his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young. I helped him stand up and with his eyes shut he was willing to be led to the cot in the living room where he dozed in the daytime, right beside the picture window. It was placed so that when he woke up he could gaze at the hot eternal sky.
When Clemence came back, I left the house and biked to a slough outside of town. It was shallow all along the edges, and I’d seen a heron there last time I went. All the herons and cranes and other shorebirds were my doodemag, my luck. There was a dock of gray boards, some missing. I lay down on the warm wood and the sun went right into my bones. I saw no herons at first. Then I realized the piece of reedy shore I was staring at had a heron hidden in its pattern. I watched that bird stand. Motionless. Then, quick as genius, it had a small fish, which it carefully snapped down its gullet. The heron went back to standing still, this time on one leg. I was getting impatient for the luck to show itself.
Okay, I said, where’s the luck?
With a flare of long, pointed wings, it vaulted into the air and flapped to the other side of the lake, where the round house was, as well as the cliff and drop-off, a place we liked to swim. The prevailing winds drove waves, junk, and scudding foam to this side of the lake. I turned around, disappointed, edged up over one of the missing boards, and looked down into the shadow of the dock through the clear water of the lake. There were usually baby perch, water skimmers, tadpoles, and maybe even a turtle to watch. This time a child’s face stared up at me. Startling, but I knew it was a doll right off, a plastic doll sunk wide-eyed into the lake. Smirking like it had a secret, blue eyes with bits of sparkle in the iris catching points of sun. I jumped up, wheeled around, then kneeled back down for a better look. It occurred to me that if there was a toy there might be a real child attached to it, and that child might be wedged underneath the dock. A cloud passed over the sun. I thought of going after Cappy, but finally I got too curious and looked down again, peering through gaps between the boards. There was just the doll. A girl baby doll floating calmly along the lake bottom wearing a blue checked dress, puffy panties, and that naughty smile. As soon as I’d truly made sure there was no real child to go with it, I fished out the doll and shook it so the water trickled out the seam where the head met the molded plastic body. I wrenched the head off the doll to dump out the rest of the water, and there was my luck. Right there. The doll was packed with money.
I pushed the head back on the doll. I looked around. All was quiet. Nobody in sight. I took off the head and examined it more closely. The doll’s head was stuffed with neatly rolled-up bills. I was thinking one-dollar bills. A hundred, maybe two. My pack was hanging behind my bike seat. I threw the doll in and pedaled toward the gas station. As I rode along I thought about my luck—there was a feeling of guilt attached. I assumed that the person who’d hidden the money in the doll was a girl, maybe even somebody that I knew. She had saved up her whole life, bills scavenged here and there, little job money, birthday money, dollars from drunk uncles. Everything she had was in that doll and she had lost it. I thought that my luck was probably temporary. There would be a pitiful ad tacked up somewhere or even in the newspaper, a hopeless message describing this doll and asking to have it back.
When I got to the gas station, I propped my bike up by the door and put the doll underneath my shirt. Sonja was taking care of a customer. I looked at the bulletin board. There were ads for bull semen and wolf puppies, offers to sell blown-out stereo equipment, hopeful snapshots and descriptions of quarter horses, pintos, and used cars. No doll. The customer finally