Hunts in Dreams (14 page)

“So she — let me understand — Lyris was . . . well, she got to the cabin somehow.”

“Walked, I guess. And she's Tiny's kid?”

“Yeah,” said Jerry, adding, “Charles,” as if Joan were there to correct them.

“He isn't going to like this.”

“No, he is not.”

“There again, maybe he knows.”

Jerry sat back and rested his arm on the headlight of the truck. He and Leo breathed a little sigh of relief at having moved from the information itself to the logistics of its distribution. “Well, I just came from there, couple hours ago, and if he does, he didn't say so.”

“But then, you wouldn't. A person might not.”

“We're pretty open that way.”

“The thing is, I wouldn't have told you,” said Leo. “That's what kills me. I really don't think I would have, if it hadn't been that it was Follard. Because to me, and I only speak for myself, a guy like that, with the —”

“History.”

“History, reputation, there are many names for it. A guy like that.”

“Oh, I know it.”

“I heard that one time Follard beat somebody so bad that the next time the person saw him, you know, across the street or however it went, his nose started bleeding on the spot — spontaneously.”

“Yeah?”

“And if you let something slide . . .”

“You can't let it slide.”

The doors of the water truck opened, the bumper fell as men climbed into the cab, the headlights came on. Jerry and Leo got up and moved out of the way. Some of the firefighters were taking the new kid out for a spin around town. The truck pulled out of the barn with men hanging on to the rails in their rain gear. Jerry had another drink from the friendship cup and went upstairs. He took out his keys and opened the office door. This was the chief's room, where he wrote his poetry. Jerry stood with his hand on the telephone. No one wanted to bear bad news to Charles. But what choice did Jerry have? His brother's family was so isolated out there, on that flat road in that open country, not counting the company they gave each other.

He sat down in a green leather chair with brass studs along the arms. The chair must have cost three hundred or more. He thought it odd that although the town was virtually deserted, the volunteer fire department had the latest of all good things. A siren sounded from the far end of town. There was no fire, they were just fooling around with the truck. The kid would be having a good time, with no inkling of the misery and danger he would encounter at fires. Jerry remembered an apartment fire in which a finch had died of smoke inhalation in its cage. He had drawn the unhappy job of carrying the cage out of the building and delivering it to the woman whose bird it was. The finch sat motionless on the perch, head bent and eyes closed.

“Will it be all right?” she asked him.

“It's hard to say,” said Jerry.

This was a small example — there were many worse ones he could think of — and yet it stayed with him. And he thought he had been cowardly in that moment, not to tell her the truth.

Charles hung up the phone. He had assumed it would be Joan, who should have been long home by now. Supper was over, dishes piled in the sink. He walked through the house, calling for Lyris to come down. She met him on the landing with a blanket around her shoulders. He told her that he had to go out and that she would be in charge of Micah until he got back. The girl's eyes searched his face. She knew that trouble had come, but not from which direction. Was it about Joan? she asked. Charles said it was not; she would be rolling up at any minute.

“Take care of your brother,” he said.

The night was cold and rainy. He hoped that the stained doors would not streak. The wipers on the van barely skimmed the windshield, and the headlights of oncoming traffic slid and surged on the watery glass. He drove up to Stone City and parked in the driveway of Follard's house. Then, on second thought, he backed the van into the street and pulled onto the grass, stopping short of the front door, where a porch light was on.

He knocked. “Come in,” said a small reed of a voice.

He opened the door and stepped into a hallway. The wallpaper was purple, dark, printed with grapes. There wasn't much light. Incense burned in a porcelain cup on a table. It took him a minute to see into the gloom, but eventually he made out the woman who had invited him in. She was a little old thing wearing an Iowa State sweatshirt.

“I'm looking for William Follard,” said Charles.

“Is something wrong?” she said, busy polishing the handle of a fireplace poker. “I'm his aunt. I live next door. If it's about a jackhammer, I can tell you that
I've
never seen it, and I think it would be a very tricky thing to hide.”

“It would be,” said Charles. “But I didn't come for a jackhammer. William put in an application, and it looks like I'm hiring.”

She worked the fireplace tool over with a cloth. “What sort of work? He has a job.”

“I'm a plumber,” said Charles. He opened the front door. “This is my van.”

“You mustn't drive on Billy's yard.”

“I'll only be a minute,” said Charles.

She wrapped her fingers around the banister and called up the stairs. “Billy,” she said. “Billy, come down.”

Something knocked against the floor above. Then Charles heard Follard's voice, but he could not get what he was saying.

“There's a man here,” said the aunt. “There's a plumber. Come down.
He's in the house right now. It's
something about a job.”

