The Grave Maurice

dried-up hedge crumbled like brick too long stressed.

Beautiful Dreamer walked on, careful and quiet. Walked, but yearned to break into a trot, then a canter, then a gallop. He saw a winter landscape, small clumps of snow bearding roots of hazels and oaks, ice gloving their high branches, dripping water, but he passed through spring- clouds of daisies, mists of cowslip, wild rose, pennyroyal, violets. Beautiful Dreamer did not so much have memories as he did comings and goings, entrances and exits, other places becoming these places. The past was like the path he had left, which wound around and sometimes turned back on itself, crossing the present.

He heard the lads at stables calling out time: time for feeding, time for grooming, for morning stables and evening stables, time for this, time for that, time after time. It meant nothing, yet they needed it. Memory was time. He still heard the raised voices under the vaulted sky; he still stormed around that rough three-quarter-mile turn; he still won or still lost; he still smelled the collar of roses.

Beautiful Dreamer loved to walk down this road but only when the boy was riding him, sleeping. When one of the exercise lads or anyone else came on it by accident, he reared up and refused to go.

“What’s this? I never knew ya t’go skittish on me. You afraid a sumppin, then?” And the lad would squint, peer through the shadows of the road and its banks and point out that not only was there nothing to fear, “But there ain’t hardly nuffin there. Just that old barn and shed and overgrown ring.”

Say what he would, Beautiful Dreamer refused to budge.

He came within sight of the barn and thought perhaps he should shake the boy awake, then thought, no too painful or at least the boy might think so. No, the boy would have to wake up himself and confront it.

Beautiful Dreamer had seen her the day he was born. It was her hands, besides the vet’s, that caught him and helped him out. He could see her now. He could hear her now, singing a breathy song, half words, half humming “Beautiful Dreamer.”

That song was why he’d been given his name. That song, and her singing. That was why. Beautiful Dreamer listened for a while and then headed home.

EIGHT

Vernon lay in bed in the moonless dark, hands clasped behind his head as usual when he was reviewing his day before going to sleep.

He had acquired that very afternoon a tiny religious publishing house that was turning over a small but steady revenue. He added this to the other two companies he’d bought named WeightLess and QuestCo, all showing income which he could list as SayWhen’s assets. In the next month or two he’d offer stock on the open market, SayWhen’s initial IPO selling at twenty-five pounds per share. The fact that SayWhen hadn’t yet brought in any money of its own didn’t bother Vernon at all, though it might bother the Securities and Investment Board.

The companies loved him for he had insisted they remain autonomous. QuestCo was a company specializing in acquiring companies. It had not come up with anything especially brilliant thus far, though it was engaged in investigating a company called NuBru, an old wine refinery, whose chief chemist had come up with a drink made out of grapes that tasted like the real thing, and-more important-had the effect of the real thing. QuestCo was having a problem finding the site and the company for although the NuBru talked about people it employed, it didn’t have an actual address.

“Located somewhere in California,” QuestCo’s CEO had told Vernon.

“It’s wine-sort of-so where else?” Vernon said.

He had considered having SayWhen actually work for its twenty-five pounds per share. He had of course put the twelve-step program on the home page, with snappy little drawings illustrating the steps-and their lack thereof. All sorts of falling-down drunk men and women, white, black, Asian, young and old, plus tipsy cats and tanked dogs, even a mouse with its stiff little legs up in the air and a minuscule bottle by its side, and a general air of flagrant abuse (although a couple of the dogs looked pretty happy). There were also links to other Web sites remotely connected with alcoholism and its curse.

Don’t tell SayWhen there’s no cure for alcoholism! Who’d want to take the high road to sobriety on club soda and San Pellegrino if he thought he’d never be cured?

Get real, Big Book.

The thing was this: the idea would have to hit the ground running because it wouldn’t be long before some wet-behind-the-ears dotcomer would refine Vernon’s original idea and improve upon it. Company start-ups were dicey things, not for the weak at heart, or (possibly) the sound of mind.

“Vernon, has it occurred to you this NuBru company is actually producing wine? I mean, if you can’t tell the difference, then how do you know?”

“Of course, it’s occurred to me. Anyway, I didn’t particularly like the name, NuBru-sounds like beer, doesn’t it?” He was sitting on a hay bale, watching Arthur, who was inspecting Fool’s Money’s ankles, which Arthur said were hot. “So I got them to change it to WineDesign.”

Arthur just looked at him and shook his head.

“What? What?”

“Nothing.”

“Their product could perfectly well be what they say it is. They’ve done tests to show its lack of toxicity. An inconsequential effect on the liver and other organs-”

Arthur gave him another look. “That’s meaningless. What’s ‘inconsequential’? What, indeed, is ‘effect’ here?”

Vernon didn’t answer directly because he didn’t know the answer. “Someone’s going to work it out sometime, Art, how to produce a nonalcoholic drink you can get high on.”

“Well, just tell your SayWhen clickers to have themselves frozen when they die.”

“Come on, Art, we’re at a point in history where we can do practically anything.”

“That’s scary, if you’re in on it.”

“How droll.”

Arthur tried not to smile. “Felicity always said you were like this even as a kid. You’d try anything if you saw profit in it. You used to break pencils in half, sharpen them and sell each part for a penny more than a regular pencil, except for the half with the eraser. That, you charged two pence for.”

“I was that cynical when I was a kid?”

“Pretty much. You could never convince Nell of it, though.”

Vernon suddenly leaned back. Anytime she was brought into a conversation abruptly, like that, out of the clear blue, as just now, he always felt he’d been punched suddenly in the chest. In the stall, perhaps everywhere, came a sudden stillness as if everything were holding its breath.

Vernon certainly was.

Nell.

Even at fifteen she’d been brilliant. When he’d first seen her, she was in Samarkand’s stall, rubbing him down after a ride. She was bent over. Her remarkably fair hair was long and covered her face, almost reaching the ground when she was bent over that way. She was quietly singing. It was a song he