‘Ned. It’s all right.’
He shook his head violently. ‘If there was a God, there’d be a reason,’ he said. He was looking down at the ground. My hand was still on his back, and I could feel it heaving up and down, like he’d just run a race. ‘If there was a God, there’d be some kind of thread running through it. But there isn’t. Not that I can see.’
‘If you have kids, Ned, tell them their grandfather died in the line of duty. Then take them here and show them his name on the plaque, with all the others.’
He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘I have this dream. It’s a bad one.’ He paused, thinking how to say it, then just plunged ahead. ‘I dream it was all a dream. Do you know what I’m saying?’
I nodded.
‘I wake up crying, and I look around my room, and it’s sunny. Birds are singing. It’s morning. I can smell coffee downstairs and I think, “He’s okay. Jesus and thank you God, the old man’s okay.” I don’t hear him talking or anything, but I just know. And I think what a stupid idea it •was, that he could be walking up the side of some guy’s rig to give him a warning about a flapper and just get creamed by a drunk, the sort of idea you could only have in a stupid dream where everything seems so real . . . and I start to swing my legs out of bed .
. . sometimes I see my ankles go into a patch of sun . . . it even feels warm . . . and then I wake up for real, and it’s dark, and I’ve got the blankets pulled up around me but I’m still cold, shivering and cold, and I know that the dream was a dream.’
‘That’s awful,’ I said, remembering that as a boy I’d had my own version of the same dream.
It was about my dog. I thought to tell him that, then didn’t. Grief is grief, but a dog is not a father.
‘It wouldn’t be so bad if I had it every night. Then I think I’d know, even while I was asleep, that there’s no smell of coffee, that it’s not even morning. But it doesn’t come . . .
doesn’t come . . . and then when it finally does, I get fooled again. I’m so happy and relieved, I even think of something nice I’ll do for him, like buy him that five-iron he wanted for his birthday . . . and then I wake up. I get fooled all over again.’ Maybe it was the thought of his father’s birthday, not celebrated this year and never to be celebrated again, that started fresh
tears running down his cheeks. ‘I just hate getting fooled. It’s like when Mr Jones came down and got me out of World History class to tell me, but even worse. Because I’m alone when I wake up in the dark. Mr Grenville — he’s the guidance counselor at school — says time heals all wounds, but it’s been almost a year and I’m still having that dream.’
I nodded. I was remembering Ten-Pound, shot by a hunter one November, growing stiff in his own blood under a white sky when I found him. A white sky promising a winter’s worth of snow. In my dream it was always another dog when I got close enough to see, not Ten-Pound at all, and I felt that same relief. Until I woke up, at least. And thinking of Ten-Pound made me think, for a moment, of our barracks mascot back in the old days. Mister Dillon, his name had been, after the TV sheriff played by James Arness. A good dog.
‘I know that feeling, Ned.’
‘Do you?’ He looked at me hopefully.
‘Yes. And it gets better. Believe me, it does. But he was your dad, not a schoolmate or a neighbor from down the road. You may still be having that dream next year at this time. You may even be having it ten years on, every once in awhile.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s memory.’
‘If there was a reason.’ He was looking at me earnestly. ‘A damn reason. Do you get that?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Is there one, do you think?’
I thought of telling him I didn’t know about reasons, only about chains — how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you’re lucky. Fucking strangled, if you’re not.
I found myself gazing across the parking lot at Shed B again. Looking at it, I thought that if I could get used to what was stored in its dark interior, Ned Wilcox could get used to living a fatherless life. People can get used to just about anything. That’s the best of our lives, 1 guess.
Of course, it’s the horror of them, too.
‘Sandy? Is there one? What do you think?’
‘I think that you’re asking the wrong guy. I know about work, and hope, and putting a nut away for the GDR.’
He grinned. In Troop D, everyone talked very seriously about the GDR, as though it was some complicated subdivision of law enforcement. It actually stood for ‘golden days of retirement’. I think it might have been Huddie Royer who first started talking about the GDR.
‘I also know about preserving the chain of evidence so no smart defense attorney can kick your legs out from under you in court and make you look like a fool. Beyond that, I’m just another confused American male.’
‘At least you’re honest,’ he said.
But was I? Or was I begging the goddam question? I didn’t feel particularly honest right then; I felt like a man who can’t swim looking at a boy who is floundering in deep water. And once again Shed B caught my eye. Is it cold in here? this boy’s father had asked, back in the once-upon-a-time, back in the day. Is it cold in here, or is it just me?
No, it hadn’t been just him.
‘What are you thinking about, Sandy?’
‘Nothing worth repeating,’ I said. ‘What are you doing this summer?’
‘Huh?’
‘What are you doing this summer?’ It wouldn’t be golfing in Maine or boating on Lake Tahoe, that was for sure; scholarship or no scholarship, Ned was going to need all of the old folding green he could get.
‘County Parks and Rec again, I suppose,’ he said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. ‘I worked there last summer until . . . you know.’
Until his dad. I nodded.
‘I got a letter from Tom McClannahan last week, saying he was holding a place open for me. He mentioned coaching Little League, but that’s just the carrot on the end of the stick.
Mostly it’ll be swinging a spade and setting out sprinklers, just like last year. I can swing a spade, and I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty. But Tom . . .’ He shrugged instead of finishing.
I knew what Ned was too discreet to say. There are two kinds of work-functional alcoholics, those who are just too fucking mean to fall down and those so sweet that other people go on covering for them way past the point of insanity. Tom was one of the mean ones, the last sprig on a family tree full of plump county hacks going back to the nineteenth century. The McClannahans had fielded a Senator, two members of the House of Representatives, half a dozen Pennsylvania Representatives, and Statler County trough-hogs beyond counting. Tom was, by all accounts, a mean boss with no ambition to climb the political totem pole. What he liked was telling kids like Ned, the ones who had been raised to be quiet and respectful, where to squat and push. And of course for Tom, they never squatted deep enough or pushed hard enough.
‘Don’t answer that letter yet,’ I said. ‘I want to make a call before you do.’
I thought he’d be curious, but he only nodded his head. I looked at him sitting there, holding the letter on his lap, and thought that he looked like a boy who has been denied a place in the college of his choice instead of being offered a fat scholarship incentive to go there.
Then I thought again. Not just denied a place in college, maybe, but in life itself. That wasn’t true — the letter he’d gotten from Pitt was only one of the things that proved it — but I’ve no doubt he felt that way just then. 1 don’t know why success often leaves us feeling lower-spirited than failure, but 1 know it’s true. And remember that he was just eighteen, a