Juliet in August (36 page)

He's almost asleep but the light is bothering him. He can see it through his eyelids. He reaches over to switch it off and sees the bull rider's face.

The face is his, and he's not dreaming.

Ghost

There's just enough light from the moon that Willard thinks he sees Marian put her finger to her lips, and then she crosses the linoleum floor, and when she's halfway between the door and his bed he can see that, yes, she does have her finger to her lips and she's whispering
Shhhh,
as though there's someone else besides Willard who might hear.

When Marian lifts Willard's covers, lifts her nightgown,
removes
her nightgown, he couldn't be more astonished. It takes a minute and the warmth of Marian's body for him to realize that she hasn't come to talk, that words aren't, in fact, needed. Marian kneels over him, and Willard isn't sure what to do. He should say something—
Christ, woman, stop whatever it is that you're doing
—but he doesn't want her to stop, feels all his pent-up love for her rushing to that one mysterious organ. His hands rise and he places them on her white thighs.
Shhhh,
she says again, now lowering herself to meet his naked body—there's that word,
body,
he wonders if he said it out loud, but
shhhh
is the only sound he hears—and he's ready for her—another surprise—and he closes his eyes and surrenders until a shudder passes through him and he moans, he can't help it. Although he's embarrassed at the guttural sound, the warmth he feels makes him want to talk, makes him want to say things, but there are no words in his head. Only fragments, nine years' worth of words and phrases and truncations. He
has
to say something, for her sake, but what? All they've ever spoken about is business (the drive-in) and household appliances (the dishwasher with its tendency to leak) and who's going to pick up the mail (usually Willard).
Her name,
he thinks,
I could say her name,
and he's about to utter it, or try to, when Marian moves her finger from her lips to his, touches him gently, then lifts herself off of him, out of the bed. She picks up her nightgown from where it has fallen and she turns, and her bare feet carry her across the floor, away from him, and she disappears.

Silence. The vapory stillness of night is almost unbearable. Willard wants the dog to bark, a truck to pass, a crack of thunder, anything to bring him back to what is familiar. But why? The last few minutes were perhaps the most pleasurable he's experienced since childhood. He closes his eyes and tries to hang on to the feeling, but it fades and then a truck does pass and the dog barks, and he's no longer sure if Marian really came to him or if he spilled his own warmth in a dark dream.

He can't sleep. In fact, he doesn't want to sleep. He lies awake, listening to the dog bark without it registering that
his dog is barking
, and wonders what is ahead. He tingles with expectation, although he has no idea where this night is going to take him. Perhaps nowhere. He knows that in the darkness the edges of things are blurred—the past and the present, dreams and memory and time. He doesn't try to understand Marian's ghostly visit. One word rolls around in his head, over and over, the word
lovers
.

Even as the dog barks, and a teenage boy lights the wick of a crude Molotov cocktail, his friends hanging back, not as brave, and throws it as hard as he can toward the dark shadow of the movie screen.

Even as the fire catches in the dry grass, flames licking at the looming wooden structure, the dog barking furiously now, and Marian returns to Willard's doorway and says, “Willard, the dog. I think the kids are out there again.”

The two of them, Willard pulling on a pair of pants and Marian in her nightgown, out the door to be greeted by the sight of fire, a real fire this time. Marian gasps, is ready to run with a bucket of water, but Willard holds her back and says, “Too late. Let it go.” Then, “Don't go, Marian. Don't leave me. I love you.”

Surprising the absolute hell out of himself.

And then he quickly goes back inside to the phone and calls the volunteer fire department to keep the fire from spreading through the grass; it's too late for the movie screen.

And Marian stands in the open doorway as though she's on fire with the flames behind her, watching him, and she says, “I'm not going anywhere, Willard. Where in the world did you get that idea?”

