Machine Dreams (32 page)

He fixed his gaze on the screen. Here came the definition, printed out a few words at a time.
Usual method of cell division. Resolving of the chromatin. Of the nucleus. Into a threadlike form.
It was a wierd language really; they should have someone reciting in a sci-fi thriller voice. Instead, a taped professorial drone pronounced the words as they appeared, or lagged a little behind the pictures; the bio department filmed the lessons themselves and narrated the course. Every freshman at the University had to take Bio I and II, and the big room seated five hundred. But it was never full. Billy envisioned the wonderful confusion if all freshmen, each carefully assigned a numbered section of Bio I, showed up for the same class. Billy listened to the scratching of pens and pencils, the ripping open of cellophane bags of junk food. A few students were sleeping. Innumerable others sat doing nothing, watching. He watched. The illustration, cells dividing under the scrutiny of a microscope, proceeded jerkily, in silence. Maybe if they synced in music, rock music, even classical music. Maybe if the films were in color. What color were cells? Billy thought the endless tones of gray were sad as hell.

His thoughts drifted. Last night Danner had come out to Towers to bring him a birthday cake. She brought a boyfriend with her, Jim his name was, a nice enough guy, and two pints of ice cream. The cake was chocolate with white icing, and Danner put twenty candles on it, one to grow on. They’d set the cake up on the only table in his dorm room, all of them laughing, and when she leaned over, lighting matches, the ends of her long hair had caught fire. Billy put it out fast with his hands, but a few strands near her face were scorched. Danner made a joke about Buddhist protests; no harm was done and they ate cake until most of it was
gone. This morning, pulling on his jeans, he’d thought he smelled the acrid odor of burnt hair, and he remembered the scared look on her face as she’d pulled back from the candles. Billy shifted in his seat. There was no smell at all in the bio classroom of Sumner Hall.

The bell rang. All around him books slammed shut, bodies shuffled. Everyone got up at once and moved, a bored herd on its way to cafeteria lines. He sat and let them pass, watching the tiers of seats reassert their emptiness. All summer, he’d waited to come to college. After he was in college, it seemed he was waiting for something else. What was he waiting for now?

He figured he would drive to Bellington. It wasn’t fair if he didn’t tell Jean right away.

The summer before he started college, Billy worked as a lifeguard at the State Park, a wilderness of rhododendron and pine crossed with trails. The trails were steep and rocky above the winding river, dotted with bridges, picnic tables, stone-hewn barbecue pits, fireplaces built in the Depression by CCC men. The river wound or rushed according to season; every spring someone drowned in the rapids, the river twisting violently around boulders and big rocks that created deep pools in the current. Teenagers from nearby towns went camping or tubing; they hiked the trails back along the river, toting beer and food far from the park entrance. They waded out to favorite rocks, awkwardly carrying ice chests, blankets, radios. Couples staked space on a flat rock and swam off the side in summer when the river was calm; they grew drunk slowly and necked in the sun.

Families stayed farther up where there were guards, where the river was cordoned off near the refreshment stand and rest-rooms. Billy sat there in his tall white chair, a silver whistle on a chain around his neck, and watched dragonflies skim across the water. Weekends the park was crowded, the stretch of paved riverbank spread with towels and bathers. Transistor radios blared pop legends. Young mothers, high school girls a few years before, lay insensate, their faces blank. They listened to Top 40 and oiled their thighs. Sometimes they started conversations.
Hey there, aren’t you Billy Hampson? What class was it you were
in—two years ago, right? Or I knew your sister, she was just three years behind me. Where was it she went off to?
Billy watched toddlers in the wading pool, a shallows roped off with plastic cord and multicolored floats. Even on weekends, the young mothers were alone. They were girls whose husbands worked Saturdays or watched TV ballgames; they bought new bathing suits every summer at K-Mart and read romance paperbacks. Already they seemed transformed into an isolated species; groups of boys who came to the park in such numbers never glanced at them.
You’re a Hampson. Aren’t you Billy Hampson? I thought you were.
They pulled piles of plastic toys from beach bags, watched their charges wade into the water, then lay down and abandoned consciousness for a semiwakeful trance. The older women, whose children were eight and ten and twelve, came in couples and played cards. They refereed their kids’ quarrels, drank iced tea from a thermos, smoked endless cigarettes; they were stolid, asexual, and self-contained. They didn’t notice Billy unless he reprimanded their children, blowing the whistle and signaling them back to the bank for dunking or straying too far. Then the women stood up in their solid-color, one-piece suits, shouting threats and directions, snapping down the legs of the suits to cover a half-moon of sagging derriere.

