An Orchard in the Street Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Reginald Gibbons

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  171819207654321

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 132 for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Art: Man with a Gun by Tony Fitzpatrick

  Cover Design: Sandy Knight

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gibbons, Reginald, author.

  Title: An orchard in the street / Reginald Gibbons.

  Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Ltd., 2017. | Series: American readers series; no. 29

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014732 (print) | LCCN 2017021308 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942683506 (eBook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Visionary & Metaphysical. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3557.I1392 (ebook) | LCC PS3557.I1392 A6 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014732

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

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  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  remembering W. R. G. and W. G.

  . . . to bind up the brokenhearted,

  to proclaim liberty to the captives,

  and the opening of the prison

  to them that are bound.

  —Isaiah 61:1

  Contents

  River

  Mekong Restaurant, 1986

  Five Pears or Peaches

  Wonder

  Bless This House

  The Vanishing Point

  No Matter What Has Happened This May

  Money

  Julius Johnson, 1995

  In the City

  A Man in a Suit

  Time Out!

  Preparations for Winter

  Dying with Words

  On Belmont

  Mission

  Just Imagine

  Small Business

  On Assignment

  Dead Man’s Things

  Slow Motion

  Persephonē at Home

  Courthouse

  Winter Friday

  Harlequin

  Near the Spring Branch

  Change the Goddamn Thing

  What Happened

  A Singular Accomplishment

  Three Persons on a Crow

  Hide and Seek

  Arms

  The Oldest Man in North America

  The Living

  All-Out Effort

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Colophon

  River

  Stay in the river, Bill was told by Father John. “Stay in the river, don’t go over to the bank and climb up there into those weeds, stay out in the middle, go where it’s flowing. You don’t know where it’s flowing but you have to stay in it, you don’t have to know, you can’t know. Stay in the river.”

  “But,” Bill said, “I’ve been around rivers and streams all my life, I’ve been up in those weeds and found those fantastic nests in there, with all those eggs, those wonderful nests, that’s where I like to be.”

  “But that’s only till they hatch. That’s only for them to leave, so they can get into the river, even the mama leaves that nest as soon as she can with those offspring of hers, or she’s got the kind that she can leave them, on the right day, and she goes back into the river—no, you can’t stay there . . . Stay in the river, don’t be afraid of where it’s going to carry you, that’s where you’re meant to be.”

  Mekong Restaurant, 1986

  What’s the half-life of a city?

  Elsewhere, far away, green shoots of rice as new as creation, a soft harmless color, rippling, shimmering, in a breeze over the flat surface of water, outside a village of frail huts with talk in them, under trees of a green hot place drenched by rain, in a country of rain clouds and smoke clouds and fire clouds.

  A menu in Vietnamese and English.

  A dozen immigrants waiting among native and naturalized citizens for their boxes and bags inside a terminal at O’Hare. Refugees streamed back the way that long war had come to them—into the very country that had turned guns and poured fire on them. The immigrants have brought their children and their names with them. Some of their children; some of their parents and uncles and aunts; names that must struggle to be pronounced inside unfamiliar mouths.

  But along these streets ice-winds race. And in summer the raw weedy vacant lots show a jewel glitter sparkling like sequins on fields of ragged green and crumbly gray—innumerable bits of shattered glass under the half-open windows of apartment buildings and ramshackle three-flats, a few with new paint and siding. Up and down the busy street there are shops—Viet Hoa Market, Nha Trang Restaurant, Video King, White Hen, Viet Mien Restaurant, McDonalds, Dr. Ngo Phung Dentist, Nguyen Quang Attorney at Law, Viet My Department Store, Casino Tours. High and far as mountains beyond and above the roofs of this street the winter gray-on-white cityscape wears banners of steam flapping straight sideways in the bitter wind. If you stare at the big buildings long enough you might begin to sense a foundational anxiety in the balanced masses of stone and you might wonder why they don’t just fall. Fall!

  Go out into a vacant lot, or even into a park, and hide under a weed.

  Same moon. Not the same moon. After danger and escapes, after straining so intensely to survive—living in this place makes some feel they have come to their own funeral. To live away from your own place, far away, and to think you will never return, is to be condemned to have been saved one time too many, some will feel. When meteor showers fall in winter and summer you won’t see them because the underbelly of the sky is lit orange all night in every season. But the children grow accustomed.

  An immigrant boy of fourteen wearing black trousers and a white shirt and a thin jacket is standing with his immigrant parents at the counter of the high-school office, waiting to be called in to be registered; the two clerks are busy, giving the immigrants only a glance, and the mother and father and boy are waiting. At this school the students speak twenty-nine languages, or forty-one, or sixty-three.

