Jewelweed

by David Rhodes

  “Aren’t you going to eat any more of that?” asked Dart.

  “I have always loved goat cheese, but I think I’ve had enough for tonight,” said Flo, speaking with such deliberation that her listeners clung to her last uttered word in order to make retrospective sense of those that had preceded it.

  “You didn’t even eat a whole piece.”

  “Almost.”

  “Almost only counts in horseshoes,” said Dart, glaring at the uneaten portion on Florence’s plate.

  “Close,” said Amy, her voice creating an almost musical tone. “Close only counts in horseshoes.”

  “That’s what I said,” replied Dart.

  “You said almost.”

  “They mean the same thing.”

  “Do you need any more beads, or anything else for making your rosaries, Florence?”

  “I work slow and have plenty.”

  “I’m worried about Kevin,” said Amy.

  “You don’t need to,” said Dart. “He’s going to be fine.”

  “Something’s different this time.”

  “That’s not what the nurse says. She says he’s going to be fine.”

  “I know, but there are other things too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Last night I had this dream where Kevin was standing out by the road. It was wintertime, and snow lay around him on the ground.”

  “I don’t put much stock in dreams,” said Dart. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have them.”

  “This school bus came along and Kevin got into it. I was worried, so I followed behind in the car. At every house the bus stopped and picked up another child, until all the windows were filled with faces. As more and more children climbed on, the bus got bigger, until it took up both sides of the road. The bus just kept going on and on, filling up with all the children in the world. It got harder and harder for me to keep up, because my car was old and the school bus was new. It got farther and farther ahead, but I still followed it over the hills, where it would often dip out of sight for a while. Then it stopped and stayed at the very bottom of one little valley. I caught up to it just as Kevin was let out. Then the bus drove away and Kevin was there by himself, standing in fresh snow. I tried to get him in the car with me, but he wouldn’t come. ‘I don’t want to,’ he said, just like that.

  “‘You can’t stay here,’ I told him, and he said again, ‘I don’t want to.’ That’s all he would say, and he wouldn’t get into the car. And then I woke up.”

  “Dreams don’t mean anything,” said Dart. “They’re stupid.”

  “It must mean something,” said Amy. “I’m afraid it means the school bus was driving into the future, and then it stopped and let Kevin off.”

  “It doesn’t mean that,” said Dart.

  “Then what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, but it doesn’t mean that.”

  “It has to, Dart. It has to. There’s no other explanation. Why would he keep saying ‘I don’t want to’ over and over again?”

  “That’s just the way people talk in dreams. Tell her, Flo. It doesn’t mean that.”

  “I never dream,” said Florence. “But I agree with Dart. It doesn’t mean that.”

  “You should talk to Pastor Winifred,” said Dart. “She knows about dreams and she’ll tell you it doesn’t mean that. She’ll agree with me and Flo.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “You don’t have to. You can just tell her you know me. Ivan and I were just over there a little while ago, helping her out with her garden. She’s got a garden, you know, a fancy one, a long way from the house.”

  “I couldn’t impose.”

  “Of course you could. Ivan and I do all the time. He’s best friends with her son. Besides, people who know more than other people have a duty. What they know belongs to all of us, really. We’ve got just as much right to it as they do.”

  “I don’t believe in her religion,” said Amy.

  “I don’t either, and neither does Ivan. Religion is stupid—except the rosary religion, I mean. But that doesn’t matter anyway. You just go over there, you tell her you know me, and you tell her you had this dream. She’ll listen to you and then she’ll tell you it doesn’t mean what you think it does. You should see her garden anyway. Everybody should. She has a fountain and a deep pool with bright fish swimming around in it.”

  “What’s that?” asked Florence, pointing to the window.

  “It’s a mysterious light,” said Amy.

  Wally crept quietly past the half-opened door and looked out the window at the end of the hall. An unsteady spot of light moved along the edge of the pond, reflecting on the water, drawing him toward it like a voice in an empty house.

  Wally went downstairs and stepped outside. He stood on the deck and felt the night air, warm and moist, against his wrinkled face. Insects, frogs, and toads sang a riotous chorus. An owl hooted in the distance. Midsummer smells swarmed in to compete for his attention: honeysuckle, pond scum, tree resin, damp earth. The sky above reeled with thousands of indistinct points of light silently shifting toward new configurations. Enthralled, Wally contemplated a familiar expectation: that his deepest hour was about to begin.

  Across the pond, the flashlight continued bobbing, the light streaming toward him over the watery surface in a narrow line. Wally marveled at the unfathomable fact of position—how the light line extending from the flashlight would seem to be aimed directly at him from anywhere around the edge of the pond, encouraging the universally held but nonetheless false impression that his occupied space was favored. Closing his eyes to better savor this delusional feeling, Wally stood there for several moments. Then, after finding the walking stick he’d left leaning against the side of the house, he climbed down from the deck.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, catching up.

  “Looking for that turtle,” replied Ivan. “I want to see its eyes.”

  “Mind if I come along?”

