Ragged Company (24 page)

“Yeah?” Dick asked. “They let you?”

“They let you, all right. Especially a wealthy man like you. I’ll get them to move you to a private room as soon as the doctor thinks you’re ready.”

“Okay. Digger?”

“Yeah, pal?” Digger asked.

“You wanna watch movies with me in my room?”

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

“Okay. You choose then. You go get us some from a movie store an’ we’ll watch until they let me out of here.”

We spent an hour or so talking around that bed. It felt good. Granite, James, and Margo joined right in, and as I stood there and watched these friends standing knee deep in relief together I felt mighty grateful. There was no way in the world that seven people like us could have ever found each other. There was no way that the lives we lived before could have ever brought us
together across so much time and distance, sorrow and longing, living and dying. Well, there
was
a way, in fact. It was a magic way. A mystery way. A great mystery way like Grandma One Sky had talked about a long time ago. The hand of Creation moving in mystery, bringing teachings to us in the smallest things. I looked around me. In that hospital where so many lives had turned, where so many sorrows were born and losses taken, there were no shadowed ones around us. I expected them. But in that room right then the light of friendship, alive and powerful, burned away all shadow and there was no room for them to stand. I smiled at that.

The nurses came and told us that Dick needed to rest. They were giving him medicine to help him with the hangover. He’d had so much that they were afraid he might have a seizure, so keeping him calm was important.

“Amelia? Can I talk to you in private?” Dick asked.

“Yes,” I said.

The others said their goodbyes and left the room. I took Dick’s hand in mine.

“What is it, Dick?”

“You know how I don’t like dreamin’? How it scares me?”

“Yes.”

“An’ you know how I drink so I don’t have ’em an’ how that always helps me get through the night most times?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I didn’t have no dreams. I was asleep a long time there an’ I didn’t have no dreams.”

“That’s good. You needed to rest.”

“Do you think the money made ’em go away? Could it do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. What do you think?”

He turned his head and looked out the window, lay there quietly for a minute or so. “It was quiet where I was. I don’t know where that was but I know it was real quiet on accounta nothing woke me up. I just kinda opened my eyes when I was ready. So I think maybe I wanna buy some quiet with my money. Maybe if
I buy enough quiet then the dreams’ll go away. Can you do that? Can you have enough money to buy quiet?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think you can do that. It sounds like what I’d want to spend my money on too, Dick. Quiet. It’s nice to think about.”

“Okay,” he said. “I need to sit with Digger now. I don’t want him to feel bad no more about what happened.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re a good man, Dick.”

He grinned at me and I walked into the hall to join the others.

I
SAT WITH HIM
for five days while he got better. They got him a good room that next morning and we had us a TV and a movie player right off the bat. The others came and stood around for a while but I kinda figured they figured that me ’n Dick was having some time together and left us alone to do that. We musta watched a hundred movies in that room. Me ’n Dick were friggin’ amazed at how many you could get to watch on your television set. It was kinda like heaven. We never said word one about the party or about him slipping away like he did. Instead, we just watched movies and we laughed. Fuck. I didn’t even hardly drink. When I did I’d slip into Dick’s bathroom and have a little swallow but not enough to bug him by getting tight or nothing. After five days he was ready to leave and we made it back to the hotel finally. I was actually glad to be there, and that friggin’ amazed me. I never stopped to think that for five nights me ’n Dick was inside. Inside. In between walls. Off the street. It just kinda happened and when I finally realized it, I was in my room, towelling off after a good hot shower, trying to find a movie to watch on the television. There I was in between walls. I walked over to the big windows in my room and hauled open the thick heavy drapes. There it was. The city. The streets. It all kinda lay below me like something you forgot you had. Seeing it again surprises the shit out of you and you want to pick it up again and feel it, remember,
recollect, remind yourself of somewhere you mighta travelled once or somewhere you mighta been. Then you just put it back on the shelf or in the corner where it sat and keep on moving wherever you happen to be moving at the time. That’s what I did. I kept right on moving.

We made it to
Field of Dreams
the night Dick came out of the hospital. All of us. All seven of us. And when we walked into that movie house there wasn’t any fuss at all about us being there. We were dressed good. We were clean. We were seven regular movie-loving people out to catch another flick and the forgotten thing—the street—was just something we were walking on to get there.

The movie was about baseball. Or at least it started out that way. It was about a guy having to make a baseball field out of his farmland so some dead ballplayer could get to play again. Not really my kind of thing. Not enough action and lights for me. But it got to me. Everyone had a reason for being where they were in that movie. Everyone had something important to do so the story could move where it was supposed to move, and as I looked along that row of people I was a part of that night, I wondered what I was supposed to do. I wondered why I was there.

Rock said that the others would follow me. Follow me where, I wondered. They followed me to a drinking party and it almost cost us big time. Then near the end of that movie the big black guy gets invited to go where the dead players go every night. He gets invited into the mystery and he says something like “if I have the courage to do this, what a story it’ll make.”
What a story it’ll make.
That’s what I heard. I figured if I had the courage to go where this money could take me, into this mystery place, maybe it’d make a pretty good story too. I didn’t know what was out there. I didn’t know what would happen when we got there. I didn’t know nothin’ about nothin’. But I knew that I had to go there. For them. For my friends.

