Thief of Dreams (29 page)

Earl must have spit on him while he was considering this. The spit was icy, but weak, since he didn't fear Earl quite so much anymore.

No, he'd walked out in the rain after all to pick up firewood, never mind that he'd already decided he wouldn't bother.

No, the rain had worked its way through the tree and his roof and found him even though he hadn't gotten up. He knew he hadn't because his hip and back were still aching and stiff, and the cold had tightened its vices on his feet again. He could feel the rain, broken and tiny, on his face and in his hair, and he pulled the blanket up to cover his head. He would wait for it to go away. Also he needed to remember where he'd mislaid those good dreams he'd had so he could remember what they were. He didn't want any more silly things to bother him.

EDWARD:

“Well,” Miles said when they crossed the wood's road, “we're in by God Pisga.” He waited until everyone caught up. “We're gonna hafta hump,” he said. “We got forty-five minutes or less of daylight, and the trail's beginning to wash, so them that can't keep up will get left. Stay where you're at if I lose you, so we can pick you up on the way back. If I have to give up and come hunt this boy tomorrow, I don't want to be huntin nobody else too.” He brought a small round tin out of his hip pocket and tucked a pinch of snuff behind his lower lip. “Sal!” he said. “Sally girl!” And he gave the bitch's leash a jerk and started off behind her and the other dog in a bow-legged trot.

Up the steep ridge they went. Miles and his dogs in the lead. Edward second with his breathing ragged and husky and his knees burning. The other brace of dogs and their handler trotting behind him. One of the forest rangers came next. Then Harley Marshall with his steady long stride. The second forest ranger. The deputy.

By the time they went over the crest, they were all soaked, and the rain was beginning to freeze on the ground, and still the old man's bitch seemed pretty sure of herself, although she didn't strain against her leash as much and seemed to work closer to the ground and move her head from side to side much more than she had been. The hound next to her seemed content merely to imitate her from time to time, but the second brace of dogs seldom bothered to put their noses to the ground.

Going down the steep far side, even the bitch got confused and stopped and tried to back up in order to smell under her own forepaws. She tangled herself for a moment with the other dog, whom she tried, without seeming to notice him, to shoulder out of the way or root under or climb over. After a moment Miles passed the leash of the second dog to Edward and, against her will, dragged the bitch around an outcropping and down the slope. “Come on. Come on. Sal! Come on,” he told her. At the foot of the drop he said, “All right, she's got him again. He musta jumped or fell, I reckon.”

By the time Edward got around and down, Miles was out of sight in the thick woods below. Edward let his dog lead him, more on the trail of the bitch and Miles, he figured, than James. He was soaked as much with sweat as rain, the woods were growing darker each moment, and a panic was building in him that they were going to be too late. It afflicted his stomach and made his heart ache in some far-off way, as though he might be yearning for something as unapproachable as a star.

By the time he struck the river, it wasn't raining anymore or even snowing exactly. Slender needles of ice were falling and hissing against the trees and the dead leaves on the ground, and Miles and the bitch were coming back down the riverbank. He had a flashlight on.

Miles spat out his snuff when he stopped in front of Edward, spat two or three times extra and shook his head. “I'm sorry, son,” he said. “I was hopin we'd catch up to him before now.” He gazed through the driving needles of ice across the river. “If I had to guess, I'd say he crossed over, but even this old bitch can't track him now. The scent was already gettin froze down and sealed up before this shit started comin. Sal can run it till it's gone, but hell, she started casting around up river, didn't even have enough scent left to backtrack herself.”

“I'm not going to quit,” Edward said.

“If it thaws, the chances are good she can pick him up tomorrow. Sal's the best I ever followed, and anyhow, we'll be able to see. You could walk right by him tonight and not know it.”

“He's my son,” Edward said, “and it might not thaw.”

“Well then, if he moves and we cut his trail, we'll find him. With or without the dogs, we'll find him then.”

“He may not move either, goddamn it!” Edward said.

