Marvel and a Wonder (13 page)

All these things flashed through Jim’s mind as he listened to the blue pickup driving through the approaching dark. He even opened his mouth to tell the boy some of these plans, his lower jaw unclamping itself to reveal the still-startling white teeth, but then, thinking on it a little longer, he chose to let the fading colors of dusk—pearl-blue and pink and red—fill the empty cabin air with their own kind of conversation.

* * *

The sign along the right side of the road exclaims:
Phantom Fireworks. Shelton Fireworks, Home of the $3 Artillery Shell. Pilot Fireworks. USA Fireworks. Holiday Fireworks. Mr. Fireworks. Wild Bill’s Fireworks. Patriotic Fireworks. Fireworks City. Boomtown Fireworks. Woodpecker’s Mulch & Landscaping & Fireworks. Indy Fireworks. Uncle Sam’s Fireworks. American Fireworks. Dizzy Dean’s Fireworks. Victory Fireworks. Sky King Fireworks. Dirt Cheap Fireworks. TNT Fireworks. Fireworks Depot. PYRO VALU Fireworks. Fat City Fireworks
, the flat white billboard bedecked with a red firecracker, an exclamation point, a cartoon explosion.

* * *

By the time they arrived back home, it was dark. He parked the pickup at an angle and climbed out. The grandfather and the boy did not go inside the darkened farmhouse. Instead, they led the horse out of the lean-to and tied it to the snake-rail fence. There they combed it and brushed the small brown burrs from its white legs. Quietly the grandfather set a hand upon its gray muzzle, staring at it. It was sort of like gazing up at the sky, or down a well, or arriving at church before anyone else had got there; you could not help but contemplate the steady, profound beauty of this animal, standing only a few feet away on the other side of the fence, to consider its flawlessness and shape.

Once it had been curried, they turned it loose, watching the horse’s long legs and smooth, rounded hindquarters spring and return, spring and return, in a staggering kind of symmetry, appearing utterly mechanical. The grandfather grinned, watching it go. The boy smiled in return, then glanced back as the horse drove past again.

After a half hour, after the sun had fully departed, they led the mare back inside its stall, replaced the bolt-through slot, and drifted toward the house. They ate their TV dinners at the kitchen table, occupied by their own thoughts, lapsing into a silence that lasted the duration of the evening.

* * *

Inside the red pickup that Saturday night, the two brothers drove west toward the highway. Then they slowly braked and turned down the long rural drive, the dust rising high, clearly visible even at this time of night, one a.m. About half a mile farther, they switched the headlamps off, the two brothers silent within the darkness of the cab. The truck began to slow along the fence line, and pulled to a stop along a culvert. One body climbed out, then the other, one slow and shiftless, the other rife with agitation. Someone had a pair of binoculars. They passed them, one to the other then back again, and listened. There, right beside the dilapidated metallic chicken coop, was the silver trailer. The tumbledown stable. The squared-off pasture. The two shapes stood there for a moment longer, staring, no words being spoken. One body followed the other back into the cab. The truck pulled around, driving off, its headlights snapping awake. The night air contained clouds of mayflies even though it was nearly September.

_________________

At dawn the horse was quiet within its stable, the morning light streaming through its mismatched slats. For a moment the animal looked golden, its mouth nuzzling the open palm of the grandfather’s hand. A sugar cube disappeared from his wet fingers. “Hello, old girl,” he said, leading her out. He filled up the water trough and raked out the manure, then petted its muzzle, feeling the animal’s breath against his warm palm. Then he led the animal over to the paddock and watched it make abstract patterns beneath an advancing sun.

By seven a.m., Jim had made a second pot of coffee and considered the work they had to get done—clearing the western field, counting and candling the eggs, feeding the birds. He walked across the kitchen and poured himself another cup. The boy had now woken up and was standing in the doorway, in a black T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, looking troubled.

The boy hung his head low and announced, “I require thirty dollars.” The words hung in the air like a cloud of gnats, buzzing with a certain irritation all about Jim’s ears.

“Thirty dollars? What for?” the grandfather asked, but there was only a stony silence as the boy apparently did not care to answer. This morning he had on a black T-shirt that said
Slayer
, with skulls and knives and other ridiculous illustrations on the front—chains and sobbing angels and pentagrams—drawings that would probably qualify as satanic, though Jim was confident that his grandson lacked both the know-how and temerity to participate in witchcraft.

