Thief of Dreams (21 page)

“Well,” Edward said, “I don't know for a fact, but I heard it meant the land of many beautiful waters.” He took a drag from his cigarette. “It's the rainfall that makes these mountains so pretty. Makes all the good creeks and rivers.”

“You and Mother are still going to get a divorce, aren't you?” James said in his matter-of-fact voice.

“Ahhh, son,” Edward said. He rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck. “You know,” he said at last, “I think I've been better than my pop, but I haven't been so good with you and your mother. Maybe I just don't have another chance coming.” He took a drag from his cigarette but found he didn't want it anymore and snapped it off his thumb across the quince bushes and down toward the road. The boy kept as still as held breath. Edward didn't know what to do about him, so he caught him by the neck and shook him gently as though to shake the sadness out of him. “Don't count me out though, squirt,” he said.

James allowed himself to be shaken, but his mood didn't alter. “I've got to see my friend,” he said.

“Don't you boys go to school once in a while?” Edward said.

“I don't have to go for a week and a half because of the fighting,” James said.

“Ahhh.” Edward nodded. “I guess you started this little rumpus then, huh?”

“All three of us were suspended,” James told him, getting up but then standing motionless, his head hung, as if he didn't know whether or not he was free to go.

Edward laughed and got up himself. “You ought not to fight them two at a time if you can help it.”

“Me and Lester fought Earl Carpenter,” the boy said, looking into some intermediate space beyond his feet. “Not at the same time,” James said and shrugged. “Earl had already whipped me, and Lester was only just trying to drag him off.”

“Ahhh,” Edward said and nodded. “Well,” he added cheerfully, as though he didn't mind being abandoned a second time, “I'll give you a lift to see your buddy then.”

Without looking at him, James went off into the house. “I need to tell Grandmother where I'm going,” he said as he went through the door.

How incredibly urgent it had seemed all through the night that he get back to his family, explain himself, set things right. And here Madeline had gone off to work, and James was going off to see his friend. So where was he, Edward, going to go? What was he going to do with himself? Of course Harley and Bertha would put him up. Although Madeline certainly wouldn't thank them. No. And he wasn't welcome in the trailer either. Well, there was a tourist court in Cedar Hill.

A buzz of uneasiness made him check his billfold. Eighty-four dollars. A very good thing that he had cashed and not deposited his last paycheck. He could go to the bank in Cedar Hill and have his funds transferred. He had almost four hundred dollars in Allegheny Bank and Trust. Yes, and he'd call Womb Broom and tell him where Star Electric could forward his pay. He stuffed his billfold back in his hip pocket, but he didn't feel any better. He felt much worse. Completely empty and lost. Jesus, but he'd thought they would at least talk to him, listen to him, hear him out; but maybe, at last, he had ceased to matter to them. It was an awful lonesome thought, but it just might be true.

JAMES TALLY

He told his grandmother where he was going and then went out the kitchen door and down the driveway when he knew his father was waiting on the porch. He was sulking, making his father pay a price, and he felt bad about it, but he couldn't make himself stop. He let himself in the car and sat quietly on the passenger's side until his father came down the walk and got under the steering wheel.

“You sorta sneaked around the other way on me,” his father said, grinning good-naturedly.

He didn't say anything.

“Well,” his father said and took the steering wheel in both hands as though making a strangely important gesture of it, “where does this buddy of yours live?”

“That way,” James told him and pointed.

After they'd driven a little way, his father remarked that it was a strong friend who would jump into a fight for his buddy, but James merely looked out the window.

“What did you say his name was?” his father asked.

“Lester Buck,” James said.

Out of the tail of his eye he saw his father wagging his head side to side as though puzzled. “No,” Edward Tally said, “I don't reckon I know that family.” He shook his head again. “Working for Watauga Light and Power Company, I figured I'd met just about everybody, one time or another.”

“They don't have electricity,” James said.

“Ahhh,” his father said. “Well there's still some families in these mountains who don't see why they can't get along without it.” He cocked his head and grinned. “Course it's hard to say they're wrong, since it wasn't so very long ago when the whole damned world had to get by without.”

