House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  “Huh,” Harley said. “Must be good money in airports.”

  Lowell passed over that, was especially conscious of Lakeund. He was aware that he wanted the farmer to admire him. There had been a growing notion throughout the evening that it was Lakeund of all of them who knew what was important. Lowell said, “I like what I do.” Then, maybe because he was high from the gin, he suddenly felt quite strongly about that.

  “Huh,” Harley said.

  “No, I really do.” Lowell looked at Peter.

  “That’s good,” Peter said. “Lots of people can’t say the same.”

  Lowell was drunk. He could feel his own sentimentality close at hand. It was like an embarrassing pet waiting at the door.

  Lakeund’s right hand rested under the dim light of one of the bar lamps. Lowell felt an unexplainable impulse to reach over and cover it with his own.

  Peter said, “You never do exactly what you want. How’re you even going to know anything exactly from day to day?”

  “Day to day ain’t so hard,” Harley said. “But when you start talking about month to month…”

  “Right, Harley.” Roman put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Today’s big lake fishing, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t think one has to know the absolute exact thing,” Lowell said. “It might just be knowing at all. I read somewhere…” He tried to remember where. “Maybe it was on the radio. Anyway, someone said that knowing what makes you really happy comes about as often as a comet. It visits you, leaves its impression, and you spend a good deal of your life wanting to remember what it was like. But it’s hard, it’s very hard to know.”

  Lowell glanced in the direction of Lakeund and quickly looked away when he saw tears forming in the farmer’s eyes. It’s the liquor, he told himself. It’s getting to him too.

  “I remember what she was like.” Harley smiled and tapped his bottle against his teeth. “Coleen Schlelein. When would you say that was, Roman, about 1961?”

  Roman swatted Harley with his cap.

  “You know what I mean. How about you, Peter?” Lowell asked, consciously moving any attention away from Lakeund.

  “I was happy when I first got the idea of having my own business. I was working in the paper mill then, and I started reading all those how-to books. I just got to feeling more and more strong about how I was going to go ahead and take the risk.”

  Lowell studied the fact that Peter had eight customers on a Friday evening. But then realized that it was harvest time, which might keep the regular customers away.

  “Do you remember a time like that, Lakeund?” Peter asked.

  Lakeund was rubbing his hand over the base of the lamp that sat on the bar in front of him. The girl near the wall was shuffling in her purse, getting ready to leave. The men waited for Lakeund. No one else seemed to have noticed the tears. The farmer brought his hands together and gave the bottle a kind of squeeze. “When I was sixteen, my sister sent me a letter from Seattle. She was waitressing at night and studying music during the day. She sent me a picture of the island she lived on. It looked lush there, almost tropical. I was surprised to hear that Seattle had islands, let alone almost tropical ones. It was a good letter. She told me how big the ocean was. How it was like the sky turned over. She said the place was meant for me; in fact, there was even a road with the same name as mine, that she took her bicycle up that road to a swimming pond. But I still don’t believe that part, the part about my name. I think I’m the only person or thing with that name.”

  “Would she have made a thing like that up?” Lowell asked. But the farmer didn’t seem to consider his question.

  He looked at Lowell. “I was going to say before, you see, I almost lived in your area. She wanted me to come. She sent me some of the money for traveling, and I was supposed to earn the rest. I was never so excited as I was thinking about that trip.”

  “But you didn’t go?” Lowell asked.

  “No. Bernard was just starting the cheese operation then. He needed me around.”

  The two pool players went out the door. Lowell could see how dark it had gotten and could feel how the air came in cooler.

  “Maybe that wasn’t my happiest time after all,” Lakeund said. “I bet it happened when I was younger—maybe too young to even remember.”

  Then he put his hands flat on the bar, thumb to thumb. His hands made a frame. “I wish I’d brought a picture of my boy. There’s a fellow who’s pleased with himself.”

  This seemed to Lowell like a digression from their present conversation. He noticed Peter look over at Roman, who was shaking his head.

