Hunts in Dreams by Tom Drury

Author:Tom Drury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2013-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Sunday

9 ◆ Lyris

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT. How had it gotten so late? She must have slept. Car lights moved toward them in lonely pairs on a narrow road between ditches. Lyris had no idea where they were or where they were going. Follard was telling her about an old friend who had driven so drunk sometimes that she would see two pairs of headlights for every car; all she could do was steer between them. “Lucky to be alive,” he said. Follard had seen too many people ruined by liquor. Lyris admitted she had tried the spiked chocolate. The headlights did not look double to her, but they vibrated.

Follard took her to see a big grain operation out in the country. Boxcars were lined up on the rail siding, and Lyris thought of Charles’s talk of grain, making its way to the river. He seemed to want to know more about agriculture than he did — as if it were his duty, being from farm country. Follard circled the towering silos, his tires throwing gravel, until Lyris grew dizzy and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw an old watchman crossing the parking lot with a baseball bat over his shoulder.

“Here comes somebody,” she said.

“I see him.”

Lyris waved at the man slowly, as if her hand were under water.

The watchman returned the wave of the girl in the car as if conceding the harmlessness of her adventure. He returned to the office, where he leaned the bat in a corner next to a refrigerator, from which he took a quart of beer. He uncapped it and drank. One of the cats had walked on his game of solitaire and mixed up the cards; there would be no getting it back.

“That’s just great,” he said to a cat gnawing its toes on an old leather chair. “Is that right?” he said. “Then who was it?”

The old man squared up the cards and shuffled. His son was a bartender who every once in a while would drop by the elevator on his way home from work. Once he had brought two dancers to see the elevator, and the old man had run corn into the pit from overhead for their amusement. The women were amazed by the force of it and by the tumbling nails that were mixed with the corn because it was salvage grain. ­Sixteen-penny, the old man had estimated. So polite they were, like college students. They called him sir and said that earlier in the night his son had ejected from the bar a man who was as big as Sinbad the Sailor.

The watchman dealt and played a new hand. Then he walked through the feed room, where the big potbellied grinder was shaking corn kernels to dust. White powder caked the grinder, drifted from the rafters. The watchman crossed the alleyway to a metal shed. Inside was a mound of salt pellets many times taller than himself. He sighed and began shoveling pellets into a large paper sack with a hand scoop.

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