Hunts in Dreams (7 page)

“They're more suited to hill country,” said Skel. “You've come to the wrong place, son.”

Charles lifted his chin proudly, surveying the
farmers arrayed against him. “Watch me,” he said. He got up and walked down the aisle to
the pen, where he pushed open a gate and strode through. He stepped onto the platform
and addressed the auctioneer, who listened impassively, as auctioneers
will.

“Who is he, anyway?” someone asked.

“Our father,”
said Lyris.

The old man with the round glasses opened a flat tin and offered it to Micah. “Want a Sucret?” he said.

A rowdy calf was sold, kicking and snorting, and then another pack of hogs. Charles reappeared from above and took a seat beside Lyris.

“I don't mind, Dad,” she said.

“When you bid,” he said quietly, “just raise your hand.”

The next animal for sale was a white cow, which no one bid on, and it was withdrawn. Then the man with the flat stick pushed the door open and dragged in a goat by a rope looped around its neck. It had a shaggy reddish coat that reached nearly to the ground. Once it saw the audience, it moved ahead of the man, strolling in a stately manner around the pen, like a float in a parade.

“This is a Toggenburg doe, two years of age,” said the auctioneer. “I'm looking for a bid of sixty-five dollars.”

Charles nudged Lyris, who raised her hand.

“Sold,” said the auctioneer. “Young woman in the seventh row's got herself a goat.”

Lyris felt all the eyes in the auction house on her. Maybe that was an exaggeration. But she had not felt chosen in this way since the Home Bringers stole her from her ironing board.

At a feed store on the way home they bought forty pounds of alfalfa pellets, a leather collar, and two metal pans. Charles pounded a stake into the back yard and tied the goat to it, leaving enough slack for her to get under the porch roof in case of rain. The goat's eyes were slotted and lively, and she smelled like hot hay. Lyris set out a pan of water and another pan of the dark green alfalfa pellets. The goat showed no interest. Then Micah carried a lawn chair over next to the goat and sat down. This was a mistake. The goat butted the chair over, and Micah ran off. The goat walked over the chair with some difficulty. Charles cuffed her on her bony forehead and told her to cut it out, and she butted him. Then all three of them stood beyond the reach of the rope and watched the goat lower her head to the pan of water.

“How did you know they had a goat?” said Lyris.

Charles smiled. “I know the auctioneer. I called him last night, set the whole thing up.”

“But then,” said Lyris, “why did you ask those men?”

“Because I knew what they would say.”

There was a home
football game that night, and the older 4-H girls went
over to the field together in a club van. They would run the concession stand and earn the proceeds. The
rival football players got off buses and stood around holding their helmets against
their hips and blinking at the falling sun, their heads
looking small and innocent above the platelike shoulder pads. It seemed
to Lyris that any sport requiring so much padding
had yet to arrive at an appropriate set of rules.

The game started. The fans prowled the sidelines with leather flasks and thermoses, screaming for progress. The band members stood in goofy uniforms, playing their instruments, and occasionally one would take off after sheet music that had escaped its harp-shaped holder to skip over the ground in the fall wind. It was an absurd and lovely spectacle for someone raised in an orphanage and by suburban terrorists. On break from the concession stand, Lyris stood behind the end zone, watching the roving street brawl of the game and drinking hot chocolate with Octavia Perry and two other girls from 4-H. Suddenly Octavia was being nice to her, and what a blessing this kindness seemed, if somewhat sinister.

“Isn't this good cocoa?” said Octavia. “It's so, like, chocolatey I could drink a barrel of the shit.”

“You've put something in it, haven't you?” said Lyris.

Octavia smiled at her. She had blazing dark eyes and coral beads in her hair. “It's possible.”

“Oh, drink up, Lyris,” said a thin girl named Mercedes Wonsmos. “You don't have to be so Christlike all the time. Don't try to iron us the way you iron your slacks.”

“Yeah, you can drop that tiresome act,” said Echo Anderson. “We've decided to be your friends, but you have to be genuine with us.”

“I have been. I'm not Christlike.”

“Have some cocoa,” said Octavia.

The crowd started yelling. The wave of sound rose and rolled their way. A small boy from the home team staggered into the end zone with the ball in his arms and a tall, thick-bodied opposing boy holding on to his leg.

“I scored! Let go! I'm going to spike!”

“I say you ain't,” said the larger boy.

The referee raised his arms as if someone had pulled a gun on him and then tugged the fighting boys apart.

