Mitch stood in my small bedroom, his hands in the deep pockets of his work pants. “What the hell were you kids doing here?” he said.
Billy knew we were in trouble. He explained about the trapdoor.
Mitch knelt down on one knee to get a closer look. He’d already moved all the loose flooring slightly aside. The dismantled work area was about two foot square and looked impressive in daylight. “You two must have worked on this pretty hard,” he said respectfully.
I know my father reglued the flooring and Billy helped him. Mitch probably did actually tell us there were no secret passages, that a trapdoor couldn’t lead anywhere because the house didn’t have a basement—but I don’t remember any remarks, only that his lack of anger seemed miraculous.
Now I know his reaction had partly to do with the house. He knew all about the Brush Fork house; he’d contracted the labor and built it himself. He’d designed the heating system, radiant heat piped under the floor so the parquet squares were always warm. He knew how well the floor was built; the parquet had been specially made. Billy’s investigation of the house was exploration my father understood: the house was my father’s, what he’d made, what he owned. Information he wanted Billy to have.
I think about the past now in terms of what Billy knew. The information he took away with him, his training, what he knew before he ever got to Fort Knox. The world, so to speak, how much he knew. What he’d practiced, what he’d perfected before he ever laid hands on an M-60. Because when he jumped from the chopper, he didn’t have the gun anymore. Robert Taylor’s letter said Billy hid.
“Cover me,” Billy said, “cover me all up.”
I piled leaves on top of him until only his face showed, like a face in a hole.
“No,” he said, “that too.”
“What, you don’t want to see?”
“No, I don’t want to know where you’re running from.”
Maybe we were nine and ten. In autumn we went down into the field and crossed the creek, walked up into the woods to a clearing where the leaves were layers deep. Our game was to pile the leaves up very high: one of us got inside, buried to the shoulders, while the other ran and jumped on top. The buried one watched the attacker run forward, screaming like a kamikaze. If the buried one made any sound, the jumper won and got to jump again. Sometimes it didn’t matter but occasionally we played the game in earnest.
“Bury me way down deep,” Billy said. “You’re still bigger than me and you won’t be able to tell where I am.”
I covered him, piling on more leaves. The wind rattled faintly in the naked trees of the woods, leaves scuttling, dipping and turning in the air. The more leaves I gave him, the better chance he had. I wanted him to win, to stay hidden, stay silent. I kept piling leaves, alone in the clearing, hiding him deeper and deeper, the mound of leaves higher than my chest. I kept working until he was secret, buried, warm. Until he was nowhere.
I dream about Billy. At first I liked having the dreams because I didn’t think about what they meant. And I got to see Billy, his face, so clearly. I still see his face, usually his young face, his kid face more real than any photograph or memory. My sense of him is so strong I think he must be coming through from some completely foreign zone, a zone free of interference and boundaries. A zone that is out of this world. I wake up sweating, scared. Then I tell myself the clarity may be a direct correlative of how alive Billy is, how desperate he feels, how hard he’s trying to get through.
But in the dreams, Billy isn’t desperate. He’s just himself. I’m the one who is afraid, who knows something terrible might happen, has happened, will happen. I’m the one who can’t stop it from happening.
You watch your little brother, Mom would say to me. He was walking, but barely. She would hang clothes out on the line in summer, big baskets of clothes, the sheets flapping and hiding her from view. We were way down in the yard, far from the road, and Jean’s radar was finely tuned. She probably didn’t take my abilities as Billy’s protector all that seriously, since I was only about three myself. But I was very serious. I wouldn’t even let him stand up. I kept him entertained with the ball or the block or whatever he was fooling with; if all else failed, I held him down by main force. She’d come back to see why he was crying.
MACHINE DREAM
Danner
Danner and Billy are walking in the deep dark forest. Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother’s play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare’s eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally. They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can’t see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a careful and private energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. War-movie sounds. Eeee-yoww, ach-ack-ack. So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP: Excerpt from “O Superman (for Massenet)” by Laurie Anderson, copyright © 1982 by Difficult Music. Reprinted by permission of the author as administered by Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP.
Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” words and music by William “Smokey” Robinson, copyright © 1962, 1963, copyright renewed 1990, 1991 by Jobete Music Co., Inc. All rights controlled and administered by EMI April Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
MCA Music Publishing: Excerpt from “Turn on Your Lovelight,” words and music by Deadrick Malone and Joe Scott, copyright © 1961, 1989 by MCA-Duchess Music Publishing, a division of Universal Studios, Inc. and Joseph Scott Music Co., copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of MCA Music Publishing.
Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.: Excerpt from “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me” by Duke Ellington and Bob Russell, copyright © 1943 (copyright renewed) by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. and Harrison Music Corp in the USA. All rights outside USA administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc.; excerpt from “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” by Duke Ellington and Paul Webster, copyright © 1941 (copyright renewed) by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
EVENING
by Susan Minot
In 1954 Ann Grant, a 25-year-old-career girl, travels to Maine to be a bridesmaid at the large wedding of her best friend. Forty years later, now Ann Lord, she lies dying in a house in Cambridge, and what she remembers is that a long-ago wedding weekend, when she fell in love with a passion that remains, after three marriages and five children, the defining event and the defining emotion of her life.
A New York Times Notable Book
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70026-9
RESERVATION ROAD
by John Burnham Schwartz
With the suspense of a heart-stopping action thriller and the psychological complexity of the best literary fiction, John Burnham Schwartz weaves together the stories of two haunted men and their families, united by an unexpected and horrendous death and its aftermath of vengeance and violence.
A New York Times Notable Book
Fiction/0-375-70273-3
SLAPBOXING WITH JESUS
by Victor D. LaValle
With thirteen original and interconnected stories in the tradition of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexio, Victor D. LaValle’s astonishing, violent, funny debut offers harrowing glimpses at the vulnerable lives of young people who struggle not only to come of age, but to survive the city streets.
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70590-2
&n
bsp; VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
New from
Jayne Anne Phillips
Lark & Termite
A novel
“Jayne Anne Phillips’s intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr’s war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original.… the characters, like those in Machine Dreams, are so indelible, so intimately drawn, that they threaten to move in and take up permanent residence in the reader’s mind.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Available now in hardcover from Knopf
$24.00 • 272 pages • 978-0-375-40195-4
Please visit www.aaknopf.com
Machine Dreams Page 33