Sand

When Lee was a boy he dreamed of living in the desert, a student of sand, the protégé of a Bedouin camel driver, learning from a master how to find his way through endless miles of dunes with no landmarks because the landscape keeps shifting and reinventing itself. Lee would lie in his bed with a flashlight late into the night and look at the soft, hand-colored photographs in Lester's old books—pictures of smiling nomad wives in front of their tents wearing heavy and elaborate jewelry. The caption under one such photograph informed Lee,
A Bedouin woman wears a large part of her husband's capital, and as his wealth increases, so will the number of silver chains supporting coins or charms.
He had no idea what that meant. He didn't know what
capital
was, unless the word was used as an adjective, as in
capital city
. He knew all the capital cities of North America.

He would try to talk Astrid into letting him camp out in the sand hills up the road, but she would never agree. He didn't know why. “You're not old enough to stay out there alone, pretending to be the Sheik of Araby,” she would tell him, and he would argue that he wouldn't be alone, Rip would be there, too, and Astrid would say, “Yes, but for how long? That old horse has a dinner bell in his head, and he's going to set off for home the second he hears the first ring.” Lee started to say something about hobbles and Astrid nipped that in the bud. “Oh no, you don't,” she said. “You're going to get yourself in big trouble if you try hobbling a horse and you don't know what you're doing. There'll be none of that nonsense.” And when she told Lester what he had planned, Lester backed her up in his usual laconic way. “Tomfoolery,” he said. He could have said
malarkey
. That was another word Lester used to put an end to things.

So Lee lay in his bed at night and imagined himself in a homemade tent with its back to the west wind. Lester had a tanned hide in a shed—his father's first purebred Hereford bull, named Lucky, shipped from Ontario and the foundation of his herd—and Lee planned how he could load Lucky's hide onto Rip's back somehow and take it into the sand and then drape it over a frame of fresh-cut poplar boughs, creating a tent that he could leave open on one side, like the ones in the photographs. He'd build a fire in front and cook for himself—beans and cheese (preferably goat cheese, but he didn't know where he would get that)—and he'd have dates from Astrid's baking supplies for dessert. When the wind came up he would lie under a single blanket inside the tent and listen to the sand battering the hide, and his tent would be sturdy, and Rip would close his eyes and turn his back to the wind just outside the tent and stand still as a statue until the storm was past. Maybe Lee would even find Antoinette out there somewhere and increase his standing, as Lester's book said, by the animals he possessed. Capital. Maybe that's what capital was.

Of course, once Lee hit puberty, his interest in Lester's obsolete books waned, and eventually he quit looking at them altogether. While other kids outgrew Saturday morning television, Lee outgrew the naive descriptions of a simple nomadic life with a small herd of animals and a wife laden with charms. He couldn't picture himself anymore as a hospitable nomad draped in layers of flowing garments, who invited strangers into his tent and served tea from a Persian samovar. And one day he looked in Lester's shed and Lucky's hide was gone—he supposed Lester had thrown it out, taken it to the dump—and then Rip and Tom died, and Lee discovered Saturday night and the joy of back roads in a car driven by someone a few years older until he was old enough himself to be the driver, a case of beer on the floor, thinking about girls from the next town but never doing much about it because he was too shy. Even though a couple of the girls tried to snap him up. Whenever they phoned, he told Astrid to say he would call them back, but he never did—except for that one girl who was serious and smart and couldn't wait to get to the city. Then after grade twelve graduation, full-time farming with Lester, all the work of the different seasons, and Lee tried to be an able hand and learn the job well, and then Lester died when Lee was twenty-two, and then Astrid.

And now, here he is, the sole owner of their capital.
His
capital.

He stretches out in the darkness on one of Astrid's webbed plastic lounge chairs in the yard. A wind has come up—the old trees are creaking—and the air feels good. He's wearing a pair of worn gray sweatpants pulled up to his knees so the breeze can cool the saddle burns on his calves. Cracker is lying in the grass beside him, no unusual sounds keeping him alert and awake tonight. Lee is envious of the dog's ability to sleep.

He closes his eyes, but it's no use. He can't stop the sand from passing. The same sand, he keeps thinking, that was there when the Perry cowboys rode the hundred miles, just blown around and rearranged the way he'd shuffled and rearranged the postcards earlier. And then the postcards are in his mind again, the certainty that the messages are from his mother
,
the handwriting not quite a picture of her face, but evidence of her existence. He thinks of the box in the closet and is satisfied now with its place there, even though Astrid had wanted it burned. He feels as though the postcards belong in the house, since the words written on them were spoken aloud and recited time and time again until they were part of the walls. He wonders whether their discovery will cause him to ask new questions, but for now he's content that one question has been answered. Did she, his mother, ever think about him once she'd placed him in Astrid and Lester's porch and driven away into the night? Yes. She had.

