Hunts in Dreams - Softcover

Drury, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618127402 ISBN 13: 9780618127405

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2001

Synopsis

In this "perceptive and captivating" (New York Times) novel, Tom Drury returns to the quiet Midwest to spend an action-packed October weekend in the lives of a precarious family whose members all want something without knowing how to get it: for Charles, an heirloom shotgun he will do anything to obtain; for his wife, Joan, the imaginative life she once knew; for their young son, Micah, a knowledge of the scope and reliability of his world, gained by prowling the empty town at night; and for Joan's daughter, Lyris, a stable footing from which to begin to grow up. Sometimes together, sometimes independently, father, mother, son, and daughter move through a series of vivid encounters that demonstrate how even the most provisional family can endure in its own particular way.

About this title

About the Author

Tom Drury's fiction has appeared in THE NEW YORKER, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, and the MISSISSIPPI REVIEW. His previous novels are THE END OF VANDALISM and THE BLACK BROOK. One of GRANTA'S "Best Young American Novelists," Drury was raised in Iowa and lives with his wife and their daughter in Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1 _ Charles
The man behind the counter of the gun shop did not understand what
Charles wanted, and so he summoned his sister from the back room, and
she did not understand either. It was late on a Friday afternoon in
October, and Charles seemed to be speaking an unknown language.
Outside, the wind gusted. Sunlight broke through fast clouds
and swept across the windows. The sister, in a coarsely woven blue
sweater, picked up the feeding rod of a semiautomatic rifle and
flicked it at her brother"s arm in play. Charles thought of it as a
feeding rod, anyway.No doubt there was another name.
"On guard," she said.
"I told you," said the brother, "keep away from me with that."
What Charles wanted seemed simple enough to Charles: for the
gun-shop owners to visit the minister"s widow and offer to buy the
shotgun she kept on pegs above the fireplace.
This is the history of the gun: Years ago it had belonged to
Charles"s stepfather, who before his death had given it to the
Reverend Matthews. It was a .410 side-by-side shotgun made by Hutzel
and Pfeil of Cincinnati. In his mind Charles could see the company
name engraved in ornate script on the breechblock. When the minister
died, his widow inherited the gun. Maybe it was sentimental for
Charles to want to retrieve it after all this time, and yet he
believed a gun should be used once in a while. A gun should be more
than an ornament on the wall of someone with no connection to the
original owner.
The sister took the feeding rod in both hands as if she meant
to twirl it like a baton.
"What do you call that?" said Charles, on the off-chance that
a simple exchange of information would set the conversation back on
track.
"It"s the long spring-loaded insert that pushes shells into
the chamber," she said.
"Oh, okay."
"How much do you want for this gun?" said the sister.
"I"m not selling it."
"Well, let me ask you this," said the brother. "Do you have
it on you?"
"It"s at her house."
"We can"t appraise what we can"t see," said the sister.
"Where is it again?"
"The minister"s widow"s house. In Grafton. Her name is Farina
Matthews."
The brother shook his head. "You"re asking the shop to act as
a go-between."
"We tried it once," said the sister. "Ended up in small
claims court. It was a total loser for us."
Charles looked at a fox pelt, dusty orange with gray fringe,
tacked to the wall of the shop. The fox had been flattened, its paws
flung outward. "What I"m suggesting is —"
Yeah . . ."
— you go to her, you buy it from her, then you would hold it
free and clear, and then I come in, as if none of this had happened.
And I buy it from you."
We don"t make house calls," said the brother. "We"re not like
doctors."
Actually we are, in that respect," said the sister. "We"re
not like old-time doctors, who made house calls."
If you want to have her stop by the shop, that"s a different
story."
She doesn"t want to sell it," said Charles. "Not to me,
anyway."
Why is this conversation taking place?" said the brother.
He turned away, presenting the blank white back of his shirt
to Charles. Blue gun barrels stood in a row, silver chain laced
through the trigger guards. Above the guns there was a license plate —
Iowa 1942 — all beat up as if the car or truck it had been on had
hit many stumps. The sister pulled a catalogue from under the counter
and began turning the pages. A lone bluebottle buzzed in the gun
shop. "Where did you come from?" said the sister. She raised her hand
briefly in the fly"s direction before returning to her search. "Okay.
Here we go. The gun you want, here it is, Hutzel and Pfeil, and
it"s . . .umm. . . no longer made."