  “Funniest little guy. Not a care in the world. Doesn’t even know when he’s uncomfortable. This morning I found him standing up on a box in the cheese house in nothing but his underpants. All his skin was gooseflesh, and he was holding himself stiff to keep from shivering. I told him it was just too cold in there. But he shook his head no, like what I said wasn’t true.”

  Harley gave a peculiar glance in Peter’s direction.

  “Aren’t you forgetting about that fish fry with Eileen?” Roman said.

  Lakeund shrugged, tipping his beer bottle to look inside.

  Lowell could feel a slight shift in the mood around the bar. He realized he shouldn’t drink anymore. He was in a hazy state. His mind was wandering a little. One moment he felt a familiarity with these people, and the next he felt on the outside—like he didn’t understand something.

  There were bound to be some vacancies in the summer motels along the road ahead. He could take a room, rather than driving the rest of the way tonight, maybe pick up a hamburger somewhere, take it to the room, and watch television.

  Lakeund set his beer bottle down with a thump, and then Lowell could hear the girl’s heels knocking across the floor. She went by them with a whoosh, her young man behind her, and the bar door shut after them with a hollow thunk.

  “She was a pretty girl,” Lakeund said.

  “Yeah,” Harley said. “I was just wondering about her little puss, how far I could take her. A lot farther than that young pony.”

  “Shut up,” Lowell heard the farmer say in a strange, dry voice. Nothing like his voice before.

  “What?” Harley said.

  Lakeund had his fingers against his brow, shading his eyes, and Lowell wasn’t sure, but felt that he was looking sideways at all of them.

  “I won’t shut up,” Harley said. “Why shouldn’t I say what I want? You’ve been yapping all night. My sister this. My sister that. Well, the one that just walked out wasn’t your sister, and I’ll talk as plain about her as I want.”

  Lakeund was quiet. His face had grown quite white.

  “In fact, it’s time one of us talked plain about Lucy. You’ve been putting her up to us for twenty years. So she wrote you a few times; then she stopped. You make her out to this visitor like she’s more than she is, like knowing her makes you more than we are. All I know about any sister of yours is what every boy in town used to tell me.”

  “Harley, stop it!” Peter said.

  Roman looked away from his friend.

  “She was nothing,” Harley murmured.

  Lowell heard glass cracking. Lakeund held the jagged neck of his beer bottle in his hand. In one smooth movement he reached behind Lowell and pulled Harley over. Harley’s stool clattered to the floor. He was gasping and seemed to hang from Lakeund’s fist, which clutched the material of Harley’s shirt underneath his arm. Lowell could see the white skin of Harley’s upper arm exposed above the line of tan and freckles. Lakeund pressed the broken neck into that pale part of his skin.

  “Christ! What’s he doing?” Harley tried to jerk away, but Lakeund had the underpart of his arm in a firm grip. His strength surprised Lowell. Though Harley struggled, he looked as helpless as a small boy getting a vaccination. Roman pulled on Lakeund’s arm, trying to relieve the pressure of the bottle neck being pressed into Harley’s skin, and Peter reached over the bar and slapped Lakeund’s face, o
nce and once again. Lowell was off his stool, but at a loss for what part he should play. When Harley was finally free, there was a wound shaped like a star on his arm. For a moment the impression remained very clear, then the wound bubbled over with new blood.

  “Enough!” Peter shouted.

  Roman stood warily by Harley, as though he thought Lakeund might try something else.

  “Goddamn son of a bitch!” Harley whimpered. He held his arm and looked away from Lakeund, as if it was he who should be ashamed.

  “It’s okay, Lakeund,” Roman said. “We’re all friends here.”

  Peter picked up some loose bills from Lakeund’s place at the bar and handed them to him. “It’s time to head home.”

  Despite his violence minutes before, they were all being gentle with him, almost conciliatory. Lakeund turned and walked away from Peter without taking the change.

