Red Dreams

by Dennis Etchison

  Down the hillside and away out of the fields, picking up speed silently. The rows of rust-colored plantings sped by in fanning parallels that would come together one day in infinity.

  If only he could be sure.

  "I must have been suffering from some kind of amnesia, Allen," he attempted measuredly. That could be it, couldn't it? "Till just now, I guess. When I saw you."

  "I figured that, from your eyes." He figured that? Really? "But you can relax now. For sure. Fix yourself a drink." Allen indicated the oversized glove compartment. "Just like old times, huh, eh, Judson?"

  Right, right. "Where are you taking me?"

  "Home, sir."

  Of course.

  Allen chucked a cartridge into the tape deck, and they drove the next hour saying very little else.

  Wait till I see her, he told himself.

  It was as rich as they come. The very private driveway curved around a garden of manicured shrubs and as the limousine ground to an effortless halt, small white quartz stones spitting under the wheels, he stared at it, the whole picture, waiting for it to snap back into some kind of alignment for him.

  Foyer.

  Hall.

  Den.

  Lots of wood and leather. Something stirred in him, a half-remembered song.

  Footsteps like the knocking of a kid glove. A striking woman, 29 going on 40, a streak bleached into her hair, très chic. She crossed the white carpet, pale arms outstretched.

  "Oh, darling!"

  A kiss. Almonds. No, egg cream. No, almonds. He flowed with it, tasting, sifting. Her teeth remained together.

  He felt the wide band of a custom bra beneath the silk blouse, saw tears dried almost before they appeared, her eyes darting like hybrid tropical fish.

  "I can't believe it's really you!"

  "I can hardly believe it myself," he heard himself say.

  "Al told me where he found you. That horrible place! Oh, what must it have been like for you?"

  "It wasn't half-bad." Over her shoulder he counted the paintings hanging on the wall, behind the couch. "Nothing like this, of course."

  "Of course not." She hugged him, rocking back and forth. "Only, how did you end up in a place like that?"

  "I think I had trouble with the car. Can we sit down?"

  "Oh, you must be tired and hungry and, oh, my poor darling! The car, yes, of course. Were you hurt?"

  "Scratched up a bit. Maybe I drove into a ditch or something. I can't be sure."

  She paced around the Lucite coffee table as he sat. The cushion was as soft as a bagful of kittens. "Yes, it burned, didn't it?" She eyed him peculiarly. "Why didn't you ever try to get in touch with us, to come home?"

  "I didn't seem to have any ID on me."

  "Yes, of course, they found your papers, and some brass buttons, I think it was, and, oh, bits and pieces. They told me you'd been burned alive!"

  "Irene, I don't remember any of it. In fact—"

  "Linda, darling. I know. Of course you don't. You couldn't. I mean…" She tapped her lower lip with a lacquered nail the color of a cut artery, then folded the lip under her teeth and bit at it. "Of course you couldn't be expected to remember anything. How could you?"

  He wasn't sure he grasped what she was telling him. He was waiting for a message inside, and it hadn't come yet. "I want you to show me a picture of myself." She should be able to do that. "I mean, it might help me remember. Do you think so, Linda?"

  She fidgeted, watching the hall.

  "There's no time, darling. You're back now and you need a shower and some clothes and…"

  He propped his feet on the coffee table. It was his, wasn't it? "I'm fine. Just let me sit here and take it all in."

  She looked at him distractedly, as if she could only be satisfied at this moment by his following her lead. Perhaps she needs that, to stay ahead of whatever it is she's really feeling. Okay, I'll let her call the shots for now, he thought. He didn't want to blow all this. He'd pick it up, learn the ropes soon enough.

  As soon as it all came back to him.

  "You know," he offered, trying to make a joke, "a man could really get to like it here."

  "Darling." She advanced, the walls so white behind her, light filtering through the gauzy drapes. He remembered something like that. "There'll be time later. You've been through…"

  Such an ordeal, he finished for her. The whole thing was off-center somehow. She leaned over him, her hands like forceps on his shoulders. He smelled avocado oil in her hothouse skin. Cleavage hung dark below one breast through the vee in her blouse. She wet her lips, her tongue a small pink ferret. He felt an urge to throw her down between table and couch, her white flesh spilling out of her silk, spread her open right then and there under him so that he might know who and what she was.

