A Book of Dreams (15 page)

Tom leaned back and yelled, ‘You see that over there?’ He pointed to a big place in the grass we hadn’t mowed, where it was all matted down.

‘That’s where a deer been sleepin’. They leave the grass all pressed down like that.’

I looked at it as we drove past. The grass was pressed down. It was like a place where someone had slept.

‘She must have been a pretty big one,’ said Tom.

The circles got smaller and smaller like the field was a big box and we were unwinding it going around and around making hay. Down across the road the pond sparkled in the sunlight. Sometimes there was a black speck that was a boat with fishermen or maybe the hunters looking for the deer.

When Tom takes us swimming over to Quimby Pond we have to dodge cowpies and thistles in the pasture to get over to
the shore. Coming back across I always look up the road to the house where that girl and her mother lived. They came here one summer and invited me over a lot. It was a funny house because the kitchen sink was black and water drops looked silvery in it. One day I was there and the girl said do you want to play doctor? I said okay. We went up to her bedroom and closed the door. She got undressed and then I got undressed. She had breasts that moved smoothly in the light. When she lay down they went away except for the darker part. And there was hair between her legs that I don’t have. When it was my turn to lie down her fingers touched my legs like grass when I run naked in the trees. When I went downstairs her mother was at the sink, working the pump. Water was coming out and swirling in the flat, black sink. She said, ‘You’ll come and visit again, won’t you?’ Tom takes us to Quimby Pond a lot. The water isn’t deep at all and there is foam at the place where the pasture meets the water.

When we came around again, Tom shook his head and said, ‘See right there.’ He pointed to the place where the deer slept. It disappeared under the cutter blade. ‘She sure was a big one,’ said Tom.

Tom always calls things ‘she’, but I can’t tell how he knows. He says I guess she’ll rain today or I guess she’ll be a hot one. Or when I’m oiling the mower blade he says, ‘You got her yet?’

‘Hey, Tom,’ I said. ‘Do you suppose she needs gas?’ We had gone around the field in square circles many times.

‘Oh, in a little while, I guess.’

Grasshoppers raced us across the field.

Tom’s mower woke me up before sunrise: he was out mowing in the grainy morning light, walking near the lab with oil smoke from the old mower hanging in a low blue cloud over the dark, dew-hung grass.

I wished Makavejev could get that on film, and was anxious to discuss it with him. I still wasn’t sure how he wanted to use me in the movie. The arrangement was that he would come over to the cabin sometime, perhaps in the evening.

The noise from Tom’s mower followed me around the cabin as I fixed breakfast and put on my work clothes. My mower, a bright-red one that I bought the year before, was in the garage. It started up quickly and we began mowing in long straight swaths across the yard. It would have been great to have Makavejev come down, cameras whirring, and catch me doing the same thing Tom was doing up the road.

But they didn’t come.

After a while I went up to the lab looking for Tom but he was gone too. Looking through the windows, I could smell the way it was even though the windows were tightly shut: a combination of cold concrete and the liquids of science. The sound of instruments at rest, the smell of hot glass, all mixed with cool air. Through the windows, it looked cold and barren. The tables were yellowed and cracked. Chairs and boxes stood around just where they had stood for the last thirteen years, as if someone suddenly walked out and left everything. The very first cloudbuster, a fabrication of wood and metal pipes, stood
in one corner next to a sink with jars, glass bottles with glass tubing. My father wanted it for a museum. Maybe someday it would be in one. At the next window, I was looking into a room lined with shelves holding rocks, bits of wood, more jars and crumbled, wrinkled cards and notes tacked to the wall. The light was diffused and showed me instruments and cobwebs, dust and black lichen on the floor, arranged like shadows of the people who were no longer there.

All around the back of the lab, the concrete pilings had rotted and were decaying, falling into rubble on the ground. In places the building had shifted and a section of lab clung to a piling by fractions of an inch, as if the whole thing would sigh in a heavy wind and sink slowly around the pillar.

I walked around the sagging barn and shed. It was all locked and closed, cobwebbed and dusty. Only the lawns were open. It didn’t really bother me that the estate was closed to me. The management of the estate was carried on by the trustee in a very independent manner. Perhaps it was just as well that I was not involved in my father’s affairs. I had to live my own life.

But I was in the movie. Makavejev told me I was, and I wondered where he was. Walking out over the smooth, green grass I went to the apple tree where Daddy took movies of me and my mother picking apples. I stood right in the same place where I stood naked in that other movie that he made, laughing and clowning, picking up apples.

Just beyond the apple tree I could make out the faint outline of a large rectangle in the grass. This was what I wanted Makavejev to see. You see, my father bought Orgonon from Tom’s grandfather. Tom grew up at Orgonon. When he was a
kid he used to bring cattle in for milking from pastures that are now the forests he cares for. So the movie should have that too, Tom, perpetually working on this land.

