Against the Day (14 page)

“It’s ’seng. Fetches top dollar, so
we’re gonna eat for a while. Look. Little red berries there?”

“Why are we whispering?” Peering up
from under her flowered bonnetbrim.
“
Chinese believe the root is a small person, who can hear you
coming and so forth.”

“We’re Chinese?”

He shrugged as if he wasn’t sure.
“Don’t mean it ain’t the truth.”

“And cash crop here or whatever, we
still aren’t going to use the money to try and find Mama, are we?”

Should’ve seen that coming. “No.”

“When then?”

“You’ll get your turn, Trooper.
Sooner than you think.”

“Promise?”

“Ain’t mine to promise. Just how it
works.”

“Well, don’t sound so happy about
it.”

They pushed out into morning fields
that went rolling all the way to every horizon, the Inner American Sea, where
the chickens schooled like herring, and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed
like groupers and codfish, and the sharks tended to operate out of Chicago or
Kansas City—the farmhouses and towns rising up along the journey like
islands, with girls in every one, Merle couldn’t help but notice, the
extravagantly kept promises of island girls, found riding the electric
trolleylines that linked each cozy city to each, or serenely dealing cards in
the riverside saloons, slinging hash in cafeterias you walked downstairs into
out of the redbrick streets, gazing through doorscreens in Cedar Rapids, girls
at fences in front of long fields in yellow light, Lizas and Chastinas, girls
of the plains and of profuselyflowered seasons that may never quite have been,
cooking for threshers far into and sometimes all through the nights of harvest,
watching the streetcars come and go, dreaming of cavalry boys ridden off down
the pikes, sipping the local brain tonic, tending steaming wash tubs full of
corn ears at the street corners with radiant eyes ever on the move, out in the
yard in Ottumwa beating a rug, waiting in the mosquitothick evenings of
downstate Illinois, waiting by the fencepost where the bluebirds were nesting
for a footloose brother to come back home after all, looking out a window in
Albert Lea as the trains went choiring by.

In the towns, ironrimmed carriage
wheels rang loud on the paving stones, and Dally one day would recall how the
horses had turned their heads to wink at her. Brown creepers strolled whistling
up and down the tree trunks in the parks. Underneath bridges, struts rang when
the riverboats whistled. Sometimes they stayed for a while, sometimes they were
on their way again before the sun had moved a minute of arc, having shone down
on sootblack trolley tracks and bridge rails, clockfaces high on the fronts of
buildings,everything they needed to know—though after a while she didn’t
mind even the big towns, was even ready to forgive them for not being Chicago,
enjoyed the downtown stores smelling like yard goods and carbolic soap, black
linoleum parquetry, went down sandstone steps to have her hair cut in fragrant
barbershops in the basements of hotels, brightly lit against the stormy days,
smelling of every grade of cigar, witch hazel brewed and distilled in the back
rooms, leathercushioned chairs with elaborate old footrests wrought in the
rosebudsandbluebirds intertwining of the century about to pass, as if poised
among the thorned helixes of vines
. . . .
Next
thing you knew, the haircut was done, a whiskbroom all over her back, and
clouds of scented powder in the air. A palm out for a tip.

As Merle watched
her sleep
, an unmanly
warmth about the eyeballs would surprise him. Her hearthcolored hair in a
careless child’s snarl. She was somewhere off wandering those dangerous dark
fields, maybe even finding there some version of himself, of Erlys, that he’d
never get to hear about, among the sorrowful truths, being lost, being found,
flying, journeying to places too detailed to be anything but real, meeting the
enemy, dying, being born over and over
. . .
.
He wanted to find a way in, to look out for her at least,
 
keep her from the worst if he could
. . . .

Waiting out there for them each
daybreak, green and wet or leafless and frozen, was always that map
crisscrossed with pikes and highways and farmtomarket roads, for their scratchy
eyelids to open and regard as if from above, as if having risen into the orange
dawn skies and hovered, scanning like journeyman hawks for the next day’s work,
which more and more turned out to be some streetcorner picture operation in
another little prairie town to get them through a couple more meals. As years
went along, the film got faster, the exposure times shorter, the cameras
lighter. Premo came out with a celluloid film pack allowing you to shoot twelve
at a time, which sure beat glass plates, and Kodak started selling its
“Brownie,” a little box camera that weighed practically nothing. Merle could
bring it anywhere as long as he held everything steady in the frame, and by
then—the old glassplate folding models having weighed in at three pounds
plus plates—he had learned to breathe, calm as a sharpshooter, and the
images showed it, steady, deep, sometimes, Dally and Merle agreed, more real,
though they never got into “real” that far.

There was always plenty of bellhanger
work—a sudden huge demand was spreading throughout the Midwest for
electric bells, doorbells, hotel annunciators, elevator bells, fire and burglar
alarms—you sold and installed them on the spot, walked away down the
front path counting out your commission while the customer stood there with her
finger on the buzzer like she couldn’t get enough of the sound. And
shingleweaving, and mending some fence, and always frogbonding work in the
towns big enough to have streetcars, and plenty of machinery to see to in the
powerhouses and car barns
. . . .
One
summer Merle put in a hitch as a lightningrod salesman, which he quit after
finding himself at last unable to misrepresent as shamefully as his colleagues
the nature of electricity.

“Any type of lightning,
friends—fork, chain, heat and sheet, you name it, we’ll send it back to
ground right where it belongs.”

“Ball lightning,” somebody said after
a silence. “That’s the kind we worry about here. What’ve you got for that?”

Merle immediately grew sober. “You’ve
had ball lightning out this way?”

“Nothing but, we specialize in it,
we’re the balllightning capital of the U.S.”

“Thought that was East Moline.”

“You fixin to be around for a while?”

