Hunts in Dreams (12 page)

“Well, there was that, but really because it was the end of my trying so hard. I mean, for the patients I try hard, but for me . . .” She waved a hand. “People thought the Golden Pyramid just fell into my lap. It's not true. I wanted it so bad I dreamed of it. I worked for it, I managed to get my name placed in consideration, I lobbied. I sought the advice of those who could help me. When you're trying to direct events, you can no longer see them for what they are.”

“Which is . . . what?” said Stephen. “Because I still try.”

“People fear the big downfall,” said Mona. “Because they're afraid they won't be able to get up again. Because they don't think they deserve to get up again. That they're awful, and now everyone will know. But unless you fall down, you never know whether you deserve to get up. That's what the morphine scandal taught me. And I would never have found out what I had without that happening.”

“This is not the American Dream,” said Stephen. “This is Mona's dream,” she said.

Dr. Lomasney got dressed and took Stephen and Joan down- stairs for a look at the clinic. There were lilies on the counter and pictures of other flowers on the wall. One of her partners was on duty, treating a teenager who had been shot at a friend's house. It was a minor wound, through the leg, no bones involved. The friend who had done the shooting and his father sat in the waiting room, pale, leafing through computer magazines. When the father saw new faces, he tossed his magazine aside and went to the receptionist's desk.

“Is Brice going to be all right?” he said.

Mona Lomasney nodded. “It would seem so.”

The man shook hands with Mona over the counter. “What about infection? Maybe a little amoxycillin.”

“Have you called the police?”

“That's what the other doctor said. So you think we should bring them into this?”

“That's the law in Hartvale,” said Mona. “We'll record the accident, and they'll want to know the circumstances, whether the gun is registered and that sort of thing.”

“It's just a pistol,” said the man. “It isn't much of a gun. I keep it for protection. We had a clivia taken off our porch that my wife had been growing all her adult life.”

“The police will want to know all these things.”

“As for the gun itself . . .” He turned to his son. “Tell the doctor what we did with the gun.”

The boy put down his magazine and looked at his hands. “Put it in a dumpster,” he said glumly.

“That's right,” said the father. “We didn't want any part of it after what it did to Brice.”

“Suppose someone finds it and uses it again?” said Mona.

“That's what I said,” said the boy.

“You've caused enough havoc for one day,” said the father.

“I can't give legal advice,” said Mona. “But you'd better get the gun if you can. And for God's sake make sure the chambers are empty.”

“Well,” said the man, “a clip in this case.”

“What's your name?” said Mona to the boy.

“Andre.”

“Come with me.” She took him to a corner of the waiting room and talked to him. She kept putting her hand on his face to make him look at her.

Brice limped into the waiting room. “I've been shot,” he said. “I don't expect I'll ever be the same.”

His parents arrived at the clinic. They seemed too old to have a teenage son, and they walked with sagging shoulders, as if they had been pelted with stones while crossing the parking lot.

“Andre shot me,” Brice told them in a tone of wonder. “I've been shot, and the bullet's in the rec room. And everything seems vivid to me now. Even these flowers, I smell them so strongly.”

“I hope this doesn't ruin the friendship between our families,” said Andre's father.

Brice's father screwed up his face as if he were about to sneeze. Joan felt a pang of sympathy. Talking seemed hard for him.

“We have never liked you,” he said. “Not really.”

Mona's partner took the parents aside and explained how to change the dressing, and the shooter and his father headed for the door.

“Much
sorrow, Brice,” said his friend. “I live in shame, man.”

Joan and Stephen hugged Mona and said they would let her get to her work. Mona thanked Joan for her help with the toothbrush.

“What's happened to the world?” said Joan. “What has it come to that children shoot one another and this is part of the everyday routine?”

Mona smiled sadly. “It's the same world,” she said. “It's just the guns. We look everywhere for the solution. We make a show of looking. All this business of is it the movies, is it the games, is it the civilization —”

“All the sociology,” said Dr. Palomino.

“It's a smokescreen,” said Mona. “It's TMFG, sis.”

“What's that?” said Joan.

“Think about it,” said Mona.

Joan thought about it as she and Dr. Palomino left the Hart- vale clinic and walked past a bridge abutment on which all manner of filthy words had been painted, and she thought about it some more as they headed across a playground toward a busy intersection where a taxi might be found. She and Stephen took a moment to sit in swings and push themselves in eddying circles as fallen leaves tumbled and scratched along the asphalt.

“Too many fucking guns,” she guessed.

“That's it,” said Stephen.

