Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

  I have to protect Delia. My mind spins with pictures: me and Delia in the white Chevy cruising the night roads with the wind full of a music only we understand, me and Delia in the river, our wet mouths passing hot breath across the cold water, our hands touching secrets under the water, Delia and Bick lying like one wedded thing on the white rock in the moonlight, their bodies moving like the storm trees move outside my window, Bick dancing silent on the edge of the rock and falling the same way, the blood prints my feet made on the limestone as I ran at him, me and Delia in her bed, falling together into the wild dream of boy and girl.

  Griner’s Zippo lighter is in my hand before the idea is clear in my head.

  I pick up a red, two-gallon gas can. It’s heavy, and as I twist the cap, metal scrapes on metal. I stop when the radio stops, and the disk jockey talks. I twist the cap again when another song starts: “Hello, Mary Lou, good-bye heart. Sweet Mary Lou I swore we’d never part.” I pour the gas along the dirt floor under the bench. The smell rises strong to my nostrils, and I look over quick at Griner’s legs, but they don’t move. He’s still humming. He grunts, and his stomach muscles swell when he pushes hard on a wrench under there.

  I pour the first two gallons along the wall under the bench. I pick up the second can, wait for the music, and open it. I pour it along the front of the barn and up the far side until it runs out. The third can is only half full, so I just tip it over under the window where I first looked in.

  The smell is so powerful now mixed with the fear and the music, the skin on my forehead starts to throb, and my feet don’t touch ground as I move quietly back to the door. I look at Griner’s legs, his greasy engineer boots, the cuffs of his jeans full of holes from putting out cigarettes. I wait. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I only came here to talk to him, at least that’s what I told myself driving out here through the night fields, passing the white, astonished faces of the cattle, watching the white moon rise out of the dark land.

  I open the Zippo lighter, and another song begins. “Every night, I hope and pray, a dream lover will come my way. A girl to hold in my arms, to know the magic of her charms. ’Cause I want a girl to call my own. I want a dream lover, so I don’t have to dream alone. Dream lover where are you, with a love oh so true, and a hand that I can hold, through the years as I grow old.”

  I’d talk to him, I told myself, and I’d know what to say when the time came. But the time came, and I had no idea what to say. The time came, and the music told me love never ends, and we dream awake and asleep, and nothing can stop his wanting her. Nothing can keep him away from her.

  Griner’s Zippo shines in the light, and I step outside the wet, three-sided figure made of gasoline. I strike the lighter at the wrong moment. There’s no music, no disk jockey talking. It’s all quiet, dead air. Griner stops humming. I hear him say, “Hey? That you, Randle? Don’t you be bumming my cigarettes, now.”

  I kneel and hold the small blue flame above the wet place in the earth. My hand is shaking. It shakes the flame up and down, and the gas awakes with a ripping sound, and it rushes right and left in front of me like something terrified, something escaping into the night. When it hits the place where the third can lies overturned, there’s a boom and a rush of air, and I’m lying on my back in the dust with the shock of a fist in my chest watching the red gas can fall from the rafters onto the roof of the Ford.

  I get to my feet in the dust and run to the first door and swing it shut. I run to the second and swing it shut, and my last glimpse of Griner is of a white face wide open with a scream I can’t hear and blue flame feathering along his arms as he tries to fan them, tries to fly. I shut the second door and lean all my weight to it just as Griner slams his body against the other side. I can hear him screaming now. Wordless words, things without names, places in hell.

  I push back at him as hard as I can, but he’s winning.

  There’s a hand on my shoulder.

  The hand throws me back, and I roll in the dust looking up at long legs in black trousers, a white shirt. Grandpa Hollister has an ax in his hands. He raises it over his head, and I know he’s going to chop the door open, but then he tilts it parallel to the earth and shoves it between the two handles of the barn door.

  Griner screams and pushes, and the door buckles and rumbles, but he can’t fight the ax holding the two door handles together. Grandpa Hollister walks to his right, toward the little window, and I get up and follow him. I stand there beside him watching the storm of flame.