Before the week was out, Merle had
his first, and as it turned out only, balllightning job. It was haunting the
upstairs of a farmhouse, persistent as a ghost anyway. He brought in all the
equipment he could think of, copper grounding spikes, cabling, an insulated
cage run up on the spot and hooked to a sal ammoniac battery to try and trap
the critter in.

It moved around the rooms, up and
down the hallway, and he watched carefully and patiently. He made no
threatening moves. It reminded him of some wild nightanimal that was being
extra wary around humans. Little by little it came closer, till at last it was
right up in his face, spinning slowly, and then they stayed like that awhile,
in the small wood house, close, as if they were learning to trust each other.
Out the curtained window, long grass blew just like every day. Chickens pecked
around the yard and compared notes. Merle thought he could feel a little heat,
and of course his hair was standing on end. He was of two minds about starting
a conversation, since it didn’t seem like this ball lightning could talk, or
not the way a human does. Finally he took a chance and said, “Look, I’m not
about to do you any harm, and I hope you’ll return the favor.”

To his surprise, the ball lightning
replied, though not exactly out loud, “Sounds fair. My name is Skip, what’s
yours?”

“Pleasure, Skip, I’m Merle,” said
Merle.

“Just don’t send me to ground, it’s
no fun there.”

“O.K.”

“And forget that cage.”

“
Deal.”

Slowly they became sidekicks. From
then on the ball lightning, or “Skip,” was never far from Merle’s side. Merle
understood that he was now committed to a code of behavior as to whose details
he was almost completely in the dark. Any small violation that displeased Skip
could send the electrical phenomenon away, maybe for good, maybe not before
first frying Merle in his tracks, Merle had no way to tell. It seemed to Dally
at first he’d finally slipped his trolley in some fashion she could see no way
back from.

“Other kids have sisters and
brothers,” she pointed out carefully. “What’s this?”

“Sort of the same, only—”

“Different, yes but—”

“If you’d give him a chance—”

“ ‘
Him’? Sure, of course, you always
wanted a boy.”

“Foul ball, Dahlia. And you got no
idea what I always wanted.”

She had to admit Skip was an obliging
little cuss, got their cookfires going in a snap, lit Merle’s cigars for him,
climbed inside the railroad lantern hanging off the back of the wagon when they
had to travel in the dark. After a while, some nights, when she was up late
reading, there’d be Skip up next to her, lighting the page, bobbing gently, as
if reading along.

Until one night, during a fierce
lightning storm out in Kansas someplace,

“They’re calling me,” Skip said. “I
have to go.”

“Your family,” Dally guessed.

“Hard to explain.”

“Just getting to like you, too. Any
chance—”

“Of coming back? You get sort of
gathered back into it all, ’s how it works, so it wouldn’t be me anymore,
really.”

“Guess I better just blow you a kiss,
huh?”

In the months that followed, she
found herself thinking more than she ever had about brothers and sisters, and
whether Erlys and Zombini the Mysterious had had any more children, and how
many, and what kind of a home situation that might be like to live in. It never
occurred to her not to share these thoughts with her Pa.

“Here,” Merle producing a pickling
jar and dropping in two bits. “Now, every time I act like a damn fool, I’ll
drop in another one. Some point we’ll have you the fare to wherever she is.”

“No more’n a couple days, I
calculate.”

One of their last days in unbroken
country, the wind was blowing in the high Indian grass, and her father said,
“There’s your gold, Dahlia, the real article.” As usual, she threw him a
speculative look, knowing by then roughly what an alchemist was, and that none
of that shifty crew ever spoke straight— their words always meant
something else, sometimes even because the “something else” really was beyond
words, maybe in the way departed souls are beyond the world. She watched the
invisible force at work among the million stalks tall as a horse and rider,
flowing for miles under the autumn suns, greater than breath, than tidal lullabies,
the necessary rhythms of a sea hidden far from any who would seek it.

They found themselves presently
across the Colorado line, moving on into coal country, over toward the Sangre
de Cristos—and they kept bearing westward until one day they were in the
San Juans and Dally came walking in through some doorway or other and Merle
looked up and saw this transformed young woman and knew it was only a matter of
time now before she was out the chute and making life complicated for every
rodeo clown that crossed her path.

And as if
that wasn’t enough, one day in
Denver Merle had happened to go in a cigar store and noticed there in a rack of
magazines a
Dishforth’s Illustrated Weekly
from back east and months
ago, with an article in it about the celebrated magician Luca Zombini and his
lovely bride, formerly his stage assistant, and their children and their warm
and wonderful home in New York. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of silver in
Merle’s pocket at the moment but he found enough to buy the magazine, forgot about
the Cuban panatela he was fixing to smoke and settled for a threecent domestic
instead, lit it up and went
 
outside to read the story. Most of the photographs, printed by what
looked to be some new kind of gravure process, in a grain so fine that squint
as he might he could find no evidence of screenwork, featured Erlys, surrounded
by what looked like a dozen or so kids. He stood there in the corner of an
alleyway, just out of a wind meaner than any he could remember since Chicago,
full of ice crystals and hostile intent, and imagined it was telling him to
wake up. He had no illusions about what could be done in the darkroom to
enhance a human image, but Erlys, who had always been beautiful, was way beyond
all that now. Years of bitterness about how little she had loved him sloughed
away and Merle understood, miles down the line, the simple truth that Erlys had
no more been “his” than the unfortunate Bert Snidell’s, and that to persist in
that belief anymore was to approach the gates of the laughing academy.

His next thought was, Dally better
not see this, and then immediately, sure Merle, good luck. And when he caught
sight of her just about then coming up the street to find him, her hair in the
wind a banner flown by the only force he had ever sworn allegiance to, he
added, reluctantly, and it’ll have to be me that tells her.