by James Gunn
“But sometimes,” the rancher said, looking straight ahead at the road, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, “when I think of my little girl, what mighta happened to her, what she mighta done, why, it makes you wonder if it's worth it, if anybody ever oughta have kids, if anybody ever oughta care that much about something that's gonna break your heart.”
“Yeah,” Gavin said.
“Young fella I picked up once, he told me he heard of her. Said he heard she was living out west somewhere in a commune. Said she had five kids and didn't know for sure the father of any of ’em. Imagine me a grandpa and never even seen a one of ’em. But he wouldn't tell me where that commune was. Thought I might go looking for her and make trouble, I guess. But I don't know—maybe he was just making it all up. They do that sometimes, you know. Kids make up stories they think you want to hear, just to pass the time. Or sometimes stories that'll hurt, just to see if you'll bleed.”
“Yeah,” Gavin said.
The rancher still didn't look at him. “You ever hear of her, Bonnee Belle Franzen?”
Now the rancher looked at him. Gavin shook his head. “Sorry,” he said.
The rancher nodded. “Well, sure. Chances are you wouldn't.”
And now the city itself loomed ahead, its concrete fingers etched cleanly against the morning sky.
“What happened to the smog?” Gavin asked.
“Been away quite a while, eh?” the rancher said. “They cleaned that up. No problem, once they set their minds to it. Cheap power means nothing's too costly, excepting food, maybe, and that's loosening up a bit. Me, raising cattle, I'm in a luxury business, you might say, but they're finding ways of making steers more efficient at turning grass and grain into meat, and one of these days they won't even be steers, so to speak, just meat factories with no waste. ‘Course, they ain't got the smog and pollution cleaned up everywhere—in the little towns, say, where industry come late, but it's coming, and the rivers gonna run clean again and the air gonna be as pure as the Indians breathed. Maybe purer, considering there was smog then, with the pine forests and prairie fires and all.”
“What do you know,” Gavin said.
“Truth,” the rancher said. He nodded, and Gavin nodded, and they agreed it was truly amazing.
The rancher parked in a large lot on the edge of the city. Even steam-driven cars weren't allowed inside the city limits, he told Gavin, but mass transportation was free and fast. They walked across the vast expanse of asphalt, softening in the sun, took the same monorail into the heart of the city, shook hands, and boarded electric buses to their separate destinations.
The buses ran swiftly, because no other surface transportation got in the way—a few electrics passed them in both directions, but they seemed to be official cars, mail or government, or delivery trucks—and Gavin stared out the window at clean streets and pedestrian traffic. None of it was what the revolution had led him to expect; he had to believe that conflicts were buried beneath the outwardly placid surface, ready to erupt.
Then he noticed that there were children and older people among the pedestrians, and among the other passengers with him on the bus, but there were no young adults—no one between the ages of eighteen and thirty—and he knew what had happened. The old people had isolated their rebellious youth on the campuses. This city was an old folks’ home.
Gavin breathed easier.
But it was strange that the slums were gone and the signboards and the garish storefronts and the dirt. Before he was quite ready, the bus had stopped silently at the corner near his home. He got off and walked down the wide, tree-shaded boulevard; he remembered when the elm disease had turned all the elms to bare dead limbs, and the city had cut them down, one by one, and replanted new trees, and now they had grown tall again and everything was the way it had been. He walked between the quiet painted middle-class houses and their green lawns, which had never known trouble or misery or hardship, and he felt good. He felt better than he should have felt in this plastic environment, so far removed from reality, but he had grown up on this street, played games in these yards—run sheep run, and red light, and may I—caught lightning bugs like the boy last night, and rested on the screened front porch in the long, slow, wonderful evenings, thinking about life and people and nature and stars and books....
He found himself standing in front of the screened porch. He was opening the screen door, and he was knocking at the front door, wondering what he would say to his mother and his father, now that he was home. “Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad. I've been expelled. I'm home to stay.” “What are you going to do, Tom?” they would ask. “Oh, I don't know,” he would say. “Sleep a lot and read and think...” He had not thought about that part. He hadn't thought about what he would do after he got home. Home had been the end of it.
The door was opening. Gavin started to say something, started to enter, and he stopped, realizing that he didn't know the person standing in the doorway. It was a young woman, a girl really, attractive, though slimmer than he preferred, rather boyish even, with blond hair cut short, and a kind of turned-up nose and a generous mouth...
“Yes?” the girl said. She had a pleasant voice, but it wasn't sexy. “Can I help you?”
“Well,” he began, “I ... I ... I'm Tom Gavin. And I...”
The girl smiled and stuck out her hand boyishly to greet him. “Well, Tom, I never expected to meet you. Welcome home.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I'm Elaine,” the girl said, and then called over her shoulder, “Mrs. Gavin. There's someone at the door who'd like to see you.”
Gavin heard a familiar pattern of footsteps approaching, quick, staccato, impatient, footsteps he had heard for eighteen years of his life coming toward him when he wanted something, and now he wanted something again, something he could not yet name.
He saw the familiar face, leaning forward, slightly turned, blue eyes looking upward, the way she did when she was ill-at-ease, meeting strangers or confronted by something distasteful. “Who is it?” she asked, and her voice was a cold hand wrapped around Gavin's spine.
