Nightmares And Dreamscapes Part 38

'That's all right, Grandpa.'

'What I mean is that every time I drive for the point, I go someplace else.'

'I know, but those someplace elses are pretty interesting.'

Grandpa smiled. 'If you're a bulls.h.i.t artist, Clivey, you are a d.a.m.ned good one.'

Clive smiled back, and the darkness of Johnny Brinkmayer's memory seemed to lift from his Grandpa. When he spoke again, his voice was more businesslike.

'Anyway! Never mind that swill. Having long time in pain is just a little extra the Lord throws in. You know how a man will save up Raleigh coupons and trade em in for something like a bra.s.s barometer to hang in his den or a new set of steak knives, Clivey?'

Clive nodded.

'Well, that's what pain-time is like . . . only it's more of a b.o.o.by prize than a real one, I guess you'd have to say. Main thing is, when you get old, regular time - my pretty pony time - changes to short time. It's like when you were a kid, only turned around.'

'Backwards.'

'Yep.'

The idea that time went fast when you got old was beyond the ability of the boy's emotions to grasp, but he was bright enough to admit the concept. He knew that if one end of a seesaw went up, the other had to go down. What Grandpa was talking about, he reasoned, must be the same idea: balance and counterbalance. All right; it's a point of view, Clive's own father might have said.

Grandpa took the packet of Kools from the kangaroo pouch again, and this time he carefully extracted a cigarette - not just the last one in the packet but the last one the boy would ever see him smoke. The old man crumpled the package and stowed it back in the place from which it had come. He lit this last cigarette as he had the other, with the same effortless ease. He did not ignore the hilltop wind; he seemed somehow to negate it.

'When does it happen, Grandpa?'

'I can't exactly tell you that, n it don't happen all at once,' Grandpa said, wetting the match as he had its predecessor. 'It kinda creeps up, like a cat stalking a squirrel. Finally you notice. And when you do notice, it ain't no more fair than the way the Osgood boy counted his numbers was fair.'

'Well then, what happens? How do you notice?'

Grandpa tapped a roll of ash from his cigarette without taking it from his mouth. He did it with his thumb, knocking on the cigarette the way a man may rap a low knock on a table. The boy never forgot that small sound.

'I think what you notice first must be different for everyone,' the old man said, 'but for me it started when I was forty-something. I don't remember exactly how old I was, but you want to bet I remember where I was . . . in Davis Drug. You know it?'

Clive nodded. His father almost always took him and his sister in there for ice-cream sodas when they were visiting Grandpa and Gramma. His father called them the Van Chockstraw Triplets because their orders never varied: their father always had vanilla, Patty chocolate, Clive strawberry. And his father would sit between them and read while they slowly ingested the cold sweet treats. Patty was right when she said you could get away with anything when their father was reading, which was most of the time, but when he put his book away and looked around, you wanted to sit up and put on your prettiest manners, or you were apt to get clouted.

'Well, I was in there,' Grandpa resumed, his eyes far off, studying a cloud that looked like a soldier blowing on a bugle moving swiftly across the spring sky, 'to get some medicine for your Gramma's arthritis. We'd had rain for a week and it was hurting her like all get-out. And all at once I seen a new store display. Would have been hard to miss. Took up most of one whole aisle, it did. There were masks and cutout decorations of black cats and witches on brooms and things like that, and there were those cardboard punkins they used to sell. They came in a bag with an elastic inside. The idea was, a kid would punch the punkin out of the cardboard and then give his mom an afternoon of peace coloring it in and maybe playing the games on the back. When it was done you hung it on your door for a decoration, or, if the kid's family was too poor to buy him a store mask or too dumb to help him make a costume out of what was around the house, why, you could staple that elastic onto the thing and the kid would wear it. Used to be a lot of kids walking around town with paper bags in their hands and those punkin masks from Davis Drug on their faces come Halloween night, Clivey! And, of course, he had his candy out. Was always that penny-candy counter up there by the soda fountain, you know the one I mean - '

Clive smiled. He knew, all right.

