Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (39 page)

What in the hell did they do with all those fish? It was too late now to find out because it was winter and bad weather had closed the pond down in October.

It was a mystery, then, and would always remain a mystery forever because I never saw them again.

Growing bored with too many fish for too few people, David changed the subject. "When did you say you wanted to go shooting rotten apples in that old orchard?"

Today was Friday.

Tomorrow would be Saturday: no school.

"How about tomorrow?" I said.

"Fine, maybe it will make me forget about that thing in my dreams," David said. "I sure wish I knew what it looked like. I can almost see it but not quite."

"Shooting some apples will make you forget about it," I said, trying to be understanding.

"Yeah," he said, but he didn't look as if he believed it too much. "Let's meet at the Crossroads Filling Station. Tomorrow at noon. How many bullets do you have?"

"A box," I said. "Hollow points."

"I'll bring a box," he said. "Hollow points. We'll shoot even-stephen."

The Crossroads Filling Station was often a meeting place for us. It was a small, tired filling station run by an old man who wasn't much interested in selling gas. He sold worms to passing fishermen and pop to thirsty kids during the summer.

As I said earlier, when David and I saw each other we were by ourselves, alone most of the time. We had a secret friendship:

 

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust

 

I was there at the Crossroads Filling Station the next day with my gun and a box of bullets that could have been a hamburger if I had been lucky.

I arrived first and parked my bicycle and went and got a bottle of pop. I had my rifle under my arm. I was twelve years old and nobody paid any attention to a kid with a rifle standing in front of a filling station, drinking a root beer.

Needless to say, America has changed from those days of 1948. If you saw a twelve-year-old kid with a rifle standing in front of a filling station today, you'd call out the National Guard and probably with good provocation. The kid would be standing in the middle of a pile of bodies.

"Why did you shoot all these people?" would be one of the first questions asked after he had been disarmed.

"Because I don't like gym," would be the answer.

"You mean you shot all these people because you didn't like your gym class?"

"Not exactly."

"What do you mean, not exactly? What actually do you mean? There are twelve dead people here."

"McDonald's hasn't been putting enough of their special sauce on my Big Macs."

"You mean, you shot twelve people dead because you don't like gym? and you haven't been getting enough McDonald's special sauce on your hamburgers?"

The kid would look a little bewildered for the first
time after his interlude of carnage and then say, "You mean, those aren't enough good reasons? How would you like something like that to happen to you? Why don't you put yourself in my shoes?" the kid would say, getting into the back seat of the police car and most likely be on his way to parole eight years and seven months from now.

They'd let him out of prison when he was twenty-one, with a baby face and an asshole three inches wide.

"Going shooting?" the old man said, coming out of the filling station. He was rubbing his hands together because it was a cold, cloudy, damp day. It had rained all night and then stopped at mid-morning, around 9.

Everything smelled of rainy winter.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm going to try a little target practice."

"It's a good day for it," he said.

I didn't know exactly what he meant by that, but I said yes to humor him. Humored, he went back into the filling station to sit beside a pot-bellied stove and sell a few gallons of gas before dark.

He sold a lot of worms and a lot of pop there in the summer but because it was February, he would have to wait a few months for the fishing season to start and for it to get hot and pop-drinking weather.

I don't know why people didn't want to buy his
gasoline. He had a good location there at the Crossroads. There are a lot of life's mysteries which will always remain unsolved.

He didn't seem to care much, so I guess it was all right with him. Maybe the filling station was just an excuse for him to sell worms. There was a big lake ten miles away and he sold a hell-of-a-lot of worms in the summer because the road to the lake went right past his filling station. They were big worms called night crawlers and he bought them from us kids for a penny apiece.

We'd go out at night and pick them up off lawns using a flashlight to see them. The lawns had to be wet to bring the night crawlers out. Rainy nights were of course the best and freshly watered lawns came in second.

I caught my share of night crawlers and sold them to the old man. I would bring in a bucket of worms and he'd count them out very carefully and then give me a penny for each one. He never paid for them with quarters or fifty-cent pieces or dimes. It was always pennies. He counted out the pennies as carefully as he counted out the night crawlers.

Every day during the spring and summer, there would be kids bringing in worms to be counted and leaving with pennies to be spent. It was very simple, earthy capitalism: What crawled out of the ground soon became an ice-cream cone. Also, the old man
never turned away a worm, even when the fishing was slow out at the lake. He could always find room to count another worm and pay a penny for its counting, but most of the time he was very busy selling worms.

Gasoline was another story.

The old man's counting was constantly being interrupted by fishermen wanting to buy worms. He sold the worms in pint cartons with a bit of dirt and some wet moss in the cartons to keep the night crawlers fresh. Each carton contained a dozen worms.

When he was interrupted counting out either worms or pennies, he had a notebook that he wrote your first name down in, along with how many worms you brought in. He would count out all the worms and then count out all the pennies that he owed you.

If he was still counting out your worms when somebody drove up to buy a dozen, he would write down: Jack 18. That meant that he had counted out 18 worms and was still counting.

He would go out and sell some worms and then come back and start with 19. If he had counted out all your worms, say 175, he would write in his book: Jack Total 175, and then he would start counting out your pennies.

If he was interrupted when he was paying you, he would write this down in his notebook: Jack Total 175, 61 paid, and then he'd go out and sell some more worms and come back and start counting again at 62.

Our hands slowly filled up with pennies. They were always freshly minted. He went to the bank and got them. He wouldn't pay us with old pennies.

I don't know.

I think the only reason he had that filling station was that he liked to count worms and pennies. I can't think of another reason.

