The Flicker of Old Dreams

by Susan Henderson

  So many people I see shoveling their own walks could have set aside old gripes and helped clear roads, carry Doris through the snow, lay her to rest.

  I don’t get it, the loathing one neighbor can have for another. The same storm bears down on us all, and for days or weeks we will be trapped with whatever electricity and provisions we have at hand. Certainly, we are capable of understanding each other. It’s as if we refuse our most natural instinct.

  We have forgotten what we have in common. We’ve forgotten when we walked to school together, when we picked up trash from the same storm. All of us have worked since we were children, on ranches, at the elevator or grocery store. In summers, the fishermen of our families likely kept jars of worms in the fridge. Go into any of our homes and I bet you’ll find a Charlie Russell painting and a Louis L’Amour novel. Walk outside and we hear the same cattle, feel the same wind. How strange that we find ourselves at odds with people so similar to ourselves that someone from another town could not tell us apart. Don’t we all just want simple things from this life—a use for our talents and passions, a chance at love, an old wound healed, someone to hold after a hard day?

  I feel the handle of the shovel in my gloves again. The sky begins to dim until I see only gray and white. But what is that smear of color? I set the shovel against the porch rail and look again. There are Pete’s flashing lights turning from the highway, the wheels grinding through the buried streets. My knees nearly buckle in relief.

  His truck stops in front of our house, and Pop struggles out the door and up the walk, wet and exhausted. I hurry to lend him my arm.

  “I’ll help you inside,” I say.

  His blue lips are too frozen for him to speak.

  I fetch towels, a blanket, help remove the outer layers. After I serve him soup and buttered toast, I watch from behind the storm door, as Pete’s truck idles outside of Doris’s house, strobes flashing. Then a silhouette of Robert, blurred by snow, returns to the white Ford carrying, what, something large, and gets back inside. They are moving again. My mind churns in place, like the truck’s wheels, until I understand. He was carrying luggage.

  “Pop!”

  I open the storm door, snow dotting my face.

  “Pete and Robert understood they had to leave tonight or they wouldn’t get out,” he says. “Pete will drive Robert to the airport as soon as it’s open again.”

  “Pop,” I whisper. “What did you do?”

  It is the slowest leaving, blue and red lighting up the snow, the house, the snow, the house as Pete’s white Ford edges away with Robert in it. I grab for my heart and stand shivering at the open door.

  From behind, I feel my father’s hands, one on each shoulder, his grip firm. He’s done this. My father, with Pete’s help. Snow sprays our oriental carpet. The radiator clicks on again, my father’s breath too close, and a fury boils inside, rising through my gut toward my shoulders. I shrug hard.

  “Get away from me,” I shout. “Call them back. Call them back right now!”

  I run down the snowy steps, run to the end of the walk, shaking, not wanting to let Pete’s truck out of my sight. Blue and red lights up the highway and then any sign of those lights is gone. I look at my house as if I don’t know it. My footprints have already filled with snow. I look again to the barren highway and wonder if I will see Robert again, my world silent except for wind hurling snow. It is as if white sheets drape across the roads, across every structure, the town bedding down for the rest of winter, and all of us trapped underneath.

  42

  Petroleum is white as far as you can see, the plains endless, disorienting without any markers. We have to shovel every hour or the snow could barricade the doors shut. Snow builds at the edges of windows, the view contracting. Soon there will be no sky. No stars.

  Sometimes during long hours with nothing to do, I imagine Robert so fully, I believe I can touch him. One moment I feel the rumble of the plow, but it is the shudder of Robert’s skin as I trace the scar that disappears beneath his shirt. Another moment I hear wind against the windows, but it is Robert whispering in my ear.

  Shh, shh now.

  He has removed his shirt. He does not have the body he would like to have. He says this. He points to his thin shoulders, his doughy middle, the loose flesh inside the bend at his elbows. And I welcome him, his insecurities, his shame. I welcome his arm that scoops beneath my back and all the way through to the other side. We press our imperfect flesh together, his long, raised scar against my assortment of stones. He clutches my hand, once stuck with pins. He kisses what cannot be made right, but kisses all the same.

  And my tears fall because I want this and because a part of me knows my arms are empty. Don’t open your eyes, don’t. I will him here, caressing, holding him gently then forcefully. I beg myself to keep believing, to keep my eyes shut so I am not alone.

  I am different than I was that windy night when I first opened the door to Robert Golden. In that one volatile month, Robert had, it seemed, placed his hands against my chest and pushed hard, pushed till ribs cracked, to get my heart beating.

  I thought I wanted a life that was predictable, the perfect steadiness of my sixty-five-degree world, with all my supplies lined up in order. That is no longer enough.

  I leave my room and wander down the staircase that feels too narrow, the ceiling too near. Pop waits at the table. We still eat our meals together, but they are often quiet. I sit in front of my plate, not hungry. My father, unshaven, smells of whiskey though it’s only lunchtime. We have given up on forced conversations. We have given up pretending we’re fine.

  His attempts to apologize to me are clumsy and insensitive.

  “You’ll fall in love again,” he says. “How well did you even know him?”

