Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (40 page)

If I had a girlfriend like her, I'd tell her all about my dreams, but maybe the reason I didn't have a girlfriend like her was because my dreams were so boring.

But I'm certain he never told her any of his dreams. I guess their friendship was built on things other than dreams, though as I said earlier, he never mentioned her to me.

Once I asked him about her and he changed the subject to Joe DiMaggio's batting average. I didn't pursue it after that because I had absolutely no interest in Joe DiMaggio's batting average. I was a big fan of Ted Williams.

"You don't seem to be in your dreams," David said, as we neared the burnt-down old farmhouse.

"I try," I said.

"I don't even have to try," he said. "I'm just automatically there. I have no choice."

We got off our bicycles.

The first drops of heavy rain started falling, but there was quite a bit of distance between the drops. They were falling very slowly and you could almost walk around them if you were interested in doing that.

The trees in the old apple orchard were filled with rotten apples. We loaded our guns and started banging away. It was a tremendous lot of fun to watch the effect of a bullet hitting a rotten apple. They just simply exploded and the bullet continued on viciously scratching white grooves in the still-living branches of the apple trees.

We both had boxes of hollow points and they
could really show an apple who was boss. We shot up about twenty rounds apiece and then David decided to walk down to the other end of the orchard where there were some thick bushes because sometimes pheasants hung out down there. I think he liked shooting in the orchard rather than the garbage dump because he was interested in maybe shooting a pheasant, which he was never able to do.

So he went down to the other end of the orchard to see if he could find one to shoot. I sat down on a huge fallen apple branch and waited for him to come back. I sat there wondering why the people had let the orchard go back to nature.

Maybe when their house burnt down they just didn't care to live there any more because it was a sign of bad memories and the apple orchard was a character in their bad memories.

They weren't even interested in selling apples any more. A lot of bad things happen to people in this life that they just don't want to be reminded of, so they move away and try living someplace else where they can forget unpleasant things like their house burning down, and start all over again and build up some good memories.

The big drops of cold gray rain continued falling all around me and the sky was growing lower and lower. It seemed to want to touch the top of the apple trees like putting a gray tent over them.

I was getting a little wet but it didn't bother me.

I sat there continuing to think about David and our dream friendship.

I wondered how it had all gotten started in the first place. It's not an easy thing for a friendship to be founded on one person telling another person about his dreams, but they were the main ingredients of our friendship, and especially the one dream that baffled him so much, the thing that frightened him, the thing that he could almost see, but not quite.

There was something in his mind that kept it out of arm's reach. Though he tried and tried, he couldn't touch it, so he was constantly telling me all about what was not visible to him.

I was interested but not that interested, though I pretended to be because I wanted his friendship, even if it was based mostly on dreams.

Then I heard his .22 go off.

It snapped me alert and I heard the noise of a pheasant rooster coming my way. The bird sounded like a rusty airplane. The bird was coming right at me. I could see him skimming over the grass toward me.

Involuntarily, I snapped my gun up and got a shot off, quite obviously missing the bird that sailed right on past me, heading toward the burnt-down farmhouse and the collapsed barn.

There was a moment for the sound of the gun to disappear along with the pheasant. Then everything
was very quiet, and I could hear the rain falling again, big February drops like small self-contained reservoirs.

The plopping of the rain would cause a beautiful green spring in a few months but I wouldn't be there to see it. I hadn't even stood up when I fired the gun. I just cracked off the shot and I had missed the bird by so much that I didn't even try for a second shot. I just turned my head and watched him disappear down around the collapsed barn.

Realizing that the bird and the accompanying shot had come from the direction David had gone in, I got up and yelled down the orchard, "You missed him!" I didn't think that he must already have known that because he heard me shoot.

Then I wondered where David was. He should have come back up this way by now. He always liked to get a second shot at a pheasant, so he would have wanted to track it down.

Where was David?

"David!" I yelled. "It came up this way! It's down by the barn!"

David did not answer.

Normally, he was very enthusiastic about stalking and shooting at pheasants with his .22, though I don't recall him ever having shot one, but he never stopped trying. They were like trying to see his dream.

"David!"

Silence

I started down there through the heavy wet grass. I knew that he couldn't be more than a hundred yards away.

"David!"

More silence

"David!"

Silence growing longer, heavier

"Can you hear me?"

I was almost there now—"David!"—and then I was there. David was sitting on the ground, holding the upper part of his right leg with both of his hands and there was blood spurting regularly between his fingers.

His face was very pale and his features had a dreamy expression to them, as if he had just awakened or maybe was falling asleep.

The blood was very red and it just kept coming. He seemed to have an endless supply of it.

"What happened?" I said, bending down to look at all the blood that was now covering the ground. I had never seen so much blood before in my entire life, and I had never seen blood that was so red. It looked like some kind of strange liquid flag on his leg.

"You shot me," David said.

His voice sounded very far away.

"It doesn't look good."

I tried to say something but my mouth was completely dry as if it had been suddenly sandblasted.

"I wish it would hurt," he said. "But it doesn't hurt. Oh, God, I wish it would hurt."

The bullet had severed the femoral artery in his right leg.

"If it doesn't start hurting soon, I'm going to die," David said. Then he kind of rolled very slowly over on his side as if he were falling out of the world's slowest chair. He kept holding his leg that was now just a sea of February orchard blood. He looked up at me with eyes that were disappearing right in front of me. They would be gone in a minute.

"Did I get the pheasant?" he asked.