  The year lasts longer here. It’s a proven fact of quantum longing—that time passes more slowly when the air is cold than when it is warm, and that snow and bright streetlights are emotionally radioactive. Not so far away is a famous atom smasher that generates twirling nanosecond particles, and around itself it pays for wide reaches of lovely restored native prairie.

  In this place are two zoos, many banks, millions of persons, and the inland sea, frozen this year near the shore, and perhaps for the las
t time in years to come. From wave water splashed into the air, where it freezes, crumbly hills of ice have risen along the beaches, and beside the lakefront roads blackened piles and heaps of soft-hard decayed slush. The fast traffic rolls and rolls.

  A menu in English and Vietnamese.

  It’s late, he’s looking out through the kitchen pickup window at three American strangers, still in their overcoats, who have come in, who are looking around, who are sitting down at a table.

  What is the half-life of a city?

  Five Pears or Peaches

  Buckled into the cramped back seat, she sings to herself as I drive toward her school through the town streets. Straining upward to see out her window, she watches the things that go by, the ones she sees—I know only that some of them are the houses we sometimes say we wish were ours. But today as we pass them we only think it; or I do, while she’s singing—the big yellow one with a roofed portico for cars never there, the red-shuttered pink stucco one that’s her favorite. Most of what she sings rhymes as it unwinds in the direction she goes with it. Half the way to school she sings, and then she stops, the song becomes something she’d rather keep to herself, the underground sweet-water stream through the tiny continent of her, on which her high oboe voice floats through forests softly, the calling of a hidden pensive bird—this is how I strain my grasp to imagine what it’s like for her to be thinking of things, to herself, to be feeling her happiness or fear.

  After I leave her inside the small school, which was converted from an old house in whose kitchen you can almost still smell the fruit being cooked down for canning, she waves goodbye from a window, and I can make her cover her mouth with one hand and laugh and roll her eyes at a small classmate if I cavort a little down the walk.

  In some of her paintings, the sun’s red and has teeth, but the houses are cheerful, and fat flying birds with almost human faces and long noses for beaks sail downward toward the earth, where her giant bright flowers overshadow like trees the people she draws.

  When the day is ending, her naked delight in the bath is delight in a lake of still pleasures, a straight unhurried sailing in a good breeze, and a luxurious trust that there will always be this calm warm weather, and someone’s hand to steer and steady the skiff of her. Ashore, orchards are blooming.

  Before I get into bed with her mother at night, in our own house, I look in on her and watch her sleeping hands come near her face to sweep away what’s bothering her dreaming eyes. I ease my hand under her back and lift her from the edge of the bed to the center. I can almost catch the whole span of her shoulders in one hand—five pears or peaches, it might be, dreaming in a delicate basket—till they tip with their own live weight and slip from my grasp.

  Wonder

  Along the dark neighborhood sidewalk, a casual, brazen raccoon waddling toward the nearby moonlit limitless lake seems to expect me to stand out of its way. I certainly do. More sightings of the other residents of this lakeshore plain have marked the meanwhile tumultuous human seasons—a running, frightened, confused deer clattering its small hooves down our street of shy silent houses early on a Sunday morning, far from any woods; a red fox that trotted out of a scraggly hedge and across my path as I was walking; in a tall bush beside our trash can, a transient gorgeous warbler lit by a shaft of sunlight on a windy, cloudy morning; and one bright afternoon when inside the house I heard for half an hour a faraway continuous honking of Canada geese. Finally I went outside to see how there could be so many. I looked up through the sunlit limitless spring sky at endless interconnected irregular skeins of them, so far up, V and V and V and V branching again and again from each other, thousands and thousands of geese, honking en masse to make their ceaseless goose and gander music, and amazingly, crossing the whole sky, the sky from church roof to treetops and house chimneys. Their calls were resounding even inside the neighborhoods’ hot dusty attics, alleyway garages, basements. Fifty thousand flying geese, a hundred thousand, how many? In the small gravel parking lot of the old red-brick church, four neighbors and I stood with heads back, not speaking, watching the geese wavily pattern the whole sky the same way waves pattern the lake, until after we had watched together for twenty minutes, that immense, inconceivable effort of birds was more than our minds could reach toward any more; it pushed our imaginations aside, it exhausted our attention, it tired our feeble necks, it would never happen again where we could see it, it was like a mythical visitation that human beings were meant to witness for the sake of a cleansing of the spirit. Rippling lines drawn across the whole sky by beating wings.

