The Dream Life of Astronauts (9 page)

I stared hard into his eyes, put my hand on top of his and squeezed it, then lifted it off my arm. “Go to hell,” I said. “Both of you.”

I pushed past him and walked outside.

T
he rest of the day I spent walking along the edge of the grove, as far away from the house and the barn as I could get and still be on the property. The workers were up and down their ladders, picking oranges as fast as their hands could move. Some had burlap sacks hanging from their shoulders, some had baskets with leather straps. They filled whatever they had, climbed down, found the truck they were assigned to, and dumped their oranges into it while a foreman on a folding chair kept track. There were all kinds of day workers—white ones, black ones, in-between ones (Cubans, I guess), some who looked almost as young as Ike and some who looked even older than the Beals. The ones I was watching on my walk around the perimeter didn't talk to one another much and didn't stop moving. I thought it might not be so bad, picking oranges for Mr. Merrick. You'd get shade when you were up in the trees, have plenty to do, wouldn't have to talk to other people too much. I was standing next to the furthest fence from the house, with the grove on one side and the swamp on the other, when one of the day workers noticed me looking at him. He was tanned red from the sun, had deep creases in his face, and looked like he could have been somebody's grandfather. He was halfway up a ladder, his fedora pushed back on his head. I was about to say hi when he said, “Keep walking, you green-moneyed bitch.”

I kept walking, and walked faster once I was out of his sight. I followed the chain-link fence because I didn't want to cut through the grove, and I was all but running when I got to the end of it. My heart was pounding in my ears. I started toward the field, and just as I cleared the grove, I spotted Ike in the distance. He was back at the pond, sitting up on the fallen tree.

I would have walked in another direction, but he had already seen me, had maybe even seen how fast I was going, so I made myself slow down. Pushed my hands into my pockets. Wandered toward him.

“Hey,” I said when I got to the edge of the pond.

“Who's chasing you?”

I glanced behind me. I kicked at a chunk of mud and sent it into the water. “Does it look like someone's chasing me?”

He shrugged.

“Sorry I called you names, but you could always just call me names back, you know?” It wasn't much of an apology, but still it tasted bad, saying it.

He was straddling the log the way you'd sit on a horse. “How come Mrs. Beal's not your mom now, if your mom's dead?” he asked.

And that made me angry all over again. Loose-cow angry. Life angry. “Because I had a mom, and now I don't. Why'd you go crying to Gary?”

He looked down at the water, staring into it like he had when he was waiting for a fish to jump. “Gary's my best friend. And he's my brother now.”

“He's not your brother. You just met him. You don't even know him.”

He kept his head down. “He can be my brother.”

I took a step toward him, but then stopped and kicked at the mud again.

He was holding on to the log with both hands. “Why can't he be
your
brother?”

“Why isn't Mr. Beal your dad?” I asked, caught up in what felt like a question loop, my voice starting to tremble. “Because someone else is your dad, only he's dead, that's why. He was hit by a train.”

His face darkened. I saw two of him, above the water and reflected down in it, the trunks pulling away like a giant, open beak.

“Hit by a train,” I said. “Gone.”

“But my mom's coming back, once she gets better.”

“Ha!” I said. “Not in a thousand years. Trust me, that won't happen.”

Part of me felt awful, telling him that, but part of me wanted to tell him everything again—that the Beals weren't his parents, that Gary wasn't his brother, that his mom was crazy in a hospital and the sooner he swallowed that, the better.

He wouldn't look at me. Only down, at the water.

U
p early the next morning, I sat by the south window paging through one of the magazines that had come in the box of comic books.
Today's Teens,
it was called. There were picture spreads of The Beatles, Freddie and the Dreamers, Herman's Hermits. Articles with names like “What Fellows Say About Girls,” and “Too Shy to Be His Steady.” There was something called a “Self Quiz” for rating your personality—ten multiple-choice questions designed to tell you what kind of person you were. The heat swarmed under the metal roof and I could feel the sweat running down my back, inside my shirt. I circled my answers. Added up my score. A horn sounded in the distance, and through the window I saw a few of the cows moving and dust clouding up from the gravel road. I was “tempestuous,” according to the quiz, but I didn't know what “tempestuous” meant.