' - but this was different. This was penny candy by the job lot. All that truck like wax bottles and candy corn and root-beer barrels and licorice whips.

'And I thought that old man Davis - there really was a fella named Davis who ran the place back then, it was his father that opened her up right around 1910 - had slipped a cog or two. Holy h.e.l.l, I'm thinkin to myself, Frank Davis has got his trick-or-treat out before the G.o.ddam summer's even over. It crossed my mind to go up to the prescription counter where he was n tell him just that, and then a part of me says, Whoa up a second, George - you're the one who's slipped a cog or two. And that wasn't so far wrong, Clivey, because it wasn't still summer, and I knew it just as well as I know we're standin here. See, that's what I want you to understand - that I knew better.

'Wasn't I already on the lookout for apple pickers from around town, and hadn't I already put in an order for five hundred handbills to get put up over the border in Canada? And didn't I already have my eye on this fella named Tim Warburton who'd come down from Schenectady lookin for work? He had a way about him, looked honest, and I thought he'd make a good foreman during picking time. Hadn't I been meaning to ask him the very next day, and didn't he know I was gonna ask because he'd let on he'd be getting his hair cut at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time? I thought to myself, Suds n body, George, ain't you a little young to be going senile? Yeah, old Frank's got his Halloween candy out a little early, but summer) That's gone by, me fine bucko.

'I knew that just fine, but for a second, Clivey - or maybe it was a whole row of seconds - it seemed like summer, or like it had to be summer, because it was just being summer. Get what I mean? It didn't take me long to get September set down straight again hi my head, but until I did I felt . . . you know, I felt . . . ' He frowned, then reluctantly brought out a word he knew but would not have used in conversation with another farmer, lest he be accused (if only in the other fellow's mind) of being high-flown. 'I felt dismayed. That's the only G.o.ddam way I know how to put it. Dismayed. And that's how it was the first time.'

He looked at the boy, who only looked back at him, not even nodding, so deep in concentration was he. Grandpa nodded for both of them and knocked another roll of ash off his cigarette with the side of his thumb. The boy believed Grandpa was so lost in thought that the wind was smoking practically all of this one for him.

'It was like steppin up to the bathroom mirror meanin to do no more'n shave and seein that first gray hair in your head. You get that, Clivey?'

'Yes.'

'Okay. And after that first time, it started to happen with all the holidays. You'd think they was puttin the stuff out too early, and sometimes you'd even say so to someone, although you always stayed careful to make it sound like you thought the shopkeepers were greedy. That something was wrong with them, not you. You get that?'

'Yes.'

'Because,' Grandpa said, 'a greedy shopkeeper was something a man could understand - and something some men even admired, although I was never one of them. 'So-and-so keeps himself a sharp practice,' they'd say, as if sharp practice, like that butcher fella Radwick that used to always stick his thumb on the scales when he could get away with it, like that was just a honey of a way to be. I never felt that way, but I could understand it. Saying something that made you sound like you had gone over funny in the head, though . . . that was a different kettle of beans. So you'd just say something like 'By G.o.d, they'll have the tinsel and the angel's hair out before the hay's in the barn next year,' and whoever you said it to would say that was nothing but the Gospel truth, but it wasn't the Gospel truth, and when I hunker right down and study her, Clivey, I know they are putting all those things out pretty near the same time every year.

'Then somethin else happened to me. This might have been five years later, might have been seven. I think I must've been right round fifty, one side or the other. Anyhow, I got called on jury duty. d.a.m.n pain in the a.s.s, but I went. The bailiff sweared me up, asked me if I'd do my duty so help me G.o.d, and I said I will, just as if I hadn't spent all my life doin my duty about one thing n another so help me G.o.d. Then he got out his pen and asked for my address, and I give it to him neat as you'd like. Then he asked how old I was, and I opened my mouth all primed to say thirty-seven.'

