Nightmare Country (6 page)

“Ramael, the fisherman, ate scrambled eggs aboard the
Ambergris
also, Meester Alesandro.” Roudan laughed until it hurt the back of his throat as the concrete facade broke into an expression of surprise. He turned away again to the door leading to the dining room, where his assistant still sat at lunch. “Aye, Seferino, come and sing for these nice people, yes?”

Seferino Munoz rose from his meal reluctantly. Three meals a day and the use of a cot in the storeroom behind the kitchen were all the wages he earned at the Hotel de Sueños, and all for the unique privilege of singing for the tourists.

“Sing for us your prison song, mon.” Roudan watched Alexander's growing impatience out of the corner of his eye.

Seferino had great dreams of becoming a recording star in the United States and had spent three years in a Mexican prison for trying to cross the border into the land of his dreams without papers. He'd returned home hoping to persuade a U.S. citizen visiting the island to act as his sponsor. But whenever a possible candidate learned that he became completely responsible for any alien under his sponsorship, the offer of help disappeared. Still Seferino dreamed and sang. He sang now a sad song of a young woman brutalized to death in a Mexican prison before her expected child could be born. The white couple looked horrified and then grew misty-eyed.

“And while Ramael, the fisherman, was dining on scrambled eggs,” Roudan whispered to the man at the bar while the couple clapped for Seferino and motioned for another round of rum-Cokes, “the
Ambergris
disappeared.”

The professor's son grabbed Roudan's wrist and almost made him spill Coke. “When did Ramael eat breakfast on the
Ambergris?
Before the storm or—”

“After she was at the bottom of the sea. The mystery, backra, is where do they get the eggs on the bottom of the sea. Yes?”

In his dreams that night, Thad saw again the rusty mountain. He walked along a chalk-colored road at its base. He knew he was dreaming. He tried hopping, took a few running steps. But the impact of his feet on the road seemed more a remembered response than an actual happening.

He tried to shout and could feel the strain on the muscles of his jaw and neck, yet he made no sound.

But there was sound in the dream. A baby cried in one of the houses to his left, and on the right a door opened and a German shepherd ran out, the tags on his collar jingling. His toenails clicked on the pebbly surface of the road as he crossed in front of Thad to lift a leg on the tire of a Toyota. Nose to the ground, he crossed again to scamper around a blocky concrete building, unaware of the dream walker behind him.

Thad followed to see how much his will could affect his movements. He probably just thought he willed himself to do what his subconscious had already decided he would do anyway.

A flagpole and playground equipment indicated this was a school. A huge mound of crushed rock looked ready to engulf the structure. As the dog brushed past it, a swing creaked and continued to sway after he'd disappeared over an embankment.

Thad pushed at one of the chains of the swing. He thought he felt it against his hand, but couldn't stop the movement or accelerate it. He wandered back across the road. Could he walk through the closed door near the lighted window of the brick building he faced?

He walked up the steps to the porch—clumsily, because he wasn't sure he really felt them beneath him or just thought he did because he could see them and remembered what steps were like. Putting his hands in front of him, expecting a jolt on contacting the door, he started forward and found himself inside the room without having felt the door.

A woman in a terry-cloth robe, with a towel wrapped around her head, stood at the far end of a sparsely furnished room, her ear against a wall as if listening for sound or conversation on the other side. She backed away and ran her fingers along streaks of some kind on the paint. He could hear the faint swish of her robe as she turned.

Thad grimaced, waved his arms to get her attention, but felt himself begin to float away. He had just enough time to notice her preoccupied expression, her obvious ignorance of his presence, before the room and the woman and his awareness disappeared.

6

When water service was restored, Tamara and Adrian cleaned the apartment. They were unable to wash most of the stain from the partition wall.