A pheasant rose from dry weeds by the railroad track, the sound of
its wings like the spinning of a wheel. Charles and his
stepfather .red almost at once as it passed over the right-of way.
White clouds blazed in the sky. The pheasant fell near the tracks.
Which of them had hit it was anyone"s guess.
"We"ll shoot for it," said Charles"s stepfather. "I"ll be
odd."
Indeed you will, thought Charles. He twisted the bill of his
hat. "I don"t know how," he said.
His stepfather explained. On the count of three they would
each display a number of fingers, letting the even- or oddness of the
combined total decide who got the pheasant. Did Charles understand?
No, but he pretended to. And sure enough, he did not do it right,
presenting his fingers too late and nonetheless making a sum that
lost the game.
His stepfather walked on, leaving the pheasant for Charles to
carry. "If you"re going to take the trouble to cheat," he said, "you
should at least win."
They crossed to the cabin through a meadow of grass and mint.
They could smell the mint as their steps broke the plants. Birch
trees grew around the house, which was made of wood, with a plank
door. It did not belong to Charles"s stepfather but was open for the
use of all. Inside, ants wandered over the walls and the rafters. A
river ran far below the windows. The stepfather boiled water on a hot
plate while Charles gathered newspapers on which they would clean the
pheasant. Surveyor 6 had lifted off from the moon, only to land again
a few feet away.
"I didn"t cheat," said Charles.
This would have been the fall of 1967. After that Charles
knew how to shoot for something, at least in this limited sense.

The minister"s widow pushed a lawn aerator on a line between the
clothesline and the house. Three sharp stars turned brightly through
the grass. She kept an excellent yard and had always made it a point
to do so. A van stopped on the street in front of the house. HERE
COMES CHARLES THE PLUMBER was written, red on white, above the
grille. She gripped the worn wooden handle of the aerator as if she
might pick it up and chase the driver away.
"There is nothing to talk about," she said.
"I"ve just come from the gun shop," said Charles. "They made
an estimate. This is more than fair." From a paper envelope he drew
three bills.
"Where did you get that?"
"The bank."
She could have used the money — who couldn"t use three
hundred now and then? — but resolutely she returned to her work. "Why
would I do for payment what I wouldn"t do for free?"
He laid the bills on the grass in her path. She speared them
deftly with the tines of the aerator. "I"m not selling the gun."
"Why not?"
"Ask your mother."
"I talked to her," said Charles. "She said it was that time
with your boy."
"Is that right?"
"When he was in the runaway car."
She raised the aerator and the impaled money. "Are you
threatening me?"
Charles took the bills back. "Mrs. Matthews, I"m trying to
buy a gun which can"t be any use to you. I know I don"t have any
right to it. But what happened between my mother and you thirty years
ago I can"t help. Just let me see it."
"Well, you don"t have to cry about it."
"Let me see the gun."
"You already did."
In the summer she had let him into the house. Standing before
the mantel he had seemed big and misplaced, and she had worried for
her miniature lighthouses of painted clay. Clearly he saw things in
the gun that she did not, but it had been left to her by her husband,
and she meant to keep it.
Farina Matthews climbed the steps of her house and washed her
hands at the kitchen sink while watching the white van move down the
road. THERE GOES CHARLES THE PLUMBER. She walked through the rooms,
past a vase of cloth roses that seemed to watch her. Her husband had
called their home Max Gate, after the residence of Thomas Hardy, his
favorite author. She did not look at the gun. Her gaze drifted to the
piano, on which stood a large and beautifully framed picture of her
son. He was a chemist in Albuquerque and had done well for himself,
discovering when he was barely out of college a new way of treating
synthetic laminate so that it would remember its former shape in a
vacuum.
The runaway car business amounted to nothing. That"s what
Charles would never understand. When her son was four years old, she
had left him in the car while getting the mail at the post office.
Somehow the youngster had released the brake. The car rolled down the
snowy street, but so slowly that her son would never have gotten
anywhere. Far from saving him, Charles"s mother had made the
situation worse by loping alongside the car and shouting as loudly as
she could.
And now Charles wanted Farina to sell him the old gun, which
complemented her.replace in such a homey way. When everyone knew he
stole and that his plumbing customers were either shady themselves or
tolerant of shadiness. I think not, said the minister"s widow to
herself.

