by Will Weaver
“Don’t talk,” Guy said, his voice breaking.
“Tex, you remember that time under the ice? When you saved me? I saw the big spring, Tex. I never realized it until now. But I saw it. It was just like the sun, darker, but like the sun . . . Tex?”
“Easy,” Guy said.
Martin and Mary Ann came forward from the crowd and knelt beside Tom. They both spoke at once.
“Tom . . . we . . . didn’t mean for anything like this to happen,” Martin said hoarsely.
“No, Tom, never this—honest!” Mary Ann said, her voice a whisper.
“Honest Injun?” Tom said with a faint smile.
“Yes—honest Injun,” Mary Ann said earnestly, her eyes starting to run tears.
“That’s good enough for me,” Tom said weakly. He turned his face away from the sun. “Maybe it was my fault,” he whispered. “Maybe I overdreamed.”
42
Zhingwaak’s story “The Boy Who Overdreamed.”
One morning in a wigwam in an Indian village by a forest, a son awoke to find ashes in his dish. His father sat beside him.
The father said, “Ningos, your legs are getting long now. Soon you will need a manido, a dream spirit who looks out for you.”
The son was very happy. At last he could go into the forest and have a dream. The father rubbed ashes on the boy’s face and sent him off to the forest. After four days the boy had a dream. He returned happy and hungry to the wigwam.
But the boy’s father told him to go back into the forest. To dream some more. The boy went back. He went on with his fasting and he had another dream. He came back to the wigwam even hungrier than before.
The father urged him to go back and fast one more day.
“Noosag, I have had my dreams, many dreams,” the boy said to his father.
“One more day,” the father said. “Go back.”
The boy went and had another dream. He came back to the wigwam. But he was so hungry by now, he could not eat. The father was away hunting, so the boy fixed himself some paint and painted his face and combed his hair so he would look like Opichi, the robin. The boy sang:
Apegish izhi, idizoyaan ji-izhinaagoziyaan,
Dibishkoo go Opichi.
I want to change myself
Into a robin.
In a moment his nose grew sharp and his arms grew red feathers. He fluttered up onto the crossbeams of the wigwam. He perched there until his father returned.
The father recognized his son at once. “Ningos, ningos—come down,” the father cried.
“I cannot,” the boy answered. “I will fly away and return in spring. You will see my red breast on the day the snow deepest in the forest is gone.”
Epilogue
For the first few days back in California Guy spent long hours at his office and Madeline slept or worked some in his yard. He found his company with three large accounts in jeopardy, thanks to three bad batches of printed circuit boards. His rose plants all needed pruning and repotting, plus the lawn service, two brothers with a pickup full of mowers, rakes, and shears, had split to Santa Rosa, where presumably the grass was greener.
In the evenings Guy got home late. Madeline waited supper. Neither talked much. After supper they usually had a glass of wine, listened to part of an album, and were asleep before nine. Guy gave Madeline the guest room that overlooked not the Bay City but the green hillside with its eucalyptus trees. He hung a small bird feeder outside her window. Kennedy slept in her room and, as he had in Minnesota, stayed with her most of the day.
When they did talk it was never about Minnesota. About Tom’s death. About Martin or Mary Ann or Helmer or Cassandra Silver. Rather, their conversation moved haltingly within boundaries of the day just past. Guy told of meetings with the three quality-control managers; how two were warming up but the third looked impossible. Madeline told of finding a banana slug under the ivy, of someone’s lost parrot that came to the bird feeder. She kept track of the birds in a little notebook. Some days Guy saw that she had done nothing at all in the yard or the house, but only made tiny notes that themselves looked like bird tracks. Madeline napped often, slept deeply, sometimes called out in her dreams, and awoke groggy. She did not want to go anywhere. She said little. She only worked some with the flowers, watched the birds, made notes, and slept. One night Guy awoke late and found Madeline standing in the dark living room. In the faint moonlight she stood before the Hundertwasser print, Der Traum des toten Indianers, tracing her fingers over its lines. Its gray colors.
Later in the week, Susan called. She asked when he had returned and why he hadn’t called. Guy did not recognize her voice; he had forgotten Susan. He recovered himself enough to lie and say he had gotten back just yesterday.