  He rose, one hand on her neck bone, now the other. She looked like a painted alabaster idiot, he decided. About to break under his scarred, sunburned hands.

  "Judson…"

  "Don't say any more." She expected too much. She had no right.

  His hands traced the tendons of her moving throat.

  "Darling," she whispered, her voice swishing like nylons, "you're hurting me."

  He lowered his hands.

  He allowed her to lead him down the hall. He saw a bedroom, neat as a hospital ward.

  "Later, darling. It's been so long. Hasn't it?"

  "Wait," he said. "Are my clothes in the closet, here?" He started into the room. "If they are, I'd like to have a look."

  She stepped in front of him. "No. I mean, I burned all your things, right after we heard about the accident. I couldn't bear to see them anymore."

  "Then whose clothes are they?" Another man's? Well, he thought bemusedly, maybe she isn't so glad to see me walk back into her life just now, after all.

  "Allen's," she said hurriedly. "This is his room now. In fact, while you're in the tub, why don't I pick out something of his that suits you, and then…"

  "What if it doesn't fit?"

  "Oh, but it will, darling. You and he are the same size."

  "I didn't remember," he said.

  "That's all right." She led him to tiles and heat lamps and plush towels. They were monogrammed JB. That detail reassured him, though only slightly, "No one expects you to."

  After dinner she prescribed a drink. "Scotch or Jack Daniel's, darling?"

  "Don't you remember?" he asked.

  She fawned over him and moused with him and handled the cord on his robe. He found her attractive in an angular, disciplined way and her fixed, controlled expression became less noticeable as the firelight waned. In the morning he would remember Allen coming into the room, her cool fingers removing the glass from his hands and the words "the drink," perhaps from his own lips. She woke him, or rather what sounded like a loud slam in another part of the house woke him, and she strung back the drapes in the bedroom and set him up for his breakfast tray.

  "Allen," he struggled to say, head throbbing, "was he…?"

  "I've sent Allen on an errand. He'll be back with the El Dorado in a few minutes. I know what, darling. Why don't you stop by Westward Dynamics this morning?" A rat-shrewd light came into her eyes. "You might find a nice surprise waiting for you. Your office hasn't been touched, you know. I've seen to it." Had she really? Had no one taken his place, then, even after so long?

  "Seeing it again might have a tonic effect," she persisted. "You might even find that you re—"

  His mouth was asbestos and his head felt as it had the morning after the night before the night before, that time at Leveland's.

  "Linda. Don't push me." She was watching the driveway below. Satisfied, she returned her attention to him. She was wearing a thin dressing gown. It creased familiarly down her body, clinging in a breathing vertical fold at her abdomen.

  "First I've got to find a doctor," he announced. "Get me my clothes."

  Hearing that, she appeared relieved, oddly enough. She shifted imperceptibly to another level.

&
nbsp; "Why not?" she murmured.

  "What?"

  She trailed to the bed, where the edge of the mattress sealed the gown to her thighs like a second skin. "We'll have to hurry. Allen will be back with the car soon." She met his eyes, calculating something. Then, with mechanical decisiveness, she touched the ribbon straps at her shoulders. A moment later she lifted the sheet.

  The car navigated the suburb, skirting the city. The distant layered din of freeways oppressed the roof of the car, the subsonic pressure of an avalanche building to smother him. Encapsulated in the oversized sedan, he felt shrunken to the size of a child. Uneasily he touched the great seat next to him. An envelope, by the unused safety belt; he undid the flap with one hand and withdrew the contents, riffled the edges. A stack of bills. It felt like all the money a man would ever need. Allen's? Not bloody likely. Perhaps she had placed it in the car when she opened the door for him. He recalled Allen standing there, his tie wrinkled, his face beaded, his eyes swimming with perspiration. What kind of errand had she sent him on? She had bothered the door shut after him, almost eager to see him on his way. She did not kiss him. She smiled with a model's efficiency as he drove away past the eucalyptus trees, but when he glanced back, adjusting the mirror, her face was set and waxen. Like Allen's.