"No," my voice blew out of the Sahara. It continued blowing. "I'm sorry. I didn't see you. I just saw the pheasant coming at me, and I fired. I didn't know where you were."

"I didn't get it, huh?"

"No."

"Just as well," David said. "You can't eat when you're dead. No good," he said. "
No good.
" He let go of his leg and rubbed his eyes with his bloody hands as if he were trying to see straight because everything had grown fuzzy. The blood on his face made him look like an Indian.

OH, GOD!

"I'll go and get some help. You'll be all right," I said. I'd just started to run when he stopped me by saying, "Do you know that thing in my dreams?"

"Yeah," I said.

"I'm never going to see it now," David said:

 

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

 

I was acquitted by the court of any negligence in the shooting. I told exactly what had happened and they believed me. I had no reason to shoot him. I was just supposed to listen to his dreams.

David was buried three days later on Tuesday and all the kids in school stopped talking to me.

He was a very popular boy and they retired his basketball jersey. There was a glass case full of trophies in the front hall of the gym and they put his basketball jersey in the case along with a photograph of him and a brass plaque that told his name and how much he was admired for his sportsmanship and academic qualities. The plaque also said that he was born March 12th, 1933, and died February 17th, 1948.

David would have been fifteen in a month.

We were off Welfare and my mother was working
now as a waitress. It was a small town and her tips stopped, so...

There wasn't much point in us hanging around there any more. I got in half-a-dozen fights at school. They weren't my fault. The only thing that was my fault was that I didn't buy that hamburger. If I had only wanted a hamburger that day, everything would have been completely different. There would be another person still living on the planet and talking about his dreams to me.

My mother kept telling me that it wasn't my fault.

"I should have bought a hamburger," I said.

She was very patient and didn't ask me what I was talking about.

We had this exchange a dozen or so times.

Finally, she said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"It doesn't make any difference," I said.

Later on that year, after we had moved, and I had taken up my obsessive search for salvation by trying to find out everything there was to know about the hamburger, my mother said to me one day, right out of the blue, startling me because she hadn't made a single comment about my hamburger research, though she was quite aware that it was going on: "Maybe you should have bought the hamburger."

I had never told her about the hamburger decision I had made that led to the box of bullets, so I was surprised even more when she told me that I should have bought the hamburger.

"It's too late now," I said.

She went into the other room without saying anything.

The next day I brought a complete end to my hamburger research. I took all my notes and interviews and assorted documents down to the river that flowed by the new town we were exiled to and burned them in a picnic stove that was beside a very sad little Oregon zoo that barely had any animals and they were all wet because it was raining again as was the fate of that land.

An extremely wet and skinny-looking coyote stood on the other side of his Cyclone fence in a pathetic little compound and watched me burn too many pieces of paper dealing with the origin, refinement and other possibilities of the hamburger.

When all my papers were finally burned and the ashes stirred into oblivion the coyote walked away.

Leaving the zoo, I passed the cage of a black bear. He had a grizzled face. He was staring at the wet cement floor of his cage. He didn't look up as I walked by. I wonder why I still remember him after all these years. He's probably dead now. Bears don't live forever, but I remember him:

 

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

 

Well, there you have it and now I have released the two people from their paralyzed photograph of 32 years ago, and their truck filled with furniture is coming down the road toward the pond.

The truck rattled to a stop and they got out. They were not surprised to see me because I was their uninvited houseguest, almost every night.

"Hello," they both said in very slow unison that sounded as if it had originated quite close to Oklahoma. It was not a big friendly hello nor was it a little unfriendly hello. I just said a simple hello hello. I think they were still making up their minds about me.

I was sort of on probation, but I felt as if I were making some progress toward developing a minor pond comrades-in-catfish friendship with them. I had all summer to get to know them. I would outlast them.

Last week they asked me if I wanted to sit down on their couch with them, though that was very difficult because they both were so big that they practically took up the entire couch themselves. I barely made it on the couch with them like the last final squeeze of toothpaste from a tube.

They were both in their late thirties and over six
feet tall and weighed in excess of 250 pounds, and they both wore bib overalls and tennis shoes. I haven't the slightest idea what they did for a living because they never said a single word about what kind of job they did.

I had a feeling whatever they did for a living, they did together. They were the kind of people who looked as if they were never apart. I could see them coming to work together, working together, having lunch together and always wearing the same clothes. Whatever they did required that they wear bib overalls and tennis shoes.

I could see them filling out employment forms.

Under the line that asked about previous experience. They just put down "bib overalls and tennis shoes."

I also had a feeling that whatever they did, they came directly from work to the pond. I don't think they changed their clothes because different, but always matching pairs of bibs and tennis shoes were their entire wardrobe.

I could imagine them even having special overalls and tennis shoes for church with the rest of the congregation sitting apart from them.

Well, whatever they did for a living hadn't made them rich because the furniture on the back of their truck was well-worn and looked as if it had not been very expensive to begin with. It looked like ordinary
used furniture or the stuff you'd find in any furnished apartment where the rent was cheap.

Their furniture was a replica of the furniture that I had lived with all my twelve years. New furniture has no character whereas old furniture always has a past. New furniture is always mute, but old furniture can almost talk. You can almost hear it talking about the good times and troubles it's seen. I think there is a Country and Western song about talking furniture, but I can't remember the name.

After their perfunctory hello to me, they took the couch off the truck. They were both so efficient and strong that the couch came off the back of the truck like a ripe banana out of its skin. They carried it over to the pond and put it down very close to the water's edge, so they could fish right off it, but still leaving enough space so as not to get their tennis shoes wet.