I sat there continuing to think about David and our dream friendship.
I wondered how it had all gotten started in the first place. It's not an easy thing for a friendship to be founded on one person telling another person about his dreams, but they were the main ingredients of our friendship, and especially the one dream that baffled him so much, the thing that frightened him, the thing that he could almost see, but not quite.
There was something in his mind that kept it out of arm's reach. Though he tried and tried, he couldn't touch it, so he was constantly telling me all about what was not visible to him.
I was interested but not that interested, though I pretended to be because I wanted his friendship, even if it was based mostly on dreams.
Then I heard his .22 go off.
It snapped me alert and I heard the noise of a pheasant rooster coming my way. The bird sounded like a rusty airplane. The bird was coming right at me. I could see him skimming over the grass toward me.
Involuntarily, I snapped my gun up and got a shot off, quite obviously missing the bird that sailed right on past me, heading toward the burnt-down farmhouse and the collapsed barn.
There was a moment for the sound of the gun to disappear along with the pheasant. Then everything was very quiet, and I could hear the rain falling again, big February drops like small self-contained reservoirs.
The plopping of the rain would cause a beautiful green spring in a few months but I wouldn't be there to see it. I hadn't even stood up when I fired the gun. I just cracked off the shot and I had missed the bird by so much that I didn't even try for a second shot. I just turned my head and watched him disappear down around the collapsed barn.
Realizing that the bird and the accompanying shot had come from the direction David had gone in, I got up and yelled down the orchard, "You missed him!" I didn't think that he must already have known that because he heard me shoot.
Then I wondered where David was. He should have come back up this way by now. He always liked to get a second shot at a pheasant, so he would have wanted to track it down.
Where was David?
"David!" I yelled. "It came up this way! It's down by the barn!"
David did not answer.
Normally, he was very enthusiastic about stalking and shooting at pheasants with his .22, though I don't recall him ever having shot one, but he never stopped trying. They were like trying to see his dream.
"David!"
Silence
I started down there through the heavy wet grass. I knew that he couldn't be more than a hundred yards away.
"David!"
More silence
"David!"
Silence growing longer, heavier
"Can you hear me?"
I was almost there now—"David!"—and then I was there. David was sitting on the ground, holding the upper part of his right leg with both of his hands and there was blood spurting regularly between his fingers.
His face was very pale and his features had a dreamy expression to them, as if he had just awakened or maybe was falling asleep.
The blood was very red and it just kept coming. He seemed to have an endless supply of it.
"What happened?" I said, bending down to look at all the blood that was now covering the ground. I had never seen so much blood before in my entire life, and I had never seen blood that was so red. It looked like some kind of strange liquid flag on his leg.
"You shot me," David said.
His voice sounded very far away.
"It doesn't look good."
I tried to say something but my mouth was completely dry as if it had been suddenly sandblasted.
"I wish it would hurt," he said. "But it doesn't hurt. Oh, God, I wish it would hurt."
The bullet had severed the femoral artery in his right leg.
"If it doesn't start hurting soon, I'm going to die," David said. Then he kind of rolled very slowly over on his side as if he were falling out of the world's slowest chair. He kept holding his leg that was now just a sea of February orchard blood. He looked up at me with eyes that were disappearing right in front of me. They would be gone in a minute.
"Did I get the pheasant?" he asked.
"No," my voice blew out of the Sahara. It continued blowing. "I'm sorry. I didn't see you. I just saw the pheasant coming at me, and I fired. I didn't know where you were."
"I didn't get it, huh?"
"No."
"Just as well," David said. "You can't eat when you're dead. No good," he said. "No good." He let go of his leg and rubbed his eyes with his bloody hands as if he were trying to see straight because everything had grown fuzzy. The blood on his face made him look like an Indian.
OH, GOD!
"I'll go and get some help. You'll be all right," I said. I'd just started to run when he stopped me by saying, "Do you know that thing in my dreams?"
"Yeah," I said.
"I'm never going to see it now," David said:
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust
I was acquitted by the court of any negligence in the shooting. I told exactly what had happened and they believed me. I had no reason to shoot him. I was just supposed to listen to his dreams.
David was buried three days later on Tuesday and all the kids in school stopped talking to me.
He was a very popular boy and they retired his basketball jersey. There was a glass case full of trophies in the front hall of the gym and they put his basketball jersey in the case along with a photograph of him and a brass plaque that told his name and how much he was admired for his sportsmanship and academic qualities. The plaque also said that he was born March 12th, 1933, and died February 17th, 1948.
David would have been fifteen in a month.
We were off Welfare and my mother was working now as a waitress. It was a small town and her tips stopped, so...
