Nightmares And Dreamscapes Part 37

The old man sat in the barn doorway in the smell of apples, rocking, wanting not to want to smoke not because of the doctor but because now his heart fluttered all the time. He watched that stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h Osgood do a fast count with his head against the tree and watched him turn and catch Clivey out and laugh, his mouth open wide enough so the old man could observe how his teeth were already rotting in his head and imagine how the kid's breath would smell: like the back part of a wet cellar. Although the whelp couldn't be more than eleven.

The old man watched Osgood laugh his gaspy hee-hawing laugh. The boy laughed so hard he finally had to lean over and put his hands on his knees, so hard the others came out of their hiding places to see what it was, and when they saw, they laughed, too. They all stood around in the morning sun and laughed at his grandson and the old man forgot how much he wanted a smoke. What he wanted now was to see if Clivey would cry. He found he was more curious on this subject than on any other which had engaged his attention over the last several months, including the subject of his own fast-approaching death.

'Caught im out!' the others chanted, laughing. 'Caught im, caught im, caught im out!'

Clivey only stood there, stolid as a chunk of rock in a farmer's field, waiting for the razzing to be over so the game could go on with him as It and the embarra.s.sment beginning to be behind him. After a while the game did. Then it was noontime and the other boys went home. The old man watched to see how much lunch Clivey would eat. It turned out to be not much. Clivey just poked at his potatoes, made his corn and his peas change places, and fed little sc.r.a.ps of meat to the dog under the table. The old man watched it all, interested, answering when the others talked to him, but not much listening to their mouths or his own. His mind was on the boy.

When the pie was done he wanted what he couldn't have and so excused himself to take a nap and paused halfway up the stairs because now his heart felt like a fan with a playing card caught in it, and he stood there with his head down, waiting to see if this was the final one (there had been two before), and when it wasn't he went on up and took off all but his underdrawers and lay down on the crisp white coverlet. A rectangular label of sun lay across his scrawny chest; it was cut into three sections by dark strokes of shadow that were the window laths. He put his hands behind his head, drowsing and listening. After awhile he thought he heard the boy crying in his own room down the hall and he thought, I ought to take care of that.

He slept an hour, and when he got up the woman was asleep beside him in her slip, and so he took his clothes out into the hallway to dress before going down.

Clivey was outside, sitting on the steps and throwing a stick for the dog, who fetched with more will than the boy tossed. The dog (he had no name, he was just the dog) seemed puzzled.

The old man hailed the boy and told him to take a walk up to the orchard with him and so the boy did.

The old man's name was George Banning. He was the boy's grandfather, and it was from him that Clive Banning learned the importance of having a pretty pony in your life. You had to have one of those even if you were allergic to horses, because without a pretty pony you could have six clocks in every room and so many watches on each wrist you couldn't raise your arms and still you'd never know what time it was.

The instruction (George Banning didn't give advice, only instruction) had taken place on the day Clive got caught out by that idiot Alden Osgood while playing hide and seek. By that time Clive's Grandpa seemed older than G.o.d, which probably meant about seventy-two. The Banning homestead was in the town of Troy, New York, which in 1961 was just starting to learn how not to be the country.

The instruction took place in the West Orchard.

His grandfather was standing coatless in a blizzard that was not late snow but early apple blossoms in a high warm wind; Grandpa was wearing his bib.a.l.l.s with a collared s.h.i.+rt beneath, a s.h.i.+rt that looked as if it had once been green but was now faded to a no-account olive by dozens or hundreds of was.h.i.+ngs, and beneath the collared s.h.i.+rt was the round top of a cotton unders.h.i.+rt (the kind with the straps, of course; in those days they made the other kind, but a man like Grandpa would be a strap-unders.h.i.+rt man to the end), and this s.h.i.+rt was clean but the color of old ivory instead of its original white because Gramma's motto, often spoken and st.i.tched into a living-room sampler as well (presumably for those rare times when the woman herself was not there to dispense what wisdom needed dispensing), was this: Use it, use it, never lose it! Break it in! Wear it out! Keep it safe or do without! There were apple blossoms caught in Grandpa's long hair, still only half white, and the boy thought the old man was beautiful in the trees.

