World and Town (36 page)

An obvious answer to an obvious question; they’re rusty. Still, Carter smiles. “Go on.”

“That is, if the belief in one’s inclusion isn’t in itself sustaining, in some way, to the individual. Enabling one to survive extreme challenge, for example.”

“Good.”

“And/or else a by-product of other cognitive biases that were once useful—and maybe still are. The connection bias, for example.” Carter grins broadly at this—remembering their youthful conversations, maybe—but Hattie pauses midthought—surprised and pleased that she can still speak labspeak
(Hattie not so batty!)
but bored by it now. It doesn’t speak of what she wants spoken of. “So you won’t talk to her,” she finishes.

“To Sophy?”

The rain.

“To Sophy.”

“When the church is providing her with the very stories we’re discussing?” he says. “A context? A community? A feeling that she figures?”

Where friends become family
.

“You are willfully refusing to know what I know you must about some of these groups, Carter. What they are.”

“And how do you know what they are, pray tell?”

“I know by the lengths to which they will go to reel the kids in. Sending cars. Opening a school right across from the public school. They are like glial cells. Astrocytes telling a girl what kind of neuron to be. Assigning her to a certain layer of the cortex.”

“Neurons may differentiate once and for all, Hattie, but people do not. And what if Sophy needs a reason to wake up in the morning? A web of significance?” He stretches as if waking up to a fine new day, though the pouring rain is like a wall of water now. In the small room that is the porch he all but brushes her with his arms. His rib cage rises; his untucked shirt lifts high. Triangles of goose-pimpled flesh flash at his sides. “Honestly, I think if I could get religion, I would.” He relaxes.

“This kind, Carter? Would you really get this kind, when freedom of thought is so important to you?”

“It’s a marketplace of ideas, Hattie. We can’t tell Sophy what to choose. It’s up to her to decide what works for her.”

“Ginny thinks she knows God’s will, not just for herself but for Sophy. She thinks she can see God’s plan for Sophy.”

“Which you imagine dangerous.”

“Of course it’s dangerous, Carter. Look at this Osama bin Laden.”

“It depends on what she sees.” A slight retrenching there, such as one rarely saw in the old days—as he seems to notice, too: He twists his body self-consciously, stretching again.

“Now you’re the one who’s reaching, Carter. Or have you simply avoided involvements for so long that by now it’s just habit?”

“When God sends her to flight school we will worry.”

“Even if there’s no Guy LaPoint, you hold back. Even if there’s no one making hay with your every mistake.”

He stops. “That’s not fair.”

“You stonewall even if there’s no El Honcho watching. You play smart.”

“Hattie.”

“How can you pretend to care about Sophy and stand by while this happens?”

“Hattie.”

“How can you refuse to see what’s going on?—to see her?” “Hattie, stop.”

“You know what people used to say about you in the lab? They used to say you knew everything except what you’d go to bat for.”

“Excuse me.” His look is dark. “Did I not go to bat for this town?”

“You took a stand against Value-Mart. That’s principle.” Hattie is no longer cold. “Meredith was right about you: You know all kinds of things, and you can play all kinds of things. Instruments, games, anything. But you’ve never learned to care about anything, really. Anything or anyone.” She glares at him now—fixing him in the hard pour of her anger. “You refused to see even your own brother.”

A pause. He raises his head slowly; and when his eyes meet hers now, they are a storm of their own.

“And what about you, Miss See-It-All?” he says, finally. “What about you? Are you sure you’re not just upset that you need Sophy more than Sophy needs you? Are you sure you’re not just upset that that’s been the story of your life?” His face is purple, his mouth low and tight, and his shirt suddenly loose—having failed, it seems, to contract with the rest of him. “And when you say I’ve never learned to care for anything or anyone, don’t you mean I never came to care for you?”

H
attie tries to focus on the talk at the Come ’n’ Eat: plywood, the cell-tower site. Plywood disappearing from the mini-mall site now, too. People’s voices, though, seem thin and far away, as if they’re coming over the sort of vinegar-and-wire-with-stretched-parchment affair she used to make with her students in her hearing unit—working models of Alexander Bell’s liquid transmitter.
Mr. Watson, come here!
the kids would say, when they were done.
I want to see you! Mr. Watson! I want to see you!

Mr. Combustible.

Don’t you mean I never came to care for you?