  But that was the wrong question. The real question is, How well do I want to know him? And my answer is that I want to know his room, what he keeps on the dresser and in the junk drawer. I want to learn the names of his closest friends. I want to watch a bad movie together and learn which of us is grumpier when we’re sick. I want to sit on the toilet while he brushes his teeth. I want to make up from an all-night argument.

  “Pop?” I say.

  He looks up and I realize I don’t have the words or the courage to speak of what’s grown between us, how I feel squeezed into a little box of my father’s wishes for my life.

  “Never mind,” I say.

  And the snow falls and falls.

  If I let myself think too long about this small space, I feel a sense of panic—an impulse to run without stopping. The walls are too close on all sides and the air smells too much of ourselves, our sorrow and boredom.

  Through a rip in the tinfoil, I see a sliver of winter’s pale sun and am left to imagine the sharp air in my nostrils. I feel desperate to be in all that untrampled space, running so long and so far that I must remove my hat and unzip my coat.

  How many days have we been inside? Do I dare count them? Do I dare guess how many more are to come? And without thinking, I’ve stood up so fast the chair falls behind me.

  “Mary, what’s going . . . ?”

  But I’ve gone, bolted out the door because I’d go mad staying inside a second longer. I flail through our shoveled path, slipping, standing up again, trying to run. Everything ahead and above is so blinding white, I can’t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins. It burns when I breathe. I want to run fast and far but the dead end is just ahead, and before I can slow down, I’ve slammed into a wall.

  Frantically, I claw at the outer shell of it, push and kick at the softer snow behind. I need to run faster and farther. I need to see color.

  “It hurts!” I yell, and the wind swallows my words.

  My cry is primal, raging. I feel a pounding in my ears and hair rising on the back of my neck. In the same moment I hear Pop call my name, he’s wrapped his arms around the outsides of mine and tackles me, both of us falling.

  “Don’t you know this is dangerous?” he shou
ts. “Out in this cold with only a sweater.”

  He holds me tight, our cheeks against the snow.

  “I hate you,” I say, the wall crumbling into the side of my mouth.

  “There will be others to help you forget,” he says.

  “I might have gone with him,” I sob.

  Pop holds on tight, and I let him—these things we don’t do easily. Faces peer from windows, where towels and tinfoil have been peeled back. Faces watch from their own shoveled mazes. My skin, my eyes sting from the wind.

  “We have to get you back inside,” Pop says, helping me stand.

  Everything feels numb as he lifts. And it ends like this, walking back without a look between us that would bring reassurance that our relationship will survive. Pop is only thinking right now about keeping us warm, and I am only thinking of my boots stepping in and out of his footprints.

  Once through the door, I drag myself on wobbly legs to my room. I sit by the front window and stare at the endless white, my skin burning and itching as it warms. Now and then I hear my father come into the room. He says nothing and leaves again.

  To Pop, I may always be the girl sitting here by the window, watching a world I can’t seem to join, and he may always see himself as the one who couldn’t give me what my mother would have.

  My fingers feel the cold glass, while sound moves far away. Wind. Mooing. Flushing. Ringing. Footsteps. Knocking. My name. My name. My name.

  My fingers bend, straighten. The blurred room comes into focus.

  “Mary?”

  My father knocks hard on the open door.

  “Mary? Phone call for you.”

  I move in slow motion, counting stairs until a thought crosses my mind. Speeding now, I nearly trip on the last step and turn the corner to the kitchen, where the phone sits off the hook.

  “Hello?”

  When I hear Robert’s voice, the tears fall, salty, to my lips. He speaks before I’m fully listening—something about rain, seagulls, how long it took to catch up at work.

  “Did my father ask you to call?”

  “I was going to call anyway,” he says.

  The phone trembles in my hand as he tells me what’s outside his window. The sound of tugboats. The smell of fish. The taste of salt in the air. And he tells me about the inside of his office, where he is working late and about the computer bugs he discovered.

  “My life’s not that interesting,” he says.

  “I like to hear about it.”

  I tell him how my windows are blocked by snow and we laugh about what we might find underneath it all—the step to the barbershop like broken piano keys, an old faded sign with three remaining letters on it, a once-shiny truck with a scrape along the length of the door and slashed tires.

  “Will you come back for it?”

  “Eventually,” he says. “Tell me about the ranchers. What are they doing in all that snow?”

  I can’t see the ranches from any window, and I’ve been so mad at my neighbors for what I’ve learned about them. But old stories rise to the surface, stories I’ve accumulated over the years from my father or conversations I overheard at the Pipeline, and I tell Robert what I remember.

  “In the mornings, and then several times a day, they crack through frozen layers at the watering hole and trough,” I say. “And calves are born between now and the end of March so the cowhands stay close in case they need to get in there and pull.”

  “Must be tough keeping them alive in a blizzard,” he says.

  “They have to check on the newborns all the time,” I say, “to be sure their slick coats don’t turn into shells of ice. Once I saw a guy driving a newborn around on the floor of his truck, trying to keep it warm.”

  My ear, pressed against the phone for so long, feels bruised. Gaps steadily grow between our stories until we’ve run out of words.

  “I should probably go,” he says.

  “Please stay on the line,” I say.