He had seen Grandpa watching them as they went about their game earlier that day. Watching him. Grandpa had been sitting in his rocker at the entrance to the barn. One of the boards squeaked every time Grandpa rocked, and there he sat, a book face down in his lap, his hands folded atop it, there he sat rocking amid the dim sweet smells of hay and apples and cider. It was this game that caused his Grandpa to offer Clive Banning instruction on the subject of time, and how it was slippery, and how a man had to fight to hold it in his hands almost all the while; the pony was pretty but it had a wicked heart. If you didn't keep a close eye on that pretty pony, it would jump the fence and be out of sight and you'd have to take your rope bridle and go after it, a trip that was apt to tire you all the way to your bones even if it was short.

Grandpa began his instruction by saying that Alden Osgood had cheated. He was supposed to hide his eyes against the dead elm by the chopping block for a full minute, which he would time by counting to sixty. This would give Clivey (so Grandpa had always called him, and he hadn't minded, although he was thinking he would have to fight any boy or man who called him that once he was past the age of twelve) and the others a fair chance to hide. Clivey had still been looking for a place when Alden Osgood got to sixty, turned around, and 'caught him out' as he was trying to squirm - as a last resort - behind a pile of apple crates stacked haphazardly beside the press-shed, where the machine that squeezed the blems into cider bulked in the dimness like an engine of torture.

'It wasn't fair,' Grandpa said. 'You didn't do no b.i.t.c.hing about it and that was right, because a natural man never does no b.i.t.c.hing - they call it b.i.t.c.hing because it ain't for men or even boys smart enough to know better and brave enough to do better. Just the same, it wasn't fair. I can say that now because you didn't say it then.'

Apple blossom blowing in the old man's hair. One caught in the dent below his Adam's apple, caught there like a jewel that was pretty simply because some things were and couldn't help it, but was gorgeous because it lacked duration: in a few seconds it would be brushed impatiently away and left on the ground where it would become perfectly anonymous among its fellows.

He told Grandpa that Alden had counted to sixty, just as the rules said he must, not knowing why he wanted to argue the side of the boy who had, after all, shamed him by not even having to find him but had simply 'caught him out'. Alden - who sometimes slapped like a girl when he was mad -had needed only to turn, see him, then casually put his hand on the dead tree and chant the mystic and unquestioned formula of elimination: 'I-see-Clive, my gool-one-two-three!'

Maybe he only argued Alden's case so he and Grandpa wouldn't have to go back yet, so he could watch Grandpa's steel hair blow back in the blizzard of blossoms, so he could admire that transient jewel caught in the hollow at the base of the old man's throat.

'Sure he did,' Grandpa said. 'Sure he counted to sixty. Now looka this, Clivey! And let it mark your mind!'

There were real pockets in Grandpa's overalls - five of them, counting the kangaroo-like pouch in the bib - but beside the hip pockets there were things that only looked like pockets. They were really slits, made so you could reach through to the pants you were wearing underneath (in those days the idea of not wearing pants underneath would not have seemed scandalous, only laughable - the behavior of someone who was A Little Soft in the Attic). Grandpa was wearing the inevitable pair of blue-jeans beneath his overalls. 'Jew-pants', he called them matter-of-factly, a term that all the farmers Clive knew used. Levi's were either 'Jew-pants' or simply 'Joozers'.

He reached through the righthand slit in his overalls, fumbled at some length in the righthand pocket of the denim trousers beneath, and at last brought out a tarnished silver pocket watch which he put in the boy's unprepared hand. The weight of the watch was so sudden, the ticking beneath its metal skin so lively, that he came within an ace of dropping it.

He looked at Grandpa, his brown eyes wide.

'You ain't gonna drop it,' said Grandpa, 'and if you did you probably wouldn't stop it - it's been dropped before, even stepped on once in some d.a.m.ned beerjoint in Utica, and it never stopped yet. And if it did stop, it'd be your loss, not mine, because it's yours now.'

'What?' He wanted to say he didn't understand but couldn't finish because he thought he did.

'I'm giving it to you,' Grandpa said. 'Always meant to, but I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'm gonna put it in my will. It'd cost more for the d.a.m.n law-rights than that thing's worth.'

'Grandpa . . . I . . . Jesus!'

