Far-Flung (3 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really think you should give this some time and thought. If you decide to reapply, I’ll personally supervise your application and make sure it gets processed with the utmost expediency. But that’s all I can do for you.”

I took the application he handed me and went outside and sat in the plaza and started to fill it out, but halfway through, the pen I had stolen from the receptionist’s desk ran out of ink, but it ran out slowly, so the application was all scratched out and awful looking, and I started to cry. I hadn’t cried once, during this whole ordeal, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

When I did stop crying, I realized my application now looked even worse: It was tear-stained and crumpled, so I tore it up and threw it away. I thought about going up and getting another application, but it was after five o’clock.

I must have sat there a long time because suddenly I realized it was getting dark. I thought about going back to Medford and trying to talk to Curly, but for some reason I knew it would be a waste of time. And I was sick of wasting my time. The plaza was starting to look ornery in the fading light, so I got up and tried to find a bus out to Pilgrim Acres. I figured I’d stay there for the night.

I wasn’t planning on hitchhiking, but a car stopped beside me. “Need a ride?” the guy asked.

“Where are you going?”

“Out to Stockbridge,” he said.

I got in the car. It seemed like the only thing to do. The man looked back over his shoulder, and pulled into the traffic. He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he looked over at me.

“Going to a party?” he asked.

I still had my Pilgrim costume on. “No,” I said. “I work at Pilgrim Acres.”

“Is that open nights?”

“Not usually,” I said, “but tonight we’re doing a special reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg.”

“Oh,” the man said. “That sounds interesting.”

“It’s fascinating,” I said. Then I realized he might want to come see it, so I added, “If you like that kind of thing. Most people find it really boring.”

We drove a little further in silence. Then the man said, “I’m Drake. What’s your name?”

“Clara,” I said.

I told Drake to drop me at the exit because I knew if the guard saw the car drive up to the main gate, he would be suspicious. So I walked down the exit ramp and the mile out to Pilgrim Acres. The park was surrounded by a stockade fence topped with barbed wire, but I knew there was a gate by the cow field that was left unlocked. I had thought the cows would be put into a barn or something for the night, but they were still in the field. They were sitting under a tree, but as I walked across the field they stood up and watched me. They looked very ghostly in the moonlight: Their white patches shone like freshly spilled paint around the holes of their dark patches, and they swayed their big heads in a sleepy, curious way.

I climbed over the fence into the herb garden. Except for the cows, Pilgrim Acres was deserted. Even the swans in the swan pond had disappeared someplace. I walked up Main Street to the Bakery.

For a few minutes I just stood there; it looked so lovely, all shut up and quiet, the flowers in the window boxes curled tight for the night. But then I took out my keys and went in, locking the door behind me. I was afraid to turn on the lights in case the guard could see, so I lit a candle. There were two rocking chairs in the parlor, supposedly antiques. They had velvet ropes tied across their arms so tourists couldn’t sit in them; I took the rope off one and sat down. I wondered who had sat there last—maybe a real Pilgrim.

I sat there and rocked, holding the candle. I watched it burn down, rocking the whole time.

“I
THINK
I
SHOULD HAVE
got four,” Natalie said.

We were standing in her spare bedroom looking at the throw pillows she had arranged across the back of the sofa bed. We had bought them at Ames on our way home from dropping my mother at the airport.

“What do you think?” Natalie said. “Don’t you think it would look better if there were four? So there wasn’t any space between?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well, we’ll just pick up another,” Natalie said. She walked over to the bed and rearranged the pillows so they were lined up, touching one another. “That’s good for now,” she said. She sat on the bed, and patted the spot beside her. I went over and looked out the window. Dewey, Natalie’s dog, was standing on top of his dog house, panting. He looked up at me.

“She must almost be there by now,” Natalie said. “It only takes about three hours to fly to Dallas.” She looked at her watch. “It must be real hot down there. When I was in Texas the road melted. They put up a road block ’cause cars were getting stuck. That’s all I remember from Texas.”

“Texas used to be the biggest state,” I said. It was all I could think of to say.

