Authors: Castle Freeman
Lillian touched Nate’s bruised side lightly with her fingertips. “Does that hurt?” she asked again. “No,” said Nate.
Lillian moved her hand over his side. “Should I go on?” Lillian asked him. “I don’t mind,” said Nate.
“That’ll do,” said Lester. “Put your clothes back on. Look at the two of you. Carrying on. I don’t know about you people.”
They drew up in front of Lester’s place. He got out of the truck and shut the door. He looked up at the sky. Above the sleeping settlement the heaven was full of stars, slowly wheeling, but the night was as yet perfectly still. In Lester’s front yard, the whirligigs were unmoving: The duck didn’t fly, the chopper didn’t chop, the Indian didn’t paddle his canoe.
Lillian moved over behind the wheel. Lester stood beside the truck.
“Well,” he said.
“You did it,” said Lillian.
“’Course we did,” said Lester. “What did you think?”
“I don’t know,” said Lillian. “I thought you couldn’t, then I thought maybe you could, then I thought you couldn’t. I knew you couldn’t. Blackway —”
“Forget about Blackway,” said Lester. “Blackway’s all done. We said we’d take care of him for you. Well, we have. I’d shut up about Blackway from now on, if I was you.”
Lester got the goose gun out of the back of the truck and returned to the window. He peered into the truck. Nate had gone to sleep.
“You’d better get him on home,” he said.
“He ought to see a doctor,” said Lillian. “I’m afraid he’s got cracked ribs.”
“He ain’t got nothing,” said Lester. “He’s fine. You can’t hurt him.”
Lillian smiled in the dark. “Okay,” she said.
“Go on,” said Lester. He stepped back from the truck and waited for her to pull away.
“Lester?”
“Go on, now,” said Lester.
Lillian nodded. She put the truck in gear and drove away. Lester turned, rested the goose gun on his shoulder, and walked slowly to his door. At the door he looked down the road where Lillian’s rear lights went around the bend and disappeared. Where were those two going? Not to the ball game. Not to the picnic. Not to church. To someplace where he couldn’t follow them. Not even the first worst man could follow them where they were going. Not if he was old. Lester had got bad too late, it looked like. He saw again Lillian’s hair, loose, tangled, falling down her back, down her shoulders. Good luck to her, he thought. Good luck to them both. They’ll need it, everybody does. For him, what he’d had to do he’d done, and for the rest, well, maybe next time. Next time?
Lester let himself into his house. As he shut the door behind him, one of the whirligigs in the yard began lazily to turn over, then another, set in motion by the first faint arrival of the little breeze that comes before the dawn on summer mornings.
“Nate?”
“Yo.”
“Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“How’s your side?”
“Not too bad. I’ll be fine, the way Les says.”
“Right. Your girlfriend. What’s her name? Rowena? Rowena will take care of it, won’t she? She’ll kiss it and make it well. Won’t she?”
“She ain’t my girlfriend.”
“What is she, then?”
“I don’t know. Well, she might be my cousin, I guess. Let’s see: Her stepdad is my mother’s cousin. I think. Does that make her and me cousins?”
“I don’t know.”
“If it does, we’re cousins. Rowena works at the clinic. One day this spring she was on her way to work and her car conked out. I came along, gave her a ride to the clinic. Les was at the clinic when we drove up. Seven
AM.
Ever since, Les has got it fixed we’re going together. Me and Rowena. We ain’t.”
“Don’t you have one, then?”
“One what?”
“A girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No need.”
“No need?”
They had stopped in front of the house where Lillian had been living with Kevin Bay, then without him, a house in the woods. She turned off the engine and the headlights, and they sat together in the dark. Not in the dark, but in the beginning of the beginning of the first paleness, the imperceptible lightening, the gray whisper of the dawn.
“No need? I don’t believe you. You don’t need anybody?”
“Why would I?”
“To be with you. To go with you.”
“Go where?”
“Anywhere. Wherever you go.”
“You need that, not me.”
“Then why did you go with me today?”
“Yesterday.”
“Why did you go with me yesterday?”
“Because you asked me to.”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t ask you. I didn’t want you. I wanted that other one, the one who wasn’t there.”
“Scotty.”
“I wanted him. Not you. I said so. You heard what I said. You didn’t have to go with me. Why did you?”
