Nightmare Country (7 page)

“In bed. She wasn't young, but she wasn't sick. Had trouble sleeping. Bothered with dreams, you know. Then again, everybody dreams—don't kill 'em. 'Course, like you said, it's isolated here. Me and Fred like it that way. But it's not for everybody. If it was, me and Fred couldn't find a place away from the maddening crowd, could we?” She beamed at this inaccurate literary allusion and opened her mouth to begin again.

Tamara raised her arms above her head. “Wait! Miss Kopecky died in bed? Here? That furniture in our apartment—”

“Hers. Don't feel bad about it. No one claimed it or her body. Must not have had relatives. Anyway, when she came, she threw out what was there. Other people took it in, so it's gone. A regular moving van brought her stuff. Caused lots of excitement.”

“What happened to Mr. Fistler?”

“Abner died too.”

“In bed?”

“Well, sure. Way most folks go, you know. Had emphysema real bad.”

Pausing only to chew rolls and yell out the door at the barking dog chained to the clothesline, Mrs. Hanley rattled on about the inhabitants of Iron Mountain. Tamara was able to filter out only a few details from the welter of disjointed information.

The Hopes, who lived in part of the triplex next to her, were without a father. Deloris, the mother; Vinnie; Bennie, the younger brother; and Ruthie, the baby. Mr. Hope had worked for the company until Ruthie was born and then had deserted. The family stayed on as squatters and lived off welfare. The apartment next to them stood empty, and the Johnsons occupied the last space in that building. The Baggettes lived in the other clapboard house, and Augie Mapes lived alone in the trailers.

Augie collected junk cars and lived on welfare. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Baggette worked in the mines, and Agnes' husband was the night watchman. Russ Burnham managed the company's operations and lived in one of the blue buildings at the end of the road. The other miners drove in from surrounding ranches or settlements.

So the Hopes supplied two students, the Johnsons one, and the Baggettes two. Two would come from a ranch. That would make the original seven students. Adrian would make it eight and be the oldest. Tamara had a fleeting fantasy of Adrian taking an interest in helping out at the school as a student assistant, blossoming with the new interest and working with her mother instead of against.

“Now, Augie, for eight dollars a month, will let you hook your TV to his antenna. Only channel you can get's Cheyenne, so there's no ghosts from different sets tuned to different programs.”

“Does he always bathe outside? In front of a schoolhouse?”

“Absolutely no telling what Augie Mapes will or won't do.”

That afternoon Tamara lay down on the bed, in which Miriam Kopecky died, more out of ennui than fatigue. But she slept anyway. A few moments of that luscious tingling as the conscious mind lets go and the body begins to float away.…

And she was walking along a narrow street of sand between little wooden houses on stilts. Some white. Others in bright pastels—yellow, green, blue, pink. Some with sand yards enclosed by board fences, lovely flowering bushes and plants growing out of the sand. Clothes hanging to dry under the houses. Poles carrying power lines aloft, looking naked and out-of-place. Footprints in the sand, and dog droppings.

A small black boy, barefoot and in shorts, opened a sagging gate and stepped into the street. She tried to ask him what place this was, but her voice made no sound. He started to walk away, and then turned and ran through her.

Other than surprise, she felt nothing. He disappeared down a side street. A woman swept sand from wooden steps. Her head was capped with tiny pin curls parted so symmetrically that the lines of white scalp between outlined black squares of hair to form a quilt pattern. Tamara could hear the clucking complaint of chickens pecking the earth around an overturned canoe under her house, the slapping of the woman's thonged sandals, and the scratching of her broom as she stepped from one stair to the next. And the unmistakable sound of sea lapping against beach not far away. And a steady thumping, a mechanical background noise … and the opening strains of wild rock music, one of Adrian's favorite songs. It introduced a discordant note, throbbed against the buildings to either side and pulsed back against her head, absorbing all the other sounds.

Tamara rose into the air, made helpless swimming motions to keep her balance. She looked down on the woman's pin curls and then on the corrugated-metal roofs of the houses, the gray concrete shell of a roofless building with concrete floor and foot-thick gray partitions. A lean black bird, its wings motionless and as long as her arms, glided by unperturbed at the awful noise and her awkward presence.

