Nightmare Country (14 page)

“Fight?” His voice was silent too. “You are not real,” he mouthed, and grinned. Then he made a grab for her.

Tamara didn't bother to sidestep his arms as they passed through her. Wasn't that just like a man?
It's my dream, but he thinks he's the one who's real
.

She glanced down at the bed. Her body still slept in it.

Panic rose with mute cries, and she lunged at the bed, horrified by the thought that she might not be able to get back. She awoke sweating and dry-mouthed—Backra gone, herself back together, her heart thumping.

Tamara had worked hard to exorcise her other self, who wanted to share life's joys and problems with another, to be dependent, to lean, to be held. But now she knew regret at not having felt Backra's arms. And that made her feel silly. And old.

The next evening, Augie Mapes appeared on the doorstep to invite Tamara and Adrian over to watch television. Images of him standing up in his outdoor bathtub flashed repeatedly on the retina of her mind, and she wondered if the same thing was happening to her daughter.

Adrian had been disappearing for long periods and being sullen and uncommunicative. She wanted to go, and Tamara accepted, hoping to lighten their boredom and find a way to cajole Augie into putting his bathtub inside during the school year.

They threaded their way among car bodies and other questionable humps in the weeds to the door of one of the house trailers.

“It is certainly nice of you ladies to join a lonely old man for an evening of telly-vision in his humble abode,” his voice said, but his eyes turned to Tamara and said:
Call you and raise you three
.

The interior had been gutted and rebuilt into one large living room with a kitchenette and bar at one end. The wall of the trailer had been cut away where it attached to the shedlike building that connected the mobile homes, and in the shed stood the largest television Tamara had ever seen. It faced the cushions and couch-lined walls of the living room.

“Awesome,” Adrian pronounced it, and settled into a bean-bag chair.

The bean-bag chair and studded stools at the bar were black plastic. Various low tables and the cupboards were brown. Refrigerator, stove, and sink were white. Everything else—walls, carpet, curtains, couches, cushions, pillows, tile in the kitchen-bar—was powder blue.

Tamara stifled a giggle as Augie handed her a can of beer and Adrian a soda. He switched on the TV by a remote control built into the arm of a corner couch and set to making popcorn.

“You must be a real TV fan … all this for one channel.”

“KYCU selects shows from two networks for my entertainment pleasure.”

“Welfare must pay pretty well.”

“Oh, enough to keep skin and bones together. But I have to admit inflation's eating into my life-style.”

“How is it you qualify?” She resented this strong healthy man living so contentedly off tax money while she struggled to make a subsistence living for herself and her child and then had to
pay
taxes.

“I suffer from a mental and emotional illness that prevents me from securing and holding down employment to support my meager needs, and I must rely upon the kindness of our good government for the—”

“I don't suppose it would be any use asking you to stop taking baths—”

“Ma'am? You would deprive me of my constitutional right to cleanse the filth from this poor body just because I number among the poverty-stricken?” He stretched his magnificent loins suggestively, and Tamara was glad Adrian had become immersed in an old Cousteau special.

“No, but do you have to do it out in front of a schoolhouse?”

He merely crossed his arms and glowered at the TV screen.

That screen was too large to convey a clear picture. The colors were bright but not sharp, tended to melt together at the edges and give everything a liquid aura—even the scenes on shipboard or land. Given this and the blending of the aqua waves of the Caribbean with the powder blue of the room, Tamara felt drawn into the watery world of Jacques Cousteau, felt herself among the cavorting fish and black-suited divers.

Backra'd worn part of such a suit, but it had been in ribbons.

A man-o'-war bird glided over and around a white beach, never seeming to move spread wings, a streak of white along its throat and chest, as silent as a dream. And Tamara could smell the sea salt on humid air, the excretions of thickly growing plant life.

“That's the bird of my dream,” Adrian said as if in a trance, “and everything's just like that.…”

Augie Mapes stared at the girl in the bean-bag chair and at Tamara, all the challenge and teasing gone from his manner, replaced by an expression Tamara couldn't read. “Don't let her dreams carry your daughter away, Miss Schoolteacher,” he warned.

