The Dream Life of Astronauts (8 page)

“Boy's dad got hit by a train,” Gary said from the bench.

I told him I already knew that, too. I told him I was busy.

“Busy doing what?”

“Whatever it is you're not doing,” I said, picking up a stack of empty crates. “Why don't you go play with your pecker?”

He got up from the bench, but then he just stood there. “Why don't you go p-play with your cooter?”

Cooter, for godsake. He scooped up his gloves and walked out of the barn.

It was July and it was hot. I still felt like a kid around the Beals every now and then, which was okay, but I wanted to feel like a grown-up around Gary and sometimes that was a challenge. I finished clearing the stall and then walked out and stood on the gravel between the barn and the house. Every window I could see was wide open, even the rooms the Beals didn't use. Mrs. Beal was playing one of her records, some ancient swing music. It filtered out through the windows, sounded further away than it was. I walked over to the oak tree, put my boot against the base, grabbed the lowest branch, and hoisted myself up. The tree was taller than the house. I heard Mrs. Beal's record fade out and then come back again when I climbed past the second-story windows. I climbed as high as I could, until the branches got thin enough to scare me.

From that height I could still make out the flattened tracks in the grass from where Mr. Beal and I had driven out to the pond two weeks earlier. There'd been a storm in the middle of the night and a tree had been struck by lightning, the snap-bang of it waking us all up. Mr. Beal had come out of the house and I'd come out of the barn and we'd both squinted into the dark, against the rain, but we couldn't see anything. So the next day we'd driven out to the pond and had found the tree lying on its side, the trunk going right down into the water. There wasn't much we could do about it.

I saw the Nova turn onto the gravel drive from the road. Mr. Beal stopped at the gate, got out to open it, rolled through, and then stopped again to close the gate behind him. Then he stopped in front of one of the cows and honked until it moseyed out of the way. I heard Mrs. Beal's music cut off as the car reached the house, and I hung on to the branch and leaned out so I could see better. The top of her gray head appeared as she came down the steps. Her arms were stretched out in front of her. Mr. Beal stepped from the car and walked around to the passenger door, but it opened before he got to it. “This must be Ike,” said Mrs. Beal.

He was small, from what I could tell, and he had a small, brown suitcase in his hand. He was a towhead.

Gary came out of the house and stood near Mrs. Beal. Mrs. Beal reached down and hugged Ike like she'd known him her whole life. Then the four of them went into the house. After a few minutes, I heard Mr. Beal laughing and the record started again.

Ike wasn't ten, it turned out. He was eight. They introduced me to him that night—“Ike, this is our Hannah”—and the five of us ate dinner together. Mrs. Beal had baked what she called a no-surprise orange pie, all the browned orange slices showing on the top of it, and I didn't even like oranges, so I didn't have any of it. After the meal, we moved into the den, where Mr. Beal sipped coffee and Gary showed Ike his comic books. I sat at Mr. Beal's rolltop desk and watched the two of them. Mr. Beal had little use for a rolltop desk, but it had come in with one of the deliveries from Mr. Merrick and had never been moved on to someplace else, so eventually we'd carried it into the house. Gary and Ike looked at comic book after comic book—all of them found in a box of old magazines that had been part of one of the deliveries, though Gary acted like he'd been collecting comic books for years. Mrs. Beal watched the two of them with a glint in her eyes. Bored, I started going through the desk drawers and found a box of matches. I took one out, turned it in my hand, scratched the sulfur end against one of the brass drawer handles. It flared up and I shook it, hoping none of them had noticed, but when I glanced at Mr. Beal, he was eyeing me over his coffee.

Mrs. Beal asked Ike if he liked it here and Ike said he did. Then Mr. Beal coughed up what sounded like a dumpling and started to tell Ike all about Mr. Merrick, how Mr. Merrick lived in a big house near the south end of Merritt Island, how he provided everything we needed, and how he wanted what was best for us and that was why we were all here together. I listened for a while, then got up and said good night.