Grandpa threw back his head and laughed at the cloud that looked like a soldier. That cloud, the bugle part now grown as long as a trombone, had gotten itself halfway from one horizon to the other.

'Why did you want to say that, Grandpa?' Clive thought he had followed everything up to this pretty well, but here was a thicket.

'I wanted to say it because it was the first thing to come into my mind! h.e.l.l! Anyhow, I knew it was wrong and so I stopped for a second. I don't think that bailiff or anyone else in the courtroom noticed - seemed like most of em was either asleep or on the doze - and, even if they'd been as wide awake as the fella who just got Widow Brown's broomstick rammed up his b.u.t.tsky, I don't know as anyone would have made anything of it. Wasn't no more than how, sometimes, a man trying to hit a tricky pitch will kinda take a double pump before he swings. But, s.h.i.t! Askin a man how d.a.m.n old he is ain't like throwin no spitball. I felt like an ijit. Seemed like for that one second I didn't know how old I was if I wasn't thirty-seven. Seemed for a second there like it could have been seven or seventeen or seventy-seven. Then I got it and I said forty-eight or fifty-one or whatever-the-frig. But to lose track of your age, even for a second . . . shoo!'

Grandpa dropped his cigarette, brought his heel down upon it, and began the ritual of first murdalizing and then burying it.

'But that's just the beginning, Clivey me son,' he went on, and, although he spoke only in the Irish vernacular he sometimes affected, the boy thought, I wish I was your son. Yours instead of his. 'After a bit, it lets go of first, hits second, and before you know it, time has got itself into high gear and you're cruising, the way folks do on the turnpike these days, goin so fast their cars blow the leaves right off'n the trees in the fall.'

'What do you mean?'

'Way the seasons change is the worst,' the old man said moodily, as if he hadn't heard the boy. 'Different seasons stop bein different seasons. Seems like Mother has no more'n got the boots n mittens n scarves down from the attic before it's mud season, and you'd think a man'd be glad to see mud season gone - s.h.i.t, I always was - but you ain't s'glad t'see it go when it seems like the mud's gone before you done pushed the tractor out of the first jellypot it got stuck in. Then it seems like you no more 'n clapped your summer straw on for the first band concert of the year when the poplars start showing their chemises.'

Grandpa looked at him then, an eyebrow raised ironically, as if expecting the boy to ask for an explanation, but Clive smiled, delighted by this - he knew what a chemise was, all right, because it was sometimes all that his mother wore until five in the afternoon or so, at least when his father was out on the road, selling appliances and kitchen ware and a little insurance when he could. When his father went out on the road his mother got down to the serious drinking, and that was drinking sometimes too serious to allow her to get dressed until the sun was getting ready to go down. Then sometimes she went out, leaving him in Patty's care while she went to visit a sick friend. Once he said to Patty, 'Ma's friends get sick more when Dad's on the road, d'ja notice?' And Patty laughed until tears ran down her face and she said Oh yes, she had noticed, she most certainly had.

What Grandpa said reminded him of how, once the days finally began to slope down toward school again, the poplars changed somehow. When the wind blew, their undersides turned up exactly the color of his mother's prettiest chemise, a silver color which was as surprisingly sad as it was lovely: a color that signified the end of what you had believed must be forever.

'Then,' Grandpa continued, 'you start to lose track of things in your own mind. Not too much - it ain't being senile, like old man Hayden down the road, thank G.o.d - but it's still a suckardly thing, the way you lose track. It ain't like forgetting things; that'd be one thing. No, you remember em but you get em in all the wrong places. Like how I was so sure I broke my arm just after our boy Billy got killed in that road accident in '58. That was a suckardly thing, too. That's one I could task that Reverend Chadband with. Billy, he was followin a gravel truck, doin no more than twenty mile an hour, when a chunk of stone no bigger'n the dial of that pocket watch I gave you fell off the back of the truck, hit the road, bounced up, and smashed the windshield of our Ford. Gla.s.s went in Billy's eyes and the doc said he would have been blinded in one of em or maybe even in both if he'd lived, but he didn't live - he went off the road and hit a 'lectric pole. It fell down atop the car and he got fried just the same as any mad dog killer that ever rode Old Sparky at Sing Sing. And him the worst thing he ever did in his life maybe playing sick to keep from hoeing beans when we still kep the garden.