There were eighteen sacks of feed. The driver helped me unload them onto the ground near the front of the barn, but said he didn't have time to help move them inside. He was in a hurry. People were waiting. I thought this was how Mr. Beal must have spent his years as one of Mr. Merrick's drivers: always in a hurry, always with people waiting.

The sacks were fifty pounds apiece. To lift them, I had to bend down and work my arms under them, leverage them up and shift my footing around. When the first one landed in the stall, all the dirt I thought I'd swept out came clouding up. After that, they just got heavier. The gravel sounded like it was powdering under my boots.

I was lifting the last sack, and I was trembling with the weight of it, thinking about Ike and his mother and what I'd said. I was thinking about my dad, and wondering for the first time if Mr. Merrick knew where he was—dead or alive—and wasn't telling. Because Mr. Merrick seemed to know everything about us, but when it came down to the spit and chaw of it, he didn't do a whole lot to help, did he? I imagined I could stay in Cassandra Grove for the rest of my life, quiz myself once a year and be “tempestuous” every time, and never see an improvement in my situation or anybody else's. Just more orphans trickling in.

I turned around.

Ike was standing just a couple of feet away, staring, like maybe he wanted to help, but maybe he only had something he wanted to say. And that's when my arms gave out and the sack went down.

Gary called his name from inside the house. The rocket was on television, he hollered. It was about to lift off across the swamp. Come see.

Ike took a step backward. He spat onto the feed that had landed between us. Then he turned and ran.

I wiped my sleeve across my eyes, stepped out of the barn, and blew dirt into my handkerchief. When I reached the garden, I looked north.

The flame was about as big as my fist and was just lifting over the furthest line of palm trees when the screen door smacked open. Ike and Gary ran down the porch steps, the Beals coming after them. Ike seemed to have already forgotten what had happened in the barn, which made me wonder if it had happened at all. He was jumping up and down, saying he'd never been this close to a rocket before. Gary picked him up and hoisted him onto his shoulders.

The flame rose on a column of gray smoke. The ground shook under my boots, and I heard a frantic twitter and a flap of wings—doves roused from the hole in the silo roof. Then the rumble, which sounded far away but grew louder until it matched the shaking in the ground. The flame climbed higher and higher, and the trail of smoke behind it began to coil.

“For Pete's sake, Hannah, what are you looking at?” Mrs. Beal asked.

I was down on one knee, squinting at the lettuce. “Cabbage loopers,” I said, lifting one of the bright-green worms with my thumbnail.

E
ver since his stroke, Leo Burke felt a constant flutter in his left eye. His neurologist—perky, effeminate, bearing a brotherly resemblance to Tony Randall—had told him several times that it wasn't the eye itself he was feeling; it was the ligaments, specifically the lateral palpebral ligament. “You've been traumatized,” Dr. Loudon had said. “You can't shake the house without upsetting the china.” Some doctors believed patients drew solace from having their medical conditions expressed in everyday terms, but Leo wasn't one of those patients. Dr. Loudon would sit on the edge of his desk with his hands folded in his lap and listen to whatever Leo had to tell him—smiling all the while, as if he were hearing a child describe a day at the zoo—then ask if Leo liked to play Yahtzee. “Think of yourself as a cup filled with Yahtzee cubes. You got shaken up and tossed out. Things aren't going to be exactly like they were before the stroke.” Then he'd reach into his blazer pocket, pull out that goddamn stick with the little red ball on it, and ask Leo to follow it with his eyes.

There was a palsy, too. Dr. Loudon had said that would probably go away with time, but it had been two months since the stroke and the left side of Leo's face still sagged. When he braved the mirror each morning, he saw a man who looked like he was trying not to laugh at something he found only half-funny. Combine that with the flutter in his eye and the pulsing of his lower lid, and he looked like a candidate for the nuthouse.

“Think of yourself as a car,” Dr. Loudon had said. “Something got knocked loose and kept the gas from reaching the engine for a little while. It might never happen again.”

Cold comfort. Dr. Loudon had encouraged Leo to get back to his normal routine as soon as possible, so Leo had pushed through the doors of Technicolor just a week later. He'd also resumed his part-time job at the hardware store, his deaconing at the church, his Scout meetings. But it wasn't the same as before. He tried to hold the left side of his mouth just slightly higher than the right, and to squint his eyelid just enough to suppress the flutter, but he wasn't successful. When people talked to him now, they talked to his left eye. And when they listened to him, which no one really did anymore, they focused on the downward sag of his mouth.

