Love and Sleep (13 page)

When he closed his eyes he didn't so much dream as believe that, even as he lay in bed, he was also walking a spiral track up a featureless conical mountain, a mountain consisting of nothing but his walking up it, which he did for hours, never getting any higher; the path was like the whirling spiral on a moving barber pole that eternally ascends without progressing. Exhausted, he would start awake, damp with sweat, the room shuttered and the heater high; he would rise up on an elbow, feeling unreal, and listen to the bungalow, to Bobby's breathing; then he would fall back, and as soon as his eyes were shut, start climbing again.

Sometime after dark he at last alighted in the old world, like a magic-carpet voyager, feeling new-minted and fire-hot. He hadn't seen night begin, and so didn't know if it was young or old. He was thirsty; his chest felt solid, and his penis was stiff.

"Bobby?"

She didn't move in her bed, but her presence there was large to him. The head of her bed was pressed against the same wall where the side of his own bed ran. He rolled over against that wall and listened, but couldn't hear anything.

He slipped from his bed, sure that he was not dreaming because he was awake, but otherwise feeling just that dream compulsion, the rooms around him empty of actuality but charged with dense meaning and looking at him. The heater's grille glowed blue and orange. He went into the next room.

"Bobby?"

He could not have spoken more softly; only if he had spoken it right into her whorled ear could she have heard him, and she didn't. She had thrown off the covers in the thick heat, and lay on her back across the bed; the flannel nightdress she had been given to wear had ruched up over her thighs, and her pale legs lay together. He stood looking down at her for an immeasurable time, his own breathing in and out matching hers, and then he went back to bed.

He woke again without knowing he had slept, as though no time had passed; but day was coming on, filling up the world outside the window with a skim-milk light. If he rolled over on his bed and extended his arm as far as possible, Pierce could just reach the books in the bookcase, and he did so now, snagging by its spine the one he wanted and lifting it (feeling the volatile blood rush to his head) to his bed.

This time around he had decided to read it systematically, from beginning to end, starting with ABBA and ending with ZOROASTER, reading every entry, forgetting each one even as he dutifully ingested it. He had got to the F's.

FIRE is a God in every clime and time, and while worshipped in itself by the PARSEES (
q.v.),
it is more often personified. Fire is AGNI (
q.v.)
among the Hindus, and HEPHAESTOS (
q.v.)
among the Greeks, who is the same as VULCAN (
q.v.)
among the Romans.

He started when his eye, in moving from one page to the next, caught movement in his doorway. Bobby watching him.

"You readn that?"

"Yes.” PROMETHEUS the trickster stole fire from heaven, and bequeathed it to the human craftsmen whose patron he was; and those who have wielded fire have seemed ever since to share in divine power, and to be connected to the Gods: smiths, alchemists, torturers. There is a reason why the
auto-da-fé
is done with fire.

She came to stand beside him, to see what he studied. “Read me,” she said.

"PARACELSUS (
q.v.),"
Pierce read, “supposed that as there were creatures indigenous to the elements of Earth, Water, and Air, so there must be creatures of the Fire too, and he called them Salamanders."

"Push over,” she said.

"There is no explaining why a humid, soft-bodied creature of the forest floor should be supposed to be fireproof, but so it has always been.” He moved so that Bobby could get up on the narrow bed next to him. “Benvenuto Cellini as a boy saw the Great Salamander in his own fire, and his father gave him a great clout on the head, so that the pain would cause the memory of this rarity to stick there."

Bobby looked down at the page. There was a sort of coin or seal pictured there, with a muscle-y lizard of sorts surrounded by tongues of symbolic flame and Latin words. “What's that?"

"That's the Salamander,” Pierce said. “I guess."

"My grandpap seed a Salamander once,” Bobby said. “Right round chir."

"So have I. In the woods."

"Not one athem little red things,” Bobby said. “A spert."

"Oh yeah,” Pierce said.

"It was a mockn spert. It mocked my grandpap when he ast a question of it."

"Oh yeah?"

"Then it showed its power, and defied my grandpap. And that was the night them woods was set afar. Look at another page."

