Hunts in Dreams (13 page)

The theater owner and Gabriel Rain reduced their argument to angry whispers. It cheered Micah to see that the owner was not going quietly but had adopted a pretty insistent tone himself. The two men hissed and pointed at each other with their forefingers held close to their chests, as if they could hide their animosity from the crowd. Then one of the dogs barked, and Gabriel Rain stopped talking.

“It's like the dogs have trained him,” said Jerry.

Micah stepped forward to rescue Gabriel Rain's sunglasses from the gutter. He breathed on the lenses, polished them with his shirttail, and handed the glasses to the showman.

“Thank you,” said Gabriel Rain. “It has come to my attention, everyone, that you have
not
seen the movie. Thus my visual aid” — he indicated the propeller on the seat of the car — “has perhaps caused nothing but confusion. Well, go in. Go in and see the movie. That's what you've paid for, or are about to, and you won't be disappointed. After the movie, there will be a demonstration in which Monk and Tandy will perform live some of the amazing stunts that you are about to witness on the screen, including the climbing of stepladders and so forth.”

Micah liked the movie, a black-and-white thriller in which the dogs were the real stars. The role of Gabriel Rain, whom no one had ever heard of apart from the advertisement in the newspaper, was played by someone else, who was equally unfamiliar. The story went like this: A doctor who flew his own plane was trying to transport vital medicine to an orphanage on a mountain. The villain wanted to stop the shipment so the orphanage would close and he could buy its land, under which lay zinc deposits, according to the map that he took pleasure in rolling out with a great rustling sound on tables, car hoods, and other flat surfaces. Gabriel Rain and his dogs enlisted on the side of the doctor, and there were many interesting shots of the dogs riding in the doctor's plane with mountains and trees in the background. At one point the villain removed the propeller from the plane and buried it, but Monk and Tandy pawed it up from the ground and took turns carrying it back to the airport.

So that's where the propeller came in.

Micah sat with his feet up on the seat and his arms wrapped around his knees, so engrossed in the film that it took him some time to notice what the usher was doing. She delivered food and drinks to Jerry and Micah. She also came and sat with them sometimes, and it was not long before Micah realized it was Lyris's friend Octavia Perry.

“
Micah,
” she said, as if his name were something to make fun of.

“
Taffy,
” he responded, but his show of disgust was muted and perfunctory, since the bad guy was at that moment training the telescopic sight of a rifle on Monk the husky.

When Micah looked over to share his enthusiasm with Jerry and Taffy, he could see that Taffy was upset, and might even have been crying. She opened her mouth wide and pressed the heels of her hands to her face. Micah did not believe that she was worried about the huskies or the fate of the hilltop orphans. Then Jerry said he and Octavia were going for a walk. They moved off down the aisle toward the looming screen and out the door where
EXIT
glowed in red letters.

Micah met Jerry and Octavia in front of the Melodeon after the movie. Gabriel Rain and the dogs were gone. Micah had not really expected to see them again. The wind had picked up, and the sky seemed deep and vivid after the darkness of the theater. Octavia was smiling, which made Micah glad, for although he disliked her, he did not want to see anyone sad. Some of the parents who had brought their kids to the show were trying to work up a head of steam over the showman's defection, but their anger was hard to sustain.

Jerry treated Taffy and Micah to ice cream at Birdsall's, and Micah tried to send a subtle hint to Taffy about his uncle's age by asking Jerry to tell what it had been like in South Korea when he was stationed there. Jerry had spent three years in the late seventies working as an electrician for armed forces television in the city of Seoul. He said he remembered exactly where he was when they got the word that President Park had been assassinated. He'd been in the apartment of a friend of his, and they'd been listening to a record by Doug Sahm. And he remembered the song that had been playing, “(Is Anybody Going to) San Antone.” Octavia looked at him as if she were going to jump across the table and take
him
to San Antone. Like Micah, she would not have known President Park or Doug Sahm from a box of apples, and yet Micah's question had done just the opposite of what he had hoped it might do.

12
◆
Charles

C
HARLES SEEMED TO
RECALL
some rule against staining over paint, but he had stain and he didn't have paint, and he chalked up the rule to paint store propaganda. He enjoyed the fumes and the wood grain and the even strokes required to stain the barn doors. He came up with thoughts that began profoundly but for which he had no ending:
In this world
you have two choices
.
No, in this
world you have three choices.
He dipped the brush into green stain and sloughed off the excess by dragging the bristles over the clotted rim.
In a restaurant you m
ay have five choices, but in this w
orld you don't get that many.

Micah came home from the dog show
, interrupting this train of thought, which Charles knew was useless yet found somehow engaging.
Wound up, the boy bounced around relaying the events of his
afternoon at the theater, most of which served as prelude, in
his telling, to his heroic retrieval of the dog trainer's sunglasses
from the street. Then Jerry came over to the barn
and Micah ran around the back yard calling “Yai, yai,
yai” in a strangled voice. This was something he was
compelled to do from time to time to burn
off energy.

The goat, which Charles had untied to see if it would stay around when it did not have to, tripped after the boy; it really seemed to understand the concept of play.

