reservoir with the blond clay banks in the sunlight and the sage knolls at each inlet, and the meadows and moose ponds up along the old road on Oakpine Mountain shadowed and surrounded by the dark wall of pines. But his default was Bleecker Street, around the corner from his apartment with Daniel, and then shop by shop up one side, the movie poster shop, the archaeological artifacts, the comic store, the cheap Italian shoes, the Bleak Arms, the green pub, and cornice by cornice to the grocer and his tiers of oranges and the nest of lemons, but he couldnât get a hold of it today, no image would take.
It had been raining now for a little while, and the water sheeted and merged as it ran down the windshield. It blurred the scene before him, the people across the football field in their coats, dots of red, brown, yellow, green, blue, three hundred people in the rain of Wyoming. They would blur and focus in the glass. He concentrated on them as they came and went. The rain was a soft pressure on the van. He lost it and then started awake and made a note to stay awake and lost that. It was a short step from the swimming windshield to his hallucinations to the high dreams. He could not feel himself breathing, and he made that note and then lost it.
Maybe he was already dead, these colored dots come to greet him, witness his induction, rows and rows of the dead blurring in this great gray room, a tray of apples. The dozen friends in New York, one by one, and suddenly the bottom dropped out. Eldon Rayalf had died in elementary school, shot one stormy fall out on the antelope hunt. He was shot in the head, the story was, and the second story was that his uncle, bored in the million-mile afternoon, had been playing with his rifle, up, down, shooting-bushes bored, and wheeling by the boy, heâd touched the trigger early, and instead of offering a noise that would have rung his ears for a week, he took off most of his forehead. Jimmy remembered the funeral in the Mormon chapel, the closed coffin, all the town it seemed, and then the ride to the cemetery. Was he the first? Jimmyâs dadâs hands were on his shoulder, and Jimmy could see Mr. Rayalf, the back of his head, his dark hair shiny from Brylcreem. Old man Rayalf would have been thirty-one or thirty-two years old at the time, and now he had something he would never get out from under, ever. It became the shadow, the pressure that would press his drinking, and he was a good, quiet, diminished man forevermore. But Eldon wasnât the first. There were two girls with the flu, and Boyd Mildone in junior high, drowned in the river, swimming or fishing. He must have been fishing alone before school, and his waders taken suddenly with the cold water like a scoop, he drowned. There was a place beyond the old Knop junkyard, the spillage of ruined cars, where the river bent and the cattails grew tall, and it had always been only one thing, the place where Boyd had drowned.
Now Jimmy focused suddenly on the furrowed windshield of Chuck Andresonâs truck, and beyond he could see the rainy home-team stands, all black dots and yellow dots, raincoats and the red umbrellas here and there, and one green one, a golf umbrella. The plangent dizziness arrived like a breeze, and Jimmy wondered at it again, the merging of the world and idea; how could he ever parse what he was seeing from what he was thinking, especially now with the five kids killed in the car driving back from Cheyenne in the year 1967, all five, and he knew them, middle names and all. And now in a car humming with the impinging friction of the rain, he could hear their voices, Claudia DeSmet, who reminded Jimmy always for some reason of a goose, a girl with a great straight nose and a womanâs body at fifteen, now dead thirty-three years.
Before him the clusters of dots, the people in the stands, shifted and reshifted, running in the rain on the glass, and he knew as an idea, as a thing, that he had been
It had been raining now for a little while, and the water sheeted and merged as it ran down the windshield. It blurred the scene before him, the people across the football field in their coats, dots of red, brown, yellow, green, blue, three hundred people in the rain of Wyoming. They would blur and focus in the glass. He concentrated on them as they came and went. The rain was a soft pressure on the van. He lost it and then started awake and made a note to stay awake and lost that. It was a short step from the swimming windshield to his hallucinations to the high dreams. He could not feel himself breathing, and he made that note and then lost it.
Maybe he was already dead, these colored dots come to greet him, witness his induction, rows and rows of the dead blurring in this great gray room, a tray of apples. The dozen friends in New York, one by one, and suddenly the bottom dropped out. Eldon Rayalf had died in elementary school, shot one stormy fall out on the antelope hunt. He was shot in the head, the story was, and the second story was that his uncle, bored in the million-mile afternoon, had been playing with his rifle, up, down, shooting-bushes bored, and wheeling by the boy, heâd touched the trigger early, and instead of offering a noise that would have rung his ears for a week, he took off most of his forehead. Jimmy remembered the funeral in the Mormon chapel, the closed coffin, all the town it seemed, and then the ride to the cemetery. Was he the first? Jimmyâs dadâs hands were on his shoulder, and Jimmy could see Mr. Rayalf, the back of his head, his dark hair shiny from Brylcreem. Old man Rayalf would have been thirty-one or thirty-two years old at the time, and now he had something he would never get out from under, ever. It became the shadow, the pressure that would press his drinking, and he was a good, quiet, diminished man forevermore. But Eldon wasnât the first. There were two girls with the flu, and Boyd Mildone in junior high, drowned in the river, swimming or fishing. He must have been fishing alone before school, and his waders taken suddenly with the cold water like a scoop, he drowned. There was a place beyond the old Knop junkyard, the spillage of ruined cars, where the river bent and the cattails grew tall, and it had always been only one thing, the place where Boyd had drowned.
Now Jimmy focused suddenly on the furrowed windshield of Chuck Andresonâs truck, and beyond he could see the rainy home-team stands, all black dots and yellow dots, raincoats and the red umbrellas here and there, and one green one, a golf umbrella. The plangent dizziness arrived like a breeze, and Jimmy wondered at it again, the merging of the world and idea; how could he ever parse what he was seeing from what he was thinking, especially now with the five kids killed in the car driving back from Cheyenne in the year 1967, all five, and he knew them, middle names and all. And now in a car humming with the impinging friction of the rain, he could hear their voices, Claudia DeSmet, who reminded Jimmy always for some reason of a goose, a girl with a great straight nose and a womanâs body at fifteen, now dead thirty-three years.
Before him the clusters of dots, the people in the stands, shifted and reshifted, running in the rain on the glass, and he knew as an idea, as a thing, that he had been
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