Grandpa laughed until he started to cough. He doubled over, coughing and laughing, his face going a plum-purple color. Some of Clive's joy and wonder were lost in concern. He remembered his mother telling him again and again on their way up here that he was not to tire Grandpa out because Grandpa was ill. When Clive had asked him two days before - cautiously -what had made him sick, George Banning had replied with a single mysterious word. It was only on the night after their talk in the orchard, as he was drifting off to sleep with the pocket watch curled warmly in his hand, that Clive realized the word Grandpa had spoken, 'ticka', referred not to some dangerous poison-bug but to Grandpa's heart. The doctor had made him stop smoking and said if he tried anything too strenuous, like shovelling snow or trying to hoe the garden, he would end up playing a harp. The boy knew well enough what that meant.

'You ain't gonna drop it, and if you did you probably wouldn't stop it,' Grandpa had said, but the boy was old enough to know that it would stop someday, that people and watches both stopped someday.

He stood, waiting to see if Grandpa was going to stop, but at last his coughing and laughter eased off and he stood up straight again, wiping a runner of snot from his nose with his left hand and then flicking it casually away.

'You're a G.o.ddam funny kid, Clivey,' he said. 'I got sixteen grandchildren, and there's only two of em that I think is gonna amount to ducks.h.i.+t, and you ain't one of em - although you're on the runner-up list - but you're the only one that can make me laugh until my b.a.l.l.s ache.'

'I didn't mean to make your b.a.l.l.s ache,' Clive said, and that sent Grandpa off again, although this time he was able to get his laughter under control before the coughing started.

'Loop the chain over your knuckles a time or two, if it'll make you feel easier,' Grandpa said. 'If you feel easier in your mind, maybe you'll pay attention a little better.'

He did as Grandpa suggested and did feel better. He looked at the watch in his palm, mesmerized by the lively feel of its mechanism, by the sunstar on its crystal, by the second hand which turned in its own small circle. But it was still Grandpa's watch: of this he was quite sure. Then, as he had this thought, an apple blossom went skating across the crystal and was gone. This happened in less than a second, but it changed everything. After the blossom, it was true. It was his watch, forever . . . or at least until one of them stopped running and couldn't be fixed and had to be thrown away.

'All right,' Grandpa said. 'You see the second hand going around all by its ownself ?'

'Yes.'

'Good. Keep your eye on it. When it gets up to the top, you holler 'Go!' at me. Understand.'

He nodded.

'Okay. When it gets there, you just let her go, Gallagher.'

Clive frowned down at the watch with the deep seriousness of a mathematician approaching the conclusion of a crucial equation. He already understood what Grandpa wanted to show him, and he was bright enough to understand that proof was only a formality . . . but one that must be shown just the same. It was a rite, like not being able to leave church until the minister said the benediction, even though all the songs on the board had been sung and the sermon was finally, mercifully, over.

When the second hand stood straight up at twelve on its own separate little dial (Mine, he marvelled. That's my second hand on my watch), he hollered 'Go!' at the top of his lungs, and Grandpa began to count with the greasy speed of an auctioneer selling dubious goods, trying to get rid of them at top prices before his hypnotized audience can wake up and realize it has not just been bilked but outraged.

'One-two-thre', fo'-fi'-six, sev'-ay-nine, ten-'leven,' Grandpa chanted, the gnarly blotches on his cheeks and the big purple veins on his nose beginning to stand out again in his excitement. He finished in a triumphant hoa.r.s.e shout: 'Fifjynine-sizzy!' As he said this last, the second hand of the pocket watch was just crossing the seventh dark line, marking thirty-five seconds.

'How long?' Grandpa asked, panting and rubbing at his chest with his hand.

Clive told him, looking at Grandpa with undisguised admiration. That was fast counting, Grandpa!'

Grandpa flapped the hand with which he had been rubbing his chest in a get out! gesture, but he smiled. 'Didn't count half as fast as that Osgood brat,' he said. 'I heard that little sucker count twenty-seven, and the next thing I knew he was up somewhere around forty-one.' Grandpa fixed him with his eyes, a dark autumnal blue utterly unlike Clive's Mediterranean brown ones. He put one of his gnarled hands on Clive's shoulder. It was knotted with arthritis, but the boy felt the live strength that still slumbered in there like wires in a machine that's turned off. 'You remember one thing, Clivey. Time ain't got nothing to do with how fast you can count.'

Clive nodded slowly. He didn't understand completely, but he thought he felt the shadow of understanding, like the shadow of a cloud pa.s.sing slowly across a meadow.