Lee drops the back of the webbed lounger down farther so that he's lying almost flat. He wishes he'd brought a pillow outside with him. He longs for sleep but it won't come. Instead, the day replays itself over and over: the miles on horseback, the heat of the sun, Mrs. Bulin in his kitchen, the postcards. And always the sand passing beneath the horse's hooves.

He recalls again how he'd never been able to talk Astrid into letting him sleep in the sand hills overnight. He thinks,
I could now, why not?
He's on his own, the master of this spread—surprisingly, the idea of that does not scare him at this moment. He gets up from the chair, pulling down his pant legs, and goes into the house and down to the basement, where there's an old nylon pup tent packed away, purchased for a school camping trip. He finds a lightweight sleeping bag, not that he'll need a sleeping bag on such a warm summer night.

Already thinking about what else he should take with him—a bit of firewood, water, an old pot for coffee—but the list gets too long and makes the whole venture seem like too much trouble. He settles on just the tent and a blanket and a flashlight, and his desert scrapbook, kept in a drawer in his childhood desk. He'll look through it one last time and then put it away forever, maybe in Astrid's closet. As he's going out the door he decides that a hot drink would be good after all, so he takes the time to boil the kettle and make tea, which he puts in a beat-up metal travel mug from the Oasis, a poor excuse for a samovar, but there's only him and he doesn't have to bestow hospitality on himself. He thinks briefly about riding the horse into the dunes again, but immediately dismisses that idea because the thought of getting back on is much too painful.

When he gets outside, Cracker is at the doorstep, wagging his tail, ready again for whatever might unfold. Normally, Lee would leave him behind, but this time he says, “What the hell?” and motions for Cracker to jump in the truck box, then he changes his mind again and lets him ride in the cab, which Lester would never have done. He takes a loop through the yard so he can check on the horse. The truck's headlights shine on the gray coat and the horse barely lifts his head. He's standing up against the side of the barn, relaxed, resting one hind foot, the breeze keeping the mosquitoes away.

As Lee leaves the yard, a gust of wind hits the side of the truck and he wonders if maybe something is moving in. He drives north, the lights of Juliet in the rearview mirror, heading once again for the big dunes up near the Lindstroms' and the Hundred Mile School. He rolls down the window so he can feel the night air, and watches the dark shapes pass: the familiar rolling landscape, the cemetery, the bins and sheds and farm machinery, and endless rows of fence posts and power poles. A white-tailed deer jumps out of the ditch onto the road in front of him and he has to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting her, but she flashes off to the east, while Cracker struggles to keep his balance on the seat.

Lee parks the truck across the road from the old school. With the rolled-up tent and its poles and pegs in a nylon bag under one arm, his blanket and the scrapbook under the other, and the travel mug and flashlight in his two hands, he sets off across the sand, Cracker sticking close to his side in this new territory.

Lee doesn't go far. Walking in the sand is difficult and he's packing his gear awkwardly. As soon as he's at the foot of a dune, he drops everything in the sand. The pages of the scrapbook rustle and flap in the wind as he unpacks the nylon tent. He pieces together the cross-poles and threads them through, and the breeze fills the tent like a sail, the gusts threatening to carry it off. He tries to stake it down but the pegs are useless in the sand. The only thing to do is sit inside and use his body weight on the floor to hold it in place. He manages to get it set with the door facing east and throws his blanket and the scrapbook and flashlight inside. Then he crawls in himself with his travel mug and ties the door open. He spreads the blanket out and sits on it. Cracker sits in the sand staring at him and Lee says, “You stay put there, no wandering off,” and Cracker obediently lies in the sand with his head on his paws so close to the tent, he's almost inside. Lee takes a sip of tea and feels sand all along the rim of the plastic lid.