“Charles has guns,” said Joan. “He hunts.”

“He hunts in dreams.”

“Maybe so.”

“Oh, I don't mean Charles. It's a poem, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. My grandfather used to read it to me. He was a big Tennyson fan. ‘Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, / Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.'”

Joan pulled herself up by the chains of the swing and stood. “He's not like a dog.”

“Of course not,” said the doctor. “Listen. Don't think of what's happened. Don't dwell on it. We're going back home. Are you on the four o'clock flight?”

“No.”

“Meet me tomorrow in Stone City.”

“I don't know. I have a lot to do.”

“We could have lunch,” he said. “There's a Marvin Cone show at the museum. You would like his paintings.”

“I'll try.”

A church stood at the intersection, and she remembered that it was Sunday and she had not gone to church. She never missed and would not miss on this day of days, with her damp and incriminating swimsuit folded over the curtain rod of the Astrid Hotel. So Stephen took a taxi alone and Joan went into the church, where the liturgy was proceeding. She moved sideways into an aisle and picked up the
Book of Common P
rayer
— only for something to hold on to, because she knew the responses by heart. She did not hope for revelation, as once she would have. For years Joan had expected a bolt out of the blue, something new and alarming that would descend, giving shape to her life. This is why she had been an actress, why she had been a proselyte, why she had studied the stars. It was deliverance she had been looking for in the churches and on the stages and in the sky, and she no longer thought it would come simply. If she could tell someone all that was in her mind, maybe she could make a start, but this was not a church that featured confession. After the service, she approached the minister anyway. He said to give him fifteen minutes and then meet him in his office in the basement. She found him talking on the telephone.

“No. That's fine. That's fine. In fact it's good,” he said. “I'm not going. I have no intention. Who said so? If I wanted to go, believe me, I would have been there and back.”

The room had a musty and tomblike smell that made it hard for Joan to breathe, let alone explain her guilt and confusion. She put her hands on the minister's desk and leaned on it for a moment.

He hung up the phone.

“I don't know how to begin,” said Joan.

“Don't,” he said. “I'm sorry, I have to go. I'm very sorry.”

11
◆
Micah

C
OLETT
E GOT UP
EARLY
and fried doughnuts in an electric pan. Micah sat in a chair at the table, numb with sleep. What had he dreamed? He knew the shadows of it but not what made the shadows. Colette moved around the kitchen, talking quietly to herself. She had no idea of his late wandering, because when he got back to her house, the door was not locked. He had been turning the knob the wrong way, that was all.

Instead of putting the doughnuts on a plate, Colette laid them in a shoebox lined with wax paper. Then she took Micah back to his house in her car, an old Chevy Nova with a forest-green litter bag hanging from the tuning knob of the radio. She explained that she would be going on to Spillville, to see the world-famous Bily clocks and the memorial to the composer Antonín Dv
orák.
She had been planning this trip for some time.

Micah carried the shoebox into the house. He and his father ate the warm, jagged doughnuts and said very little. There was a deep scratch on Charles's nose.

“What did you do?” said Micah.

“Bumped myself.”

“On what?”

“A coat hanger.”

Later on, the farmer named Skel who had been at the auction
barn came by to drop off a book about raising
goats. Lyris was still asleep, so Skel gave the book
to Charles and Micah.

“As I say, I don't recommend them as a rule,” said Skel. “They're not much of a cash animal, and I don't like the way they look at you.”

“Is that right,” said Charles absently. The book was called
Modern Goat Husbandry,
and like many books with
modern
in the title, it was old, with a woven binding of dark orange.

“It always seemed to me they were expecting something,” Skel explained. “Whereas a cow, feed it and hell, you're the best friend it ever had. A hog, of course, is a different story. I don't say a hog is friendly, far from it. But once they understand they can't kill you, they become indifferent. Why, I remember one cold day in January —”

“What do you feed a goat?” said Charles. “We got some alfalfa yesterday. Are we on the right track?”

“We had a mix,” said Skel. “We give ours a mix until we decided to let them go.”

“You let them go?” said Micah. He pictured Skel's goats traipsing about the countryside.

“What I mean is we sold them.”

A woman got out of Skel's car, a glossy white purse under her arm. “We have to go, Skel.”

“What'd we feed our goats, Lucy?” said Skel. “What was that mix?”

“What you been giving 'em?” said Lucy.

“Alfalfa,” said Micah.

“We didn't do that,” said Skel. “But it is done.”

