First Light

by Charles Baxter

  His father smiles. “No, I am not. I’m thinking about you, and Dorsey, and your mother, and I’m thinking about my own parents, and I have this feeling, kiddo, that there’s an order to things, and we’ll never know what it is, human beings are just not capable of it, but we get these drifts … these … tunes. The older you get, the more of them you hear.”

  “From where? Where do they come from?”

  His father looks Hugh in the eye. He appears to be angry but at nothing in particular. “Listen to me,” he says. “Everything on earth is what it is and something else. Everything gives off a signal. Most people never hear any of it. Their ears are closed. You have to listen with your whole body, everything in your soul, to even this old ugly drop-forged claw hammer”—he holds it up—“and this wood, and to everyone you know, and all objects, everywhere. You can break your soul trying to hear. But some people have a talent. Your mother does. She’s better at hearing the world than I am. It’s like music, but it isn’t music, it’s an overtone. Dorsey hears it. It’s an order. Do you know what I mean?”

  Hugh says he does, but he doesn’t, and he’s angry again because his father has included everyone in the family in this lucky group of listeners except his own son, Hugh himself, dull, reliable, strong, and deaf.

  23

  They do not keep any animals as pets in the house because of Mr. Welch’s long-standing allergy and therefore antipathy to dog and cat hair, and because of Mrs. Welch’s contempt for caged birds and bowled fish. Dorsey claims that she and Hugh are deprived children, thanks to what she calls her parents’ “mindless prejudice,” and she puts out saucers of milk every Sunday morning for Max, the bad-tempered neighborhood Siamese. Dorsey’s real fascination, however, is with horses. She says they are the most beautiful of all animals. Along with the star chart and the large framed picture of the moon, she has tacked up on the bedroom wall a picture of a chestnut-colored American thoroughbred standing in a heroic pose in an open bluegrass field, a pillared manor house in the distance.

  Hugh has stopped badgering his parents about pets, but Dorsey keeps after them. She speaks on behalf of Cairn terriers, poodles, rodents, and snakes. It’s a topic that comes up every two hours with her. On a Sunday afternoon drive, sitting slouched in the backseat, Dorsey is going on about loped-eared rabbits, their loyalty and charm. She’d like Hugh to help her out here, but he’s at home, listening to his records.

  Her father is distracted by the weather. It’s late May, a time of sudden violent thunderstorms and tornadoes in Michigan, and for the last half-hour thick clouds have been extruding from the west horizon like plastic out of a mold. The family has been driving west on unfamiliar dirt roads, playing “Spot the River” or “Spot the Lake.” Dorsey has been losing the game because she’s been too busy talking about the virtues of animals. She is still talking as they approach a storm cloud, over a hill two miles to the west, where for a moment a bony white farmhouse and a rusting windmill are briefly visible, before they are both obscured.

  “Looks like a thunderhead,” her father says.

  “Actually it’s a cumulonimbus capillatus,” Dorsey tells them, “and you’ll notice that it’s got the characteristically anvil-shaped upper portion. We’re really in for it now.”

  “In for what?”

  “Rain, Mom. Bricks of it.”

  Already rain is sprinkling the car. Soon the downpour becomes so heavy that Dorsey’s father cannot see, and he begins to mutter, changing his posture so that he’s leaning forward, hunched. The windshield’s interior fogs up. After pulling out a perfumed handkerchief from her purse, Mrs. Welch starts to wipe the mist away, but by now the rainfall has thickened, and Dorsey’s father is complaining that he can’t see anything—the road, the shoulder, the front of the car. The wiper blades push the teeming water back and forth on the glass but do not clear it. The gusts of wind rock the car and set up roaring and snuffling sounds.

  “Daddy, you should stop,” Dorsey says. “Look.”

  To the left of the car and just on the opposite side of the road, away from the direction in which the rain is falling, is a farm whose long front field is covered with grass and enclosed by a chest-high white fence. At those moments when the rain lets up, Dorsey can see four horses standing in the rain, shaking their heads as the water falls on them. One of the horses, a breed that Dorsey can’t identify, startles at a thunderclap and breaks away from the group, running off into the field’s middle distance, disappearing.

