Nightmares and Dreamscapes Read online

  Grandpa, watching him closely, seemed to read all this in the boy's brown eyes, to know all the words for all the things the boy never could have found a way to tell, things that could not escape him because his mouth could never articulate the language of his heart. And then Grandpa nodded, as if he wanted to confirm this very idea, and suddenly Clive was terrified that Grandpa would spoil everything by saying something soft and soothing and meaningless. Sure, he would say. I know all about it, Clivey--I was a boy once myself, you know.

  But he didn't, and Clive understood he had been stupid to fear the possibility even for a moment. Worse, faithless. Because this was Grandpa, and Grandpa never talked meaningless shit like other grownups so often did. Instead of speaking softly and soothingly, he spoke with the dry finality of a judge pronouncing a harsh sentence for a capital crime.

  "All that changes," he said.

  Clive looked up at him, a little apprehensive at the idea but very much liking the wild way the old man's hair blew around his head. He thought Grandpa looked the way the church-preacher would if he really knew the truth about God instead of just guessing. "Time does? Are you sure?"

  "Yes. When you get to a certain age--right around fourteen, I think, mostly when the two halves of the human race go on and make the mistake of discovering each other--time starts to be real time. The real real time. It ain't long like it was or short like it gets to be. It does, you know. But for most of your life it's mostly the real real time. You know what that is, Clivey?"

  "No, sir."

  "Then take instruction: real real time is your pretty pony. Say it: 'My pretty pony.' "

  Feeling dumb, wondering if Grandpa was having him on for some reason ("trying to get your goat," as Uncle Don would have said), Clive said what he wanted him to say. He waited for the old man to laugh, to say, "Boy, I really got your goat that time, Clivey!" But Grandpa only nodded matter-of-factly, in a way that took all the dumb out of it.

  "My pretty pony. Those are three words you'll never forget if you're as smart's I think y'might be. My pretty pony. That's the truth of time."

  Grandpa took the battered package of cigarettes from his pocket, considered it briefly, then put it back.

  "From the time you're fourteen until, oh, I'm gonna say until you're sixty or so, most time is my-pretty-pony time. There's times when it goes back to being long like it was when you were a kid, but those ain't good times anymore. You'd give your soul for some my-pretty-pony time then, let alone short time. If you was to tell Gramma what I'm gonna tell you now, Clivey, she'd call me a blasphemer and wouldn't bring me no hot-water bottle for a week. Maybe two."

  Nevertheless, Grandpa's lips twisted into a bitter and unregenerate jag.

  "If I was to tell it to that Reverend Chadband the wife sets such a store by, he'd trot out the one about how we see through a glass darkly or that old chestnut about how God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, but I'll tell you what I think, Clivey. I think God must be one mean old son of a bitch to make the only long times a grownup has the times when he is hurt bad, like with crushed ribs or stove-in guts or something like that. A God like that, why, He makes a kid who sticks pins in flies look like that saint who was so good the birds'd come and roost all over him. I think about how long them weeks were after the hayrick turned turtle on me, and I wonder why God wanted to make living, thinking creatures in the first place. If He needed something to piss on, why couldn't He have just made Him some sumac bushes and left it at that? Or what about poor old Johnny Brinkmayer, who went so slow with the bone cancer last year."

  Clive hardly heard that last, although he remembered later, on their ride back to the city, that Johnny Brinkmayer, who had owned what his mother and father called the grocery store and what Grandpa and Gramma still both called "the Mercantile," was the only man Grandpa went to see of an evening. . . and the only man who came to see Grandpa of an evening. On the long ride back to town it came to Clive that Johnny Brinkmayer, whom he remembered only vaguely as a man with a very large wart on his forehead and a way of hitching at his crotch as he walked, must have been Grandpa's only real friend. The fact that Gramma tended to turn up her nose when Brinkmayer's name was mentioned--and often complained about the way the man had smelled--only reinforced the idea.

  Such reflections could not have come now, anyway, because Clive was waiting breathlessly for God to strike Grandpa dead. Surely He would for such a blasphemy. No one could get away with calling God the Father Almighty a mean old son of a bitch, or suggest that the Being who made the universe was no better than a mean third-grader who got his kicks sticking pins into flies.