  Things too heavy to float in water—cans and bottles and tools—rise on the power of the fire. I want to run away, but I can’t. I know we have to get out of here. This light can be seen for miles. I know I’ll be lucky if I get the white Chevy two miles away from here before somebody comes. But I can’t leave. I can’t believe how fast it all goes up. The old pitch-pine boards of the barn, the greasy rags, the cans of oil erupting and exploding, the hot air driving straight up with the pounding sound of a locomotive engine.

  The hand’s on my shoulder again. I know it’s God reaching down to take me to the place where I’m told what happens to people like me. But when I look up, it’s only Grandpa Hollister. And he’s not looking at me. He’s looking into the fire. We stand there together, and his grip is hard on my shoulder like the first day I met him, and he stood me in front of him and told me to call him sir and said he’d treat me like my father did: like a boy who took responsibility for his actions.

  It’s getting hot where we are. The fire is eating up the sides of the barn in front of us now. I put out my hand, and the boards are too hot to touch. Black snakes of smoke hiss and crawl out between the slats. I look up at Grandpa Hollister, and I see him reach into the pocket of his black coat. He takes out a piece of paper. He unfolds it and holds it out in front of me. I try to take it, but he won’t let go.

  “Read it,” he says.

  I read it.

  Delia,

  Meet me tonight behind the gas station, 9:00. I’ll be waiting in my car. Don’t bring the little boy you like so much. Come or the whole town will know how you like to swim.

  When I finish, Grandpa Hollister says, “Do you understand, Travis?”

  I look up at him. I nod.

  She took it with her when she went to meet Bick behind the ESSO station. She left it in the red Oldsmobile. And that’s where my Grandpa Hollister found it when he went out to Widow Rock and brought the car back.

  My Grandpa Hollister holds the paper in his right hand, he reaches into his pants pocket with his left and takes out the thing Griner called his knuckle-duster. It’s the leather-covered club with the long, braided lanyard. He punches the club at the window in front of us, and the hot pane snaps like a pistol shot, and the broken glass is sucked inside, and we stand there in the wild breath of the fire. The fire tries to suck the whole windy night into the garage where Griner is trying to fly.

  My Grandpa Hollister holds the paper out to the broken pane and lets it flutter there in the firebreath, then he lets it go, and we both watch it explode and rise as nothing but fine black dust in all that flame.

  Grandpa Hollister puts away his knuckle-duster, and the hand comes back to my shoulder. He pulls me back from the fiery window. We walk out into the old field. When we get to the rusted-down fence, he squats in front of me and looks into my eyes. “We have to get out of here right now. Can you drive back to town?”

  Of course I can drive. I got here, didn’t I?

  I just say, “Yes, sir.”

  “All right, follow me.”

  He gets up and starts loping his long stiff frame toward the Buick parked next to Delia’s white Chevy. I run a few steps and stop. I run back to the barn doors and pull the ax from the two handles. I throw the ax out into the yard and take off running after my Grandpa Hollister’s long, black legs.

  We don’t go home the way I came. He takes me out to the county hardroad
, and we turn away from town. I follow his red taillights through a tangle of country roads only he knows, and the storm is boiling black on the horizon to the south, and the trees along the narrow roads bend and groan, and the air at my window is cold from miles high in the sky. We circle out and come back to town just as morning comes on the same road we took my first day here. The one that crosses the bridge over the Hiawassee River where the sign says, Welcome to Widow Rock.

  We get home before anybody’s up, and we sneak into the house together. The last I see of him that early morning, he’s standing at his bedroom door looking back at me. His eyes tell me we have a secret, and it will lie in our hearts untold on the days we die.

  I’m in the kitchen washing the soot from my arms and face when Marvadell comes in the back door singing one of her over Jordan songs. She stops short, scared when she sees me. “Chile, what you doin’ in my kitchen this time of the moanin?”

  I say, “I got up early and I went outside and got dirty, and I’m washing up down here so Grandpa won’t know.” It’s the voice of a boy who isn’t anymore, and it sounds strange to me. But not to her.