Natalie stood up and rearranged the pillows, spreading them back out. “Are you O.K.?” she asked. She came over and stood behind me. Dewey was still watching me. He thought I was going to do something. He barked up at us. “That dog,” Natalie said. “You’d think he’d be smart enough to stay out of the sun.” She put her hands on my shoulders. She said, “This is all going to be just fine,” and then she left me alone. She went outside and sprayed Dewey with the hose.

I had been living in the apartment downstairs with my mother, until she decided to move to Texas to marry a dentist she had met last winter at a dental convention. She had a job giving out free samples. She stole a lot. We still have miniature toothpaste tubes. She didn’t tell the dentist she had a child; she promised me that when she got settled with him, she would tell him about me, and I could move down there if I wanted. In the meantime, I was renting Natalie’s spare bedroom for fifty dollars a month, but I didn’t have to start paying till I resumed my job at Ogermeir’s Nursery. I had been laid off on account of the drought.

My mother waited until I was eighteen to move to Texas. This was so she couldn’t be accused of abandoning me. How I know this is that she called in to a radio program with a lawyer. I just happened to be listening. She said her name was Beth. Hello, Dave, she said, I’m Beth. She asked her question. Beth, the lawyer said, you have no legal or financial obligation to an eighteen-year-old. In the eyes of the state, such a child is an adult.

When I was sixteen I stopped going to school. That’s legal. I had been in special education. We didn’t have a classroom—we met where they stored the paper. It looked like a closet but it wasn’t. It was a storage room. Later we moved to a different room, but it wasn’t special education anymore. It was called Headstart. The difference was, in Headstart we did things like putting things together. They didn’t try to teach us things anymore.

A man named Hugo Trenti rented our old apartment downstairs. He slept during the day, because he worked at the pharmaceutical plant nights. He moved his bed down into the basement, where it was cool and dark, and put a sign on the front door that said “QUIET DAY SLEEPER.”

Natalie worked at the college library. She was only supposed to work three days a week during the summer, but because it was air-conditioned, she went in every day. I went with her. I tore some things out of books but secretly. Just pictures. One night, on our way home, we stopped at Jamboree for burgers. Mr. Trenti was at the counter, eating scrambled eggs. Breakfast time for him.

“He’s a perfect tenant,” Natalie said. “He sleeps all day and is out all night.”

“I wonder when he does things,” I said.

“Maybe he just doesn’t.”

“He went to the races last weekend.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. He asked me to go with him.”

“Maybe we’ll all go to the races some night,” Natalie said. “That could be fun.” She looked over at Mr. Trenti.

“Do you have a crush on him?” I asked. A crush means you love someone till it hurts. I had a crush on Natalie.

“I’m too old for crushes,” Natalie said. Natalie was divorced. When my mother and I first moved in, she was living with the chemist at Schnabel’s, but about a year ago he was arrested for selling drugs. He was in prison upstate and once I went with Natalie to visit him. I stayed in the car while she went in, though. While I was waiting a woman came over and asked me to sign a petition for them to serve brewed coffee in the prison cafeteria.

Mr. Trenti got up, but instead of leaving, he went over to the jukebox. He read the list of songs all the way through before making his selection.

“Are you going to eat your pickle?” I asked Natalie. She didn’t answer. I could tell she was waiting to find out what song Mr. Trenti picked.

In Darcy, where we lived, you were allowed to water your lawn if you had your own well. In Chippenewa, where Ogermeir’s Nursery was, it was against the law to water your lawn at all. You had to take showers at the high school; you could only flush your toilet once a day. When you drove out Route 91 to Chippenewa, you could tell when you crossed the boundary: It was like a tan line, only it was green and brown.

Mr. Trenti decided to grow a garden in the backyard. He asked me to help him. We dug up a square area of grass and then went down to Woolworth’s and bought seeds. Mr. Trenti had a green pickup truck. There was a sticker on the bumper that said HIRE A VET. For a minute I thought animal doctor, then I remembered.

“Were you in Vietnam?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Mr. Trenti said. He held out his arm. “See,” he said.

“What?”

“It shakes,” he said. “I have a permanent tremor.”

