by Drury, Tom
Micah came out on top of the school, where the California flag flew. The bear on the flag trudged along, head down and mouth open, following a red star. The view was panoramic—cars on the freeway, dusty horse farms, low houses with yards of sand and tufted grass. He felt far from home.
Then the door opened, and the headmaster came up. Many rumors went around about the large and well-dressed Mr. Lyons. He’d been a psychiatrist, an oilman, an admiral in the Navy, a double agent. He knew secrets about the board of directors that would keep him headmaster for life. Joan claimed that he’d once put Eamon in a coffin for writing something on his desk.
The headmaster put on sunglasses and lit a cigar. “Who told you to come up here?”
“No one.”
“Go to the edge. Look down.”
Micah leaned into a notch in the wall and saw the ground far below, scrub grass and white rocks disappearing in shadow.
“What would happen if you fell?”
“I would die.”
“And how would that look?”
“If I was dead?”
“How would it look for the school?”
“Oh. Pretty bad.”
Mr. Lyons puffed on the cigar and looked at it as all cigar smokers must for some reason. “People would say, ‘See there? They can’t even keep students from falling off the school.’”
“I wasn’t planning on falling.”
“No one plans to fall till they do. Do you know what this tower is for?”
“Looks?”
“It’s for me to smoke. Unless you want a cigar I don’t see any reason for you to be here.”
“Cigars make me sick.”
“That passes. What’s your name?”
“Micah Darling.”
“You just got your first detention, Micah Darling. Are you the one with the goat?”
Micah nodded.
“That means nothing to me.”
“I’ll leave now.”
“What’s your sport?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Volleyball is your sport. Sign up now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you have detention for the next three days. In this school I am king. Don’t prize yourself above others. Stay out of the towers.”
When Joan learned of Micah’s detention, she called a family meeting. Micah tried to talk her out of it, but once the idea had occurred to her she became fond of it.
And so they all gathered one evening in the library, a dark room with a chandelier that was a replica of a famous one in some opera house. The armchairs were large and leather-bound, and the family took their seats like actors in a play.
“We all need to be aware,” said Joan. “It shouldn’t be Joan deals with Micah and Rob deals with Eamon. What we face, we face together.”
“Micah went into the tower, right?” said Rob.
“There was no sign,” said Joan. “The door was not locked.”
“Still, it seems reasonable. You can’t go everywhere.”
“I knew I shouldn’t,” said Micah.
“I don’t trust Mr. Lyons,” said Joan. “He seems to have it in for our family. I thought the same thing when he put Eamon in a coffin for writing Charlotte’s name on his desk.”
Micah sighed. Now this image that meant so much to her would be revealed as imaginary. Perhaps it recalled to her a scene from a vampire movie.
“It wasn’t a coffin, Joan,” said Eamon. “It was a closet.”
Rob picked a bit of lint from his sweater and brushed the cloth with his fingers. “Joan may exaggerate, but I didn’t like that closet business either.”
“I do not exaggerate,” said Joan. “I distinctly remember a coffin.”
“Why would there be a coffin at the school?” said Rob.
Micah prayed the family talk would end. By his presence he drew Joan into strange variations on motherly behavior. She’d found herself a good situation and he didn’t want to be the one that messed it up.
“It felt like a coffin,” Eamon said helpfully.
The phone rang. Joan picked it up, went to a corner, talked while idly spinning a globe. Then she came back smiling her beautiful smile.
“I’m going to be in a movie,” she said.
They celebrated with brandy, happy for Joan and happier still that the family meeting was done.
The Powder Horn would actually be her second film. She had played a hand-wringing wife in Shovel Boys, about boyhood friends who team up later in life to rig a race at Santa Anita. “What do you even know about horse racing?” had been her big line.
Detention amounted to sitting in study hall and doing homework with other kids in detention. It was no big thing, except that much of the homework baffled Micah, which was another problem.
Charlotte Mann picked him up on the last night. She wore camo riding pants and a thermal shirt of quilted purple. She hugged him, her legs taut as bowstrings. California girls must hug twenty times a day, Micah thought, their lives teeming with affection.
“I told Joan I’d come get you,” she said. “I owe her a favor.”
“For what?”
“She helped me one time I was passed out in the park.”
They walked to the parking lot and got into her yellow pickup. She put it in reverse, peering up at the school.
“This place is like a prison,” she said.
Micah rolled down the window and rested his arm on the door. “They forced me to play volleyball.”
“Where did you go before?”
“Boris-Chesley Regional Middle School. We had an English teacher one time, he said, ‘Cauliflower is just garbage with a college education.’”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Cabbage with a college education.”
“You should take me there sometime.”
“They wouldn’t believe you.”
“That’s all right,” said Charlotte. “I don’t believe myself sometimes. You want to go straight home?”
“Not especially.”
So they drove out to Topanga to see her filly, which they didn’t get to see last time because they got high and looked at helicopters.