Candy is speaking: “It’s been disappearing in batches.” And: “Who can watch all night?”

“That is just a fact”: Beth.

Disagreement: Should they tell the police about the van? What do they really know?

Agreement: It’s finally Everett’s job to secure the site. As Everett has said himself. How plain unfortunate, though, that the price of half-inch has gone through the roof lately.

“That wood was worth five thousand dollars, easy,” says Candy.

Five thousand dollars!

“Everett’s extreme but you have to say, he’s honest,” says Grace. Her own honest face is shiny, like some sort of solar shield.

No one looks at Ginny.

As for whether the owner should have insisted on someone with builder’s insurance, well, people around here can’t afford that sort of thing, says Candy; and seeing as how her husband was in the building trades before he died, her word is considered definitive.

Are you sure you’re not just upset that you need Sophy more than Sophy needs you?

Are you sure you’re not just upset that that’s been the story of your life?

On her way home, Hattie sees, out in front of the Chhungs’, a pile of plastic and glass. She squints.

The computer, its screen smashed in, thrown out onto the ground.

Should she tell someone? She is trying to decide when she finds Cato lying just inside her door, his big head on his paws. He seems to be waiting for her, except that when she comes in, he does not work his way to his feet. Neither does he open his eyes. And already there are flies. Reveille stands uncertainly behind Cato’s body—lifting his head, barking, then ducking his head. Then lifting it and barking again. Trying to convey the news. Hattie pets him. He licks and licks her hand. Annie jumps frantically, confused.

“Cato,” says Hattie, kneeling down. “Cato.”

How strange to feel his fur as thick as ever, but cold. His body inert, like his collar—all the miraculous processes and exchanges of life she used to describe with such alacrity to her students—his cell divisions, his transcriptions, his Krebs cycles—shut down.

Oh, where are Lee and Joe now?
Come back! Come back!
Because she would not at all mind having someone to pet cold Cato one more time with her now; or to help her take off his collar; or to help her lug him out to the yard. Probably she should wait for help with the lugging. But a dead dog in her house. And the flies—the damned flies. Plus she knows from experience what the smell from even a dead mouse can be. And so she drags him out by the paws, on his back; his legs having gone all stiff already—calcium ions having flooded his poor muscles. He is heavier than she realized; his tail goes on forever. She keeps stopping to cry. But then she drags some more, cradling the rough pads of his paws in the palms of her hands. His toenails claw her, his familiar overgrown toenails—the same, though everything else has changed. She wants to do something about them—trim them so they’ll look nice in dog heaven. How dry the pads of his paws. Dead dry. Oh, to have somebody to help her now! Somebody to sit with her in a little sendoff at the pet cemetery, tomorrow, too—maybe she’ll call Greta. Though why does she bury her animals and cremate her humans? Never mind. Tomorrow she will bury Cato, back in their old town, alongside all the other dogs Joe and she had. But, well, cover him with a blanket in the meanwhile. Lock him in the shed, so the fisher won’t get him. Those damned fisher.

Your main man
.

Sweet Cato, who was there when Joe died, and Lee, too. Sweet Cato, whose ears would have pricked right up if he’d ever heard either of them laugh again. Who will remember them now? And who will remember Cato? Will Reveille remember? Will Annie? What do dogs remember?

She wants to know, though what can it matter? When time, that great fisher, will nab them all in the end. What can it possibly matter?

J
osh has met Serena’s parents.

“And?”

“I didn’t drool.”

“Her parents don’t mind you’re American?”

“They say journalists aren’t really American. They say journalists are like nomads—our own tribe, really, wandering all over. And anyway, I’m a quarter Chinese, right?”

“Something like that. But what do you think?”

“I think she’s a great cook. And that our kids, if we have kids, will be—what. To an identity crisis born. Maybe they’ll get religion. Like everyone else, once globalization has made mincemeat of the nation-state. It’ll be their identity-in-a-pocket, a little affiliation-to-go.” Hattie doesn’t laugh. “Does marriage come before kids?”

“Maybe.”

“Does Serena believe in marriage?”

“No, now that you mention it. But her parents do, so. And you’re going to love her. She likes to swim.”

“Wonderful.”

“She’s very warm. You know—Chinese. Speaks Chinese, by the way, as well as Russian and Portuguese and English. Her parents are very Chinese, too. Especially her mother.”

