Jack did not take up the assumption that jazz was weird. Maybe it was. Anyhow, it probably sounded weird to Dale. "I wouldn't have thought farmers had much time to listen to music."
Dale opened his mouth and uttered a bray of laughter. "Henry isn't a farmer. Henry . . ." Grinning, Dale raised his hands, palms up and fingers spread, and looked into the middle distance, searching for the right phrase. "He's like the reverse of a farmer. When you get back, I'll introduce you to him. You're going to be crazy about the guy."
Six weeks later, Jack returned to greet the moving van and tell the men where to put the furniture and other things he had shipped; a few days afterward, when he had unpacked most of the boxes, he telephoned Dale and asked if he was still willing to give him a hand. It was 5:00 on a day so slow that Tom Lund had fallen asleep at his desk, and Dale drove over without even bothering to change out of his uniform.
His first response, after Jack had shaken his hand and ushered him in, was undiluted shock. Having taken a single step past the doorway, Dale froze in his tracks, unable to move any farther. Two or three seconds passed before he realized that it was a good shock, a shock of pleasure. His old house had been transformed: it was as if Jack Sawyer had tricked him and opened the familiar front door upon the interior of another house altogether. The sweep from the living room into the kitchen looked nothing like either the space he remembered from childhood or the clean, bare progression of the recent past. Jack had decorated the house with the wave of a wand, it seemed to Dale, in the process somehow turning it into he hardly knew what — a villa on the Riviera, a Park Avenue apartment. (Dale had never been to New York or the south of France.) Then it struck him that, instead of transforming the old place into something it was not, Jack had simply seen more in it than Dale ever had. The leather sofas and chairs, the glowing rugs, the wide tables and discreet lamps, had come from another world but fit in perfectly, as if they had been made specifically for this house. Everything he saw beckoned him in, and he found that he could move again.
"Wow," he said. "Did I ever sell this place to the right guy."
"I'm glad you like it," Jack said. "I have to admit, I do, too. It looks even better than I expected."
"What am I supposed to do? The place is already organized."
"We're going to hang some pictures," Jack said. "Then it'll be organized."
Dale supposed Jack was talking about family photographs. He did not understand why anyone would need help to hang up a bunch of framed photos, but if Jack wanted his assistance, he would assist. Besides that, the pictures would tell him a considerable amount about Jack's family, still a subject of great interest to him. However, when Jack led him to a stack of flat wooden crates leaning against the kitchen counter, Dale once again got the feeling that he was out of his depth here, that he had entered an unknown world. The crates had been made by hand; they were serious objects built to provide industrial-strength protection. Some of them were five or six feet tall and nearly as wide. These monsters did not have pictures of Mom and Dad inside them. He and Jack had to pry up the corners and loosen the nails along the edges before they could get the crates open. It took a surprising amount of effort to lever the tops off the crates. Dale regretted not stopping at his house long enough to take off his uniform, which was damp with sweat by the time he and Jack had pulled from their cocoons five heavy, rectangular objects thickly swaddled in layers of tissue. Many crates remained.
An hour later, they carried the empty crates down to the basement and came back upstairs to have a beer. Then they sliced open the layers of tissue, exposing paintings and graphics in a variety of frames, including a few that looked as if the artist had nailed them together himself out of barn siding. Jack's pictures occupied a category Dale vaguely thought of as "modern art." He did not grasp what some of these things were supposed to be about, although he actually liked almost all of them, especially a couple of landscapes. He knew that he had never heard of the artists, but their names, he thought, would be recognized by the kind of people who lived in big cities and hung out in museums and galleries. All this art — all of these images large and small now lined up on the kitchen floor — stunned him, not altogether pleasantly. He really had entered another world, and he knew none of its landmarks. Then he remembered that he and Jack Sawyer were going to hang these pictures on the walls of his parents' old house. Immediately, unexpected warmth flooded into this notion and filled it to the brim. Why shouldn't adjoining worlds mingle now and then? And wasn't this other world Jack's?
"All right," he said. "I wish Henry, that uncle I was telling you about? Who lives right down the road? I wish he could see this stuff. Henry, he'd know how to appreciate it."
"Why won't he be able to see them? I'll invite him over."