Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Page 45

  There were real pockets in Grandpa's overalls--five of them, counting the kangaroo-like pouch in the bib--but beside the hip pockets there were things that only looked like pockets. They were really slits, made so you could reach through to the pants you were wearing underneath (in those days the idea of not wearing pants underneath would not have seemed scandalous, only laughable--the behavior of someone who was A Little Soft in the Attic). Grandpa was wearing the inevitable pair of blue-jeans beneath his overalls. "Jew-pants," he called them matter-of-factly, a term that all the farmers Clive knew used. Levi's were either "Jew-pants" or simply "Joozers."

  He reached through the right-hand slit in his overalls, fumbled at some length in the right-hand pocket of the denim trousers beneath, and at last brought out a tarnished silver pocket watch which he put in the boy's unprepared hand. The weight of the watch was so sudden, the ticking beneath its metal skin so lively, that he came within an ace of dropping it.

  He looked at Grandpa, his brown eyes wide.

  "You ain't gonna drop it," said Grandpa, "and if you did you probably wouldn't stop it--it's been dropped before, even stepped on once in some damned beerjoint in Utica, and it never stopped yet. And if it did stop, it'd be your loss, not mine, because it's yours now."

  "What?" He wanted to say he didn't understand but couldn't finish because he thought he did.

  "I'm giving it to you," Grandpa said. "Always meant to, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna put it in my will. It'd cost more for the damn law-rights than that thing's worth."

  "Grandpa . . . I . . . Jesus!"

  Grandpa laughed until he started to cough. He doubled over, coughing and laughing, his face going a plum-purple color. Some of Clive's joy and wonder were lost in concern. He remembered his mother telling him again and again on their way up here that he was not to tire Grandpa out because Grandpa was ill. When Clive had asked him two days before--cautiously--what had made him sick, George Banning had replied with a single mysterious word. It was only on the night after their talk in the orchard, as he was drifting off to sleep with the pocket watch curled warmly in his hand, that Clive realized the word Grandpa had spoken, "ticka," referred not to some dangerous poison-bug but to Grandpa's heart. The doctor had made him stop smoking and said if he tried anything too strenuous, like shovelling snow or trying to hoe the garden, he would end up playing a harp. The boy knew well enough what that meant.

  "You ain't gonna drop it, and if you did you probably wouldn't stop it," Grandpa had said, but the boy was old enough to know that it would stop someday, that people and watches both stopped someday.

  He stood, waiting to see if Grandpa was going to stop, but at last his coughing and laughter eased off and he stood up straight again, wiping a runner of snot from his nose with his left hand and then flicking it casually away.

  "You're a goddam funny kid, Clivey," he said. "I got sixteen grandchildren, and there's only two of em that I think is gonna amount to duckshit, and you ain't one of em--although you're on the runner-up list--but you're the only one that can make me laugh until my balls ache."

  "I didn't mean to make your balls ache," Clive said, and that sent Grandpa off again, although this time he was able to get his laughter under control before the coughing started.

  "Loop the chain over your knuckles a time or two, if it'll make you feel easier," Grandpa said. "If you feel easier in your mind, maybe you'll pay attention a little better."

  He did as Grandpa suggested and did feel better. He looked at the watch in his palm, mesmerized by the lively feel of its mechanism, by the sunstar on its crystal, by the second hand which turned in its own small circle. But it was still Grandpa's pocket watch: of this he was quite sure. Then, as he had this thought, an apple blossom went skating across the crystal and was gone. This happened in less than a second, but it changed everything. After the blossom, it was true. It was his watch, forever. . . or at least until one of them stopped running and couldn't be fixed and had to be thrown away.

  "All right," Grandpa said. "You see the second hand going around all by its ownself?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. Keep your eye on it. When it gets up to the top, you holler 'Go!' at me. Understand?"

  He nodded.

  "Okay. When it gets there, you just let her go, Gallagher."

  Clive frowned down at the watch with the deep seriousness of a mathematician approaching the conclusion of a crucial equation. He already understood what Grandpa wanted to show him, and he was bright enough to understand that proof was only a formality. . . but one that must be shown just the same. It was a rite, like not being able to leave church until the minister said the benediction, even though all the songs on the board had been sung and the sermon was finally, mercifully, over.

