Nursery Tale

by T. M. Wright

  "He opened a relatively large wound on his forehead, Mrs. Wentis; it took seven stitches to close it, and that's where the blood came from." He paused briefly, then continued, "He also sustained quite a few bruises and minor lacerations, but they're nothing to worry about. I am going to prescribe some painkillers, however. Those fingers"—Sam had broken three fingers on his right hand—"are going to give him a good deal of pain."

  Dick Wentis asked tentatively, "Then we can take him home, Doctor?"

  The doctor checked his watch. "Why don't we let him rest here for another hour or so, until four o'clock. We've got a nice little coffee shop down the hall." He nodded to the right. "You can grab a bite to eat, if you're hungry, and when you come back, I'll have that prescription and then you can take Sam home. Okay?"

  Dick and Trudy both nodded. "Okay," Trudy said, and Dr. Wilkins hurried away.

  Dick Wentis popped a cool, stiff french fry into his mouth. He grimaced. "Yuck!"

  Trudy pushed her plate away. "I don't know why I ordered this," she murmured. "I'm not hungry."

  "Nerves," Dick suggested. "You come to a restaurant and you're expected to order food. They expect it; you expect it. It's part of the rational order of things."

  Trudy cut in, "Why in the hell would Sam do that? Why, Dick?"

  "I don't understand him either, Trudy." He pushed his plate away. "Not all the time."

  "I gave up trying to understand him a long time ago, Dick."

  "Is that fair? To him, I mean."

  "No. And I don't think I've given up, really. It's just that sometimes it takes so much effort . . ."

  "I know." This was a conversation that was all too familiar to them both, and Dick thought that this time it was best to change the subject. "Tell me about Timmy Meade," he said. "Are he and Sam pretty close, do you think?"

  Trudy smiled tentatively. "Sam and Timmy? Oh sure, but I don't think it'll last. I think they'll drift apart. Sam will find other friends, kids that are more his type . . ."

  Dick harrumphed, "He sure won't find them in Granada."

  Trudy looked questioningly at him.

  "Haven't you noticed," he explained, "that Sam and Timmy are just about the only kids in the entire development? Maybe when other families move in—"

  "But Dick, I heard them in the woods."

  "Heard who?"

  "Children. I assumed they lived in Granada."

  "No, there's just Sam and Timmy at the moment, as far as I know. Of course, as I said, when other families start moving in—"

  "Maybe they were farm kids, Dick. Do you think they could have been farm kids?"

  "In the woods? Sure, I guess so. I guess they'd have to be, wouldn't they?"

  "Yes, Dick, they would." She paused; she remembered the voices, and the laughter all around her as she tried, nearly in vain, to keep up with Timmy Meade. And she remembered thinking—hearing the voices of the children, and their laughter—Why don't they help? Can't they see we're in trouble here? Remembered calling out to them, futilely, "Can you help us, can you help us?" Remembered casting about for some glimpse of them and seeing only the random, changing patterns of late afternoon sunlight through the branches of evergreens and oaks and honey locusts. Remembered that at the fence, where they'd found Sam, the laughter and the crowd of voices had been loudest. . .

  "Trudy, are you with us? Trudy?"

  She came out of her reverie; she checked her watch. "Ten till four, Dick. Let's go."

  "Okay," Dick said. He looked about, saw the waitress and motioned to her. "Check, please," he called.

  Chapter 9

  October 15

  It was nice, Miles, Janice McIntyre wanted to say, to deny the truth, that it had been little more than a chore, something to do merely because it hadn't been done in so long. She reached across the bed and touched his cheek tentatively; she said nothing.

  "Could you turn the light on, Janice?" he said.

  She stood, switched the overhead light on; she squinted at the sudden brightness.

  "I'm sorry, Janice." He thought a moment. "About the lovemaking."

  "Why, Miles? I'm not."

  "I know you're not." It was an offhanded remark; he wasn't sure where to go with it. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up.

  "Sometimes, Miles," Janice said, "it's great. Sometimes it's good." She got her oversized red velour robe out of the closet and shrugged into it. "This time, it was good."

  He looked questioningly at her. "You going somewhere?"

  She nodded. "Downstairs. I'm hungry."

  He glanced at the alarm clock. "At this hour?"