Lucy nodded. She had a rugged face that made her look as if she could do anything. “Some go that route. What we did was shake up one part oats, one part Ringmaster Show Lamb, one part black sunflower seeds, and then sometimes a little nutmeg.”

Many buckets, and one with black sunflower seeds . . . The future was taking shape before Micah's eyes, and it was good.

“And for cream, good news there, don't bother with a separator,” said Skel. “Just put the milk in a big open jar in the refrigerator and leave it overnight.”

Micah and Charles stood in the yard and watched the farmers drive off in a silver Lincoln Town Car. “Here,” said Charles, handing Micah the goat book.

Micah wished that Joan were there to read to him. They had an early-morning ritual in which they would lie in Joan and Charles's bed and Joan would hold a book in her left hand while draping her right arm over his shoulders. “Arm position,” Micah would say, and she would provide it, reading in her quiet, steady voice, Micah turning the pages. Charles would read aloud, but he could not resist adding sarcastic remarks, and when he got tired of a story, he would say, “And so they all moved away. The end.”

“When's Mom coming home?” said Micah.

“Late afternoon, early evening.”

Micah carried his sleeping bag into the yard, unzipped it, and spread it under
the willow tree. The light was more blue than yellow. He
thought it important to notice the way the light was. It fell on the side of
the birch trunk, which had bright bark and black scars. When the winter ice came, the birch would bend over the driveway so that its branches scratched the roof
of Charles's van, and Charles would remind himself to cut
it down, but he never did. Micah pushed his shoes off with his toes and lay stocking-footed
and holding
Modern Goat Husbandry
by Lloyd Mumquill between his face and the
light. He liked the coolness of the breeze, because the
house always seemed too cold or too hot, and this
morning it had been too hot. He had had trouble breathing
and felt a cold coming on, as his mother would sa
y.

On the left-hand page opposite the title was a drawing of a goat with a comical animated face and the words
Help Me!
printed above its head. This made the book seem simple, but it was not. Micah read the introduction:

The average goat operation in this country clears a net of five to six percent. If this book could have the wondrous yet at the same time modest effect of reducing costs by one percent per hundredweight per annum while simultaneously increasing monthly dairy output by as little as nine ounces per mature nanny (see Appendix C), these figures would rise smartly, with seven percent becoming the floor and eleven percent the ceiling of our new and attractively remodeled “house.” No steward of
C. hircus
in this nation could resist an invitation to such a dwelling, and yet many prefer to stumble on in the wilds of blameless ignorance of certain economies. Now I want to introduce a phrase you will encounter with some frequency in these pages.
It Does Not Have to Be So!
Remember this and apply it throughout your daily chores and you will have learned all I have to teach. “Then tell me why, Mumquill,” you may say. “Tell me why I should read on.” This is a fair question. Perhaps you have examined other books pertaining to goat management and found them wanting. Lord knows I have. Many of these august publications look forward to a day when the pendulum of public opinion will swing from that virtual poison known as cow's “milk” (the quote marks indicating my belief that cow's milk is not milk at all but rather some dyspeptic and Vitamin A–deficient liquid of indeterminate nature, a danger to infants and old-timers alike, the Alpha and Omega of family living). Until that great changeful day, these utopian tracts suggest, the goat farmer is doomed to the here-a-penny-there-a-penny subsistence with which many of us are sadly familiar. Thus the solutions to our difficulties lie outside ourselves. Start a local production board! Catch the ear of a newspaperman! And if we all set to proselytizing from coast to coast, then slowly, imperceptibly, rich rewards will accrue, et cetera, if not to the present generation, then to its luckier heirs in some distant day. This approach, championed most prominently by Marilyn Faber in
Goat and Man,
which has seen an impressive if unfortunate six printings, frankly nauseates me. Moreover,
It Does Not Have to Be So!

This is as far as Micah got, and that he did so was a testament to his perseverance. In order to keep going he had replaced the words he did not understand with other words that started the same way, which resulted in sentences that made no sense. If Joan were here, he thought, he would have her read not this book but some other book —
The Railway Children,
with the wrongly accused and absent father.

Micah lay on his back looking at the sky. The bending yellow reeds of the willow moved slowly against the blue. He sneezed, swiped the back of his arm across his nose, rose from the sleeping bag, and walked around behind the house. He batted the streamers of moss that spilled from the clotted eaves and grabbed a garbage-can lid to deflect the goat's charges. The goat, however, did not want to fight. She lay in the sun, gazing up at Micah. There were mounds of manure here and there on the grass — perfect bearings of dark and shiny green, as if the alfalfa had gone through the goat without changing.

