Interstate (8 page)

For weeks later she has dreams almost every other night concerning her father—in one he says “Save me, I'm drowning in dirt,” in another he greets her with a formal handshake while she has her arms out for a hug and kiss, asks her to cup her hands, she does and he spoons a pyramid of earth in each palm and says “One more time?” in another she gets a telegram saying “My dearest child, I am completely in pieces and unmotivatedly scatterbrained, is there no rhyme not to say a season why you're also not distraught, my deepest regards to those authorities above who might be able to do something to redress this, your loving poppy, Nat,” in another he's a boy of about six sitting on her lap and she's supposed to be his mother she thinks in the dream “but how's that? since he's this and I'm his,” when he says “Mamma grammar, divided we're lame, together we contaminated, do you know that hysterical smote?—who said it second? ah, I could never teach you nuttin',” and dives off into a hole in the sofa and disappears, in another he appears in the distance riding a horse, shouts “Hi-ho, my Margo, hi-ho,” and rides closer waving a sword over his head, stops under her bedroom window still shouting hi-ho, her husband stirs in bed m the dream and says in his sleep “Largo, heed the drosses, need the worms, give them crosses, sieve the burns,” she says “Glendon, wake up, be up, we've got to start making some sense,” and to her father from bed “Daddy, hide away, now, bow,” and her father says from below, still seated on the horse but sword sheathed, “Dearest Julie, I mean my darling Margo, I'm so lonesome, separated, throw me a rope, I want to crawl up and join you,” same night in another dream he's standing talking to her cordially, seems like an art opening at a gallery, then a cocktail party at her home, he seems to be a friend of a couple she invited and he clinks her glass with his and says “So how's the weather up there?” “Am I that tall to you?” “I'm talking real weather, lady: shrouds, tornadoes, lightning storms,” “Excuse me but who brought you, the Kahns, the Kanes?” “I'm still asking weather, missus, weather,” “Weather? where? we're both in the same spot and consanguineous, Father, indoors,” “Hardly, earthly, cementally, it's as dark as a person can see, though I love you neverthebestly, I mean beastly,” then he suddenly becomes a rat, same size and color as one but with her father's face, and leaps onto her chest and starts scratching at her eyes and she swats it off and runs out of the house, her husband in pajamas, when in her dream she thinks “That's funny, he only sleeps nude,” yelling from their bedroom window “Come back, he's scampering up the vines, I told you we should've cut them down, now he's coming through the window, don't leave me be a solitary speck with him, he still has all his teeth and the rat can bite,” in another her father's a mosquito buzzing around her head and she says “Stay away, now stay away—okay, don't say I didn't warn you, for I can get murderously allergic to bugs, having attacks like you've never seen,” and slaps at it but keeps missing, then she doesn't see or hear it and while she's looking around and listening for it it lands on her arm, she watches it stick its proboscis in, “Wait till it's drawing blood,” she thinks, “even if there is some pain it'll be worth it,” counts to six, whispers “Time,” and slaps it hard and lifts her hand to see what she thinks will be its squished bloody carcass even if it is a male, but nothing's there and she yells “Damn air pockets, damned if they're there, damned if they're not, but I still might have nipped its tip if not flattened it and it's dead or dying on the floor and all I got to do is step on it,” when it starts buzzing around her head and she says “I can take it, you don't bother me so don't think you do, I can take much more than this so you'll just have to do your sneaky biting and then buzz away on your own, for I'm not wasting another wave on you,” in another she's sleeping alone and he pushes open her bedroom door with his head and crawls into the room and up to her ear and says into it “I miss you, I miss your sis most persistently not to mention you, what dries up isn't a scream, what cries down isn't a dream, I can come up with these long after you're sufficiently sick of them and me, fried, dried, you got it, so make more meaning out of me, my sweet, release me, let me already Margo,” and she says in her dream half asleep “But it's you, goddamnit, you, I did everything good I could, cried, dried, so all right, didn't fly, but that's over and done with so now let me sleep,” and her eyes close and in her dream-sleep she dreams of hovering butterflies and bees, a flower garden with a deer eating the sweet peas, and a few hundred feet behind it an old barn with several big holes in the roof and its doors off and a buggy in a cow stall showing through and nothing else around but pasture with the tall grass being jerked by the wind, and she thinks “Peaceful, I like it, even the peas, by God, even the sky, blue with downy clouds, and thank goodness, nothing of him,” in another