The horse was a Dutch warmblood named Pallas Athena. In her stall Charlotte showed Micah how scratching Pallas at the base of her mane made her lift her head and move her lips strangely, as if talking to herself.
Charlotte tacked the horse with saddle and bridle, easing the bit in with cupped hand. She put on a plastic helmet and mounted up.
Micah had ridden three times, got thrown once. He found horses hard to read. Their thoughts might go back to the beginning of horse time, or they might be afraid of a candy wrapper on the ground. He was wary of anything that big that bit.
Charlotte rode the horse at a walk to the ring. Micah opened the gate and let the shadow of the horse pass by and latched the gate and stood leaning on the fence with his arms over the rail. The sun was down. Lights shone around the ring.
Horse and rider walked and trotted for a while and then picked up a canter. Charlotte pushed Pallas forward with her hips. Mane and braids rose and fell in rhythm. Pallas’s hooves drummed on sand and her breath went huff, huff, huff.
Charlotte began to work the horse in figure eights the length of the ring, taking jumps with planters of flowers or small trees on either side. She leaned long over Pallas’s neck, the horse rising as if levitated by her hands. They seemed to calculate together the steps before a jump, and when they landed their heads turned as one toward the next gate.
Then two kids came down from the barns, calling Charlotte’s name in singsong voices. She brought Pallas down to a walk and spoke to the boys from the saddle as she went along the railing.
The boys
turned to look at Micah, and he glanced away at the tall and shaggy trees across the ring. They came over and introduced themselves as Doc and Dalton.
“Are you going to be a doctor?” Micah said.
Doc shook his head. He had a narrow face and luminous green eyes and was a little scary in appearance, like he had handguns at home.
“I used to wear scrubs,” he said. “Somebody said I looked like a doctor, so that’s how it got started.”
“I thought you started it,” said Dalton.
“What do you know?”
“That you gave yourself a nickname, which is a sad and lonely thing to do. Don’t you agree, Micah?”
Pallas Athena was trotting formally, neck arched, nose down, knees high. “I wouldn’t be the one to say,” said Micah.
Dalton carried a red and white cooler, from which he took bottles of beer and passed them around. He had long hair, a red beret, a wide and placid smile.
“So why are you here?” he said. “Do you have designs on Charlotte?”
“I’m watching.”
“How hard it is to wait for one’s heart’s desire,” said Doc.
“Who said that?” said Dalton.
“I think it was Babar.”
Dalton collared Micah’s head with his arm. “Here’s the thing about Charlotte. You might even want to write it down. Everyone wants her, but no one can have her.”
“Even when she’s drunk,” said Doc.
“That’s when she’s most like an angel.”
“A falling angel.”
“Just be quiet,” said Micah.
“Are you Irish?”
“No.”
“You sound it.”
When Charlotte had finished her ride she brought Pallas to the gate and the boys swung it open.
“We were talking about you,” said Dalton.
“Who cares,” she said.
“Trying to get your friend to open up.”
“He’s like a clam in a clamshell,” said Doc.
“No one can talk when you’re talking.”
“That is kind of true. Listen, we’re not going to wait around for the tedious unshackling of the horse. And you’re coming, now, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on,” said Doc. “We said you were.”
“There is anticipation,” said Dalton. “You too, Irish. It’s a party.”
Charlotte walked the horse around the barn and into an alley between stalls. She dismounted, loosened the girth and ran the stirrups up, exchanged the bridle for a green halter.
“Don’t mind them,” she said.
“I don’t.”
“Why’d they call you ‘Irish’?”
“My voice, I guess.”
“They’re just thoughtless boys,” said Charlotte. “One time we were at somebody’s house, and a dog got into Dalton’s backpack and ate some pills. So everyone’s going, ‘Oh no, this is terrible, should we call the vet?’ And Dalton said, ‘No, it’s fine. They’re for dogs.’”
From the horse farm Charlotte and Micah went to a party on the roof of a loft building in the Toy District. They rode up in an elevator and, holding hands, made their way down a sandalwood walk lined with path lights and waxy plants.
There were many people, a luminous blue swimming pool, and a bar. The skyscrapers of Los Angeles bent overhead in bands of light. Doc and Dalton dangled their legs from atop a brick shed with silver ducts climbing the walls. Bartenders in white shirts and bow ties poured drinks from silver pitchers.
That Micah should not be here, that he was too young, that he knew no one—all these things did not matter. With Charlotte by his side, the world opened as he’d always dreamed it might.
They got drinks and settled into a sunken space with cushioned benches. The drinks had salt crusted on the rims.
“What are these?” said Micah.
“Margaritas,” said Charlotte.
After two drinks Micah could admit to himself that he loved Charlotte. She was not beholden to him but seemed to find something that interested her, God knows what, for he considered himself unaccomplished and lacking in basic skills.