Miles looked away across the river. “I been doin this all my life,” he said almost apologetically. “You're gonna tromp around and mess everything up over there, and chances are we'll be lookin for you.”

“I'd like to borrow your flashlight,” Edward said.

The second handler and his dogs came up then and, a moment later, Harley Marshall and one of the forest rangers. The second handler had produced a poncho from somewhere, which he was wearing, and all three men had flashlights. For a moment no one spoke, and the whole tired company merely gazed at the ice passing like slivers of broken glass through the beams of their flashlights and listened to it hissing around them and rattling against the young man's poncho.

“Well,” Miles said, “looks like we lost a couple.”

“Your partner took a little fall a ways back,” Harley Marshall told the forester; “put his back out someway, so I don't expect him. I can't say as to the deputy,” he told the rest of them. “Haven't seen him since we topped the ridge.”

“Clarke,” Miles said to the young handler, “you take Sally home, dry her good, use some of that salve under my bunk on her off front foot, and give her a good feed. Use a boot on her tomorrow if she needs it. I want her back here in the mornin ready to go. And I want your flashlight and that goddamned tarp you're a-wearin. Me and Mr. Tally are gonna stay with it awhile.”

MADELINE:

She couldn't wait in the house, even though that was where the phone was. She felt in exile somehow, even if she was too tired and afraid to consider if it was through fault or circumstances. Her mother would come and get her if there was a call, just as she had automatically taken over Harley's duties at the post office. No one was accusatory any longer, not even her nieces. This wretchedness was hers alone, and she understood that, and so, at last, did everyone else. Only Lily presumed to come to the trailer and wait with her; but even Lily had the good manners not to speak. Without a word she made coffee for herself and Madeline and sat across the little fold-down table, while Madeline, rigid and scarcely breathing, found herself consecrated to something so awful and pitiless, she would never have guessed it. How could she have known that her own feelings could be so treacherous and that there was no end to wretchedness, no bottom to it? She would never have guessed she'd want to bargain away everything she'd wished and hoped for, if only things could be back the way they were, if her sweet son could be brought back to her alive and well, if her family could be restored in just the way that, not so many months before, she had found intolerable.

EDWARD:

He was grateful the older dog handler had understood him. He couldn't say aloud or even think what he dreaded most. And so the young handler, the forester, and three dogs had been sent back to collect the other two men; and Harley had been persuaded to search the near side of the river.

The nice thing about the dogs, Miles told them, was they followed their noses and didn't think; he did all the thinking and guessing and therefore made ninety percent of the mistakes. He was guessing that James had crossed over because Sal had hesitated for a beat or two at the edge of the water before she went on up the bank and then lost the trail altogether. He unzipped his jacket, reached around toward the small of his back, and gave Harley his pistol.

“Turns out I'm wrong and you find that boy,” he told Harley, “point the muzzle in our direction and fire a shot. Fire another every twenty minutes till we find you.”

When they had stripped to the waist, waded the river, and re-dressed, they separated and began to climb, Miles with the remaining dog, which he claimed was only a little bit better than no dog at all, and Edward with a borrowed light and poncho, since he hadn't given a thought to how he was dressed or what he might need. “James!” he called every fifty yards or so; “James!” although it didn't help tame the fear that had hollowed out his chest whether he chose to acknowledge it or not.

“Whooee!” Miles called off to the north, his voice made thin and faint by the ice hissing down between them. They were no more than a hundred yards apart, but Edward seldom saw a glimmer of the other man's light, as though the curtain of ice between them not only sliced voices thin, but turned light back nearly altogether.