“Stay a little longer, Hannah,” Mrs. Beal said.

But I shook my head and walked out of the house. Outside, the dirt and the barn looked the same shade of dark, and the gravel was glowing with moonlight. I dragged my feet over the gravel, listening to it move under my boots as I made for the barn.

T
he next morning I was in the garden on my hands and knees, pulling up weeds, when I heard a voice ask what kind of animals I took care of. I looked around and saw Ike standing there, holding a milk carton.

“Where'd you get that?” I asked.

“The old lady gave it to me.”

“She gave you the whole thing?”

“There's only a little left in it. She said I could have it.” He asked me again what kind of animals I took care of.

“I'm not a zookeeper. There's cows, but I try not to have anything to do with them. And if you walk out that way far enough, there are gators who'd probably love to eat you.”

He upended the carton and finished off the milk. “In Jacksonville, there was a man who had a monkey he kept chained to a tree in his front yard.”

“That's great,” I said. “I'm busy.”

“The old lady said you'd show me the lake.”

“It's not a lake. It's barely even a pond.”

“She said you'd show it to me.”

I ignored that for a little bit. Then I stood up, smacked my hands against my knees, pulled my handkerchief out of my back pocket and dragged it over my face.

The carton was standing on the ground now next to his feet, and he was staring at me, the milk drying on his lip. I figured it was probably a safe bet Mrs. Beal was watching us from the house.

“Come on,” I said, and started walking.

We crossed the yard. I hopped the fence and watched Ike climb up one side of it and down the other. Then we made our way out into the field. He walked with his hands in his pockets, taking extra steps to keep up with me. What would it be like, I wondered, to have friends who weren't half-pints, or half-wits, or old people? What would it be like, at seventeen, to know other girls—just
one
other girl—who would want to spend time together without having to talk about every stupid thing under the sun? I had to remind myself sometimes that I'd once lived in a town a whole county away, in an apartment down the street from a school my mom would send me off to and tell me to behave at, and I had friends in that town, and we made dollhouses out of Saltine boxes and stole Cokes from the drugstore and changed the secret password every week for the club we'd formed that we didn't want anyone else to join (not that anyone else even knew about it, since the club was secret). I had to remind myself sometimes that I'd had that life. That I'd had almost seven years of schooling, in a real school. That if my dad hadn't taken off and my mom hadn't gotten sick, I wouldn't be here at all.

When we got to the pond, Ike climbed right up on the lightning-struck tree that was sunk down into the water. He said, “You catch fish in here?”

I leaned against the trunk. “There aren't any fish. Mosquitoes, but no fish.”

He was peering down at the water like he was trying to spot fish, never mind what I'd told him, and he had his fingers on some kind of pendant hanging from his neck. I asked what it was.

“My mom gave it to me.”

I asked if I could see it.

Without hesitating, he pulled the chain over his head and reached down to hand it to me.

The pendant had one round edge and one jagged edge and was stamped with words.
The Lord between thee we are one another.
“It doesn't make any sense,” I said.

“Her half's got the other words,” he said. “It's a prayer.”

I let the necklace pool in my hand and bounced it up and down a little. I knew that with a toss I could have it out in the middle of the pond. With a toss, I could ruin his day.

I handed it back to him and started walking. “That's the pond,” I said.

He followed me, and by the time I reached the garden he was already starting up the porch steps, calling for Gary.

M
r. Merrick took his time sending the feed sacks over. I carried buckets of water out to the troughs for the cows, and worked in the garden, and watched Gary and Ike playing in the yard. They'd hide from each other and find each other. They'd sit in Mr. Beal's Nova and steer and make noises. I pulled every weed I could find, but the garden still looked ragged.

At dinner, Mrs. Beal would ask us how our day had been, and Gary would tell her everything he and Ike had done together. Then she'd ask what I'd done and I'd say I'd worked and waited for the feed. On the fourth night, while Mrs. Beal was in the kitchen cutting up dessert, Mr. Beal mentioned how he'd met Ike's father once and how he was a respectable man. “He had an eye for chickens,” he said. “He could always pick the winners at a 4-H fair.”