A squad of cheerleaders sprinted down the field
with fists pressed awkwardly to their sides. “Ahhh, cut me some slack,
'cause if you don't, I won't, scratch your
back,” they shouted.

The 4-H girls looked at each other and
shook their heads in the steam rising from their cups. “I
don't know why we even have to drink when life
itself is so fascinating,” said Mercedes Wonsmos.

The sarcastic delivery of
her remark did not make it false. Lyris liked the cold
hilltop field and the high lonely banks of floodlights and the white jerseys of the home team and the field
so bright and the sky so dark. She took the pieces
of the night into her heart and had room for more, as if her heart were as big as the auction
house. Now the boy who had scored the touchdown spun free of the gyrating cheerleaders and came
so near that she could have counted the cat decals
on his dull gold helmet. He had an eager, what-next expression on his
face and reminded her of Micah. She put her foot out
and tripped him, settling a score that he could not have
been aware of. Down he went on the grass, but he bounced up immedi
ately, as if his fall were intended, a new part
of the scoring ritual. His teammates gathered around, slapping and punching him to
convey their approval. All of their helmets had the cat
stickers, given for accomplishments on the field. The team seemed rich
in achievement indeed, though it had yet to win a game. But
this illusion was all right too, beautiful in its way,
for if they counted themselves better than they were, then couldn't she do the same? “Go, Fighting
Cats,” she found herself crying, “go,” as if urging the boys to leave
the field and the town and strike out through the bristling dry cornfields for the perilous journey to
adulthood. Yes, she was thoroughly drunk, but with some clarity of
vision, and at this moment she turned to see Follard standing among the thick and curving
pipes of the pumping station behind the field. He saw her
too. He swung down from the bolted blue jungle and came to
the field's end.

“I'm carrying your knife,” she said.

“Give it to me.”

6
◆
Charles

W
HEN IT GO
T
LATE
and Lyris didn't come home, Charles left her a note explaining that he had been called out on a job and had taken Micah with him.

He went to the boot room and unlocked a cabinet, from which he took the double-barreled Savage shotgun that, of his three long-barreled guns, most resembled the one held so dear by Farina Matthews. Outside, he opened the door of the pickup and exchanged the gun for the umbrella he kept as a joke in the gun rack. He leaned the umbrella on the porch and went upstairs and into Micah's room. The boy had fallen asleep in his clothes.

“Wake up,” said Charles. “Wake up. You're going on a sleepover.”

They drove down the road with the moon cruising lopsided and bright over the town and bridges and fields. Micah slept with an Indian blanket on his legs, his head nodding against the passenger window of the truck. Charles carried him crosswise into his mother's house, put him on the davenport, and settled the blanket over him. In sleep, the boy's innocence seemed so absolute that it was hard for Charles to imagine it would not last forever.

In the kitchen, wondering where Colette might be, he saw two black speakers in metal casings on the counter and heard a scrabbling noise coming from the cracked linoleum at his feet. As he watched, a double-stranded wire emerged from a small hole in the floor, frazzled ends extended.

“Mom?” he called.

“I'm in the cellar” came her muffled reply.

He went out behind the house and ducked under a clothesline hung with stiff worn dresses swaying in the wind. The bulkhead doors lay open, spilling pale light on the grass. Charles's mother was coming slowly up the stairs with wire cutters and electrical tape.

“I wonder if you could help me,” said Charles.

“I wonder if I could.” She stopped on the steps to turn off the light. “What time is it?”

“Eleven-thirty. I got called out on a job, but I'm watching Micah.”

Colette handed up the tape and the cutters. “Joan told me she was going away.”

“When'd you see Joan?”

“She came by yesterday, wanting me to ask Farina Matthews for that gun you like.”

“She knows my mind,” said Charles.

“What good would it do?”

“Probably none,” Charles agreed. “I've tried talking to Farina, but I get nowhere.”

“What do you want with it?”

“More than she does, I would think.”

“It didn't belong to your father anyway. It belonged to your sister Bebe's father.”

“I know.”

Colette pulled clothespins from the hanging wash and laid the dresses over Charles's arms. “Say you got it. So what?” she said. She led the way into the house, where Charles dropped the clothes into a wooden basket with broken slats.

“Now if you'll be so kind as to fetch up those wires,” she said.

“Micah's in the living room.” When he lifted the guillotine catches of the speakers and secured the wires, music began to play. It sounded like the wailing and mourning of many men.

“What are we listening to?”