Then they started on the schoolhouse. Vinnie and Deloris Hope worked with them for a day and lost interest. A Mrs. Hanley, who lived in the clapboard house with the dog, joined them but spent more time gabbing than scrubbing. A plump woman in her sixties who still wore cotton housedresses and changed her apron every day, Mrs. Hanley worried aloud about what they'd do when B & H shut down its operations in Iron Mountain (rumor had it this catastrophe could befall any day) and the state of the world where the “damned Arabs” were allowed to buy up all the land in Wyoming.

Tamara wondered why the Arabs would want it and why the state maintained a school here for so few students, but had to concede a two-and-a-half hour bus ride each way was a lot to ask of young children. She and Mr. Curtis had agreed it would be too much even for Adrian, who'd be the oldest student. At least she'd have full control over the influences on Adrian for a year. They were truly marooned together here. It could tighten their relationship. And without having to pay rent or for any entertainment, she could save most of her meager salary.

The basement of the school had two rooms, one for storage and the other a gymnasium. There were two corresponding classrooms above, with a hall in between. Tamara selected the room used by Miss Kopecky the year before, because the other one was coated with more years of grime and its windows looked out on the ugly mountain.

This one had windows on three sides—the ones in back looking directly into the mound of crushed limestone and forever shaded. Adrian stood before the ones at the front of the room, swiping at dust on the books and shelves beneath them. “Mom, you know all that fancy furniture and stuff in our dumpy apartment? It's got to be Miss Kopecky's.”

“I'd thought of that too.” It was too expensive and personally selected to have been furnished by an impersonal company.

“Then why didn't she take it with her when she left?”

“I've tried to ask Deloris Hope, but she suddenly has to run home to baby whenever I bring it up. I'll have to ask Mrs. Hanley—if I can get a word in edgewise.” Tamara realized they were discussing something without arguing. A pleasant lull in the battle. Could she lengthen it? She dropped her gritty rag onto the teacher's desk and leaned back in the chair. A stack of textbooks hid Adrian from view. “Honey, let's take the rest of the day off, pack a picnic lunch, and—”

“Oh … gross!”

“What is gross about a picnic? I just thought we might have a—”

“Mother, shut up and come see this.” Adrian leaned over a bookcase with her forehead pressed against the window. Tamara joined her.

Across the playground, in front of the attached house trailers, a man bathed in the old-fashioned bathtub that stood on little paw feet. His lips were pursed in a cheerful whistling which they could just hear. Even through panes clouded with dirt, he was amazingly visible.

Sunlight caught brief sparks off water droplets flying from the end of his washcloth. Short dark hair curled to his head and grew all the way down a husky neck. Reaching over the side, he took a tough-bristled toilet-bowl brush, rubbed it across a soap bar, and scrubbed his back.

“God, Mom, stare, why don't you?”

“I just can't believe what I'm seeing. He must be wearing a bathing suit or … something.”

“No, he's not. I saw him get in.”

He pulled the plug and used the brush to clean the sides of the tub while water ran downhill toward the sofa that leaned against a trailer. And then he stood up.

Tamara had hard-boiled some eggs for a casserole but packed them now instead with tomato-and-cucumber sandwiches, carrot and celery sticks, and oranges for a picnic lunch. In les than an hour she was dragging it and her daughter up the creek and away from Iron Mountain, hoping the excursion would take Adrian's mind off the bather. They struggled over hummocky ground in the full glare of the sun, because the short trees and bushes along the creek were too dense. When the stream branched, both rivulets wandered off at a different angle, naked across rolling treeless country.

Tamara chose the branch that led to a rock-strewn hill, expecting to find some shade there, and, without realizing it, slipped into a dream situation in which Adrian became lost in just such a vast place. Gilbert Whelan led a search party, but Tamara went off on her own and found their child where he couldn't, because, as she later told reporters, her mother instinct and basic knowledge of her daughter (which Gil didn't have because of his long separation from her) had told her where to look.

“His name's Augie Mapes. Mrs. Hanley told me.”

“What? Who?”

“The faggot in the bathtub.”

“Adrian, I want you to forget all about that!” She turned to find the girl sweat-soaked and puffing, her nose and forehead reddening.