Pierce turned to other gods. Hermes in his winged construction worker's hat and Keds, very like the figure bearing flowers by wire on the back cover of the telephone book. And nothing else.

"Bar Nekkid Land,” said Bobby appreciatively. “Did you ever."

"Well,” said Pierce, but just then she leapt from his bed and hustled to her own, having heard, though Pierce had not, someone approaching over the dogtrot. Winnie came in the door just as Bobby pulled Bird's covers up to her neck. Winnie had breakfast for them, and she wore her New York suit (so Pierce thought of it) and her autumnal hat, fox-orange plush with the pheasant feather, and her Sunday makeup, including the perfume he inhaled as she put his toast beside him on the bedside table.

"Sam says he thinks it's best if you stay home from Mass this morning,” she said. “And just rest. All right?"

Pierce nodded solemnly.

"You'll be all right?"

"Yes."

She paused by Bobby's bedside, and asked her too if she would be all right, getting the answer she expected since it was evident she would not have known what to do with any other, and said that she thought her father would be coming soon to see her.

"Not my father."

"Well a Mr. Shaftoe. Mrs. Calton told us..."

"Ain't my father."

"Well.” She drifted away, unwilling to solve this. “We'll be back soon. Rest."

She closed the door softly behind her.

For a long time Bobby and Pierce lay silent, listening to the bustle of the family leaving the house, going to the car, someone running back for something forgotten, the car starting, shifting gears, departing. And then for a moment Pierce still lay unmoving, in the almost unbearably intense peace and silence of the empty house and his own missing of Mass, a peace pregnant with unguessable possibility, like a flame in his sternum.

He got out of bed this time, bringing the great dark book with him.

"Is she your maw?"

"Yes."

"But not thers."

"No. Theirs is dead."

"Where's your paw?"

"Brooklyn, New York."

She pulled away her covers. “Show me,” she said.

"This was a long time ago,” Pierce said. “In the Old World.” He opened the book on the sheets of her bed: Bar Nekkid Land.

"Let's,” Bobby said.

Winnie at her place in Blessed Sacrament would be kneeling now, taking out her beads to pass the time till the show started (so her face seemed to Pierce always to suggest); the pale amber beads like a string of glycerine cough drops.

"Lookit it,” Bobby said. “Why's it do that?"

"I don't know,” Pierce said. “It just does."

"Hang yer hat onm,” Bobby said.

"You can touch it,” Pierce said. “If you want."

She did, delicately, with one finger. She herself remained covered, small fingers delicately holding the mound, just as the motherly Venus on the next page of the Dictionary did. She laughed and turned half away from him when he pulled gently at her hand; then she flung herself back on the pillow, hands above her head, stretching, gleeful: the balls of her knees still tight together, though.

"You can
kiss
it,” she said. “If you want."

Probably she meant that as the sort of mocking challenge he wasn't supposed to rise to, the kind she liked to throw at him; maybe he surprised her by his willingness. Osculation. Softer than its firm plumpness suggested, still fever-hot, and with an odor he would not often remember but never entirely forget, different from the sea-smell of the grown-up women whom now and then his willingness would also surprise.

Cumberland girls of eight and nine in those days either knew everything about sex or they knew nothing. Bobby knew nothing, nothing but a few scandalous words, and Pierce didn't know even that much; when his mother had found out that everything she thought she knew was wrong, she had decided the whole subject could not be spoken of, and she had not tried. So mostly he and Bobby only lay together side by side, chaste as knight and lady separated by a sword, knowing the effervescent delight of their choice to see and touch: the delight was the knowledge, the snake's knowledge brought to Adam and Eve, which the Ophites rejoiced in: they knew that they were naked.

"Your grandfather's here!” Bird called around the door into the bungalow (Pierce and Bobby again in separate beds, jammies chastely up). “He's right outside!” She watched Bobby closely to see what effect this news would have, but Bobby's face revealed nothing that Bird could read: except that for the first time Bobby looked foreign to Bird, temporary, out of place in Bird's bed and house, and in passage away.

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His hair stood up thick and black, not gray or white like a grandfather's, but his face was lined, so deeply lined it seemed to have been gruesomely scarred, furrows running not only down his cheeks and across his forehead but diagonally too over the ridge of his brows and across his eye. He arrived in a pickup driven by someone else, who remained in the truck while Floyd got out and came up to the porch.

