Under the Rainbow

by Silvis, Randall;

  Donald hears this story in various places and versions from various sources over the next few days. He hears it from Phil, from Deirdre, from the night clerk at 7–11. He feels cheated by Phil, who—in self-defense probably, not maliciously, Donald will grant him that—has turned the entire episode into a joke. Donald feels cheated that he was not summoned to discover the body. That Wright chose to take leave of him without even that consideration. Without as much as a See you around, bud. The courtesy of a simple Goodbye.

  Jessica is furious because Donald did not tell her that Wright was dying. She seems to blame the death on Donald’s silence, as if friendship were a dark conspiracy, an evil pact. Donald feels the same way. He always will.

  “He didn’t want anybody to know, Jess. He didn’t want me to know. I felt compelled to honor his wishes.”

  “Bullshit,” she says. She has been angry for three days now, still angry on this crystal morning as she dresses for the funeral, as she over-blushes her cheeks while sitting at the dressing table, Donald hangdog in his wrinkled blue suit sitting perched on the edge of their unmade bed.

  “What about surgery?” she demands. “Chemotherapy? Cobalt treatments? Plutonium?”

  “Plutonium, uranium, explodium, even kryptonite, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The chain reaction had already begun. The meltdown couldn’t be stopped.”

  “Don’t even talk to me,” she says.

  He understands her anger, which is a mask for something else, so many things.

  “Should we take Travis?” he wonders.

  Her mascara wand poises in mid-air, eyes close to the glass, searching their own reflection.

  “It might help,” Donald says. “On the other hand, it might hurt.”

  Jessica, like him, does not know.

  Donald stands finally, he goes to Travis’s room. Travis is not there. So be it, Donald thinks, the decision made.

  He waits downstairs until Jessica descends. She is wearing too much blush but he says not a word. Her eyes are as red as her cheeks. Silently they walk outside to the car. Travis is seated in the back, white shirt and tie, no jacket.

  “I’m going along,” he says.

  Donald nods, slides in behind the steering wheel, starts the engine. Jessica turns to address her son. “No sport jacket?” she says.

  “The arms are too short.”

  “We can get you a new one on Monday.”

  Jessica says, “It was a nice funeral, wasn’t it?”

  “It was horrible,” says Donald. “Every funeral is horrible, no matter how nice it is.”

  And Travis stares out the car window, his gaze scours the sky.

  The funeral is over, the dead interred, the wounded still wandering the earth. A brown panel truck is parked in Donald’s driveway as he returns with wife and son. A brown-uniformed man is pushing a dolly loaded with three cardboard boxes toward Donald’s front porch. There are eight boxes stacked on the porch already.

  “What’s all this?” Donald asks.

  “I waited a half hour and then I started unloading,” the delivery man says. “Wait here, I got an invoice for you to sign.”

  Donald kneels on the porch and rips open one of the boxes. The first thing he sees is Wright’s smiling face, his own grinning glossily beside it, a black and white photo, 11” x 14”, of Wright and Donald standing arm-in-arm knee-deep in clover, a photo Donald himself shot. There are forty-nine more photos all the same in this same box, forty-nine more book jackets, forty-nine more copies of A Nature Walk.

  The delivery man hands Donald the form to sign, he brings another load of books. When he finishes wheeling the dolly back and forth there are twenty cardboard boxes on the porch, fifty books inside each box.

  “Here you go,” the delivery man says, “the very first copy.” And he places in Donald’s hand a single book photoside up. Scrawled in black ink across the sky of the picture is To Donald, good friend. The one I could always count on. Hang tough, buddy. Wright.

  Donald is surrounded by boxes, boxed in by boxes, hunkered down low in a bunker of boxes.

  Jessica says, “It must have cost him a fortune.”

  And Travis asks, “What are you going to do with them all, Dad?”

  And the delivery man drives away. “Enjoy!”

  Another sleepless night.

  In his basement office Donald sits as still as a ceramic dog in the center of his unsupporting sofa. Everywhere he looks stands a cardboard box, enough to deflect a mortar attack. And yet he feels disarmed by them, blasted naked despite the heavy gray sweatsuit he wears. His answering machine is silent, his darkroom nothing but dark. What is he supposed to do with all these books? Wright, you goof, what the hell am I supposed to do?

  He can feel the weight of all those books just as surely as if each were stacked upon his shoulder. He wonders if the floor might collapse, a hole punched into the earth, down he is dragged with a thousand dud bombs tumbling about his head, pages riffling, useless flapping wings, down through the thin dust of anthropology, the crust of theology, geology after geology whupping by, no more chronology, goodbye etiology, etymology, parapsychology.

  This would be fine, he thinks, if he could count on plopping into a molten core. A quick sizzle and he is nothing but steam, as are the books, his worries all behind him.

  But no, it could never happen so sweetly. He would crash through the underside of existence and just keep falling, falling even though there is nowhere to go, there is nothing here but gravity, the only absolute.…

  Donald hears a creak on the stairs. He turns. That naked foot, size eleven, can be none but Travis’s. Those long skinny legs in short-pant pajamas, it tugs at Donald’s heart.

  “Okay if I come down?” Travis asks.

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  Travis does not answer yet but instead concentrates on climbing over a low stack of books, a lanky hurdler in slow motion. He eases down on the edge of the sofa cushion, knees sticking up nearly as high as his chin.

  “Can’t sleep?” Donald asks.

  Travis shrugs. He reaches forward and lifts off the coffee table the signed copy of A Nature Walk. He turns it over to the photo, his father and Wright’s dopey smile.

  “You lost another friend,” Travis says.

  And Donald says, “Yup.” He would say more, start a conversation, chat, if only he remembered how. But he has gone crashing through the earth and left even semeiology behind.