It was hard to tell if it was shaking, because we were driving and everything was shaking a little. But when we got to the checkout at Woolworth’s and Mr. Trenti looked through his wallet, I realized he was right: His arm did shake, like it needed to be tightened or something.

Mr. Ogermeir called me up and told me he had some work for me, despite the drought. I rode my bicycle out Route 91, which was soft and bubbling. My bicycle left a snake-like trail across the tar patches. Mr. Ogermeir was waiting for me. He was wearing his bathrobe. We went through the greenhouse and out the back. There were fields of baby Christmas trees, all of them dead. They were about three feet high, bright orange, and when I touched one the needles dropped off in clumps. My job was to dig them up and burn them. I was paid by the tree: twenty-five cents for every tree.

The next day I had to stay home because my arms were so badly scratched. I should have worn long sleeves. Mr. Ogermeir said I could come back when my skin healed.

No more watering of lawns in Darcy. Mr. Trenti and I had to abandon our garden. We decided to study for our high school equivalency diploma tests together. We’d move to Alaska and become forest rangers. At night before he went to work we sat on the front porch and asked each other questions from a workbook Mr. Trenti got from the VA:

Name the thirteen original States.

What’s one-quarter times one-half?

Who’s Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

Spell chrysanthemum.

Other things happened. Dewey stopped eating. Natalie and I took him to the vet. Dewey lay on the metal table, panting. White lather fell off his tongue. He eyed us all suspiciously.

“That’s how dogs sweat,” the vet said. “They can only sweat through their tongues.”

He looked in Dewey’s eyes and mouth; he took his temperature.

“What’s the matter?” Natalie asked.

“It’s just the heat,” the vet said. “It’s called heat fatigue. Dog days.” He laughed. “Make sure he has plenty of water,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

By the time my arms healed, Mr. Ogermeir had found somebody else to burn the Christmas trees. I got another job, painting fire hydrants. I walked from hydrant to hydrant, following a map I was given. When I ran out of red or silver paint, I used a citizen’s telephone to call Town Maintenance. They sent a truck with more paint.

Some citizens were nice. They gave me drinks: beer or iced tea or lemonade. One lady gave me lunch, because the cheese sandwich I had brought with me melted to its plastic bag. One lady told me I could swim in her pool. As soon as I jumped in her dog jumped in, too.

“He’s just trying to rescue you,” the woman said.

The dog swam over to me and guided me, with its nose, to the side of the pool.

It got so hot we couldn’t sleep. We didn’t even try. Natalie and I sat outside, near the abandoned garden. The sky was full of stars, but the heat made them look out of focus. We drank beer, nice and slow, so we wouldn’t get dizzy.

About four o’clock Mr. Trenti came home. We heard his truck in the driveway, and were illuminated in his headlights. He kept them on, watching us. Then he came and sat on the ground beside Natalie.

“It’s hot,” he said.

Natalie got him a beer. “It was hot once this way when I was little,” she said. “People went crazy. At night my father took his gun out in the backyard and shot it up into the sky. Everyone was doing it. To relieve tension. Heat makes you tense.”

“Don’t let’s talk about guns,” Mr. Trenti said. “Or heat.”

In the darkness I could see that Mr. Trenti had put his hand on top of Natalie’s. She lifted her fingers and coiled them around Mr. Trenti’s. They both kept staring straight ahead, as if it were their hands that were falling in love, not them. I got up and walked around front.

That afternoon I got a postcard from my mother. She was on her honeymoon in a place called Canyon Springs. She had learned to play badminton; things were going well. She said she hadn’t mentioned me but she would. She was just waiting for the right moment. Sometime in the near future. The near future means soon. I wanted her to ask me to move to Texas so I could say no. I wanted to tell her I was moving to Alaska. Alaska is the biggest state now.

I crossed the street and walked behind the dry cleaner’s. I stood in the middle of the gravel parking lot, throwing stones at the dark window, each throw harder, till the window broke. When the sound of it breaking was finished everything seemed especially quiet. I thought something might happen then, but it didn’t.

After a while I heard a frog chirping down in the culvert, but when I walked toward it, it stopped. I stopped, too. Neither of us wanted to be the one to do something next.