“I require thirty dollars,” the boy said again, still not looking Jim in the eye.

“Is that a fact?” the grandfather muttered. He took another sip from the chipped coffee mug and turned to face the uninterrupted light coming in through the kitchen windows. The fields outside were flush with a magnificent glow.

The boy groaned then, ruining his grandfather’s enjoyment of the moment; Jim shook his head and turned back to face the boy still standing there in the doorway. “Son, I want you to answer a question for me before I answer yours. What is my name?”

“Sir?”

“What is my name, son?”

“Jim.”

“First and last.”

“Jim Falls.”

“Jim Falls. That’s right. Not Jim Rockefeller, not Jim Woolworth, not Jim Ford, or any other. So what does that mean to you?”

“You’re not gonna loan me the money.”

“No sir. What kind of fool would I be to loan you money without even knowing what it’s for? I’d be a sorry case, just like you, without a cent to my name. And I don’t care to have that in common with you. Now, unless you want to tell me what it’s for . . .”

“I don’t want to have to tell you what it’s for.”

“Well, of course, I can appreciate that. You’re a man with your own needs. What I suggest is you head over to the bank in town. You remember you got a checking account we started a few years ago? Go in there and ask them if maybe they might be interested in giving you a loan for something you don’t want to talk about. I got a sneaking suspicion that Bob Blair or one of his clerks is gonna ask you the same thing I just did. And if that idea don’t suit you, well, you can do what I’ve always had to do. Which is to go out and get a job and earn a dollar and spend it any way you see fit.”

“Okay, okay. Jeesh. It’s for a water dragon.”

“A what?”

“A water dragon.”

“Water dragon.”

“It’s an animal. From China.”

“You sit there and you tell me you want thirty dollars for a dragon from China? What kind of imbecile do you think I am?”

“It’s a lizard. It’s like . . . a reptile. It’s no big deal.”

“It’s a lizard? Why is it thirty dollars then?”

“It’s like an iguana, but it’s rare. It spends most of its time in the water.”

“You want thirty dollars for a lizard that lives in water?”

“Yes. No. It’s called a water dragon. They got them for sale at the pet store.”

“Well, I would have guessed as much.”

“It’s thirty dollars for a pair. A male and female. Gilby there said he can get me a deal.”

“Oh, Gilby can, can he? Why a pair? You don’t even have enough for one, how do you expect to get two?”

“To breed. All it takes is a cage and a recording of some Chinese music, Gilby says. He said he could loan me a cassette tape.”

“To breed? And where exactly are you gonna do this breeding?”

“Upstairs. In my room. Or out in the coop. It’s an easy way to make money. Gilby said if I breed them I can sell the babies back to him.”

“Oh, Gilby did, did he? Well, I tell you one thing: I wouldn’t have those things out there in my coop. No sir. I got enough troubles out there without having to worry about whatever disease those creatures might be carrying. All the way from China, who knows what sickness they might have with them.”

“Are you going to let me have the thirty dollars or not?” the boy asked again.

The grandfather did not answer at first, only stood, reaching for the white cattleman hat. He fitted it over the dull gray remains of his hair and said, “Thirty dollars of work will get you thirty dollars in pay.”

* * *

Thereafter, the grandfather and grandson ran through their list of chores. They began the day clearing the scrub and weeds from the westernmost field. Jim looked at the boy’s small, bare hands and asked, “Where are your gloves, son?”

“I don’t need them.”

“You don’t need them? There’s lots of weeds and brambles out here.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

The boy had on his headphones as usual, the clamor of which Jim could hear from ten feet away.

“Did you lose them somewhere?” the grandfather asked.

“No. I just don’t need them.”

“Well, do you want to borrow mine?”

“No sir, I don’t need any gloves. I’m training myself to withstand all sorts of human pain.” What this meant Jim did not care to know.

They continued on with that section of field, which, a week ago, when the weather had turned bad—hot, humid, then rainy, the kind of weather that often made for a late-summer tornado—Jim had been forced to abandon. He looked around for his grandson and saw him leaning over a pile of wet-looking tree limbs, which had been knocked loose from the line of nearby oaks, planted as windbreak.