“Lock me up in this perverted place. And then not let me talk. Try to tell me what to think or not. I can think whatever I want, and you'd never know.” Adrian waited, teeth clenched against the threat of tears.

Tamara felt the cutting edge of panic. It always told her she couldn't cope alone, made her say the wrong things, or kept her from saying the right. “I'm sorry, honey. I want you to be able to talk to me always. It's just that you use certain language to shock me, and it does. Puts me on the defensive.” She reached an arm around Adrian's waist. “What else did Mrs. Hanley say about this Augie Mapes?”

“Nothing.” Adrian moved off along the creek.

“You see? I try, and you … make me feel like a child batterer.” Tamara picked up the grocery sack and hurried to catch up. “Your face is getting red. Let me soak some Kleenex in the creek and cool it down.”

“Pampering doesn't work anymore.” Adrian trudged on.

“I read somewhere that children—I mean young adults—”

“You mean zitzy adolescents.”

“That they use foul language to get attention. I must not be giving you enough. I thought maybe we could discuss how I might give more.”

“Oh, crap.”

They walked on in silence; the hill with the shading rocks seemed to move off ahead of them. When they finally reached it, it was far past lunchtime. Adrian was limping. They had to search out a rock with enough shadow to accommodate two. The juice had heated out of the tomatoes and cucumbers and soaked into the bread so that the sandwiches broke at the touch.

“I can't even make a picnic lunch right,” Tamara said with disgust.

Adrian grinned. “Now you sound like me.”

But there was ice left in the tea in the thermos, and they managed the sandwiches in soggy lumps and ate everything else she'd brought. After washing hot faces and soaking their feet in the stream, they returned to the shade of the rock to lie with their heads on the grocery sack. They were engulfed in the snappy scent of sage, the buzz of grasshoppers. Drying grasses rustled in the faintest of breezes. They watched a lonely cloud shape and reshape, then split to become two.

“Why do we have to live here?” Adrian asked suddenly.

“Because parents have to support their children.”

“You weren't prepared, like you always tell me I should be before I have children.”

“Adrian, I was twenty-two when I married, with four years of college, and twenty-three when I had you.”

“Then why did you have to go back to school for two years to reprepare to support me, and why did we end up in Iron Mountain?”

Because your father never makes child-support payments
. “Because I made the mistake of never practicing my profession. Because I trusted someone else to support us. Don't you ever make that mistake. Don't even think about it.”

“There you go, trying to control my thoughts again. Nobody can control somebody else's thinking. Like today on the way here, I couldn't control your daydreaming.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You mumble under your breath.”

“I do not. Do I? I was just talking to myself.”
How can I tell you I was busy heroically saving your life just to show up your father?
“Don't you ever daydream?”

“No.”

The next morning Tamara worked up the nerve to visit Mrs. Hanley at the midmorning coffee hour, something that would have been natural in most places but which seemed an affront in this unfriendly settlement.

Agnes Hanley welcomed her with a smile, hot coffee, and sickly bakery sweet rolls that had been in the freezer too long. “You know, this is the first time I've had a visit from the teacher in years.” She spread margarine a half-inch thick over the cracked frosting on her roll. Her glasses were the old-fashioned kind with two-toned plastic rims. They looked small and limiting on her large features.

“I would have come sooner, but no one ever visits us, so—”

“Oh, I never go over there. Not since Miss Kopecky died.”

“Died? I understood she left. That most of the teachers stayed for a year or two and then moved on because it's so isolated here.”

“Miriam Kopecky didn't quite finish out the second school year. The one before, Lomba, stayed one year. 'Course she was Negro and maybe she could live next to Jerusha Fistler and be all right. And Jerusha'd just got here. Jerusha's skin's white, but Kalkasins don't get features like hers.”

“Kalkasins?”

“Yeah. White people.” Mrs. Hanley wiped her hands on her apron and poured more coffee. “She's not A-rab, but not white neither. I expect you want to know about the people who live here. Well, there's—”

“Wait a minute. Miss Kopecky died? How?”