  Maybe they're more concerned about me than I thought.

  He wheeled with mounting impatience through street after identical street, not realizing for several miles that he had forgotten to get directions. The hell with it, he thought. He would find an intersection, a sign, a way. He would get his bearings and make it one way or another now. He thought that.

  He drove past a discount store, a supermarket, a mindlessly milling shopping center. The people appeared speeded up as if in a silent film. Children like deranged rabbits scattered before the wheels.

  And so on and on, block after patternless block.

  My God, he thought, what have I come back to?

  Impulsively he wrenched the wheel, changing course. He could still make it to the freeway, watch for yesterday's landmarks.

  Traffic lights, staggered in an obstacle course, batted their hooded eyes with furious indifference. He spotted an opening in the cheap circus boulevard. The freeway sign was familiar. He aimed for the on-ramp.

  A woman with a pilfered shopping cart, her view blocked by the overstuffed brown bags she bussed, clacked across the pedestrian walk on the other side of his tinted windshield, her face pale as cancer.

  He accelerated, shutting her out.

  Brakes screamed on all sides and horns like deep-throated trumpets. He had a brief, shuddering flash of what it would mean to die here, struck like a dog and run over again and again by countless unknown assassins.

  Now he heard the piercing wail of a siren, trying to lure him aground in this trashed sector.

  Not on my life.

  A gas station loomed ahead. He gunned the engine and the car swerved and dipped and lurched to a halt.

  He slammed the steering wheel with his fists.

  A boy with a rag in his pocket marched to the window and mouthed, "Fill 'er up, sir?"

  Unable to make out the boy's words through the glass, he nodded him away.

  A police car bumped over the curb and eased into the station.

  He started the engine again.

  In the police car, the officer covered his mouth with a coiled-cord microphone.

  A pounding, so close it seemed to be in his head. Twisting to his left, he saw the boy knuckling the glass.

  He hit a button and the window rolled down.

  The boy hooked a thumb toward a sign. NO SMOKING TURN OFF YOUR ENGINE.

  He glanced back and saw the pump hosed into his tank.

  He cut the ignition.

  He did not notice a second squad car enter the station.

  He leaned into the headrest and squeezed his eyes shut until shards of light fired on the inner surfaces of his lids. When he opened them again, the boy was cleaning the windshield with a wad of blue paper toweling. At the end of one wiper blade, an old parking lot receipt clung stubbornly to the glass. LAX, it read. The boy respectfully avoided it, as if the cardboard tag were a permit of great importance.

  He heard the hose jump. The boy polished off the window and circled to the rear to retract the nozzle.

  "Cash or charge?"

  He unpacketed one of the bills and handed it over.

  "Do you know your transmission's leaking, sir?"

  No, but if you hum a few bars I'll fake it. "Get me a map, will you?" he snapped.

  "Sure. Lemme get your change. She's throwin' oil pretty bad. Eh, you don't have anything smaller, do you, sir?"

  He glared back.

  His eyes followed the boy to the office. The boy took a key from his belt and hunkered over a cash box.

  The policeman entered the office.

  It had been so long since he had seen a cop—how long?—that the siren and the quick black-and-white wolverine at his tail had jarred him and he had overreacted, detoured into the station. Apparently, though, he was not the target. However, the boy now glanced back curiously at the limousine, as the uniform quietly vied for his attention.

  So what? he asked himself. If he's going to write me up, let him, and let's get it over with.

  He pushed out of the car and headed to the office.

  The uniform met him, a reflexive hand at his side.

  "You give him this fifty?"

  "It wasn't a tip." To the boy, "I'd like my change." He picked through the white, blue and red road maps.

  "In a hurry, are you?"

  He eyeballed the cop.

  "That your ve-hicle?"

  "It sure is. If you don't mind—"

  He followed their focus to the limousine. Eight or nine police had materialized while his back was turned and were in the process of turning it inside out. He watched blankly as three more squad cars arrived, joining the four already there.

