Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

  I watch him write. He’s a tall, thin guy with sandy brown hair going gray at the temples. He looks like the Hathaway Man in the ads for shirts. He wears wool sport coats and yellow or blue button-down shirts and knitted ties with square ends. He wears vest sweaters, too. I’ve counted six so far in all different colors. He wears saddle shoes sometimes and sometimes penny loafers, and when I’m talking he likes to lean back and pull his ankle up onto his knee and pick at the weave in his argyle socks, especially when I say something particularly interesting.

  He fiddles a lot with his pipe. He empties it and refills it. He frowns when it’s not packed right and doesn’t burn evenly. He straightens paper clips and pokes them into it. He wears a gold key on a chain. I asked what it was, and he said, Phi Beta Kappa. He acted like I’d know what that meant.

  He looks up from his notebook and screws the cap onto his pen and turns on the tape recorder. “So, how’s it going, Trav?”

  I don’t know why he calls me Trav. Nobody else does. I don’t call him Jane.

  “Fine,” I say, and smile, and we start through the usual list of questions and answers. I’m doing well in school. I find my assignments interesting. I’m getting along with my teachers. I like my work in the furniture shop, except sometimes I get a little light-headed from the varnish. I haven’t had any problems with the other guys. I haven’t had a D.R. since my first week here. I’m getting letters from my mom and dad, and I’m writing back to them. I miss home, but I know why I have to be here, and I understand that it could be a long time before I get to leave. I know it depends on the progress I make here.

  Once when Dr. Janeway said that about progress, I said I wished I just had a sentence. Just time to be here and a time to leave. He frowned like I’d missed something important. “Don’t you see, Trav,” he said, “the indeterminacy of your time here works in your favor. You can’t just manipulate the system until it’s time to go back into society. Under the indeterminacy policy, the staff here can really evaluate your progress. They can put you under some pressure and see who you really are.”

  I nodded. I made my face look like it does when I read something in a book I like, something that means a lot to me. But I was thinking what a rotten rat-bastard system it is. You’re like an animal in a zoo, and there’s a wild forest only miles away. You smell that forest on the wind at night, and you know you’re wild, and sometimes you even dream your way out through the bars. But you always wake up with the bars and the fences around you, and you know you won’t get out until someone who can’t smell the forest decides to unlock your cage. Or you die.

  While we’re doing the usual questions, Dr. Janeway leans back and smokes and picks at the little squares in his socks. They’re brown today, the squares. When we finish, he leans forward and rests the leather patches in his sportcoat sleeves on Mr. Bronovitch’s desk.

  “Trav,” he says, “you look uncomfortable today. Is anything bothering you? Be honest with me.”

  I lean forward and smile and try to look more comfortable. I drag some honesty into my eyes. “No, really, I’m fine, Dr. Janeway. There’s nothing bothering me.”

  Dr. Janeway frowns. When he picks up his notebook, he sneaks a look at his watch. We have to put in an hour here.

  He puts down the notebook, picks up the fountain pen, and drums it on the notebook cover. “Travis, I want to go back to the day you got into trouble. I want you to tell me again why you did it.”

  It’s not the first time he’s made me do this. It’s like the cops when they took me to the station and put me in a cell and talked to me before my dad got somebody from his law firm downtown to get me out. They kept making me go over it and over it. They kept asking me the same questions. Where did I get the bayonet? Where was the bayonet when Jimmy Pultney shot the arrow at me? How many times had he shot at me before? They acted like I was lying and they were going to prove it until I pulled apart the hair on the top of my head and showed them the scar. After that, one of them started talking about self-defense.

  I look at Dr. Janeway with my best Trav Trying Hard eyes and say, “I don’t know what I can tell you that we haven’t already talked about. I got back from my summer in Florida, and I was feeling bad about my mom and dad and things not going so well with them, and I went into the bedroom and took the bayonet from under my dad’s pillow. Jimmy already tried to kill me twice, and I knew he’d do it again. I knew his parents couldn’t stop him, and I didn’t want to bother my dad about it.”