Weekdays were long, lazy, the park nearly empty and the swimming area frequented only by a country family or two. The men were present then: they were truckers between hauls, or miners or plant workers on night shift, or they were out of work. Never less than five or six kids, and the parents middle-aged on wool blankets. The kids wore shorts and T-shirts; the babies went naked. They brought big rubber intertubes and tires instead of toys. No radios, no plastic bottles of oil. There was little talk and easy silence; the kids could all swim and were usually obedient, and the older ones took care of the younger. Billy sat all day in the swoony heat. By four in the afternoon everyone was gone from the swimming area; he put away life jackets and guard poles, checked the bathrooms, picked up litter. He would lock up at five. Just before, he knelt by the river with a set of corked vials to take a water sample. The river was getting dirtier; mine drainage striped the rocks orange just a few miles up. In a year, two
years, swimming would be officially disallowed. Billy held the vials to the sun, watched the water cloud, then wrote dates and acidity registration in the record book. The days smelled of pollen. Close insects sounded, faint stirrings, dollop of a fish breaking. Billy would dump the vials, rinse them, put them back in the case and shut the lid. He stood looking at the water and then went in, swimming underwater. He cleared the river to the opposite bank in five powerful strokes and long glides, surfaced, and moved back across with a regular butterfly stroke, hearing only the quick, flat impact of his limbs cutting water.

Often on the way home he stopped at a small beer joint called Bartley’s. It was a peaceful red-neck bar not big enough for fights or dancing. The interior was just nine bar stools, the bar itself, and five square tables arranged across the slanted wood floor in front. A closet to the right of the bar held a stained toilet. The insulbricksided building had been some worker’s shanty house back in the days when there were lumber mills. Narrow secondary roads near the park were dotted with such houses, some of them fallen away to frames and inverted roofs, the struts pointing into air. Trees grew up through the floors where there was sun enough.

At Bartley’s the sun was muted by brown paper blinds; the blinds were old and faded and strained the light to a dull gold. Unhurried conversations continued at the tables. The patrons were mostly men in their fifties or sixties who lived nearby in Hampton or Volga, rural settlements begun as mill towns along the river. Billy’s grandfather had built Hampton, had owned a mill. But the man, his mother’s father, had died when Jean was a girl; Hampton had died before he did. Even then, it must have been steamy in summer. Country near the State Park was brushy and still forested, valleys overhung by hills. The old air conditioner at Bartley’s wheezed over the entrance, and a small rotating fan, its face no bigger than a pie plate, stood on the bar. Billy drank one or two cold beers in tall Stroh’s glasses, and wondered about Kato with little urgency. He thought in terms of ‘getting rid of her,’ getting her out of his mind. But four years back, things referred to her. Summers, winters, high school, movie houses. His car reminded him of her. His friends reminded him. Girls he went out with now reminded him; even the best ones seemed coy and
mannered. They were willing to different degrees but wanted something in exchange for their loyalty, their favors—some assurance. They all had plans, secretarial school or college, and they believed in their plans as though the future were cast in iron. His sister, Danner, was a little like that too, but Danner was smart enough it seemed reasonable she have plans. And she could veer off course suddenly. Most girls around Bellington didn’t. And to Billy, who’d been sleeping with Kato for nearly two years, the proceeding and backing off in parked cars, the lines drawn, the expectations, seemed a waste of time. He wouldn’t make any promises.

Kato hadn’t needed promises. He guessed they might have slept together even sooner if he’d tried. Somehow his getting a car had started them off. He wasn’t the first; Kato told him candidly she’d been with another boy before, twice. She attached no judgments and neither did Billy. He took her to school every morning and took her home in the afternoon, except during football season, when he was team manager and stayed late. Afternoons, she worked with her father in the billiard room, doing food orders for customers while Shinner poured drafts and saw to the tables. Billy played pool or shot the bull with Shinner until he had to go home to supper. Later, he phoned. Saturday nights they went to the movies at the Colonial, then walked across the street and upstairs to Kato’s room. They were always alone then and they didn’t have to hurry. Sometimes Billy fell asleep afterward, as though her bedroom were his own, then got up and left after midnight.

