What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (8 page)

“Yeah. I was in pre-med when my lottery number came up.”

“Lottery?” Who would want to win a prize like that?

“There were so many protests about rich kids getting draft deferments for being in college and poor kids going to Nam that the government started a lottery. They drew birthdates, and the guys with the first birthdate drawn, they went first.”

“What did your family do?”

“My mom wanted me to go to Canada, but my old man said no way. He put me on a bus for the induction center.”

I thought about Jesse’s mom and the way she’d looked at his father. “What was it like?” I asked.

“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

“I didn’t want to dream about it, either. Did you do this to me to scare me away from Jesse?”

“I told you, I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Well, something did it. Somebody did it.”

“God moves in mysterious ways,” Felix said.

“You think God is giving me your dreams?”

“Well, he cancelled my sainthood. If he can do that, he can do what he wants to. Maybe I’ll get your dreams.”

“
No
!” I said. I did not want him poking around in my dreams. Dreams are too personal. Not to mention embarrassing. I’ve had dreams I wouldn’t even tell Lily about.

“No, I probably won’t,” he agreed. “I’d like to be fifteen again, though. I’d like to have those dreams back.”

“If you’re St. Felix of Valois, you were studying in an abbey when you were fifteen,” I pointed out.

“We dream anyway,” he said.

“What happened after you got drafted?”

“Goats.” He didn’t seem to have any trouble shifting back and forth between lives. “Boys. Boys with their feet blown off. They took ’em away so fast in the dust-off chopper, I never knew whether they lived or not. Except for sometimes. Sometimes if they died they came back and saw me.”

“Ghosts?” I had a horrible vision of a soldier with his guts taped to his chest, leaning over Felix’s bed. No wonder he was crazy.

“Yeah. There’re two or three I see pretty regularly. Kid with a sucking chest wound—the one you dreamed about.”

“I don’t want to dream about that again,” I said. Something occurred to me. “Are you a doctor now? Did you finish med school when you came home?”

He shook his head, staring down at the pew. It was old, dark wood, shiny with two hundred years of people’s butts. “I lost my taste for it. I thought I could save the world, you know, and I couldn’t even save some kid who stepped on a booby trap.”

“What did you do?”

“This and that. I worked construction some. Cut trail. Planted trees. I stayed home till my old man got tired of me.”

“Felix? What am I going to do about the dreams?” I was dead tired from not getting any sleep, and totally scared of them coming back.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Pray?”

7

It was Friday night and Grandma Alice had lit the candles and said the Sabbath prayers, so I thought maybe that would do. But I still thought about the dreams all the way through dinner, scared to death I was going to have them again. Finally, Grandma Alice patted my hand and said, “Angie? Honey? You look like you don’t feel so good.”

“I don’t.”

“In the stomach? Or up here?” She pointed at her forehead.

“It’s kind of hard to tell,” I said. “I’ve been having bad dreams.”

“What about, kiddo?” Ben looked worried too, now.

“About war, sort of.” I didn’t say which war. I didn’t want them to think I was as crazy as Felix. “And it’s not because I’ve been hanging out with Jesse,” I added before Ben could open his mouth.

“No, wars just do that,” Grandma Alice said. “They get in the air. I remember when Ben’s father was overseas, during the war.”

I knew she meant World War II.

“I was a hostess at the Hollywood Canteen,” she continued. Grandma Alice’s father ran a movie studio; she was a Hollywood princess when she was young. “We’d serve coffee and dance with the boys who were home on leave. It made me feel like I was doing something to help keep my husband safe. Some kind of sympathetic magic—I danced with those lonesome boys here, and somebody would be nice to him over there.”

“Did you dream about the stuff they told you?”

“They never talked about the war, really. They just wanted to be normal for a few days. But yes, I dreamed. My head made things up. All David’s letters home to me were censored, of course. They weren’t allowed to write about troop movements or anything that might give the enemy information. So we pretended we were discussing movie plots when he wanted to tell me where they were shipping him.”

“You never told me any of this, Mom,” Ben said.

“Well, it didn’t come up,” Grandma Alice said lightly. “I was just glad when your brothers got through Vietnam without getting drafted. You, I didn’t have to worry about; you were too young.”

“Now we have nice new wars.” Ben sighed and speared a lamb chop.

“There was another demonstration downtown,” I said. I’d passed it on the way home from St. Thomas’s. “There were a lot of people holding candles and signs, and they were selling bumper stickers that said W
HEN
J
ESUS SAID LOVE YOUR ENEMIES,
I
THINK
H
E MEANT DON’T KILL THEM.”

Ben smiled. “Your mom wanted me to go stand with them.
She
can’t, because the school board will get on her case, so she wanted me to take a stand for the family’s political convictions. I mentioned that she seemed to have forgotten she’s left me.”

That almost made me laugh, it sounded so like Mom. When I got ready for bed I thought about what Felix had said, about praying.
Please God,
I thought,
just let me have my own dreams.
I don’t know whether God really listens to individual people or not. If he does, he must have a thousand ears. And I would think the people getting blown up in Afghanistan and murdered in Africa would drown out people like me. Just in case he
was
listening, though, I said,
Please make Mom come home. Please get her back together with Ben.

How can he keep things straight, all the things people are asking him? What does he do when two people ask for opposite things? And what about all the people who keep saying God is on their side? How can he be on both sides? And how could he be on anybody’s side who wants to blow somebody else up in his name?