  Dorsey’s father turns the car onto the shoulder and shuts off the engine. He twists the key counterclockwise to the option slot, snaps off the wipers, and switches on the radio to see if any tornado warnings are being announced, but it’s an AM radio and all he can get is thunderstorm static. Dorsey’s mother, settling back, gazes calmly through the window on the passenger side, and in the storm’s growing uproar she murmurs to her husband about other storms they’ve waited out: in New Mexico, and, before that, the one at Mitchell, South Dakota, when they were visiting the Corn Palace.

  Dorsey’s happy, watching the two Arabian horses and the pinto standing near the white fence, just on the other side of a huge oak. The Arabians are gray and the pinto spotted brown and white, and they seem to be enjoying the downpour, though they continue to twist their heads before lifting them up and down in a nodding gesture. After another thunderclap, the Arabians gallop off in the same direction taken by the first one.

  The pinto raises its head to the rain, and, as Dorsey watches, she feels an instant of physical itching all over her body, no more than a split second, a force-field sensation inside her, working its way out, and in that instant the horse is hit by lightning.

  The lightning spurts up from the horse’s shoulders, and an instant later the Welches’ car is enveloped in a blistering roar of thunder, and as Dorsey watches, the horse falls. It holds its head up off the ground for a moment, and its mouth opens and its lips part, so that the line of its large upper teeth and bluish-pink gums is visible. Then its legs begin a galloping sideways convulsive beating against the air.

  Dorsey is quiet. She does not speak to her parents during the time that her father starts the car, and she sees, as if from the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, that he is driving up to the farmhouse and is telling the aproned woman who comes out that one of her horses has been killed and is now lying in the field, and Dorsey hears, now, her mother’s interminable murmuring about accidents. Dorsey shakes her head. No, she won’t listen. She reaches down and pulls off her sneakers and socks, and she sits cross-legged and puts her fingers between her toes, and when people ask her questions, she’s not going to answer them.

  They wait in the car until her father returns. He says they’ve been invited inside to wait out the storm, but, no, Dorsey will not move. Her mother and father go inside. She waits in the back. Then the storm passes, leaving behind its sickening clarity, and the big phony rainbow.

  She’s home, taking down the picture of the chestnut-colored horse. She’s still barefoot; the soles of her feet tingle, as if the floor is electrified. There’s a knock at the door. “Dorsey?” It’s Hugh’s voice. “How are you doin’, kid? Mom and Dad said that you—”

  “—Go away.” The horse is crunched up in the wastebasket.

  “That’s pretty wild, what you saw! Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  “Just askin’,” he says.

  “Leave me alone,” she says. His footsteps pad down the hallway to the stairs. She hears him descending the stairs, and then there’s no more sound of her brother. She never mentions horses again to her parents, and there is no more talk about pets, and when her mother asks her, eight days later, if she’s going to put out a saucer of milk for Max, Dorsey pretends not to hear.

  24

  “Dorsey.” A winter Saturday afternoon: in her room, Dorsey is reading a junior high science book about how gases combine in deep space to make stars. She’s nine years old. Hugh has sneaked up behind her in wet, snowy shoes and has p
ut his terrible cold Egyptian mummy hand on her neck and is whispering in a new style he’s picked up from the television shows he watches. He glances into the hallway, a gangster glance, also learned from television. “Come on,” he whispers. “Get into your overcoat. We’re going somewhere with Tommy.”

  Tommy is Tommy Connell. She wants to know where they’re going but Hugh won’t say, except that this is something he and Tommy have been planning for years. She runs into the kitchen to tell her mother that she’s going out to play with Hugh and his friend. Mrs. Welch is delighted: her daughter is being included in something, for a change. Dorsey throws on her overcoat, her cap, her gloves, her scarf, and her boots, and she runs out to the front walk, where the two boys are standing together, huddled with their hands around their mouths, whispering, out here, in public. Dorsey has the sudden feeling that she shouldn’t go along with them on this adventure, whatever it is. But when they see her, the boys straighten up, put on their Solid Citizen expressions, and begin to walk fast before breaking into a run.

