Around six o'clock I went out back to have a smoke. We have a bench there facing the parking lot. Beyond it is a very pretty western view. Ned Wilcox was sitting on the bench with his acceptance letter from Pitt in one hand and tears rolling down his face. He glanced at me, then looked away, scrubbing his eyes with the palm of his hand.
I sat down beside him, thought about putting my arm around his shoulder, didn't do it. If you have to think about a thing like that, doing it usually feels phony. I have never married, and what I know about fathering you could write on the head of a pin with room left over for the Lord's Prayer. I lit a cigarette and smoked it awhile. 'It's all right, Ned,' I said eventually.
It was the only thing I could think of, and I had no idea what it meant.
'I know,' he replied at once in a muffled, trying-not-to-cry voice, and then, almost as if it was part of the same sentence, a continuation of the same thought: 'No it ain't.'
Hearing him use that word, that ain't, made me realize how bad he was hurt. Something had gored him in the stomach. It was the sort of word he would have trained himself out of long ago, just so he wouldn't be lumped with the rest of the Statler County hicks, the pickup-truck-n-snowmobile gomers from towns like Patchin and Pogus City. Even his sisters, eight years younger than he was, had probably given up ain't by then, and for much the same reasons. Don't say ain't or your mother will faint and your father will fall in a bucket of paint. Yeah, what father?
I smoked and said nothing. On the far side of the parking lot by one of the county roadsalt piles was a cluster of wooden buildings that needed either sprucing up or tearing down. They were the old Motor Pool buildings. Statler County had moved its plows, graders, 'dozers, and asphalt rollers a mile or so down the road ten years before, into a new brick facility that looked like a prison lockdown unit. All that remained here was the one big pile of salt (which we were using ourselves, little by little - once upon a time, that pile had been a mountain) and a few ramshackle wooden buildings. One of them was Shed B. The black paint letters over the door - one of those wide garage doors that run up on rails - were faded but still legible. Was I thinking about the Buick Roadmaster inside as I sat there next to the crying boy, wanting to put my arm around him and not knowing how? I don't know. I guess I might have been, but I don't think we know all the things we're thinking. Freud might have been full of shit about a lot of things, but not that one. I don't know about a subconscious, but there's a pulse in our heads, all right, same as there's one in our chests, and it carries unformed, no-language thoughts that most times we can't even read, and they are usually the important ones.
Ned rattled the letter. 'He's the one I really want to show this to. He's the one who wanted to go to Pitt when he was a kid but couldn't afford it. He's the reason I applied, for God's sake.' A pause; then, almost too low to hear: 'This is fucked up, Sandy.'
'What did your mother say when you showed her?'
That got a laugh, watery but genuine. 'She didn't say. She screamed like a lady who just won a trip to Bermuda on a gameshow. Then she cried.' Ned turned to me. His own tears had stopped, but his eyes were red and swollen. He looked a hell of a lot younger than eighteen just then. The sweet smile resurfaced for a moment. 'Basically, she was great about it. Even the Little J's were great about it. Like you guys. Shirley kissing me . . . man, I got goosebumps.'
I laughed, thinking that Shirley might have raised a few goosebumps of her own. She liked him, he was a handsome kid, arid the idea of playing Mrs Robinson might have crossed her mind. Probably not, but it wasn't impossible. Her husband had been out of the picture almost five years by then.
Ned's smile faded. He rattled the acceptance letter again. 'I knew this was yes as soon as I took it out of the mailbox. I could just tell, somehow. And I started missing him all over again.
I mean fierce.'
'I know,' I said, but of course I didn't. My own father was still alive, a hale and genially profane man of seventy-four. At seventy, my mother was all that and a bag of chips.
Ned sighed, looking off at the hills. 'How he went out is just so dumb,' he said. '1 can't even tell my kids, if I ever have any, that Grampy went down in a hail of bullets while foiling the bank robbers or the militia guys who were trying to put a bomb in the county courthouse.
Nothing like that.'
'No,' I agreed, 'nothing like that.'
'I can't even say it was because he was careless. He was just . . . a drunk just came along and just . . .'
He bent over, wheezing like an old man with a cramp in his belly, and this time I at least put my hand on his back. He was trying so hard not to cry, that's what got to me. Trying so hard to be a man, whatever that means to an eighteen-year-old boy.
'Ned. It's all right.'
He shook his head violently. 'If there was a God, there'd be a reason,' he said. He was looking down at the ground. My hand was still on his back, and I could feel it heaving up and down, like he'd just run a race. 'If there was a God, there'd be some kind of thread running through it. But there isn't. Not that I can see.'
'If you have kids, Ned, tell them their grandfather died in the line of duty. Then take them here and show them his name on the plaque, with all the others.'
He didn't seem to hear me. 'I have this dream. It's a bad one.' He paused, thinking how to say it, then just plunged ahead. 'I dream it was all a dream. Do you know what I'm saying?'
I nodded.
'I wake up crying, and I look around my room, and it's sunny. Birds are singing. It's morning.
I can smell coffee downstairs and I think, 'He's okay. Jesus and thank you God, the old man's okay.' I don't hear him talking or anything, but I just know. And I think what a stupid idea it
•was, that he could be walking up the side of some guy's rig to give him a warning about a flapper and just get creamed by a drunk, the sort of idea you could only have in a stupid dream where everything seems so real . . . and I start to swing my legs out of bed . . . sometimes I see my ankles go into a patch of sun . . . it even feels warm . . . and then I wake up for real, and it's dark, and I've got the blankets pulled up around me but I'm still cold, shivering and cold, and I know that the dream was a dream.'