  A hand between the shoulder blades.

  "Put-your-hands-on-the-door-spread-your-legs-don't-move."

  "What do I do with this?" asked the boy, waving the bill.

  "Evidence, son."

  Damning evidence, by the sound of it. But of what?

  Searched, frog-marched to the car. Uniforms swarming, black shoes and white hands and shortwave radios groaning static against the grinding traffic.

  "Money's there, all right." Envelope, proffered pincer-like, for Top Cop's inspection.

  "Hold on, my wife gave—"

  Fugitive fifty bagged with the rest. "Mister, this money was reported stolen less than an hour ago." Smirk. "Now what do you say to that?"

  "License plates check out, sir. Bledsoe, Judson Stephen. 3729 Arroyo Glen. This is the car."

  "Of course it checks out. If you'll take a minute to call my wife—"

  "What's your name, fella?"

  "Uh, Judson. Bledsoe." Painstakingly enunciated; his jaw felt wired. "What's it supposed to be?" A not-at-all insincere question, that one.

  "You tell me, fella. You tell me."

  "Look. This my Cadillac. I am on my way to my office at" what was it? "Westward Dynamics. Check it out. Go ahead. If you'll just let me sign your God damned ticket—"

  Snickers, waggling heads, sounds like the wheezing of disappointed schoolmasters. "It never fails to amaze me, you know? In broad daylight. You would have had better luck trying to get away with stiffing a liquor store. Don't you guys ever get it? All right, you're under arrest. Just a minute and somebody will read you your rights."

  "What charge, for Christ's sake?"

  "You want to watch your mouth, little man. How about grand theft auto, breaking and entering, two counts of kidnap, let's see, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon. Attempted rape. How's that grab you, smart guy?"

  "Attempted what?"

  "We'll think up some more, don't you worry." Clipped, close-mouthed, orders to a stick, an object, a spot on the sidewalk.

  "I don't get it."

&nb
sp; "We don't have to tell you anything yet, you got that?" Then, taken in by dumbfounded life mask but probably not, probably more out of a long-suppressed yearning to swing weight behind such words: "The lady notified us an hour ago. The story seems—" What panache on that word! "—Seems to be that you flagged down the lady's chauffeur in one of those halfway settlements, forced him to drive over the County line, that you proceeded to hold them both at gunpoint—" Again, a liquid familiarity with such a word. "—At her residence until this morning, when Mr. Bledsoe arrived home from a business trip, at which time you took him hostage and fled the premises with over ten thousand dollars in cash. And the car. Let's have a look at that coat."

  Lapels flailed as if by a professional pickpocket.

  Monogrammed.

  JB.

  "These are his clothes."

  You have such a way with words, officer. And that about wraps it up. Mark it and strike it. Move 'em out.

  "Just one more thing."

  Yes? Yes?

  "What did you do with your hostage?"

  Dum-da-dum-dum.

  He broke and lunged at the car for proof, papers, ID, a picture, something, anything with which to identify himself. The glove box rattled open.

  In the gaping shadow, a revolver.

  Struggle in handcuffs. Jerk and strain your back, raging until the blood bursts like drums in your ears over the traffic and the crackling radios.

  "Sergeant, you want to take a look at this."

  Bent knees, tops of caps. Trail of oil oozing from the car. Dark oil, spreading in a pool under the trunk.

  "Yeah," volunteered the boy, "his transmission's throwin' oil like a sieve."

  The sergeant knelt, dipped a finger, smelled. "This isn't oil, son." Dramatically. "Get that trunk open."

  The trunk yawned.

  Luggage, flight-tagged.

  Shoe.

  Foot.

  Leg.

  Body, contorted like an uncooked pretzel in a gray suit. Dead, of course.

  Of course.

  Blood from single bullet wound trickled from death mask skull, still congealing, to asphalt.

  Cop: "Well, shit." Crowded like actors silenced by an unexpected entrance, huddling for a next line. "All I can say," says one of the cops, "is I sure hope his old lady had plenty of life insurance on him."