Keeper of Dreams (63 page)

Tim went back to work, not at the company where he and Selena had met, but in a new place, with new people. Eventually he married, they had children, and just as Wanda had said, Selena and Diana faded, but never completely. There would be a book left open somewhere, one that nobody in the house was reading. There would be a whiff of a strange perfume, the sound of someone humming a tune that hadn’t been current for years.

Right along with his new family, he knew that Diana was growing up, in a house full of siblings who knew about her, loved the stories of her childhood that he told, and who came to him, one by one, as the years passed, to tell him privately that once or twice in their childhood, they had seen her, the older sister who came to them during a nightmare and comforted them, who whispered love to them when friends at school had broken their hearts, whose gentle hand on their shoulder had calmed them and given them courage.

And the smiling mother who wasn’t their mother but there she was in the doorway, just once, just a fleeting glimpse. Selena, looking at the children she had never given birth to but who were still hers, partly hers, because they were his, and he would always be a part of her even though he loved another woman now and shared his life with her.

Sometime, somewhere down the road, his life would draw to a close and he would see them again, face to face, his family, his first family, waiting for him as Tonio had waited for Wanda all those years. He could wait. There was no hurry. They were only moments out of reach.

I can’t remember now if the local paper asked me for a Halloween story—I think they did, but it might be that I’m conflating this story with a multi-author serial that the same newspaper put together a few years later. It might be that I came up with the idea, called them, and asked if they would consider running a piece of scary fiction and, if so, how long it ought to be.

Whether they initiated it or I did, the result was this story, set in a specific neighborhood. In fact, the house where Tim finds the newspaper is the home of our friends the Jensens. If you can’t tip your hat to friends or family now and then, what’s the fun of being a fiction writer?

I began this story frivolously enough. It was a lark; write a newspaper horror story for Halloween.

But it turned serious almost at once. I had only just started running. After our last child, Erin Louisa, died on the day she was born, I had suddenly come face to face with mortality. People I loved could die. I could die—and at the weight I was carrying at the time, I probably would,
sooner rather than later. I got serious about getting my body under control and started exercising. I never became the kind of runner Tim was—but I knew something about what it felt like, to run.

And so I suppose it wasn’t just coincidence that I made this a story about the worst thing in the world—to have a family and lose it. It was what I was going through at the time, in a very small way. And things like that, things from real life, are going to show up even in the “frivolous” fictions of a writer who’s just doing something for the fun of it.

“You know a lot of these guys?”

“No. We didn’t fight the same war.”

“I thought you went to Vietnam.”

“Oh, sure, yeah. But I never fired a rifle at anybody, and nobody ever fired one at me. I never even left Saigon.”

“But I always thought . . .”

“What?”

“You know.”

“What?”

“Your hand. Your fingers. The missing ones. I thought that happened in Vietnam.”

“It did . . . . There he is.”

“Who?”

“My guardian angel.”

“Man, if I got a guardian angel I hope mine ain’t
dead
.”

“Yeah, well, he was joking, too, I think. Got in country, he saw I was kind of green. You know. I was young, I’d never been out of Hickory, I didn’t know a thing, so he says to me, I’m your guardian angel, I’ll not only keep you alive in this hellhole, I’ll even keep you sane.”

“Well, one out of two ain’t bad.”

“I know you don’t mean anything by it, son, and there’s nothing wrong with joking, but I got my fingers resting on the name of a friend who died saving my life.”

“Sorry, Dad. You know I didn’t mean . . .”

“Funny thing is, your grandpa had it all figured out so my life wouldn’t
need
saving. See these hands? All seven fingers? Would you believe I used to be a typist?”

“That before or after you were front man for the Beatles? No, sorry, I want to hear. Dad, I do. Really.”

Your grandpa was a grunt in World War II. Volunteered the day after Pearl Harbor, and when they saw how that country boy could shoot, he was infantry all the way. He wasn’t stupid, he didn’t volunteer for anything, didn’t get himself into Airborne or the Marines, turned down sergeant’s stripes three times. He just knew how to shoot, so they had him on the front lines in North Africa, Sicily, and in slow motion all the way up the boot of Italy.

He told me it got so he didn’t even bother learning the name of a new guy till he’d been there for a week, so many guys got blown away just cause they were new and didn’t know enough to keep their heads down. Dad and the other guys’d tell ’em, but they just didn’t have survivor instinct, that’s what Dad called it. The sense to know just how far you had to bend over to keep from giving them a target.

Helmets don’t stop bullets, son. You got a helmet so you don’t get killed when a bullet knocks a chip out of a stone wall and the chip comes and hits you in the head. But somebody aims right at you, that helmet just adds a little more metal to get slammed into your skull.

Anyway, Pop comes to me when I’m thirteen years old, summer before eighth grade, and he says, “No, I’m not going to teach you how to shoot. Knowin’ how to shoot got me three and a half years on the front lines killin’ guys and having guys get killed all around me. What you’re going to do this summer, boy, you’re going to learn how to
type
.”

Now, I didn’t even hardly know what typing was. Something girls took in high school, something you saw secretaries doing when my mom took me with her to pay, like, the water bill or something. Pop had to drag me there, I ain’t kidding, kid, had to drag me up to the high school and sign me up for summer school typing. Bought me a typewriter, too, and he didn’t have a lot of money, that was a big deal, we had to be the only people we knew had a typewriter on their kitchen table, it sat there during meals and everything. At least an hour a day, he set the kitchen timer on
me and it was worth half the skin on my butt to fiddle with it and cheat. So I sat there and typed, and a lot of the time he was watching me. Stuff like “Don’t look at the keys!” and “Spell it like it’s written, you moron!”

