Thief of Dreams (6 page)

“He doesn't wear clothes that are too small for him or too big or worn-out because he's peculiar,” she told her nieces. “He just doesn't have anything better.” She gave each of them a significant glance, but there was no malice in it. “I shouldn't really have to explain that,” she told them.

Virginia had had the most to say about how peculiar Lester always looked, and she had the decency to blush, but Clara took another tack.

“Well you weren't in the first grade with him!” she said. “You ask Miss Teasdale if he didn't jump out the window and run home every time she turned her back. In about an hour his momma would come marching him back into the classroom where he'd sit, all red-faced and snotty-nosed, and then he'd do exactly the same thing again. Miss Teasdale finally had to keep every single window shut and locked because of him, and for two weeks we nearly died of the heat. But that didn't even do any good, because the moment we were let out for recess or lunch, he'd hit the front steps running, and by the time the rest of us got outside, he'd be all the way across the playground on a beeline for home, couldn't anybody catch him!”

Grandfather Marshall laughed at that, one short laugh almost like a cough, his chin into his chest and his eyes merry.

“He never got one bit better!” Clara said, looking at Harley Marshall as though this were no laughing matter. “I'll bet he wasn't in class one full day all year. He never spoke a single word to anyone or even
looked
at anybody that I can remember. He was just a little red-faced lump, watching his chance to run, and he had to do the whole first grade over because of it. Now I call that peculiar,” Clara said, suddenly staring into James's eyes.

“I don't think it's peculiar,” James said, and he didn't, although he noticed that everyone at the table gave him a surprised look, as though he might have had the grace to admit the obvious—everyone, anyway, except his grandfather, who had slipped behind his wall of privacy again. What Lester had done seemed wonderfully brave and pure to him. He himself had hated first grade; it was a prison sentence, an unreasonable and arbitrary punishment he'd suffered only because he hadn't thought it possible to do otherwise.

“And I thought you were supposed to be bright,” Clara said.

“Well, I'm sure I never in my life met a shier boy than Lester Buck,” his aunt Lily said, “but I never found the least bit of harm in him. I don't think there is a mean bone in that child's body, and I think it's just grand that the two of you made friends.”

“He's cracked,” Clara said, “and being poor or shy doesn't have a thing to do with it!”

“That will be sufficient, missy,” Grandmother Marshall said.

Lester was not cracked, James knew that much, but he took his grandmother's remark to include anything he might have to say on the subject too and kept his peace. Still, the silence that followed was painful and awkward, and it seemed, as well, his fault; so, trying not to be obvious, he hurried to finish his supper and asked to be excused. After he had carried his plate, glass, and silverware to the sideboard by the sink, he left by the kitchen door, grateful to be outside in the long, oblique twilight. He didn't know how he felt, but he knew he didn't want to shut himself up in the trailer, so he got no further than the stile where he sat on the top step and listened to the crickets making little shivers of sound as though they were having chills. Across the fence, milked and contented and chewing her cud, the cow added a gourdy rhythm of her own.

He didn't know how or why people became friends, but he decided at once that it had to do with the eyes, something in them held in common that each could see and recognize, even if they couldn't name it. He'd seen that Lester was all right from the beginning. Sure, the first times they'd run into each other fishing, they hadn't spoken, but they'd managed to raise their hands in greeting, and it wasn't long before they'd said a word or two, and now they were real friends. As for his old friends in Cedar Hill, twice he'd gone in with his mother, and while she worked, he'd rushed off to spend the day in the neighborhood where he'd lived; but that had only taught him just how long five years could be, at least when it came between the time when you were eight and the time when you were thirteen. Standing around in someone's yard who wasn't sure they cared to remember you wasn't much good. Oh they had been nice enough, he supposed, but the last couple of times his mother had asked, he hadn't wanted to go back to Cedar Hill. There wasn't any way it was going to earn back the investment of homesickness he'd put into it.

He heard something stir behind him, and when he looked over his shoulder, he was surprised to see Clara coming through the dusk of the side yard.