“Get an armful of those branches and drag them over to the coop. We’ll run them through the chipper.”

The boy pulled the black headphones down over his ears once more and stumbled as he gathered the branches into his arms. Jim started up the tractor but switched it off when he heard the boy screaming. He climbed down off the machine in a hurry, rushing over to where his grandson was holding his left hand, leaping up and down.

“What is it?”

“A snake bit me. I think it was a female cottonmouth.”

“A cottonmouth?”

Jim turned and eyed the pile of branches. He hiked up his jeans and kicked at the limbs with the toe of his boot. Nothing moved. He kicked again, moving the pieces of rotten wood with his foot, turning it over. There was nothing, only a few black pieces of mud-clung oak.

“It felt like a snake.”

“Here,” the grandfather said, handing him the gloves. The boy frowned and put them on.

Jim turned, climbed back aboard the tractor, and started it up. The small circular rearview mirror along the tractor’s left side reflected the shape of the boy as he stumbled, dragging a few limbs along the muddy earth, tripping over his own feet. Jim gave the mirror a gruff shove, adjusting it so that the boy’s figure was out of sight.

* * *

At lunch, after the field had been cleared, after the boy had spilled a full bag of grass seed, after he drank all of his grandfather’s coffee, the boy asked, “What about my money?”

Jim smiled, piling a few burnt twigs of bacon upon a mound of scrambled eggs in the middle of the boy’s plate. “What money?”

“For all the work I did.”

“We still ain’t finished.”

“But you said—”

“I said thirty dollars of work will get you thirty dollars in pay.”

“But you said—”

“We got to pay a visit to the Hale place this afternoon.”

“What for?”

“Miss Hale asked for our help. She’s got coyotes coming in her fence.”

The boy set down a strip of bacon and sighed.

* * *

Out to Lucy Hale’s at two p.m., they passed the Presbyterian church which Jim was upset to see had been defaced by graffiti. Fantastic gray circles and lines, what looked to be some manner of gigantic genitalia—near the size of a grown man—filled the redbrick facade. Jim slowed down the pickup as they came along the side of it, taking notice; he glanced over at his grandson, eyeing him hard. The boy was occupied, listening to the noise on his Walkman. The grandfather studied the boy’s face, but there was no sign that he had done anything so stupid. His grandson’s stupidity was of a whole different sort.

Driving on, the grandfather signaled a turn into the parking lot of the A&P; the boy switched off his Walkman and perked up.

“Where we going?”

“I’m stopping off for an errand.”

“What errand?”

“I thought I might bring her some flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Yes, flowers. You ever hear of them?”

The boy began to laugh falsely, a kind of whinnying donkey laugh, smacking the dashboard with a too-wide grin. “I thought we was going over there to do chores.”

“We are.”

“No. You’re going over there to have intercourse.”

Jim glanced over at his grandson once more, then drove on, speeding past the entrance to the supermarket’s parking lot, a thorny look in his eyes. What was wrong with this boy exactly? Jesus Christ. It was too much. It was enough to get you to consider the limitations of both schooling and religion.

What the grandfather thought as he drove past the slanting wooden gates of Lucy Hale’s home was how sad and weepy the place looked. The white paint on the old homestead had begun flaking, the fences were a tangled mess of post and wire, and nothing anywhere—not even a tulip or hyacinth bulb, let alone a field of corn or soybean—had been planted on the hundred-fifty-acre spread. It was a shame. The place had been something when Burt Hale had been running it, one of the nicest little sheep operations anywhere in the state. Now, like almost everything else in the world, it had been left to rot.

Ignoring the flaking paint on the porch, the grandfather, with the boy standing in the shadow behind him, paid the widow a call at the front door. Lucy answered, looking slender in a pair of jeans and a green blouse. She held a cat in her arms, the animal glancing up suspiciously from the comfortable cleave of the woman’s chest. Surprisingly, Lucy was all smiles and cheer. What Jim decided he liked best about this woman was both her softness—the softness in her eyes and lips—and her firmness—the firm line of her hip; the whole shape seemed put together as solid as anything he had known.