  She looks at me from way up high in the air over Jordan, and then she remembers our conspiracy against Grandpa Hollister, and she smiles and says, “All right, Travis, Honey. You get along now. I’ll clean up down here.”

  Upstairs, I go to Delia’s door. I listen. I raise my hand to knock, but I don’t. My hand still smells of smoke. I think: Let her dream.

  When I crawl into bed, I know I’ll be getting up in an hour, and I know I won’t be able to sleep. My eyes are too full of fire for that. But I close them and try anyway, and the storm breaks over our house, and over all of Widow Rock. I lie there with my eyes closed, seeing the rain roll on over the town, roll on over the farms and fields until it puts out Griner’s fire. I see it wash away the footprints and the tire tracks, too, until all that’s left is an accident. Something that happened to a poor boy nobody cared much about.

  SEPTEMBER

  Come softly darling, come to me, stay,

  You’re my obsession, forever and a day.

  COME SOFTLY TO ME

  —Music and Lyrics by Gary Troxel, Gretchen Christopher, and Barbara Ellis

  —Recorded by The Fleetwoods

  Thirty-eight

  I put down my John R. Tunis novel and go to the library window. Some guys are playing kickball down on the playground. It’s hot even though it’s the middle of September, and they don’t look like they’re having much fun. I like it up here in the library. I come as much as I can, nights and weekends. It’s a big room with tall windows and good-smelling oak floors and narrow aisles of bookshelves. Three big paddle fans keep the air moving. If you sit still and let your mind go into a book, you can stay pretty cool.

  I go back to the library table and pick up my book and try to read, but it’s not working like it should. I’ve read all nine books about the baseball team. I’m reading the one about the catcher again now, but it’s a kid’s book, and I’m not a kid anymore. I know things now you won’t find in this library. The books Mrs. Cohen gave Delia had those things in them. Maybe the books Griner read did, too. I don’t know.

  Mr. Hale, the librarian, looks over at me kind of stern. Most of the guys think he’s an okay guy, but the library has a rule: if you’re not reading or studying or doing something they call constructive, you have to leave. You can’t just sit up here and think or feel the cool air from the paddle fans on your skin. That’s not constructive. Mr. Hale calls it woolgathering, which is all right with me. I guess I’ve gathered a lot of wool since I came to this place.

  Dr. Janeway, the psychologist, calls it morbid self-absorption. Most of the guys here think he’s a shithead. But not all of them know him like I do. I have an appointment with him pretty soon. He comes in on Saturday afternoons. He has an office somewhere else, but he talks to the guys here that interest him. The first day they pulled me out of the furniture shop to see him, he told me he was interested in my case. I told him I didn’t know I had one. He said, “You don’t have one, Travis, you are one. You did something boys your age usually don’t do.” I told him not to call me a boy, so he calls me a guy when he remembers, which isn’t all the time.

  We have our meetings in Mr. Bronovitch’s office. Mr. Bronovitch is the superintendent. The guys call him the Super, or just Soup. He was a cop before he got educated, and a prize-fighter before that. All his fingers have been broken, and his nose is as flat as Mrs. Cleary’s chest. She’s the night nurse. Some of the older guys here say that Soup will talk to you about boxing if he’s not busy and you ask him right. They say he fought Tony Zale once, and he could have made it big but he cut too easy. I guess I know what that means.

  There are some tough guys here, but they don’t mess with me. They think I’m a bug, that means crazy, and I don’t try to convince them I’m not. If they leave bugs alone, then I’ll be a bug. Bugs get along okay. I read in a library book that bugs have been around since before the dinosaurs.

  I go over to Mr. Hale’s desk and hand him the John R. Tunis novel about the catcher. Mr. Hale smiles at me. His teeth are crooked and brown from all the coffee he drinks. “You finish it, Travis?”

  “I read it once already. I don’t think I can get through it again. The funny thing is, they’re all the same. It’s a different guy in each one, and he plays a different position, but they’re all the same. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure that out.”

