Days Like Today (8 page)

‘Walked? But it’s miles.’

‘Well, I lost my license a while back. Took the bus to … um … other side of the mountain, there.’

‘You must be tired.’

‘Not specially. I used to walk a lot. Been through all the national parks. That’s wild country. I liked that.’

‘I’d have liked to do that, too,’ Franklin said. ‘Maybe later, some time. We could go camping with the kids. When they’re a little older.’ He smiled at Irene, who said, ‘You think I can cook and do the laundry for six people out in the Rockies someplace? Oh, that reminds me. Sherman, if you let me have your denim jacket, I can put it into the wash and hang it out on the line with Frank’s dungarees.’

Sherman nodded, his glance sliding away. ‘Sure. Thanks,’ he muttered.

Later that night Franklin took him out for another drink. He’d sized Sherman up as a man who was no good at mixing with other people so, instead of dropping in at one of the places where he might be caught up in talk with acquaintances, he chose a bar he didn’t know well.

Without Irene to help, he found it hard to make Sherman loosen up. The man tended to exude a morose withdrawal from the world until the time when a sarcasm or criticism would come out of him. Franklin reported on the general direction his life had taken since the war; then he got down to the details. The catalogue of events went on and on: talking too much was the form his discomfiture had taken. At last he said, ‘Well, you know about me. I guess just meeting Irene and the kids tells you everything. I had to work like hell to begin with: I went back to school, got through
college. I met her after that. She was still in high school but I knew right away, the first time I saw her; she was the girl I was going to marry.’

‘I guess you’ve got it made,’ Sherman said. ‘A wife and kids like we used to talk about. Like we used to dream about.’

‘No, we didn’t. We used to sit around and have bull sessions about how we were going to come back and mount a surprise attack on the White House and hold the president to ransom for millions. And Captain Pauling was going to call on his cousins’ connections and get all the money snuck into Swiss bank accounts for us.’

Sherman jerked back his head and laughed with the first sign of genuine enjoyment he’d shown since his arrival. ‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘You’re right. That’s what we were going to do.’

Franklin laughed too, but he was thinking:
This ruined
man – did I save him for this? Is he going to be in this condition
for the rest of his life?

What tied them together, Franklin thought – the original act – had been a matter of luck. Circumstances pulled a bold action out of his frightened soul and that had made him strong and lessened his fear of being ultimately unworthy. From then on he had something in reserve that could balance everything to come. For ever afterwards he could point to that moment, telling himself:
That’s the kind of man I am
. He no longer worried about making mistakes because they stopped being so important.

But who could tell what the same deed had done to Sherman?
He might feel that he was under an obligation. And he might not like that.

‘And your wife is named Irene, just like the song: “Goodnight, Irene. Goodnight, Irene. I’ll see you in my dreams.”’

‘Don’t start. It took me five years to get that tune out of my head.’

Anything took about five years, he thought – a bereavement, a serious illness, a broken marriage or love betrayed: anything bad took about five years to come to terms with. That didn’t mean you could forget it, but you could manage.

*

The next day Franklin showed Sherman around town and told him everybody’s life story.

In the afternoon Irene set up the ironing board near the kitchen table where the two men were sitting. When she brought the clothes in off the line, Franklin went to hold the door for her. As she passed him, she whispered, ‘How long is he staying, honey? I’ve been trying to talk to him but it’s tough going.’

‘Not long,’ he answered. ‘Take it easy.’

The baby was asleep and the other children were out in the yard, where they could be seen and heard.

She sprinkled water over a shirt and started the ironing.

Franklin and Sherman began to talk about men who went down into volcanoes to study them and how that was a job neither one of them would envy anybody.

‘If you had to, that’s different,’ Franklin said. ‘But out of choice – no.’

‘You could do it, sugar,’ Irene said. ‘He’s so brave, when I had a dream about being in the hospital –’

Franklin groaned. Sherman asked, ‘What?’