she and a grown-up Julie enter an empty cottage she and her family rent for two weeks every summer, wonders where's the ramshackle furniture that practically makes the place in addition to the missing woodstove and the picture postcards of artworks she's tacked to the door frames and the owner till now hasn't taken off, hears tapping under the floor and says “What's that?” “What's up?” Julie says, “I don't hear or see anything,” “That tap-tap, tap-tap, it's even louder now and could be a code of some sort, Morse, lost, from under the floorboards,” and Julie says “You're seeing things again, hon, for what floor, who boards?” and she says “And pardon me, my nearest miss, but you've either lost all your sensory powers or I don't know what, lower powers, infrapowers,” and says to the floor “Tell her in taps or words if there is someone down there for I don't want to appear hard of feeling,” and he says “Yeah, it's me, Daddy, to you both though you're so much apart, hidden from you while I'm hiding from one of the Axis, and if they find me, the Nazis particularly, I'll be pitched into an infinite dip like everyone else of my kind, first shot, stabbed or gassed or eaten by dogs or two of those or three,” “Maybe Julie can help you, sir, but I've got to inform you I'm not that sort of daughter and don't see how I could ever be, in fact now that I know you're there and wanted, if I don't say anything I'll be risking all our lives for yours—even mine, let me tell ya, which I have to admit is to me of much less significance, feeling deep down that being last on line and kind's the only thing,” “Please, enough with heartfeltness and panoplied philosophies, pry open the fucking boards, help me out and to get away for I'm too goddamn weak to, and take me to my mother cunt where there are no such things as axioms and Nazis, then I'll be free and never again need to ask you for anything for me,” “No can do,” and Julie says “Who you speaking to, hon, me?” and she says “Yup, you, nope, me, maybe, unclear, over, under,” in another she draws up a pail from a well and he's cramped into it, chin pinned to his knees, rubbing his knuckles and looking asleep, pail's seams stretched and buckling, in another he says to her in a barrens with no houses or other people around “The weather's been so inclement out here, I can't see any shooting stars this year, there are only another few days till the peak of the shower's over, I wish I could go back to where I started from to see it better, would you buy me a ticket?”

Next morning she says to Glen “Again, another one of those deadly daddy dreams, what gives with them? last night there might have been two, maybe three—you know, I really can't take it anymore, I mean I can probably take it so long as I don't lose a lot of sleep over it, but I don't want to take it anymore, goddamn guy won't leave me alone and I think I know what it all means, not ‘goddamn,' that's just what was in my last dream or one I remember as last, the goddamn cursing, but you know what I mean, and it's not, I swear—how do you like that? ‘swear,' ‘cursing'—but it's not that I believe in spirits or anything like that, and I'm aware that cementarians or something—that's from another dream about graveyards, the made-up word I mean if it is made up—don't stick much of the cremated person's dust into those soup cans, maybe a tenth of it someone in the know once said, so for me perhaps one fifth for two cans, but I almost feel that his ashes are talking to me in their way, or his spirit's doing the talking for his ashes, or it's neither of those, which is probably the case, for things like that can't be, can they? and it's just my mind which I don't think will be normally composed for months unless I get his ashes and dust and bone fragments and eyeballs, for christsake, and whatever back together again, two cans, I don't plan to mix them and put them in one, that'd be too complicated and messy and probably smelly and not something I'd ask anyone to do and I certainly won't, but one on top of the other or side by side but at least as close as two cans can be in the same burying place,” and he says “So you have to do something about it, what else can I say?” and she says “Good advertisement for plane travel and what I was thinking myself, you think you can handle the boys for up to two days?” and calls work and says she won't be in today and possibly the next and drives to the cemetery, at the office there asks if she may dig the can up herself, she knows exactly where it is and she brought a garden trowel for the work, and the person in charge says they'd get into all sorts of difficulties with the gravediggers' union if they let her do anything with the trowel but fluff up the earth a little around the privets or dig up some weeds and she says “Good, so a professional digger will have to do it, I don't care what the charge so long as it's done in the next hour though I hope you'll be fair, this isn't a casket I'm asking you to unearth but a small can which is maybe at the most, or was when we put it there, a foot and a half underground,” gravedigger's taken off another job and can's dug