“Almost four weeks,” Susan said. “I thought you said a two-week vacation.” Her voice was surprisingly cheerful. People talked and laughed in the background. Guy guessed she and the other Stanford grad students had passed some sort of exam.
“I did,” Guy said.
“You must have had a great time to stay so long!”
He started to speak but she said, “Anyway, you can tell me all about it. Friday afternoon there’s an open house at the Stanford English Department. Wine and cheese. Can you come? We could have dinner later.”
Guy was silent for a moment. “Sure,” he said.
After he hung up he checked on Madeline. It was only eight o’clock in the evening but she was already asleep. He tucked the sheet tighter around her shoulders, then sat on his deck with a glass of cold rosé. Below, in the flat, somber blocks of Palo Alto, streetlights faltered orange, then raced ahead like straight strikes of lightning far away. City lights.
Guy thought of Cassandra. She had come to Tom’s funeral. Or at least he thought she had. He saw her once far back in the pews at the Catholic church, in sunglasses, a head taller than the Indians and the scattering of white farmers. Her head was bowed and she did not see him turn to look. Later he tried to find her in the crowd but could not. That night, too, he thought he saw her at the wake. Beyond the tire fire, in the shadow of the trees, he saw her watching the dancers. Watching him. He pushed forward through the crowd, cut through the circle of dancers toward her. But she was not there. He walked the curving shore of the fire’s glow, following its edge, where light lapped against shadow, searching, but did not find her. He asked. No one had seen a tall white woman. After a while he came to believe he had imagined her; that he had seen only firelight shining in the pale curves of birch trees. She never existed in the first place. All of this—Tom’s death, Helmer’s death, Mary Ann and her potato factory, Madeline and Tom, Cassandra, his trip back among them—all of it was a dream.
It was then he joined the dancers. He danced and remembered dancing with Tom in Flatwater that Fourth of July night long past. He danced until he was wet through with sweat, until his circles about the fire were stumbling lurches on the edges of the flame, until his voice had wailed itself to a hoarse whisper. He danced until he fell in the warm ashes, tasted their lye and soot, felt heat singe his hair and eyelids. Rough hands tumbled him away from the flames, and on his back he looked up to see Madeline and the darker moons of Indian faces. Above them the sky was pale blue, pale yellow, pale pink. They pulled him to his feet. He made his way to the Chevy. On the seat he found a dozen wilted red roses.
At the end of two weeks Madeline began to take short walks. Guy knew this because she mentioned houses she had seen in the neighborhood. He brought home a new pair of jogging shoes for her, blue ones with white stripes and Miracle Air-Piston heels that tilted the whole shoe forward. Madeline tried them on. She laced them tight and stood. She flexed up on tiptoe, then back. She smiled a half smile.
At night they talked more. They let the conversation touch down on the Midwest, on the reservation—but only lightly—like the birds that came and went fro
m the feeder. Yet it was progress.
Two days later Guy returned from work to find both Madeline and Kennedy gone. She came back just before supper, breathing steadily, cheeks red, forehead shiny. She shrugged off a small backpack that held Kennedy, an empty water bottle, and her notepad. “Guy—guess what!” she said.
“What?” Guy said, grinning.
“I saw the ocean. I kept walking and walking up the hill, and suddenly I was on top. I wasn’t even thinking about it, but when I looked up, there it was, this big sheet of light. I’d never seen the ocean before!”
Guy laughed. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll take a picnic lunch. Tomorrow, the ocean!”
That afternoon Guy was to see Susan. He drove the ’57 Chevy up Highway 280 and took the Palo Alto exit. He parked near the Stanford tennis courts and paused to watch two short-haired girls in their tennis whites hit the orange ball back and forth. One of the girls was tall, a trifle gangly, and wore a white headband over shiny brown hair. Her laugh tinkled like stream water. Guy found himself watching her through passing glance to steady stare to the far edge of good taste. A moment before he turned away, she smiled briefly at him as she jogged past. Guy smiled in return. He passed Hoover Tower and headed toward the Quadrangle, but found himself walking slower and slower the closer he came to seeing Susan. He paused on the cobblestone walk outside the grad-student lounge. Inside he heard voices. Someone at the piano played a ragged imitation of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill.” A wine cork popped. He stepped to one side and looked through the window. Clusters of grad students stood around a few men and women with graying hair. Susan stood with her back to the window. He could see only her dark hair and white blouse. Her shoulders seemed thin and bony, her hair too dark, her laugh too loud. He stepped away from the window before she saw him, before anyone saw him.
