And here Brendan was explaining to Jackson that he’d lived in a nursing home for years, and no, he didn’t always like it, sometimes the lack of solitude had been very trying; and yes, he surely was glad to be out for a while, he was grateful to Henry here. They were going, he said, to visit some family: “Cousins. Some second cousins of mine, in Massachusetts.”
They had, as far as Henry knew, no family left there at all, but when Jackson looked at him he nodded. “Cousins,” he said, wondering again why Brendan told these half-truths to everyone they met.
“We ought to sleep now,” Brendan said. “We have to leave early.”
The back of the van was a jumble of odds and ends, but Jackson helped Henry move things around until they’d cleared a space big enough for two men to lie down. Henry set aside the two blankets he’d taken from Kitty’s house and then folded Jackson’s blankets into a thick pad for the floor. He and Jackson lifted Brendan from his wheelchair and stretched him out on the pad. Bongo leapt in and tried to lie down next to Brendan, but Henry tossed him into the front seat.
“Sleep well,” Jackson said. “I’ll be around if you need anything.”
Henry wedged himself next to Brendan, who lay very still with his hands drawn up on his chest. Over both of them, Henry draped one of Kitty’s blankets. The blanket smelled; he drew it over his face and inhaled deeply. It smelled of leaves and dirt and his girls, and he remembered how Lise and Delia used to take it into the backyard and drape it over a tree limb to make a tent. The girls were so angry at him — too angry, he thought, for it to be just a reflection of their mother’s fury. It was as if they’d been angry at him for years and had only just figured it out. He couldn’t understand what he’d done that was so wrong.
Outside he heard the little pongs and pings of Jackson tapping gently on his homemade drums, and he wondered if Jackson’s children were angry as well. A kind man, Jackson — who else would have fed them dinner and let them camp there for free? Who else would have fixed the van in exchange for a watch that might easily have been fake? The watch happened to be real — Henry had bought it back when he had money, and he knew Jackson had gotten the better part of that exchange. But it could have been fake, and he and Brendan could have been murderers, and Jackson would have trusted them just the same.
He eased himself onto his right shoulder, trying not to disturb Brendan. The van was no wider than two coffins laid side to side. Their hips touched and his feet banged into the junk piled by the rear door. Bongo, curled in the front seat, whimpered and twitched. Brendan snored. Henry rolled over again. He could not, he thought, blame Jackson’s wife, or not completely; as kind as Jackson was, he was overweight and had bad teeth and blackened hands. His body was worn, wrinkled, used, and maybe Rhonda had only craved newer flesh.
The van was impossibly hot and noisy — his breath, his uncle’s, his dog’s; snores, creaks, groans. He sat up suddenly and grabbed Kitty’s other blanket and slid the side door open. The outside, bugs and dew or not, could not be worse. He found a spot twenty yards from the van, where the ground seemed fairly smooth, and he lay down wrapped in his blanket. The stars above him shone brilliantly and the trees made a black fringe against the horizon. Water was running somewhere, in a creek or a stream nearby. Jackson’s drums were silent now, and he thought of Jackson lying on his cot inside that empty, dirty garage, waiting for Rhonda to call him home. He fell asleep thinking of his own young-fleshed mistake, of Anita, who had left him.
He had met her at the bank and she had not, despite what Kitty had said, been stupid at all. She had only been young. She had processed the application for his doomed loan on Coreopsis Heights, and when he’d driven her down to look at the land he’d been able to make her see the finished project through his eyes. She believed him. She believed everything he said. She slipped her hand around his elbow as they paced the hummocked ground.
Anita had beautiful thighs, as smooth and curved as a swan’s wing, and she’d lost her job because of him. When Coreopsis Heights had failed and he’d defaulted on his loans, the bank had blamed her for approving them in the first place. She’d stood by him during his long slide, during the months when Kitty had screamed at him nightly and he’d scrambled for a foothold in the mounting heap of bills, but when she lost her job, she dumped him. She didn’t tell him face-to-face; she didn’t even call. She sent a cool, cruel letter to his house, which Kitty opened. Then Kitty threw him out and he crashed his car.
They were gone now, both of them. He dreamed of a green stretch of land, cut through by a broad river — the land of the blessed, the fairy-tale land that Gran used to tell stories about, which had come to her from her own grandmother in Ireland. Across the ocean and hidden by mist, she said, lay a temperate land of warmth and light. Grapes there grew to the size of apples. Otters stepped from the streams and walked on their hind legs, bearing gifts of fish. The men were brave and the women were lovely; no one ever grew old there and no one ever died. A monk, the one Gran had named Brendan for, had set sail from Ireland with his companions, bobbing and tossing for seven years in a hide-covered curragh until they found the land of promise. They wandered there for forty days, which passed like a single afternoon. Then an angel found them and sent them back home.
Gran had called that place the country of the young. In his dream, Henry stepped out of a leather-skinned boat and set foot on a soft white beach. Deer stood in the grass where the beach merged into the forest. The river was full of salmon and the trees were heavy with fruit. Henry made his way through the woods until he came upon a clearing. In the clearing a fire burned in a ring of stones, and around it stood all the women he had ever loved.
All of them were young. Anita, as she’d looked on the day when Coreopsis Heights was still a dream; Kitty, as she’d looked on the shore of Canandaigua Lake; Lise and Delia; his mother. Even Gran looked as she had in the wedding picture that had hung over the mantel in Coreopsis. He looked down at himself and saw that he alone had a fifty-year-old body. He had hair in his nose and his ears and his eyebrows were growing together. His stomach hung down, no matter how hard he tried to suck it in. His hands and feet were callused and freckled and the skin where his thighs met his groin was creased. In the soft breeze, against the fresh vegetation, he looked obscene.
He threw himself onto the grass and rolled like a dog, and when he stood he bristled with green stems. He pranced in his green coat; he danced and threw his hands in the air; and when the smooth-fleshed women still ignored him he jumped into one of the trees and sang like a mad bird. The stems clothing him had turned into feathers. The women, he realized, could neither see nor hear him, and he raised his tattered wings and flew over the water.
He woke when he heard his uncle calling, “Henry? Henry?”
Feathers? he thought, feeling his clothes with his hands. Where had that come from? He walked to the van and stuck his head through the open window.
“What is it? Are you all right?” He couldn’t see Brendan’s face at all.
“I have to take a leak,” Brendan whispered. “I had a little cup, I left it on my chair.”
The chair stood next to the van, and Henry felt along the seat until his fingers touched a plastic cup. He passed it through the window. “Do you need help?”
“No. But you can toss it for me when I’m done.” Henry heard water again, just a trickle this time, and then Brendan said, “Here.” Henry emptied the half-filled cup on the ground.