Sam at his Sunday dinner was called out by Winnie, who had been alerted by Warren, who had been sent in by Hildy, she having seen the truck drive up as she came out of the bungalow after bringing Pierce's and Bobby's trays. Winnie looked down from the porch at Floyd, who seemed unwilling to come closer. The engine of the truck was still running.

"Come to get my daughter."

"Well I wonder if you'd mind talking to Dr. Oliphant first."

Floyd chewed, blew impatiently, looked off into the distance.

"Just for a minute,” Winnie said. “She's just been so sick."

Floyd looked back at the truck, and after a moment the driver turned off the engine. Floyd started up the steps of the porch, and as he did, Hildy ran through the kitchen, disposing of the trays and gathering Bird and Warren with her as she ran, pulling them up the back stairs and down the hall to the register where (they well knew) conversations in the room beneath could be heard.

They had missed the howdys and other careful compliments, and the ritual offer of a cigarette, which Sam made and Floyd accepted, slipping it behind his ear like a carpenter's pencil.

My legal responsibility, is what it is, Floyd was saying.

Well sure. (Sam's voice, from Sam's chair.)

Can't have her where I can't see her.

But I've got my responsibilities too, Sam said (and Hildy's breast warmed where her breath was held). She's a very sick child, and I have to be sure she's not going to get worse. Now now now. (This maybe in response to some gesture of Floyd's.) I could put her in the hospital here. I could do that.

There was a shuffling of protest or realignment of forces below that Hildy, even ear to the grate, couldn't interpret; then Warren insisted on having what had happened explained to him.

"Just hush. Just
hush
Warren.
Please
."

Don't mean no offense to you, she heard Floyd say.

No. Sure.

You understand, Doc. What it is. We're Christian people.

Uh huh, Sam said. Hildy thought she knew what face he had when he said it.

Now yall down there. To that hospital. Yall worship the Popa Rome. Now for us thad be no different than worshippn the Devila Hell.

Scandalized, Hildy with drawn breath waited for Sam's reply, which she couldn't imagine but whose irrefutability she could sense already.

But Sam only said: Well, I'm not going to argue with you.

He rose, then, apparently, and Hildy heard him say: I tell you what. You go see her, in the little back house there, and see she's all right. And then we'll talk.

That was all. Silence fell in the room below. Hildy (while Warren pestered her, whadeesay whadeesay) had a paralyzing insight, that the world of grown people was divided from the world she knew by a gulf, and that she must one day cross it, and think and feel as they did, and not as she now did; and that only then would she know if her horror now at what Sam had done—and not done—was justified, or not: just as a person asleep and dreaming can only judge her dream when she awakes.

Pierce in his bed heard the bungalow door open; he heard Floyd Shaftoe studying his daughter, granddaughter—he could hear the man's breathing, while Bobby said nothing. When they did speak they spoke both at once and so low and quick that it was like foreign language.

Cmon. You ain't stayn here.

Will if I want.

You ain't sick.

I like to die.

Well you ain't sick now. Cmon.

Won't.

Floyd said nothing more for a moment. Pierce (as though his ear were huge, sensitive as an antenna) could now hear Bobby's breath: quick, angry, and the phlegm whistling faintly in her throat.

They teach you things? Floyd asked. They make you swar to things? Did they?

None your business.

You have some damn respect.

Pismire.

You're comn home.

Won't. Don't you touch me. You touch me I'll kill you. I'll cut your throat while you lie sleepn. I will.

You're a devil. They turned you on me. You're accursed.

Silence then. The door of the bungalow closed. Pierce lay unmoving while the mephitic curses the Shaftoes had loosed (the more terrible for being all constrained whispers) evaporated, and Bobby's hot breathing slowed. His own heart beat hard; it was evident to him that Bobby could never leave here, never return to where she had come from, that she had only escaped harmless from Floyd by the most terrific daring and pluck, and that to go back would be death: the wrongness of it was self-evident, and would not be permitted in the world he lived in, which Sam and Winnie managed and not Floyd.