Charles Darling lived with his wife Joan, their son Micah, and Joan"s
daughter Lyris on two acres south of the town of Boris. The house had
been built a hundred years ago and added on to forty years ago, and
the two pieces did not much match. The older part was a dormered
cottage, the newer part a boot room. All in all, the place was too
small, especially since the arrival of Lyris, the daughter whom Joan
had placed for adoption sixteen years before.
Behind the house stood a stucco hut with a dirt floor. They
called it a barn, but this was an overstatement. The doors latched
with a hasp and pin, and the soft ruts of the driveway were thick
with grass. Railroad tracks ran behind the back yard, and trees grew
on the hill beyond the tracks. Charles went into the barn and looked
through his toolboxes for a chain pipe wrench. He had no immediate
need for it but had noted its absence and did not like to be out and
about without it.
In the house he asked Micah if he had taken the wrench from
the barn.
"Describe it," said the boy.
"About yay long and blue, with a chain on the end," said
Charles. "Like a bike chain. It"s a good heavy wrench. You can"t
mistake it for anything else."
Micah sat on the deep freeze in the boot room looking at a
clothespin as if a secret message had been written on it in very
small print. The red hair bristled on his head. He had careful,
measuring eyes. "What"s a bike chain?"
"How old are you?"
"Seven."
"And you"re asking me that."
"I didn"t take any wrench."
It bothered Charles that Micah could not ride, and yet there
was only so much he himself could do. A father can"t ride a bike for
a son. "You"ve got to know these things, Mike."
"Do you want to hear my part in the school play?"
"Get off this," said Charles. "Get off a minute."
Micah jumped down from the freezer. Charles raised the lid
and pulled up a clouded blue sack of ice. "Let"s hear your part in
the school play."
""You know, as well as I / The fossil record does not lie.""
"What"s the topic?" said Charles.
"Evolution."
Charles beat on the ice with a hammer and then made a drink
in the kitchen, where Joan sat at the table packing her suitcase for
a trip to the city. The orderly stacks of her clothing seemed at odds
with the clutter of the kitchen. Curtains lay in heaps under the
windows. One of the burners on the stove, missing the knob that
turned it on and off, was controlled by a pair of vise grips locked
onto the metal stem. Under the table were black suede riding chaps, a
green laundry basket with clothes spilling over the sides, and a tin
of walnuts. Everything might have been moving a short time before,
spinning around Joan and her suitcase.
"Don"t say anything," she said. "I"m thinking."
Charles took Micah and the drink outside. The bike leaned
against a stone column. Charles turned it upside down so that it
rested in the dirt on seat and handlebars, and worked the pedals,
blurring the spokes of the rear wheel.
"If you learned how to ride, you would know what the chain
was," Charles advised. He righted the bicycle, lifted the boy onto
the seat, and gave a push. "Leave now and you can be in Canada by the
first snow."
The bicycle wobbled into the cool air of fall. Charles picked
up his drink from the ground. Micah could not steady the handlebars
but kept wrenching them back and forth in the stylized tango of all
beginning riders. Then he fell, on the sand by the road. He
disentangled himself from the bike and ran to Charles, holding his
elbow, on which blood appeared in dozens of tiny gouges. Charles
helped him limp to the house. The boy"s breath came at rough
intervals. "I don"t like learning," he said.
"Learning isn"t so bad," said Charles. "It"s falling that
hurts."
Joan had closed her suitcase. Her arms lay over the lid, her
head resting sideways between them, as if she were listening to the
heartbeat of the luggage, her blond hair fanned over her shoulders.
She looked spent and peaceful, like a pilgrim who has found the
sacred site.
She spoke softly into the pale hollow of an elbow. "Did you
remember to get my travel-sized samples?"
"I did." Charles reached into the pockets of his coat and
laid on the table his keys, the three hundred dollars, and the small
containers of face cream and hair conditioner that she would not go
without. Joan held reflexive opinions about many subjects, including
travel. Everything had to be a certain way long before the time of
departure or else she became anxious.
Micah ducked under the table. "Daddy! Here"s your wrench." He
had found it nestled in the chaps.
"What happened to your elbow?" said Joan. "Oh, Charles, why
do you have to roughhouse with him on the very night before I go
away?"
"He fell off his bike," said Charles. "Don"t read things into
it that aren"t there."
"And who ends up dressing the wound?"
"Stop arguing," said Micah.
As a rule, Charles and Joan did not let their seven-year-old
tell them what to do, but they disagreed often enough lately that
they sometimes forgot to remind him of his lack of authority. Charles
sat in a chair, shoving the tin of walnuts with a steeltoed boot to
clear space for his feet. The ice of his drink had melted to wafers.
"I would be glad to put a Band-Aid on Micah"s arm," he said
diplomatically, knowing that Joan would never give up the chance to
doctor her son when she was on the verge of going away for the
weekend. She was the executive director of a league of animal
shelters headquartered in Stone City, and would give a speech at the
regional convention on Saturday night.
Joan led Micah upstairs. Charles took the opportunity to
raise the lid of her suitcase. Her blouses and skirts, her black
swimsuit, lay carefully folded, and under them he found the white
Bible with her maiden name printed in gold. He unzipped her flowered
cloth makeup bag and removed silver and gold tubes of lipstick, an
eyelash curler that looked like some ungodly surgical scissors, and a
paintbox for the eyes. Cosmetics bothered Charles. He did not want
Joan going to the city with any more makeup than that which was on
her face when she left. He did not want her dolling up for strangers
in a strange place. Either the men would fall for her or they would
not, and she would be left standing alone, with paint masking her
pretty features. He buried the makeup in the laundry basket and
fille...

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0618127402
• ISBN 13: 9780618127405
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208