“If the pulse and the palsy are bothering you that much,” Dr. Loudon had said, “just think of yourself as a trusty old appliance. A Westinghouse. You might have a few new rattles, but you're still running.”

Leo wouldn't have minded punching Dr. Loudon in the stomach.

He also wouldn't have minded screaming into the faces of the people in his life who used to respect him and who now only saw him as weak. His coworkers at Technicolor. The customers at the hardware store. The congregation at First Baptist.

His wife.

His two boys.

Just a couple of blasts from his whistle used to bring Mitch and Howie home for dinner; now Leo had to stand at the foot of his driveway and blow his lungs out: three blasts, then three more, then three more after that. The boys weren't afraid of him anymore; they tuned out the whistle just as they tuned out his voice. And they looked at him differently. If they weren't focused on his eye or his drooping mouth, they were looking at his hair, which had turned half-white over the past eight weeks. They were obstinate, but they weren't idiots: they worked it to their advantage. They pissed and moaned now about having to do their chores. They complained about having to go to church, having to wear Toughskins instead of Levi's, having crew cuts. They'd begged for puppies last year—one for each of them—and Leo had brought home a pair of six-week-old springer spaniels on the condition that they take care of them, walk them, train them. But the dogs went largely ignored and slabbered around the backyard like wolves.

For godsake, he wanted to tell his boys, life is
short.
Shut the hell up and appreciate what you have. But they were too busy griping. They were too busy punching stop signs and running over snakes with their bicycles. A week ago, they'd taken one of the younger boys from the neighborhood—a fellow Scout in Leo's troop, no less, and a boy who they knew full well was the son of one of Leo's underlings at Technicolor—and tied him to a palm tree, then pulled down his pants and stuffed a dead myna bird into his underwear. It had been irksome for Leo to have to hear about it from Marie, who'd heard about it from Skip Ferris's wife. It had been embarrassing to have to apologize to Skip Ferris at work the next day. And it hadn't been nearly as satisfying as it should have been to take Mitch and Howie, one at a time, over his knee and smack their backsides. In fact, Leo had felt a little silly doing it, wondering if their cries were genuine or fake, all the while feeling his eye flutter like a telegraph key.

J
ulian Ferris heard the first, faint blows of the whistle and felt something close to relief. The Burke brothers had dragged him into the side yard of an empty house at the end of their street, where they'd dug a hole to bury him in, and he was kneeling in it now while they fought over who got to use the shovel.

“Keep reaching for it,” Mitch, the older of the two, told Howie as he held the shovel away from him, “and I'll flatten your head into a birdbath.”

Howie snorted, said, “Fat chance,” and reached for it again.

“Keep reaching for it,” Mitch said, “and I'll shove it so far up your ass, the handle will come out your mouth.”

“Hug a nut,” Howie said.

It went on like this for a while. Julian's knees started to ache, and he counted to ten over and over again, waiting for the next set of whistle blasts. Climbing out of the hole and making a run for it wasn't an option, since the blond, crew-cutted Burke brothers were faster and stronger than him; the last time he'd tried to escape, they had nabbed him easily and had taken turns slapping the back of his head.

Whole days could go by wherein they seemed to forget he existed. Then they'd descend upon him, drag him off somewhere, and explain what they had in store for him. One day they'd tell him they were going to make him eat a lizard, and if he threw up, eat the throw-up, and if he pooped, eat the poop. Another day, they were going to stuff him into a garbage can and throw in a live hornet's nest. They were going to make him eat an ant pile with a spoon. They were going to cover his dick with peanut butter and tie a squirrel to his ankle. Poor planning usually saved him—they weren't able to find a lizard, had no way to handle a hornet's nest, couldn't locate an ant pile or catch a squirrel. But the day they'd threatened to tie him to a tree and stuff a dead bird into his pants, they'd surprised him by actually having a dead bird on hand, and today they'd already dug the hole before capturing him on his way back from 7-Eleven. Fortunately, they were lazy and had dug down only about a foot and a half.

The second set of whistle blasts rose up through the warm air.

“If you were any stupider,” Mitch told Howie, “you'd forget to breathe.”

“If you were any uglier,” Howie told Mitch, “you'd make the whole island drown in its own puke.”