“We're supposed to apologize,” she said, “although I don't see the point since we were only trying to help you out. Anyway, Ginny said she'd do the dishes by herself if I came, so here I am.”

He turned half around to face her. “Help me out?” he said.

“Sure,” she said. She propped a foot on the bottom step of the stile and seemed to strike some sort of pose. “What are you doing sitting out here anyway?”

He tilted his head to one side and didn't answer, and she looked off toward the east, holding her fine-boned, somewhat haughty face in profile. As irrelevant as the thought seemed, he found himself conceding that she was pretty, and for all that it mattered, so was her sister. They were both blond and blue-eyed, and their figures often snared his attention.

“You
are
family after all,” Clara said, “and there isn't any reason to let you make an ass of yourself without warning you.”

“I'm an ass because Lester is my friend?” he said and laughed. He thought she might laugh too, but she didn't.

“Friends are important,” she said. “He's goofy, that's all. His whole family is. He's my age, and he's two grades behind me for goodness sake. Have you ever seen him in church, or his momma or poppa? No, and you won't. They're trashy.”

“No they're not,” he said.

“Oh I don't like this,” she said. “I don't like the way it makes me feel. Grandmother sent me out here to apologize because she thought we acted like spoiled little snots, and maybe we did. But friends are important,” she said and turned back toward the house. “You do whatever you want.” As she rounded the flowering quince bushes by the porch, she called back significantly: “Birds of a feather….”

A sudden flash of anger warmed his temples until he realized he'd had almost the same thought before she'd come out. He just hadn't put the same complexion on it; he hadn't thought of Lester as goofy, or, by association, himself. He sat on the top step of the stile and pondered the matter until the chill of the evening drove him into the trailer where he lay on the couch, his hands behind his head.

It was true Lester Buck seemed to have no more friends than he did, although Lester had lived all his life in the same place, while he himself had just got there. But that didn't mean Lester was goofy. He had just got off on the wrong foot somehow. Maybe because he was so shy, like Aunt Lily said, or maybe just because he'd gotten use to being on the wrong foot, it had stayed with him, become, somehow or other, who he was. Or maybe people like Virginia and Clara weren't going to see him but one way, no matter that he'd gotten to be somebody else entirely. He didn't know.

He understood, however, that his association with Lester Buck didn't do him one bit of good in his cousins' eyes. It was an embarrassment to his cousins to have him and his mother living in an ugly purple trailer in their cow pasture, never mind the reasons for it, which all by themselves were sleazy and embarrassing. And then there was Lester Buck's house, which had neither bathroom nor running water nor electricity. It was the sort of house you didn't see anymore, with an open dogtrot running down the middle, a kitchen and sitting room off one side, and two sleeping rooms off the other, so that when you went from the kitchen to one of the bedrooms, you had to cross this hallway, which was roofed over but open at both ends and cluttered with tools and washtubs and lanterns and clothes hung on pegs or nails driven in the walls. The house had never seen a coat of paint and had no foundation but was merely held off the hard-packed mud of its yard by large, stacked stones under its four corners. And there was Effie, Lester's mother, her big chapped hands scrubbing out clothes over a washboard in a galvanized tub, or else boiling them in a big black iron pot out back and scooping them up with a wooden paddle and slopping them over a line until they were cool enough to wring out and hang properly. And Roy Buck, Lester's father, with his asthma and weak heart and general poor health, and that terrible scar across his face that tugged down the corner of his right eye so that tears seemed always to leak out there—a scar James's grandmother had told him came from a knife fight when Roy Buck was younger, and since it was his grandmother saying this and not Virginia or Clara, it would be the truth—and no education or job and only forty acres of steep, poor land to make a living on. And Lester himself, all bone and greenish freckles and bad teeth.