She said, ‘I had a dream that I was in the hospital, having the baby, and that they wouldn’t let Frank in to see me. He was on the other side of the door, calling to me and they wouldn’t … it was really horrible. In the dream I lost the baby and then I died because he couldn’t get to me. So, when the time came –’

‘She insisted. She was so sure everything was going to go wrong unless I was there that I thought if I didn’t agree, everything probably would happen the way she’d seen it. She was so nervous.’

‘I don’t like dreams,’ Sherman said.

Irene folded a T-shirt, took up another and asked, ‘Why on earth not?’

‘They make me feel bad.’

‘Well, sure. I guess nobody likes having nightmares. Portia’s starting to get them. We just have to keep telling her that they’re only dreams: they don’t mean anything.’

‘If they don’t mean anything, that dream you had about being in the hospital – it would have been the same: only a dream.’

‘No. That came at a special time. It was like a sign. An omen. If I’d disregarded it, that would have meant … well, I don’t like to think about that. Children’s nightmares are different. They dream about dying, but it’s mixed up with growing. They dream that something’s chasing them and they can’t get away – they can’t move fast enough. They’re
running away from a fire or a big wave from the ocean, or maybe a truck is coming right at them and there’s no place to go because they’re backed up against a wall. They also have nice dreams about being able to do magical things: being able to fly, and that kind of thing. It’s the beginnings of, um, physical feelings. You know. A lot of dreaming is like that. If you need to get up and go to the bathroom, you have a fear dream about being late for something. Or, if you aren’t lying in a comfortable position, there’s some kind of frustration in the dream’s story. Dreams aren’t all what those psycho people tell you: all about some sick feeling you’ve got against your mother. I read this article at the doctor’s and it said the brain spends the night sort of putting information into its filing cabinets and getting some of the old stuff out to look at it.’

‘But some of those drawers,’ Franklin said, ‘are labeled s-e-x.’

‘Well, you know about sex. You had to watch it in the raw, didn’t you?’

‘I have to admit, it sobers you up. There are some things you don’t take for granted any more.’

‘Like what?’ Sherman asked.

‘Like what happens to women. Like what they can go through when some man has said goodbye and shut the door and he thinks that’s the end of it.’

‘Get in, go off, get out, roll over and go to sleep,’ Irene said.

Franklin turned his head.

‘That’s what one of my friends told me,’ she explained.
‘We were pretty surprised, too. We always thought her husband was such a nice guy. I guess she could have been describing somebody else, but that would have been even more surprising.’

‘Well, whichever way you cut it, that isn’t me.’

‘It’s plenty of others. So I’m told.’ She picked up a pair of striped shorts and put them on top of the pile.

‘In your dream …’ Sherman said, ‘You really died?’

‘I was dying and I knew that I was, and that if he couldn’t get to me, I would. Not exactly the same, but bad enough.’

‘They say when you dream you’re falling, if you hit the ground in your dream, you die: you die for real, not just in the dream.’

‘You don’t die,’ Franklin said. ‘That’s just an old wives’ tale.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How does anybody know? If you died, who would know what you’d been dreaming? I know because it happened to me. I was up on a skyscraper, walking over the construction girders. Somebody was chasing me.’

‘And you fell off and hit the ground?’

‘You bet.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Right before I was going to hit the ground, I had an orgasm that just about knocked me out of bed and I woke up.’

Irene said, ‘I think this conversation has gone far enough.’

‘So you didn’t hit the ground?’

‘I think that’s what they mean by dying.’

‘OK, boys,’ Irene said to Franklin. ‘Break it up.’

‘Yes, Sir, Officer O’Brian.’

‘Who’s O’Brian?’ Sherman asked.

‘The college cop, where I did my studying. We never used his name. We’d just call him “Break it up, boys”, because that’s what he was always saying. He was a nice old guy. In the springtime a lot of the kids used to get drunk and go around in a mob: picking up the back end of cars, and that kind of thing.’

‘Not very funny for the people in the cars,’ Irene said.

‘Oh, nobody ever got hurt. Nobody even had any paint scratched except just that one time when the guy lost his nerve and gunned the thing, so when they let the wheels down again, he roared ahead at top speed.’

Sherman laughed.

Irene sniffed. ‘Childish,’ she said.

In the evening the two men went out together again and had a couple of drinks. This time Sherman did the talking.