  “That’s fine,” said Ivan. “But try to keep quiet. If we find him we can both look into his eyes and see if he’s the devil.”

  “Lead on,” said Wally.

  July Montgomery’s House

  When Jacob opened his repair shop in the morning, the radio had already been tuned to a folk-country station, and the smell of hot metal, sizzling flux, and ozone assaulted his sleepy mind. Blake was welding in the corner, surrounded by a thicket of silver smoke with a tiny bright white center.

  Jacob raised the double doors and the long metal panels clattered noisily as they rolled up above the overhead supports. Dew-heavy morning air and the sudden gloss of ambient light poured in from outside.

  “Hey,” said Blake, pivoting the black welding hood over his head, flashing teeth, looking more wide awake than anyone should before eight o’clock. “Hope you don’t mind. I came in a little early, made coffee—brought some from home.”

  Jacob poured a cup and set the pot back on the cluttered workbench between the grinder and a rack of deep-well sockets. “What you working on?”

  “Turns out my father kept my road bike. I found it in the shed.”

  “That looks like a new resonator,” observed Jacob, pointing to the sculpted metal tube leaning against the arch welder.

  “It is,” said Blake. “The old one was rusted through so I got a new one, and I’m welding together a better bracket to hold it in place. The old one was cracked.”

  “Might choke off some of the power,” said Jacob. He picked up the resonator and peered inside at the baffles. “I thought half the fun was the noise.”

  The younger man nurtured a momentary suspicion that Jacob might be teasing him, but quickly let it go. “I just want to get back to riding, not advertise where I am. Besides, they tune these resonators to the engine displacement. Not much power is lost.”

  Blake felt good. He’d had the best night he could remember, slept nine hours without waking up. The day before, he got the bike running and rode it for a couple of miles.
It ran rough. The four carburators needed to be boiled out and reset, and he needed new plugs and brakes on the front, but when he twisted the throttle and sped into the open country, the future expanded inside him like a primal flame. And then later that afternoon—even without the matched pistons thrumming beneath him—he could still feel the vital burning, steady and reassuring.

  Last night, lying in bed, Blake remembered how in prison, when he couldn’t sleep, he’d pictured riding along the rustic road between Luster and Red Plain—twenty miles of curving, climbing, plunging, and twisting, through mostly uninhabited woodland. Lying on his cell bunk, he’d recalled every detail he could remember of the once-familiar road, like fresh water from a deep well: ditches, bridges, intersections, grades, slopes, straightaways, humps, dips, bumps, fences, gorges, and hillsides, even trees reaching out toward the road and the changing view of the horizon. With sufficient concentration, the remembered trip could take over an hour, and often provided the hypnotic solace required in order to fall asleep. With years of devoted repetition, more details emerged, and the refuge he found in the imagined journey became even more welcoming.

  He wanted to take that same ride now, to coax the imagined route out of his memory and thank it for the sanctuary it had once provided, joining the past to the present in a way that would cleanse his world of the reasons he had needed a sanctuary in the first place, enabling him to really start over.

  But first he needed to return the bike to its former state. Then, after it was running like it used to, he’d be ready to take the ride, and in this way another debt would be repaid. After promising himself and Spinoza’s god that this would be done, he’d slept soundly.

  “What do you need to get it running?” asked Jacob.

  “It’s running already, but I need to find someone who can adjust the carbs after I get the cobwebs out.”

  “There’s a little shop outside Luster, owned by a guy about your age.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Walt Black.”

  “I remember him. He used to hang out with Skeeter Skelton—worked on his bikes.”

  “That’s him,” said Jacob. “I think Skeeter owns part of the shop.”

  “And here’s another thing,” said Blake, half-lowering the hood over his face and fumbling with the heavy gloves.

  Jacob waited, drinking coffee.

  “I can’t stay at home anymore,” he said. “Need a place of my own.”

  “Jack Station isn’t going to like that.”

  “I know it.”

  “What’s wrong with staying with your father?”

  “Nothing and everything. How long would you want to live with your father?”

  “Good point. I’m not sure it will work on your parole agent, though.”

  “Release agent,” corrected Blake, tilting the hood back. His face hardened and he paused for a moment, as if he were looking down an alley before walking into it. Then he rubbed the back of his neck and continued. “Technically, they don’t have parole agents anymore, because they don’t have parole. They don’t like the sound of it. Scumbag politicians put an end to that. Giving someone a second chance—except themselves and their rich friends—doesn’t strike them as reasonable. Hell, they don’t like much of anything that doesn’t put money in their own pockets. And the public goes along with it like a bunch of herded sheep.”

  Jacob turned his head and stared outdoors, where Words was waking up. A door slammed and two dogs barked.

  Blake continued, “Those bastards took this country and made it into a goddamn police state. They’re building prisons everywhere, locking up everyone who looks the wrong way. The government-industrial gulag is a multi-zillion-dollar business. Why do you think there’s all this talk about illegal immigration? I’ll tell you why: they want to get those people into their private prisons. It’s postmodern slavery, a war on minorities and the poor. The whole system is corrupt.”