The lopsided heads of coconut palms, their fronds parted at the crown and flopping over in all directions. Slashes of violent green jungle. Blue-green glitter of ocean. Improbable white of the beaches. All too intense under the glaring sun, and bulging with the savage pulse of the music.

An inkling that she dreamed. Because this was all impossible if not. But still she fought, panic overriding any direction logic might suggest. She began to tire. The bright scene below dulled to gray and disappeared into a blackness that was even more frightening.

The feel of her weight pressing against Miriam Kopecky's bed brought such a surge of relief that Tamara lay still—almost enjoying the tingles of shock running over her at the sudden cessation of her battle. Sweat under her hair and along the back of her neck made her shiver.

Music from Adrian's stereo glutted the apartment and probably all of Iron Mountain. She'd have to make her daughter turn it down, but for the moment it was comforting just to know the source of the grating noise.

Tamara opened her eyes to Miriam Kopecky's tiny room, and she breathed deeply of the powder-dry air. But she still had the memory impression of tropic air so thick and damp it left a taste on her tongue—the combined taste of sea salt, mixed fragrances of flowering plants, and the overripe greenness of vegetation. Since she'd never been farther south than Kansas, she was impressed at the creativity of her subconscious.

Her imaginary struggles had left her mildly achy, and she stretched. Running her hand through wet hair, she prepared to take on Adrian's love affair with decibels. But her arm fell back on the pillow, and she was drawn into sleep. Against her will. As if she'd been drugged. One moment she was alert and awake, and the next, drifting away again. She fought to waken, but even the music from the stereo began to fade.

The sudden scream of a seagull.… Tamara could smell the sea once more.

7

Several sea gulls screamed, and others kept their bills closed around flapping fish tails or tried to swallow quickly.

The cause of the excitement was a black bird like the one she'd seen before, but larger. Its wingspan must have been seven or eight feet. The gulls scattered at the sight of it, but one luckless victim, tiny in comparison, seemed to vomit from fright in midair. The slimy dinner never reached the water. The black monster caught it without pausing, and floated on to another gull just rising from the water. More sinister than its size, slender shape, and forked tail was the attacking bird's silence in the midst of screaming gulls.

Tamara stood on the beach next to a tall man, who was also watching. He held a hand above his eyes to shield them from the sun. They'd have looked like an ordinary couple if he'd really existed.

She knew she was dreaming now. It would have been intriguing if it weren't so foreign. She had to wake up and get Adrian to turn down the stereo, which Tamara could no longer hear, so she must be very deep in sleep. Fortunate that Jerusha Fistler was away, but still …

The man who wasn't real walked off down the beach. She followed, hoping he would do something that would wake her.

The man who wasn't real left footprints and a shadow on the sand. She, who was real, did not.

He bent to pick up a shell, and a white line of skin showed above the rim of his swim trunks, hid again when he straightened. Tamara touched his back, but wasn't sure she felt it or just remembered what a man's back felt like. He obviously felt nothing.

He walked on, and then stopped. She moved in front to look up at him as he stared over her head. It wasn't until she noticed the gloss of skin oils and sweat on his face that she thought she might be overwarm herself. The man was too complete, and at the same time unfamiliar, for the subconscious workings of a dream.

Tamara stepped aside so he wouldn't walk through her as the boy had done, and once more followed him along the beach. It seemed strange to feel in control of her dream. Could she control him? “I command you to stop.” Her voice was soundless.

But nothing else was. It was as if her dream was real and she wasn't. Water made a flushing sound as it rolled up onto the beach. Segments of palm fronds shaped like swords clattered against each other in a breeze she couldn't feel.

Ahead of them a tiny house sat on the end of a dock, and beyond that the beach came to a point where trees and their roots grew down into the water. A dugout canoe rounded the point; the man standing in it pushed it along with a pole.

“Ramael!” the man called, and hurried toward the dock to help pull the dugout onto the land beside an outboard with its motor flipped up. He started talking about something called an “ambergris.”

