The Dream Life of Astronauts

by Patrick Ryan

  Frankie brought the fragment up to his face and peered at its knobby surface. It smelled like gunpowder. “I don’t feel molested.”

  “I know. But it means you get to keep the rock.”

  We never would have laid eyes on Ike if his dad hadn’t gone to sleep on a pair of railroad tracks somewhere in Jacksonville. The man was either drunk or simpleminded—either way, he was gone and it must have been gruesome. I was untangling the garden hose when Mr. Beal told me Ike was coming to stay with us and help out.

  “We’ve got more than enough day workers for the grove,” I said, “and there’s not that much to do around here. How old is he?”

  “Young, I guess. Maybe ten.”

  “Why can’t he stay where he is?”

  Mr. Beal spat a dark rope of tobacco juice onto the dirt, wiped a finger across his lip, and said, “Hannah, you’re about as friendly as a possum.” Then he told me the boy’s father used to work for Mr. Merrick, and I knew the matter was settled. Mr. Merrick owned the orange grove and a handful of other groves in Brevard County. He owned a trucking company and half a dozen packinghouses. He was letting the Beals live on the farm because Mr. Beal had driven one of his delivery trucks for most of his life and Mr. Merrick wanted to show his gratitude. Whatever Mr. Merrick wanted was pretty much how things went.

  I asked Mr. Beal for a pinch of his Skoal. Skoal wasn’t for girls, he reminded me, but he dug the can out of his pocket and handed it over. My spit was too soon, hardly even brown. “We might have cabbage loopers,” I said, jawing toward the garden. “Something’s eating holes in the lettuce.”

  “You heard what I said, though.”

  “Ten years old,” I said, giving the hose a snap. “What good’s he going to be around here?”

  “I want you to be nice to that boy,” Mr. Beal said.

  “I’ve got no use for him.”

  “Nobody’s asking anybody to have a use,” he said. “If it’s going to kill you to be nice, then you might as well get on with dying.”

  Such was life at Cassandra Grove.

  —

  Up till then, it’d just been the Beals, their adopted son Gary, and me. I didn’t live in the house with the rest of them. I’d moved out to the barn two years earlier when I was fifteen, not long after Gary arrived—partly because I was tired of hearing Mrs. Beal’s record player coming up through the floor of my room, and partly because I didn’t much care for Gary, who was two years younger than me, nosy, and a boy. I dragged my mattress up to the barn loft, along with an orange crate to use as a nightstand. From up there, out the south side, I had a view of the field, the road, and the Indian River. Out the north side, I could see the orange trees, the swamp beyond them, and, way off in the distance like a mountain, the enormous building where they were putting together the next rocket, the one they said was going to the moon. If nothing else, the view reminded me there was more to the world than just the farm and the grove.

  The Beals were old, at least seventy when they adopted Gary. They were calm, quiet people. The only time I ever heard Mrs. Beal raise her voice was when she caught Gary playing with himself on the tire swing behind the house. Mr. Beal and I were up on the roof fixing the shingles when she started hollering, and we edged over and looked down in time to see her walking in a circle and waving at the air while Gary swung around trying to get his pants buttoned.

  That night at dinner, when the four of us were sitting around the table, Mrs. Beal said maybe we should have a family discussion about what was okay to do in private and what wasn’t okay to do in public—say, in the backyard. In the tire swing, she added, just in case we didn’t know what she was getting at. Gary flushed. I rolled my eyes, and Mr. Beal said, “That’s okay, Mother.” It was okay, she said, but not in the tire swing, and Mr. Beal said her point was understood.

  Gary and I had to wash the dishes together every night—it was the last thing I did before heading out to the barn—and I was staring at his hands and trying not to smirk, wondering which one he used to play with himself, when he dropped a pot into the sink and splashed water onto my shirt.

  “Klutz,” I said.

  “You’re the k-klutz.”

  “So what were you thinking about? Girls? Naked girls?”

  “N-not you, that’s for sure,” he said.

