Dreams Underfoot

UNCLE DOBBIN'S PARROT FAIR 1 She would see them in the twilight when the wind was right, roly-poly shapes propelled by ocean breezes, turning end-over-end along the beach or down the alley behind her house like errant beach balls granted a moment's freedom. Sometimes they would get caught up against a building or stuck on a curb and then spindly little arms and legs would unfold from their fat bodies until they could push themselves free and go rolling with the wind again. Like flotsam in a river, like tumbleweeds, only brightly colored in primary reds and yellows and blues. They seemed very solid until the wind died down. Then she would watch them come apart the way morning mist will when the sun burns it away, the bright colors turning to ragged ribbons that tattered smoke-like until they were completely gone. Those were special nights, the evenings that the Balloon Men came. * * * In the late sixties in Haight-Ashbury, she talked about them once. Incense lay thick in the airtwo cones of jasmine burning on a battered windowsill. There was an old iron bed in the room, up on the third floor of a house that no one lived in except for runaways and street people. The mattress had rust-colored stains on it. The incense covered the room's musty smell. She'd lived in a form of self-imposed poverty back then, but it was all a part of the Summer of Love. "I know what you mean, man," Greg Longman told her. "I've seen them." He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt with a simple peace symbol on it and scuffed plastic thongs. Sticking up from the waist of his bell-bottomed jeans at a forty-five degree angle was a descant recorder. His long blonde hair was tied back with an elastic. His features were thinan ascetic-looking face, thin and drawn-out from too much time on the streets with too little to eat, or from too much dope. "They're like..." His hands moved as he spoke, trying to convey what he didn't feel words alone could saya whole other language, she often thought, watching the long slender fingers weave through the air between them. "...they're just too much." "You've really seen them?" she asked. "Oh, yeah. Except not on the streets. They're floating high up in the air, y'know, like fat little kites." It was such a relief to know that they were real. "'Course," Greg added, "I gotta do a lot of dope to clue in on 'em, man." * * * Ellen Brady laid her book aside. Leaning back, she flicked off the light behind her and stared out into the night. The memory had come back to her, so clear, so sharp, she could almost smell the incense, see Greg's hands move between them, little colored after-image traces following each movement until he had more arms than Kali. She wondered what had ever happened to the Balloon Men. Long light-brown hair hung like a cape to her waist. Her parents were IrishMunster O'Healys on her mother's side, and Bradys from Derry on her father's. There was a touch of Spanish blood in her mother's side of the family, which gave her skin its warm dark cast. The Bradys were pure Irish and it was from them that she got her big-boned frame. And something else. Her eyes were a clear greytwilight eyes, her father had liked to tease her, eyes that could see beyond the here and now into somewhere else. She hadn't needed drugs to see the Balloon Men. Shifting in her wicker chair, she looked up and down the beach, but it was late and the wind wasn't coming in from the ocean. The book on her lap was a comfode Lint, Charles is the author of 'Dreams Underfoot' with ISBN 9780765306791 and ISBN 0765306794.