got to eat.”

“Not ghosts.”

“That's true. But even they want to eat. They're always hungry and they don't know why. And it's too bad.”

She poured brandy and water into the glasses. “Go to sleep.”

“I'm not tired.”

“Drink this and you will be.”

“It tastes like blackberries.”

“That's right.”

“Tell me about ghosts.”

They drank from their respective glasses while Colette told of traveling ghosts, who howl along with train whistles — Micah must have heard some of them, living as he did by the tracks — and paper ghosts, who mess up documents, and jealous ghosts, who call on the telephone and ask for people who aren't there. Also touching ghosts, who give the shivers, and bridge ghosts, such as the so-called Baby Mahoney, and vain ghosts, which are the only ones that can be seen, and mumbling ghosts, who are responsible for the phenomenon of one person turning to another in a quiet room and asking, “Did you say something?”

“Do the men you married ever come back as ghosts?” said Micah.

“No.”

“They say Morris hit a train.”

“Eugene hit the train, who would have been your grandfather. Morris just fell over one day. He was before Eugene. The last to go was Jack Sandover.”

“I'm scared.”

She nodded, seemed far away. “Fear is a hard thing.”

“I don't know what to do about it.”

“Finish your drink and say goodnight.”

She picked up the tray and left. Micah was alone in the living room. The music had stopped, but at least she had left the light on. He stretched out on the davenport. Wakefulness was like a fire inside him, and if he did nothing but lie still, he knew very well, it would soon be burning out of control. Adults seemed not to understand how desperate a child could get being awake when no one else was.

Maybe he should get a
book. A cupboard by the kitchen door held a hardback guide
to game animals. He took it down and returned to the
davenport, where he lay on his back with his right
ankle balanced on his left knee. He rested the book
on his stomach and flipped the pages. Th
e photographs were black-and-white and nothing special. The porcupine looked like a
wig tossed in the grass, and the jaguar's eyes
were glassy from the light of a flashbulb. Micah was surprised to
see the porcupine listed as a game animal. Most of the
pages had no pictures, and many contained maps of North
America with boring shaded areas. Impatiently he turned pages, arriving
at last at the inside of the back cover. The
paper had split, revealing a coarsely webbed backing. So this
was how books were made.

Micah closed the cover,
behind which lay an empty triangle framed on either side by
his legs and across the top by his right calf.
He opened the cover again and the space was hidden.
His legs, in other words, formed the archway of a mountain pass,
and the book cover was a crude wooden door that had been fitted into the
stone by robbers. The three robbers had dismantled a
cabin and set the door into rock, and now they were coming home. He spoke their conversation softly
to himself.

“I'm so tired I could collapse right into bed.”

“Unfortunately, we have no beds.”

“It doesn't matter, since I can't sleep anyway.”

“You can't sleep because you don't try to sleep.”

“Maybe I will sleep on the stove.”

“We must steal some beds.”

“You will burn yourself sleeping on the stove.”

“That would be true if we had firewood, but as you remember, we're fresh out.”

“We must remind ourselves to steal beds to sleep in and wood to burn in the stove.”

He muttered on, but the game would have been more entertaining if he had had small figures to move about. He thought he remembered seeing some of his father's or Jerry's or Bebe's old cowboys in a coffee can on the porch. The cowboys were made of yellow rubber, and their feet were joined by flat platforms in the shape of a peanut. In his mind's eye, the can was in a cardboard box, along with a piston of an old car that was no longer around. But he knew he might find no piston and no coffee can and no cardboard box. Maybe there were ghosts who made you believe that the things you wanted were in one place while they were moving them to another.

One of the most oppressive times for Micah was when Joan or Charles ordered him to help find something. Sometimes by moaning and kicking and looking where they had already looked he could get himself dismissed from the assignment. Until then, it was like purgatory, or a prison sentence of no fixed term. He would picture them all growing older — Joan stooped and fragile, Charles with a long gray beard, himself a tall and handsome young man — while doomed to the eternal hunt for the savings deposit book or the corkscrew or the little key that would fit onto the inset stems of the radiators if only someone could find it. And what about Lyris? What would she be in the years to come? A scientist, an aviator — something beyond their expectations.