  I hadn’t been wondering that at all. I didn’t want him or anybody thinking about me when they touched their penis. But I knew he was trying to be mean, so I asked, “Have you ever noticed your head is crooked?”

  He told me to shut up.

  “It is,” I said. “Your entire head is crooked. They probably squeezed the forceps too hard when you were born.”

  “They p-probably squeezed your five-ceps too hard,” he said.

  Not the sharpest nail in the toolbox, Gary. But even if he’d been sharp, I wouldn’t have liked him much.

  The truth was that, thankfully, not a lot happened at Cassandra Grove that involved other people. The day workers who picked the oranges had almost nothing to do with us and were gone by sundown. (I’d nod to a few of them now and then, but even the women eyed me with suspicion and wanted nothing to do with me.) The farm bordering the grove was hardly a farm at all. It sat far back off the road, tucked into the northern swell of the island, just below the Space Center. There was a gravel drive that ran from the road to the front porch and curved off to the barn and the rusted silo. Behind the silo was the shed where Mr. Beal kept the tools for Mrs. Beal’s garden. Mrs. Beal hadn’t worked in the garden for years, said she couldn’t bend over anymore, but I kept it up. Lettuce and radishes, mostly. Kale, when I could get it to grow.

  Mr. Merrick kept about forty head of cattle in the field past the barn, fenced and gated off from the house and the orange grove. We never had much to do with them besides giving them water and replacing the salt licks. Every so often, Mr. Merrick would send a truck over to take a few of them away. The cows would walk onto the truck like they were walking across the field, then they’d be gone. And the ones who were left behind seemed unbothered. They collected themselves around the gate near the house, until they got tired of Mr. Beal honking his horn every time he wanted to get his Nova through. Then they’d move out near the road and just stand there, all of them facing the same direction. Every once in a while we’d hear a gator growling out in the swamp, or a fruit bat banging against the inside of the silo, and one time something bit one of the cows and made its leg swell up to the size of a grapefruit for a few days. But for the most part, it was a stagnant place. Nothing moved unless it had to.

  —

  The cows were all out by the far gate the morning Mr. Beal drove to the bus station to pick up Ike. I watched him leave while I was sweeping the front porch of the house. Mr. Beal had had to drive on a schedule for most of his life, and now that he was retired, he was a slow driver. His Nova crept to a stop when he had to open and close the gate, and then crawled off toward the highway.

  Behind me, I heard the screen door open. Mrs. Beal stepped out and stood on the porch, watching her husband drive away.

  “It’ll be nice to have a new member of the family,” she said.

  “I thought he was just coming for a little while.”

  “As long as he needs to stay. You want me to braid your hair so you look nice when he gets here?”

  I didn’t even answer that. Why in the world would I care how I looked? “Doesn’t he have other family besides his dad? Doesn’t he have a mom?”

  “He does, but not that he can go to,” she said. “His mother’s in the state hospital, tried to hurt herself. Don’t you go talking about it, though. It’s none of our business.”

  “But he’s got somebody.”

  I felt her hand pat my arm, then rub up and down a little. It was the same rub she’d given me when I first got there. The same rub she’d given me when she tried to school me, with the help of some textbooks Mr. Merrick had sent over. She’d struggled, trying to keep me focused for two hours a day, but I felt lik
e I’d already learned all I needed to in school before I’d come to the farm, and I had no interest in math or science. Or history. Or English. The books Mr. Merrick had sent over had illustrations in them. They were meant for kids.

  But Mrs. Beal would rub my arm and tell me I deserved an education. She’d tell me not to forget how blessed we were to have one another, to be a family, and it always sounded strange when she said that, because the Beals hadn’t asked for me to be there, and I hadn’t asked to come. My dad was already out of the picture when I was still little. My mom had taken work as a cook at one of Mr. Merrick’s camps and had done that till her cough got worse, when I was around twelve. Then she coughed for a whole year, lost weight, and died. Next thing I knew, one of the foremen from the camp dropped me off at the farmhouse. The Beals had had no choice in the matter.