'But I was saying how sure I was I broke my G.o.ddam arm after - I swore up n down I could remember goin to his funeral with that arm still in the sling! Sarah had to show me the family Bible first and the insurance papers on my arm second before I could believe she had it the right way around; it had been two whole months before, and by the time we buried Billy away, the sling was off. She called me an old fool and I felt like putting one up on the side of her head I was s'mad, but I was mad because I was embarra.s.sed, and at least I had the sense to know that n leave her alone. She was only mad because she don't like to think about Bill. He was the apple of her eye, he was.'

'Boy!' Clive said.

'It ain't goin soft; it's more like when you go down to New York City and there are these fellas on the street corners with nutsh.e.l.ls and a beebee under one of em, and they bet you can't tell which nutsh.e.l.l the beebee's under, and you're sure you can, but they shuffle em so G.o.ddarn fast they fool you every time. You just lose track. You can't seem to help it.'

He sighed, looking around, as if to remember where exactly it was that they were. His face had a momentary look of utter helplessness that disgusted the boy as much as it frightened him. He didn't want to feel that way, but couldn't help it. It was as if Grandpa had pulled open a bandage to show the boy a sore which was a symptom of something awful. Something like leprosy.

'Seems like spring started last week,' Grandpa said, 'but the blossoms'll be gone tomorrow if the wind keeps up its head, and d.a.m.n if it don't look like it's gonna. A man can't keep his train of thought when things go as fast as that. A man can't say, Whoa up a minute or two, old boss, while I get my bearins! There's no one to say it to. It's like bein in a cart that's got no driver, if you take my drift. So what do you make of it, Clivey?'

'Well,' the boy said, 'you're right about one thing, Grandpa - it sounds like an ijit of some kind must've made up the whole thing.'

He didn't mean it to be funny, but Grandpa laughed until his face went that alarming shade of purple again, and this time he not only had to lean over and put his hands on the knees of his overalls but then had to sling an arm around the boy's neck to keep from falling down. They both would have gone tumbling if Grandpa's coughing and wheezing hadn't eased just at the moment when the boy felt sure the blood must come bursting out of that face, which was swollen purple with hilarity.

'Ain't you a jeezer!' Grandpa said, pulling back at last. 'Ain't you a one!'

'Grandpa? Are you all right? Maybe we ought to - '

's.h.i.t, no, I ain't all right. I've had me two heart attacks in the last two years, and if I live another two years no one'll be any more surprised than me. But it ain't no news to the human race, boy. All I ever set out to say was that old or young, fast time or slow time, you can walk a straight line if you remember that pony. Because when you count and say 'my pretty pony' between each number, time can't be nothing but time. You do that, I'm telling you you got the sucker stabled. You can't count all the time -that ain't G.o.d's plan. I'll go down the primrose lane with that little oily-faced p.i.s.sant Chadband that far, anyway. But you got to remember that you don't own time; it's time that owns you. It goes along outside you at the same speed every second of every day. It don't care a p.i.s.shole in the snow for you, but that don't matter if you got a pretty pony. If you got a pretty pony, Clivey, you got the b.a.s.t.a.r.d right where its dingle dangles and never mind all the Alden Osgoods in the world.'

He bent toward Clive Banning.

'Do you understand that?'

'No, sir.'

'I know you don't. Will you remember it?'

'Yes, sir.'