Imperceptibly at first, and then more and more distinctly, outlines of buildings that once dotted his grandfather’s farm show through the cropped grass. Tom stops where the old forge was and picks bits of iron and slag from the earth. He mows carefully around the cloudbuster platform, which stands on the imprint of the old barn’s foundations.

No doubt there existed somewhere, in an attic or antique store, an old daguerreotype or glass-plate negative of Jesse Ross himself, proprietor of the farm on Dodge Pond. In this photograph, Jesse Ross would have held himself proudly, in his best store-bought clothing, putting forth the best image he could muster of himself as a landowner for the gaze of all future viewers.

He would have had no inkling that a hundred years later the same box that froze his image would have developed so that it could make the images move, come to life in such a way that had he wished, he could have made a movie of his grandson, Tom. Tom the child bringing cows into the barn. Tom working for The Doctor, tearing the same barn down. Tom building a platform for a strange machine over the very same spot and then mowing around and around the same grass, mowing with his, Jesse Ross’s, great-great-grandson so that, in all, five generations would have put their sweat into the same land.

Now that was a movie!

I turned back towards the cabin to get my car. I was going to Rangeley to find Makavejev and talk to him about the movie.

Driving to town with Daddy, I reached into the glove compartment and took out the tyre gauge. I flicked it and the measuring part slipped out to 23. That meant that scouts and Indians were alert within a 23-mile radius of the car. Looking out of the window, I could see them sitting on their ponies in the fields, watching us. They nodded as we drove past and I nodded back, smiling. It was good. They were watching.

I pushed the gauge back in and flicked it again. Thirty-three. They were at watch up to 33 miles away.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Daddy.

‘Oh, this is how I tell my cavalry where to patrol and stuff.’

‘I see.’

The road dipped down sharply, making it look as if we were going to fall off a cliff right into the lake.

‘Are they good soldiers?’

‘Yup.’

‘Good.’

The car slowed down at the turn and Rangeley Lake slid sideways off the window as we turned onto the main road. I checked the tyre gauge.

‘Peeps?’

‘What?’

‘Are you frightened?’

‘A little bit, I guess. Are you?’

‘Yes, somewhat.’

At Doc Grant’s we sat at our special table next to the stuffed
deer and the setting sun came in through the screens so it rested on the deer’s yellow-brown back.

Daddy looked at me for a long time because I was quiet. ‘Let’s go home and call Mummy before we go to the movies,’ he said.

The sun on the deer’s back was like the sun on the hay where the deer had slept. I closed my eyes when the mower came to cut the place where the deer had slept. When I put my hand on the deer’s back, dust came up into the sun. The deer’s nose was painted red and I felt around to see if I could find the bullet hole that killed him.

‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘what is going to happen?’

Makavejev wasn’t in town. I didn’t know where he was. I worried. The movie had to be good. All those bad things that were scary in that night with Ed Carmel and those people that weekend, why am I thinking of them now? I want the movie to have good things, like Tom.

As long as I was in town, I went into Collins’s to get some paint. Vernon Collins, the man who built Orgonon, still tends the store while his son, Elden, manages the firm.

Makavejev had been there already. He had spoken with Collins already.

‘Yessir,’ said Vernon, ‘wasn’t that something? I don’t know if I’ll live to see it but wasn’t it something? Yessir. They come right in here with cameras and everything and asked me about the doctor. Yessir. Half the town knew about it and people was
coming up to me and sayin’, “I hear you’re a movie star.” Yessir, I don’t know that it’ll ever get over here. I told them that it was just going to be in Europe and if they wanted to go over there to see me, they was welcome to.’

He picked a gallon can of creosote stain off one of the shelves and we walked back to the paint shaker.

‘Yessir, he was a real nice fella. He spoke pretty good English too, even though there was a couple of them that didn’t speak much English at all. Yessir, he asked me about the doctor and I told him that I’d been working with the doctor all along. Yessir, I told him that he was a good man to work for. Why, in all them years we worked together we never once had an argument. Yessir.’

Screwing the can into the paint shaker, he flipped the switch and the can began its hard vibration. ‘Yessir. He asked me if folks in town was shy of the doctor and I said that a lot of people just didn’t get to know him. Why, if there was a family burned out or something he was the first one to make a contribution. Yessir.’

He looked out of the window for a while, shaking his head.

‘What you think of that storm on Saturday? Wasn’t that something? Rain all day.’

‘Yeah, but we sure needed it.’

‘Oh, we needed the rain all right but gee whiz, you couldn’t go oudoahs. Nosir, there wasn’t too much you could do. Yessir, we haven’t had rain like that in a long time. Funny how rain seems to come just on days when you don’t want it. Coss there’s not much you can do about it.’ And then he added, ‘Since your dad died.’

The paint shaker stopped with a thud, putting a new silence in the store. Vernon leaned down and unscrewed the creosote. Yessir. As we turned to walk back to the counter, a friend of Vernon’s walking out of the store stopped and asked Vernon if he’d heard that Dr Nile had died Saturday. They chatted for a minute about how he had been ailing for a while. Vernon was serious.