“They're poor,” James said, keeping his face turned away. “That's why they don't have electricity or much of anything else.”

Edward Tally nodded.

“Everybody makes fun of Lester because he has such sorry clothes and his mother gives him these stupid haircuts, but he's the best friend I ever had.”

“I'd like to meet him,” his father said.

“He got worse beat up than me,” James said. All at once his eyes grew wet. “He wouldn't give up. He's terrible at fighting, but he wouldn't give up. He's not afraid of anything,” James said.

His father didn't speak.

“Why can't I be like that?” James blurted. Was he going to cry now in front of his father too? What was wrong with him? The way he was behaving didn't make any sense. What did it have to do with the awful chasm between his mother and father?

“Everybody's afraid of something, son,” his father said.

“Not Lester,” James insisted. “Not you.” He looked out the window through brimming eyes, wiping his nose on his sleeve and his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Me and Lester too,” his father said.

Not like me, James thought. All at once the landscape outside the window came into focus, and he realized they had missed a turn. “We were supposed to turn off back yonder,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve again. His father cocked himself up on one hip, got a handkerchief out of his pocket, handed it to him, and told him to blow his nose. When they came to a farm road on the right, his father pulled in and turned around.

“It's just that folks are different,” his father said. “Some fellows are afraid of heights or snakes; some are afraid of water or being in the woods, or big cities.” He took James by the neck and gripped it, but not hard enough to hurt him. “And you're not afraid of any of those things, squirt,” he said and laughed.

His father did not understand, but there was no explaining it. “It's just there,” James said and pointed to the wagon road, rough and half washed out, winding up from the blacktop on the right. He hadn't expected his father to drive it, but the car paused only a moment before his father shifted the Packard into low and turned up the rutted dirt track. The car bounced and lost traction and scraped something underneath, but then it took hold and climbed, James's side seeming to hang off the edge in space.

The labored sound of their approach brought first Roy and then Effie Buck out on the open dogtrot. If Roy was surprised or curious about an automobile appearing where few had ever been before, he didn't show it; he looked like a man who knew who and where he was, but Effie seemed worried and frightened. Still, James was out of the car almost before it stopped in order to set their minds at ease.

“Why chile!” Effie said, “we didn't know who in the world …”

“My dad brought me,” James said, already embarrassed and puzzling over just exactly how to make introductions when his father got out of the car and Roy Buck came down the steps, and the two men shook hands and called each other “Mr. Tally” and “Mr. Buck” and seemed to share at once the same shy, formal, but easy friendliness with each other, as though it were all written down in a book somewhere that both men had read.

Effie stayed on the porch and did not speak, as though that were a part of the book too, not even when Edward Tally touched the brim of an imaginary hat and nodded to her.

“Mrs. Buck,” he said, but Effie merely nodded back, very formal and ladylike.

“Is Lester around?” James wanted to know.

“He is, son,” Roy said with a gentleness that made James uneasy, although he didn't, at first, know why, “but he's kinda puny.”

James looked to Effie on the porch as though for confirmation or explanation and saw that she was caught in an agony of worry, although it was all contained in her eyes and in the way her big, mannish shoulders were hung, so that if he hadn't known her, he wouldn't have seen it. “He's in bed, honey,” she told him.

“James explained to me how your boy took up for him, Mr. Buck,” Edward Tally said. “If there's something we can do, we'd sure like to do it.”

“Well, I've been to a neighbor's down the creek this mornin to call the doctor out, and I reckon there's not a thing to do right now but wait on him to get here.” Roy turned to James and gave him a good facsimile of his usual easy grin. “Don't know why you couldn't look in on him though. Just let me take a peek and see is he awake?”