His stiff back; his pelvis, which felt perversely twisted where it hooked to his spine; his hips and legs, which felt as though they'd been beaten; his feet pressed tightly in their separate vices—all these he came to regard with a sort of distant, fond pity as though they were former friends he'd learned were unhappy, or poor countries he'd studied in a geography lesson. But he had retreated toward the center of himself where he was more or less all right and able to take the long view of things. He'd left a lot of things so far behind, he had trouble recalling what they were. He had a remote memory of waiting for a vision and a new name, such as Indian boys were supposed to receive, but he'd mostly given up now. It would have been nice, but perhaps a vision and a name weren't going to visit. No matter. Anyway it wasn't so hard to be alone once he'd learned that pride couldn't help. Like guilt or fear or courage, pride wasn't made of such sturdy stuff, and he'd left them all nearly as far behind as his feet. There was about the same amount of conceit in any one of them as there was in any other, and that was the head and tail of it.

Finally he'd realized that the
it, itself
, was the most interesting thing of all.
It
was raining was not conceited, but very important.
It
was snowing. And perhaps
it
was too late. The most comforting part of all was that he had become a part of
it
, at last.

EDWARD:

Even when he went athwart the grade of the mountain to the north, he no longer heard Miles whoop or saw any light, although they had agreed to zigzag toward and away from each other so as to cover more ground and stay in touch. Perhaps he'd let himself slide too far south. Perhaps when he was moving north, so was Miles, and vice versa. “James!” he shouted.

A hundred times a bush, a log, an outcropping of granite, sometimes nothing at all, had made his heart jump. But at least for the last hour the ice had quit coming down, and his flashlight, though weaker, revealed more. “James!” he called.

When he played the light over the lean-to, he didn't know what it was and swept the beam on past. Not until the second time he washed the lean-to with his brassy light did he see the two forked corner posts and realize what he was looking at. In the next instant he saw the cut boughs inside and the humped blanket, frosted over and completely still.

There were filaments of ice in the boy's hair, and a faint rim of ice in his eyelashes sealed his eyes. Gently he cleaned all this away with a hand that seemed obscenely warm against his son's icy flesh before he tried to gather the small, stiff, terrible body against his chest as though to rock it and beg its forgiveness.

But the boy moved and groaned. He was certain of it. “James! James!” he croaked and rubbed the boy's small back savagely. “Son! Son?” he shouted and put his face against James's lips. He wasn't sure he felt any breath at all. He felt the boy's icy neck, digging his fingers under the jawbone for the carotid artery until, at last, he felt the faint, slow jog of blood. “I gotcha,” he said, laughing and crying at the same time and holding James against his chest, “I gotcha now!”

Fiercely, he ripped off his poncho, laid James on it, and rubbed the boy's chest and arms and legs. Without ceasing to work, he shouted, “I found him!” to the north so ferociously, it seemed to rip the lining of his throat. He shucked himself out of his light jacket and put it on James, fearful of the awful stiffness of the boy's limbs. Gathering him up, poncho and all, fumbling until he got hold of his flashlight, he started off down the mountain. “I found him!” he shouted again.

Once he fell to his knees, and once he lost his footing so completely that he fell flat of his back, but he was up again almost immediately. Twice more he cried out that he had found his son, but he was so winded, he didn't think his voice could have carried very far. Still, a few minutes later, he heard Miles whoop, and a few minutes after that he saw a light bobbing and jigging toward him.

Miles helped him get his son across his sweating back, tying James's wrists together around Edward's neck with a handkerchief and ripping out the hood of the poncho until it would accommodate both Edward's head and James's too, which rested against the nape of Edward's neck. Miles did the shouting after that, while Edward labored and breathed great ragged, snoring breaths like a winded horse.

They didn't stop at the river but waded directly in. Miles set his dog free and kept himself downstream to brace Edward at every step while they waded toward the light Harley Marshall shone toward them from the far side.

EPILOGUE

What she decided in the next days and weeks was this. Everyone had deep desires and strong yearnings of the heart. The important thing was to know which were to be acted upon and which were to be confined to the realm of dreams. It made her happier, although on some level sadder too, having grown so wise. It was a relief to define things in a way that didn't put herself and everyone else in such peril and allowed her to know, as much as anyone could, what was going to happen tomorrow and the day after. And it was true that Edward had changed as well, and whatever else could be said, she would never again doubt that he loved her.