  When the second hand stood straight up at twelve on its own separate little dial (Mine, he marvelled. That's my second hand on my watch), he hollered "Go!" at the top of his lungs, and Grandpa began to count with the greasy speed of an auctioneer selling dubious goods, trying to get rid of them at top prices before his hypnotized audience can wake up and realize it has not just been bilked but outraged.

  "One-two-thre', fo'-fi'-six, sev'-ay-nine, ten-'leven," Grandpa chanted, the gnarly blotches on his cheeks and the big purple veins on his nose beginning to stand out again in his excitement. He finished in a triumphant hoarse shout: "Fiffynine-sixxy!" As he said this last, the second hand of the pocket watch was just crossing the seventh dark line, marking thirty-five seconds.

  "How long?" Grandpa asked, panting and rubbing at his chest with his hand.

  Clive told him, looking at Grandpa with undisguised admiration. "That was fast counting, Grandpa!"

  Grandpa flapped the hand with which he had been rubbing his chest in a get out! gesture, but he smiled. "Didn't count half as fast as that Osgood brat," he said. "I heard that little sucker count twenty-seven, and the next thing I knew he was up somewhere around forty-one." Grandpa fixed him with his eyes, a dark autumnal blue utterly unlike Clive's Mediterranean brown ones. He put one of his gnarled hands on Clive's shoulder. It was knotted with arthritis, but the boy felt the live strength that still slumbered in there like wires in a machine that's turned off. "You remember one thing, Clivey. Time ain't got nothing to do with how fast you can count."

  Clive nodded slowly. He didn't understand completely, but he thought he felt the shadow of understanding, like the shadow of a cloud passing slowly across a meadow.

  Grandpa reached into the pouch pocket in the bib of his overalls and brought out a pack of unfiltered Kools. Apparently Grandpa hadn't stopped smoking after all, dicky heart or not. Still, it seemed to the boy as if maybe Grandpa had cut down drastically, because that pack of Kools looked as if it had done hard travelling; it had escaped the fate of most packs, torn open after breakfast and tossed empty into the gutter at three, a crushed ball. Grandpa rummaged, brought out a cigarette almost as bent as the pack from which it had come. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth, replaced the pack in the bib, and brought out a wooden match which he snapped alight with one practiced flick of his old man's thick yellow thumbnail. Clive watched with the fascination of a child who watches a magician produce a fan of cards from an empty hand. The flick of the thumb was always interesting, but the amazing thing was that the match did not go out. In spite of the high wind which steadily combed this hilltop, Grandpa cupped the small flame with an assurance that could afford to be leisurely. He lit his smoke and then was actually shaking the match, as if he had negated the wind by simple will. Clive looked closely at the cigarette and saw no black scorch-marks trailing up the white paper from the glowing tip. His eyes had not deceived him, then; Grandpa had taken his light from a straight flame, like a man who takes a light from a candle in a closed room. It was sorcery, pure and simple.

  Grandpa removed the cigarette from his mouth and put his thumb and forefinger in, looking for a moment like a man who means to whistle for his dog, or a taxi. Instead he brought them out again wet and pressed them agai
nst the match-head. The boy needed no explanation; the only thing Grandpa and his friends out here in the country feared more than sudden freezes was fire. Grandpa dropped the match and ground it under his boot. When he looked up and saw the boy staring at him, he misinterpreted the subject of his fascination.

  "I know I ain't supposed to," he said, "and I ain't gonna tell you to lie or even ask you to. If Gramma asks you right out--'Was that old man smokin up there?'--you go on and tell her I was. I don't need a kid to lie for me." He didn't smile, but his shrewd, side-slanted eyes made Clive feel part of a conspiracy that seemed amiable and sinless. "But then, if Gramma asks me right out if you took the Savior's name in vain when I gave you that watch, I'd look her right in the eye and say, 'No'm. He said thanks as pretty as could be and that was all he done.' "

  Now Clive was the one to burst out laughing, and the old man grinned, revealing his few remaining teeth.

  "Course, if she don't ask neither of us nothing, I guess we don't have to volunteer nothing. . . do we, Clivey? Does that seem fair?"