  I look out of my Trav Trying Hard eyes at Dr. Janeway. Maybe I should ask Dr. Janeway if he’d rather be sitting here with Jimmy Pultney talking about why he shot a steel-tipped arrow into my head. Ask him if that would be more interesting. Dr. Janeway is listening carefully. I know he wants something new. He wants something I haven’t said before. And suddenly I’m tired of this, so tired of all this, and the Trav Trying Hard eyes blink and the light goes out in them, and I can’t get Dr. Janeway back into focus, and I say, “You see, I learned some things in Florida, and so I knew what I had to do about Jimmy.”

  And there it is. The new thing. And the lights go on again, and Dr. Janeway’s very interested face comes back into focus, and I know I’m in trouble. I don’t know what made me say it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t even know it was there. I’ve memorized the things I always say.

  Dr. Janeway is on my words like a cat on a baby bird blown from a nest in a storm. He leans forward and points the fountain pen at me and says, “You learned something in Florida? What did you learn, Travis?”

  I don’t know what to say. Travis, the real one, not Trav Trying Hard, but Travis Marking Time, has fucked up. He should have kept to the story he always tells. I have to come up with something. I say, “To defend myself. I learned to defend myself.”

  “What happened in Florida that taught you that, Trav?”

  I don’t know what to say. I close my eyes and look back, all the way back a year and a month to Widow Rock. Ronny Bishop’s mean, red-headed face appears out of the dark, and there’s a revolver in his hand, and then I see Bick dancing on the edge in the moonlight, and then Griner howling in the flames. I say, “I met some guys down there who taught me how to stand up for myself, that’s all. I think every guy should know how to stand up for himself, don’t you?”

  One of the framed pictures of Mr. Bronovitch in the ring catches my eye. I look at it now, and so does Dr. Janeway. Mr. Bronovitch is standing up for himself so well, the other guy’s gonna sleep for a week. Dr. Janeway sucks so hard on the pipe I can see his back teeth through his cheeks, and he blows a lot of blue smoke into the room. Finally, he says, “Trav, Buddy, have you ever heard of a thing called premeditation?”

  Of course I have, but I tell him no.

  He says, “When you went into your dad’s bedroom and you stole the bayonet from under his pillow, that meant you planned to stab Jimmy. That’s what our friends down at the courthouse call premeditation. In fact, Trav, that’s what got you into this place. Do you see what I mean?”

  I know I shouldn’t say it. I know he’s not going to think it’s progress, but I say, “If I didn’t get the bayonet ahead of time, I wouldn’t have been ready to stab him when he tried to kill me again with his bow and arrow. I don’t call that premeditation, I call it preparation.” I want to tell him how dangerous the world is out there, and how you have to plan for every possibility, but I don’t. Maybe guys like him don’t need to know that. Maybe the world isn’t dangerous for them.

  I can see he doesn’t like my answer. I can see we’ve hit a rough place on the long road to progress.

  We talk for another thirty minutes, going over some of the same things we’ve talked about before, getting back to the people we always are with each other, getting past the moment when Trav Trying Hard turned into Travis Marking Time.

  When my hour’s up, Dr. Janeway looks at his watch and stands up and stretches. I know I’m supposed to stay
in my chair until he comes around the desk and puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “All right, Trav, Buddy. I think we did pretty well today. I want you to think about what we said, and if you have any questions about the session or any insights you want to share with me next time, write them down and bring them in and read them to me. Okay, Buddy?”

  I say, “Okay, Dr. Janeway.”

  He says, “You are still keeping your journal, aren’t you?”

  I tell him yes, I’m still keeping my journal.

  I’ve got the Trav Trying Hard look back in my eyes, and I stand up under the soft pressure of his hand, and we walk to the door together, and I say, “Thanks, Dr. Janeway. I’ll sure think about what you said today. See you next week.”

  “See you, Trav. And Trav. Think about what you said today.”

  As I walk through the outer office, I don’t look at the next poor guy waiting to see Dr. Janeway.