  Clive took a nervous step away from the figure in the bib overalls, who had ceased being his Grandpa and had become instead a lightning rod. Any moment now a bolt would come out of the blue sky, sizzling his Grandpa dead as doggy-doo and turning the apple trees into torches that would signal the old man's damnation to all and sundry. The apple blossoms blowing through the air would be turned into something like the bits of char that went floating up from the incinerator in their backyard when his father burned the week's worth of newspapers on late Sunday afternoons.

  Nothing happened.

  Clive waited, his dreadful surety eroding, and when a robin twittered cheerily somewhere nearby (as if Grandpa had said nothing more awful than kiss-my-foot), he knew no lightning was going to come. And at the moment of that realization, a small but fundamental change took place in Clive Banning's life. His Grandpa's unpunished blasphemy would not make him a criminal or a bad boy, or even such a small thing as a "problem child" (a phrase that had only recently come into vogue). Yet the true north of belief shifted just a little in Clive's mind, and the way he listened to his Grandpa changed at once. Before, he had listened to the old man. Now he attended him.

  "Times when you're hurt go on forever, seems like," Grandpa was saying. "Believe me, Clivey--a week of being hurt makes the best summer vacation you ever had when you was a kid seem like a weekend. Hell, makes it seem like a Sat'dy mornin! When I think of the seven months Johnny lay there with that. . . that thing that was inside him, inside him and eating on his guts . . . Jesus, I ain't got no business talkin this way to a kid. Your Gramma's right. I got the sense of a chicken."

  Grandpa brooded down at his shoes for a moment. At last he looked up and shook his head, not darkly, but with brisk, almost humorous dismissiveness.

  "Ain't a bit of that matters. I said I was gonna give you instruction, and instead I stand here howlin like a woe-dog. You know what a woe-dog is, Clivey?"

  The boy shook his head.

  "Never mind; that's for another day." Of course there had never been another, because the next time he saw Grandpa, Grandpa was in a box, and Clive supposed that was an important part of the instruction Grandpa had to give that day. The fact that the old man didn't know he was giving it made it no less important. "Old men are like old trains in a switchin yard, Clivey--too many damned tracks. So they loop the damned roundhouse five times before they ever get in."

  "That's all right, Grandpa."

  "What I mean is that every time I drive for the point, I go someplace else."

  "I know, but those someplace elses are pretty interesting."

  Grandpa smiled. "If you're a bullshit artist, Clivey, you are a damned good one."

  Clive smiled back, and the darkness of Johnny Brinkmayer's memory seemed to lift from his Grandpa. When he spoke again, his voice was more businesslike.

  "Anyway! Never mind that swill. Having long time in pain is just a little extra the Lord throws in. You know how a man will save up Raleigh coupons and trade em in for something like a brass barometer to hang in his den or a new set of steak knives, Clivey?"

  Clive nodded.

  "Well, that's what pain-time is like . . . only it's more of a booby prize than a real one, I guess you'd have to say. Main thing is, when you get old, regular time--my-pretty-pony time--changes to short time. It's like when you were a kid, only turned around."

&
nbsp; "Backwards."

  "Yep."

  The idea that time went fast when you got old was beyond the ability of the boy's emotions to grasp, but he was bright enough to admit the concept. He knew that if one end of a seesaw went up, the other had to go down. What Grandpa was talking about, he reasoned, must be the same idea: balance and counterbalance. All right; it's a point of view, Clive's own father might have said.

  Grandpa took the packet of Kools from the kangaroo pouch again, and this time he carefully extracted a cigarette--not just the last one in the packet but the last one the boy would ever see him smoke. The old man crumpled the package and stowed it back in the place from which it had come. He lit this last cigarette as he had the other, with the same effortless ease. He did not ignore the hilltop wind; he seemed somehow to negate it.

  "When does it happen, Grandpa?"