  And we listen to each other breathe.

  After I’ve hung up, I walk down the hallway to shut off the lights before bed. My father, passed out in his office chair, must have tried his best to listen to our call. I kneel beside him, my hand on his forearm. Could I do this if he were awake—slide my fingers gently down his arm until my hand is over his?

  “Good night,” I whisper to this man who loves and hurts me.

  I keep my hand on his a little longer.

  After I go to bed, I watch the white windows and the hints of violet that show through. Gradually, they darken to black, the house exquisitely quiet. And then I feel it. A feeble stirring deep-in, beneath the stones. Desire, dreams, the soul that had curled up in hiding, trying to rise.

  Robert’s calls aren’t predictable but they come before I fret.

  “Phone for you,” my father says, no longer trying to keep us apart.

  He leaves the kitchen along with the dishes he promised he’d wash. I don’t think he’s cleaned anything since the blizzard. I put the phone to my ear and pretend we are skin to skin. I love the surprise of our conversations, hearing about a world so different from Petroleum, finding that one story leads to another I didn’t see coming. As he speaks, I quietly load the dishwasher, switching ears whenever one feels too hot or sore. I wash the counters and the spills that have dripped down the cabinets to the floor.

  “My father’s driving me crazy,” I whisper into the phone. “You wouldn’t believe the mess he made of the kitchen. We’ve been locked in this house so long, all the stories he tells are ones he’s told before.”

  “When he’s gone,” Robert says, “you’d be amazed what you’ll miss.”

  I put down the dishrag and sit at the table as he tells me of his mother tiptoeing behind him to drop oyster crackers into his bowl of soup. Or her winded laugh whenever her favorite game show started.

  “The opening was funny to her every time,” he says. “I couldn’t see it, what made her laugh. But the sound. The sweet, sad sound of giggling with no air behind it . . .”

  I want to see his face and touch my hands to his cheeks.

  “Even painting . . .” He stops speaking for a moment, swallows. “The same stupid hobo. You can even miss that.”

  “I’ll be more patient,” I say.

  “He loves you,” Robert says of my father.

  He has said the word love. For the rest of the call, I memorize his whisper of that word.

  More and more, when I close my eyes, I dream of a bigger world. I dream of blank pages to fill. My hands long to hold paintbrushes, sticks of charcoal, pencils. Is this fair to my father? I watch him slump over the kitchen table, over his office desk, in the recliner in front of the TV, no more secret phone calls or visits to fill his time. I feel guilty having such dreams when I see the sorrow that shows in his eyes and at the edges of his mouth. But I refuse to crawl back beneath the stones.

  Epilogue

  The day of Doris’s burial it snowed twenty-nine inches. There was another storm not far behind it, seventy-six inches for the year. Ranchers scrambled to save their livestock. Many lost a quarter to half of their herds. Petroleum was such a huge stretch of white that, for weeks, it was without streets and sidewalks, and for some time, electricity.

  With no shipments to the grocery store, our town managed on the goods we prepared in warmer weather or purchased during the Blizzard Festival. The doors of the abandoned homes were walled off for months. The rest of us were restricted to wherever we’d shoveled while the snow was still soft enough to move. And we milled back and forth in our outdoor mazes, trying not to count the days of our captivity.

  The calendar has said for some time that it’s spring, but only recently have I seen evidence—creeks flowing, snow dripping from branches, birds returning. The giant letter P on the rimrocks slowly reveals itself again, while homes, trailers, sheds, and stores emerge from all that white, everything leaning a little bit more.

  The air smells of mud and new growth. My feet sink into the slush. Cottonwood
seeds fly toward me like a surprise, warm snowfall. And I am glad for the sun.

  I carry a bucket of soapy water down the driveway, toward my van. My hands fish for the sponge as windows open on the upper floor of the hotel, the sound of vacuuming inside. I soap up the hood, swirl the grime in circles.

  “Do you think the rumor’s true?” a voice says from across the street.

  A group of boys stands in front of the Goldens’ empty home, which now displays a sign saying, for sale by owner.

  “The money’s going to the school.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “It’s going to fix up the library.”

  “We could have band uniforms.”

  “My dad says, if there is any money, Petroleum won’t see it.”

  I’ve asked Robert about the rumor and he still doesn’t know if there are any savings. Between his work schedule and whatever remains in the locked house, there are many loose ends.

  The kids move down the road and turn into a field. One picks up a stick and throws it in the direction they’re walking. What the people of this town seem to crave is a different ending to their story. But a mortician knows something about death. Can sense it coming without the need to turn away. Like old age, it comes whether you fear it or not. And hits hard even when you expect it.

  Still, some must hope. Others must rage and strike out.

  You can’t tell someone how to mourn.

  You can’t tell someone how to die.

  Pop joins me with his own sponge and starts on the headlights and grille. We don’t talk about what happened over this last winter—I think it’s how we’ll always be—but that afternoon when he tackled me in the snow has weighed on each day since.

  I stand on the footrest to reach the top of the windshield, and that’s where I say what I’ve been pondering these past many weeks.

  “I’m thinking I might try a different line of work,” I say. “Maybe a different town.”