  "Yes," Clive said. He wasn't a good-looking boy and never became the sort of man women exactly consider handsome, but as he smiled in complete understanding of the old man's rhetorical sleight-of-hand, he was beautiful, at least for a moment, and Grandpa ruffled his hair.

  "You're a good boy, Clivey."

  "Thank you, sir,"

  His grandfather stood ruminating, his Kool burning with unnatural rapidity (the tobacco was dry, and although he puffed seldom, the greedy hilltop wind smoked the cigarette ceaselessly), and Clive thought the old man had said everything he had to say. He was sorry. He loved to hear Grandpa talk. The things Grandpa said continually amazed him because they almost always made sense. His mother, his father, Gramma, Uncle Don--they all said things he was supposed to take to heart, but they rarely made sense. Handsome is as handsome does, for instance--what did that mean?

  He had a sister, Patty, who was six years older. He understood her but didn't care because most of what she said out loud was stupid. The rest was communicated in vicious little pinches. The worst of these she called "Peter-Pinches." She told him that, if he ever told about the Peter-Pinches, she'd murdalize him. Patty was always talking about people she was going to murdalize; she had a hit-list to rival Murder, Incorporated. It made you want to laugh . . . until you took a good look at her thin, grim face, that was. When you saw what was really there, you lost your desire to laugh. Clive did, anyway. And you had to be careful of her--she sounded stupid but was far from it.

  "I don't want dates," she had announced at supper one night not long ago--around the time that boys traditionally invited girls to either the Spring Dance at the country club or to the prom at the high school, in fact. "I don't care if I never have a date." And she had looked at them with wide-eyed defiance from above her plate of steaming meat and vegetables.

  Clive had looked at the still and somehow spooky face of his sister peering through the steam and remembered something that had happened two months before, when there had still been snow on the ground. He'd come along the upstairs hallway in his bare feet so she hadn't heard him, and he had looked into the bathroom because the door was open--he hadn't had the slightest idea old Pukey Patty was in there. What he saw had frozen him dead in his tracks. If she had turned her head even a little to the left, she would have seen him.

  She didn't, though. She had been too preoccupied with her inspection of herself. She had been standing there as naked as one of the slinky babes in Foxy Brannigan's well-thumbed Model Delights, her bath towel lying puddled around her feet. She was no slinky babe, though--Clive knew it, and she knew it too, from the look of her. Tears were rolling down her pimply cheeks. They were big tears and there were a lot of them, but she never made a sound. At last Clive had regained enough of his sense of self-preservation to tiptoe away, and he had never said a word to anyone about the incident, least of all to Patty herself. He didn't know if she would have been mad about her kid brother seeing her bareass, but he had a good idea about how she'd react to the idea that he had seen her bawling (even that weird boohoo-less bawling she'd been doing); for that she would have murdalized him for sure.

  "I think boys are dumb and most of them smell like gone-over cottage cheese," she had said on that spring night. She stuck a forkful of roast beef into her mouth. "If a boy ever asked me for a date, I'd laugh."

  "You'll change your mind about that, Punkin," Dad said, chewing his roast beef and not looking up from the book beside his plate. Mom had given up trying to get him to stop reading at the table.

  "No I won't," Patty said, and Clive knew she wouldn't. When Patty said things she most always meant them. That was something Clive understood about her that his parents didn't. He wasn't sure she meant it--you know, really--about murdalizing him if he tattled on her about the Peter-Pinches, but he wasn't going to take chances. Even if she didn't actually kill him, she would find some spectacular yet untraceable way to hurt him, that was for sure. Besides, sometimes the Peter-Pinches weren't really pinches at all; they were more like the way Patty sometimes stroked her little half-breed poodle, Brandy, and he knew she was doing it because he was bad, but he had a secret he certainly did not intend to tell her: these other Peter-Pinches, the stroking ones, actually felt sort of good.

  *

  When Grandpa opened his mouth, Clive thought he would say Time to go back t'the house, Clivey, but instead he told the boy: "I'm going to tell you something, if you want to hear it. Won't take long. You want to hear it, Clivey?"

  "Yes, sir!"