  "I can't exactly tell you that, n it don't happen all at once," Grandpa said, wetting the match as he had its predecessor. "It kinda creeps up, like a cat stalking a squirrel. Finally you notice. And when you do notice, it ain't no more fair than the way the Osgood boy counted his numbers was fair."

  "Well then, what happens? How do you notice?"

  Grandpa tapped a roll of ash from his cigarette without taking it from his mouth. He did it with his thumb, knocking on the cigarette the way a man may rap a low knock on a table. The boy never forgot that small sound.

  "I think what you notice first must be different for everyone," the old man said, "but for me it started when I was forty-something. I don't remember exactly how old I was, but you want to bet I remember where I was . . . in Davis Drug. You know it?"

  Clive nodded. His father almost always took him and his sister in there for ice-cream sodas when they were visiting Grandpa and Gramma. His father called them the VanChockstraw Triplets because their orders never varied: their father always had vanilla, Patty chocolate, Clive strawberry. And his father would sit between them and read while they slowly ingested the cold sweet treats. Patty was right when she said you could get away with anything when their father was reading, which was most of the time, but when he put his book away and looked around, you wanted to sit up and put on your prettiest manners, or you were apt to get clouted.

  "Well, I was in there," Grandpa resumed, his eyes far off, studying a cloud that looked like a soldier blowing on a bugle moving swiftly across the spring sky, "to get some medicine for your Gramma's arthritis. We'd had rain for a week and it was hurting her like all get-out. And all at once I seen a new store display. Would have been hard to miss. Took up most of one whole aisle, it did. There were masks and cutout decorations of black cats and witches on brooms and things like that, and there were those cardboard punkins they used to sell. They came in a bag with an elastic inside. The idea was, a kid would punch the punkin out of the cardboard and then give his mom an afternoon of peace coloring it in and maybe playing the games on the back. When it was done you hung it on your door for a decoration, or, if the kid's family was too poor to buy him a store mask or too dumb to help him make a costume out of what was around the house, why, you could staple that elastic onto the thing and the kid would wear it. Used to be a lot of kids walking around town with paper bags in their hands and those punkin masks from Davis Drug on their faces come Halloween night, Clivey! And, of course, he had his candy out. Was always that penny-candy counter up there by the soda fountain, you know the one I mean--"

  Clive smiled. He knew, all right.

  "--but this was different. This was penny candy by the job lot. All that truck like wax bottles and candy corn and root-beer barrels and licorice whips.

  "And I thought that old man Davis--there really was a fella named Davis who ran the place back then, it was his father that opened her up right around 1910--had slipped a cog or two. Holy hell, I'm thinkin to myself, Frank Davis has got his trick-or-treat out before the goddam summer's even over. It crossed my mind to go up to the prescription counter where he was n tell him just that, and then a part of me says, Whoa up a second, George--you're the one who's slipped a cog or two. And that wasn't so far wrong, Clivey, because it wasn't still summer, and I knew it just as well as I know we're standin here. See, that's what I want you to understand--that I knew better.

  "Wasn't I already on the lookout for apple pickers from around town, and hadn't I already put in an order for five hundred handbills to get put up over the border in Canada? And didn't I already have my eye on this fella named Tim Warburton who'd come down from Schenectady lookin for work? He had a way about him, looked honest, and I thought he'd make a good foreman during picking time. Hadn't I been meaning to ask him the very next day, and didn't he know I was gonna ask because he'd let on he'd be getting his hair cut at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time? I thought to myself, Suds n body, George, ain't you a little young to be going senile? Yeah, old Frank's got his Halloween candy out a little early, but summer? That's gone by, me fine bucko.

  "I knew that just fine, but for a second, Clivey--or maybe it was a whole row of seconds--it seemed like summer, or like it had to be summer, because it was just being summer. Get what I mean? It didn't take me long to get September set down straight again in my head, but until I did I felt . . . you know, I felt. . ." He frowned, then reluctantly brought out a word he knew but would not have used in conversation with another farmer, lest he be accused (if only in the other fellow's mind) of being high-flown. "I felt dismayed. That's the only goddam way I know how to put it. Dismayed. And that's how it was the first time."