“Got another brush?” said Jerry.

Charles found one in
a can in the barn. He freed it from a bottom-dwelling pad
of congealed turpentine and bent the bristles back and forth, so that flakes of old paint fell on the
cuffs of
his shirt. The half-brothers worked in silence as the
shadows of the trees stretched
toward them.

Finally Jerry spoke. “You know, I've never had very much in the way of . . .”

Love or money would have been Charles's guess, but he only nodded his head thoughtfully.

“Well, what?” said Jerry. “Companionship.”

“This is not the postman's way,” said Charles. “You guys kind of keep to yourselves, until one day some little thing happens and you go off like a roman candle.”

“I expect more from you,” said Jerry.

“And so do I,” said Charles. “So do I. Sometimes I think, Well, I'm just a crumb and so be it. But in this case, I take it back. This is about Octavia, isn't it? Must be.”

“It's about Octavia,” said Jerry.

“All the forces of the world are lined up against you,” said Charles. “Knowing that, if you still — or if she, because I think she's the one who has to . . . Ah, but I don't know, Jerry, it's just too —”

“Unconventional,” said Jerry.

“It is that.” Charles slapped a brush full of stain onto the door and smoothed it up and down. “She's young,” he said. “She's real young.”

“Past the age of consent.”

“What is that?”

“Sixteen, isn't it?”

“Did they raise it when they raised the drinking age?”

“I don't know. I never heard that.”

“You'd better check.”

“You've never been conventional,” said Jerry. But in this approach he was playing a losing hand.

“I've got the kids,” said Charles.

“Pure luck.”

“It is luck. What else would it be? And Joan.”

“You took a while to marry her.”

“Nevertheless. We went to a justice of the peace. And I've been
divorced
. What could be more conventional than that? And there's the house.”

He looked around the yard. The goat was carrying the lid of the garbage can like a retriever with a Frisbee. All right, forget the goat as an example. He gestured toward the barn.

“I don't see the relevance of the barn,” said Jerry.

Charles shrugged. “Evidence of conventionality.”

“Which is about to fall down.”

“There are cracks in the foundation.”

“And for that matter, I have a house and a shed.”

“This is true.” Having said that, Charles had to take a break, for it was a phrase his first wife, Louise, had often used. Thinking of the divorce, he had slipped into her mode of speaking. He and Jerry sat down in the grass.

“You have stain on your eyebrow,” said Jerry.

Charles rubbed the back of his forearm across his brow.

“You're just pushing it around.”

“Look,” said Charles, “what you have to do is ask yourself what is in Octavia's best interest. You could ask her, but that begs the question of whether she can make a reasoned judgment, which I'm not sure she can. Now is one thing. Think when she's forty and you're some decrepit thing she has to wheel around in a cart.”

“I have thought of that,” said Jerry. “What if it was only a couple years. We sing in the sunshine, she gets her mind together, goes off to college. I wouldn't complain . . . I'd make that trade in a heartbeat.”

“Why?”

“I get a kick out of her. I like her. Who can say?”

“She wouldn't be pregnant.”

“No.”

“She has parents.”

“They don't talk.”

“To each other or to her?”

“To anyone, from what she tells me.”

“What if they put a contract out on your life? Who are they again?”

“Teachers.”

“Right,” said Charles. “That might work in your favor, and it might not.”

He went into the kitchen and got two bottles of Falstaff. On the way back he remembered that he wanted to ask whether Octavia would get a G.E.D., just because it sounded like the kind of star-crossed plan that would inevitably call for a G.E.D. somewhere along the line. Perhaps Jerry and Octavia could get their diplomas together, then go to the sock hop.

Charles gave Jerry a beer. He did not know what to tell his older brother. Probably Jerry would do whatever he wanted anyway.

Colette looked at clocks made of walnut, butternut, maple,
and oak in the building in which the composer
Dv
orá
k
once stayed. She
especially liked the apostle clock and the Festina church clock, even though she
was an agnostic.
Dv
orá
k
was said to have worked on his “American Quartette”
here. Still, Colette could not get the “Ring-Around-the-Rosie Rag” out of her head.
A brochure said that the Bily brothers, who had made the clocks,
“employed the idle hours of long winter days and evenings
with their skills of woodcarving.” The other tourists included a couple
with a little girl who walked around in circles, eating small
candy bars and dropping the wrappers on the floor.
Later Colette saw the couple crossing the street, the father holding
the sleeping child in both arms.

This reminded Colette of the time Charles almost died. He and Jerry had been roughhousing and Tiny had hit his head on the corner of a coffee table. They were just kids. Colette held the back of an ashtray to Tiny's mouth, and no cloud formed on the glass. They had no phone, so she gathered him up in her arms, just as this man now held his sleeping daughter, and carried him out the door. Jerry and Bebe followed, making small sounds of suppressed hysteria. Sunlight fell around them, as though nothing was wrong.

Colette raised her ashen son to the air.

