Hunts in Dreams (15 page)

He got up to leave. Maybe he'd go shopping. A new pair of shoes always put him in a better frame of mind.

The bus arrived in Lonachan late in the afternoon. The town had a tragic atmosphere, and Joan realized while walking to the police station that the trees had all been sheared off at a height of ten or twelve feet.

“They're here,” said the sergeant at the front desk, as if he knew her. “Arrived today. The calendars, I mean. We are the ones. The men of the police department. Well, I shouldn't say men, because there are two women as well. The year 2000 — think of it, where has the time gone?”

He showed her a calendar, turned to a color photograph of himself working, shirtless, on the engine of a pickup. “Not bad for someone who never modeled,” he said.

“You're Mr. February,” said Joan.

“I know, a nothing month. I asked for September. What do you need?”

Joan had given this some thought. Her best option seemed to be the appearance of having a destination. She knew three things about the town. A tornado from the past could not be a destination. The effigy mounds could be, but they might not be much to look at. That left the reform school. She might even find a job there.

“I'm looking for the reform school,” she said.

“Follow me in your car,” said another officer, dusting the floor of the station with a mop.

Joan explained that she had come on the bus.

“I'll take you,” he said. “My shift is over, I'm going up there anyway, and I'm tired of hearing about that grotesque calendar.”

He and Joan got into his cruiser and rode through the broad streets of the town. Joan asked where he'd been during the tornado.

“In my basement, under a pallet,” he said. “Where we're going got it pretty bad, though. Now, you're aware the school is closed.”

“Oh,” Joan said.

“Six or seven months ago,” said the policeman. “They still have community activities in the gym. Were you one of the graduates?”

Joan shook her head.

“Because every once in a while we still get alumni, come back to see the school. You'd be surprised how successful some of them are. The reason I'm going there is we're rehearsing a play.
The Seagull,
by Anton Chekhov.”

Joan sat up straight and turned to him. Her voice surprised her with its hoarseness. “I know that play. Mister, I've been in that play. I was Masha.”

“No lie,” said the policeman. “Because guess who I am: Semyon Semyonovich.”

“My hopeless lover . . .”

“‘What terrible weather! Two whole days of it!'”

“‘There are waves on the lake,'” said Joan. “‘Tremendous ones.'”

He laughed and turned the wheel. “Tell me something, because I'm curious. When you were Masha, did you take snuff?”

Joan gave him a look of professional reproach, going back through years, an actress again. “You have no choice if you're going to be Masha. But you can pretend.”

“I wish everyone thought like you. We've got snuff, but our Masha won't go near it.”

They went into the school, down a dark corridor, and through the doors of the gym. The actors were on the stage, performing a scene. Wooden tables were all around. Joan stood below the footlights as the policeman climbed the stairs. The woman who would not take snuff was asking the writer Trigorin to sign books for her.

And Joan whispered the line with her: “Just put ‘To Masha, who doesn't know where she comes from or what she's doing on this earth.'”

14
◆
Lyris

C
HARLES CALLED LYRIS
AND MICAH
into the living room on Monday morning before school. He sat listening to the news on the radio, pulling on socks and boots.
His socks did not match, but
he didn't seem to mind or even necessarily notice.

A man on the radio said that it was going to be a windy week and now was the time to put away any summer furniture still out in the yard. A woman on the radio said now was the time to buy a hog if you had the freezer for it. The man said he had been unable to get the song “Winter Wonderland” out of his head for two years running, so he was ready for the change of season. The woman said they shouldn't joke about such a thing, because nuisance music might be a serious problem for some people. The man said he was not joking, he was one of those for whom it was a serious problem.

Charles shut the radio off. “Did you feed the goat?”

They said they had not.

“Here's how it's going to work. Lyris will feed the goat in the morning and Micah will feed the goat at night.”

Lyris turned to go feed the goat.

“Wait a minute,” said Charles.

“Are you and Mom getting divorced?” said Micah. He held a plate with toast on it.

“What did I say last night?” said Charles.

“That she will be home today.”

“Is that what I said?”

“That you weren't sure when she'd be home,” said Lyris.

Micah folded to the floor, cross-legged and crying. He put the plate on the rug. “I want her here.”

“When her work is done,” said Charles. “It might be a while. We thought it was going to be for the weekend, but now we don't know. They chose her. Of course she would rather be with you. She didn't ask for it.”

“Is that what she said?” said Micah.

“She said she'll be home in the spring,” said Charles. “What does crying get you?”

Micah spoke with a trembling voice: “Nothing.”