Even the churches can’t decide that one. There’s a big sign outside the Baptist church that says S
UPPORT
O
UR
T
ROOPS
and one outside the Unitarian church that says P
EACE
V
IGIL 7 P.M.

At the peace demonstration
there was a car with a bumper sticker that said:

D
YSLEXICS, REMEMBER THAT
D
OG LOVES YOU.

A MESSAGE FROM THE UNTIED CHURCH OF DOG.

Maybe God really is a dog, and he loves everybody but he can’t help them do things or get things or win the lottery, or wars. That probably isn’t an idea I should talk over with Father Weatherford. With Wuffie or Grandma Alice, maybe. Sometimes I think those two old ladies know stuff nobody else does. Grandma Alice had a cousin who died in the Holocaust. The family tried to get her out but it was too late. Grandma Alice doesn’t talk about it much. If
she
still believes in God, I guess he must be out there somewhere.

I went to sleep thinking about God, and Felix’s dreams stayed out of my head. But in the morning they were still so real in my memory—as if they had to be real somewhere, and inhabit somebody’s head—that I hoped that didn’t mean Felix was having them. It was Saturday, and the more I thought about it, the more I worried about him. So I went back over to St. Thomas’s and found him in the herb garden at the back of the church, weeding.

The herb garden was the Altar Society’s idea—to make the church look just like it did when it was founded in 1800-something. Back then, the Indians they were trying to convert would have been the ones working in the garden; not really voluntarily, but the Altar Society has sort of sidestepped that fact. The Church was really awful to the Indians, it’s a wonder any of the Chumash people around here will even speak to us.

Felix had on that ratty old bathrobe, and he was kneeling in a pool of sun by a stone bench, setting out lavender starts. He was barefoot and the bald spot in his gray hair looked like a monk’s tonsure. He really did look like he might be a brother in some old monastery.

“Hey,” I said.

He sat up on his heels and smiled at me. “Hey, yourself.”

“If I don’t have those dreams, does it mean you get them?” I asked him. They were so awful. Maybe I could stand them for a while, just to keep him from having them. After all, he’d been taking on my troubles since I was nine.

“Did you get them again last night?” He looked worried now.

“No,” I said. “Did you?”

“No, I dreamed I was riding a camel through this big mountain of whipped cream.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was lying to make me feel better or not. It sounded like a dream somebody might have.

“Fish were swimming out of my ears,” he added.

I had to laugh. And I could tell he wasn’t going to tell me whether it was true or not.

“Did you pray?” he asked me.

“Kind of. I thought about God, and how everybody says he’s on their side. He can’t be on both sides.” Unless, of course, he
is
a dog. Dogs love everybody.

“That’s why every religion claims that everyone else’s God is really the devil,” Felix said.

“Why can’t they all be the same God with different names?”

“Watch out. That’s the kind of thinking that got me un-sainted.”

“How do you know?” I asked him. “You said you didn’t know why it happened.” Now I was talking like he really was St. Felix.

“Well, being St. Felix is very specific to Christianity. I mean, the Virgin came and rang the cloister bells for me and all.”

I suppose he read the same
Lives of the Saints
in the parish library that I did. At any rate, I wasn’t going to get into a discussion with him about whether he’d actually seen the Virgin Mary.

But I must have looked skeptical, because he said, “If Juan Diego can see her, I can see her.”

Juan Diego is the Aztec Indian who supposedly saw the Virgin of Guadalupe and converted all his friends afterward. He maybe didn’t really exist any more than St. Felix of Valois did, although the Pope canonized him. But I couldn’t help it; I said, “What was she like?”

Felix stared across the herb garden, like he was looking straight through the adobe wall, and said, “This woman had a baby, all wrapped in a shawl, you know?”

“The Virgin?”

“No, she shoved the baby at the lieutenant and he took it. Then she ran like a bat outta hell, and the baby exploded. The lieutenant was standing under this tree, you know, and there were scraps of him and the baby hanging off the tree. The tree was all burned black. That was when I saw her. She was just hanging in the air over the tree, in her blue gown, and she looked so sad.”

“Oh my God.” I sat down on the bench. There was no way I was going to remind him that he’d just said she rang the bells for him in the monastery. It was clear that this was where he’d
really
seen her. Or seen
something
.

“She had on this starry cloak,” he said softly. “And she said, ‘You’re late.’”

“Felix—”

“Scared the shit outta me, because I didn’t want to go, you know, not where the lieutenant had gone.” He looked up at me and he was back in the herb garden again, not wherever he’d been a second before.

“Do you dream about that?” I asked him, scared to get an answer.

He smiled. “Just about the Virgin. She always has her hands full of roses, that’s how I know it’s her.”

I hoped he was telling the truth. I did
not
want to have the dream about the baby. If I had to, I thought, bargaining with whoever was in charge of these things, I would take the one about the boy with his insides taped to his chest instead.

“Felix, is that what it was like for Jesse?” I asked. “In Afghanistan?”

“I don’t know. Alike and different, I expect. There’s a kid who was in Afghanistan in a group I go to sometimes.”

“What kind of group? You mean, like, a support group?” I wondered if he tries to tell
them
he’s St. Felix.

“Yeah. At the VA.”

Maybe a support group would be good for Jesse, I thought. I hung around while Felix put the rest of the lavender starts in the bed, and on the way home I bought a P
EACE
N
OW
bumper sticker from the Unitarians, who were having another vigil. I asked Ben if I could put it on his car. He said he doubted a bumper sticker here would have much influence there, but go ahead, peace was a fine sentiment for the season, what with Thanksgiving coming up.