  He looked at the boy, who only looked back at him, not even nodding, so deep in concentration was he. Grandpa nodded for both of them and knocked another roll of ash off his cigarette with the side of his thumb. The boy believed Grandpa was so lost in thought that the wind was smoking practically all of this one for him.

  "It was like steppin up to the bathroom mirror meanin to do no more'n shave and seein that first gray hair in your head. You get that, Clivey?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay. And after that first time, it started to happen with all the holidays. You'd think they was puttin the stuff out too early, and sometimes you'd even say so to someone, although you always stayed careful to make it sound like you thought the shopkeepers were greedy. That something was wrong with them, not you. You get that?"

  "Yes."

  "Because," Grandpa said, "a greedy shopkeeper was something a man could understand--and something some men even admired, although I was never one of them. 'So-and-so keeps himself a sharp practice,' they'd say, as if sharp practice, like that butcher fella Radwick that used to always stick his thumb on the scales when he could get away with it, like that was just a honey of a way to be. I never felt that way, but I could understand it. Saying something that made you sound like you had gone over funny in the head, though . . . that was a different kettle of beans. So you'd just say something like 'By God, they'll have the tinsel and the angel's hair out before the hay's in the barn next year,' and whoever you said it to would say that was nothing but the Gospel truth, but it wasn't the Gospel truth, and when I hunker right down and study her, Clivey, I know they are putting all those things out pretty near the same time every year.

  "Then somethin else happened to me. This might have been five years later, might have been seven. I think I must've been right round fifty, one side or the other. Anyhow, I got called on jury duty. Damn pain in the ass, but I went. The bailiff sweared me up, asked me if I'd do my duty so help me God, and I said I will, just as if I hadn't spent all my life doin my duty about one thing n another so help me God. Then he got out his pen and asked for my address, and I gave it to him neat as you'd like. Then he asked how old I was, and I opened my mouth all primed to say thirty-seven."

  Grandpa threw back his head and laughed at the cloud that looked like a soldier. That cloud, the bugle part now grown as long as a trombone, had gotten itself halfway from one horizon to the other.

  "Why did you want to say that, Grandpa?" Clive thought he had followed everyt
hing up to this pretty well, but here was a thicket.

  "I wanted to say it because it was the first thing to come into my mind! Hell! Anyhow, I knew it was wrong and so I stopped for a second. I don't think that bailiff or anyone else in the courtroom noticed--seemed like most of em was either asleep or on the doze--and, even if they'd been as wide awake as the fella who just got Widow Brown's broomstick rammed up his buttsky, I don't know as anyone would have made anything of it. Wasn't no more than how, sometimes, a man trying to hit a tricky pitch will kinda take a double pump before he swings. But, shit! Askin a man how damn old he is ain't like throwin no spitball. I felt like an ijit. Seemed like for that one second I didn't know how old I was if I wasn't thirty-seven. Seemed for a second there like it could have been seven or seventeen or seventy-seven. Then I got it and I said forty-eight or fifty-one or whatever-the-frig. But to lose track of your age, even for a second . . . shoo!"

  Grandpa dropped his cigarette, brought his heel down upon it, and began the ritual of first murdalizing and then burying it.

  "But that's just the beginning, Clivey me son," he went on, and, although he spoke only in the Irish vernacular he sometimes affected, the boy thought, I wish I was your son. Yours instead of his. "After a bit, it lets go of first, hits second, and before you know it, time has got itself into high gear and you're cruising, the way folks do on the turnpike these days, goin so fast their cars blow the leaves right off'n the trees in the fall."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Way the seasons change is the worst," the old man said moodily, as if he hadn't heard the boy. "Different seasons stop bein different seasons. Seems like Mother has no more'n got the boots n mittens n scarves down from the attic before it's mud season, and you'd think a man'd be glad to see mud season gone--shit, I always was--but you ain't s'glad t'see it go when it seems like the mud's gone before you done pushed the tractor out of the first jellypot it got stuck in. Then it seems like you no more'n clapped your summer straw on for the first band concert of the year when the poplars start showing their chemises."