He and Lyris
rode to school on a snub-nosed yellow bus that pitched and shuddered in the wind. The
treelines were bright and slanted beyond the fields. Lyris sat far
from Micah, as was dictated by the difference in their
ages. She knew more than he did. The work Joan had gone to
the city for did not figure into Joan's absence. Lyris was tempted to think
Left once,
left again,
but she knew that would only be paranoia and that in the world Joan
had decided not to come back to, she played a
fairly minor role. In this light, the blood ties that the
Home Bringers put all their emphasis on seemed insubstantial and
even arbitrary. Anyone could be anyone's child.

When
she was younger, Lyris had sometimes wondered how it
would be if she were someone else. She did not
imagine being a person in better circumstances, because she had always had
heat, a roof, a bed, and food. Instead she imagined
being a child in a war-torn province, what that
would be like. She had sometimes come perilously close to wondering herself out of
existence. But she rarely thought that way anymore.

Lyris had art history just before lunch. The class was an odd mix of people who cared quite a lot about the topic and people who didn't care about it at all. This had to do with the way the class had been filled. Art history was mandatory for all the seniors who would be going on the spring trip to Paris, but a fair number of these students had chosen Paris (over Amarillo, the alternate destination) not because of its cultural treasures but because getting there would require a flight across the ocean. Some of them had never flown before, and they reasoned that if they were going to do it, they might as well go as far as possible.

In any case, the students who did not care about art history sometimes tried to disrupt the classroom experience of those who took it seriously. One of the forms this disruption took was the throwing of the methamphetamine tablets called white cross. The idea was to lob the pills in such a way that the person you were trying to bother would have to either retrieve and hide them or risk being caught with illegal drugs in the vicinity of his or her desk. Explanation was out of the question. It would amount to ratting, and no one could rat. In other words, planting white cross on someone was regarded as less of a sin than disclosing who had planted it on you. Lyris did not make up the rules. She sat neither in the front nor in the back. She thought of the long narrow room as a river and her desk near the window as a sandbar on which she might avoid the currents.

The teacher was a handsome if careworn man who had been a painter himself. He had suffered disappointments, among which teaching in this school seemed to be one, and he tended to portray the history of art as an unbroken chain of disastrous events. Today's topic was a French artist who came to prominence after painting a portrait of the empress Josephine cupping a plum in one hand and a yellow pullet in the other. For a while the young painter held Napoleon's favor — the emperor presented him with a walking stick with a silver handle. When Napoleon divorced Josephine, though, the artist fell from grace and joined the French army. Wounded at Borodino, he starved to death on the retreat from Moscow and was found with Napoleon's walking stick clutched in his icy hands. A tragedy, for salt cod was on the way.

“How many of us would show that kind of dedication?” asked the teacher. “Or are we too comfortable, with our soft pillows and our prepared foods? I think perhaps we are. And yet that is what it takes — to be willing to insulate the walls of your house with your rejected paintings and never experience a moment's doubt.”

This was not the first time the teacher had mentioned the use of unsold paintings as insulation. Another thing he sometimes brought up was how he was saving big boxes in case his radical views got him fired and evicted.

One of the students now asked in what way the story of the painter-turned-soldier demonstrated dedication to art. He stood to ask his question. “I mean, he died in a war — got that. But what's it got to do with painting?”

The teacher turned to face the blackboard. A white pill bounced off the boy's lumberjack shirt. The teacher wrote
war
and
painting
on the board. “Anyone?”

A good long silence followed. “Because painting is like a war,” said Lyris. She was only guessing. Painting did not seem at all like a war to her. This was just her go-along-to-get-along nature in operation.

The teacher beamed. It was not because she had found the answer he intended her to find. In fact, the boy had raised a good point. So far as the teacher knew, the painter had never picked up a brush after the imperial divorce. The lecture had arrived at a logical impasse, due to the teacher's desire to leave the students with the image of a dead artist on the side of the road. So he was glad to have any answer. He drew an equal sign between the two words, stepped back to consider the equation, and then underlined the words
war
and
painting
.

Meanwhile, some of the students pantomimed the eating of porridge, as was their practice when Lyris spoke up in class. They did so with various hand-to-mouth motions that would have confused anyone who did not know they were trying to make fun of a person who had once lived in an orphanage.

Lyris smiled shyly — she could take a joke with the best of them. Was she so pathetic, she asked herself, that she welcomed even ridicule? She hoped not, but kept on smiling.

Juniors and seniors were allowed to leave the school grounds at lunchtime. Lyris, Mercedes Wonsmos, Echo Anderson, and Octavia or Taffy Perry walked up to the Lake Park Tavern along with another young woman, the senior Jade Teensma. Jade bought all her clothes in the Twin Cities, or “the Cities,” as she called them, and had gained early admission to the University of Minnesota, and was going to Paris in the spring. Her future seemed suspended above them, shining like the sun. Today she wore platform sandals and a long silver coat.