Grandpa Banning's eyes studied him so long the boy became uncomfortable and fidgety. At last he nodded. 'Yeah, I think you will. G.o.ddam if I don't.'

The boy said nothing. In truth, he could think of nothing to say.

'You have taken instruction,' Grandpa said.

'I didn't take any instruction if I didn't understand!' Clive cried in a frustrated anger so real and so complete it startled him. 'I didn't!'

'f.u.c.k understanding,'the old man said calmly. He slung his arm around the boy's neck again and drew him close - drew him close for the last time before Gramma would find him dead as a stone in bed a month later. She just woke up and there was Grandpa and Grandpa's pony had kicked down Grandpa's fences and gone over all the hills of the world.

Wicked heart, wicked heart. Pretty, but with a wicked heart.

'Understanding and instruction are cousins that don't kiss,' Grandpa said that day among the apple trees.

Then what is instruction?'

'Remembrance,' the old man said serenely. 'Can you remember that pony?'

'Yes, sir.'

'What name does it keep?'

The boy paused.

'Time . . . I guess.'

'Good. And what color is it?'

The boy thought longer this time. He opened his mind like an iris in the dark. 'I don't know,' he said at last.

'Me, neither,' the old man said, releasing him. 'I don't think it has one, and I don't think it matters. What matters is, will you know it?'

'Yes, sir,' the boy said at once.

A glittering, feverish eye fastened the boy's mind and heart like a staple.

'How?'

'It'll be pretty,' Clive Banning said with absolute certainty.

Grandpa smiled. 'So!' he said. 'Clivey has taken a bit of instruction, and that makes him wiser and me more blessed . . . or the other way around. D'you want a slice of peach pie, boy?'

'Yes, sir!'

'Then what are we doin up here? Let's go get her!'

They did.

And Clive Banning never forgot the name, which was time, and the color, which was none, and the look, which was not ugly or beautiful . . . but only pretty. Nor did he ever forget her nature, which was wicked, or what his Grandpa said on the way down, words almost thrown away, lost in the wind: having a pony to ride was better than having no pony at all, no matter how the weather of its heart might lie.

Sorry, Right Number.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Screenplay abbreviations are simple and exist, in this author's opinion, mostly to make those who write screenplays feel like lodge brothers. In any case, you should be aware that cu means close-up; ECU means extreme close-up; INT. means interior, EXT. means exterior, BG means background; POV means point of view. Probably most of you knew all that stuff to begin with, right?

FADE IN ON:.

KATIE WEIDERMAN'S MOUTH, ECU.

She's speaking into the telephone. Pretty mouth; in a few seconds we'll see that the rest of her is just as pretty.

KATIE.

Bill? Oh, he says he doesn't feel very well, but he's always like that between books . . . can't sleep, thinks every headache is the first symptom of a brain tumor . . . once he gets going on something new, he'll be fine.

SOUND, BG: THE TELEVISION.

THE CAMERA DRAWS BACK. KATIE is sitting in the kitchen phone nook, having a good gab with her sister while she idles through some catalogues. We should notice one not-quite-ordinary thing about the phone she's on: it's the sort with two lines. There are LIGHTED b.u.t.tONS to show which ones are engaged. Right now only one - KATIE'S - is. As KATIE CONTINUES HER CONVERSATION, THE CAMERA SWINGS AWAY FROM HER, TRACKS ACROSS THE KITCHEN, and through the arched doorway that leads into the family room.

KATIE (voice, fading) Oh, I saw Janie Charlton today . . . yes! Big as a house! . . .

She fades. The TV gets louder. There are three kids: JEFF, eight, CONNIE, ten, and DENNIS, thirteen. Wheel of Fortune is on, but they're not watching. Instead they're engaged in that great pastime, Fighting About What Comes On Later.

JEFF.

Come onnn! It was his first book!

CONNIE.

His first gross book.

DENNIS.

We're gonna watch Cheers and Wings, just like we do every week, Jeff.