Thief of Dreams (7 page)

Until weariness stole his wits, he pondered Lester's menagerie, how the fox would tolerate no one's touch but Lester's, and even Lester was often bitten. “Just had his eyes open too long by the time I dug him outten his den,” Lester explained. He'd gotten the crow before it could fly and split its tongue with his pocketknife in order to help it talk, but it still had no interest in conversation, although it would call the cows down from the field, call Lester's dog Skipper, and even call Lester himself, crying, “Lesser? Lesser?” with exactly Effie's intonation. Maybe, James thought, the raccoon had some affection for Lester, but that was an even bigger shame, since tomorrow Lester was going to have to put it down. It had been too much trouble for too long, killing laying hens, stealing eggs, spoiling the milk the Bucks kept in their springhouse, and eating nearly every ear of sweet corn from the kitchen garden the day before the Bucks might have picked it for their own use, so that Roy had told Lester that very afternoon: “I got to get rid of that animal, son, or you do.”

A moment later, when Osceola appeared to hold a silent counsel with Lester's animals, James was not surprised. Osceola was dressed in white buckskins, a single eagle feather bound to the ends of each braid of hair lying across his broad chest and down his back, and he was full of a strange, stern compassion. For their part, the animals paid serious attention. The crow blinked and stared at Osceola one eye at a time. The fox pricked its ears forward and tested the breeze with small movements of its nose. And the raccoon watched with its intelligent, glittering eyes, now and again rising off its front feet as though to listen better. When he was through with the animals, Osceola had the same strange, wordless conversation with Lester, only Lester began to shiver violently until, all at once, he wasn't Lester any longer, but a young, spike-horned buck, who suddenly snorted and leapt out of the company of those animals he had claimed as pets.

“What are you doing lying there in the dark?” James's mother asked, although he wasn't in the dark and she was in a nimbus of electric light so bright that he could not look at her. He didn't know what he was doing there. “It's nearly eleven o'clock. Why aren't you in bed?”

“I was thinking,” he told her, his voice full of the burrs of sleep.

“Look at your feet!” she said. “They're black as pitch. Have you brushed your teeth?” When he shook his head groggily that he hadn't, she marched off into her bedroom to leave her purse and take off her jacket. “And what do you propose to do when your teeth rot out of your head, and how am I supposed to pay the dentist bill?” She came back into the kitchen, lit the stove, and plopped the teakettle over the eye. “Well I won't have you waking everybody in the house in the middle of the night.”

She took a saucer from the cupboard, mixed salt and baking soda in it, and set it beside him on the couch. He had swung his feet to the floor and held his head in his hands. “Scrub your teeth with that. Good and hard. Use your finger.”

Still more asleep than awake, he dipped his finger in the mixture and began to rub his teeth and gums with it. It tasted horrible, and he got up to use the kitchen sink.

“No you don't, young man,” she told him. “You know better than to spit in the sink. Go outside.” She gave him a glass of water. “Why can't I count on you to look after yourself?” she asked as he went out the door. “I just can't be around to mother you every minute, to make sure you brush your teeth and clean …”

Holding the glass of water against his chest with his forearm, he shut the door on her harangue and sat down on the step of the trailer. It was cold outside. As blinded by the darkness as he had been by the light, it was a while before he could make out the saucer he was holding, if not the hand that held it; and he set his water down, dipped his finger in, and began to scrub his teeth and gums with the revolting mixture until the pressure in his bladder became unbearable, and he set the saucer aside too, and went off by the fence to relieve himself. Shivering beneath the cold glitter of the stars, he hoped she would not catch him urinating so close to the trailer. He dreaded going back inside, but after he'd rinsed his mouth until the water was gone, there was nothing else to do. Besides, it was so cold his skin had shrunk and felt way too small for him.

“Wash your face and hands and those filthy feet before you go to bed,” she told him and pointed out a pan of warm water and a soapy washcloth sitting by the couch. She was in her nightgown and bathrobe, and he was aware of her studying him while he scrubbed his face and neck. When he started on his feet, the washcloth and the water in the pan turned grayish black.

