Thief of Dreams (18 page)

“I don't have time,” Edward said.

“Goddamn, you could let a man finish his drink and think a minute!”

But he was already half out of the room. If Ironfield said anything, he hadn't heard it; but as he gathered up his things and the door closed behind him, he heard one last, surprised, disbelieving, and exasperated “Well, goddamn!” from Womb Broom.

Outside again, he snatched open the rear door of the Packard and threw his two suitcases and the laundry bag inside, but when he slammed it and started around to get in the driver's side, there was laughter.

“Shit, that lady's husband must be fuckin ferocious. Look at him go!” someone said.

“Hey, think a minute, bub. She may not give him your address,” another remarked.

But he had started the engine and backed up over the sidewalk toward them. He saw bodies dodging but didn't know if they were men or boys. They seemed both good-size and very agile. There was a part of him that wanted to maim and be maimed, but he didn't have time for that either. “Crazy bastard!” “Mother-fuck!” they shouted. But he slammed the Packard into low, squealed off the sidewalk, and fishtailed into the street.

Hours later, far down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, doubt tried to cool the joy and clarity he felt at getting Madeline and James back. Suppose, no matter how contrite he was and no matter how much he insisted he'd changed, she wouldn't take him back. And how much had he changed except in his own mind? But that was everything, it seemed to him. And it would make all the difference. She'd see that. She couldn't help but see it, and they'd be a happy family again, happier than they'd ever been because he knew now where true happiness was and what it was made of.

He drove through a corner of Maryland and West Virginia and then down the endless Shenandoah, the dark mass of the Blue Ridge Mountains on his left and the Allegheny Mountains on his right looming against the stars. His stomach was knotted, and his eyes were raw, and he'd been out of cigarettes for better than a hundred miles, but he had no intention of stopping for anything but gas. He lit butts from the ashtray, got a drag or two before they began to sear his lips, and then snapped them off his thumb out the window. He rolled the window up when he got cold, down again when he got sleepy, but stubbornness and numb fatigue kept him hounding the beam of his headlights through the dreaming towns and countryside.

Strange memories came to visit him. Madeline plopping a diapered James in his lap with orders to mind him. “Sure,” he'd told her, snapping his paper a little further out in front of his son in order to read it. James, just beginning to crawl and only a few teeth peeping through his gums, had bumbled softly against his chest; but the next thing he knew, the child had eaten half a pack of Lucky Strikes, and he, Edward, was trying to dig the loose tobacco out of that small, wet, innocent mouth before Madeline got back from the store to discover what a careless father he was. He'd had just enough time to dispose of the soggy pack of cigarettes, squeezed to mush in the tiny fist, and to wash James's face and hands. All evening he had waited for the child to be sick, but James showed no effect and never betrayed him.

Then he was remembering Madeline coaxing him outside in the pitch dark to look back through the windows at their snug and festive habitation that first Christmas they had their house in Cedar Hill—James safely tucked in bed, the tree decorated and lit, and even a fire in the fireplace. “My. Oh my,” she'd said, dithering with the cold, “imagine just passing by and looking in to see the three of us inside.” He'd laughed and tried to talk her back into the house, but, strangely, she didn't wish to go, and he'd taken his raincoat from the trunk of the car and the ratty blanket he'd kept there against some ill-defined winter emergency, and he'd spread the raincoat over the snow to kneel on and wrapped the blanket around the two of them; and for perhaps an hour they had looked through the windows with great wonder and sadness.

He thought of the first time he'd allowed James to shoot the Lefever and how he'd been about to tell the boy to hold the shotgun tight, to pick his head up some and not crawl the stock, but James had been so anxious to fire the double, he hadn't waited for advice, and the Peters high-velocity number fives had kicked him hard and split his lip and bloodied his nose.