  She yells at them to slow down, and they cut off the street onto the path through Five Oaks Park, and Dorsey follows them, panting, twenty feet behind. They’re easy to see because of their coats: Hugh’s is red and Tommy’s is blue, two primary colors rushing down the winter path through branches covered with snow. “Slow down, you guys!” she shouts. The boys laugh and keep running. Soon all she can see are the two color dots of their coats far ahead of her in a forest of pure white crisscrossed by gray twigs and branches. As she runs, she has the sensation that she isn’t moving, but the forest is. She’s in one place and somehow the woods and the snow and the path and the twigs are rushing toward and away from her, and since the path goes downhill, the velocity of the trees’ approach in front of her and retreat behind her accelerates. She runs faster and faster past the scruffy pines and sharp hawthorns and elms and oaks and maples. She hears a squirrel chittering angrily at her, and she sees a bird, a brown female cardinal, flying in irregular swoops ahead and to the right of her, another small dot of color in this colorless forest. The bird’s watching me, Dorsey thinks. It knows something about me.

  At the lower end of the path, on Lake Street, near the snow-covered park benches, the boys are waiting for her, grinning. “Come on,” they say, and they run up the sidewalk, Dorsey following a few paces behind, walking in their boot tracks. They run past the Municipal Liquor Store, Koehnen’s Standard Oil, and the Quik-’n’-Ezy grocery. The boys stop. They’re at the fence outside the Five Oaks Amusement Park, and they wait for Dorsey to catch up.

  She’s out of breath, panting, and she says, “Come on. What are we doing?” For an answer, Tommy points down at the cyclone fence. There’s just enough room at the bottom of the fence for a kid to wriggle through. Dorsey sucks in her breath and says, no, she’s not going to do it, it’s illegal, they have guards, we could be arrested, and, besides, why would anybody want to go into an amusement park in the winter anyhow, it’s closed! You can’t ride anything! Stop it! But she can’t stop him. Hugh is following his friend under the fence, pushing his face down into the snow and twisting his back and his butt and his legs like a snake, and now he’s inside the fence, and he stands up. It’s started to snow. Dorsey begins to wail. You guys! she says. I don’t want to go in there! The front of Hugh’s red coat is covered with snow. He looks through the fence at his sister. Don’t be a big baby, Dorsey, he says. We brought you along because we thought you’d have the guts to do this. What’s the matter? No guts?

  I’ll show you, she says. She lowers herself to her stomach, and she pulls herself under the fence, feeling it scrape and pull at her back, catching a piece of her coat, which Hugh releases. She stands up on the other side and Hugh grabs her hand, and they run toward the boarded-up house for Dodgem Cars, covered with snow. They hide momentarily behind the canvas-covered remnants of the Tilt-a-Whirl, then they run behind the Dodgem Cars toward the umbrella-shaped building that houses the merry-go-round. They rest for a minute, the boys crouching with their backs against the wall, inhaling in deep gulps of excitement. Dorsey asks Tommy Connell if he’s broken into this amusement park before, and he nods and says, sure, lots of times.

  It’s getting darker with the snow and late afternoon coming on, and Dorsey looks toward the geometrical angles of the roller coaster’s snowy white wood slats. Have you climbed up the roller coaster? she asks, but her brother and his friend have already started running toward the Fun House, and she follows them, a collaborator now. The front door of the Fun House has been boarded up, but the upper windows, protected with exterior wire mesh, have been left clear. The boys stop and stare up at the huge painted clown face on the front of the building, the mix of inappropriate colors, the painted balloons, and Hugh says that this place looks real weird in the winter. The snow is blowing in gusts over the Fun House and the semi-dismantled Scrambler behind them and the Penny Arcade locked up in the alley to their right. Tommy tells them to follow him, and he runs around to the other side of the Fun House and kicks a board that gives way immediately, and he crawls into the space the board has left, and Hugh follows him. Dorsey waits outside. She hears her brother’s sucked-in muffled voice from whatever interior it is he’s crawling through. Come on, he says, a distant shout. No, Dorsey shouts back, I’m not going. She hears her brother’s voice, fainter now, fading away. Gutless, the voice says. Gutless.

  She crawls down into the dark space. Once inside, she can’t see much of anything except the black shapes of her brother’s overshoes ahead of her. Dorsey realizes that she and her brother are under the funhouse, beneath it, in some kind of crawl space, and Dorsey wants very badly to scream. The dark scares her, and the clammy cold, and the sensation that she’s going to get stuck here under a wood beam and the old funhouse is going to collapse, board by painted board, any minute right on top of her. Then, ahead and to her right, she sees a crack of light in the shape of a stalactite, and as she crawls she sees Tommy pulling himself up and squeezing his way through the crack, then her brother doing the same. There’s some creature behind her making a fingernails-on-wood sound, and she thinks: big funhouse rats. And now she wants to scream the way they do in operas, a scream to put your whole life into, but instead of screaming she pulls herself through the dark spaces smelling of mud and the pellet dung of small animals, and she pinches her way through the stalactite-shaped opening, and she’s inside.