He sighed and got up and went out to the porch through the door that the prehistoric singers had used. He closed the door silently and nudged the light switch, but the bulb had burned out. This would not matter if the yellow cowboys were where he thought they were. The street light filtering through the large slack porch screens would be enough. The box should be behind a defunct water heater that had been cut open for the storage of magazines. He found the box, found the piston with its lank shaft like a broken wing, found the coffee can full of . . . marbles. He clawed through them, making a glassy racket, as if the cowboys might be beneath them. Moving sadly back to the door, he opened a wooden cabinet to confirm that his chrome six-shooter was still there. Yes — at least something could be counted on. He picked up the shining gun and took hold of the doorknob, only to find that the door had locked when he had come out.

Micah thought of calling for his grandmother. Instead, he spoke her name in a low and confident voice that she might not have heard if she were standing beside him. “Grandma,” he said calmly and generously, as if bringing to her attention in the kindest way some obvious flaw in her logic. “Grandmother.” And what difference did it make? The night he was afraid of was inside the house, not outside. The darkness of the country could be fearsome, with its rumors of bridge ghosts and of wild cats that would maim the unsuspecting pet. Here in town, darkness was just a name that could not hide the relative wealth of light. Micah went down the swaybacked planks of the steps. These town people didn't know how good they had it. There were streetlamps and house lights and a yellow traffic beacon that flashed and swayed on a cable over the street. The town was a playground of electricity, and he had the whole place almost to himself. A car rolled past so slowly that it seemed he might reach out and stop its tires with his hand. On the car radio, a woman sang in a deep and weary voice, “I think I lost it, let me know if you come across it . . .” Micah wondered how he must look to the driver — small but dangerous, a figure of mystery, a kid in the night with a pistol in his hand. He knew that adults sometimes mistook toy guns for real ones. In the city, police might even shoot you for hav- ing a cap pistol. Of course, the driver might not have seen him. He could not rule that out.

When the car had gone he crossed the street, which seemed to put years between him and Colette. Standing on the sidewalk, he thought of her as someone he had seen long ago, and he realized with a faint tremor that he should be standing beside the house calling her name or lobbing pebbles against her window. It occurred to him that he had split into two personalities, one of whom was trying to get back into the house while the other could do whatever it wanted.

A man sat in his living room, watching television and drinking from a mug. Micah stuck the gun into the waist of his jeans, cupped his hands around his eyes, and leaned against the window. On the television screen, a man and a woman with no clothes moved about, their bodies so large they might have been circus folk. They stalked each other around a wide bed. Micah had wondered about sex. Maybe they were about to launch into it.

He took one hand from the window, intending to scratch his back with his thumb, and his forehead clunked against the glass. The man got up and stood with his back to the television. Micah hurried from the window to hide behind a bank of split wood beside the house. A spider walked on his wrist, and he shook it off. The front door opened. The man looked dumpy and confused, nothing like the characters sporting on the television. He wore a sweatshirt from an automotive store. An orange cat ran out of the house, and the man called, “Who's out there? Terry?” He drank from the mug and looked up and down the street. “If it's Terry, you better show yourself. I mean it, honey.”

Micah waited until the man was in the house before walking carefully away. He passed the building that used to be the barbershop and another building that used to be the grocery store and was now said to be teeming with mice. He wondered what time it was. It might be midnight or it might be three-thirty or it might be fifty-hundred. The drying fan of the grain elevator ran all night this time of year. He listened to its thriving, empty sound. A ladder ran to the top of the silo, and he made a mental note that he would climb it someday to survey the town and the fields around it. He might yell his name —
Micah! I am
Micah!
— though no one likes a showoff. For now, he walked to the top of the ramp that led into the covered alleyway and sat down on the concrete, his back to the big wooden doors. Kernels of corn littered the ramp. Scooped into a basket, they would make a fair amount. A person could earn extra money just picking up the grain that others had spilled in this town. It was surprising how many adult thoughts you could generate when no adults were around to remind you that you were not them. He would give his money to the bank, in front of which a cottontail rabbit now hopped uncertainly along the sidewalk. Micah took out his gun and trained it on the rabbit but made no shooting sound. Like his father, he would never eat rabbit.