“Boss said I was to.”
“You mean Whizzer?”
“Him and Les.”
“You do what they tell you?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
“No reason not to.”
“No reason except it almost got you killed. No reason except the person you were trying to help was laughing at you. Me. I was laughing at you. I thought you were — well, you know what I thought. You went with me anyway. No dummy who’s just following orders does that. Does he?”
Nate shrugged. He didn’t reply. They sat in the truck and watched the day resolve itself before them in a shifting silver screen of fog, light, shadow, and mass.
“Does he?”
“Who?”
“You. No dumb kid would have done what you did, would have gone with me the way I was, the way you did. A dumb kid doesn’t do that, does he?”
“How about if I asked you a question?”
“What question?”
“Before, when he was after you — that one we left back up there. Why didn’t you run, like they asked you? Why didn’t you just get away?”
“I was different.”
“Was?”
“I thought I was. I wanted to be. The boy I was with, before?”
“Kevin?”
“Kevin was different. He was smart. He could talk. Schmuckville, he called this place. East Schmuckville. It wasn’t for him. Not for Kevin. He was going to get out. He was going to do things. Like me.”
“Sure.”
“And then, Blackway? Blackway went past Kevin like a big truck on the highway when you’re riding a bicycle. Blackway just blew him away. Poor Kevin.”
“Poor Kevin.”
“For a day, two days, he didn’t leave the house. All he wanted to do was smoke dope and watch TV. Then he ran. He ran and he left me.”
“Well, that’s Kevin, ain’t it?”
“Is it? Did you know Kevin?”
“Sure. He was a year ahead of me. Come to that, we’re cousins, Kevin and me.”
“You are? Kevin’s your cousin. Rowena’s your cousin. Is everybody in town your cousin?”
“Pretty much.”
“When he ran, Kevin, I decided I wasn’t going to. I picked up a little knife, a paring knife, and I left the house, alone. If Blackway was out there, I was going to take him on. I was going to take Blackway on with a paring knife.”
“What’s a paring knife?”
“Oh, like for in the kitchen. A little kitchen knife. But, do you see, about Kevin? Kevin ran. He was different, but he ran.”
“Can’t blame him, can you? I guess he didn’t have a what’s-it knife. ’Course he ran.”
“You didn’t run.”
“I ain’t Kevin.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“I ain’t different.”
“No.”
“That’s enough about me and Kevin, now, ain’t it?”
“It is.”
In the woods the first birds had begun to call, tentatively, in simple, hesitant notes —
plink, plonk —
like the hammering of sleepy smiths up in the trees.
“Nate?”
“Yo.”
“What do you say? Will you go with me again?”
“When?”
“Now?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Whizzer didn’t tell you to, you know.”
“I know.”
“Lester didn’t tell you to.”
“I know.”
“I’m not them.”
“No, you ain’t.”
Lillian opened the door of the truck and got out. She shut the door. She turned to Nate.
“Well?”
“I don’t mind.”
18
THE GROUND
Conrad sat down on the edge of the bed and bent to untie his shoes. Betsy was sitting on her side of the bed with her legs crossed, watching the national news report on the TV. There were fires in the West, in the dry mountains: Colorado, Arizona, places like that were burning.
“Those poor people,” said Betsy.
“Do you know a girl named Lillian?” Conrad asked her. “Late twenties, beautiful long brown hair, used to work at the nursery?”
“At the nursery?” Betsy said. “No. I don’t know her. I can’t keep track of the girls in their late twenties with beautiful long brown hair who work at the nursery. There are too many of them. None of them stays more than a week. Edie Lippincott can’t keep them.”
“What’s the matter with her?” asked Conrad.
“Edie? Edie’s a dragon,” said Betsy.
Conrad watched the TV for a minute. What was needed out there was rain. But there was no rain.
“This girl was at the mill today,” he said.
“She was? I’ll bet Lonnie liked that.”
“You’re right,” said Conrad. “He did. They all did.”
“The old goat. Were you really there all day?”
“Yes.”
“God,” said Betsy. “I’d think you’d bore yourself to death.”
“Why?” said Conrad. “It’s not boring. Not at all. You ought to stop down there yourself sometime.”
“No, thank you,” said Betsy.
