Machine Dreams

filled with order forms and diagrams of the metal buildings he sold to construction sites. He’d shown Billy the notebook, just as he’d once shown him the engines of concrete mixers. He’d owned the concrete company with Uncle Clayton then. The trucks were no mystery, their hoods thrown up to reveal hard interiors of throbbing blocks and hoses. The parts were crusted with age and smelled of cooked dirt. The notebook his father carried now smelled clean, barely disturbed, like a new text. Danner had probably never even looked inside.
    He walked into her room. The pink-checked curtains were drawn, the small room dim in the bright morning. For a moment the bed was only a high dark shape in tangled space.
Stirred with a stick
, his mother called Danner’s room. Billy walked over magazines and books and cast-off clothes and stood waiting. She’d wake up if he stared at her, unless she was only pretending to sleep.
    She lay on her stomach, limbs outstretched as though she’d reached the bed in free-fall and clung to what she occupied. Her hands held the curved edges of the mattress.
    “Danner,” he whispered, certain she was awake, “get up.”
    She opened her eyes immediately. “Why?”
    “Ride out to the airfield with me before Mom is awake.”
    She turned over and pulled the sheet up to her chin. “The hangar isn’t even open yet. There won’t be anything to see.”
    “I can get into the hangar,” Billy told her, “but we have to hurry.”
    “You can?” She paused, considering. “Dad told you not to go out there again until after the air show. Is it true there’s a guard with a gun at the hangar now?”
    “Just old Cosgrove. He’s always had a gun—he shoots groundhogs on the landing strip.” Billy leaned closer to her. Somewhere near them he heard a minute whispering. He reached under her pillow and held up the transistor radio. “Do you sleep with your radio?”
    She smiled, embarrassed, and took it from him. “I forgot. I fell asleep.” She turned the sound off and on to make sure the batteries still worked, then held it to her ear. “Last night after we got home from the pool dance, I heard WLS. Now there’s only air.”
    “What’s WLS?”
    “Chicago. Hundreds of miles away.” Her eyes moved to the obscured windows above her bed. “I hated that dance,” she said then, almost to herself.
    “You told Mom it was okay.”
    Danner turned the radio off. “Well, it wasn’t. I’m not going anymore.” She looked at him quizzically. “You never told me you know how to slow-dance.”
    “I don’t. I just moved my feet.” He shifted his weight, remembering uncomfortably the crowded floor, the lights strung up above like carnival lights. “It doesn’t matter now. Hurry and get up. We have to leave right away, and don’t make noise.”
    Crickets sounded up and down the road in the fields, as though it were still night. The wheels of the bicycles skimmed along the smooth cement. He rode beside Danner, wishing she’d go faster but observing a tacit etiquette.
    “Listen how loud the crickets are,” Danner said. “They’re down in the thick grass near the dirt and don’t know it’s daylight.”
    “Sure they do. The sun just isn’t hot enough yet to make them stop.”
    She glanced at him, leaning more forward on her bike. “You don’t know why they don’t stop.”
    “I know how to get into the hangar. I’ll show you, but you have to do like I say so Cosgrove won’t see us.”
    “Doesn’t he live beside the airfield, in that white house?”
    “That’s why he’s the caretaker. He’s just an old retired guy.” Billy leaned back, steering with one hand. “We go around the other side of the hangar—he can’t see from the house.”
    They rode, without talking, up the hill. There were no cars on the road and no movement around the infrequent houses, but the fields themselves looked alive. Their colors brightened in swatches as the sun got higher. Crows flew. The hoarse calls of roosters ricocheted.
    “When Polly got lost, Cosgrove was the old man we talked to at the airfield.” Danner spoke without turning her gaze from the road.
    “Did Dad bring us out here? Are you sure?”
    Their dog, Polly, a retriever mix, had disappeared two years before. Jean had announcements made on the local radio; Mitch had driven up and down dirt roads branching off Brush Fork, while Danner and Billy called the dog’s name from the car. Months later, Billy found an animal skeleton in a