Grandpa reached into the pouch pocket in the bib of his overalls and brought out a pack of unfiltered Kools. Apparently Grandpa hadn't stopped smoking after all, d.i.c.ky heart or not. Still, it seemed to the boy as if maybe Grandpa had cut down drastically, because that pack of Kools looked as if it had done hard travelling; it had escaped the fate of most packs, torn open after breakfast and tossed empty into the gutter at three, a crushed ball. Grandpa rummaged, brought out a cigarette almost as bent as the pack from which it had come. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth, replaced the pack in the bib, and brought out a wooden match which he snapped alight with one practiced flick of his old man's thick yellow thumbnail. Clive watched with the fascination of a child who watches a magician produce a fan of cards from an empty hand. The flick of the thumb was always interesting, but the amazing thing was that the match did not go out. In spite of the high wind which steadily combed this hilltop, Grandpa cupped the small flame with an a.s.surance that could afford to be leisurely. He lit his smoke and then was actually shaking the match, as if he had negated the wind by simple will. Clive looked closely at the cigarette and saw no black scorch-marks trailing up the white paper from the glowing tip. His eyes had not deceived him, then; Grandpa had taken his light from a straight flame, like a man who takes a light from a candle in a closed room. It was sorcery, pure and simple.

Grandpa removed the cigarette from his mouth and put his thumb and forefinger in, looking for a moment like a man who means to whistle for his dog, or a taxi. Instead he brought them out again wet and pressed them against the match-head. The boy needed no explanation; the only thing Grandpa and his friends out there in the country feared more than sudden freezes was fire. Grandpa dropped the match and ground it under his boot. When he looked up and saw the boy staring at him, he misinterpreted the subject of his fascination.

'I know I ain't supposed to,' he said, 'and I ain't gonna tell you to lie or even ask you to. If Gramma asks you right out - 'Was that old man smokin up there?' - you go on and tell her I was. I don't need a kid to lie for me.' He didn't smile, but his shrewd, side-slanted eyes made Clive feel part of a conspiracy that seemed amiable and sinless. 'But then, if Gramma asks me right out if you took the Savior's name in vain when I gave you that watch, I'd look her right in the eye and say, 'No'm. He said thanks as pretty as could be and that was all he done.''

Now Clive was the one to burst out laughing, and the old man grinned, revealing his few remaining teeth.

'Course, if she don't ask neither of us nothing, I guess we don't have to volunteer nothing . . . do we, Clivey? Does that seem fair?'

'Yes,' Clive said. He wasn't a good-looking boy and never became the sort of man women exactly consider handsome, but as he smiled in complete understanding of the old man's rhetorical sleight-of-hand, he was beautiful, at least for a moment, and Grandpa ruffled his hair.

'You're a good boy, Clivey.'

'Thank you, sir.'

His grandfather stood ruminating, his Kool burning with unnatural rapidity (the tobacco was dry, and although he puffed seldom, the greedy hilltop wind smoked the cigarette ceaselessly), and Clive thought the old man had said everything he had to say. He was sorry. He loved to hear Grandpa talk. The things Grandpa said continually amazed him because they almost always made sense. His mother, his father, Gramma, Uncle Don - they all said things he was supposed to take to heart, but they rarely made sense. Handsome is as handsome does, for instance - what did that mean?

He had a sister, Patty, who was six years older. He understood her but didn't care because most of what she said out loud was stupid. The rest was communicated in vicious little pinches. The worst of these she called 'Peter-Pinches'. She told him that, if he ever told about the Peter-Pinches, she'd murdalize him. Patty was always talking about people she was going to murdalize; she had a hit-list to rival Murder, Incorporated. It made you want to laugh . . . until you took a good look at her thin, grim face, that was. When you saw what was really there, you lost your desire to laugh. Clive did, anyway. And you had to be careful of her - she sounded stupid but was far from it.

'I don't want dates,' she had announced at supper one night not long ago - around the time that boys traditionally invited girls to either the Spring Dance at the country club or to the prom at the high school, in fact. 'I don't care if I never have a date.' And she had looked at them with wide-eyed defiance from above her plate of steaming meat and vegetables.

Clive had looked at the still and somehow spooky face of his sister peering through the steam and remembered something that had happened two months before, when there had still been snow on the ground. He'd come along the upstairs hallway in his bare feet so she hadn't heard him, and he had looked into the bathroom because the door was open - he hadn't had the slightest idea old Pukey Patty was in there. What he saw had frozen him dead in his tracks. If she had turned her head even a h'ttle to the left, she would have seen him.