Can you?

He took care of his worm business in that part of the filling station that used to be the garage. Instead of putting cars up on the rack and finding out what was wrong with their brakes or transmissions or differentials or changing tires or doing anything that would help a car run better, he counted worms and pennies in the garage.

Where there should have been racks of tires, there were long wooden boxes filled with thousands of night crawlers and where there should have been cans of motor oil, there were stacks of pint boxes waiting to be filled with worms.

In his little office in the front, he kept a refrigerator to store the boxes of worms that were ready to sell. He had rigged the refrigerator so that the worms stayed cool in it but wouldn't freeze or suffocate. He called it his worm box. Because he spent so much time in the garage counting, he had a little bell outside the door of the office. There was a sign beside the bell that said:
RING FOR WORMS.

Maybe that's why he didn't sell very much gasoline.

It was probably easier for somebody who wanted to buy gas to find a filling station that didn't have a sign out front that said:
RING FOR WORMS.

I think a lot of people took advantage of that option because I doubt if he ever sold more than a few gallons a day and that would have been on a good day.

He had a huge cooler just outside of his office where he kept the pop. Every day in the summer he filled the cooler with big blocks of ice and the bottles of pop just floated there in the melting ice, making it the coldest and best-tasting pop in the world. That cooler of pop was a mecca for kids on a hot day. When you couldn't stand the heat any more, you knew that pop was waiting. The old man trusted kids. There was a tin can beside the cooler to put your nickels in or your pennies.

I wish that I could have a bottle of that pop right now.

David pedalled up to the filling station on his bicycle. He had his .22 across the handlebars. Again: it was not an unusual sight back in those days just after the War for kids to casually carry guns around with them.

"Want a pop?" the old man came out of his office and asked David.

"No, I'll wait for summer," David said.

"OK," the old man said. "Suit yourself."

He went back into the filling station to wait for summer.

We pedalled off toward the old abandoned apple orchard that was about three miles away. The day had grown darker and cloudier, but it wasn't very windy. The air was almost stationary with winter dampness. Everything had a slightly decayed, wet smell to it. This was in Western Oregon where the winters are usually just so much rain, days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months of just so much rain.

"How did you sleep last night?" I asked.

"I had that same dream," David said. "But it wasn't so bad. I wasn't afraid this time. I just had it and it went away. I couldn't see it, but I didn't really care."

"Well, I just dreamt about John Wayne," I said.

"What about him?" David said.

"Nothing," I said. "Just John Wayne doing all the things that he does."

"Were you in the dream?" David said.

"No."

"At least I was in my dream," David said.

"You're lucky," I said. "I was just watching it like a movie. I wanted to be in it, but I couldn't get out of my seat. I just had to sit there and watch it. I didn't even have a bag of popcorn."

There were very poor houses along the road to the orchard. People had built along there, I think, just after the First World War, but for some reason or another, it never really caught on as a place for people to live, so they just gradually moved away until now there were only people living in those houses who were very poor.

They had a lot of broken cars in their front yards that were never going anywhere again. The people just used the parts of those cars to try and put together cars that might work for a while. They were not gigantically successful at doing this.

All of their gardens had been crushed by winter storms and their corn patches were defeated and all akilter.

Sometimes dogs barked at us as we rode by, but the dogs were all so useless that they barely presented a threat. There were kids playing around the houses. The kids all looked defeated and out of kilter, too. Instead of being born, they just could have been ears of corn left over from last autumn's harvest.

Low, flat, gray smoke came from the chimneys of the houses. The smoke had a lot of trouble getting any distance into the air, so it just hung there like strange useless sheets that could have been hanging on an odd clothesline.

A kid about ten years old saw us coming and yelled at us when we pedalled by. "You sons-of-bitches all have bicycles!" he said. "I'll have a bicycle someday!"

Soon we had left his voice behind like a voice from a dream dreamt down the road, but I looked back into the dream and I could still see him yelling, but I couldn't hear a word. He was just another kid driven crazy by poverty and his drunken father beating him up all the time and telling him that he'd never amount to anything, that he would end up just like his father, which he would.

The old orchard was back in some hills about half a mile from the main road. We had to take a dirt road to get there. The road was narrow and very muddy and it was hard pedalling. There were no houses along the road. About the only thing there was were some abandoned farming equipment and broken-down fences that would never be repaired again.

The grass was a grayish yellow and had been beaten down by an endless series of hard winter storms that were our fate that autumn and winter.

The clouds were gradually lowering and it looked as if it might start raining any time, but we didn't care because we were Pacific Northwest kids and we were used to getting wet. It didn't bother us much at all. We were both wearing raincoats and rubber boots.

We continued pedalling up the road, slinging mud behind us off our rear wheels. It was very slow
going. Sometimes we had to get off our bicycles and push them.

No one had used the road in front of us for a long time, not since hunting season. Then pheasant hunters went up there and banged away, but the season had been over for months now and the road had not been used since then.

At the end of the road was a burnt-down farmhouse and half a barn. One half was still standing and the other half had just collapsed because it was too old to hold hands any longer with the rest of the barn.

"I'm always in my dreams," David said.

Maybe our friendship was based on the fact that he always told me about his dreams because he was constantly talking about them. They were our chief subject of conversation and he always initiated it.

As we pedalled along, I thought about that. We had known each other since July and I had certainly heard a lot about his dreams, especially the nightmare that he couldn't see.

I guess he never told any of his teammates or his parents about the dreams. I was certain that I was the only person he ever talked to about his dreams. I don't think he even mentioned them to his beautiful girlfriend.