  “What happened?” Lowell asked Peter.

  “Harley shouldn’t have said that.” Peter looked over at Harley, who was still blotting his arm with a bunch of cocktail napkins. “In the first place, it wasn’t true. A lot of fellas might have wanted to have Lucy, but you can be pretty sure they didn’t.” Peter leaned forward, his elbows on the bar. “The other thing is, Lakeund’s got some problems, you know, mentally.”

  “He’s usually okay,” Roman said.

  “That’s right.” Peter pointed at Lowell’s glass, asking if he wanted another. “Lakeund is one of us. It’s not like the city out here; we don’t put people away so easily. We try to live and let live.”

  On his way out, Lowell had to pass Lakeund, who was standing by the door with his head down and his hands in his pockets. The farmer looked so lonely; he wasn’t afraid of him anymore. Pausing, his hand on the door handle, he asked, “Anything I can do?”

  Lakeund looked at him with an expression as clear and direct as any Lowell had seen all night. It was the kind of face the chamber of commerce should paint on a highway sign to sell their state. So clean and alluring and good it was. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  After Lakeund left the bar, he stood out back looking over the meadow. There was no moon, just stars, and the meadow was so black that there was no making out what were the hills and what were the flat places.

  The last time there had been trouble about Lucy seemed a long time ago. It didn’t matter so much if Harley and Roman never talked to him again. But when he thought about the city man, he felt ashamed. He had a feeling that Lowell was a connection to Lucy—that somehow, after making his way back to Seattle, he might meet her there. But what would he have to say about Lakeund? That he was a dumb hick who could barely hold a conversation. That he was drunk and crazy and cut people in bars. Maybe if Lucy heard that it was Harley he had cut, she would say to Lowell, “If I still lived on the same road as Harley Brandt, one way or another I’d end up cutting him too.” That was a comforting thought to Lakeund.

  But he wished he’d told Lowell more. Why had he missed the chance to tell him? Except that it was all mixed up, and there weren’t any exact words for it. It was about what he wanted when he was a boy, before the cheese business, it was about real dreams, what Lucy used to tell him about them.

  He remembered nights like this, lying on the hill with her, when the stars seemed held in a net over them, and the net had seemed so tenuous and insecure that it threatened to give way.

  It was those nights, without the moon, when Lucy would talk about dreams. He was nine years old and she was thirteen. It was so dark on the hill, he couldn’t see her. It was so dark that he had needed her to talk almost constantly, lest he stop believing she was there, start believing he wasn’t there himself. Dreams. She knew about music, and that was how she had learned to explain things that were all too complicated for most people. There was a tone in real dreams, she said, that you learned to recognize. When he was nine, he didn’t understand what she meant, but he needed to hear her voice because it was so dark. So he would say, “Tell me about real dreams.”

  They talked about it the way farmers discussed the weather and mothers discussed their babies’ teeth. Lying on her back in the grass, she would say, “Any dreams yet? No? Well, I have one. I’m going to ride the bike straight up the pasture slope without stopping. And then, because I deserve it, I’m going to come rolling down again with my hair blowing back. Here’s an important one: I’m going to play violin, not fiddle. I’m going to make serious music like nothing anybody’s heard before. You and the folks can come to see me at the concert hall. A new symphony. People will sob—they’ll be dumbstruck, it’ll change their lives.”

  “You couldn’t,” he’d say.

  “Yes.” She’d grip his hands. “Don’t ever say that. What’s with you? You’ve the face of an angel, and you’re smart. Can’t you see anything out there? Not even a house?”

  “On a mountain!” He’d begin to see the house he wanted. “No glass in the windows, birds could fly straight through it. I’d grow orange trees in the yard.”

  He found that he was capable of desiring things outside his life. And thinking about these things was similar in sensation to hunger: the way the smell of a turkey in the oven could suddenly make him ravenous, when only a half-hour earlier he hadn’t been aware he had an appetite at all.