She didn't, though. She had been too preoccupied with her inspection of herself. She had been standing there as naked as one of the slinky babes in Foxy Brannigan's well-thumbed Model Delights, her bath towel lying puddled around her feet. She was no slinky babe, though - Clive knew it, and she knew it too, from the look of her. Tears were rolling down her pimply cheeks. They were big tears and there were a lot of them, but she never made a sound. At last Clive had regained enough of his sense of self-preservation to tiptoe away, and he had never said a word to anyone about the incident, least of all to Patty herself. He didn't know if she would have been mad about her kid brother seeing her barea.s.s, but he had a good idea about how she'd react to the idea that he had seen her bawling (even that weird boohoo-less bawling she'd been doing); for that she would have murdalized him for sure.

'I think boys are dumb and most of them smell like gone-over cottage cheese,' she had said on that spring night. She stuck a forkful of roast beef into her mouth. 'If a boy ever asked me for a date, I'd laugh.'

'You'll change your mind about that, Punkin,' Dad said, chewing his roast beef and not looking up from the book beside his plate. Mom had given up trying to get him to stop reading at the table.

'No I won't,' Patty said, and Clive knew she wouldn't. When Patty said things she most always meant them. That was something Clive understood about her that his parents didn't. He wasn't sure she meant it - you know, really - about murdalizing him if he tattled on her about the Peter-Pinches, but he wasn't going to take chances. Even if she didn't actually kill him, she would find some spectacular yet untraceable way to hurt him, that was for sure. Besides, sometimes the Peter-Pinches weren't really pinches at all; they were more like the way Patty sometimes stroked her little half-breed poodle, Brandy, and he knew she was doing it because he was bad, but he had a secret he certainly did not intend to tell her: these other Peter-Pinches, the stroking ones, actually felt sort of good.

When Grandpa opened his mouth, Give thought he would say Time to go back t'the house, Clivey, but instead he told the boy: 'I'm going to tell you something, if you want to hear it. Won't take long. You want to hear it, Clivey?'

'Yes, sir!'

'You really do, don't you?' Grandpa said in a bemused voice.

'Yes, sir.'

'Sometimes I think I ought to steal you from your folks and keep you around forever. Sometimes I think if I had you on hand most the time, I'd live forever, G.o.ddam bad heart or not.'

He removed the Kool from his mouth, dropped it to the ground, and stamped it to death under one workboot, revolving the heel back and forth and then covering the b.u.t.t with the dirt his heel had loosened just to be sure. When he looked up at Clive again, it was with eyes that gleamed.

'I stopped giving advice a long time ago,' he said. 'Thirty years or more, I guess. I stopped when I noticed only fools gave it and only fools took it. Instruction, now . . . instruction's a different thing. A smart man will give a little from time to time, and a smart man - or boy - will take a little from time to time.'

Clive said nothing, only looked at his grandfather with close concentration.

'There are three kinds of time,' Grandpa said, 'and while all of them are real, only one is really real. You want to make sure you know them all and can always tell them apart. Do you understand that?'

'No, sir.'

Grandpa nodded. 'If you'd said "Yes, sir", I would have swatted the seat of your pants and taken you back to the farm.'

Clive looked down at the smeared results of Grandpa's cigarette, face hot with blush, proud.

'When a fellow is only a sprat, like you, time is long. Take a for-instance. When May comes, you think school's never gonna let out, that mid-month June will just never come. Ain't that pretty much how it is?'

Clive thought of that last weight of drowsy, chalk-smelling schooldays and nodded.

'And when mid-month June finally does come and Teacher gives you your report card and lets you go free, it seems like school's never gonna let back in. Ain't that pretty much right, too?'