He thought of Madeline putting her icy feet on him in bed at night; he thought of the shapely calves of her legs flashing under a light summer dress; her laughter. He hadn't known he'd saved so many moments of his wife and son and stored them away. Over against all of that, he realized he wasn't worth much. Somehow as tired and without defenses as he felt, it cost him very little to admit that he wasn't the hotshot he'd always thought. Truth be told, he was nothing special. He'd only gotten by, made a living. A fair mechanic, a decent electrician, nothing more. He felt humbled at the very center of his spirit where he suspected, without need of verification, every man felt himself brighter, quicker, stronger, and more worthy than his fellows. Even in that most private place he could find nothing redeeming. As though he'd grown too humble and honest even for that, he made no vows. He didn't even quite dare to think the words
husband
and
father
, but beyond the depth of terms and vows, he found it possible to hope.

Not long after, he came to an all-night gas station, and in the false, gauzy dawn of its lights, while the attendant filled the tank and checked the water and oil, he bought cigarettes and emptied his bladder. Then, his stomach raw, his backsides laced with pinpricks, and his eyes feeling stitched with wire, he started the Packard and went on.

MADELINE TALLY

A few inches below the top of her windshield, the harvest moon sailed through the clouds above her as she drove down the mountain from Cedar Hill, and it made her realize she still hadn't gotten past the thrill of driving herself around in her own car, small and old and plain as it was. At least it was all hers, the only substantial, grown-up thing that had ever been hers alone. She laughed suddenly and softly. Now if she herself could only manage to feel substantial and grown-up for more than a few minutes at a time, she'd be getting somewhere. Still, it was both good and important to get up in the morning and drive herself to work and away from her family. And it was just as good to drive herself home and away from Leslie's house in the evenings.

This evening after dinner and lovemaking at Leslie's, it seemed particularly important that she'd been able to leave when she wished in her own car. The last two times she'd been to his house, she'd driven there and parked in his driveway so that she wouldn't have to feel dependent on his charity or his whim—although she'd never had reason to mistrust either—for a ride back to Cedar Hill and her car.

Still, she wasn't sure how she felt about his final gesture. Without her permission he'd fished her car keys out of her purse and held up a key of his own. “To the front door,” he'd said, smiling and slipping the key on her ring.

She gave it a glance where it hung from her ignition in the dull light from her dash, and it seemed a little menacing.

At the foot of the mountain the valley spread out under such a bright moon, she could have driven without her headlights. Farmhouses and fields were lovely, and although the highway was wider than it had been when she was a girl, it followed the original roadbed, and very little of the scenery had changed. But she had changed.

When she pulled into her father's driveway and parked behind her sister's car, on a sudden impulse she took Leslie's key from her ring and shut it in the glove pocket before she got out. The air was cold and still held the spice and sweetness of fall, but there was a bite in it that made her think of winter. It wasn't dew stinging her through the open toes of her shoes, but frost. No wonder the fields and farmhouses had given back so much moonlight on the way home. She had a sudden vision of walking a path through the shoveled snow out to the beggarly trailer, and she thought again of Leslie's key.

But with the waiting period, the sheriff in Pittsburgh having to serve Edward with papers, the uncertainty of what Edward might do, all the necessary and inescapable proceedings, it could take a year. It could take two.

Recently Leslie had mentioned driving her to the airport in Asheville and putting her on a plane to Reno, Nevada, where, in only six weeks she could have her divorce. Was he serious? She didn't quite know, couldn't quite be sure. But to go to Reno like some movie star—he might just as well have suggested that she take a ship to India and become a snake charmer.

Slowly, carefully, so as not to slip, she crossed the frosted stile into the cow pasture.

The divorce would be all she could take even in familiar surroundings with her family about to help her remember who she was. But to fly on an airplane, which she'd never once done; to go to Nevada, where she'd never been; and to live there for six weeks in order to get a divorce? To do such things would be to lose herself completely. She knew that much. If she behaved in such a way, she'd never again know who she was.