No, he actually called me shit-for-brains, but your mother doesn’t like me talking to you the way my pop talked to me. And yes, this is about how Daniel I. Keizer saved my life. Look, forget it, let’s go find your mother and your sisters.

It’s not like I tell this story a lot, son. So I don’t know which parts to take out so it’s entertaining.

It’s about my father trying to save my life. That’s why he made me take typing class. He says to me, “Bobby, there’s gonna be a war. There’s always gonna be a war. First thing they do, they find out what you can do. Me, I could shoot the shit off a squirrel’s ass so clean he’d think he wiped himself, so they put me in the dust and the mud and had people tryin’ to kill me, and all I got in exchange was the GI Bill, but I never got me a single one of my buddies back, they stayed just as dead as they were when I left ’em behind in Italy. Well, that ain’t gonna happen to you, Bobby. You go into that recruiting office and where they say skills, you put down, ‘typing, fifty words per minute.’ That’s the magic number, boy. You type fifty words a minute—and that’s fifty words without a single mistake, every minute, page after page—and they never put you near a rifle. After Basic, you just sit at a desk and type and type and type, and when the war’s over you go home and you ain’t dead and nobody you knew in the army is dead because they were all typing, too, or giving orders from some nice safe place ten or twenty miles back or five thousand miles even. That’s where I want you in the war.”

So I says to him, Pop, what if I
want
to fight, and he says, “Bobby, you volunteer for infantry, I’ll kill you myself so I don’t have to worry about you getting killed by somebody else. Better me than a stranger. Your mother and I, we’ll cry over your grave, but we sure as hell never gonna sit there waiting for some letter or some telegram from the government to find out whether you made it through another day of people shooting at you. You get me?”

Didn’t matter whether I got it or not, I was going to learn to type. And that first summer, I kept telling him to go ahead and kill me, because hell couldn’t be worse than breaking my fingers on that damn machine.

But by the end of that summer, I was typing thirty words a minute, and that’s
after
you take off ten words a minute for each typo.

All through eighth grade he makes me type all my homework—and that was before computers, hardly anybody typed their stuff, not in Hickory anyway—and I had to practice an hour a day and then every Saturday morning first thing, he’d time me and correct my paper and if I ever did worse than the week before—lower speed or more typos—then I couldn’t go anywhere with my friends that whole weekend.

By the end of eighth grade I was typing fifty words a minute, just like he wanted. He let me off then, no more hour-a-day practices, but those weekly tests kept right on, and any week I didn’t stay over fifty words per minute, I was back to the practicing.

So I graduate high school and Johnson’s escalating the war in Vietnam and everybody who went to college got to sit it out and I could’ve, too, you can bet I got accepted at college—I mean, hell, kid, I could
spell
, I could
type
, that made me an intellectual in the hills of western Carolina. But, see, I figured I’d get drafted, put in my two years, and then come out with the government paying all my college bills cause I’d be a veteran. I wasn’t worried about no war, kid, cause Pop took care of that, I could
type
.

No, it worked just like Pop said. I come in there looking and talking like a hillbilly and I put down on my form that I can type 50 wpm and the recruiter looks at me and says, “It’s a federal offense to lie on this form,” and I says to him, I ain’t lyin’, man, and so he sets me down at his own desk and opens a book and puts a paper in the machine and looks at his watch and says, “Go.”

Well I made that thing sound faster than a machine gun. A minute later he says to stop and what I got on that page isn’t fifty words, it’s ninety words, all spelled right and pretty as you please. And then he says, “Do it again,” and this time he doesn’t say stop after a minute, he just has me keep typing and typing. I blew through three sheets of paper and the other recruiters are standing around laughing and he looks over my typing and I didn’t make a single damn mistake and even including changing sheets, I was over ninety words per minute.

I don’t know what he wrote in my file, but even in Basic I kept getting called out of my company to go type stuff for the base commander
and when I got to Vietnam I think I’d fired a rifle exactly once. My pop, he knew what he was talking about. I was going to live through that war.

Course it wasn’t really as easy as all that. Cause I kept thinking about how other guys were going to go out into the jungle and lay down their lives, and the worst that was going to happen to me was getting my fingers smudgy when I changed ribbons. But when I wrote that to my mom in a letter, my pop read it, too, and he wrote back to me cussing a blue streak right there on the paper and he says, “It’s just as much part of the war to type up orders and reports. Somebody’s gonna sit in that chair in that nice clean office and usually it’s some lily-assed faggot son of a congressman but this damn war it’s gonna be a hillbilly from Hickory N.C.” In those days you could still say faggot, son, it was a different world. Wasn’t better, just different.

So I get to Nam, my orders put me right in the typing pool in an office building in downtown Saigon, and that’s where Danny Keizer spotted me.

Danny wasn’t in the typing pool. He was the guy in charge of all the guys who typed up orders every day. You know, sending this regiment to that place and telling where supplies had to go. And it was pretty high level, I mean, the stuff he typed got sent to other offices where other guys had to type up fifty more orders just to carry out the orders Danny’s office sent them. And Danny comes into the typing pool and there I am, showing off, typing as fast as I can, and he says, “What’re you typin’ there, ass-face, ‘Now is the time for all good men’ or ‘When in the course of human events’?” And he comes over and looks at my paper and he gives this low whistle and twenty minutes later some guy comes over and lays a paper on top my machine and it says I’m assigned to the office of sit-and-dick-around-with-Danny effective immediately.

No, that wasn’t the real name, but that was the job description whenever we weren’t actually working. I mean, Danny kept that office humming, he did his job and made sure we did ours, but as soon as we were done for the day, all he wanted to do was have fun, and he’d take along whoever wanted to go.