David Gates: The Wonders of the Invisible World

He carries the laundry upstairs and looks in again: Deke’s on his side, mouth slack, his outbreaths roaring in the silent house. Then he creeps into his own room, slips Fuckbuddies into the sports section of the Times, carries it out to the breezeway, still in his stocking feet, and sticks it in with the garbage. He pours yet another finger of Macallan, gets into bed and opens The Interpretation of Dreams, his current go-to-sleep book: in The Western Canon, his previous go-to-sleep book, Harold Bloom did such a good job of selling Freud as imaginative literature that Billy’s giving it another try. He begins “The Dream of the Botanical Monograph,” which sounds like a Sherlock Holmes title, or Borges maybe, but quickly becomes impenetrable. Behind “artichokes” lay, on the one hand, my thoughts about Italy and, on the other, a scene from my childhood which was the opening of what have since become my intimate relations with books. Do tell. He pages around and stumbles across the part about staircase dreams, which he’d always heard were supposedly sexual. So that was why? Because you mount higher and higher and pant as you reach the top? What incredibly silly shit.

He realizes after a while that he’s been cruising along with his eyes closed, following some parallel story about painting over wallpaper with a roller; this is not, technically, reading. He reaches over and puts out the light, then instantly comes wide awake, worrying what question he could ask if Dennis should call. The only question he can think of is Did you ever fly when you were a little boy ? Because he’s imagining Deke in a Diamond Dogs uniform, soaring around the bases six feet above the ground, making smart right-angle turns like Casper the Friendly Ghost. So maybe he’s asleep and doesn’t know it.

The light wakes Billy up too early Saturday morning: those flower-print curtains of his mother’s just don’t cut it. He reads until he hears Deke calling, then delivers a clean outfit, goes to the kitchen to start coffee and puts on the Shostakovich, skipping right to the zippy second movement. Before breakfast they play three games of Old Maid. Billy’s caught with the Old Maid each time, in scary defiance of the law of averages; but even if this meant something, it would simply mean what he already knows. He gets out bowls, milk, spoons and Product 19. No TV, no sugared cereals, no throwaway pop music — someday Deke will hold all this against him. Assuming Deke just stays on and on, which Billy shouldn’t be assuming.

“So I thought today we better make a pumpkin run,” he says. Halloween’s a week away. Make it through that and they’ve got Thanksgiving. And then Christmas.

“What’s a pumpkin run?”

“Maybe five dollars. That was a joke.”

“I don’t get it.” Deke’s eating with his face down in the bowl, holding his spoon overhand. Must this be corrected, or do kids grow out of it automatically?

“Don’t worry, it wasn’t funny. What I meant was, we should go out and get a pumpkin. You ever make a jack-o-lantern?”

“I don’t know. Can we read first?”

“Sure. We got the whole day.” Though in fact Billy would like to get the hell out of here before Dennis calls back. “What did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know.” But of course it turns out to be The Runaway Bunny.

“Heck of a story,” Billy says when he’s finished reading the thing. “Now, would you go get your shoes, please?”

“Thank you,” Deke says. A reflex triggered by the please ? Or is Deke actually thanking him?

“You’re welcome.” Billy decides to break the rule. “Tell me something. Are you missing your mom today?”

“Not really. Can we call her?”

“We can’t call her, but she’ll probably call us later on.”

“Can we wait?”

This requires a lie. “The last time I talked to her, she said she probably wouldn’t be calling till tonight.” Mistake: this invention is checkable. “Or that’s what I thought she said. So we have lots of time. Shoes?”

They drive up to Troy, then cut east toward Bennington. It’s a flawless autumn day, the blue of the sky either absolutely deep or absolutely without depth. Billy’s put on The Magnificent Gigli, and at least Deke’s not complaining. They take a side road north, past barns and tractors, through intermittent odors of manure. Billy passes on his tractor lore: red for Farmall, green for John Deere, gray for Ford, orange for Case, Allis-Chalmers and Massey-Harris. And they make up a tractor game: Deke gets a point for every red one, Billy for every green, and points for gray and orange go to whoever spots them first. Deke’s ahead four to two when they stop at a field with a beach umbrella, an aluminum chair and a PUMKINSsign.

There’s nobody here, just rows of pumpkins ranked by size and a tackle box with a three-by-five card reading HONOR SYSTEM: LG $5, MED $3, SM $1.

“Can we get a big one?”

“But of course,” Billy says in his French accent.

“But I feel sorry for the little ones.”

“So we’ll get some little ones too, for decoration. The little ones are the ones they make pies out of.”

“Can we make a pie?”

“We can think about it.”

“But can we?”

“Yeah, why not? I guess we could figure it out.” One of his mother’s cookbooks must have a recipe, though they’re probably all based on canned pumpkin. Which must be more condensed, so therefore … something. Whether Deke’s budding housewifeliness ought to be encouraged is a whole other question. But here’s Billy encouraging it.

When he opens his wallet, he finds only three singles and a couple of twenties. The tackle box has two singles and three quarters. Hmm. Deke’s walking through the big pumpkins, crowing “Look at this one — no, look at this one!” Billy steps into the road. That must be the house, way up there on the opposite side. A tall, pointy-roofed farmhouse with two-over-two windows, weathered gray. Not a place where he’d ordinarily knock on the door. If he left a twenty and took the two singles, they could get three big pumpkins and three little ones. Except he doesn’t want three big pumpkins. And he doubts you need three little ones for a pie, even if the stuff’s not condensed.

“Come here quick!” Deke calls.

“You find one?”

“You have to see this.”

Billy walks over. Deke’s sitting beside a knee-high pumpkin, classic pumpkin-shape on one side, the other side flattened, with diseased-looking patches of brown.

“A wright, ” he says. “Good choice.”

“We can just turn the bad side away,” Deke says.

“Absolutely.”

“So we can get it, right?”

“If I can lift it.”

“I’ll help,” Deke says.

They wrestle the monster into the backseat, then pick out three small pumpkins. Billy puts a twenty in the tackle box and takes out the two ones. Five for the big pumpkin, buck apiece for the three little ones, ten dollars for the entertainment. He backs around, noses onto the blacktop, looks both ways and decides to drive on past the farmhouse instead of turning around and appearing to hightail it out of there. He points at the chickens pecking in the front yard and a small black-nosed sheep chained to a car wheel lying in the grass, and misses a Farmall tractor out by the barn.

“Can we listen to Barney?”

“Sure,” Billy says. “You like that song ‘The Old Brass Wagon’?”

“I guess so.”

“I’m really into it, for some reason.”

Deke looks at him and narrows his eyes, as if he’s suddenly been dealt one more crazy adult. “How come you like it?”