  "It's a craving, Miles. You've heard of cravings. They happen to pregnant women." She put her slippers on, went to the bedroom door, opened it. "Do you want anything?"

  "No. Thanks." He lay back suddenly, threw his arms straight up over his head. "I'm beat."

  "You're getting old, Miles," she said, and she left the room.

  He listened—exhaustion rapidly catching up with him—to her soft footfalls on the hardwood floor as she made her way to the top of the stairs. "Turn the light on, Janice," he called.

  "I'm okay," she called back, at once annoyed and at the same time comforted by his protectiveness. But he was halfway into sleep already and hadn't heard her.

  The little breakfast nook, she thought, was becoming her own private place to be alone, to think.

  It had been a smooth and quick transition, she decided, from her good feelings at the apartment (feelings she had nurtured for almost seven years) to her good feelings here, in this house, big as it was, and new (and therefore strange) as it was, and quiet as it was. She thought the quiet had a lot to do with it, and she was sure that in time, when the dozen or so other families moved into Granada, it would change. But, for now, she had the quiet. And the darkness. And the good feelings.

  She let her gaze wander idly over the softly spotlit backyard; she imagined winter resting heavily on the small tool shed, and on the white marble birdbath, and the four flowering dogwood trees. She liked winter. She imagined that winter in Granada would be something very special.

  She accepted the gentle touch of a hand on her shoulder as Miles's hand. She said, "You should be asleep." The idea that he'd come downstairs bothered her; he couldn't help but see that in the last few weeks these "private moments" had become very precious to her. She smiled to cover her annoyance, and reached behind and to her left for the light switch. She thought about their lovemaking earlier that evening; it was probably what he wanted to talk about. She switched the light on and turned quickly in the seat.

  She noted first the heavy odor of something burning and wondered fleetingly why one of the ceiling-mounted smoke alarms hadn't gone off. She thought it was woodsmoke she smelled; woodsmoke and, underneath it, barely noticeable, the acrid smell of burning hair. She grimaced. "Miles!" she called, not nearly loud enough, because, she knew, if the house was on fire she didn't want to know about it. Not yet, anyway.

  "Miles!" she called again, but no louder. She tried to stand, and couldn't. Because the gentle touch at her shoulder had strengthened enormously. "Please," she whispered. "Please," she repeated.

  And then she heard the loud, insane, staccato crackling of the fire all around and she whispered "Please" again; then she shouted it, her head darting from right to left in a futile search for the flames.

  The quiet settled over her again like a quick sleep.

  The smell of woodsmoke and burning hair ended in the same moment.

  She murmured her husband's name once more. And fainted.

  Chapter 10

  Shelly and Malcolm Harris

  Lorraine Graham and her twin sons Robert and Robin

  The fifth and sixth families to move into Granada were Shelly and Malcolm Harris, proud parents of a seven-month-old baby daughter named Serena, and Lorraine Graham, widowed mother of twin thirteen-year-old boys named Robin and Robert. They all came to Granada on the same day—a bright, warm Sunday late in October. Shelly Ha
rris said to Lorraine Graham, when her family's moving-in process was half done, "It's the only place to bring a child up. I'm convinced of that," and she gestured expansively to indicate Granada and what was, as far as she was concerned, the wilderness surrounding it. Lorraine Graham agreed completely. "It's a move that Stan and I had been planning for a long, long time." She broke down momentarily, remembering her late husband—Shelly pretended not to notice—and concluded, "I think the boys and I will be very happy here. I grew up on a farm, you know, and this"—she gestured in much the way that Shelly had—"is almost nostalgic. All that's missing is the smell of cow manure and wet hay, and those are things I'll gladly do without."

  Shelly nodded. "Malcolm—that's my husband—suffers from hay fever. Our daughter, Serena—she's with her grandmother today—has no allergies at all, thank God."

  The two women continued chatting for nearly an hour. They agreed several times that Granada would someday be quite beautiful—"Once those ugly bulldozers are taken away," Lorraine said. "And once they finish laying all that pipe. What is that? Is that sewer pipe?" Shelly said she wasn't sure, that she'd have to ask her husband.

