Page 100 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

water tower was erected, they would return the site to a “park-
like” state, not mentioning the 10-foot chain link fence topped
by barbed wire to keep everyone out. To the salespeople who
worked for the Robin Hill subdivision — the only hills were
the mounds of construction debris left here and there by the
builders — it took only a minor misappropriation of the word
“park-like” to arrive at park, and anyway, once the tower was
built what could anyone do?
When the water tower was completed, it could be seen for
miles. Whenever anyone asked Brian for directions to their
house he would say, “Just look for the water tower. When you
find it, head toward it. When you’re directly under it, you’ll be
at our house.”

Eventually, Brian’s family stopped noticing the water tow-
er, and they started thinking how lucky they were not to have
other families all around them. It was bad enough they had to
look out at their next-door neighbors back yard with the huge
hole in the ground for the pool that never got built.

Not long after they moved into the house, they put a fence
all around the back yard, less to see the neighbors than to keep
their German Shepherd dog from roaming the neighborhood.
Brian planted kudzu vines along the fence from seeds he found
at a nearby nursery. The seed catalog said the vines grew 300
feet a season. It called them Jack and the Beanstalk, in paren-
theses. The seeds grew all right, engulfing the entire fence in
just two years. After three years it started growing up the side
of the house and onto the roof of the patio that Brian and his
father had built the previous summer. His father had to slash
away at the vines with an axe to keep them from coming into
the house. All the while his father worked at cutting the vines,

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