There wasn't much point in us hanging around there any more. I got in half-a-dozen fights at school. They weren't my fault. The only thing that was my fault was that I didn't buy that hamburger. If I had only wanted a hamburger that day, everything would have been completely different. There would be another person still living on the planet and talking about his dreams to me.
My mother kept telling me that it wasn't my fault.
"I should have bought a hamburger," I said.
She was very patient and didn't ask me what I was talking about.
We had this exchange a dozen or so times.
Finally, she said, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"It doesn't make any difference," I said.
Later on that year, after we had moved, and I had taken up my obsessive search for salvation by trying to find out everything there was to know about the hamburger, my mother said to me one day, right out of the blue, startling me because she hadn't made a single comment about my hamburger research, though she was quite aware that it was going on: "Maybe you should have bought the hamburger."
I had never told her about the hamburger decision I had made that led to the box of bullets, so I was surprised even more when she told me that I should have bought the hamburger.
"It's too late now," I said.
She went into the other room without saying anything.
The next day I brought a complete end to my hamburger research. I took all my notes and interviews and assorted documents down to the river that flowed by the new town we were exiled to and burned them in a picnic stove that was beside a very sad little Oregon zoo that barely had any animals and they were all wet because it was raining again as was the fate of that land.
An extremely wet and skinny-looking coyote stood on the other side of his Cyclone fence in a pathetic little compound and watched me burn too many pieces of paper dealing with the origin, refinement and other possibilities of the hamburger.
When all my papers were finally burned and the ashes stirred into oblivion the coyote walked away.
Leaving the zoo, I passed
the cage of a black bear. He had a grizzled face. He was staring at the wet cement floor of his cage. He didn't look up as I walked by. I wonder why I still remember him after all these years. He's probably dead now. Bears don't live forever, but I remember him:
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust
Well, there you have it and now I have released the two people from their paralyzed photograph of 32 years ago, and their truck filled with furniture is coming down the road toward the pond.
The truck rattled to a stop and they got out. They were not surprised to see me because I was their uninvited houseguest, almost every night.
"Hello," they both said in very slow unison that sounded as if it had originated quite close to Oklahoma. It was not a big friendly hello nor was it a little unfriendly hello. I just said a simple hello hello. I think they were still making up their minds about me.
I was sort of on probation, but I felt as if I were making some progress toward developing a minor pond comrades-in-catfish friendship with them. I had all summer to get to know them. I would outlast them.
Last week they asked me if I wanted to sit down on their couch with them, though that was very difficult because they both were so big that they practically took up the entire couch themselves. I barely made it on the couch with them like the last final squeeze of toothpaste from a tube.
They were both in their late thirties and over six feet tall and weighed in excess of 250 pounds, and they both wore bib overalls and tennis shoes. I haven't the slightest idea what they did for a living because they never said a single word about what kind of job they did.
I had a feeling whatever they did for a living, they did together. They were the kind of people who looked as if they were never apart. I could see them coming to work together, working together, having lunch together and always wearing the same clothes. Whatever they did required that they wear bib overalls and tennis shoes.
I could see them filling out employment forms.
Under the line that asked about previous experience. They just put down "bib overalls and tennis shoes."
I also had a feeling that whatever they did, they came directly from work to the pond. I don't think they changed their clothes because different, but always matching pairs of bibs and tennis shoes were their entire wardrobe.
I could imagine them even having special overalls and tennis shoes for church with the rest of the congregation sitting apart from them.
Well, whatever they did for a living hadn't made them rich because the furniture on the back of their truck was well-worn and looked as if it had not been very expensive to begin with. It looked like ordinary used furniture or the stuff you'd find in any furnished apartment where the rent was cheap.
Their furniture was a replica of the furniture that I had lived with all my twelve years. New furniture has no character whereas old furniture always has a past. New furniture is always mute, but old furniture can almost talk. You can almost hear it talking about the good times and troubles it's seen. I think there is a Country and Western song about talking furniture, but I can't remember the name.
After their perfunctory hello to me, they took the couch off the truck. They were both so efficient and strong that the couch came off the back of the truck like a ripe banana out of its skin. They carried it over to the pond and put it down very close to the water's edge, so they could fish right off it, but still leaving enough space so as not to get their tennis shoes wet.
Then they went back to the truck and got a big stuffed easy chair. The chair did not match the couch which was an Egyptian-mummy-wrapping beige. The stuffed chair was a blood-fading red.
She took the chair off by herself while he stood there waiting to take something off himself. As soon as the stuffed chair was on its way to join the couch by the pond's edge, he got two end tables off the truck and put them on each side of the couch. By this time she had gone back and gotten a rocking chair and set it up.
Then they took a small wood cookstove off the truck and they began creating a little kitchen in the corner of their living room.
