Machine Dreams

while I got him out of the office. Reb kept a drawerful of candy suckers for kids and you brought Billy’s out to him. Once he got the candy in his mouth, he’d stop shivering. We’d walk down those dim steps to the glass street door. Light shone through in that shape in the dark. Billy strained toward it and you walked down stiffly, holding to the bannister. I could never figure out why you always seemed afraid when everything was already over with.
    Even with all the windows open, it is too hot in Billy’s room. I lower the windows, then walk out onto the carpeted upstairs landing, open the screen door to the forbidden porch balcony. It is a summer afternoon and much later, in the dark, it will rain. The warm air smells of the promise of rain. I lock my arms around myself and prop my feet on the railing, memorizing one angle of vision: the slope of the shingled roof to my mother’s square backyard, clean garbage cans sentinel by the alley, the vacant lot with its one scrawny birch. Across the lot are the empty sidewalks, the street, and St. Clair funeral home. The house sits squarely on its wide, banked lawn, waiting. St. Clair Home is one of the few Quality Hill mansions left completely intact; most of the other old homes have been chopped into apartments or defiled by fraternities. The mortuary trade sign, discreet, glassed-in like a portrait, stands on two legs in the center of the lawn. The large round clock attached to the railing of the third-floor balcony is a commercial touch, illuminated at night, but the black numerals and their constantinformation are easily visible: a service to the community. The peaked slate roof rises over windows framed in blue glass. The glass is densely blue, like the blue of old medicine bottles, and murky.
    Billy would never sit and stare at St. Clair Home. He was as uninvolved with undertakers as he was with grades. But I remember coming home from parking at the concrete plant on weekends when I was in high school. Senior year especially, riding past the funeral home with one of the two boyfriends of my high school career. The big St. Clair clock hung as always in its circle of blue neon from the high balcony. The blue ring glowed around the moonish face of the clock. The minute hand moved with a discernible jerk, accurate, later than I’d thought. Late, I fumbled to button my blouse, straighten my stockings. Then whispering, easing of the car to the curb. Winter: patches of ice in the dark. Kisses, good-byes, picking my way up the broken stone walk to the side door as the boyfriend coasted his car down the hill, soundlessly away. Billy was never home yet; he and Kato slept together in her bed and he seldom came in until one or two. I was female, due in at midnight. Inside, glow of the kitchen night-light and again, the tick of a clock loud in the sleeping house. Moving into the hallway, I saw my face in the small mirror above the message board. The apparition of my own image welled up from shadows and startled me. I would think,
Billy’s not here, I’m the only one.
In the bedroom my father snored, the sheets turned down to his waist. From her bed in the basement came my mother’s voice, her words angry, afraid, and indistinct. I couldn’t answer her. What journey was this, and where were we all going?
    Billy got to Vietnam in May of 1970. He said it was so hot there you could barely breathe. I had a job that summer in Bellington, teacher’s aide at Project Headstart. It was hot in Bellington, too. Billy was in the air and I was in the ground-floor classroom of the old Central Grade School with Mrs. Smith and twenty poor kids. We kept all the windows open; flies buzzed in and out, but the air never moved. Mrs. Smith was teaching all summer for the
money
; she was nice, she was patient, but she had no illusions about head starts. I had illusions. I had nightmares, too, aboutBilly’s letters, but I waited for every one of them and wrote to him twice a week. I even started hanging out with his friends, kids who’d been two years behind me in school and so were just finishing a first year of college or a first year working for the gas company, or whatever. We’d have a few beers at the Tap Room, and I’d write Billy about funny things they said, how they looked, who they were going out with. He mentioned Kato in his letters, but I never mentioned her to him. I knew she was spending time again with the cop she’d stopped seeing for the few months before Billy went