  Jacob sipped his coffee and fondly remembered those mornings, not long ago when he’d worked alone. But he caught himself quickly, remembering also that he’d agreed to this. He’d even promised himself not to entertain regrets. If he wasn’t prepared to give it an honest try, he shouldn’t have agreed to take Blake on. It was going to take some time. Blake needed not only to work through the last eleven years, but also to find a way to make up for the experiences he had missed while he was incarcerated. His growth had been stunted, and he hadn’t yet learned how to resume his life.

  On the other hand, it was also true that he was way ahead of himself in other ways. His mind seemed quicker than most, which was probably because he’d had time to read difficult books. He seemed to actually enjoy writers like Spinoza, whose unyielding sentences presented most readers with an incline too steep to climb. Still, while Blake had undoubtedly learned to negotiate brilliant abstractions, his social and emotional life seemed stalled, mired in his early to mid-twenties.

  The coffee tasted unusually good, Jacob noticed—robust yet without bitterness—and he looked around for the package it came in.

  “All they care about is their wealthy friends and to hell with everyone else,” Blake continued. “They’ve made a mockery of the principles that once made this country great. You know as well as I do that there was a time, not long ago, when the rest of the world looked up to us. We were rightly proud of our democracy, proud of our freedoms, proud of our system of justice, and proud of our schools. You could feel it in the air, waking up in the morning, walking down the street. Everyone felt it. There was a time when . . .”

  And that was the problem, thought Jacob, running the lift up to get underneath a garden tractor. When the best days were in the past, what could be done? When just being alive no longer seemed as fulfilling, what could a person do?

  For the most part Blake was like everyone else, Jacob thought. He did his work, went home, and took care of all the things people had to take care of. He didn’t desire more than he had, but then something would set him off. It didn’t happen often, but sooner or later, Jacob feared, something would light Blake up at the wrong time. This morning, for example, he’d come in early, seeming better adjusted than usual, and then he got knocked off course. A fermented thought entered his head, and he simply couldn’t leave it alone. Not that Jacob disagreed with his opinion about how the country had taken a wrong turn. Any fool knew there was something to that; but living a grounded, contented life—in good times and bad—had always been a narrow path, and only those paying close attention could stay on it. Jacob certainly knew that. Until he found Winnie and she found something in him—well, he didn’t want to think about that. He was vulnerable, to say the least. Living without a center would do that to anyone. People needed a path—they were born needing it and they would die needing it—and if you couldn’t find your way back to your path after you strayed from it, you were finished.

  “Where’d you get this coffee?” asked Jacob, pouring another cup.

  “My dad. He’s big on coffee and he wanted you to try it. He gets it from some guy in Missouri who roasts his own.”

  “It’s good. Say, we’ve got a lot of work to get out of here today. If it’s all right with you—I mean, as soon as you’re finished with what you’re working on—that four-wheeler needs new gaskets.”

  Blake stared at him blankly for a moment. “You’re the boss,” he said, and lowered the black mask over his face.

  Several days later, Blake’s release agent called the shop to tell him to come in for another drug test. Blake explained over the phone that he didn’t want to live with his father any longer. Not long after this exchange, Jack Station’s blue Mercury arrived. He climbed out, walked past the half dozen or so people standing around in the lot, and came inside, his eyes narrowed into slits.

  “Home not good enough for you?” he asked, laughing without humor.

  “It’s not that,” said Blake. “My father’s got his own life. I’ve got mine.”

  “What do you know about this?” Station asked Ja
cob, stalking to the other side of the shop and standing with his hands in his pockets. “Did something happen between Blake and his father, something no one bothered to inform me about? Was there some kind of altercation? What do you know about it?”

  “About what?” asked Jacob. The people in the lot moved closer to the open door, smoking, drinking soda, and listening.

  “Did you know he wanted to change residences?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “Did you explain to him that any change of residency is contingent upon my approval? Without my personal authorization Blake can’t do anything—not so long as the state bears responsibility for him. Did you explain that to him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What’s ‘not exactly’ supposed to mean?”

  “It means I didn’t.”

  “That’s what I thought. It’s not likely he could find a place, you know, not one he can afford.”

  “I’ve been out almost two months,” Blake said.

  “Have you found a place?” demanded Station. “Have you?”

  “Not yet. I thought I better talk to you about it first.”

  “Where exactly do you want to live?”

  “Maybe I could find a room.”

  “Not likely. You’d have to tell the landlord you’re an ex-con. You know that, don’t you? Your landlord would also have to be informed of the conditions of your release, the felonies you were convicted of—transporting drugs, assaulting an officer of the law—and your record of uncooperative behavior while you were incarcerated. They’d have to know all that.”

  “Of course.”

  “And you were intending to come clean on every detail. Right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Just a minute.” Station stepped outside, unfolded his cell phone, and dialed a number. The people gathered there moved away. Then he came back inside. “I can’t believe this. There’s no service here. I can’t believe it. What kind of a place is this—something out of the Dark Ages?”

  “The hills,” said Jacob.