Clive thought of that highway of days and nodded so hard his neck actually popped. 'Boy, it sure is! I mean, sir.' Those days. All those days, stretching away across the plains of June and July and over the unimaginable horizon of August. So many days, so many dawns, so many noon lunches of bologna sandwiches with mustard and raw chopped onion and giant gla.s.ses of milk while his mom sat silently in the living room with her bottomless gla.s.s of wine, watching the soap operas on the TV; so many depthless afternoons when sweat grew in the short hedge of your crewcut and then ran down your cheeks, afternoons when the moment you noticed that your blob of a shadow had grown a boy always came as a surprise, so many endless twilights with the sweat cooling away to nothing but a smell like aftershave on your cheeks and forearms while you played tag or red rover or capture the flag; sounds of bike chains, slots clicking neatly into oiled cogs, smells of honeysuckle and cooling asphalt and green leaves and cut gra.s.s, sounds of the slap of baseball cards being laid out on some kid's front walk, solemn and portentous trades which changed the faces of both leagues, councils that went on in the slow shady axial tilt of a July evening until the call of 'Cliiiiive! Sup-per!' put an end to that business; and that call was always as expected and yet as shocking as the noon blob that had, by three or so, become a black boy-shape running in the street beside him - and that boy stapled to his heels had actually become a man by five or so, albeit an extraordinarily skinny one; velvet evenings of television, the occasional rattle of pages as his father read one book after another (he never tired of them; words, words, words, his dad never tired of them, and Clive had meant once to ask him how that could be but lost his nerve), his mother getting up once in a while and going into the kitchen, followed only by his sister's worried, angry eyes and his own simply curious ones; the soft clink as Mom replenished the gla.s.s which was never empty after eleven in the morning or so (and their father never looking up from his book, although Clive had an idea he heard it all and knew it all, although Patty had called him a stupid liar and had given him a Peter-Pinch that hurt all day long the one time he had dared to tell her that); the sound of mosquitoes whining against the screens, always so much louder, it seemed, after the sun had gone down; the decree of bedtime, so unfair and unavoidable, all arguments lost before they were begun; his father's brusque kiss, smelling of tobacco, his mother's softer, both sugary and sour with the smell of wine; the sound of his sister telling Mom she ought to go to bed after Dad had gone down to the corner tavern to drink a couple of beers and watch the wrestling matches on the television over the bar; his mom telling Patty to mind her own p's and q's, a conversational pattern that was upsetting in its content but somehow soothing in its predictability; fireflies gleaming in the gloom; a car horn, distant, as he drifted into sleep's long dark channel; then the next day, which seemed the same but wasn't, not quite. Summer. That was summer. And it did not just seem long; it was long.

Grandpa, watching him closely, seemed to read all this in the boy's brown eyes, to know all the words for all the things the boy never could have found a way to tell, things that could not escape him because his mouth could never articulate the language of his heart. And then Grandpa nodded, as if he wanted to confirm this very idea, and suddenly Clive was terrified that Grandpa would spoil everything by saying something soft and soothing and meaningless. Sure, he would say. I know all about it, Clivey - I was a boy once myself, you know.

But he didn't, and Clive understood he had been stupid to fear the possibility even for a moment. Worse, faithless. Because this was Grandpa, and Grandpa never talked meaningless s.h.i.+t like other grownups so often did. Instead of speaking softly and soothingly, he spoke with the dry finality of a judge p.r.o.nouncing a harsh sentence for a capital crime.

'All that changes,' he said.

Clive looked up at him, a little apprehensive at the idea but very much liking the wild way the old man's hair blew around his head. He thought Grandpa looked the way the church-preacher would if he really knew the truth about G.o.d instead of just guessing. 'Time does? Are you sure?'

'Yes. When you get to a certain age - right around fourteen, I think, mostly when the two halves of the human race go on and make the mistake of discovering each other - time starts to be real time. The real real time. It ain't long like it was or short like it gets to be. It does, you know. But for most of your life it's mostly the real real time. You know what that is, Clivey?'

'No, sir.'

'Then take instruction: real real time is your pretty pony. Say it: "My pretty pony'."

Feeling dumb, wondering if Grandpa was having him on for some reason ('trying to get your goat', as Uncle Don would have said), Clive said what he wanted him to say. He waited for the old man to laugh, to say, 'Boy, I really got your goat that time, Clivey!' But Grandpa only nodded matter-of-factly, in a way that took all the dumb out of it.

'My pretty pony. Those are three words you'll never forget if you're as smart's I think y'might be. My pretty pony. That's the truth of time.'

Grandpa took the battered package of cigarettes from his pocket, considered it briefly, then put it back.

'From the time you're fourteen until, oh, I'm gonna say until you're sixty or so, most time is my-pretty-pony time. There's times when it goes back to being long like it was when you were a kid, but those ain't good times any more. You'd give your soul for some my-pretty-pony time then, let alone short time. If you was to tell Gramma what I'm gonna tell you now, Clivey, she'd call me a blasphemer and wouldn't bring me no hot-water bottle for a week. Maybe two.'

