Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Who’s old Kopecky?” She probably thought he was crazy. Her daughter had stopped where the gate should have been, not bothering to hide a look of horror. Because of him? Or her new home? Why should he give a damn?

  “Last teacher.” He walked over to the corner entrance. Locked. A dirty face peered around red brick. Russ grabbed a small arm and pulled it and the body attached into view. “Want you to meet your new teacher. Mrs. Whelan, this is Vinnie Hope.”

  “Hello, Vinnie.” The new teacher smiled uncertainly and took on a whole new look.

  “Vinnie, your mom got the key to this place?”

  Vinnie snatched a glance at the fat daughter and scurried off through weeds toward the next triplex. Red shorts, tanned stick-legs, tangles in her hair. “Name’s Gloria Devine Hope,” Russ mumbled for want of something else to say. “That’s why we call her Vinnie.”

  When Deloris Hope arrived with the key, the teacher moved her car across the road and Russ helped them carry in (boxes, groceries, luggage, and a stereo. He avoided looking around the place, pushed away memories of the last time he’d entered it, ignored the startled expressions of the Whelans, assumed a brusque attitude to put off questions, and pleaded the excuse of work to get the hell away from there.

  A gold brocaded couch and matching armchair sat on a Persian rug in a room with livid aqua walls and grimy ceiling. A small maple dining-room set stood on a floor of chipped institutional-gray tiles. A stove, cupboards, counter, and refrigerator faced into the room from the back wall. A film of chalky dust over all.

  Inside cheap metal cupboards and nestled on folded linen cloths—exquisite chinaware, rimmed in gold and decorated with tiny pink and lavender flowers. Goblets of cut crystal, some clear and others shaded in cranberry. Tamara held a delicate teacup in her hand and stared at Deloris. “But I brought my own dishes—”

  “Refrigerator’s working.” Deloris closed the door on an ancient machine with rounded corners. It began to rattle and the floor to vibrate. Faded eyes in a young face looked from the teacup to Tamara and then away. Her blond hair frazzled in that heavily permanented but no-set style, and she looked as if she wore last week’s eye makeup. “When you want heat, the thermostat’s on the wall by the bathroom door.”

  “But who furnished this … this place?”

  “I gotta get back. The baby’s got the croupies.” Deloris Hope smiled reassuringly and left in a hurry.

  That evening, as Tamara selected a linen tablecloth from the maple buffet stuck up against the extra front door, a fire siren ripped the stillness of Iron Mountain for a half-minute and stopped. She and Adrian rushed to the window and pulled aside gritty golden sheers. A screech of tires, a blast of a horn, and four pickup trucks and some cars careened past, laying a cloud of white dust so thick it obliterated the schoolhouse across the road.

  “Workers from the mine going home.” Tamara wished she could go too. “I didn’t think they could all live here.”

  They dined on fine china and drank from crystal goblets and by candlelight, trying to ignore the horrid barnlike room these treasures inhabited. A thin pretense at celebration. Veal patties, rice with parsley, steamed broccoli, and a tossed salad dressed in lemon juice and herbs.

  “What’s for dessert?” Adrian’s dinner, except for the broccoli, was gone before her mother had finished dishing up.

  “Chilled white grapes.”

  “I’ll have ice cream.”

  “There isn’t any. And that broccoli is better warm.”

  “I know why we’re out in this forsaken hole. So you can starve me to death.”

  “Adrian, the doctor told you if you don’t learn to control your weight now, you’ll be an obese adult.”

  “I like being fat.”

  “No, you don’t.” The silence grew long and nasty.

  “Have you noticed the stains on that wall?” Adrian said finally over the grapes, and pointed to the partition between apartments. “Looks like someone tried to wash off blood and left smears.”

  “Probably just a moisture stain like we used to get in Columbus.”

  “What moisture? Bet it hasn’t rained here in ten years. My throat’s sore from just breathing.”