  Bless This House

  It’s late morning, and inside one of the small houses standing always side by side up and down the street, there is quiet. All three beds have been left unmade upstairs, dirty dishes from the night before lie in the kitchen sink, two damp clumped towels lie on the floor of the one bathroom, downstairs, and the front door has locked something in—the daytime absence that no one can ever witness. They all rushed out—he for the whole day, she and the children for her errands and their doctor and then the supermarket, and the children would get sweets to soothe the shock of the needles.

  Before this, before the rush to leave, even before anyone awoke, what was there? There was peace in the small rooms on the second floor. Into each of the four dreaming souls the sounds of the spring daylight had begun to enter: the chirping town birds in trees and bushes—robins, sparrows, and a triumphant cardinal shouting from somewhere—and the first few cars starting, and an early plane too high up to be heard.

  Before that, in the half-sleeping night, lying in bed face to face, the man and woman with closed eyes had lain still, aware along their bodies of each other’s warmth and solidity in the dimness—exhausted, remedyless, greedy for at least the least contentment of having gone past the time for work or thought, lying half asleep in the half comfort of each other’s arms.

  Before that, before anyone had gone to bed, there was the sound of their younger child crying. The father held the little girl awhile, whisper-singing off-key, “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Daddy’s gonna buy you . . .” It didn’t work, and back in her crib the little one cried and cried, softly, and also called a few times so achingly that when at last she stopped and was calm, not yet helped but too tired to keep crying, there came from next door the sound of another child crying, child who had heard her call and was relaying it on, unable not to, renewing the search for an answer that sometimes is known to no parent.

  Before that, it had been bedtime—some separate sorrow twisting the face of the boy, older by three years, wringing a few tears from him too. An obsessing heart might falter at such seemingly helpless sadness. But it passed through him and went away somewhere and shyly he came back to them and sat close to his mother on the couch, happier again. And the mother’s shoulders were no longer, for a while, too heavy, the father stood less pained and weak, less in danger of becoming angry, his face not failing him or his family.

  Before that, there had been television, and before that, dessert, and before that, dinner. All the while the little boy was feeling something he didn’t want to feel, something as scratchy as wool in his being and he ran here and there and made noise and poked his infant sister with his finger and upset her and then gave his trouble to his mother. She took it from him wearily, but the man and the woman did not know anything about what troubled him, and the boy couldn’t say it because he couldn’t quite think it.

  Before that, there had been the man’s arrival home, relieved, tired, looking as if some of his very substance had been worn from him again by the day’s work. Wanting to be restored by his children but having to try to help restore them and their mother. Hadn’t each of them too flowed like water through the unique and ordinary day and arrived again at a place never before known—this late afternoon, this moment? In the aisles of supermarkets, one after another, the man had stood, with one painful foot in a shoe half unlaced, he rested that foot on edge, his hand marked the long sheets on his cl
ipboard, his eyes counted things and things, his hands neatened the stock he had delivered—the soft loaves of bread in their soft plastic sleeves, the packaged muffins . . . In a slow hurry . . .

  At his entrance into the realm of the woman and the two children, he had put on some cheer for them, and lifted both children up, one in each arm, and hugged them, and felt the precious hands of the little boy at the back of his cricked neck and in his grateful hair, the adorable heft and scent of the tiny girl. And he had remembered to ask what he could of the woman’s day and he had tried to listen to her and he had thought of a dozen things he would have liked to tell her if he could have found the words, if long before now he had found them, so that they would have been ready when he needed them. But he was home, the day had taken him from himself and even now kept him from them, somewhat. It was too late, at this passing moment, to find the words. And could he hope that she would care to hear him beyond her own cares, which also weighed on him?

  Before that, the woman had tried to hold her back just so—there was a little catch in it that had been jabbing her with pain for four days if she didn’t hold herself just so. She thought about how to speak to the man, about what to say, what to ask, how to ask it, how to hope he would answer it, how to make a beginning of a beginning of a change, how to figure out what it was that could be changed, that needed to be changed, how to change it, how to find a place to start, inside these rooms, clothes, hopes. How to hold on, to live each date of the calendar in what seemed the endless succession of days of attending to the children and everything that had to be done. Find the corner where the dissonance sounded, when it did, and go there and smooth it—how to do that, how to find whatever it was that was not what it should be, whatever it was they wanted, the two of them, the mingled commitments that together they lived but that seemed to be almost entirely hers alone to feed and warm and prod into speech—that simple overwhelming how. And wanting, needing, to wait two years more before leaving both children in some stranger’s arms and care.