Land of Dreams (2 page)

She’d lecture Skeezix by the hour about diets. She’d eaten only whole-wheat muffins and well water, she said, when she was a girl. And it seemed to be true, since she was thin as a wind-beaten scarecrow and had dark hollows under her eyes. Skeezix couldn’t see any profit in such a diet. And even if he could, he could hardly have eaten less of her cabbage soup and bread than he ate; there wasn’t half enough to go around as it was. Helen very often gave him a piece of her bread, because she was small and didn’t eat much, she said, and Skeezix would bring Helen dried starfish and the empty shells of chambered nautiluses and moon snails that would be tossed up onto the beach after a storm.

But you had to put up with Peebles. There he was, after all – what old Willoughby would call a ‘sad case’, hated as he was by almost everyone except Miss Flees, and by himself most of all. That’s how it seemed to Skeezix anyway, who climbed now over the little stile fence behind the orphanage, waded through the knee-high grass, slipped a copper ruler between a window rail and its jamb, and levered up the little slip lock that held the window shut. After a minute of groaning and hoisting and kicking, he tumbled in past the open casement and onto the floor. He stood up and dropped the ruler into the grass outside, along the clapboards of the wall. Then he shut the window and peered out into the hallway, where he could hear the sound of clinking plates and glasses.

The sour, heavy aroma of boiled cabbage hung on the air. Two cats wandered toward him down the hall, and he bent down and picked one of them up, a white and orange cat named Mouse, his particular favourite. He was half sure that the cat could speak, and more than once just lately he had awakened in the middle of the night to find it perched by his car, whispering something to him, something he couldn’t quite make out. It was the Solstice that did that, that turned everything onto its head.

Miss Flees blinked at him out of a pinched-up face. Her hair seemed to have lost its mind. Half of it was shoved up atop her head in a sort of geyser and clamped with a piece of twine. The other half had abandoned the twine and hung around her ears like the oars of a galley. The corners of her mouth drooped. ‘You’re late,’ she squeaked, in a voice only half human.

‘I fell asleep. I was awfully tired because of all the rain last night.’

‘You’re lying again.’

That’s right, he is,’ said Peebles happily. ‘He wasn’t in his bed half an hour ago. I looked in, and he was still gone. He’s been gone all day. Look at him, his clothes are wet, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, Mr Peebles, I’m certain they are. Miss Flees gave Skeezix a shrewd look, seeming to mean that she saw right through him, that Skeezix would have to work a little harder if he wanted to fool someone like her.

‘You’re
lying,’ said Helen to Peebles in a tired voice. ‘I saw him asleep myself an hour past, and then again just before supper.’

Now it was Helen’s turn to be squinted at. Miss Flees looked her up and down, as if she was just that second seeing her for the first time, or as if she’d just then
really
seen her for the traitor she was. ‘And the wet clothes?’ she asked, smiling and nodding at Peebles.

‘I was sleeping with the window open, actually,’ Skeezix put in, not wanting to make Helen lie for him. It was fairly clear by then that Miss Flees hadn’t herself looked into his room. She rarely did. She sat and read dime novels in what she called the parlour, and she told fortunes for a penny.

She used to hold seénces. Once Skeezix and Helen had watched through the window and were surprised to see a ghostly apparition appear from the direction of the kitchen in the middle of the spiritualizing. One woman had fainted and another had screamed, the fainting woman thinking it was the ghost of her dead son come back around at the bidding of Miss Flees. It hadn’t been the dead son, though – although the woman had never found that out – it had been Peebles covered in baking flour and wearing a black robe. The fainting woman was the wife of the Mayor, the other was the Mayor’s sister, and the Mayor himself had bitten the end off his cigar and nearly set his trousers on Are with the ash. Peebles had fled through the kitchen door, and it took about a gallon of tea at Ave cents a cup to restore the party to the extent that they could walk home.