  We get an hour of free time before they ring the bell and we line up for the mess hall. Sometimes I go out on the playground and walk the fence line or toss a baseball around with some of the guys, but I don’t feel like it today. I go back to the dormitory and lie in my bunk with my face to the window and think about how close I just came to telling Dr. Janeway about Florida, the town of Widow Rock, about Delia. It scares me so much that I almost told him, my face gets hot and I start to shake. I reach down and pull my journal out from between the mattress and the springs and hold it against my chest to make the shaking stop.

  • • •

  Grandma Hollister cried when I left Widow Rock. She hugged me and said she loved me, and she was glad she’d gotten to know such a fine young man, and it hurt her that such sorrowful things had to happen while I was here. She said she was sorry, too, that we never went to Panama City Beach. Any boy who came all the way from Omaha to Florida should have a day at the beach with a picnic lunch and swimming and fishing, but that would have to wait for my next visit, and she hoped it would be soon.

  Grandpa Hollister didn’t look at me that whole Monday morning. All through breakfast when Delia didn’t come downstairs, and all through my last minutes packing and saying good-bye to Marvadell, he never let his eyes and mine combine. The phone rang early that morning with the news about the fire at Kenny Griner’s house, and Grandma Hollister went upstairs to tell Delia, and we all said that was Delia’s reason for not saying good-bye to me.

  When Grandpa Hollister said it was time to leave for the airport, Grandma Hollister went to the foot of the stairs and called up, “Delia, can’t you come down and say good-bye to Travis? I know you’re upset, but you never know when you’ll see him again.”

  Delia didn’t say anything. We stood there at the bottom of the stairs. We could hear the radio playing up there soft, and Grandma looked at me and said, “Travis, Honey, she’s just very upset. It’s terrible, two of her friends dying like this in one month. We’ve had such bad luck in our little town.”

  She looked over at Grandpa Hollister. “John, do you want to go up and ask her to come down and give Travis a hug?”

  Grandpa Hollister didn’t look at her, or at me. He watched the top of the stairs, then he said, “Come on, Mother. If we don’t leave now, the boy will miss his plane.”

  That’s how I ended up leaving Widow Rock the way I came to it, sitting in the front seat of the Buick Roadmaster between Grandma and Grandpa Hollister. My plane was delayed, so we went to the little restaurant in the terminal. They had coffee, and I had a glass of orange juice, and finally Grandpa Hollister looked at his watch and said, “Mother, I think Travis can get on the plane all right by himself. We need to get on back and see to things.”

  Grandma Hollister cried when she looked at me then, and I remembered how she’d cried when I arrived, saying she was worried about me getting snatched by white slavers. Grandpa Hollister carried my suitcase back down the terminal to the airline desk. Grandma Hollister leaned down and gave me one of her big smothering hugs. Then she hurried off toward the Buick with her hanky pressed to her eyes.

  Grandpa Hollister put the suitcase handle in my hand and tucked my ticket into my shirt pocket. Then he looked straight at me for the first time that morning. He gave me the full gale of his eyes, all the storm wind and dark night and hard rain that was in them, and he whispered one word to me, “Remember.”

  I wake up at night sometimes hearing him whisper that word. Remember. How could I forget? That Delia wouldn’t see me the morning I left. That she locked her door the night before.

  A week after I got back to Omaha, my mom came home from the hospital. She told me she was better. She said, “Travis, my sweet boy, I want to go and stay with my family in San Francisco for a while.” She and my dad argued about that. Late at night I heard her crying and him saying she’d never come back to us. They talked and argued, and she cried all the next day, and when she started singing in Japanese again, I had to go out into the backyard.

  It was like some crazy thing in a movie, the same thing happening to me again just like it happened before, just like I’d never left Omaha and there never was a summer in Widow Rock.

  Jimmy Pultney shot the arrow at me, and for a second I thought I wouldn’t duck. My mom was going to visit her family, and I knew what that meant, and Delia was two thousand miles away, and I didn’t know what that meant yet, and so for a crazy second I thought I wouldn’t move. I thought I’d let the arrow hit me. It wasn’t aimed at my head like before. It was coming for the center of my chest. But not even a kid like me is that crazy.

