“I’m sorry. Do what you want. But I know she’ll call, and if you’re not here, I’ll have to lie.”
“And we wouldn’t want that,” Win said. “Would we? Not from us, the truthful twosome.”
Wendy laughed despite herself and Win looked into her eyes for the first time in ages. “You’ll be out of here in three months. I’m stuck for another year and a half. You want to take me with you?”
“I would if I could.” Their shared past hung in the room like a mist. “When we’re twenty-five,” she said, “this will all seem funny. We’ll be able to laugh about it.”
Win picked up the phone and dialed the pizza parlor. “I won’t remember it by then,” he said. “I’m not planning on remembering any of this. When I’m twenty-five, I’m going to be in another country.”
16
FROM THE “LETTERS TO THE EDITOR” OF THE PARADISE VALLEY Daily Transcript:
July 6, 1927
Dear Sirs:
Our fate has been sealed with the passage of the Paradise River Acts. Although we have been left up in the air as to when we must leave our beloved valley, and what parts of the valley we must leave, and how we shall be compensated for the loss of our land, our homes, our livelihoods, and everything we hold dear — leave we surely must. But we need not leave yet.
Already, many residents have requested real estate appraisals from the field offices of the Commission. Many, in fact, have left the valley; at the last Nipmuck town meeting, it was reported that 200 residents had already departed, and that those remaining were finding the tax burden intolerable. Twoof the summer camps in Pomeroy have closed. The Merriweather School and the Sweet Hill Hotel have shut their doors. Stores are leaving all of our valley towns.
Can we not maintain at least some semblance of dignity, some shadow of our former lives? The Commission assures us that it will be some years before the start of serious construction, and many more years before construction is complete. By leaving now, by collapsing and admitting defeat, we only aid and abet the destructive plans of our occupiers. Should we not stay here as long as we can, and live what remains of our cherished lives here as fully and richly as we can? Each family that leaves now tears a permanent hole in the web of our community life. No new neighbors will come to replace those lost: we are the last people who will live here, and we must band together. Let us leave only when we must. Let us leave together, at the end — not piecemeal, in panic and terror, at the beginning.
Frank B. Auberon, Sr.
Pomeroy
Part III The Country of the Young
17
HENRY AND BRENDAN DROVE EAST ALONG THE FINGER LAKES, past brick buildings with flat roofs, white churches, stone Masonic Halls, gas stations, red lights, convenience stores. Brendan drank the sights in eagerly. The towns looked much as they had in 1954, when he’d traveled by bus from Rhode Island to Coreopsis, but the spaces in between the towns had changed. Low-roofed shopping centers and garden stores dotted what had once been stretches of field.
They passed an old woman in Waterloo scattering bread to some pigeons, and a row of swallows perched on the telephone wires in Cayuga. The sun caused complex patterns of shadow on a yard in La Fayette. In Cazenovia, a dog with brown eyes caught sight of Bongo and chased the van wildly for a while. Henry was silent, his face hidden in the shadow of his Red Wings cap. Look, Brendan wanted to say. Here. Look at all this. But instead he let Henry drive unmolested.
The van broke down south of Herkimer, within sight of another small town. There was a noise, first, which pulled Brendan’s eyes from the window; then there was smoke. Then Henry said, “Damn — the fan belt,” and then, “Hell. The power steering just went.” While Brendan watched, helpless but interested, Henry wrestled the van to the side of the road and then coaxed it into the parking lot of a service station next to a church.
Brendan let out his breath, aware only then that he’d been holding it. “Lucky for us,” he said.
“Lucky?”
“That it happened here.”
Henry shook his head, and when he hopped out of the van, it appeared that they were not so lucky after all. Quarter past six on a Saturday night — the station had just closed and there was no one around except for a boy with a lazy eye and a gap between his front teeth. Brendan opened his window as Henry approached the boy.
“Nope,” Brendan heard the boy say. “Can’t help you. All the mechanics are gone.”
“Is there someone I can call?” Henry asked.
“The other stations are all closed. Everyone’s gone home. I guess you’ll have to wait until Monday.”
“Monday? What are we supposed to do until then?” Henry laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and eased him toward the van. “Look at this,” he said as he opened the side door. Brendan smiled down at the boy and said hello.
“This is my uncle,” Henry told the boy. “He’s eighty. He’s sick. Can’t you just look under the hood?”
Brendan did what he could to help. He let his hands curl into claws and his head loll forward against his brace. He wiped his smile away and let his mouth fall open, trying to look eighty, ninety, on his last legs. The boy was visibly impressed. Behind him, Henry shook his head and smiled.
“Wouldn’t do any good for me to look.” The boy stepped back and almost bumped into Henry. “I just pump gas. But there’s this guy my brother knows — he has a tow truck of his own. Maybe we could give him a call.”
“Let’s do that,” Henry said.
The two of them vanished inside a darkened building, and when they returned Henry looked relieved. “Just wait here,” Brendan heard the boy say. “Jackson’ll be along — he’ll take care of you. I gotta go.”
He ran his hand through his long blond hair, and his eyes disappeared as the strands rose and separated and then fell back against his face. He snapped his neck with a gesture Brendan hadn’t been able to make in years, which parted the curtain of hair and revealed his eyes again. Then he drove off in a low red car with enormous tires.
“Strange kid,” Henry said, and Brendan turned to him.
“What’s going on?”
Henry climbed back into the van. “We wait, I guess. This guy said he’d come tow us to his shop — he’s got a garage of his own, way out in the woods somewhere.”
Twenty minutes later Jackson appeared. His hands were grimy and his teeth were bad; he poked under the hood and said, “I can’t fix this here. Have to bring you back to my place. That all right?”
“Fine,” Henry said wearily.
Henry rode in the truck with Jackson, but Brendan and Bongo stayed in the van, which was tilted up and suspended by a tow bar. Jackson blocked the wheels of Brendan’s chair with the box Henry had taken from Kitty’s house, and he promised to drive slowly. For miles, out of town and along a quiet road that ran beside a river and then rose up into wooded hills and turned to dirt, Brendan watched the world pass by on a mysterious slant. Bongo barked beside him, excited and confused.
It might feel like this when I die, Brendan thought. His soul might float above the earth, dipping and tilting so that things were skewed from their natural positions. He’d felt like a ghost for months already, parts of his body shutting down one by one until, as the pie he’d tried to eat earlier had reminded him, nothing was working but his head. The tumors inside him had grown until his throat closed like a door when he tried to swallow. He couldn’t feel his legs at all; his hands and arms were his only intermittently. His lungs felt as solid as cheese — when he breathed, the air seemed to stop somewhere in his throat. He was solidifying, turning to stone, the organs and tubes that had once been hollow silting up. Sometimes it hurt, but mostly it didn’t; he often felt better, in an odd way, than he had in years. His joints, which had once stabbed him with shooting pains, felt as if they’d been packed in sand. His stomach, once a sack of fire, was calm. He was only his head, only his eyes and ears — the wedge of sky that flew by his window was as soft and gold as the skin of an apricot. Letting go wouldn’t be hard at all, he thought. The deadness would creep from his chest to his head and then his soul would slip out of his mouth. His brother’s soul might have slipped away just that easily.