The sun was just setting and the pond was totally calm. I could see the old man standing on his boatssss dock across from us watching. He was motionless as they unloaded their furniture. Everything was shadowy on his part of the pond and he was just another shadow textured among thousands of other shadows.
They took a box of food and cooking things off the truck and a small table to use for preparing their evening meal. The man started a fire in the stove. They even brought their own wood. He was very good at starting fires because the stove was hot enough to cook on momentarily.
Redwing blackbirds were standing on the ends of the cattails and making their final night calls, saying things to other birds that would be continued the next morning at dawn.
I heard my first cricket chirp.
That cricket sounded so loud and so good that he could have been a star in a Walt Disney movie. Walt should have sent some scouts out and signed him up.
The man started cooking hamburgers.
They smelled good, but I did not pay the attention to them that I would the following February and the long months that I mulled over hamburgers after the shooting. To me now they were just the good smell of hamburgers cooking.
The woman got three once-electric floor lamps that had now been converted to kerosene use off the truck. The kerosene worked real nice, though of course the lamps were not as bright as they would have been if they used electricity.
There was another interesting thing about those lamps. The people had never bothered to remove the cords. They were still fastened to the lamps. The cords didn't look wrong, but they didn't look right either. I wonder why they didn't take them off.
The woman put a floor lamp next to each end table beside the couch and lit them. The light from the lamps shined down on the end tables.
Then the woman got a cardboard box off the truck and took two photographs out of the box. They were in large ornate frames. I believe one photograph was of her parents and the other photograph was of his parents. They were very old photographs and tinted in the style of long ago. She put them down on one of the tables.
On the other table she put an old clock that had a heavy somber ticking to it. The clock sounded as if eternity could pull no tricks on it. There was also a small brass figure of a dog beside the clock. The figure looked very old and was a companion and watchdog for the clock.
Did I mention that she put a lace doily on the surface of that table before she put the dog and clock there?
Well, I have now, and there was also a lace doily on the end table that held the photographs of their parents. I might add that their parents were not wearing bib overalls and tennis shoes. They were dressed formally in perhaps the style of the 1890s.
There was another kerosene lamp burning on the worktable beside the stove where the burgers were cooking, but it was a traditional lamp. I mean, it looked like a kerosene lamp.
The man was also boiling some water for Kraft dinner and there was a can of pears on the table.
That was going to be their dinner tonight: 32 years ago.
The smoke rising from the stove sought desperately for a pipe but not finding one just drifted slowly around like an absentminded cripple.
Their living room was now completely set up except that I have forgotten to mention the National Geographic magazines that were on both end tables. Sometimes when the fishing was slow they would just read the National Geographic while waiting for a bite.
They drank a lot of coffee from a huge metal coffeepot that he was now filling with water from the pond. They also drank the coffee out of metal cups. They put a lot of sugar in their coffee. Every night they used a pound box of sugar. You could almost walk on their coffee. An ant would have been in paradise if it drank coffee.
While they were setting up this living-room ritual of life beside the pond, I sat in some grass nearby, just watching them, saying noth
ing.
They hardly spoke either and this evening, their conversation was mostly about people who weren't there.
"Father, Bill would have liked this place," she said.
They always called each other Mother or Father when they called each other anything. They did not spend a lot of time talking to each other. They had spent so much time together that there probably wasn't much more to be said.
"Yes, Mother, he would have been happy here. This is a good pond."
"I don't know why people have to move all the time, Father."
"Neither do I, Mother."
He flipped over a hamburger in the frying pan on the stove.
"Betty Ann moved in 1930," he said.
"That means Bill must have moved in either 1929 or 1931 because they moved a year apart," she said.
"I don't know why either of them moved," he said.
"Well, don't forget: we moved, too," she said.
"But it was different with us. We had to move," he said. "They didn't have to move. They just could have stayed there. They could still be there if they wanted to be," he said.
She didn't say anything after he said that.
She just busied herself with the living room beside the pond, futzing like women do when they want to think something over and it needs time.
More crickets had joined in with the first cricket, but the new crickets were not star material. They were just ordinary crickets. No one from Hollywood would ever come to Oregon and sign them up.
I could barely see the old man across the pond on his dock staring at us, but he was fading very rapidly away. When night gets started, it just won't stop.
"How's the Kraft dinner?" she asked, sort of absentmindedly.
She had a feather duster in her hand and was dusting off their furniture that had gotten dusty because of the long gray destroyed road that had taken them to this pond in Oregon in late July 1947, the second year after the sky stopped making all that noise from endless flights of bombers and fighter planes passing overhead like the Hit Parade records of World War II, playing too loud on a jukebox that went all the way to the stars.
Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Page 31