Tamara recognized the little building on the end of the dock as an outhouse—a one-holer, by the size of it. A heavy woman rubbed clothes against a washboard under a cabin on stilts and watched the men grimly. A toddler threw a stick, and chickens scattered.

Ramael pointed out to sea, made diving motions, and then spread his arms and shook his head. He was a handsome Latin with pants too tight and his shirttails tied up in front to expose a sleek midriff. He kept calling the other man “Backra.”

Tamara had the sensation of too much time passing, and hoped the residents of Iron Mountain hadn't lynched Adrian yet, but when she tried to slap herself awake, there was not enough feeling to provide the needed shock. She attempted to throw herself around on Miriam Kopecky's bed, but merely whirled above the dream sand.

She followed Backra down the beach and through water around the tree roots on the point. He dripped water from the knees down. She made no impression on the water, had no feeling of being wet.

They came to a longer dock, this one painted white, with expensive pleasure boats tied up to it. Identical thatched huts formed a semicircle facing the sea. The well-groomed beach had a long, porched building at the back, and strategically planted palms and flowering bushes.

A group of men sat in deck chairs in the shade. Loud voices in Southern accents. Boisterous laughter. Plastic glasses. One of them waved tentatively at Backra, who merely nodded and looked away, as if shy. Even in a dream she recognized the odd male ritual of the offer of comradeship tinged with challenge. Apparently her companion wasn't up to either.

Statues, crosses, overturned concrete slabs. Tamara followed him through a ruined cemetery, wondering why her imagination would put one on a beach, make it such a wreck. Bizarre, yet familiar from another dream.

Backra entered a house where the porch had no floor. She stood alone outside, staring at a net hammock. She didn't want to be alone. Her hand passed through the door when she tried to open it. That made the dream more of a nightmare.

She put both hands through to the elbow and moved the rest of her through so she could see them.

He was looking down at a round wooden table with thick legs. On it was a plate covered with a paper napkin and three flies. Taking a bottle from an old refrigerator, he uncapped it and sat down to a solitary meal.

She'd always thought that when Gil Whelan ate alone, he'd talk to himself or read. But then, Gil was real.

The dream man emptied the plate and scratched his arms.

Tamara walked through a side door after he'd closed it behind him, and then up an outside staircase, through another door, and into a room with a bed and an open suitcase.

Lying flat on his bed, she rolled around, trying to make herself wake up in the bed in Iron Mountain.

He dropped his swim trunks to the floor and stepped out of them.

“Oh, God, this isn't going to be one of those erotic dreams?” But he didn't hear her, because she couldn't make sound and because he wasn't real.

Tamara jumped off the bed. He just scratched his buttocks and left the room.

“Adrian, please come in here and wake me up!”

With the stereo blaring, she'd be as soundless in Iron Mountain as she was here. But Backra wasn't. She heard the running of a shower. He didn't sing, even whistle. Just the thump of elbows against a wall.

Towel in hand, he returned, making wet footprints on bare wood.

“Mom?”

Tamara jumped at the hand on her shoulder. Backra was clear across the room. Every last inch of him.

“Adrian? Help me wake up. I'm having a nightmare.”

“You're already awake or you wouldn't be talking to me.”

Backra's bedroom was unpainted, colorless, dim, the light from outside allowed in only in narrow bars through wooden louvers that covered the windows. His light eyes, silvery hair, teeth between parted lips, and the swath of white that had been covered by swim trunks left an imprint on Tamara's brain resembling the negative of a photograph, with light and dark reversed.

Miriam Kopecky's bedroom was dim. Adrian looked more like a shadow than someone in shadow. Wrenched from her dream world to her daughter's, Tamara experienced a sensation of paralysis, while her mind seemed to float without vision, somewhere near the ceiling.

“You've been sacked out all afternoon. I came in twice to see if you were dead.” Adrian switched on the light.

The shock of it in her eyes helped Tamara to shove her mind and body back together in time to register Adrian's expression shift from mild concern to anxiety. “You're not sick or anything?”