  “You know who I was thinking about tonight?” Travis asks. “Uncle Jerry. Remember him?”

  “Sure,” Donald says.

  “He died, what … four or five years ago?”

  “Seems more like yesterday.”

  “Do you still think about him, Dad?”

  “A lot.”

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  “A lot.”

  Travis nods. “I remember what a nice guy he was. He called me Mr. T, remember?”

  “T for Travis, yep.”

  They nod silently; bookends. A few moments later Travis opens the book at random. The photo is of a large wild mushroom, poisonous, the top concave, fluted edges turned up, a bright orange chalice holding a shimmer of wet sunshine.

  “This is beautiful,” Travis says.

  Donald is about to say thank you, those close-up shots are tricky in such meager light, when Travis continues. “He wrote this, didn’t he?”

  “Hmmm?” Donald says.

  “Your friend Wright. He wrote this beautiful poem.

  “‘So deadly to consume,’” Travis reads, “‘so filling to behold, The beauty of its bitter taste can warm the chillest cold.’”

  Donald asks, “You like that?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s not very good poetry.”

  “I don’t care. I like what it says.”

  He closes the book, holds it on his lap, his fingers on his father’s glossy face. “You remember the other night?” Travis asks. “When I followed you down to the river? I ne
ver told you why I was still awake when you left the house.”

  “No, you never did.”

  “I had a dream about Uncle Jerry that night.”

  “Oh?”

  “Just a piece of a dream, I guess. I hardly remember any of it.”

  Donald waits.

  “All I can remember is … I dreamed I saw him standing there beside my bed. Just for a second or two. And then I woke up. That’s why I was sitting by the window when you went outside.”

  “So,” Donald says.

  Travis flips the book over, looks at the front cover. He places the book on the coffee table. “You wouldn’t let me go to Uncle Jerry’s funeral,” he says. “I remember that.”

  “He wasn’t your real uncle, you know.”

  This is an insufficient explanation, no answer at all, as Donald soon learns from Travis’s silence.

  “We thought you were too young,” Donald says. “That it wasn’t a good idea. That … you know … you were too young.”

  Still Travis says nothing. Donald wonders what the boy is thinking. Feeling. How to get at and hold the sweet truth of this child.

  “So that’s why you insisted on going to Wright’s funeral,” Donald says.

  Travis’s answer, as he continues to stare at A Nature Walk, is a noncommital shrug.

  “I’m sorry if I was wrong,” Donald says. “In not letting you go to Jerry’s.”

  “I don’t know,” says the boy a long moment later. “I’m beginning to think that all of us, no matter how old we get to be, are still too young for that kind of thing.”

  And Donald sleeps that night in restful marvel of the adolescent mind, its elasticity and spaciousness, as nimble as a springbok, as vast and forgiving as the Serengeti Plain.

  It is a Sunday afternoon in late September, a drive in the country, a new family routine. Travis is at the wheel, his mother beside him, Donald sprawled in the rear with his hand steadying a short stack of books. Here is what they are doing, what they have done for the past five Sundays, what they will do for the next three hundred and twenty-eight:

  Each is responsible each Sunday for three copies of A Nature Walk. Donald began with the obvious choices, he left one copy in the bus station, one in a restaurant, one in a filling station restroom. But he is learning from his companions to be more creative now, to keep his eyes open, look for harder possibilities.

  Jessica, for example, spots an austere white farmhouse down a long narrow lane. With a single glance she takes in the hungry fields of corn, the milkbarn, cows, the neat garden and quiet yard, long hours of toil, vast winter nights. She places a copy of the book in the mailbox at the end of the lane, she raises the flag. “Onward,” she says.

  Travis pulls over next to a low concrete bridge abutment. Gazing down into the shallow dirty stream is a girl approximately Travis’s age, a plain girl in a too-long dress, a gawky girl whom Travis knows immediately, this stranger, he knows how she sits at her desk at school and seldom speaks, never raises her hand, no parties for this girl, no dances, just dreams. So Travis pulls along beside her, he winds down the window. “Excuse me,” he says, and when she turns hesitantly, afraid to be spoken to, he hands her a book, “This is for you,” he says. She looks at it curiously, with effort returns his smile. “What for?” she asks, and Travis says, “You’ll see.”

  Donald loves these slow afternoons, the healing air, incense of dirt and grass and trees, music of crows, salubrious light. He holds his camera on his lap, he captures moments, he lets them go.

  Sometimes, through long stretches of unpeopled land, Jessica opens the book and reads aloud. They are learning to laugh with Wright’s insistent lines. Asparagus, wrote Wright, please bear with us.

  Donald sometimes confesses his hope for an international assignment, of trips to Belgrade, Moscow, Beijing, Panama City, a trunkful of Wright’s books in tow, Jessica and Travis and maybe even Deirdre to help him dispense them throughout ingenuous lands.

  They talk of the scenery, of possibilities, of remodeling that needs to be done, of temporary and transient things. It is all very important to Donald. It is a ritual as important to him as what they do not say aloud, what they never once discuss, this house of mirrors, this two-headed cow, this babble, this silence, this danse macrabe, this Irish wake, this graduation day, this morning after, this night before, this insult, this tease, this tohubohu, this argument, this agreement, this funeral march, this wedding, this foreplay, this failure, this pearl in the mud, this wink, this sneer, this nightmare, this dream, this lump in the throat and this pang in the heart, this captured moment, this speeding comet, this trumpet blast, this cotton in the ears, this poisonous mushroom, this cool drop of dew, this insatiable hunger, this Sunday so alive.…

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Randall Silvis

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2837-0

  The Permanent Press

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