town, all of them refugees of a sort, he'd said. When I asked him refugees from what, he laughed and quoted Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones: 'What do you have?' Some local kids had got themselves tanked up and destroyed the camp. Rape and pillage-without the rape, as Isaiah put it. Spearheaded by June, the town had pulled together and built a replacement camp, a compound, really: two thirty-foot cabins, a storage shed, a common hall for cooking and eating.
'Saw June down the street. She's looking good.'
I nodded.
'You too.'
'You know, Isaiah, in three years plus, I don't believe you've ever been in this office before.'
Irue.
'So what can I do for you?'
He started as someone banged hard on the plywood outside, once, twice, then a third time. We both looked to the window, where half a head with almost white hair showed above the sill. Les Taylor's son Leon. Deaf, he was always beating on walls, cars, tree trunks, school desks, his rib cage. Because the vibrations, we figured, were as close as he could get to the sound the rest of us all swam in.
'You understand,' Isaiah said, 'that it is very difficult for me to ask for help.'
I did.
'Back not long after we first came here, one of us-'
It had been only a few years; even my aging, battered memory was good for the trip. 'Kevin,' I said. He'd been killed by my neighbor Nathan's hunting dog. That was when we first found out about the colony.
Isaiah nodded. 'For some, like Kevin, the fit's not good. They drift away, leave and come back. Or you just get up one morning and they're not there. Not that they are necessarily any more troubled than the rest. It's…' He glanced at the window, where Leon was up on tiptoe looking in, and waved. 'It's like specific hunger-pregnant women who eat plaster off the walls because their body needs calcium and tells them so, even when they've no idea why they're doing it. Whatever it is these people need when they find their way to us, we don't seem to have it, and eventually, on some level or another, they come to that realization. Usually that's it. But not always.'
Pulling Don Lee's rolling chair close with his foot, he sank into it.
'This, what we have here, is… kind of the second edition? My first go at something like it was wholly unintentional. I was living with a friend, a critical-care nurse, in an old house out in the country, this was back in Iowa, and weekends we'd have other friends string in from all around, Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Moline, even Chicago. Sometimes they wouldn't leave when Sunday night came, they'd stay over a day or two. Some of the stays got longer and, with the house an old farmhouse, there was plenty of room. One day Merle and I looked around and the thought hit both of us at the same time: We've got something here. By then, anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen people were resident or next door to being so.
'But things change, things that just happen, once you begin paying attention to them. People who've always been perfectly happy cooking up pots of spaghetti aren't around when dinnertime comes, Joanie's bread goes stale and gets fed to birds, people stay in their rooms, wander off into town… It was all over the space of six months or so. Toward the end, Merle and I were sitting outside in the sun one afternoon. He asked if I'd like a refill on iced tea, poured it, and handed it to me. 'Not working out quite the way we hoped, the way we saw it, is it?' he said. It was going to take a while, I said. He was quiet for moments, then told me he had a job over in Indiana, at the university hospital there, and would be leaving soon.
'Thing is, I wasn't so much upset that he was leaving as I was that he'd done it all, the planning, applying, without telling me. You've kept yourself pretty damn busy, he replied when I voiced that. And I'd already started to say, 'Yes, building the… ' when I realized that, first, I wasn't building anything, and second, I didn't even know what it was I'd thought I was building.'
This wasn't quite the same story I'd heard a couple of years back, but storytellers do that. We all do, memories shifting and scrunching up to fit the story we want to tell, the story we want to believe. And maybe it's enough that the teller believes the story as he tells it.
'That's the long of it,' Isaiah said just as the phone rang. Red Wilson, complaining about his neighbor's barking dog. Red had recently moved into town after seventy-odd years on the farm. City life, he wanted me to know, was gettin' on the one nerve he had left.
'And the short?' I asked Isaiah after assuring Red I'd be out his way later that afternoon and hanging up the phone.
'There was a period when we didn't, but following that, Merle and I kept up over the years. He knew what we were doing here and kept saying he wanted to come see it for himself. Three months ago he set a date. When he didn't show up as planned, I thought, Well, something's come up at the hospital. Or, he was always driving these junker cars that gave out on him at the worst possible moment-maybe that was it. No response to my e- mails. I even tried calling, home and hospital both, but he wasn't either place.
'Yesterday, I finally found him,' Isaiah said. 'He was killed two weeks ago on his way here. In Memphis.'
CHAPTER SIX
Some nights the wind comes up slowly and begins to catch in the trees, first here, then there, such that you'd swear invisible birds were flitting among them.
The dreams began not long after Val's death. I was in a city, always a city, walking. Sometimes it looked like Memphis, other times Chicago or Dallas. There was never any sense of danger, and I never seemed to have any particular destination to reach or any timetable for doing so, but I was lost nonetheless. Street signs made no sense to me, it was the dead of night, and no one else was around, not even cars, though I would see their lights in the distance, lashing about like the antennae of dark-shrouded insects.
I'd wake to the trees moving gently outside my windows and often as not go stand out among them.
As I was now.
Watching a bat's shadow dart across a moonlit patch of ground and thinking of Val and of something else she'd told me, something Robert Frost had said, I think: 'We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant.'
My to-do list just went on getting longer. Go see Red Wilson about the barking dog. Get up to Hazelwood to interview Miss Chorley, former owner of Billy's Buick, to try to figure out what had been going on with him. Check in with MPD about Isaiah's friend Merle. Do whatever it was I was going to do to help Eldon.
I'd told Isaiah I would see what I could find out about his friend, and asked for a favor in return. 'Absolutely,' he said. 'Anything.'
So Eldon was up there in the hills with Isaiah and the others, where he should be safe until I figured out what to do.
Of course, I'd been waiting all my life to figure out what to do.
Back in prison it was never quiet. Always the sounds of toilets flushing, twittery transistor radios, coughs and farts and muffled crying, the screech of metal on metal. You learned to shut it out, didn't hear it most times, then suddenly one night it would break in on you anew and you'd lie there listening, waiting-not waiting for something, simply waiting. Just as I'd sat out on this porch night after night once Val was gone.
Like nations, individuals come to be ruled by their self-narratives, narratives that accrue from failures as much as from success, and that harden over time into images the individual believes unassailable. Identity and symbology fuse. And threats when they come aren't merely physical, they're ontological, challenging the narrative itself, suggesting that it may be false. They strike at the individual's very identity. The narrative has become an objective in its own right-one that must be reclaimed at all costs.
I thought about the radical shifts in my own self-narratives over the years. And I had to wonder what scripts might be unscrolling in Eldon's head now.
Or in Jed Baxter's, to fuel his pursuit of Eldon.
Whether by heritage, choice, or pure chance, we find something that works for us-amassing money, playing jazz piano, or helping others, it doesn't much matter what-and we hang on, we ride that thing for all it's worth. The problem is that at some point, for many of us, it stops working. Those who notice that it's stopped working