“I didn't call a plumber,” said Follard.

She smiled patiently. “Come down and talk to him. Don't stand up there all night long.”

The aunt looked at Charles. “Billy's a bachelor, and he never takes time to think of the hospitality that makes a house a home. I've been like a mother to him. That's what my friends tell me. That I mother him and mother him, try to do it all, never taking time to think of myself.”

“Do you live here?”

“Oh my, no. I live next door.”

Charles took the fireplace tool from the woman and urged her to leave, as the business he had to talk over with William would be of no interest to anyone but William and himself.

“Go on home and have yourself a nightcap,” he said, and nodded, as if it were her thought instead of his.

She put on a belted wool
coat and left reluctantly. The door closed and opened, and
she peeked in. “Tell him I'm leaving.”

“Follard,” Charles yelled. “Your aunt is leaving now.”

When she was gone, Charles locked the door. He threw the poker down a stairwell to the cellar.

“Who are you?” said Follard,
ambling down the steps, buttoning a white shirt. He was tall but with no weight to speak of.

“My name is Tiny Darling. I'm Lyris's father and I know what happened last night.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Then it will all come as a great mystery to you.”

“Get out of here, old-timer,” said Follard. His eyes seemed drowsy and aimless. “Get out before I hurt you.”

Follard jumped the banister and came sailing down. Charles turned his back and Follard landed on it. Charles was struck less by the impact than by the strangeness of the tactic. When you were on someone's back, you had very little control of the field. But if this was his approach, then let it be. Follard clamped an arm around Charles's windpipe and dug his fingers into Charles's eyes. Charles could have fought this kid blind, he really thought so. Yet he was having trouble breath- ing, and felt a sharpness in his neck. He crouched and staggered, gripping Follard's arms as if they were a muffler that he was wearing on a winter's day. Follard held on tight, until Charles could no longer think clearly. Fragments of memory ran through his mind in no order he could understand. This couldn't go on much longer. Through a film of tears, Charles saw the newel post. He rolled his shoulders and swung Follard into the column. Then he stepped into the front room and dropped the young man on the floor.

“My ribs,” said Follard.

“I'll bet they hurt.”

Charles set the toe of his boot on Follard's sternum and put a little weight there. Now it was Follard who couldn't breathe.

“If you ever . . .” Charles began. “But why put limits on it? You know what I mean.”

Charles left the house and walked through the rain to his van. He clasped his hands around his neck, turned his head from side to side. Something was stuck in there. He removed it, looked at it in the light: a jackknife with a pheasant on it. Charles wiped the blade on his coat, closed the knife, and put it in his pocket. Behind the wheel again, he pushed a blue handkerchief down between his collar and the wound. Heart racing, he lowered his forehead to the steering wheel. He was not hurt much. Fighting always did this to him.

Monday

13
◆
Joan

J
O
AN SEEMED TO
BE SWIMMING
, rather than running, away from home. It was Monday morning, and she was in the pool of the Astrid Hotel once again, watching her reflection move across the ceiling of blue mirrors. She was glad the doctor had gone home. It made everything simpler. Long ago, she had walked from door to door, offering religion to all those who would listen. She remembered traveling dusty roads, white Bible in her hands, red-winged blackbirds flitting from post to post. Like everyone, she wanted something back that she used to have, and it was nowhere to be found.

Her family would wait for her. Joan was operating under the common illusion that the life of those she knew became circular in her absence. Micah would orbit the yard and fall off his bike; Lyris would lie in the grass eating raw cauliflower; Charles would fix something in such a way that it would need fixing again soon. And one day she would return to them, settled and strong, herself again. It is easy to feel resilient in a swimming pool, because your natural buoyancy is all that keeps you from sinking.

The telephone was ringing when she returned to her room. It was one of those weightless hotel phones, so overburdened with lights and information that it seemed to have a life of its own. To pick up the receiver would be an unwarranted intrusion. She lay on the bed, listening to the sound the phone made, an electronic bird call that would fool no birds. It was as if an accident were happening before her eyes and she could not raise a hand.

The phone stopped ringing. Joan got dressed, put her extra clothes in a drawstring plastic bag, and called the laundry department. A woman said she would send someone up. It was seven-thirty. Micah and Lyris would be getting ready for school, brushing their teeth, tying their shoes.

Joan called Charles to say she would come home in the spring. She told him she needed time to think. She had seen movies and TV shows in which this request, once made, was routinely granted. Charles, though, being neither movie star nor concerned TV husband, gave her no time to think.

“The spring?” he said. “What is it, Joan? What has happened? Did you go and find someone new?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. Not in the way you mean. Have I been unfaithful? Yes. Have you? Don't tell me you haven't. But this has to do with us and not with anyone else. You stopped believing in me, Charles. You put me off to the side, where I became another person.”