  Her brother and Tommy are standing quietly now, just gazing in the dim light, awed by themselves. They have bypassed the corridors leading into the Fun House, the ones with shifting wood floors, tilting barrels, and air jets, and they have emerged into the Fun House’s central room; they have come in under the Slide-for-Life. From a few wire-meshed ceiling-level windows a cold blank light drains in, and Dorsey notices her breath in the flat air. Fun House breath. There, to the side, is the giant turning tunnel that you’re supposed to walk through—when it’s working—and in which everybody falls, and over on the other side of the Fun House is the whirling disk that spins and you can’t stay seated because it gives you an electric shock if you do, and in front of them is another moving floor that of course isn’t moving, and behind them is the high Slide-for-Life and a corridor going out, leading to the Tilted Rooms and the Hall of Mirrors.

  “Yeah,” Hugh says.

  “Yeah is right,” Tommy says, nodding.

  Dorsey is scared and excited, but she’s also feeling a little annoyed. “Okay, it’s neat,” she says, “but what is there to do in here?”

  “What d’you mean, what is there to do? You’re here, aren’t you? How many friends have you got that’ve ever been in the Fun House in the middle of winter?”

  “None,” she says, “but so what? There’s no fun in the Fun House if they don’t have the electricity on. What can we do?”

  “Well,” Tommy says, a look of what-do-women-want impatience on his face, “I guess we could go down the slide.”

  “Where’re the sacks?” she asks.

 
“What sacks?”

  “The feed sacks,” she says, “that you sit on. You’ve got to sit on feed sacks on the slide ’cause otherwise you’re going so fast on the wood that you get friction on your rear end.”

  “They’re over here,” Hugh says, behind her. “In the feed-sack box.”

  They each lean down to smell the thick ropy aroma of burlap, then grab a sack and run up the stairs, Tommy in the lead, followed by Hugh and Dorsey. At the top, there’s a window that looks out over the north end of the amusement park toward the frozen snowy surface of Five Oaks Lake. Tommy and Hugh smooth out their burlap and sit down next to each other, then push themselves off and disappear down the first hump, yelling at each other. Dorsey can hear them yelling at her to follow them. Why does she always have to follow? She isn’t sure. She lays down her sack on the middle lane of the Slide-for-Life, and she pushes herself off, alone.

  Now at last she can scream, and she does, and the scream echoes all through the empty dim Fun House, and when she slides feet first into the cushion at the bottom, her brother lifts his finger to his lips and shushes her: there’s a guard who goes through the amusement park once a day, he says. Does she want to get caught? No? Well, then. Shut up.

  She slides down once more. It’s okay, but sliding down into the dark isn’t her idea of fun, it’s just creepy, and the Fun House has a kind of so-what feel. So what if they’re inside? Nothing works in here, except the slide. Dorsey begins to whine in her brother’s direction. Okay, he says, we’ll go into the Tilted Room.

  Tommy and Hugh run, stomping, toward a doorway underneath an unlit EXIT sign, and Dorsey follows them, finding herself in a pitch black hallway whose floor rises so steeply that she must grab at a handrail to keep herself upright. Tommy, ahead of her, is laughing: a horror-movie laugh that in this narrow corridor sounds louder and weirder than any laugh she’s ever had the bad luck to hear, and now her brother joins in, their humorless cackling and hawing like a duet of crazies. She pulls herself up against the hallway’s incline, feeling the whisper of fabric against wood slats as her coat drags on the right wall; the corridor has started to list, so that it both rises and pitches off in the direction of the handrail. Then Dorsey sees a slit of light, a sprig of illumination that leads into the Tilted Room, which has a small and inaccessibly high window, most of whose light is blocked by two pine boards nailed across it. In the gray diluted light that does penetrate into the Tilted Room, she can observe her brother and her brother’s friend imitating drunks as they stagger across the floor that angles down from the doorway where Dorsey stands with her fingers clutched around the doorframe. Tommy and Hugh ram into each other, whacking each other’s arms as if they were prizefighters and the Tilted Room were some version of a ring, a room where men are supposed to fight because, after all, the floor is tilted.