“Mom,” he said, “it's me. Tom.”
“Oh, Tom,” she said fretfully. “Tom? What are you doing here?”
“I came home,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “Well. I must say.” She stood at arm's length, peering up at him, her arms at her sides.
“Don't you know me?” he asked. Somehow the edge of his excitement had been dulled.
“Of course I know you,” his mother said. “Think I wouldn't know my own son? It's just that ... It's just...”
Gavin took a half-step forward. “I know it's a surprise.” He raised his arms and took her by the shoulders. He felt a shiver go through her body. She was a relatively small woman, five-feet-three, he thought. “But I'm home.”
“Of course you are,” she snapped, and then, as if apologizing, “but it is a surprise.”
Gavin pulled his mother to him. She came stiffly, like some girls he had known who did not like him very well or were afraid of him, or themselves. He held her against him for a moment, trying to recapture the old warmth and comfort he had once felt when he was near her, even the joy with which he had held the thought of returning home, but they were both elusive, like trying to remember what it felt like to be in love.
For a moment her dark head bent forward to touch his chest, as if in response to some ancient hormonal instruction, and then her head snapped back and she pushed herself away. “Come in and sit down,” she said. It was an invitation she might have issued to a door-to-door salesman or the local pollution inspector. “I'll call your father.”
She walked and led the way toward the living room. She walked differently now, shuffling and slow. She was acting like an old woman, Gavin thought, and she wasn't old. She couldn't be more than forty-seven or forty-eight, and that wasn't old. She still looked good, he thought, still the most beautiful woman he had ever known—or, at least, the most beautiful older woman.
>
He didn't follow her. He stood in the little hall with the living room to his right and the dining room to the left and the breakfast room straight ahead, and he sniffed the odors of home, the old, delicate odors of favorite foods that had permeated the walls and the rugs, the musky perfume his mother wore, the deodorants sprayed in the air. He closed his eyes for a moment, and it all came back to him, all the feelings of childhood rushing upon him simultaneously, impossible to separate: a mingled emotional mixture of eating and of waiting to eat while the smell of cooking food drifted from the kitchen and set his stomach to working, of reading and the slightly mildewed, powdery smell of the old books, and of rushing to his mother and holding her by the knees, the thighs, the waist, as he grew taller, smelling the comfortable smell of her; of lying on the rug, feeling it springy under him, and watching television in the evening, looming tall and wonderful on the wall above, and of the strange electric smell of his father when he came home, and of friends who came to play while his mother tried to get them to go outside, and of bodies, sticky and warm, in the secret explorations in the garage or the attic with little boys and little girls...
I'm going up to my room,” Gavin said, and he turned and ran up the stairs two and three at a stride.
“Tom,” his mother called from below. “There's ... there's been some ... some changes.”
But Gavin already was at the door, and he swung it open, and stopped. The old brass bed was covered with a frilly orange-and-white spread; swiss curtains matched the spread; and the walls had been painted white like the walls of a monastery. Where his old desk had been stood a white dressing table with a mirror attached, and the top of the dressing table was neatly arranged with bottles and brushes and combs and round boxes and canisters, and a picture of some young man.
Gavin walked slowly to the closet and opened the door. It was filled with dresses and blouses and other kinds of feminine clothing.
He turned toward the door, still not understanding, and the girl was there—what was her name?—Elaine. “What your mother was trying to say,” the girl said—she was good-looking, all right, but not in a way that excited him—"was that your parents have taken in a boarder. Me.”
He looked at her again. This time he saw her as something else, not a stranger, not a girl, not a possible bed partner, but as an interloper, a rival. “Why would they do that?” he asked, but not of her.
“It wasn't the money,” she said. She had a pleasant, soft voice and a clear, precise way of speaking that he might have liked in any other girl. “I think they got lonely.”
“For you?”
“Oh, not for me.” She laughed. “But I think your mother always wanted a girl. They treat me just like one of the family. And it isn't all one-sided. I help around the house when I'm not working.”
“Working?”
“When I met your parents I was still in school. Oh, not like you. Computer school. Very practical. That's how I happened to be here. Your father came to lecture, and they told him—the people at the school—how I needed a room....”
Gavin brushed past her on his way to the door. “I'm not interested,” he said. He called from the head of the stairs, “Mom, where are my old clothes?”
After a moment his mother said something that he don't understand. “I said,” Gavin repeated, “'where are my old clothes?'”
“We gave most of them away,” his mother said more clearly. “We ... we didn't think you'd be needing them again. There may be a few things left in a box in the attic, but they wouldn't fit. They're from when you were much younger.”
He turned, angry now, and went toward the linen closet in the hall, pulled out a towel and a washcloth, and headed for the bathroom. It was coming back to him, how it had been, the arguments and the niggling little disagreements. All he had wanted was justice; all they had wanted was conformity. “I'm going to take a bath,” he shouted.
“That's good,” his mother called. “Maybe your father will be home when you get done.”
He glanced at the girl standing in the doorway to his old room. She smiled a bit ruefully. “Well, do you rant to help me?” he snapped.