If you build it, they will come.
That was the other thing I heard. I remembered me ’n Dutch standing at the back of the big semi looking at the wheel all piled on the flatbed, all pulled apart and empty laying there. When I put my hands on those pieces of steel
there wasn’t nothing in them. No energy. No motion. But as we raised the wheel to the sky it got to be something. Bolt by bolt we put something magic together, and when we were done it wasn’t empty no more and neither was I. I’d stand in the crossbrace and look across the midway, across this field that held the dreams of all those people that would come because they saw the lights of the wheel spinning around and around against the sky, and I’d hold my hands a little tighter on the cables and struts of that wheel and feel it thrumming and pulsing and I felt like a magician. I felt alive. Alive as the wheel.

There were four and a half million pieces to put together here. And later, as I stood at the window in that hotel room far above the city watching them lights twinkle and dance and shine like tiny eyes looking up at me, I felt like I stood in the crossbraces of another great wheel in the sky. A wheelman. Someone who could build it from the ground up. It didn’t scare me like it shoulda then. It didn’t make me wanna bolt and run back to what I knew. It didn’t even make me wanna drink it all away. No. Instead, it made me wanna finally get over that far horizon, my horizon, our horizon, and see the life I could live on the other side.

I
WALKED
. I still walked. Every morning I’d get up before sunrise and wander the streets. The others would all be asleep, even Digger, and I’d move through the house we bought on Indian Road and get ready for the street. Digger had discovered coffee makers that turned on automatically like alarm clocks and he set it for me so there’d be a hot cup when I woke. He’d discovered a lot of gadgets in those months since we won the lottery. There were gizmos that turned the outside lights on and off at a certain time each night and morning, gadgets that let you tape a TV show or movie while you watched another one, and even one that turned our bedside lamps on when we clapped our hands. It never failed to surprise me when Digger came home trundling another box of something. The world was filled with thingamajigs, doohickeys, and doodads, and Digger seemed to be able to find all of them. I liked it. It made the house a curious place. It made it irregular, and irregular suited me fine in a neighbourhood of sameness and predictability.

We bought a big three-storey house with an attic. We decided that if money meant we had to live inside, we might as well live inside together. So James Merton, Granite, and Margo had found a real estate guy and we’d toodled around the city looking for some digs that would be big enough for us to have our private spaces. We found this place after about a month. Indian Road was
close to one of the biggest parks in the city and known as a quiet, stable area filled with hard-working people with families who’d been in the same house for years and years. I actually liked it. It took a few weeks to get used to it, and I didn’t sleep much, but just knowing that there was someone down the hall to talk to if I woke up feeling heebie-jeebied made it easier. My room was in the attic. We fixed it up and made it into a living area with skylights and big triangle windows at each end so I could look out across the skyline at night. It was like street digs almost, all tucked away and quiet.

But I still needed to walk. I don’t know why really, only that something inside me was tied to the concrete and straight lines of curb and gutter, something that needed to know that it was all still there, that it hadn’t been a dream, that I had been a rounder and the street had framed my life for years.

The others understood and they let me do my thing without comment or question. I’d get up and move quietly through the house gathering my coat and shoes, hat and gloves, moving through the darkness easily like I had through the boarded-up buildings I used to squat in once upon a time. I’d coffee up, sitting on the back porch with a cigarette, and then I’d step out the door, down the steps, and onto the sidewalk that led around the house to the front where it bordered the driveway and tumbled down a slight incline to the street. I’d stand there at the end of the driveway and look back at the house. It stood against the morning sky like a living thing, all hushed up and quiet, its lines and edges sharp as solitary decisions made in darkness. It sat there heavy and solid. A place to come back to. A place to remain. I’d look and see it, follow its lines from the roof to the bottom step leading from the front veranda and down to where I stood anchoring it in my head.

Then I’d do what I started doing the very first time I took a morning walk. I knelt in the street. Knelt down and put my hand on the curb and felt the pocked surface of the concrete. It felt like it always had: rough, cold, unyielding; but I felt it every morning anyway. Felt it on the palm of my hand, rubbed it, anchored it in
my soul. Then I followed it with my eyes as it flowed down Indian Road, past the grand old houses, the manicured yards, the shiny cars, the kids’ bicycles, the discarded toys, and onward to the corner, where it split like choice. I imagined it from there, snaking through the city leading a wanderer through neighbourhoods, areas, zones, and boroughs, linking everything it passed, tying it all together in a long, flowing vein until it reached the inner city. It always led back there. Always. So I’d kneel in the street and feel the concrete, follow it in my mind to its inescapable returning, and then I’d stand, heave a breath, and start to walk.

I walked down Indian Road. I walked through the park. I walked through adjoining neighbourhoods. I walked in a haphazard loop that led me back to the house after a couple of hours. I never measured it. I never wondered how far I’d gone. I just walked, feeling the street moving beneath my feet like it had for years. I liked the feel of the city waking up around me. It was a strange comfort for me to hear the hum of wheels growing louder and louder, punctuated by slamming doors, the whoosh of bus doors, the clank of garbage cans, the cawing of crows, the twitter of songbirds, the chatter of squirrels, and eventually, the voices of the people starting their days. Walking that way that early made me feel a part of it at the same time that I felt detached, removed, isolated from it, and it took me a few weeks to realize that I was recreating the feeling I’d had as a rounder. Part of the flow but removed from it all, like an island in a stream. I guess that’s why I liked it. Why I needed it. To remind me that I was still a rounder despite the money, despite the house, despite the fact that I slept indoors and my life was contained. Still a rounder, still what I knew.