14

Thad and his patient slept for about eighteen hours. He'd insisted she lie on a blanket on the floor of his room.

“These village dogs aren't housebroken, and she's probably got fleas, ticks, worms, and everything else,” Dixie had protested.

The dog felt weak and sick and helpless and expected to die. She was sore but not in intense pain. She was troubled by a deep longing she couldn't put a name to, had the feeling she'd forgotten something urgent she'd planned to do before she ceased to be.

So she was surprised to awake occasionally and find herself still inside the wooden structure and the man still asleep on the raised platform across the room. The lizard on the far wall sent the thought that surely she must die soon, and then its tongue flicked out to catch a fly and it forgot about her.

Once she awoke to bands of moonlight striping the floor and a shimmery figure rising up from the man who still lay as he had.

Thad dreamed he walked on railroad tracks running along a shelf on the mountain's side. The moon shadowed the group of buildings below, and he recognized the school he'd seen in another dream. Thad placed the dream woman's house directly beneath him. Rough rock and weeds pressed unfelt against his bare feet as he moved down to it. He was surprised to find himself dreaming that he wore pajamas, which he knew he actually was.

The German shepherd he'd seen on another night was sniffing and digging around a little shed, and Thad could hear the mutter of nervous chickens. This time the dog saw him too, froze for a moment, gave a startled yip, and tore off between houses.

Thad moved through the back door as easily as he had the front, and realized he could just as well have walked through the wall. He was in a sort of utility porch. A very dark one. But, as befitted a dream, he had no trouble seeing. The main room was uninhabited. He found her bedroom.

The dream woman looked to be in a very deep sleep; the covers over her chest seemed not to move. He reached down to touch the fluff of her hair, and pondered the liberties one was allowed in a dream. But his fingertips had no sensation of touching her.

The tiny room had one window. The closet door stood half-open, and her shoes were a jumble on the floor. An open book spread facedown on the night table, its spine aglow with the luminance shed by the digits on her alarm clock.

The woman in the bed smiled languidly, making a gesture to pull back the covers, but they remained in place. In a slow liquid motion she rose through them and stood before him, her smile part quizzical, part invitation. At least one of her did. The other still lay under the covers.

Shadows hinted at some interesting shapes beneath the gauzy nightgown. She spoke to him soundlessly, as if to tease, and he thought her lips and tiny even teeth formed the word “fight” on the end of whatever she said. He repeated the word but found his voice silent too.

“You are not real,” he said slowly so she could read his lips. And as that was the case, he dared to discover more about the shadows beneath her gown. Although she didn't move away, his arms filled with nothing.

The bridge of his nose shot aches into his cheeks and brought tears to his eyes, one shoulder pained deep in the joint, and surface scrapes burned everywhere. His head pounded with the receding effects of the rum, and he awoke to bars of moonlight and the little cemetery bitch asleep on the floor. He staggered into the bathroom to swallow some aspirin, certain he'd never get to sleep again.

The next he knew, Thad was putting up a basketball hoop above the garage door and Ricky was trying to hold the ladder and hand him nails at the same time. Thad reached down to take a nail and noticed how the smooth boy cheek was losing the extra flesh of childhood, the bones firming to take on the lines of the Alexander face. Odd that this boy would grow to look like Edward P., the grandfather he'd still not met.

Molly came around the corner of the garage, honey-colored hair curving smoothly toward her face. The dimple in her cheek deepened. “Thad; I realize you have great expectations for Ricky, but don't you think that's a little high?”

“High? It's regulation height. He's going to be tall, Molly. That's already where they are at school.”

“I still think you're jumping the gun a little. Come on, baby, Mommy'll warm your bottle.”

“Bottle!” Thad turned with the hammer still poised against the backboard, to see his wife pick up a drooling baby, fit him comfortably over a hip, and carry him toward the front door. One pudgy leg shaped itself perfectly down the curve of her buttock, one fat little arm waved “bye-bye” to Thad.