“This is the Hilliard Ensemble, singing the ‘Mass for Four Voices' by Thomas Tallis,” said Colette. She picked up a CD case from the top of the stove and took out the accompanying booklet and read. “‘It is not possible for a man to rise above himself and his humanity,' says Montaigne. ‘We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.' What do you think? Agree? Disagree?”

The voices faded to silence and then began again. He pictured the singers climbing a steep rock, on top of which waited some fate that they were afraid of but that they had to face or they would never feel right. “It does hit home.”

“Doesn't it?”

“Who's Montaigne?”

“Some thinker of great degree, from the sound of it.”

“I'm going.”

“What happened, someone's pipes give out?”

“No one you know.”

“If it's true, I believe you,” said Colette.

They went to look at Micah, who slept with his face resting on hands that were pressed together in the attitude of prayer.

Charles left the
house and closed the door, but he could still
hear the voices of the Hilliard Ensemble. He took the roundabout route toward
Grafton, where Farina Matthews lived, and plunged his truck down a lane between two
cornfields. Then
he parked, put his feet
up on the seat and his back against the door, drank some whiskey and Coke from a
Mason jar, and went to sleep. When he woke, he looked at his watch and took the
gun from the rack behind the seat and walked through a field with the
sound of leaves rustling in his ears. Some odd hunter he made
in the black trough of the nighttime cornrow.

When the field ended, he climbed the fence and walked across the quiet yards of the town. On the back side of the widow's house, he leaned the shotgun against the clapboard, slit the screen above the weatherboard with a utility knife, and separated the hook from the eye that secured the screen. He rested the screen against the house, raised the sash, and went in, first one leg, then his torso, and then the other leg, not forgetting the shotgun, which he held in one hand, bringing it sideways through the open window. Mrs. Matthews's black Labrador came padding and panting into the room. He scratched the dog on the back of the neck. It collapsed, melted to the floor, turned on its side. Charles stood up and looked around. It had been a long time since he had stolen something, but he had no trouble finding the old thrill of it. In the wrong house, at the wrong time, he felt alive. But this wasn't stealing, anyway; it was more like trading.

In her bed, Farina Matthews dreamed in that familiar mode in which something that happened long ago is happening again, except with new fantastic touches that constitute the dream's imaginary or psychological aspect. She knew it was a dream while having it; it was lucid dreaming. She and the Reverend Matthews were driving along in their Edsel with the deep seats and pushbutton transmission, a car ahead of its time, although the dream reconstructed an incident from so long ago that by now both the car's actual time and the time it had been ahead of had well passed. They were going up to the hospital, where he would visit sick parishioners and she would distribute gifts to the new mothers. In those days hospitals did not hustle the women out the door as they do now but kept them languishing for days. The bewildered and isolated mothers were always happy to receive a basket of soaps and blankets and pacifiers, tied with ribbon. In the dream, however, the baskets were full of the kitchen rags from beneath Mrs. Matthews's sink.

On the way to the hospital they encountered a hitchhiker, and the reverend pulled over. An open trailer was hooked to the car, and she saw the man walking up past its wooden side. He had short hair and melancholy eyes and was dressed like a laborer. His name was Sandover. He was Charles's stepfather.

“Afternoon,” said the reverend. “Where you headed?”

“Morrisville.”

“Get in. What did you put in the trailer?” Farina's husband was always so observant. He could see rain on the horizon of what looked to anyone else like a clear day.

“A shotgun.”

“What are you going to do in Morrisville?”

“Well, I'll tell you. I got laid off at the molasses plant, and I heard they might be planning to call some back.”

“With the gun, though.”

“The gun I hope to register at a pawnshop.”

The reverend drove along for a while, then said, “I'll give you forty for it.”

“This is unexpected.”

“I'll give you sixty dollars and you can leave it right there in the trailer and save yourself going to the pawnshop.”

“The thing is, I'll want it back when the work starts up again and I can redeem the price.”

“That's a promise.”

“It's a good gun. It's light and it looks smart and it hardly kicks at all. And I think you'll find that it shoots accurate. But I should tell you it's a four-ten. It's not really a beginner's gun, although many consider it to be one, without thinking it through. Maybe you don't want to hear about this.”

“No, it's fascinating.”

“Well, some are of the opinion that you give a small-bore gun to a kid who's just starting off in their shooting. The problem is they won't be able to hit anything with it, and whatever they do hit, they might just wing, so that it gets down in the brush and runs, or drags along till it meets up with a fox or a hawk. Not that you want something too massive. A twenty-gauge isn't a bad idea. But the four-ten is more of a gun for the specialist.”