The only thing they disliked more than each other, it seemed, was Julian. And there was no avoiding them because their lives were so miserably wound up with his. They lived in his neighborhood. They went to his school and were in his Boy Scout troop. Their father, Mr. Burke, was not only his dad's boss and the scoutmaster, but he also drove the three boys to the weekly Scout meeting.

Mitch and Howie couldn't stand Julian's name, which they only ever pronounced “Julie-Ann.” They couldn't stand his face, either, which they said looked like a steaming plate of balls. And they
hated
his hair. It was girl's hair, they'd said. Long and brown and stringy, like Mackenzie Phillips's, if Mackenzie Phillips never took a bath. Julian's hair wasn't that long; it barely reached his shoulders, but they'd grab it when they caught him, and twist it, and once they had him pinned to the ground, wipe their hands on his shirt and say he could end the oil crisis if he'd only turn himself in to the government.

The third set of whistle blasts finally arrived—clipped and mean sounding, louder than it was before. The Burke brothers both turned in the direction of their house.

“You're lucky,” Mitch said after a moment, looking down at Julian. “You were almost dead.”

“So almost dead,” Howie said.

As they started out of the yard, the shovel resting on Mitch's shoulder and Howie, for some reason, still reaching for it, Mitch called back, “Till next time, Julie-Ann.”

Julian was eleven years old and was convinced he'd suffer for the rest of his life at the hands of the Burke brothers. He'd certainly never grow big enough to fend off Mitch and Howie, who were not only older than him, but just a little bit fat in the middle. Still, he thought as he stepped out of the hole and brushed the dirt off his legs, wouldn't it be wonderful to get exposed to radiation and wake up so enormous that he couldn't be caught by anyone? Wouldn't it be the best thing in the world for his new mega-self to walk over to the Burke house and tap a finger on their roof, and when the Burkes came running out and looked up in terror at the giant looming over them, say hi to Mrs. Burke (who seemed nice), and hi to Mr. Burke (who had a scary-looking twitch in one eye but had never been mean to him), and then raise his foot into the air and say
“Ha-yaa!”
as he brought it down on Mitch and Howie? He'd take one step to the east and wash his foot off in the river. And then Mr. and Mrs. Burke, all the residents of Merritt Island, and even President Ford would say,
Thank you, Julian Ferris. Now and forever, thank you.

S
cout nights were the only times Leo ever laid eyes on Julian. The boy was small, only a year behind Leo's youngest, but about half the size. He was quiet and skittish, looked rattled much of the time. It wasn't any great surprise that Mitch and Howie picked on him, even though they'd been told not to and had been punished for doing so. How could they resist? They were boys, after all, and Leo had once been a boy—and a small one, at that. He'd never told his sons, but he'd taken his own share of knocks back in Mississippi until he'd gotten wise and learned how to throw a punch, learned how to make sure there was at least one kid in his neighborhood who crossed the street when he saw Leo coming. It was a natural part of childhood to either wallop or get walloped now and then. But, for the love of God, let there be no more dead animals shoved into people's underwear.

Leo blamed himself a little. He'd tried to teach the boys boxing once, but he'd lost his patience too soon. He'd bought them gloves and headgear and a stand-up punching bag and had tried to teach them the rules he'd learned in basic training at Camp Shelby. But he made the mistake of calling them “queens rules” instead of just “rules,” and the little idiots couldn't get past the phrase, thought it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. They lisped and pranced around with their gloved hands dangling from their wrists until finally Leo said forget it, snatched back the gloves and everything else, and donated the whole kit and caboodle to Goodwill.

In theory, Scouting should have instilled the kind of confidence that brought focus, and the kind of focus that undermined dumb behavior. Having a uniform to wear, a troop number to be proud of, badges to work for—what could be better for both men and boys alike? But, as with anything lately, there were hassles to deal with. For one thing, enrollment was down. There were only five other Scouts besides Mitch and Howie, and two of them were Jewish. Leo had nothing against the Jewish, but every time you turned around they were having some sort of holiday that kept them from attending meetings. And of the three boys who weren't Jewish, one of them had a doctor-certified heart condition, poor kid, and couldn't do much more than sit on a folding chair and highlight his Scouting manual. That left the Stelzel boy, who was promising, and Julian Ferris, who wasn't.