Helen and Skeezix had waited a day before they asked Miss Flees, very casually, why it was that Peebles had bathed in baking flour and what all the screaming had meant. Skeezix had had extra bread that night, and Helen was relieved of washing the dishes, and for two months afterwards they had a better time of it than they had in years – coming and going as they liked, finding a scrap of salt pork in their cabbage soup, laughingly recalling now and again how surprised they were to see Peebles dressed up like that in the robe and all, and what a fine trick Miss Flees had played on the two ladies, who, heaven knew, were too stuffy for their own good in the first place. They could ‘throw the whole thing in their face,’ insisted Skeezix. It would serve them right. But Miss Flees seemed very anxious that such a thing be avoided, and although she shook with the effort of it, she’d even bought Skeezix a pie for dessert one night, and he’d eaten it – sharing a slice with Helen – right down to the last scrap of crust, while Miss Flees stood gaping and sputtering like a bomb about to explode and level the house. Miss Flees hated both of them. So did Peebles.

After supper Skeezix went out through the window again. He’d catch it from Miss Flees in the morning. She’d keep an eye on his room for sure that night. But so what? What would she do to him, put him on half rations? He could live with Dr Jensen, couldn’t he? Except that would mean abandoning Helen to Miss Flees and Peebles, and he couldn’t do that. She was like his sister. He wasn’t half a block up the hill to Willoughby’s farm when Helen caught up with him.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked. But she knew the answer well enough; there was nothing beyond Willoughby’s farm but redwood groves and meadows choked in berry vines and skunk cabbage.

‘Only up to Jack’s.’

‘Then where?’

Skeezix shrugged. He wasn’t certain he wanted a girl along on such a night – not with the storm threatening to break loose again and the sky full of bats and clouds and wind. ‘Just hanging out.’

‘You lie as badly as Peebles. You and Jack are up to something. What is it? I’m going to help.’ She pulled her coat around her more tightly and turned the collar up against die wind, which was blowing almost straight onshore and was heavy with misty sea salt.

Actually, Skeezix was happy enough to have her along. He muttered something about girls out on a night like this, but Helen gave him a look and he shut up about it, grinning at her as if he’d said it just to provoke her, which, of course, was why he
had
said it. Higher up the hill, the wind blew along in gusts, kicking up newly fallen leaves as if it meant to sail them into the next county. But the leaves were heavy from days of rain, and they fell almost at once back onto the road and lay there dark and wet and glistening with moonlight. Creeks and rills flowed with muddy water. They’d continue to flow straight through until summer, all of them dropping finally into the Eel River, which, any day now if the rain kept up, would overflow its banks and flood the orchards and farmhouses in the lowlands along the coast. The Eel fanned out into little sandy islets and then disappeared into the ocean above Table Bluffs Beach, some miles up the Coast Road from the cove where Skeezix had found the shoe and where the enormous spectacles had washed up.

Wild fuchsia bloomed in the shadows of hemlocks and alders along the road, but the startling purple and pink of the blossoms was washed colourless in the shadow. The mossy forest floor was like a saturated sponge, so Skeezix and Helen kept to the road, counting on the leafy carpet that lay upon it to keep mud off their shoes. All was silent but for the occasional patter of rain flurries and the moaning of wind in the top of the forest, and once, when the wind fell off and there was nothing in the air but the
drip, drip, drip
of water falling from tree branches, they could hear, distant and muted, the crash of breakers collapsing along the shore of the cove behind and below them. There wouldn’t be another high tide until almost morning. The shoe would be safe at least until then – plenty of time, it seemed to Skeezix, for the three of them to haul it away on a cart.

He didn’t tell Helen about the shoe. She could hear about it when he told Jack. She tried to get it out of him, and that made him happy. Then she quit trying to get it out of him, and that made him happier yet, because he knew she was just pretending to be indifferent. So he shrugged and started talking about whether or not butterflies flew in the rain and, if they did, whether the dust that covered their wings would shed rainwater so they wouldn’t get saturated like wet leaves and end up as a part of the carpet on the roadway. Dr Jensen, he said, once owned a butterfly as big as an albatross that had beautiful aqua-blue wings with silver spots like raindrops in sunshine. Its body, though, was still the body of a bug – and a monstrous bug at that – and you couldn’t stand to look at it, not if you wanted to sleep that night.