The whole thing made James's stomach hurt somehow, and he stared at the dim ceiling of the trailer for a while before he found himself remembering the first time he and Lester had really had a conversation, rather than just raising a hand and nodding and speaking and then going on to keep a respectful distance between them while they fished. He had come down to the spot where Piney Creek flowed into Sugar Creek and was cheered to see Lester already there, but he hadn't even had a chance to raise his hand in their usual formal greeting when Lester hooked a huge bass. James had never in his life had a fish on so large, and Lester didn't have it long, since, after racing all over the long deep hole where the two streams met, it surged completely out of the water on James's side and got free. He could see it afterward, no more than five feet from him, finning in the current and popping its mouth and gill covers open very wide. Finally it shook its head like someone who'd just caught a heavy punch, and for a second James could even see the red in its eye before it turned downstream and, with one, and then another, muscular twitch of its tail, glided out of sight. “Holy God,” James croaked, “what a fish!”

But Lester merely blushed and without a word brought in his line and inspected his hook.

“I was looking right down on his head,” James said. “I bet he weighed five pounds!”

“Maybe three,” Lester allowed, and then, as if those single-word greetings they had exchanged for nearly a week amounted to a conversation that, at last, could be continued, he added, “I've done lost him bout once a week all summer. Can't do nothin with him.” He turned an even deeper shade of red. “Don't have the line to give him, and he straightens my hooks out.”

James went up Sugar Creek, where the water wasn't quite waist deep, and waded across. He had an extra one of his father's snelled hooks with him, and when he got on Lester's side, he worried it out of the fabric of his shirt pocket and offered it. “Try this one,” he said, “it's as strong as you'd ever want.”

Lester glanced at the hook. “Ain't got the money to buy it off you,” he said.

“Didn't ask for any,” James said. “It's way too big for hornyheads anyway.”

But Lester wouldn't take it for free. He brought a matchbox out of his pocket with six or eight hooks in it that had been scraped free of rust but still looked as old as family heirlooms and told James even two or three of them wouldn't be a good trade, but James took only one. It had been a little smaller than his father's hooks, but it turned out to be so soft that even forcing it through the carapace of a grasshopper often bent it out of shape.

“They aren't trashy,” James said aloud to the dim ceiling of the trailer. Lester wouldn't even take a silly hook from him without offering something in return. And he'd never been to Lester's house when Effie didn't ask him to stay to supper or inquire about his mother. And Roy always inquired about his father, whom he didn't even know, although out of some strange sense of propriety he never asked about his mother, whom he knew every bit as well as Effie did, having, like Effie, been a schoolmate. “They are not trashy,” he said; they just didn't have any money or any luck.

But Lester's father wasn't off in Pittsburgh, was he? No. Roy Buck was home where he and Lester worked together worming tobacco, drenching cows, hoeing and weeding, splitting wood, and.… Phooey, he thought suddenly, what did that have to do with anything? The trouble with being around Virginia and Clara was that, pretty soon, you began to think like them.

He turned on his side, making up his mind to trouble himself no more about the silly attitude of his cousins. He adjusted himself comfortably on the couch. His mother would be home soon, and he found himself thinking about the '39 Ford coupe she'd bought from the Kaizer-Fraizer dealer in Cedar Hill. It was gray and had a cream-colored steering wheel and gearshift knob, which looked expensive and reminded him of mother-of-pearl, and he liked the gearshift on the floorboard rather than on the steering wheel where the later '39 models had it. He hoped she would let him drive a little, but he doubted it, even though his father had sometimes let him drive the Packard. His father was far braver in such matters than his mother.

But then, as though his mind were strolling a beach and idly picking up pebbles and shells, he wasn't thinking about the Ford coupe any longer, but about Lester's collection of wild animals. His raccoon. His pet crow, Black Jack, tethered by one foot to the fence around the barnyard, cocking one outraged eye or the other toward the kernels of corn in his, James's, palm before the beak came down like a chipping hammer. Lester's pet fox, who lived mostly under the house and, for all the brains they were supposed to have, never quit trying to chew through the six-foot length of wire that attached his collar to the simple cotton rope. He might have chewed through the rope easily, but he kept gnawing and worrying the wire as close to his neck as he could reach. All these creatures, James thought, did they take the place of friends? Lester's dog, a little black-and-white fice, was the only one of them who truly was a pet and showed any affection, or wanted any.