  And they introduced themselves to two of their neighbors—Marge Gellis and Dora Meade, who stopped briefly, within minutes of each other, to talk. Shelly and Lorraine agreed that Marge was, as Shelly put it, "a little dowdy, but nice enough," and that Dora, according to Lorraine, "will probably take some getting used to. She seems a little hard around the edges."

  Lorraine and her sons, Robin and Robert (who, Malcolm Harris commented later, seemed to giggle more than two young boys ought to) had dinner that night at the Harris home. Lorraine felt, thankfully, that she had a great new friend in Shelly Harris.

  Around Granada, autumn was settling in. It was slow in coming this year; the summer had lingered lazily, well into October. Even the nights stayed warm. Then, toward the end of the month, the air grew chill and for the very first time, a still, ragged, horizontal line of chimney smoke, caught in a freak temperature inversion, hung over the small cluster of inhabited houses.

  Outside Granada, in the stand of woods a half mile to the west, in the fields of quack grass, in the long-untended apple orchards to the north, the sudden rush of autumn caught many creatures by surprise. A gaggle of Canadian geese, which had early in the afternoon stopped to water itself at a small, stagnant pond, hurried noisily into the air again; it would soon stop somewhere else. Only the first snowstorm would push the geese on in earnest.

  A hundred thousand grasshoppers and a million crickets finished their lives quickly, leaving their egg sacs behind for the spring.

  And in several places, the autumn came and brought fear with it. It was the fear caused by ignorance, and pain, and knowledge—the knowledge that in the winter's cold, death came. It was the way of things.

  And the eyes that studied Granada, that studied the pretty line of chimney smoke, and the warm lights, and the dark shapes of the houses, saw all of it now with the very crude beginnings of understanding.

  Laughter, like small, dense flights of insects, rose up in several places that night and dissipated very slowly in the still air.

  Norm Gellis owned two long-guns—a thirty-five-year-old Remington 760 pump-action rifle, and a Weatherby 20-gauge, semi-automatic over-andunder shotgun. Both guns were kept standing, barrel up, in a locked closet in his bedroom. Twice a year on his birthday (because the rifle had been an eighteenth-birthday gift from his father) and on Christmas Eve (because Marge had given him the shotgun fifteen years earlier as a Christmas gift. "I'm going to take up hunting again, Marge," he'd told her), he cleaned the guns thoroughly. The cleanings were essentially unnecessary because he had never used the shotgun, and had fired the rifle only five times, on various hunting trips with his father. Beyond wounding a doe very slightly on one of those trips, he had never hit anything. He was a terrible shot. "You're too nervous," his father told him. "Why are you so damned nervous?" But the young Norm could only grin stupidly and plead ignorance. He didn't want to explain that, drawn as he was to "the overwhelming thrill of the hunt" (as his father put it), long-guns frightened him overwhelmingly. He thought that if there were such a thing as "instant shellshock" then he had it, and it was incurable. It was the noise, he felt certain, and the vibration, and the recoil. And perhaps there were some other factors—the weight and size of the gun, for instance—but he had never taken the time to think it through completely. His father had called him a coward on their final hunting trip, and he didn't want to find, upon self-examination, that it was true.

  He thought the Smith & Wesson Model 12 .38 Police Special he held on his open right hand now was quite a striking little piece of equipment. Small, blunt-nosed, easily concealed. He had fired it several dozen times, and it was loud, sure, but not nearly as loud as the damned long-guns, and the recoil was practically nonexistent. And he had found that, remarkably, his confidence with the gun had made him into a passable marksman. (He had been taught the bent-legged, straight-armed, two-handed method of firing; he thought it looked good on him.)

  Marge, across the living room from him, looked up from her magazine. "Norm, I'm really very uncomfortable with that thing around." She had been toying with the proper words for half an hour, ever since Norm had gotten the gun from its hiding place ("You'd put a big hole in yourself, Marge, so to keep you from messin' with it, I'm gonna hide it. Okay?"), but, after the words came out, she thought she might have offended him, so she immediately attempted to amend the words: "I don't mean . . . please don't think I'm afraid of it."