I half-suspected he was making this up and had, in fact, never met Ike's dad. “That's not so hard,” I said. “A fat chicken looks like a fat chicken.”

For a moment, the only sound was what was coming through the windows: field crickets and frogs.

Ike looked at me with half his face scrunched up. “Where's
your
dad?”

“Somewhere else. Like your mom.”

“Hannah.” Mr. Beal shifted in his chair. “Why don't you go see if Mother needs any help?”

In the kitchen, Mrs. Beal was sinking a big knife into a pound cake, making slices for the plates she'd laid out. I leaned against the wall by the back door. The kitchen was painted yellow and it made the one lightbulb seem brighter than it really was. I watched her wipe the knife on a dish towel between slices. With her back to me, she said, “You know he's just getting used to everything.”

“What's to get used to?” I asked.

Instead of answering, she said, “It seems like you two would get along fine. Just seems like you naturally would.”

I heard the blade connecting with the plate. “We're not family.”

“But you could be. You've both lost people, and you're both here now.” She set the knife down in the sink.

“Doesn't matter to me.”

“Well, it should.” She gathered up two plates in each hand and motioned for me to get the remaining one.

Pound cake was a far shot better than no-surprise orange pie, but I was done being around all of them for the night. I told her I'd have mine tomorrow.

Then I was down the hall and outside, crossing the gravel, crawling up the ladder to my loft in the barn. I'd never talked to the Beals about my dad, and they'd never really asked—at least, not a question as direct as Ike's. I always assumed Mr. Merrick had given the Beals the story on both my parents, which meant that at some point my mom must have given Mr. Merrick the story on my dad. That was enough for anyone to know, wasn't it? It should have been, if it wasn't.

W
hen I walked out of the barn the next afternoon, there were at least a dozen cows milling around the house. A few of them were sitting in the shade of the oak tree. One of them had its face up to the dining room window.

I ran toward the gate that separated the driveway from the field and before I got there I could see it was wide open. A cow on the other side tried her footing on the cattle guard, jumped over it, and walked toward the house like she had a bone to pick with someone inside. Ike was sitting cross-legged in the grass next to the fence.

“Did you open this gate?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “The old man left it open when he drove his car into town.”

“Then why the hell didn't you close it?”

He pointed at the metal grill set into the trench across the driveway. “Gary told me those things are supposed to keep them from getting across.”

I grabbed the gate and shoved it closed. “Any moron can see they don't work. You could have closed the gate and saved us a lot of trouble. It's going to take hours to get these cows back out to the field.”

I was angrier than I needed to be, but I couldn't help it. He stood up and looked toward the house, then started running.

“Get back here, you jackass!” I hollered.

The screen door slammed behind him.

When you have a dozen cows in one open area and you need to get them to another open area, it's not exactly a breeze. Not without a dog, or another person. You clap at two cows, and one of them walks in the opposite direction you want it to. You get three lined up to move and two of them drift away, like canoes. It didn't take all afternoon to get them back out to the field, but it took a chunk of it. By the time I went in for lunch there wasn't any, just the stale slice of pound cake from the night before. I waved a fly off of it and carried it out to the barn.

The stall I'd cleared for Mr. Merrick's feed was empty, but looked like the dirtiest thing I'd ever seen. I swept it, then swept it again. There was always more dirt. By the time I had it in somewhat better shape, my nose and eyes felt clogged with grit. I was heading out to wash up at the hose when Gary walked in. I started past him, but he stepped in front of me.

“Don't call him any more names,” he said.

I told him to get out of the way, but he took hold of my forearm.

“Leave him alone.”

“I'm in a bad mood, so you ought to just watch it.”

“Sh-
shit
,” he said—the first time I'd ever heard him swear. “You've been in a b-bad mood since the day I met you.”