He walked back to the parking lot. As he neared the tennis courts he walked faster. He wanted to speak to the girl. But she was gone.
On the way home he stopped by his office. He was in a bad mood and did not want to go home to Madeline just yet. The receptionist said cheerily, “Present for you in your office.”
“More bad boards?” he grumbled.
On his desk he found a bouquet of velvety red roses. Thirteen roses.
“Where’d these come from?” he asked. He touched their petals, smelled them.
“By messenger,” she called back.
He bent to inspect the tag. There was nothing written on the tag except the variety, Scarlet Knight Rose, and the name of the greenhouse.
He called the greenhouse.
“Whoever sent them wouldn’t give a name,” a man with a heavy Chicano accent said, “but they knew where to call. Ain’t many houses grow Scarlet Knights.”
“Can you tell me where the order came from?” Guy asked.
“Hang on, my man,” the Chicano said. Papers rustled. Then he spoke again. “Out East,” he said. “Washington.”
The next morning Guy hummed while he worked on the picnic lunch. Madeline helped.
“Six ham sandwiches?” Madeline said.
“Plus pickles, chips, blueberry muffins, apples, iced tea, and wine,” Guy said.
“That’s enough for an army,” Madeline laughed.
“We’ll eat it—you’ll see,” Guy said.
They drove at 10:00 AM up the narrow, winding road that led to Skyline Boulevard. On the sunlit hillsides, shaggy eucalyptus trees smelled like camphor. Nearing the summit, Madeline leaned forward to look.
“There!” she said excitedly as they topped the hill. Twenty miles away, the Pacific lay like a great blue field whose far end rose up into the sky.
Guy steered the Chevy down the long slope of land. Madeline watched the ocean and began to talk. She told him she was almost ready to go back. To Minnesota. To the reservation. She had her job at the Humphrey Center. She had Tom’s house. Tom had told her what to do if this ever happened. He had planned. She talked more the closer they came to the ocean, more and faster, her words leaping forward like water flowing down a steepening hill.
Guy smiled and tried to speak on occasion, but couldn’t get in a word. So he just grinned and listened as he maneuvered the Chevy around the curves, then down onto the flatter slopes and the fields planted with artichokes. The spiny artichokes grew on the last land before cliffs and salt water. Black sheets of plastic rippled in the sunlight. A line of Mexicans moved in another field that ran west to the cliffs. Land’s end.
“Here we are,” Guy said. He slowed the Chevy and parked behind a long line of cars.
“Hurry!” Madeline said, shading her eyes to look up at the water, then up toward the shriek of sea gulls. She headed down the rocky ravine toward the beach.
“Hey—wait,” Guy laughed, lugging the blanket and the picnic basket.
But Madeline was already far ahead of him, leaping nimbly from stone to stone on her way down to the water.
When Guy reached the beach Madeline already stood barefoot on the glistening wet sand, holding her shoes, looking down at the foamy waves that ran uphill over her ankles, then rolled back. Guy stopped to watch her. She stood alone at the center on the long beach. To the left was a half mile of flat sand; far down were occasional dots of color, the umbrellas and blankets of people who wanted to be alone. To the right, where the shore curved white toward the brown cliffs, were the rest of the people. They clustered on blankets only a few feet apart like seals gathered on the same rock. Radios played. Around a volleyball net people leaped, with faint shouts, to thud the ball back and forth. Guy watched the players punch the white ball higher and higher in the blue air, trying to keep it from touching sand. Trying the impossible, for as long as they could leap and swing and shout, just for the fun of it.
Guy walked on to Madeline. She was staring out to sea and crying. He put his arm around her. They watched the waves for a long time. Finally she wiped her eyes and said, smiling, “I’m hungry.”
“Me too,” Guy said.
Then, at the same moment, in the same direction, they turned to walk up the beach toward the music and the cries of human voices.