Micah fetched a hairbrush from the house and went to work on the goat's red coat. Dusty hanks of hair came off on the bristles. Sometimes the goat tried to bite, but not seriously. Micah patted the bony crest of her head with one hand while brushing with the other.

The goat struggled up on its hard-shelled feet, as if to signal the arrival of an intruder. It was Micah's Uncle Jerry, who said, “Oh, God.”

“That's right,” said Micah. “We got her yesterday.”

“You want to go to a show?”

Having resented Jerry ever since he had cut down his tent, Micah said nothing.

“You don't even know what it's about.”

“Tent wrecker,” said Micah.

“Why'd you get a goat?”

“Lyris's going to raise it for 4-H. But it's half mine.”

“You'll rue the day.”

“It does not have to be so,” said Micah.

Jerry rattled a newspaper in his hands and folded it twice. “Look here,” he said. “If this doesn't interest you, then you're no relation of mine.”

“Meet Gabriel Rain and His Huskies Monk & Tandy,” said the advertisement. The photograph showed a man standing between two proud dogs. The animals sat alert and open-mouthed and had thick silvery ruffs. “Melodeon Theater.”

The goat ripped the newspaper from Jerry's hands and began tearing it up.

“Hey,” said Jerry. “Give that back.”

“She doesn't listen to anyone,” said Micah. He picked up a shred of paper. “Look how small she makes it.”

Micah had been to the Melodeon in
Morrisville once before. He and Charles and Joan had gone to
see an old movie called
Charlie the Lonesome Cougar,
but they missed the first twenty minutes, and when they tried
to stay for the beginning of the next show the usher
said they couldn't. Charles argued for a long time, but when they were halfway home he
seemed to have forgotten all about it. That night they ate
at a fish fry in a tavern in Chesley.
Charles surprised Joan and Micah by going around to all the
booths and drinking water from the glasses of the other customers. The people
didn't like it, anyone could tell, but most let him do what he wanted. Micah and
Joan looked at each other and laughed with their mouths if not with their eyes. Micah thought that Charles was
like the cougar in the movie, in that those who did not know him
were afraid of him and those who did know him
were keenly aware of this general fear without having any solution.

Now a horde of kids milled and shouted outside the Melodeon, and Jerry and Micah were carried along by the crowd. Someone shoved Micah hard in the small of the back, and he turned on a larger and older boy. Charles had advised him to go for the knees in a fight, but when Micah pictured the pale and lumpy knees of the bully, he could not do it. This was why he would never be a good fighter. He always thought of the other person, and by then he was lost. A tedious shirt fight ensued. Jerry separated the two boys and asked if this was any way to carry on.

At that moment a long convertible pulled up in front of the theater. It was driven by Gabriel Rain, whom everyone recognized from the picture in the newspaper. The dogs, Monk and Tandy, sat stoically on either side of the back seat.

“This is nothing new to them,” Jerry commented. “They've seen it all a thousand times.”

Gabriel Rain stepped from the car holding the propeller of an airplane. What this signified no one could say, but dozens of kids rushed him while the dogs cast their eyes about uneasily.

“See there,” Jerry said into Micah's ear. “A normal dog, in this situation you would have a problem.”

“Get back,” said Gabriel Rain. “Get back, I say.” The wave of children broke and subsided, and the dog trainer raised the propeller over his head. “Now that you've all had a chance to see the movie, I thought —”

“What movie?” screamed several children at once.

“We ain'
t
seen
any movie!” said the one who had pushed Micah, in that
triumphant and slightly hysterical voice some children employ when an adult has
made a big obvious error.

The owner of the theater stepped forward to deal with the misunderstanding. He twisted his hands while speaking quietly to Gabriel Rain, who tossed the propeller across the front seat of the car and listened impatiently. A funeral procession moved past, the slow black hearse followed by a line of clean cars with their headlights on. This quieted the crowd for a while, and the mourners looked at the dogs.

“Well, we
haven't
seen no movie,” said Micah's adversary.

Gabriel Rain removed his cowboy hat and held it over his heart. But once the last car had bumped over the railroad tracks, he threw the hat on the pavement and began berating the theater owner.

“Did you think
I was going to be here all day?” he said.
He bent to retrieve the hat, and a pair of
sunglasses fell from the pocket of his jacket. “That's not
in the contract, sir, which you signed.” He took a piece
of paper from the dashboard of the car and unfolded it. “It specifically says,” he said,
and then he went into the details of the contract, which
no one cared about.