“I wish he hadn’t bolted,” Fencer was saying.
It occurred to Fletch that he could not be certain that Fencer had not heard him come in.
“You know, like he just bolted. It looked for a while like we were really going to get something going together. I thought, by God, it’s gonna work, we’ll go up there and turn on and we’ll groove and we’ll break down the verbal barrier. But he bolted.”
“Well, my God,” Marge said, “it was pretty stupid of Willie Wings to shoot at him. For Christ’s sake, he’s so paranoid anyway.”
“Willie’s a fanatic,” Fencer said. He ran his hands over Marge’s backside. “I’m kind of a fanatic too.”
She took his long hair in her hands and pulled it round his neck and kissed him.
“You super-romantic shithead,” she said.
Fletch lay still on the tiles trying to hold his breath and watched them do it. When his ribs began to hurt, he turned over and slid across the cool floor to the doorway. It took him nearly five minutes to crawl out — a masterpiece of silence.
When he was outside, he picked up one of the weights he had bought to keep himself in condition and lay down with it. Lying on his back, he held the weight at arm’s length for quite a long time. Sweat welled from his body. Then he lowered the weight and looked at the sky.
“Willie Wings,” he said to Willie Wings, “I went up that mountain, right? You were there, you saw me do it, right?”
“Yeah,” Willie said. “Not all the way. But you went up the mountain.”
“Right,” Fletch said. “I went up.” He leaned his head back to look at Willie. “I went up. And you should have been there to see me come down, man. Because that was really something else.”
Willie Wings watched him for a little while.
“Fletch, babe,” he said. “I had you wrong, brother. You really are a poet.”
HELPING
ONE GRAY November day, Elliot went to Boston for the afternoon. The wet streets seemed cold and lonely. He sensed a broken promise in the city’s elegance and verve. Old hopes tormented him like phantom limbs, but he did not drink. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before.
Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret. His wife went to Mass and cooked a turkey. Sober, Elliot walked in the woods.
In January, blizzards swept down from the Arctic until the weather became too cold for snow. The Shawmut Valley grew quiet and crystalline. In the white silences, Elliot could hear the boards of his house contract and feel a shrinking in his bones. Each dusk, starveling deer came out of the wooded swamp behind the house to graze his orchard for whatever raccoons had uncovered and left behind. At night he lay beside his sleeping wife listening to the baying of dog packs running them down in the deep moon-shadowed snow.
Day in, day out, he was sober. At times it was almost stimulating. But he could not shake off the sensations he had felt in Boston. In his mind’s eye he could see dead leaves rattling along brick gutters and savor that day’s desperation. The brief outing had undermined him.
Sober, however, he remained, until the day a man named Blankenship came into his office at the state hospital for counseling. Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face and a sneaking manner. He was a sponger and petty thief whom Elliot had seen a number of times before.
“I been having this dream,” Blankenship announced loudly. His voice was not pleasant. His skin was unwholesome. Every time he got arrested the court sent him to the psychiatrists and the psychiatrists, who spoke little English, sent him to Elliot.
Blankenship had joined the army after his first burglary but had never served east of the Rhine. After a few months in Wiesbaden, he had been discharged for reasons of unsuitability, but he told everyone he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He went about in a tiger suit. Elliot had had enough of him.
“Dreams are boring,” Elliot told him.
Blankenship was outraged. “Whaddaya mean?” he demanded.
During counseling sessions Elliot usually moved his chair into the middle of the room in order to seem accessible to his clients. Now he stayed securely behind his desk. He did not care to seem accessible to Blankenship, “What I said, Mr. Blankenship. Other people’s dreams are boring. Didn’t you ever hear that?”
“Boring?” Blankenship frowned. He seemed unable to imagine a meaning for the word.
Elliot picked up a pencil and set its point quivering on his desktop blotter. He gazed into his client’s slack-jawed face. The Blankenship family made their way through life as strolling litigants, and young Blankenship’s specialty was slipping on ice cubes. Hauled off the pavement, he would hassle the doctors in Emergency for pain pills and hurry to a law clinic. The Blankenships had threatened suit against half the property owners in the southern part of the state. What they could not extort at law they stole. But even the Blankenship family had abandoned Blankenship. His last visit to the hospital had been subsequent to an arrest for lifting a case of hot-dog rolls from Woolworth’s. He lived in a Goodwill depository bin in Wyndham.
“Now I suppose you want to tell me your dream. Is that right, Mr. Blankenship?”
Blankenship looked left and right like a dog surrendering eye contact. “Don’t you want to hear it?” he asked humbly.
Elliot was unmoved. “Tell me something, Blankenship. Was your dream about Vietnam?”
At the mention of the word “Vietnam,” Blankenship customarily broke into a broad smile. Now he looked guilty and guarded. He shrugged. “Ya.”
“How come you have dreams about that place, Blankenship? You were never there.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship began to say, but Elliot cut him off.
“You were never there, my man. You never saw the goddamn place. You have no business dreaming about it! You better cut it out!”
He had raised his voice to the extent that the secretary outside his open door paused at her computer.
“Lemme alone,” Blankenship said fearfully. “Some doctor you are.”
“It’s all right,” Elliot assured him. “I’m not a doctor.”
“Everybody’s on my case,” Blankenship said. His moods were volatile. He began to weep.
Elliot watched the tears roll down Blankenship’s chapped, pitted cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Look, fella…” he began. He felt at a loss. He felt like telling Blankenship that things were tough all over.
Blankenship sniffed and telescoped his neck and after a moment looked at Elliot. His look was disconcertingly trustful; he was used to being counseled.
“Really, you know, it’s ridiculous for you to tell me your problems have to do with Nam. You were never over there. It was me over there, Blankenship. Not you.”
Blankenship leaned forward and put his forehead on his knees.
“Your troubles have to do with here and now,” Elliot told his client. “Fantasies aren’t helpful.”
His voice sounded overripe and hypocritical in his own ears. What a dreadful business, he thought. What an awful job this is. Anger was driving him crazy.
Blankenship straightened up and spoke through his tears. “This dream…” he said. “I’m scared.”
Elliot felt ready to endure a great deal in order not to hear Blankenship’s dream.
“I’m not the one you see about that,” he said. In the end he knew his duty. He sighed. “OK. All right. Tell me about it.”
“Yeah?” Blankenship asked with leaden sarcasm. “Yeah? You think dreams are friggin’ boring!”
“No, no,” Elliot said. He offered Blankenship a tissue and Blankenship took one. “That was sort of off the top of my head. I didn’t really mean it.”