The reverend did not like to have anyone alter the position of his rearview mirror, so Farina turned to look at the back seat. Jack Sandover had opened one of the baskets and draped the rags up and down his arms. Now her son was in the back seat too, not grown, but still a child. “Stop the car,” her boy said. “At the rate we're going, I'll never get my doctorate.”

Farina's husband pulled over on the shoulder and they all got out to look in the trailer. The shotgun rested on a bed of straw. Sandover picked it up and began dismantling it, handing out the pieces of wood and metal. Then the car began moving, with the child behind the wheel. Farina ran after the car, dropping shotgun parts on the pavement while Sandover laughed. The steering wheel emerged from the window, for it had come off in the boy's hand. The Edsel veered from one side of the highway to the other, and thick black smoke rolled from the chassis.

The dream had turned ominous, and Farina woke herself by force of will. She got up and went to the bathroom for a drink of water. Waves of guilt seemed to travel down her back; what sort of guilt? she wondered. She looked in the mirror, noting sleep's contradictory effects. It made her look older but feel younger, with all the fears and anxieties of a young woman, uncertain of herself and what life would bring. Yet she told herself to wake up, because most of what life would bring had already arrived. She had her health and her income and her collection of miniature lighthouses, which seemed an ironic commentary on her never having seen a real one. Once there had been a fake lighthouse at a restaurant on the lake. Even here, in the middle of so much land, everyone thought of the sea, as if in genetic recollection of the Flood, looking out from the island of Ararat with perhaps a cardinal bird on each shoulder, the red male and the fawn female, if cardinals lived in that faraway place.

She drained the water glass and the dream came back to her in fragments — the rags on the man's arms, the crumbling gun, the sunlight sliding like oil over the Edsel's lavender hood. She did not know why the night had to be so heartbreaking, unless its simple loneliness served as an intimation of the final solitude. But she was not alone, or at least something unusual was going on. She heard the rapid thump of the dog's leg, its involuntary scratching, and she heard intermittent footfalls followed by long silences, as if someone were stepping on stones in a pool of water that rose to reclaim each rock once it had been disturbed, and she heard random small metallic clicks and scrapes that seemed to underscore the material nature of our lives. She had laughed last spring, reading of the high school's plan for a substance-free prom. She had imagined the disembodied seniors floating like wandering souls in a bottomless miasmal gymnasium.

Farina could not defend herself without a weapon, so she went to the closet and selected a cedar clothes hanger that was good stout wood on all three sides, with the image of an evergreen burned into its apex, below the hook. She moved silently, while conceding to herself that the correct approach might be to turn on the lights and make all kinds of noise. On the other hand, if the intruder were after her and not her television set or the good silver that came from Rainy Lake, then creating a racket would only be playing a high card to his inevitable trump. It surprised her how calm she felt. She did not want to lose the Rainy Lake silver, which was packed in a zippered burgundy case so well made that the forks could only be wrenched from their felt slots.

“Take the television,” she whispered. “Take the television and go.”

Charles lifted his stepfather's shotgun from the rack on which it rested and broke open the barrels to make sure no shells were inside. He laid the gun on the davenport before putting the other one in its place. Then he heard Mrs. Matthews moving slowly down the stairs. He could not get the shotgun and himself out the window before her arrival, so he sat down in a chair to wait for her. Best not to go running around, because a house with one gun may well have two. More shootings occur in mutual panic and confusion than when one of the parties is sitting in a chair. He might even turn on a light; yes, that would be a good idea. There was a lamp on a table next to the chair. It had one of those elusive cord switches, and as he groped up and down the cord for the notched wheel, Farina Matthews came into the room. Moving swiftly past the chair, she backhanded him on the bridge of the nose with a fragrant mallet. Tears fell from his eyes and his nose ran and his head filled with some awful decaying smell, but still he did not get up. He covered his face with his hands.

“Don't hit anymore,” he said. “It's Charles. Charles the plumber.”

She reached for the lamp cord, and the light came on. “You're bleeding.”

He breathed into the cave of his hands. “I came back for that shotgun.”

“I dreamed of it,” she said. “Let's get you out in the kitchen and off these rugs.”

Farina Matthews wrapped ice cubes in a rag from beneath the sink, and Charles sat in a chair in the middle of the kitchen floor, like someone getting a haircut. He dropped his head back and pressed the numbing cloth to his nose.