From the dogtrot Effie said that she'd just made a fresh pot of coffee and would be pleased if James's father sat with them while the boys had their visit; and James's father said he'd be glad to if it wasn't too much trouble; and the three of them went up on the dogtrot, and Roy stuck his head in Lester's room and said in his unusually gentle voice that somebody had come to see him who sure wasn't walking, and then stepped back and let James in and softly shut the door behind him. It was very dim in Lester's bedroom, and though James didn't know why, it always smelled a little like a snuff box. Out on the dogtrot he heard Effie say, “We just think the world and all of that boy of yours,” but he couldn't make out his father's soft response.

“Hey,” Lester said in a weak voice. He appeared to be looking out of his small window, with its old, green, wavy panes of glass. “You didn't tell me you was rich. That there's a big ole Packard.”

Him? Rich? It hurt to hear it, as though he'd been treated like a stranger in a place he'd thought was home. But Lester's face, when James's eyes got used to the dim light enough to see it, made him forget everything else. James was surprised Lester could talk, his lips were so swollen and cracked; and both his eyes had swelled so tight, it was hard to believe he could see anything at all.

“How you feelin?” James said.

“Ha,” Lester said in a voice that was much more whisper than laugh, “I reckon nowhere near as bad as they tell me I look.”

“Your face is real bad,” James said. “It must hurt like crazy.”

“Nawh,” Lester said, “it don't bother.”

“It don't look like you can even see,” James said.

“I can,” Lester said. Very slowly, almost too slowly to believe, Lester shifted his position in bed. “I can see out better than you can see in,” he said. “I just ain't got the strength of a fly.”

James didn't know what to say.

“I'm sorta wind broke,” Lester said.

“Can I get anything for you?” James said. “God, Lester, I'm sorry I started it with Earl Carpenter.”

Lester moved again in bed. With infinite slowness he crossed his legs as though on purpose to look casual. “Poppa's got asthma. Figures I do too,” he said. He seemed to take a rest, and James could see his eyeballs move behind the puffed eyelids in the same fashion he might have seen the eyeballs move behind the closed eyelids of someone sleeping. At last he said, “I reckon asthma ain't got much to do with Earl Carpenter.”

“Do you want me to leave you alone so you can sleep?” James said.

“Nawh,” Lester said. “Can't sleep noway. Feels like a mule is standing on my chest.”

Someone stepped up on the dogtrot and helloed, and not much more than a moment later the doctor came through the door with his satchel and Effie on his heels with an oil lamp. Behind Effie, James glimpsed his father, who with a single motion of his head told him to come out and give the doctor some room.

James sat on the steps up to the dogtrot and scratched Lester's little fice behind the ears, while Edward Tally and Roy Buck found things to talk about that somehow acknowledged the doctor's visit and the friendship of their sons without speaking of either. It seemed a long time until the doctor came out of Lester's room with Effie on his heels as mute as a shadow.

“Well,” the doctor said with a wry grin, “the lumps and bruises sure are colorful, but they don't worry me much.”

He was a young man, the doctor. James thought he looked too young to be an actual doctor, at least until he began to shake his head and rub the back of his neck and sigh.

“I just didn't find any evidence of asthma. His lungs sound open and clear. No coughing or wheezing or any of that. But I'm afraid he needs to be in the hospital,” the doctor said and gave Roy and Effie a long, serious look. “I've got two more calls to make down the road, and I can take him on my way back, but I'd feel better if you'd let me call the ambulance from Cedar Hill to come and fetch him.”

“Lordamercy,” Effie said.

“Now, Momma,” Roy said.

“What is it, doctor?” Effie said. “What's wrong with my baby?”

“Mrs.,” the doctor said and stroked his jaw, “it would be foolish of me to say a whole lot without us getting him to the hospital where we can have a better look at him.”

“Lordamercy,” Effie said.

“How about taking him in my car?” Edward asked.

The doctor gave James's father and the Packard a glance and then looked at Roy and Effie where they were standing together. “It would be lots quicker than waiting on me,” he said. “And cheaper than an ambulance. And since they have got to come all the way from Cedar Hill and find this place before they can start back … I think I'd like that best. I'll call the hospital first thing down the road and tell them Lester's coming.”