  "You really do, don't you?" Grandpa said in a bemused voice.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Sometimes I think I ought to steal you from your folks and keep you around forever. Sometimes I think if I had you on hand most the time, I'd live forever, goddam bad heart or not."

  He removed the Kool from his mouth, dropped it to the ground, and stamped it to death under one workboot, revolving the heel back and forth and then covering the butt with the dirt his heel had loosened just to be sure. When he looked up at Clive again, it was with eyes that gleamed.

  "I stopped giving advice a long time ago," he said. "Thirty years or more, I guess. I stopped when I noticed only fools gave it and only fools took it. Instruction, now. . . instruction's a different thing. A smart man will give a little from time to time, and a smart man--or boy--will take a little from time to time."

  Clive said nothing, only looked at his grandfather with close concentration.

  "There are three kinds of time," Grandpa said, "and while all of them are real, only one is really real. You want to make sure you know them all and can always tell them apart. Do you understand that?"

  "No, sir."

  Grandpa nodded. "If you'd said 'Yes, sir,' I would have swatted the seat of your pants and taken you back to the farm."

  Clive looked down at the smeared results of Grandpa's cigarette, face hot with blush, proud.

  "When a fellow is only a sprat, like you, time is long. Take a for-instance. When May comes, you think school's never gonna let out, that mid-month June will just never come. Ain't that pretty much how it is?"

  Clive thought of that last weight of drowsy, chalk-smelling schooldays and nodded.

  "And when mid-month June finally does come and Teacher gives you your report card and lets you go free, it seems like school's never gonna let back in. Ain't that pretty much right, too?"

  Clive thought of that highway of days and nodded so hard his neck actually popped. "Boy, it sure is! I mean, sir." Those days. All those days, stretching away across the plains of June and July and over the unimaginable horizon of August. So many days, so many dawns, so many noon lunches of bologna sandwiches with mustard and raw chopped onion and giant glasses of milk while his mom sat silently in the living room with her bottomless glass of wine, watching the soap operas on the TV; so many depthless afternoons when sweat grew in the short hedge of your crewcut and then ran down your cheeks, afternoons when the moment you noti
ced that your blob of a shadow had grown a boy always came as a surprise, so many endless twilights with the sweat cooling away to nothing but a smell like aftershave on your cheeks and forearms while you played tag or red rover or capture the flag; sounds of bike chains, slots clicking neatly into oiled cogs, smells of honeysuckle and cooling asphalt and green leaves and cut grass, sounds of the slap of baseball cards being laid out on some kid's front walk, solemn and portentous trades which changed the faces of both leagues, councils that went on in the slow shady axial tilt of a July evening until the call of "Cliiiiive! Sup-per!" put an end to that business; and that call was always as expected and yet as shocking as the noon blob that had, by three or so, become a black boy-shape running in the street beside him--and that boy stapled to his heels had actually become a man by five or so, albeit an extraordinarily skinny one; velvet evenings of television, the occasional rattle of pages as his father read one book after another (he never tired of them; words, words, words, his dad never tired of them, and Clive had meant once to ask him how that could be but lost his nerve), his mother getting up once in a while and going into the kitchen, followed only by his sister's worried, angry eyes and his own simply curious ones; the soft clink as Mom replenished the glass which was never empty after eleven in the morning or so (and their father never looking up from his book, although Clive had an idea he heard it all and knew it all, although Patty had called him a stupid liar and had given him a Peter-Pinch that hurt all day long the one time he had dared to tell her that); the sound of mosquitoes whining against the screens, always so much louder, it seemed, after the sun had gone down; the decree of bedtime, so unfair and unavoidable, all arguments lost before they were begun; his father's brusque kiss, smelling of tobacco, his mother's softer, both sugary and sour with the smell of wine; the sound of his sister telling Mom she ought to go to bed after Dad had gone down to the corner tavern to drink a couple of beers and watch the wrestling matches on the television over the bar; his mom telling Patty to mind her own p's and q's, a conversational pattern that was upsetting in its content but somehow soothing in its predictability; fireflies gleaming in the gloom; a car horn, distant, as he drifted into sleep's long, dark channel; then the next day, which seemed the same but wasn't, not quite. Summer. That was summer. And it did not just seem long; it was long.