She drank fast, watching the party, the people gathering and drifting apart in the darkness. Facets of the glass magnified her upper lip. She got half a glass ahead of him and they lost track of who was leading, who chasing. At some point she went away and didn’t come back for a long time.
Micah thought it would be a good time for a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but many people were doing so, and it seemed worth trying.
“Excuse me, I wonder if I could have a cigarette,” he said to a woman in a long red shirt that look soft and touchable.
She gave him a cigarette and lent him her lighter. He had trouble with it, so she took it back and lit his cigarette.
“Nice party,” he said.
He had decided recently that everything he said sounded artificial, and he would not fight it. He was acting. The woman gave him a dubious smile while putting the lighter away. She wore green velvet shoes of elvish design.
“How old are you?” she said.
“I will be fifteen in November.”
“What the hell, we’ve got fifteen-year-olds here?” she said.
Micah nudged her with his shoulder. “In November I’ll be fifteen. And how old are you?”
“You’re rather bold.”
“You asked me.”
She looked at him as if half wishing someone would come and take him away, but then, half not. “I did, didn’t I. I’m thirty-two.”
“That must be a nice age. I think I would like to be thirty-two.”
“And why is that?”
“If you want to go somewhere, you just get in the car and go. That in itself is a tremendous advantage. You have your own place. I’m assuming that you do. I don’t know that.”
“You’re at it.”
“Well, okay. That’s what I’m talking about. And you can put pictures on the wall, and when your friends come over, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I like what you’re doing with this place.’”
Later he was talking to Charlotte again. They were on top of the air-conditioning shed, and Doc and Dalton were gone.
Charlotte said she and her mother were out of money and putting Pallas’s expenses on a credit card. They would have to sell her. Charlotte’s mother was a flight attendant who flew from Burbank to Hawaii and back three times a week.
“I can give her up,” said Charlotte. “We have to. I know that. But that will be a hard day. We went to Del Mar. We went to City of Industry. We went to Indio, Micah.”
“How did you learn to ride so well?”
“I made my legs strong,” she said. “I don’t know what she’ll think when I don’t come around anymore.”
Micah put his arm around her and she leaned her head on his shoulder. “I’m never having a credit card,” he said.
“It’s too much,” she said. “The vet, the board, the feed, the farrier.”
She slid away and lay down with her head on Micah’s thigh. “Pallas Athena was almost Horse of the Year,” she said quietly. “This is comfortable.”
After a little while Micah said her name but she was asleep. He laced his fingers behind his head and lay back on the roof of the shed. “I’m up on a tightrope,” someone sang below. Micah wondered what Tiny would say about a girl who was sad because she might have to give up her jumping horse. He might not make fun of her if he knew she was Micah’s friend. He wondered where Indio was. The way Charlotte said the name, it sounded like an enchanted city with streets paved in jade.
The woman in the long red shirt woke them up. The party was over, the night cold. Charlotte sat up and rested her head in her hands with closed eyes. The leg
she’d used for a pillow was dead to feeling and Micah hobbled around until he was ready to go.
Five or six times a year Joan visited a fortune-teller named Dijkstra in the desert. He lived on a long gravel road off Old Woman Springs Road north of Twentynine Palms Highway in the isolated beauty of that country.
Much as she loved the Joshua trees and the high desert, Joan could not have lived alone here as Dijkstra did. The darkness would close around her—she would be out of her mind in a matter of days.
Dijkstra’s house was three stories tall and the paint had been peeled away by the wind. Dusty velvet curtains moved in the windows, ceramics lined the sills. The place looked like something from an old photograph but for a satellite dish off to the side.
Dijkstra made pottery that he sold in the towns along the highway, and he used the potter’s wheel for divination as well.
He met her at the front door. In his seventies, he wore a pith helmet, khaki shirt and shorts, light green socks up to his knees, and battered desert boots.
Years ago he’d been a marine researcher in Monterey, but one day he got the bends while diving and in the recompression chamber received a vision of living in the desert.
They went into the kitchen and sat on opposite sides of the potter’s wheel. Beside the wheel a cactus grew in a terra-cotta pot, and the Palm Springs Yellow Pages lay on the wooden floor.
“How are things?” said Dijkstra.
“I got a role in a movie, and my son came to live with us,” said Joan. “He’s fourteen and doing pretty well, I think—he’s made friends, got on the volleyball team at school. The other night he didn’t come home till three in the morning.”
“You must have been worried.”
“I was asleep. He came in and woke me up. I can’t stay mad at him. I can’t even get mad at him. I was out of his life for a long time.”
“This happens with families.”
Dijkstra picked up the Yellow Pages and handed them to Joan. She let the book fall open in her lap. She tore out a page and placed it on the wheel for the turning of clay.
Dijkstra secured the page with Scotch tape. “Think back to the night your son woke you up. The transition from sleep is a time when insight is strongest.”