By the time she got the door to the trailer open and stepped inside, her toes felt frozen and she'd twisted her ankle on the uneven ground of the cow pasture, which was no damned place for high heels, she told herself. But the trailer was warm; James had left her dim little bedside lamp on; and was, head and all, covered in his blanket and sound asleep. She patted his rump before she began to undress and wash her face and brush her teeth.

In bed at last, she realized how tired she was, not only in body but in mind. She was, she decided, a relatively new person and so, naturally, a little anxious and unsure. It was only normal, and comforting herself with that thought, she fell asleep almost at once.

In the morning she was surprised to see that James didn't appear to have moved, but she set about making breakfast, thinking he'd rouse any minute. Yet he kept himself turned away and completely covered. Finally she smacked him lightly on the rump. “Hey,” she said and laughed, “roll out, sleepyhead, or you'll be late for school.”

She poured his orange juice, fixed his cereal, and even put the milk in it for him, but although she'd seen him shift, he'd made no significant move toward getting up. “Hey, rise and shine, young man, right now!” she said. “You know the pressure on the bathroom. Your cousins, and me, and Lily, and …”

When at last he turned his misshapen face to her, she caught her breath and took an involuntary step backwards. “What on earth …!”

“I can't go to school today,” he told her, his chin crinkling for a moment as though he might cry, but he seemed to master it. “I can't go tomorrow or next week either,” he said.

“Just what happened?” she said.

James looked at the floor, cleared his throat softly, and then cleared it again. His left eye was half-closed, and his nose and mouth were so swollen, she wouldn't have known him. “A fight,” he said.

“I blame your father for this,” she said suddenly and bitterly. “I do! Why do you have to fight?
Why?”

James looked at the floor and made no answer. At last he raised his shoulders and croaked, “I didn't want to.”

For a moment Madeline was rigid with anger. Somehow Edward, James, and all males everywhere seemed maddeningly defective and bent on making her pay for their craziness. She looked at James who still had his shoulders raised as though her question had no answer, but wouldn't release him all the same, as though not being able to answer it had paralyzed him.

“I didn't want to fight,” he said in a broken voice. “From the first day of school, I didn't want…” He stopped and wagged his head miserably between his hunched shoulders. “Girls don't understand,” he said. “You don't know. There isn't any way you can know. … I couldn't … Lester had to save me … and he couldn't, but he … and now …” He shook his head and ceased, as though despairing of a voice that jumped from tenor to baritone to tenor again and was so disgustingly full of the garbage of emotion.

“Oh baby, I'm sorry,” she said and went to him to kneel and hold him. “I'm so sorry,” she told him, petting his back and neck, to soothe the stiffness out of him. But it wouldn't yield. “I didn't mean to be cross,” she told him, trying to look into his discolored, swollen face, into his eyes; but he hid from her. He was just a child, she realized, and so small, so very small to be beaten so, and she was his mother. She felt totally culpable, and at the same time, unfairly put upon; and as she held and petted him, tears for both of them and for something larger and without a name began to start. She rocked him and crooned to him and crooned to herself; and, at last, James went limp and began to cry with her. He tried to talk, but for a long, long time she understood very little of what he said, except that he never, ever, wanted to go back to school again as long as he lived.

She had no idea how much time had passed until Lily came in for keys to move the little coupe in order to get to school. She was with them only a moment, but she was so casual and loving and almost cheerful that when she left, Madeline felt better. Even James seemed to take some sort of cue from his aunt, as though, if Lily could treat the matter so amiably, then maybe it wasn't the black disaster, the end of the world, he'd thought. Or maybe he'd just cried himself tranquil because Madeline was able, at last, to get some sense from him about what had happened and how long it had been going on.

“Why didn't you tell me about this Earl Carpenter weeks ago, sweetie?” she said, but James merely shrugged. “Why didn't somebody call me at work yesterday, for God's sake?”

“Aunt Lily was going to,” James told her, “but Grandpaw said he didn't think I was going to die, and she could wait until quitting time to call and not bother you while you were working. Only the phone got busy, and you'd already gone when she got the store.”