“What’s her name?”

“Lola.”

“A nice Chinese name.”

“Isn’t it? Just like Hattie. I keep telling them how Chinese you are.”

“And?”

“Lola says aren’t you lucky to have the skin—it’s such a savings. She says she only spends half as much as everyone else on her face.”

Hattie laughs and hangs up cheered, though was it
holding back
not to have told Josh about Cato?

Your dog has died, you mean
.

She’ll write him an e-mail. Grace and Greta, meanwhile, have left flowers for her, a bag of biscuits for Annie and Reveille, and a condolence note. Cato, they said, was a good dog.

• • •

T
here’s been a fire at the mini-mall site. Some wires got crossed; someone was in a hurry. Something sparked. It happens, say some. Only Ginny is suspicious.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, who can even say how much plywood was stolen now, right?”

The thieves probably stole some more, then set the fire to cover their tracks, agrees Beth. Greta is more skeptical. What kind of a way is that to get away with something? Even she concedes, though, that it is strange that there’d be trouble with the electrical when Everett’s dad was an electrician—wasn’t he an electrician?

“He was,” says Grace. “And Everett grew up helping him.”

“So he must have known his safe practices,” says Hattie. “On the other hand, people do make mistakes. It could still be an accident.”

“It was a coverup!” insists Beth, who, having suddenly cut her hair again and given up on skirts, seems more pugnacious than ever. “It was!”

Candy hesitates but finally nods. Beth’s right, it was a coverup.

Their connection biases at work.

“So then,” says Ginny, “should we turn the boys in?”

When they don’t know that the fire had anything to do with the plywood, or that the plywood has anything to do with the van?

“No, we should not turn them in,” says Hattie. “There is just no proof.”

“They are innocent,” agrees Greta, “until proven guilty.”

Ginny folds her napkin perfectly in half.

D
eer bound across Ginny’s lawn, eating things up; her ornamentals are no longer ornamental. And seeing as how Everett’s gone and taken her chicken wire down, her whole vegetable garden’s gone, too—her last tomatoes, her leafies, her squash. You can see how Ginny might be upset. But should she be letting hunters come hunt in retaliation? Usually she posts her
NO HUNTING
signs all over. This year, everyone’s invited instead, and not just for deer. Ginny’s letting the bear hunters come, too, starting immediately.

All of which so disgusts Jill Jenkins that—never mind that for many, lying around opening their hearts is the best part of yoga—she cannot wait until after her headstand to explode. Her chest heaves with outrage, her arms flail around; she seems wholly unacquainted with yogic serenity.

“Do you know what these guys do? They put radio collars on their hounds, and train them to tree bears,” she informs anyone who doesn’t know. “When the radio signal goes off, they go driving over. Then they put down their beers, get out of their trucks, stand there at the base of the tree, and shoot.”

Silence. This is not a hunting crowd, of course—and they’re outraged, too—but still.

“Think we’ll be able to meditate?” says Hattie, finally.

People laugh. Carter smiles.

Hattie straightens out her mat.

A lot of the hunters are neighbors—some of them rough customers, but not all of them as bad as Jill paints them. And it’s only every now and then, really, that you see a flatbed with a bear, though Hattie did see a cub on its back the other day, its narrow snout reminding her, disconcertingly, of Annie’s.

I’ll but lie and bleed awhile
.

It’s hard to feel that Ginny’s got the right idea, especially as poor Everett hardly seems worth harassing. He does not go out and, what with the mini-mall trouble, isn’t building anymore, either. The fire wasn’t much, really, as fires go, but coming on top of the plywood, people say, it could ruin him. He can’t pay his subcontractors; he can’t pay the lumberyard. All he can do is drink, it seems, knowing that there are hunters all around him—knowing that he’s treed. Hattie and others have started leaving food at the base of his tower, but what else can they do? Besides shake their heads—that tower—all that scrap wood hammered on every which way. It’s pretty crackpot. Hattie shouts up to him one day, standing in the goldenrod. The sun is bright in her face as she fashions a crude megaphone out of some cardboard, then shouts and shouts into the clear fall air. Sounding a little crackpot herself—she almost can’t blame him for not answering. And what would she say if he did? That she talked to Ginny? That she could try talking to Ginny again? When she can see how much good it did the first time, and when Ginny is conveniently out of town, anyway? Visiting friends, people say.