“I hate to ask when you last took a bath,” she said.

He said nothing, rinsed the washcloth the best he could, and got up to empty the pan of water outside.

“I'll do that,” she told him. “You get ready for bed.”

While she was gone he stripped down to his shorts, tipped up the couch, got out his folded sheet and blanket and his pillow, and arranged them much more neatly than usual. She was gone so long, he figured she'd walked all the way to the end of the cow pasture merely to dash out the water; and when she came back, it was true, her house slippers and the hem of her bathrobe were soaked with dew, and he felt a familiar, painful tug of guilt. “I'm sorry,” he said, “I didn't mean to go to sleep. I only lay down to think a minute.”

“I just expect you to look after yourself a little,” she said. “You're nearly grown, and I'm working like a nigger and can't look after you every single minute. Is that too much to ask?”

“No,” he said.

She went off into her bedroom and slid the thin partition shut behind her. It was as though her disappointment and anger had left an odor in his part of the trailer like spent gunpowder.

After many minutes, he said, “Good night,” across the darkness; and after an undetermined length of time during which he hardly dared to breathe, she said, “Good night,” in return.

MADELINE TALLY

Anger, like a low-grade fever, stayed with her through her prayers. Still, she patiently named the members of her family and asked that they be blessed, and she asked a special blessing for herself and her son, and, out of habit or guilt or hope or some martyred effort to be fair—she didn't herself know precisely why—her husband. But when she had finished, she was astonished to find herself thinking immediately about Leslie Johnson with whom she'd had dinner for the second time that week. Leslie's starched white cuffs, his three-piece suits, and his charming manners popped into her head so easily, they had to have been there all along, hidden behind her anger at James and even behind her prayers. She'd barely known there was a Leslie Johnson when she'd been a schoolgirl because he was two years younger, and he still seemed boyish to her in spite of his prematurely gray hair. But he'd become a lawyer, for goodness sake, and was quite successful in a small-town sort of way. And since his wife had died of cancer and he was childless, he was utterly free. While she, on the other hand.… She lay perfectly still, looking up at the ceiling for a moment before she got abruptly out of bed, snatched back the partition, and made her way to James's couch where she knelt and gathered him into her arms.

“I'm sorry, baby,” she told him. “Momma is just tired and cranky.” She wished with all her heart that it were true, and she squeezed him hard as though to make it true. But a stubborn resentment had taken up residence in her and couldn't be dislodged, and it frightened her and made her sad to think she felt it in James too. But maybe she only imagined it. Maybe he was responding as well as his small boy's shocked dignity and confusion would allow.

JAMES TALLY

James carried the little falling block, single-shot .22 rifle and a spade, and Lester carried the raccoon. Or rather, it rode his shoulders, its clever black hands sometimes braced against the slope of Lester's chest or back, sometimes holding him about the neck.

It was a long climb to the top of the ridge behind the Bucks' house, but the moment they got there, Lester tilted his shoulders so the raccoon dropped softly to the earth; and then, as though it were all one motion, he took the rifle out of James's hands, chambered a shell, and shot the raccoon just behind the eye. The rifle didn't make much noise, just a flat crack, not loud, but the raccoon went down on its side, shivering as though it were cold before it began to kick aimlessly and endlessly, it seemed, although probably only seconds passed. “There, you son of a bitch,” Lester said, “I hope you're satisfied,” and he sat down on the ground with his long bony hands drooping between his knees and the rifle abandoned beside him.

Somehow James hadn't believed any of this would happen. He'd showed up with the fine idea that they could take the raccoon a long way off somewhere and just leave it, but it turned out that Lester had already tried that more than once that summer, and the raccoon always got back. Even when they'd started climbing the mountain, James had been convinced something would come along to keep them from doing what they had clearly set out to do. But now he found himself staring at the tiny but irreparable hole just behind the raccoon's eye and the dark stain leaking into the earth under its head, and he sank down to the ground too.