  There was no television. Their books were on a train presumably headed for Cheyenne. And none of the mysterious inhabitants of Iron Mountain bothered to pay a call. No hint of sound from the Fistlers on the other side of the stained partition. Tamara thought fondly of the house they’d left in Columbus, and even of their crowded quarters in Iowa City, where they’d lived the last two years with her mother and ancient grandmother while she’d studied to renew a lapsed teaching certificate.

  Too tired and dispirited to begin dusting the powdered limestone off everything, they showered and went to bed early. The bathroom had no tub, only a shower and stool and a cabinet stuffed with gorgeous thick towels. They had to brush their teeth in the rusting metal sink in the kitchen.

  Tamara crawled into a walnut bedstead that would have brought a fortune in an antique store. There was just room for it and a matching dresser and a rocking chair. The dresser’s mate was in Adrian’s room, with a valuable iron bedstead. Why would B & H furnish the place so extravagantly and not spend a penny or so on floors, walls, kitchen, and bath?

  Tamara went to sleep worrying about how they would survive Iron Mountain even for a school year. But her dreams were of another place, a place she had never seen. She dreamt of a beach that glistened white with moonlight, the sand rumpled with footprints. And of a small dog who crouched in the shadow of a broken block of concrete.

  2

  Thad Alexander laid scraps of last night’s dinner on a stone burial chamber sunk almost flush with the beach. But the dog waited until he stooped at the water’s edge to rinse his fingers before she crept toward the food. He remained crouched until the animal had finished. Two other strays raised noses at the smell of a meal, realized it was already gone, and went back to sleep.

  Thad returned to his father’s house, collected fins, snorkel, and mask and walked in wet sand along the edge of the Caribbean in the shadows of predawn. There were two hotels on Mayan Cay, one on each side of the cemetery. He passed the thatched huts of the sleeping Mayapan Hotel—a yacht and a sport-fishing launch tied up to her dock—and he was near the end of the village of San Tomas.

  Brackish pink traced the sky along the reef. Rows of dead seaweed at high-water line showed dark against white sand, much of it black and gooey where the sea had retched man’s accidental oil spills and deliberate dumping. It took turpentine to get it off bare feet and forever marred shoes once attached. A paltry justice.

  Thad crawled over the roots of a mangrove tree that fanned out like fingers to dip into salt water and entered a beach clearing with a shack on stilts, with chickens running loose.

  “Aye, backra, you want boat?” Ramael, the fisherman, sprawled across wooden steps. “Full of gas. I guide you to special wreck.”

  The last time Ramael guided him, Thad had taken tanks. When he’d come up from a long dive, Ramael was drunk. They’d run out of gas halfway home.

  “I’m just going to snorkel before breakfast. How much for the boat for an hour?”

  “One dollar B.H.”

  The currency printed by the government of Belize was still fondly referred to as “B.H.,” for British Honduran, as opposed to the U.S. dollar, and was worth even less. The plump head and shoulders of a young Queen Elizabeth II continued to gaze wistfully from this ex-colony’s bills.

  Morning sun spread over the clearing, warm and already enervating in steamy air. Thad pushed the old outboard into the water and poled until it was deep enough to lower the motor. Standing and holding the tiller between his legs, he nosed the boat toward the reef line. He drew his T-shirt up over his head, and for the instant his face was covered, the boat swerved. The tiller tried to unbalance him.

  When his vision cleared of shirt, a two-masted yacht was moored directly in his path. Although he turned the outboard in pl
enty of time, shock prickled along the backs of his fingers.

  A strip of red at the water line. White hull and superstructure. A strip of blue along the gunwales and outlining portholes. Red life preservers and dinghy. Sails reefed for the night and encased in blue covers. Even a miniature crow’s nest. Ambergris written in gold across her stern. A man smoking a cigarette stood on her deck.

  Thad registered this detail through a fog of reactions. He’d been preoccupied, true, but remembered only an empty sea as far as vision extended before pulling the shirt over his head. The Ambergris was simply too large and colorful to be missed. The only explanation was that he’d been so engrossed in thought he’d seen what he expected to see. Yet he could remember thinking of nothing except steering the outboard and removing his T-shirt.