  Mr. Hale nods when I talk. He nods too much. Some of the guys make fun of him, but I don’t. So what if he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer and he doesn’t make much money. Nobody that works here does. Mr. Hale’s been okay to me, and I like him for that.

  He says, “Maybe I’ll bring in something a little more adult for you to read. Would you like that?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Yeah, I would.”

  I don’t know what he means by adult, but anything from outside would be okay. Mr. Hale smiles and says, “I’ll have to clear it with Mr. Bronovitch, but I think he might look with favor upon my request.”

  That’s another thing about Mr. Hale. He talks funny, like an actor or like somebody from back in history who was dropped here by space monsters or something. I give him my most serious look and say, “I hope he does. I hope he looks with favor upon your request because I’d enjoy something more adult to read.”

  You have to do that in here. I learned that the first week. You have to take what they say seriously, even when it’s stupid. You can’t make fun of anything they do. That’s the worst thing you can do in here. It’s worse than fighting or getting caught in a closet with some other guy doing the reach around.

  The older guys tell a story about a kid who came here, and his face was stuck in a grin. He couldn’t help it. He was just born that way. He wasn’t a funny guy. Even when he wanted to smile, you couldn’t tell it because he was always grinning. It was written in his file, the older guys say, that the permanent grin was a birth defect, but he still couldn’t make it here. The staff couldn’t stand to look at him.

  They didn’t see the kid, only his grin. And they thought the kid was laughing at them, at the program, at all their education and good will and good works. They started finding bruises on the guy, and the injuries got worse, and pretty soon he was like the chicken the other chickens peck to death in the barnyard. Everybody was on him.

  The older guys say he lasted six weeks. They say he left one night on a stretcher with the blanket pulled up to his chin and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. I don’t know if that part is true. You hear a lot of bullshit in here. If it isn’t true, it ought to be true.

  So I tell Mr. Hale thanks again, and tell him it’s time for me to go to Mr. Bronovitch’s office to meet Dr. Janeway. Mr. Hale smiles and scratches his arm, and I know he’ll watch me leave. I know he wonders what Dr. Janeway and I talk about, and it’s fun to ma
ke him wonder. If you have to be a bug, you might as well be a mysterious one.

  Dr. Janeway’s waiting for me in Mr. Bronovitch’s office. He always arrives first and arranges his notebook and his fountain pen on the desk and plugs in the big suitcase tape recorder and lights his pipe and leans back in Mr. Bronovitch’s brown leather chair. When I come in, he’s already got the room full of good-smelling pipe smoke, and he’s in control. That’s what he likes.

  What he doesn’t like is Mr. Bronovitch’s office. Mr. Bronovitch is not a pipe type of guy. If he smoked, it would be big fat cigars. Mr. Bronovitch’s office is decorated with framed black and white pictures of his boxing matches. There’s a lot of smoke in those pictures, and a lot of it’s in the eyes of the guys Mr. Bronovitch is knocking the crap out of. There’s a baseball signed by the entire pennant-winning New York Yankees team of 1956. There are plaques and trophies, too, from the organizations Mr. Bronovitch belongs to. I like the office. It’s official, but it’s like an old coat. You could wear it pretty well on a winter day. Dr. Janeway thinks it’s low-class crappy. He only tolerates it because he’s getting at some interesting cases. I’m one of them. I don’t know how I fit with the other guys he talks to, and I don’t care. It’s okay to be interesting if it gets me out of the furniture shop.

  I knock on Mr. Bronovitch’s door, and Dr. Janeway calls out, “Come in, Trav.” I walk into the cloud of pipe smoke that smells like flowers burning in a pile of maple leaves. I sit down in the chair across from the desk. I pull the trousers of my uniform up and straighten the creases in the brown cotton. Dr. Janeway thinks that’s interesting. He calls it my need for order in a disordered world. What the hell.

  He’s always writing when I come in. He doesn’t look up until he finishes what he’s writing with his tortoiseshell fountain pen. He’s got neat handwriting, I can see that. I guess the sentence he’s finishing is so good he’d really lose something if he looked up when I came in.