He felt the way he did during fistfights. He always stood his ground and traded the necessary insults and shoves, but he never actually believed the fight would occur, even after it had clearly begun. Neither blows nor the taste of blood in his mouth could overcome his disbelief, and as a consequence, his anger and strength never came to his rescue because a part of him wouldn't believe it and had withdrawn beyond the reach of pain or the need for rescue.

The moment the rifle went off, it was that way. Some essential part of him simply went away, and it wouldn't come back, not even when they began to labor through the iron-hard roots of laurel and rhododendron to get a hole deep enough to bury the body. He was shocked and weak in his limbs, but another side of him had gone away somewhere and wouldn't acknowledge what they had done.

When they got down off the mountain and into the nearly grassless hard-packed earth of Lester's backyard, Effie was on the dogtrot washing clothes, but she didn't speak to them. She merely gave Lester a brief, discreet glance when he passed her to take the rifle back inside to put it away. Listlessly, James propped the spade against the fence and wandered over to the apple tree by the springhouse to get a treat for the crow.

“You boys want a little something to eat?” he heard Effie ask gently when Lester came out again.

“I reckon,” Lester told her and went on to fetch the spade and put it away in the tool shed.

The crow didn't seem to want the apple. When James held it out, the crow merely glared at it as though it had no idea what an apple was, and then it hopped to his shoulder and rapped him solidly in the head, pulling out a tuft of hair. “Ouch, you bastard!” James said, brushed the bird off, and inspected the side of his head tenderly with his fingertips. He wasn't surprised to find a little blood.

“Must think you're a tree and he's a woodpecker,” Lester said, sounding almost like himself. “Hold him for me.”

Carefully, so as not to injure the crow's leg, which was already scarred by the hog staple bent around it, Lester pulled open the metal band, took the crow out of James's hands, and gave it a pitch in the air. “So long, Blackjack,” he said, but the crow hovered uncertainly for a moment and then lit again on the rail.

“What are you up to, chile?” Effie called from the dogtrot. “Blackjack don't do no harm.”

“He don't do no good neither,” Lester told her. “Scat,” he said and gave the bird a push, but it simply flopped its wings for balance and moved a few inches down the rail until Lester picked it up and pitched it high overhead. This time, after it had fluffed in the air a moment like a swimmer treading water, it banked over to the roof of the springhouse where it made a clumsy landing. When it had righted itself, it wiped one side and then the other of its beak against the comb of the roof, getting rid of some of James's hair, and stared at its new surroundings with what looked like pure hatred.

Lester rushed at it, waving his arms. “Shoo, get outta here!” he shouted, but a single beat of its wings lifted it into the apple tree. “Well,” Lester said, looking up at it, “I reckon you ain't had much slack.”

“Awwwh honey …” Effie said, shading her eyes with her hand and looking at Lester sadly.

“I've just growed out of it, Momma,” Lester told her.

“Come on,” he said to James, “less us take this next'n off a ways.”

“Awwwh honey,” Effie said as James followed Lester around the house, “you got no call … Poppa didn't mean …” she stammered from the front end of the dogtrot.

“I know it,” Lester told her, opened his pocketknife, cut the cotton rope with a single stroke, and began to pull the fox from beneath the house.

James could hear its small, keening growls before it came into view, all four feet braced against being dragged and its bushy tail thrashing side to side like the tail of a cat.

“Ha,” Lester said. “Ain't you in for a surprise though.”

With Effie looking after them, they went off down the wagon road, the fox making frenzied dashes toward any sort of cover before the rope, coming taut, snatched it off its feet, but it was always up in an instant, making a mad dash in another direction. When they were out of sight of the house, they cut across the lower pasture, where, at last, Lester knelt and began to pull the fox gently toward him. “Well, well, buddyroe, easy now, well, well,” he crooned, but he got bitten just the same, quicker than the eye could follow. Still, he got his left hand around its muzzle, got the collar off, and stroked the fox gently and fondly until it quit bucking and jerking. But the moment he turned it loose, it skimmed across the open ground of the pasture and into the woods. Gone. Vanished. Just like that.