  He cut in, grinning, "Hey, listen, I know this weapon makes you 'uncomfortable,' and I wish I could help that, Marge, I really do. But you wanta know what makes me uncomfortable? I'll tell you what makes me uncomfortable, Marge. It makes me uncomfortable to think that while we're asleep up there"—he pointed with the gun to indicate their bedroom—"asleep and vulnerable, some lousy trespasser can just waltz in here and do whatever he wants. In our house!" His grin became a tight, malicious leer. "And you know what the law says I can do with that trespasser, Marge? That trespasser in my house! The law says I can't do a goddamned thing. The law says if I blow him away, if I hurt one little hair on his precious little head, Marge, then I'm the one who gets thrown in the cage, like I'm the one who's the goddamned animal. And that's why I got this goddamned gun, Marge. 'Cuz the fuckin' law is fuckin' wrong, 'cuz the next time this house gets broken into—"

  "But, Norm, he was just a boy—"

  He held his hand up to quiet her. She stopped talking abruptly. "I'm going to tell you something, Marge, something from when I was in 'Nam, something I've never told you—"

  "'Nam?"

  "Viet Nam. We fought a losin' war there, Marge. Remember?"

  Marge nodded, embarrassed. "You never told me you were in Viet Nam." She tried to smile, as if suddenly proud of him.

  "Yes, I was, Marge." It was a lie. "Saw three years of combat, and I want to tell you a story from those years, and if you'll stop interrupting me, I'll tell it." He paused; she said nothing; it was his cue. "Okay. We were in Khe Sanh, just outside Saigon—that was the capital of 'Nam, you remember that, Marge? And it was the closin' days of the war, the last few days, and we were all itchin' to get outa there 'cuz we knew the communists was on their way. And there I was with my buddy, Frank Thompson—I ever tell you about him?—and we were patrolling this street, you know, for snipers, and I was talkin' to Frank about one thing and another, and, all of a sudden, Frank grabs his chest, and falls straight to his knees. 'Norm?' he says, and then he falls flat on his face. Dead!" He paused for effect.

  Marge said, "He had a heart attack, Norm?"

  Norm rolled his eyes. "Jesus, Marge. What do you mean heart attack! In 'Nam, for Christ's sake?! He got shot right through the heart, just like 50,000 other guys, only he didn't get it from no Viet Cong, at least not from a grownup one. I know that, Marge, 'cuz when I look up, I see this kid, about 50 yards away, and he's maybe nine or ten—the same age
as that kid who broke in here—and this kid has this sickening grin on his face, and this government issue rifle in his hands, and he says something like 'I got him, I got him!' And then he runs off."

  Norm paused again for effect. Marge said nothing; she looked ill at ease.

  "That's a true story, Marge, true as yesterday." He nodded at the Smith & Wesson still in his hand. "And it's one reason I got this little beauty, and one reason I'm going to use it, if I got to—if I'm forced to use it."

  Marge's hands began to tremble. The magazine she had been pretending to read fell to the floor. "That's an awful story, Norm." She bent forward and picked up the magazine; a ludicrous, quivering smile appeared on her lips. "That's an awful story, Norm." She stood abruptly and put the magazine on a small table near her chair. "I'm going to go to bed now. I'm tired, Norm." She continued smiling; she made her way to the living room doorway; she paused. "Are you coming up, Norm?"

  "This weapon needs cleaning, Marge. I practiced with it today, so now I got to clean it. Guns are just like pets, Marge. You got to tend to 'em all the time."

  "Yes," she said, in a monotone. "I understand that." And she left the room.

  Norm listened as she padded up the stairs. Her steps were slow and deliberate. She sounded very old and very tired.

  By midnight, the still, ragged line of chimney smoke was gone, pushed off by a sudden strong wind. Several poorly installed roofing tiles on one of Granada's not-yet-completed houses were whisked away by the wind. The smallest of the four flowering dogwood trees in the McIntyres' backyard was partially uprooted. At the Harris home, some empty garbage cans, still awaiting the white aluminum sheds that sheltered all garbage cans in Granada, rolled noisily across the side yard and into the Harrises' new Mercury Bobcat.

  From their bedroom window on the second floor of the Graham house next door, Robin and Robert Graham fell into fits of nervous giggling. Rolling garbage cans were hilarious things, as far as they were concerned. At the end of one giggling fit, Robert (Rob) Graham said to his brother, "It's a good thing they weren't fulla banana peels and melon rinds," which set them both up for another fit of giggling.