He was full of bizarre anecdotes and unlikely pieces of information. His favorite reading, he said, had always been ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’. They couldn’t stand or sit or drink in silence for more than a few minutes without Sherman saying, ‘Did you know that …?’ or ‘I read someplace …’ or, more often, ‘A guy I met once told me …’ Naturally, any such meeting would have taken place in another bar.

As the flow of Sherman’s knowledge became a torrent, Franklin understood that he was supposed to admire and not interrupt too often. But it was no good letting his attention wander at any stage because occasionally Sherman would stop in the middle of a narrative and lose
track of where he was. Then he’d ask to be prompted.

‘A lot of people,’ he said, ‘are just here for the ride. You know? Up and down, back and forth. They do a little shopping, they go out for meals, they put on brand new clothes once a week. What I got to say to those people is: just quit it. If you’re only here for the ride, get off the escalator. What you got to do is appreciate the nature of things. See, what’s in our minds is dead. In our minds we hold the past and the future: one gone and the other – maybe it’s never going to be anything. The present is where we live. It’s like a thin line between the dead and the unborn and it doesn’t belong to either of them till it happens or it’s passed away. Then it can join everything that’s dead. I used to think a lot about stuff like that when I was in the veterans’ hospital.’

‘Well, I don’t know. I guess I think ideas and philosophy ought to make things clearer, not just get you feeling more mixed up.’

‘I’m not mixed up. I got it all figured out. Listen. This is what the world is like. Did I tell you about the Canadian fur-trappers and the Arctic fox? Some guy I met told me. These foxes are very, very valuable. They’re the white ones. But you need a lot of them to make a coat. They’ve got to be the right size and you have to get yourself several completely pure pelts, unmarked. So what do those trappers do? They don’t go out gunning for the things – that way they’d shoot the skins full of holes. No. What they do is: they put a little bit of fresh meat on the tip of a knife and then they bury the knife point-up in the snow. The fox smells it from a long ways off and he comes running. He
gets to the meat, he licks it, he licks it some more and he cuts his tongue on the blade. But it’s winter and he’s half-starving, so he keeps going, in spite of the pain. He’s tasting all that wonderful, fresh blood and he don’t realize that it’s his own. That’s how they catch them. Not a mark on them; the fox just bleeds to death. It’s so simple. And cheap. No cash spent on bullets. You can use the knife again. And you don’t have to risk anything – you don’t even have to get cold till it’s time to go out and collect the corpses.’

‘Horrible.’

‘Oh, no. That’s what we’re like. That’s the ingenuity of man.’

‘They can’t still be allowed to do that.’

‘I guess it’s probably outlawed by now but it was a traditional method, specially for a poor man who couldn’t afford to waste ammunition. It’s so easy and so smart. So, I bet it still goes on. It’s a practical method of doing that voo-doo thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You think bad luck onto somebody. If you do anything with real belief, it works.’

‘Hunting foxes?’

‘Killing people without touching them. That kind of thing.’

‘That’s too much. That’s like what Irene says her aunt was always telling her: that a cake baked with love tastes better than an ordinary one.’

‘Well …’

‘Well, it won’t help you if you forget the flour, or the butter or the eggs or anything else that’s supposed to go into
the mixture. Love isn’t one of the necessary ingredients for a cake.’

‘But I read someplace that all these magnetic and electrical impulses can come out of people depending on how they feel and what mood they’re in. They can give off something like a vapor or, ah, something chemical that sort of changes the atmosphere.’

‘Maybe. But I doubt it.’

‘Well, I never been to college, like you.’

‘Oh you’re smart enough, when you want to be.’

‘Animal cunning, that’s what I’ve got.’

Franklin laughed. Every once in a while he found himself enjoying Sherman’s company. He’d feel that it was a relief to get out and be in new surroundings, and to escape from the noise of the kids.

‘How about another?’ Sherman said.

They went on to talk about mountain-climbing in different parts of the world and then discussed climate in general and geographical oddities in particular. Sherman liked to describe the places he’d seen since military service and the people he’d met. He enjoyed imparting information on all sorts of subjects.