  For whatever reason, they’d decided they wanted a family in their ripe old age. After nobody else laid claim to me or took an interest, they asked me how I felt about being adopted by them. I told them I didn’t feel right about that since I still had a dad out there somewhere, so they said I could stay on anyway. Mrs. Beal sewed me a dress, which I felt silly in and wore only once. They said I could call them Mom and Dad, or Mama and Papa, or Mother and Father, but that didn’t feel any more right than letting myself get adopted. I was thankful for how welcoming they were, and I appreciated Mr. Merrick’s generosity, especially given that I’d never even met the man. But I wasn’t an orphan.

  There were deliveries now and then. Things Mr. Merrick wanted us to store in the barn. Farm equipment, fertilizer, sometimes furniture—like whole houses somewhere had been tipped to one side and emptied out. We stored whatever we were sent until someone came to take it away, sort of like what happened with the cows. Earlier that morning, Mr. Beal had told me there would be some feed sacks coming in on a truck in a few days, so when I was done sweeping the porch, I walked out to the barn to clear one of the stalls.

  I was dragging the tooth end of a chisel plow across the floor when Gary walked in.

  He nodded at me, and I nodded back. He took off the work gloves he often wore—not that he ever did anything you’d call work—and laid them on a bench, then wiped his hands on his hips. His fly was open, but I didn’t feel like saying anything about it.

  “Dad’s gone to get that boy,” he said.

  I told him I knew that already and walked back into the stall.

  Gary sat down on the bench. He was the bona fide orphan around here. He’d come from an actual orphanage, had been brought here by the Beals’ choice, and he’d started calling them Mom and Dad almost from the get-go. He followed them around, those first few days, looking at me over his shoulder like he was trying to figure out who I was. Eventually, he started following me around, too. I would glare at him until he’d pick up a mud clot or an orange and throw it—not at me, but nearby, sometimes at the side of the barn—and then run back into the house.

  In the evenings, after he’d gone to bed, I’d sit in the den and read to the Beals from National Geographic. Or we’d watch the news on the black-and-white television Mr. Merrick had sent over. The world’s longest suspension bridge being built somewhere. The war on poverty starting up somewhere else. The stories we saw had nothing to do with us and felt just as exotic as American Bandstand, which I watched almost without blinking, I was so taken by the dancing and the way that entire room full of kids seemed to know one another. “Go up and ask Gary if he wants to watch the news with you,” Mrs. Beal had said one night, and I’d told her no way, I didn’t like Gary almost as much as he didn’t like me. “Nonsense,” Mr. Beal had said from his chair. “He’s just sore because you got a head start on him.” What head start was that? I’d asked, and he’d said that, in Gary’s eyes, I’d gotten the jump on his new life and he was coming to terms with that in his own way. I kept it to myself, but I thought that was one of the stupidest things I’d ever heard.

  “Boy’s dad got hit by a train,” Gary said from the bench.

  I told him I already knew that, too. I told him I was busy.

  “Busy doing what?”

  “Whatever it is you’re not doing,” I said, picking up a stack of empty crates. “Why don’t you go play with your pecker?”

  He got up from the bench, but then he just stood there. “Why don’t you go p-play with your cooter?”

  Cooter, for godsake. He scooped up his gloves and walked out of the barn.

  It was July and it was hot. I still felt like a kid around the Beals every now and then, which was okay, but I wanted to feel like a grown-up around Gary and sometimes that was a challenge. I finished clearing the stall and then walked out and stood on the gravel between the barn and the house. Every window I could see was wide open, even the rooms the Beals didn’t use. Mrs. Beal was playing one of her records, some ancient swing music. It filtered out through the windows, sounded further away than it was. I walked over to the oak tree, put my boot against the base, grabbed the lowest branch, and hoisted myself up. The tree was taller than the house. I heard Mrs. Beal’s record fade out and then come back again when I climbed past the second-story windows. I climbed as high as I could, until the branches got thin enough to scare me.