He clamped sore loosened teeth together and tried to shout “No!” between them. It came out sounding more like a growl, and his eyes shot open to unpainted rafters and the whimper of the cemetery dog as she struggled to her feet. His heart tried to pound through the top of his skull when he sat up too fast. Dizziness whirled him around inside his head.

Thad carried the dog down the outside stairway, ringing her muzzle with the circle of one hand. When he set her down, she swayed and then squatted, giving tiny yips as she voided in the sand.

She tried to stagger off, but he scooped her up and carried her into the house, where Rafaela stood at the stove stirring something that smelled delicious. Thad remembered he'd had no food since the cheese sandwich he'd eaten while the
Golden Goose
towed in the dive boat.

“You should be with your family. I can take care of myself for—”

“The living must eat, Thaddeus. The angels look after my Aulalio now. And I look after you.” She eyed the dog with something less than enthusiasm but made no protest as he placed the animal in the corner and put a bowl of water beside her. “He is with his brother and sister, my Aulalio, and has much hoppiness.”

Thad downed a tumbler of papaya-and-pineapple juice and poured himself another. It barely mollified the rage of his rum-induced thirst. “I didn't know you'd lost children before.”

“A wave comes that sweeps them out to sea, and they are no more.”

Thad thought the sea that provided so bountifully in food and climate for this paradise did, nevertheless, exact quite a toll. Rafaela set a plate before him of rice and pieces of barracuda and tomatoes and herbs, all fried together with a side of black beans and another of doughy tortillas just right for scooping the solids and sopping the juices.

“How old were they when you … lost them?”

“Marina she had six
años
and little Marcos had four years. The sea took many children and the old ones and the sick. And many of the dead.” She gestured toward the graveyard outside. “But the sea can have only the body to keep.
Las almas
… the souls, God takes to heem.”

“She has all the answers too,” Thad said to the little dog when the housekeeper had left. “Somehow her answers don't explain what happened out there yesterday, though, do they, My Lady of the Rum-Soaked Belly?”

She'd lapped water when she thought he wasn't looking. Now her chin settled on her paws. Her eyelids drooped but snapped open again whenever he moved.

He finished a cup of the thick sweet coffee, slipped upstairs to dress. The sky was cloudy and the sea gray. For the first time since he'd come to the Cay, Thad put on long pants and a sweatshirt. He picked up the blanket the dog had used in the night. When he covered her with it, she stirred but didn't waken.

Taking down the box with his father's manuscript, selecting certain books from the bookshelf, and hunting up the shoe box full of bits and pieces and his father's notes to himself, Thad placed them all on the table, boiled himself another cup of coffee, and set to work. His father's desk top was too small to contain all this material.

That evening, when Rafaela came to cook dinner, he had to pile everything on the floor so she and Stefano could sit and eat with him. Steamed lobster and crabmeat, breadfruit, and candy-coated sea grapes.

Stefano sat in his usual superior silence. One would never guess he'd just lost the third of his four children. He glanced at the dog in the corner and then at Thad, as if he'd expected as much from a stupid Yankee. When he left, Thad knew he would go to sit at Roudan's as always. But this time with only one son.

He fed the dinner scraps to his patient, the first food she'd accepted that day. Not every dog was lucky enough to recuperate from surgery on lobster and crab.

When he was alone again, he arranged the books and papers back on the table. Closing all the slats in the windows against the chill, he could still hear the crashing of the sea on the coral reef, talk and laughter at Roudan's bar, even Chespita, the parrot. It had never ceased to amaze Thad how life could go on so normally, no matter how recent the calamity.

He'd been working for several hours under the dim light of the one unshielded bulb that hung above the table when he heard a knock at the door over the thrashing the wind was giving nearby palm fronds. Harry Rothnel, the man who owned a “slew” of bakeries, stood outside cradling four bottles of Belican, the dark so thick behind him Thad could barely make out the gravestones and the sea beyond.