Nevertheless, Grandpa's lips twisted into a bitter and unregenerate jag.

'If I was to tell it to that Reverend Chadband the wife sets such a store by, he'd trot out the one about how we see through a gla.s.s darkly or that old chestnut about how G.o.d works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, but I'll tell you what I think, Clivey. I think G.o.d must be one mean old son of a b.i.t.c.h to make the only long times a grownup has the times when he is hurt bad, like with crushed ribs or stove-in guts or something like that. A G.o.d like that, why, He makes a kid who sticks pins in flies look like that saint who was so good the birds'd come and roost all over him. I think about how long them weeks were after the hay-rick turned turtle on me, and I wonder why G.o.d wanted to make living, thinking creatures in the first place. If He needed something to p.i.s.s on, why couldn't He have just made Him some sumac bushes and left it at that? Or what about poor old Johnny Brinkmayer, who went so slow with the bone cancer last year.'

Clive hardly heard that last, although he remembered later, on their ride back to the city, that Johnny Brinkmayer, who had owned what his mother and father called the grocery store and what Grandpa and Gramma still both called 'the mercantile', was the only man Grandpa went to see of an evening . . . and the only man who came to see Grandpa of an evening. On the long ride back to town it came to Clive that Johnny Brinkmayer, whom he remembered only vaguely as a man with a very large wart on his forehead and a way of hitching at his crotch as he walked, must have been Grandpa's only real friend. The fact that Gramma tended to turn up her nose when Brinkmayer's name was mentioned - and often complained about the way the man had smelled - only reinforced the idea.

Such reflections could not have come now, anyway, because Clive was waiting breathlessly for G.o.d to strike Grandpa dead. Surely He would for such a blasphemy. No one could get away with calling G.o.d the Father Almighty a mean old son of a b.i.t.c.h, or suggest that the Being who made the universe was no better than a mean third-grader who got his kicks sticking pins into flies.

Clive took a nervous step away from the figure in the bib overalls, who had ceased being his Grandpa and had become instead a lightning rod. Any moment now a bolt would come out of the blue sky, sizzling his Grandpa dead as doggy-doo and turning the apple trees into torches that would signal the old man's d.a.m.nation to all and sundry. The apple blossoms blowing through the air would be turned into something like the bits of char that went floating up from the incinerator in their backyard when his father burned the week's worth of newspapers on late Sunday afternoons.

Nothing happened.

Clive waited, his dreadful surety eroding, and when a robin twittered cheerily somewhere nearby (as if Grandpa had said nothing more awful than kiss-my-foot), he knew no lightning was going to come. And at the moment of that realization, a small but fundamental change took place in Clive Banning's life. His Grandpa's unpunished blasphemy would not make him a criminal or a bad boy, or even such a small thing as a 'problem child' (a phrase that had only recently come into vogue). Yet the true north of belief s.h.i.+fted just a little in Clive's mind, and the way he listened to his Grandpa changed at once. Before, he had listened to the old man. Now he attended him.

Times when you're hurt go on forever, seems like,' Grandpa was saying. 'Believe me, Clivey - a week of being hurt makes the best summer vacation you ever had when you was a kid seem like a weekend. h.e.l.l, makes it seem like a Sat'dy mornin! When I think of the seven months Johnny lay there with that . . . that thing that was inside him, inside him and eating on his guts . . . Jesus, I ain't got no business talkin this way to a kid. Your Gramma's right. I got the sense of a chicken.'

Grandpa brooded down at his shoes for a moment. At last he looked up and shook his head, not darkly, but with brisk, almost humorous dismissiveness.

'Ain't a bit of that matters. I said I was gonna give you instruction, and instead I stand here howlin like a woe-dog. You know what a woe-dog is, Clivey?'

The boy shook his head.

'Never mind; that's for another day.' Of course there had never been another, because the next time he saw Grandpa, Grandpa was in a box, and Clive supposed that was an important part of the instruction Grandpa had to give that day. The fact that the old man didn't know he was giving it made it no less important. 'Old men are like old trains in a switchin yard, Clivey - too many d.a.m.ned tracks. So they loop the d.a.m.ned roundhouse five times before they ever get in.'