  From that height I could still make out the flattened tracks in the grass from where Mr. Beal and I had driven out to the pond two weeks earlier. There’d been a storm in the middle of the night and a tree had been struck by lightning, the snap-bang of it waking us all up. Mr. Beal had come out of the house and I’d come out of the barn and we’d both squinted into the dark, against the rain, but we couldn’t see anything. So the next day we’d driven out to the pond and had found the tree lying on its side, the trunk going right down into the water. There wasn’t much we could do about it.

  I saw the Nova turn onto the gravel drive from the road. Mr. Beal stopped at the gate, got out to open it, rolled through, and then stopped again to close the gate behind him. Then he stopped in front of one of the cows and honked until it moseyed out of the way. I heard Mrs. Beal’s music cut off as the car reached the house, and I hung on to the branch and leaned out so I could see better. The top of her gray head appeared as she came down the steps. Her arms were stretched out in front of her. Mr. Beal stepped from the car and walked around to the passenger door, but it opened before he got to it. “This must be Ike,” said Mrs. Beal.

  He was small, from what I could tell, and he had a small, brown suitcase in his hand. He was a towhead.

  Gary came out of the house and stood near Mrs. Beal. Mrs. Beal reached down and hugged Ike like she’d known him her whole life. Then the four of them went into the house. After a few minutes, I heard Mr. Beal laughing and the record started again.

  Ike wasn’t ten, it turned out. He was eight. They introduced me to him that night—“Ike, this is our Hannah”—and the five of us ate dinner together. Mrs. Beal had baked what she called a no-surprise orange pie, all the browned orange slices showing on the top of it, and I didn’t even like oranges, so I didn’t have any of it. After the meal, we moved into the den, where Mr. Beal sipped coffee and Gary showed Ike his comic books. I sat at Mr. Beal’s rolltop desk and watched the two of them. Mr. Beal had little use for a rolltop desk, but it had come in with one of the deliveries from Mr. Merrick and had never been moved on to someplace else, so eventually we’d carried it into the house. Gary and Ike looked at comic book after comic book—all of them found in a box of old magazines that had been part of one of the deliveries, though Gary acted like he’d been collecting comic books for years. Mrs. Beal watched the two of them with a glint in her eyes. Bored, I started going through the desk drawers and found a box of matches. I took one out, turned it in my hand, scratched the sulfur end against one of the brass drawer handles. It flared up and I shook it, hoping none of them had noticed, but when I glanced at Mr. Beal, he was eyeing me over his coffee.

  Mrs. Beal asked Ike if he liked it here and Ike said he did. Then Mr. Beal coughed up what sounded like a dumpling and started t
o tell Ike all about Mr. Merrick, how Mr. Merrick lived in a big house near the south end of Merritt Island, how he provided everything we needed, and how he wanted what was best for us and that was why we were all here together. I listened for a while, then got up and said good night.

  “Stay a little longer, Hannah,” Mrs. Beal said.

  But I shook my head and walked out of the house. Outside, the dirt and the barn looked the same shade of dark, and the gravel was glowing with moonlight. I dragged my feet over the gravel, listening to it move under my boots as I made for the barn.

  —

  The next morning I was in the garden on my hands and knees, pulling up weeds, when I heard a voice ask what kind of animals I took care of. I looked around and saw Ike standing there, holding a milk carton.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “The old lady gave it to me.”

  “She gave you the whole thing?”

  “There’s only a little left in it. She said I could have it.” He asked me again what kind of animals I took care of.

  “I’m not a zookeeper. There’s cows, but I try not to have anything to do with them. And if you walk out that way far enough, there are gators who’d probably love to eat you.”

  He upended the carton and finished off the milk. “In Jacksonville, there was a man who had a monkey he kept chained to a tree in his front yard.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “I’m busy.”

  “The old lady said you’d show me the lake.”

  “It’s not a lake. It’s barely even a pond.”

  “She said you’d show it to me.”

  I ignored that for a little bit. Then I stood up, smacked my hands against my knees, pulled my handkerchief out of my back pocket and dragged it over my face.

  The carton was standing on the ground now next to his feet, and he was staring at me, the milk drying on his lip. I figured it was probably a safe bet Mrs. Beal was watching us from the house.