  A dream was something you put your life into—even if only for a day—and what made the dream true was how close to a real want it was. The dream and the want needed to fit together to make a good sound. And if you started believing that you wanted something, it had to be for the right reasons, otherwise—you could hear it in your head—the tone would be off.

  It was this tone she had taught him to listen for. When Bernard had talked at dinner about going to the university for two years, Lucy had looked across the table with just this question in her eyes: Is it a real dream? Lakeund had shaken his head almost imperceptibly. “No.”

  When their mother, after years of vegetable gardening, decided to devote hours of her week growing Floradora roses, they weren’t sure. Then one day they found her behind the house, kneeling next to an open book about rose cultivation, the lap of her apron full of dirt. They had come to ask her a question, but she looked up at them so distractedly, so different from her daily presence, they would have been ashamed to interrupt her. “That’s the want I mean, Lakeund,” Lucy had said. “We can’t listen to anything less. Like Mom with her roses—that’s the way we are going to love what we do.”

  But he didn’t know what kind of want came to him those nights they lay together on the hill. It was a more open want, and frightening, because there was no dream with it, only a kind of aching expectation. The two of them would leave the family after dinner, climb the hill, with ordinary conversation about relatives and school and the people in town. Behind the hill the sun would set, and they would turn on their stomachs to watch it, that brief aura at the end of the day that would tend to impress him more than her. Afterward, he felt irresolute. The light faded, and everything around him diminished, first in color and then in form. He would watch her face as they talked, until that too began to lose its lines, became a sort of gray, except for a more startling white from her eyes and her teeth. “I’m so glad I can talk to you, Lakeund.”

  They would lie there for hours. Some nights they would even sleep while they waited. But it seemed to him, after many times, that she had changed. It was really the dark she came to wait for—not the stars.

  One night he had interrupted the silence by saying, “They’re lit now, Lucy, every single one of them.”

  “They’re always lit,” she had said. “It’s just when the sun’s up you can’t see them. That’s the good thing about darkness. You can see things that you wouldn’t see otherwise, and I don’t just mean stars. There are things you can’t even know about yourself until you’re blind and afraid. People say the future’s bright, but I’m beginning to think it’s a terribly hidden thing.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that. It had made him think of the crack between
his bed and the wall. Made him think of their pastor’s description of eternity, how it went on and on and never stopped. It was something he had been unable to think about. It had seemed to him that the future should be something you could see as clearly as a picture. He wanted to be able to see what he was going to be, and where and how.

  That night Lucy must have sensed how lost he felt, because she had smoothed her hand over the short hairs on his head and said into his ear, “Lakeund. Your name is Lakeund. I know who you are.”

  But as he got older, she let him feel alone. And if she ever talked at all, it was never in the clear way she once did. She began to have trouble with the family. She stayed away in town, left her chores. Yet even when she was eighteen and he fourteen, they didn’t stop going to the hill together. If there was a moon out, sometimes she would stand up, and he would watch her. She would move about, show him a dance step, pull at the grass. And sometimes she would just holler out over the pasture: swear words, the secrets she knew about a high-school teacher, or some other gossip from town. Mostly she would holler about the ocean and the coast, and places away from the farm.

  She was restless. He wanted her to talk to him. “Why do you want to go to the ocean?” he would ask. “What would you do? Buy a boat, fish for a living?” But she would just lie there with her eyes open, saying nothing. There was always something she held just beyond his reach. If only she would tell him, he thought, they would both feel better.

  She became so remote that he felt lonelier with her than he might have by himself. It seemed so long since she had talked directly to him about any dreams. And he had begun to dread that maybe she didn’t actually know as much as he had trusted she knew. Lucy had raised his expectations. He’d taken her ideas as something akin to promises. There was the one where he could be a mathematician someday, be smart and calculate the meaning of things, the way Einstein had. Each new idea she had given him wore a deeper groove down the center of him. But then she stopped dreaming with him, and that groove came to feel only like a hollow place.