“Oh, Joan.”

“Speak into the phone, honey.”

“That doesn't sound like me.”

“Let me go, just for a while, let me go.”

“When were you with this man? Are you with him now?”

“He's gone. I'm sorry if it hurts.”

“Do you know what I was doing last night? Taking a knife out of my neck.”

“That is just how it feels,” she said. “As if a knife has been removed. I love you, Charles. I always will, in my heart. Just please tell Micah and Lyris I will be home in the spring.”

“Where are you going?” he said. “Where will you be?”

“I don't know yet,” she said. “Goodbye.”

In a little while there was a knock at the door. Joan gave her clothes to a young porter, who waited for a tip. Getting none, he shrugged and walked off.

“Wait,” called Joan. She met the porter in the hall and gave him two dollars.

“Do I seem old to you?” she said.

“To me? No.”

“Well, how old do I seem? Take a wild guess. Don't worry about my feelings.”

“Thirty-two,” said the porter, and Joan felt better, although the figure sounded rehearsed, as if it had been suggested in the hotel handbook. “When will you want them back?”

“Want what back?”

“Your things.”

“I don't,” she said. “Clean them, charge it to my room, and after that I don't care what happens to them.”

“Why not throw them away?” said the porter.

“Good idea.”

“Look, miss —”

“I don't care about the clothes. Can't you see that?”

She left the hotel with her suitcase in her hand. There was almost nothing in it, but she did not want to be the sort of woman who begins a new life without a suitcase.

The streets that had been empty yesterday were now very busy. Everyone had somewhere to go, and so did she, although she did not know where. Charles would tell the children, and there would be no going back now. He would tell them at the first chance, and with bitterness. If only she had kept Lyris as an infant instead of having her handed back so late, things would have been different. Yet they all might wait for her. Micah would; he was true-blue. And spring was not far away. It would be winter and then it would be spring. She wondered if she would keep her promise. It was easier to say “I'll be home in the spring” than it was to say “I won't be coming home.”

She needed someone to talk to. The person she and Dr. Palomino had seen in the sleeping bag was not in front of the bakery but down the street. He sat with his back to a fence, drinking an orange drink, his long gray hair falling over his shoulders. Long-haired people always struck Joan as wise. She walked up and down the block, crossing and recrossing his territory, working up the nerve to speak.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” she said.

“No,” he said.

She sat down beside him. They said nothing for five minutes.

“Don't you want to know what I'm doing, with my suitcase?” said Joan.

“Oh, tell me.”

“I'm leaving my family.”

“Don't.”

“I have to,” said Joan. She opened her suitcase, took out the Bible, and opened it to a place she had marked.

“Let's keep it short,” said the man.

“Listen,” said Joan. “‘For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother . . . And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.'”

“That's in the Bible?”

Joan held the book open for him to see.

“I can't read without my glasses,” he said. “But you can't go by that. It was a different time. The early church, they were under a lot of pressure.”

“I suppose you're right,” said Joan. “I don't believe it's the word of God anyway. At one time I did, but now I'm not sure.”

“A pack of tall tales, handed down, over generations.”

“And if that's the case,” said Joan, “then you no more have the right to say ‘I do this because of the Bible' than you would to say ‘I do this because of —'”

“The
Sporting News.
”

“I came to this city on business,” said Joan.

“I know.”

“How?”

“The way you're dressed.”

“Oh, right. But I also — and I see this now, and I saw it before — I was also looking for something to force the issue. To be hypnotized, or fall in love, or be taken hostage in a failed heist, and everything would change. Instead I have to do it myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about you?”

“What do you want?”

“Well, it's just that you've been down, and — I don't know if this is presumptuous —”

“Absolutely, I've been down,” he said. “They once called me a natural at deciphering industrial codes, but I could never forget what the lawyer told me. ‘Succinct answers make succinct depositions.' Imagine hearing those words, what they would do to a young mind. I wish I could forget them. And they told me I could not join the war effort until I was ready to dress for success. And they said I knew Somoza, but that was another lie. And ever since then I haven't felt right. What time do you have?”

Joan pulled back the sleeve of her jacket. “Quarter of ten.”

“I've got to run.”

They stood. The man rolled and tied his sleeping bag with swift, forceful motions, as if roping a small animal.

Joan walked around until she found a bus depot. Inside, a demonstration of Irish dance was going on, and this made it hard for her to concentrate. She was tired and hungry. The dancers linked arms, stomping the tiles. Joan walked along the ticket counters, looking for the shortest line, the clerk with the kindest eyes. She chose a young woman in a turtleneck sweater.