Lyris looked forward to ordering hash browns at the Lake Park. She walked a little ahead of the other girls, going along the alley, thinking of the painter whose career was ruined by Napoleon's divorce.

“So what happened Saturday night?” said Mercedes. “Did you pull a Dun and Bradstreet?”

Echo tugged on the sleeve of Lyris's jacket. “Mercy has a question.”

Lyris turned and walked backward with her hands in her pockets. “I'm sorry?”

“With Billy Follard,” said Mercedes. “You know what I'm talking about. You're within range of my voice. Did you do anything you shouldn't have?”

“It didn't go very well,” said Lyris.

“It was ever thus,” said Jade.

“Boys on one side, girls on the other,” said Echo.

“Nothing happened,” said Lyris.

Mercedes took Lyris's hands in her own. “Tell the truth. Because this is important.” The girls stood looking at Lyris with light in their eyes. They seemed to want a certain answer from her.

“Nothing did,” said Lyris. “We went to a grain elevator. We went to a bridge. He told me a story about Baby Mahoney.”

“The wild child?” said Mercedes.

“Not that old saw,” said Jade.

“Then he wouldn't take me home, so I found my own way.”

“I don't buy that for a second,” said Mercedes.

“I do,” said Octavia.

“Swear it on your mother's grave,” Echo suggested.

“My mother's alive.”

“But eventually.”

“She doesn't have to swear,” said Octavia. “I believe her. Every situation doesn't end in sex.”

Jade brought out a pack of herbal cigarettes, lit one by cup- ping it against the wind, and handed the pack and lighter around. “Let's hurry up,” she said, and they did, each thinking her own private thoughts and considering what Octavia had said.

Follard worked in a shoestore in Stone City. It did not seem a fitting occupation for a badass, and he felt this himself, but it couldn't be helped. He had been hired by his uncle, who owned the store. In the twenties, a famous bank robber had bought a pair of blucher oxfords here before being apprehended in another county. Somehow the shoes had been returned to the store, and they still resided in a glass case behind the counter. They had more or less collapsed over the years, and the toe caps looked stiff and set. Sometimes old men brought their grandchildren in to see the gangster's shoes, as if to say, “Let them be a lesson.” Once, after Follard had begun working at the store, he dreamed that his uncle was chasing him between the racks, wearing the shoes on his hands. When he woke up, he had to walk around the house to make sure no one was there.

Follard
was suffering. When he reached for the top shelves, he
felt a sharpness in his heart. Naturally, all the shoes
people wanted that day were up high. The store was busy
for a Monday. When he answered the phone, the caller would ask if he had been running. He refused to admit to himself that his ribs
might have been broken by Tiny Darling. At noon he walked down the street to
a diner, where a man having the hot beef launched into a sneering tirade
against the president. The monologue seemed aimed at Follard, who only looked around. He
didn't care about the president, so this was no way
to start something with him, nor was he in any condition
to respond. He bought an egg salad sandwich and a newspaper and walked back to the
store, where he meant to eat his lunch at a card
table in the supply room. When he reached for the glass door
, the pain brought him low, so that he was
kneeling there, with newspaper and sandwich spilled on the sidewalk, when his
uncle came to the front of the store.

“Get up,” he said.

“I think my ribs are broken.”

“You've been acting funny all day,” said his uncle. He helped Follard to his feet and brought him inside, then dialed the hands of a cardboard clock to two o'clock and hung it on the door. He directed Follard to sit in one of the trying-on chairs and brought him a paper cup of water. With an ease indicating long years of practice, he hooked a low padded bench with his foot, slid it over, and sat down.

“What happened?”

Follard drank the water and sprawled in the chair. “I fell last night,” he said. “I fell against the stair thing. The post.”

“Your aunt said a plumber came to see you. Did this happen before or after the plumber came?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you fight the plumber?”

Follard crushed the paper cup in his hand. “I fought the plumber.”

“Were you at fault?”

“I am hurting! Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you.”

Just then Dr. Palomino opened the door and leaned into the shop. “Closed, are you?”

Follard's uncle stood up. “Is it something quick? If it's a small item, such
as a shoelace or mink oil, I could ring you up.”

“I'm looking for a pair of shoes. I don't like to rush into these things.”

“It's my nephew — claims his ribs are broken.” He waved his hand, a gesture that meant
Oh, these
kids and their ribs
.

“Want me to take a look? I am a doctor.”

“How lucky. Come on in. We'll give you cost plus ten. He was in a fight.”

“That's what it usually is with ribs,” said Dr. Palomino. “Fights and car wrecks and team sports. Get his shirt off. Let's hope it isn't flail chest. I don't suppose you know what a flail is, but your uncle might. A flail is an ancient threshing tool with a free-swinging wooden stick.”