The story was a lie and Helen knew it. Dr Jensen had
heard
of such a creature – almost everyone had. He’d travelled by rail up to Lilyfield where it had been netted by a butterfly collector, a man named Kettering, with whom Dr Jensen had gone to school. Where it had come from neither of them could say, from some distant land, perhaps, on a wind out of the east. Mr Kettering’s cats got in through an open window one night and shredded the creature’s wings until it resembled a tired kite that had hung through the autumn in the branches of a tree. It wasn’t worth much to anyone after that. All that was left of it, really, was the bug part. Even a scientist like Kettering was repelled by such an enormity.

Helen told Skeezix that he was a fool; Dr Jensen had never owned the butterfly and everyone knew it. In fact, most people wondered if the whole story weren’t a lie. There was an awful lot about Dr Jensen that people wondered about, and that was why almost no one, except people who hadn’t any money, went to Dr Jensen when they were sick or hurt. He could set a bone as well as the next doctor, of course, but he’d set it in an office that looked like a museum – an office full of bins of dried tide-pool animals and moths and beetles and the skins of snakes. And he had the jawbone of a skull on his mantel – a skull that he’d fairly clearly dummied up out of plaster of Paris and dirt, for the thing was the size of a barrel hoop smashed in half and had teeth in it like ivory playing cards. There was a certain amount of suspicion in the village that Dr Jensen’s interest in the enormous spectacles was feigned, and some went so far as to suggest that he’d had the glasses built on one of his trips south and had tossed them into the tide pool himself and then arranged to have them found. Why he would have done such a thing they didn’t know. He was a lunatic, some said, and that was reason enough.

Skeezix waved his hand at Helen, who had got to him by talking that way about Dr Jensen. He’d been teasing her by avoiding the subject of the night’s mystery, and now she’d got back at him. The doctor
had
to have the bins full of odd stuff, Skeezix said, in order to sell it down south to the biological supply houses in San Francisco and Monterey, because there wasn’t enough money in doctoring to make it pay – not on the north coast, there wasn’t. Helen said if he cleared the stuff out of his house maybe he’d get a little bit of business from people who didn’t want to hobnob with salamanders and toads when they were getting their tonsils yanked out, and then Skeezix said she didn’t understand anything at all, and after that he wouldn’t talk. They were at Jack’s by then anyway, so Helen gouged him in the side and slugged him on the arm in order to show him she was just kidding. Of course she understood everything. Peebles wouldn’t have – that was certain. But Helen had the right instincts, as had Jack, and Skeezix knew that, and Helen knew that he knew. She’d proven, though, that she could irritate him as easily as he could irritate her, and so things had ended well.

Jack Portland lived on Willoughby’s farm. No one else lived there except old Willoughby, who had been a friend of Jack’s father – no one else unless you counted the cows and the cats. Skeezix and Helen threw rocks at the shutters high up in the barn loft, and Skeezix called Jack’s name in a sort of shouted whisper. There wasn’t any real reason to be sneaking about like that, since farmer Willoughby would be snoring beside his pint glass by then anyway and wouldn’t care about them even if he weren’t. But the night was dark and windy and full of portent, and Skeezix was anxious that everything be done right.

After a half dozen rocks the shutters opened and Jack looked out. They could see that a candle burned on the table beside him, and the dark cylinder of his telescope formed a long dancing shadow across his face and the open shutter opposite. He had a book in his hand, and when he saw who it was on the meadow below, he waved the book at them and then disappeared back inside – gone after his sweater and jacket, perhaps.

In a moment he stood in the window again, hooking the iron hangers of his rope ladder over the windowsill. The tails of the ladder flopped to the ground, and Jack clambered down like a sailor down rigging. In a moment he was on the meadow. He hauled back on the end of the ladder, gave it a wavy sort of toss, and the hooks hopped off the windowsill. The entire ladder dropped onto the grass. Jack rolled it up and then ran around and tossed it in through the barn door, padlocking the big hasp afterwards. Skeezix liked the idea of Jack’s coming out by the window even though there was a door at hand. And he liked the idea of reading by candlelight. Jack could as easily have used a lantern, of course, but it wouldn’t have been the same. One did things right, thought Skeezix, or one might as well just go to bed. There wasn’t much to be said for common sense – or for anything common, for that matter.