“Whizzer’s a gallant old boy, in his own way,” said Conrad.“He’s got a lot going against him and not much for. And he is your brother.”
“He is,” said Betsy. “He might as well not be. Lonnie never paid much attention to me. Why would he? I was eleven years younger, and plus, of course, I was a girl. Lonnie and them don’t have much use for girls.”
“That’s not what you just said.”
“That’s exactly what I just said.”
They watched the TV together for a couple of minutes. Three children were missing in Florida, three little girls. They’d been gone for four days. Nobody believed those children were still alive, but thousands were looking for them. All over Florida, Alabama, Georgia, they were searching. Friends and family members of the missing girls were talking to the TV reporters. The girls’ parents were in seclusion.
“Those poor people,” said Betsy.
Conrad stood up to take off his shirt and pants.
“What did she want, the girl from the nursery?” Betsy asked him.
“She was in trouble with some guy she’d done something to,” said Conrad. “He was threatening her, following her. She went to the sheriff. He couldn’t do anything. The guy hadn’t acted, you see. The sheriff told her to go to Whizzer’s for help. Whizzer sent her off with one of the kids who hangs around the mill and an older guy named Lester.”
“Lester Speed?” Betsy asked.
“I guess so.”
“I didn’t think Lester Speed was still alive,” said Betsy.
“They went off looking for the guy who’d been after the girl,” said Conrad. “He sounded like a fairly serious kind of a guy. They were going up into the mountains to find him. He lives up there.”
“Blackway,” said Betsy.
“You know him, too?” asked Conrad.
“By reputation,” said Betsy. “He’s been around for years.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s like the village criminal,” said Betsy. “He’s what we’ve got up here instead of organized crime.”
“From what they were saying this afternoon,” said Conrad, “you might have some of that, too.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Betsy. “It’s called progress.”
Now the TV was reporting a story from out on the Plains. At a wildlife park in Nebraska, a buffalo had gone off its rocker and charged into a group of tourists, killing two and injuring a dozen. A state policeman had shot the buffalo. But the TV reporter was alarmed, as there are buffalo by the hundreds of thousands all over Nebraska, Wyoming, and both Dakotas.
“Those poor people,” said Betsy.
“Those poor buffalo,” said Conrad.
“You had enough of this?” Betsy asked him.
“More than,” said Conrad.
Betsy turned off the TV, slipped under the sheet, and lay on her back. Conrad got in beside her. He turned off the light. After a moment Betsy spoke again.
“Don’t worry about Lonnie,” she told Conrad. “He’s not neglected.”
“No, he’s not,” said Conrad. “He’s got the others.”
“Them,” said Betsy, “and, plus, he comes here Thanksgiving, Christmas, so on. Doesn’t he? And by and by, when he really gets past taking care of himself, I expect he’ll move in here, live here. With us. He’ll have to.”
“I expect he will,” said Conrad.
“You’ll love that. Won’t you?”
“I expect I will.”
“Do you want to go to sleep now?”
“I don’t mind.”
Betsy patted his stomach under the sheet.
“You’re really going native on me, aren’t you, boy?” she asked.
“You know?” Conrad said. “I’m down there sitting around with them, listening, and of course I don’t know the ground.”
“Mmmm,” said Betsy.
“I don’t know what they’re talking about, half the time, or who,” Conrad went on. “But I have this feeling. The more I hear, the more I have it.”
“Mmmm?” said Betsy.
“This feeling that Whizzer and the rest of them are all sitting inside a spaceship,” Conrad said. “A rocket ship. They’re in there, and the ship is traveling. It’s moving. It’s going so fast. It’s going at light speed, you know? And so, the men who are on it don’t get old, do they? That’s what Einstein said. Isn’t it? They don’t change. Time doesn’t pass for them. Time stretches. It stretches, or it shrinks. Or something. They’re out of time. You know?”
“No, Einstein,” said Betsy. “I don’t know. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t think you do, either.”
“That’s possible, too,” said Conrad.
19
MORE EARLY RISERS
Coming from the head in his cart, Whizzer rolled past the wide mill door. He looked out, stopped, backed up, looked again. Across the yard, behind the morning fog, a truck. The sheriff’s truck. Whizzer got his cart turned and rolled out the door into the yard. Wingate left his truck and went to meet him.