He supposed they’d acted grown-up long before they really were. But in some ways Kato was never a kid. Her mother had died a long time before, and she and her brothers had raised themselves. Shinner didn’t impose many rules, and he drank. Billy had cleaned him up a few times to save Kato’s doing it. Shinner wasn’t a mean drunk but he was fairly dependable; twice a month he’d drink himself into a stupor. One of the brothers or even Kato ran the billiard room then, though it meant she served beer. She hadn’t turned drinking age until recently, but the cops knew the story and looked the other way.

Billy had gotten used to it all gradually, so nothing had
seemed odd. Only now he wondered, because he wondered about everything. Shinner had bought the building outright with an inheritance years before, and the family lived upstairs. He had no overhead and a pretty good business; there weren’t money problems but the rooms upstairs looked impoverished. A rug, one long couch, a cheap maple coffee table, and a color TV console in the living room. Arrangement of blue plastic flowers on the console. The kitchen with its Formica table and chairs, its prefab cabinets and old sink. A dishwasher, outcast and new, off by itself on one wall. A low ceiling full of pipes. Kato’s bedroom: white child’s bureau, big stuffed animals, presents from Billy, on the floor. A double bed on a frame. Dimestore full-length mirror he’d helped her mount on the back of the door, the closed door. They kept a box of rubbers under the bed, though Shinner would never have bothered looking.

He liked Billy well enough. Sundays, Billy ate dinner with them in the kitchen, Rice-a-Roni and pork chops Kato cooked in a big frying pan. The two brothers, three and four years older than Kato, ate when they passed through the kitchen. The boys more or less roomed above the billiard hall and kept no particular hours. The older one was 4F—
basketball, hell
, Shinner said,
he messed up that elbow leaning on too many pool tables
—and worked in the mines near town. The other played football at Lynchburg State. Weeknights, whoever was around ate downstairs at the counter: hot dogs, fries, hamburgers made at the grill, and beer. Sundays, anytime, Billy loved being with Kato above the billiard hall. He liked all the nearly empty rooms. He loved how she looked, like she didn’t need anything else around her.

Last spring, senior year, when it was certain he’d go away to college, things had gotten bad between them. She flirted with other guys and went out with some. He wasn’t about to ask her why or yell at her; he just got his class ring back and stayed away. Now she was going out with some city cop who hung around the billiard room; cops ate lunch there. Billy saw her now and then, not much; she didn’t hang around with the high school crowd anymore. The cop was seven or eight years older—apparently they went to Winfield to supper clubs, and skeet shooting. Maybe it wasn’t so strange; cops around town had always gone easy on
Shinner, and the whole family had reason to be nice to them. But what did she think was happening to her?

Danner had asked Billy, around graduation, if he’d thought of marrying Kato. He hadn’t. He didn’t want to be married. He couldn’t see Kato married either, to anybody. But nothing was right anymore.

His parents were glad when it ended, especially Jean. She’d talked to him about it in July or so. She was sorry, she told him, but after all, he and Kato were so young. And Kato might be a nice person—her father and Jean had gone to high school together and, no matter what anyone said, there wasn’t a better person in this town than Shinner Black—but Kato had never had a mother to teach her certain things. Would she ever have made the kind of home Billy had grown up in, the kind he might someday want?

Billy didn’t know what he wanted. Jean had gone on speaking softly, with such worry in her voice that Billy didn’t say anything back, only nodded. But all he could think of while she talked was the sound of her footsteps, every early morning all summer, up the stairs from the basement. Ever since they’d moved from the house on Brush Fork, almost two years ago, she’d slept down there in a single bed. Billy hadn’t paid much attention before, but that summer he began to notice everything. He got up early, drove the fifteen miles to his job, opened the swimming area by nine. But before he could drive to the park, where it was quiet and lush, he had to listen to his mother’s footsteps. He lay in bed, waking up, and listened. Her steps were heavy with a resignation he couldn’t fathom. Later he sat by the river and heard the rush of water. He stared at the moving surface, and finally all other sounds left his mind.