“Thanks a lot,” she said, shaking her head, ‘but I think I'll pass.”
He ran the old tub full of hot water. The room filled with steam and misted the bathroom mirror until beads ran down, leaving crooked clear tracks behind, and he steeped himself for an hour, letting his aggressions drain from him, letting the old memories return—water therapy, his parents used to call it, the hours he had spent in this tub, soaking, reading, keeping the water hot with a trickle from the tap while his parents pounded on the locked door and demanded to know if he was going to be in there all day, that other people had to use the bathroom once in a while too, and that it was sick to just sit in there and turn pruney day after day.
Maybe he had expected too much, he thought. Maybe he had exaggerated the reserve he thought he felt in his mother when she came to the door. Anyway, why shouldn't they let someone else use his room, even if it happened to be a snippy straight of a girl? He had been gone for almost four years, and they had no reason to think he would return, and if it hadn't been for an unusual combination of circumstances, he wouldn't have been here now.
He resolved to give his homecoming another chance.
When he got out of the tub and toweled himself glowing dry, he was in a better mood. It was good to be home in spite of everything, and after he got rid of the girl it would be the way it used to be.
He found a pair of slacks and a shirt, topped by a pair of undershorts and a pair of dark socks, folded and stacked neatly in the hall by the bathroom door. Beside them were his shoes, now cleaned of mud and polished. The clothes weren't his, but when he put them on they fit pretty well. Perhaps they belonged to his father.
Dressed, he walked down the hall to the stairs and down the stairs to the living room. His mother and father were waiting for him. They were sitting on the brown plush sofa side-by-side. He had thought of his father as a big man, but he didn't look big beside Gavin's mother. He still wore his hair long and his face bearded, although the beard was a bit neater now than Gavin remembered it, and, like his hair, beginning to streak with gray.
Hair had been the big thing when his father was in college, a symbol of dissent, an expression of solidarity, a hint of virility; Gavin tried to imagine it, but it was difficult. Long hair had been popular with girls when his mother was a student, but since then her hair had been short and long and short again over and over. His father still was handsome, still looked like women would be interested in him, but different now, on the defensive, a little uncertain. Gavin remembered his father taking him to political meetings, standing up, denouncing injustice, arguing persuasively for mass action in his rich agitator's voice. And even earlier, or perhaps he only remembered being told about it, Gavin remembered riding everywhere, strapped like a papoose to his father's back.
“Thanks for the clothes, Mom,” Gavin said.
“What clothes?” his mother said vaguely.
“Hello, Dad,” Gavin said.
His father didn't get up, didn't move to embrace him or shake hands. “What are you doing home?” he asked.
Gavin sighed. “I got expelled,” he said. He looked round the room. It was the same as it had always been: the easy chairs in the corners, a little shabbier now. The television on the wall opposite the fireplace. The tall color photograph of his great-grandfather as a child, dressed in a long gown, above the mantel. The little table covered with glass and porcelain knickknacks and flanked by straight chairs with padded seats. He pulled the nearest one around so that he could sit facing his parents. He didn't feel like sitting in something soft. It was going to be a confrontation. He could feel it.
“Expelled?” his father echoed. “Nobody gets expelled anymore. What can you do to get yourself expelled? You'd have to kill somebody, and even then it would have to be the right person. If he were an enemy of the people, it wouldn't matter.”
&nb
sp; His father's voice had a querulous tone. Gavin remembered that, too, from the endless arguments before he left for college. “It was partly that,” Gavin said. He hadn't meant to talk about that—he wanted to keep that part of him separate—but his father annoyed him.
“You really did kill somebody?” his father exclaimed. Gavin had succeeded in shocking him.
“It was an accident, and that really wasn't the cause of it.”
“It wasn't the cause of it,” his father repeated. “Damn!” he said, shaking his head. “What was the cause of it?” he demanded, as if by disbelieving in its validity he could reverse the whole turn of events.
“You don't want to know the bloody details,” Gavin said. “It isn't important.”
“I want to know,” his father insisted, as if knowing would cauterize the wound. His half-closed eyes watched Gavin as if he were a rival.
Gavin remembered his father pitching a ball to him, over and over, while he tried to hit it with a bat. The sun was always hot in the sky, always shining in his eyes, and he always gave up, finally, defeated, unable to please his father, unable to keep up the pretense that he was personally involved. “Some campus politicians thought I was a threat,” he said. “They had me expelled.”
“Politics!” his father said.
Gavin shifted in his hard chair. “You and Mom were into political activity when you were in college,” he said. “How many times have you told me about the sit-ins and the marches and the rallies and the arson and the bombs, about holding the Chancellor for ransom, presenting your ultimatums and your nonnegotiable demands, and about your refusals to negotiate without a promise of total amnesty?”
“That was when politics was important,” his father said, brushing away the comparison. “That was when things were getting started, when we had to fight for student power. Why, if it hadn't been for us, your mother and me and our friends, the Vietnam war might still be going on, girls would still have closing hours, the fuzz still would be hauling students off to jail for smoking grass, and hitting them over the head with nightsticks for marching in the street.”
