Lonny was the product of big energy and tiny town, where the limitations imposed by three square blocks of homes — an Alcatraz adrift on an ocean of unswimmable wheat — fueled the kind of incendiary pressure that could only come out wrong. Even back then, when I was eight and Lonny was nine, his combustion resulted in trouble; so years later, when I heard that he was in the pen for grand theft auto and some litany of other offenses, it was disappointingly no surprise: the wide world never succeeded in changing Lonny’s first impressions, nor would he be able to see it as anything but an endless, confining small town. A twitch in his heart was too large for his skin, a cruel itch, an irritation for which he found no balm. Maybe he didn’t look hard enough. Maybe he took off in the wrong direction, followed the wrong leader, and never got righted.
In those summertime memories, though, whatever malevolence was coming hadn’t yet arrived, his dysfunction was “creative”, if in a driven sort of way, and he owned a curiosity that was perhaps as insatiable as mine… Who, as I recall, was helped onto a train by myself, leaving family and everything I knew behind, to spend those ripening seasons with my Great Aunt and Great Uncle, not far from the “geographical center of North America, which meant miles from any other landmark, awash on the wide prairie. (Who, as I recall, found the sea of green no different than a liquid one, found self-reliance early, found love, found the infinite, found limits to the infinite, in the call of the Mourning Dove, every elm-shaded evening, from the wire outside my bedroom: she brought sad news; she brought beautiful news.)
What would happen, Lonny would ask, if we put a nail…, or a coin, or some other trinket on the railroad tracks, before the grain cars rolled by? I have a flattened and stretched 10-penny spike in my treasure-box to this day; later he would experiment with a stone the size of his head, derail an eastbound freight, and wind up in Juvenile Hall. Or: despite all appearances, could one actually fit through that crevice behind the grain elevator? The answer proven yes, two could in fact, single-file, passing through to the other side by sucking in the belly and the breath, maybe by believing there was no obstruction, thinking right through the lightless space, and reaching as long and as thin as that flattened nail from where we were to where we wanted to be. I saw magic; Lonny saw another wall, and broke it down.
Do you know what… (he asked one day) …what I heard is buried in the dust at the Perkins house…?
There is a highway sign a few miles to the west, where one road meets another road as casually as wind meets cloud, or effortlessly as snow covers a field. Maybe the reasons for roads were lost in a more bustling past, where their meeting held more purpose and boasted more traffic. At the crossroad there is a sign that reads Carbury; it also used to read: Pop’n. 1. In the field near that sign there was a house long devoid of human care, and long home only to wind and weather, bleak, blown, abandoned. It was not the Perkins’ house, but all that was left of Carbury, population zero despite the optimistic advertisement, and the single most clamorous object in that whole landscape: one lone building made those fields emptier than they ever could have been were the house not there. Imagine the voices of ghosts, when the winter wind came wailing from Alberta, across that treeless terrain, and found the edges and the windows of that house!
Glad I was never to have witnessed that, child or man; but ghosts have a way of reaching out, and inhabiting tucked-away corners of the mind, so that when Lonny took me to third block in town (third of four), and showed me the drab two-story with its peeling paint and shingles missing as often as not, it was Carbury that was in my heart, whether I spoke the name aloud or not.
I remember asking Is it ok to go in there?, since that was the plan. I have the suspicion from this end of time that the question was more about whispering fears and corners-of-the-mind than it was about authorities. Besides, in a town of 114 the only real authority was most likely my own Great Uncle Olaf, who managed the grain elevator, the laundromat, any number of other local services and who (I expect) was de facto mayor. Lonny glanced at me with that devil in his eye, and tugged at a first-floor window. It opened with that sandy scrape unused windows acquire. Flecks of paint fell on the sill like flakes of dead skin.
It was daytime, probably afternoon. Every day was structured by the following: breakfast, morning coffee (for Olaf, I drank RC Cola that summer) and a doughnut at Muggy’s Cafe, lunch, dinner. Breakfast was accompanied by the grain futures, lunch with a contemplative cigarette and sometimes a bit of town chatter, dinner with music on the radio. In between those pillars lay stretched out green wandering, and sun more often than not. Sometimes there was a run to Hilmer’s to help shovel grain, or time spent with the old adding machine at the grain elevator. Once a week there was a walk with Hazel, around the corner to the small grocery. They were summers of indulgence and wonder. The summer of Lonny contained a bit more daring than others. It was after lunch his blood seemed to get stirring. For the sake of setting and mood, we’ll call the hour of the break-in afternoon.
The light inside — of course we hooked our legs over the sill, and slid down the gray wall to the floor — the light was dull, as the dust that lay inches-thick on the floor wasn’t heavy enough for gravity to hold it in place, and the Carbury-wind must have spun it around as though shaking a braided rug. There was nowhere to go but up, and the windows were coated with feathers of history, or gray snowflakes that fell only indoors. Small particles were suspended in the shaft of light that shouldered its way into the room, and seemed to hang there, immobile. Time was stagnant! Our footsteps made no sound. Our weight sometimes shifted an old plank against its neighbor; or a square nail, loose in its peghole, would hold hold hold then give way with a small wooden-metallic knock, and the silence would for an instant be disturbed; then even sound seemed to fail, in this house of failure, and it died in the dust at our feet.
Over here! Lonny spoke in a whisper. No one outdoors could have heard us, even shouting; everyone was out in the fields. But there was something ponderous… can you shout in a cemetery? I think words stick in your throat. Wherever Lonny was heading in his life, toward whatever darkness that fascinated his soul, still he respected the dead.
He motioned toward the fireplace, where wind from the unsecured flue had swept a two-foot arc clear of the grate. It looked as though an arm had reached down the chimney, stretched as far as it could into the room, and ran its hand left then right then left again, to sweep and clean what it could. I was surprised to see anything but bare floor — there were scraps of life there, someone had left behind!
A postcard. A broken child’s toy. Some ragged clothing that might have been a child’s, or a doll’s. Trivia. But then…
The corner of my eye caught a shape. Some shapes have meaning. Some meanings take shape, when a heart meets a heart, by whatever medium that connection is forged. My eyes turned away from scrap, toward meaning, and the eyes of a photo turned in time to meet my gaze.
In a white-waved border, half covered in Dakota rime, was the picture of a boy no older than me, perhaps a year or two my junior. He looked out on the room but was smiling, was not seeing the room, but his parents maybe, his friends maybe. The photo was old enough, was taken in black and white. His eyes were full of life, but discarded on the floor they were as disquieting as that shell of a house down the road. For me there was a vanished air about him — whatever that is — his stare shook things inside of me like thunder; there was a storm coming. The house suddenly seemed fragile in spite of the dust’s proof of years. There was an ugly mystery here. Who leaves a photo when they leave a home? Who leaves a boy behind, who leaves Lonny to wander, who doesn’t catch him up in arms, keep him as safe as possible against the weights and weather of time? Who wouldn’t burn history to the ground and leave the fields as clean as virgin spring, so those lives don’t dry and rattle like empty corn-husks on their stalks?
Lonny, let’s get out of here, I said, and I did, and he followed me. This time he followed me, like the time he followed as I set off walking down the tracks one day, away from town. He followed me as quickly and as surely as he followed me that other time, toward a horizon he would never reach, a beauty that he couldn’t see, and which I could never show him.
A postage stamp of ground: a shout’s distance from the Canadian border. Wind that bows the seed-heads of the durham and the rye. Wind that makes waves in the fields you can follow with your eyes, wind rushes the grasses like fingers through hair. Wind carries the scent of the earth from far away, back there. If you know it, you can smell it, on an August evening, when you close your eyes.
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