“I don't care where I go. I just want to get out of town for a few days.”

“How about Lonachan?” said the clerk. “A lot of people go up there to see what the tornado did. Plus it's got the effigy mounds and the reform school.”

“When was the tornado?”

“Two summers ago,” the clerk said. “But it's still damaged.”

“One, please.”

Joan boarded the bus. The engine was running, and it was very hot inside. She sank gratefully into a seat. How many nights had it been since she had slept well? She could not count them, or remember where she had been, or when. Her seatmate was a traveling salesman reading a science-fiction novel called
The Woman with Many Arms.
He saw her looking at the book and asked the purpose of her trip. Her mouth moved, but she said nothing. He waited. She remembered a church pageant in her youth when she had drawn laughter by nervously repeating the title of the piece she was supposed to say —
A Gift at Our House,
A Gift at Our House
— while outside the church the wind gusted and icicles cracked against the windows. Where was that? Indiana . . . The woman on the cover of the book had four arms, reaching out like the arms of Shiva.

Dr. Palomino took two sack lunches to the Stone City art museum at noon. He was a benefactor of the museum, but he always had a hard time finding his way in. It seemed that you entered through the freight elevator.
Oh, this modern
architecture, where is it headed?
he thought.

Once inside, he looked at the exhibit book but barely registered its contents, because he was thinking about Joan. He believed — in fact, he had read — that promiscuity results from a lack of identity; thus you are always looking for new bodies through which to discover your true self (not having found it in other bodies, grown familiar). And he thought it was true that he was most troubled by lust when he felt it least likely that he would make a mark in his field. However, he was also troubled by lust when things appeared to be going his way. At those times his desire seemed less like trouble than like a generous impulse to share his happening self with the uninitiated. Where was she?

He was standing in a room full of landscape paintings. The artist had a facility for clouds. He had rendered them in shades of blue, violet, and green. They lorded it over the life forms in the paintings — a sharecropper, a mule, a farmer and his little son.

Dr. Palomino thought he had pinpointed the very moment when he had begun to lose the sense of himself that was reportedly the key to a balanced libido. It was at his wedding, many years ago. It was a hot day; later there would be thunderstorms. The ceremony was not long, but given the darkening sky, everyone was anxious to get out of the church. Nonetheless, when it came time to kiss the bride, the doctor did not hurry. A moment of thought seemed worthwhile. He had witnessed other weddings where the bride and groom, in their eagerness to get through the ceremony without making any mistakes, would bump their lips together in a pro forma sort of way, and he wanted to avoid this. And as he studied his bride — her upturned face, her frightened eyes, the interesting thing that her sisters had done with her hair — he heard his own father, speaking in a stage whisper from the front row: “Kiss her, kiss her, for God's sake.”

Well, maybe he didn't say “For God's sake.” But he definitely told Dr. Palomino to hurry and kiss the bride, which he did, but even as he did, the seed of doubt was planted. Was he Stephen Palomino, M.D., with ten years of the finest training behind him, the family practitioner in command of all aspects of his life, or was he someone who could not stumble his way through even this most memorized of social rituals without the pathetic coaching of his father?

He
had
known what he was doing, that was the hell of it. He had been trying to work a variation on the norm, but he knew what the norm was and did not need his father to draw a diagram and wave it before the congregation.

Could this be where his restlessness began?

He looked at his watch. Then he moved on to the next room, which featured paintings of country fairs. A clown in white makeup and a millstone collar held a small monkey before a backdrop of sagging canvas; three women posed half dressed on a stage, their backs to the painter; a woman in a burlap bathing suit stood blankly, with an emerald snake coiled three times around her body. The spectators in the paintings were an odd lot — rural folks with sunken cheeks, leering businessmen, and agitated old women. Only the clown with the monkey had drawn a wholesome audience, but there were not many in it.

The doctor hurried away from the carnival pictures;
they seemed to indict him. The next room had so
many paintings of hallways, doors, and stairs that you wouldn't know which way to turn if you had
to get out. Several of the hallways featured a
crooked portrait of an old man with a long beard and
restless eyes. In others, a chalky ghost hovered a foot or so above the floor.
These paintings filled the doctor with anxiety.

He went out into the courtyard of the museum and sat on a bench to eat lunch. Joan's absence might represent a disavowal of their night together. He blinked rapidly, remembering the way she had looked in the light that filtered through the hotel window
. Kiss her, you fool,
kiss the woman
. He felt no rejection and only a little disappointment. But he knew he would keep his distance from here on out. When he saw her, he would make some innocuous remark, nothing that would hurt her, just some commonplace.