  I jumped to the side like you do in dodge ball, and the arrow buried deep across the yard. Those red and yellow feathers stuck up like flowers from the grass.

  And Jimmy said, “Kid, go get that arrow. Don’t make me climb over there and stomp your ass.”

  So I looked at Jimmy, and I think I smiled. The bayonet was there, hidden down the back of my jeans under my shirt.

  Mean, stupid Jimmy was standing at the fence. He had another arrow on his bowstring to scare me with. I knew exactly what he was going to say: “Kid, I’m not going to tell you again.” I went and picked up the arrow.

  I brought it over and I stood close to the fence. I held the arrow on my side, then over the top, not through the wire. Jimmy was too far away. I said, “Here it is.”

  Jimmy still had the second arrow pointed at me. He said, “Toss it over.”

  I said, “No, you have to come and get it.”

  Jimmy’s mean, stupid eyes were full of Pultney suspicion. That’s what keeps them alive and multiplying though they’re useless at everything else. Finally, he came over. When he reached for the arrow, I watched his eyes. When they moved, mean and cold, from my face to our hands, my left hand held onto the arrow, pulling him close, and my right hand shoved the bayonet through the fence. I could feel the meat and then the bone on the point of my knife. I drove it in as deep as I could. I tried for his heart, but I missed. If mine was going to be dead, why should this little shit have one?

  All hell broke loose after that with me disappearing into the wheatfield to bury the bayonet, and Jimmy’s father pounding on our back door with a shotgun butt, and the ambulance coming to take Jimmy away, and Jimmy’s fat, stupid mother running around like one of those chickens Jimmy gives the ax, and my father the only one with the sense to press his hand so tight to Jimmy’s shoulder that the bleeding stopped. When it was all over, and the cops had Jimmy’s father in a police car and his shotgun in the trunk, and a detective arrived and told my dad he’d have to take me away, my dad stood there with Jimmy’s blood drying all over him, and he looked at me like Grandpa Hollister did the last time I saw him, and it wasn’t a secret his eyes were telling me to keep. It was me he wasn’t keeping, not anymore. And so my Mom was leaving, and I was, too.

  Jimmy didn’t die. My dad wrote me that he’ll never have the use of his left arm. As far as I’m concerned, Jimmy dragging around a dead ar
m is fair enough. And just a little less trouble for everybody else in this world.

  I got sent here, and my dad passed the bar examination, and now he’s a real lawyer. He wrote me that he thinks he’ll go back to Widow Rock where people know him. He said they need him, and it’s better to be a small-town lawyer than one of a thousand in a big city like Omaha.

  • • •

  At night, I dream of Delia.

  I dream of the house on Bedford Street and our two rooms with the hallway between them and my night walks to Delia’s door. I dream of her hair fanned out black on her white pillow, my night angel. I dream of the gold cross and her fingers twisting it as she lies with her arm over her eyes, and I dream of her laughter like water moving over stones. I dream the spicy smell of the river, and the thousand years it takes water to saw through rock and how the river swept away earth to bring the bones of the driftwood beast to light. I dream of Delia swimming like some river animal, her arms and legs white in the coffee-brown water. I hear her sweet voice singing with the radio, and I feel her holding me in the river, turning me around and around and singing Rockabye Travis and telling me the bough doesn’t always break. I always dream of Delia.

  We can’t have radios here, but a guy who bunks near me knows how to make one by winding copper wire around a toilet-paper roll. Sometimes after lights out, I go to his bunk, and we listen together. The radio’s no good, and the music comes from far away, but the words are still out there. I listen for the message. I listen for the songs about secrets and promises. There are people out there just like me.

  I’m thirteen years and three months old now, and Delia’s seventeen. When I’m twenty, she’ll be twenty-four. I look at grown-up people. When I can, I ask how old they are. I watch the men and the women, and I know it will be all right for Delia and me someday.

  The bell to line up for the mess hall rings.