There was no one on the road, and they didn't have a car. The lilac bush loomed like death's messenger at the end of their path. The heavy boy began to slip, and she hoisted her arms to renew her purchase. It was this little bump, gathering and lifting, that started him breathing again. He tossed his head and wheezed, and she laid him on the picnic table amid a swarm of mourning cloak butterflies that had been hovering over something sweet on the boards.

After that she felt for many years that Charles had been spared in order to achieve things. Now she wondered what obstacle had kept him from them. The same could be asked vis-à-vis Jerry. If only they'd had woodcarving skills to employ in their idle hours, they might have something to show for themselves. Bebe had done all right, in far-off California. She sometimes sent pictures of her friends by her swimming pool.

Maybe time was the enemy, thought Colette. The Bily
brothers never thought so, making all those clocks. But where did time take them?
To St. Wenceslaus Cemetery, where, if she hurried, she might see their graves before the light was gone.

The volunteer fire department met every night of the week, but attendance
was optional. Given this congenial arrangement, the place often had the
feel of a nightclub with trucks. Tonight a new volunteer
would be initiated, and when Jerry arrived the lights were low
and the running boards of the ladder truck were lined with burning candles. The
initiate was a young man barely out of community college.
He was no one Jerry knew. The fire chief insisted
on the use of the sound system, for its eerie, echoing effects, and Jerry took his place behind the graphic
equalizer. He slid the level bars randomly up and
back while the fire chief recited a poem to test the
speakers.

“‘Last night, she said, a star did fall / From heaven's ceaseless costume ball. / It lit the night but for a minute, / With gold and blue and silver in it, / My rent, she said, is due tomorrow / But I can only pay in sorrow.' How's that?” said the fire chief. He wore a blue flannel shirt, leaned on a cane, and scratched the wiry beard he had grown for the town's centennial.

“I don't get it,” said Jerry.

The newcomer was brought forth in full gear: yellow boots, a dun suit circled about the calves and biceps with reflective yellow, a cylinder of compressed air, a red helmet, a breathing apparatus and face mask that suggested space travel. On his chest he wore a round and fluted pressure regulator. He carried a box-end hydrant wrench, and as he staggered into place the other firefighters remembered how disorienting that first time on oxygen had been.

The fire chief read the induction speech slowly, without emphasis. He wanted to stir emotion with the words, not with a dramatic tone. There were references to Prometheus, to the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who discovered oxygen's role in fire, to the virgins who had tended the fires of the Temple of Vesta. As a speech, it was all over the place. Like the poem, it had been written by the fire chief in his spare time.

“And when it's cold,” the chief recited, “and when it's late, and the snow lies roundabout, deep and crisp and even — when you least want the siren to sound — sound it does, oh yes, its mournful cry piercing the night at three
a.m
. or three-thirty . . .”

The sergeant at arms helped the subject out of his heavy gear, and the ladder master uncorked a bottle of grappa and poured one part liquor and two parts coffee into a wooden bowl known as the friendship cup. Meanwhile the new fireman walked beside the ladder truck, leaning down to pinch out the candles on the runner. As each was extinguished, the firefighters shouted “Hurrah,” according to custom. This was Jerry's least favorite part of the induction ceremony, few crowds being as self-conscious as the one obliged to shout “Hurrah.” He would have preferred something less painfully traditional, such as Micah's “Yai, yai, yai.” Then came the drinking from the friendship cup. This had been outfitted with a number of straws emerging from holes in the wood.

Jerry was one of the last men to take a drink. He and Leo Miner held the bowl and drew on the straws. Leo worked at the door factory. He had long hair, and deep crevices bracketed his mouth.

“Do you have a niece named Lila?” asked Leo as he set the friendship cup on a card table.

“Lyris?”

“Yeah . . .
Lyris
.”

“Shirttail relation. My brother's daughter, or half-daughter, I guess you'd say.”

Leo laughed softly and shook his head. “So hard just to keep
track
of people, it seems like, these days.”

“What about her?”

“Well, it ain't none of my business, but . . . ” he began, motioning Jerry away from the table. They went over and sat on the front bumper of the water truck. Leo polished the chrome intake cap with his handkerchief. “I run into her over in Martins Woods last night,” he said. “This Follard . . . You know William Follard, they call him Billy sometimes.”

“Yeah.”

“But you know him.”

“Not to say hello, but yeah.”

“Well, and I couldn't say the whys and wherefores of it, but evidently —” And here his voice grew quiet, and he bent low, forearms on knees, looking not at Jerry but at the floor, as if to suggest it was all in confidence and he would deny saying it if questioned. “'Parently this Follard, from what I understand, and again, none of this comes firsthand, but if you asked me if it sounded true, I would have to say it did.”

“Christ, just say it,” said Jerry, who had adopted the folded posture of his informant.

“That he threw her, threw Lyris —”

“Follard did.”

“Yes, off the bridge,” said Leo. “And now, I'm assuming this would've have been the second of the ones they call Four Bridges. I found her in Sprague Heileman's cabin, up off the North Pin River.”

“What would he do that for?”

“They disagreed,” said Leo. “And what about I will leave to your imagination. Because she didn't say. She'd been in the water. That much I do know.”