up and she takes it home in the shoebox she came with, wraps it in several layers of aluminum foil and plastic produce bags, phones her father's cemetery and tells them what she's coming for and they say it's all right though of course there'll have to be some costs, phones her travel agent, arranges for a friend to be home when the kids get there and calls Glen to say she's leaving now, “I've been thinking,” he says and she says “My mind's made up so don't try to change it,” “It's not that but can't it wait till the weekend when I'll be freer to take care of the kids and your leaving won't be such a shock to them and you also might have had more time to think about it, because for all you know your bad dreams might end for good here tonight,” “I've already made all the arrangements, not that anything like that can't be changed, but I don't want to keep the can around the house for that long, it wouldn't be right for the kids or good for me, I also don't see myself bringing it back to the cemetery and asking them to rebury it, so I just want to get the whole thing done with and if all goes well I'll be home tomorrow around midafternoon,” drives to the airport, flies east with the wrapped can in her carry-on bag, stays at a hotel near the airport, the can in the bathtub behind the drawn shower curtain while she sleeps, gets up early and doesn't remember having any dreams about her father or Julie or graves or holes or anything alluding to them, breakfasts and cabs to the cemetery and tells one of the owners she doesn't know where the other can's buried except that it's around her sister's grave so if they don't have any record of the exact location, which isn't to say the can couldn't have shifted underground, they'll probably have to go get a gravedigger to search for it, something, she said, they probably would have done anyway what with the possible labor trouble with the gravediggers' union, while two men poke around Julie's grave with poles she thinks of her and closes her eyes and says very low “You know, I don't pray, I mean, never, I'm telling you, maybe not since I was a little girl and was afraid of God and thought he'd kill me if I didn't pray so I felt forced to, but I'm doing it now for you, my darling sister, so if you're near and you hear me please know I love you and have always loved you more than I can say or can express in any kind of way and feel you got the rawest deal anyone could get in this world and I only hope it never hurt and that things where you are now are all right for you, and I'm sorry I haven't been out to see you since I don't know how many years ago, when I was still a teen, I think, the last time, but I live far away and it isn't easy but that's no excuse for all those years, and I miss you too, meaning I miss you much the way Dad always used to say he did, said it in words and letters to me and also in my dreams since he died how he missed me but especially you, Mom you must know how much she loves you for I know how often she visits you even though she lives a few hundred miles away, and of course you know what I'm doing today and if you don't it's that now all of his remains or what's left of them and I'm hoping his spirit too if there is one will be beside you, and I also think so much of what it might have been for me if you had lived, this I've been thinking since a little after you were killed and have never really stopped thinking it since, been for us both, really, both, so, that's enough, there could be more but I don't think I can go on any further, I hope you heard if you're there or the essence of the message got through to you or just got to you or just eventually does in some way, essence or the whole,” cries, someone pats her shoulder but she doesn't see who, breaks down, walks off by herself to be alone, wishes she'd brought flowers for Julie and her father and grandparents whom she never knew, thinks she saw a flower stall about a half-mile down the road from the cemetery but too late for that and she picks some flowers bordering another burial place out of view of Julie's grave, there are lots of them around this plot and they seem like fast-growing and abundant healthy flowers so she doesn't think the grave owners would mind, goes back to her family's gravesite, “Found it,” one of the grave diggers says while she's arranging some flowers on her grandmother's grave and he holds up a rusting can, same size and kind as the one she has in her handbag, she says “Think it'd be all right if I do the honors?—it's what I came for,” “Your privilege, I guess, I've no objections, and hole's not so wide or deep as for you to fall in,” she asks him to make the hole a bit wider, unwraps her can, switches around the cans behind her back till she doesn't know which one is which, doesn't look at them till she sees just their tops in the ground, buries them side by side and touching each other, pushes the dirt over them till the hole's filled, tamps the earth around it till it's flat and says “Okay, Dad, now rest in peace,” and goes back to the cemetery office and asks the receptionist there to call a cab to take her to the airport.