  He lined up with the beach and the mangrove tree and began searching for the coral beds he wanted to investigate. He had to backtrack toward the Ambergris before he found them, and dropped anchor about forty feet away. The man on the yacht’s deck waved. Thad returned the wave, slid into his fins, grabbed mask and snorkel, and slipped over the side, still bothered by his apparent loss of control over his own senses.

  He wet down the inside of his mask and paused to watch a slender figure in golden skin and a breath of bikini poise on the Ambergris’ gunwale and make a clean dive into the water. The man on the deck tossed her a mask and she began to swim and surface-dive minus snorkel or fins. Thad felt his body stirring at the sight.

  On the deck of the Ambergris, Milt Keller watched his daughter show off her aquatic skills and mused over the sudden appearance of the outboard. He could have sworn he’d been gazing at that very patch of water when the small craft appeared, not arriving along a course from the beach but rather existing or materializing all in an instant.

  His daughter’s antics drew even closer to the man moving facedown over coral gardens, diving occasionally for a closer look at something on the bottom. Milt was intensely aware of a similar setting and happening, perhaps more than one. But he couldn’t place them. Keller had experienced déjà vu in his life, but this was different, disturbing, irritating. Like being asked what he’d watched on television the night before and not being able to remember. Or a doctor asking what he’d eaten the day before.… Wasn’t it yesterday morning Linda’d gone swimming and brought in someone for breakfast? Myrna had made scrambled eggs.

  Milt laughed. At least he knew what he’d had for breakfast. And for lunch it was … Milt laughed again. Nervously. “Probably fish. Lots of that around these parts.”

  Pans banged in the galley. He leaned into the hatchway. “Myrna, better put on extra. Linda’s swimming in a guest.”

  “Again?” His wife sounded half-exasperated, half-amused. “Odds it’s a male.”

  “Yeah, but this one’s older than usual.” Milt was relieved she’d said “again.” Curious thing, memory. And aging. But he didn’t feel that old. Chalk it up to the good life? Make an appointment for a checkup when he got home? Milt lowered the platform on the stern as the brown head and the silver approached. He reached a hand to help the older man on board and found his hand empty and his clothes wet as both swimmers jumped the gunwale.

  “Daddy, this is Thad Alexander.” The impish grin of a girl who usually got her way by using surprise tactics. “He hasn’t had breakfast either.”

  “I’ve already alerted your mother.” He shook hands with their guest and looked into eyes colored the gray-white of new ashes. “Milt Keller. Hope Linda gave you the chance to say yes before she hauled you aboard.”

  “I’m not sure. It all happened so fast.” Alexander grinned and caught the towel Linda threw at him before she disappeared down the hatchway. He was as tanned as she, and couldn’t have been much over thirty-five.

  “Alexander … you any relation to the professor on the island?”

  “Edward P. III? My dad. And he was no professor.”

  “Is in my book. Knows more than all those damned eggheads with degrees. Could at least listen to a man before they tar and feather him. I only read his last book. Made sense to me. I mean, hell, he was down here.”

  As they squeezed around the table, Milt introduced Thad to his wife and son, David, who was civil enough to look up from his Mad comic book and smile around a mouthful of braces and scrambled eggs.

  “Scrambled eggs again? Didn’t we have them yesterday?” Milt filled his coffeecup.

  “Did we?” Myrna’s forehead puckered in confusion and then cleared. “Oh, well, you always say it’s your favorite breakfast. Thad, have some bacon.” She never let unimportant things bother her for long.

  Thad Alexander’s glances were for David now instead of Linda, and the laughter had left his eyes.

  “What do you think of the young heir apparent there?” Milt asked.

  “Looks like a good boy.” Thad looked down at his plate.

  “Don’t you want to know what he’s heir to?” Linda tried to regain some of the attention. “Toilet paper.”

  “T. P. Maggot’s the name,” David said, voice lowered in an attempt to sound like Milt. “Toilet paper’s the game.”

  “Oh, honestly.” Myrna rolled her eyes. “Can you imagine living with this every day?”

  “Daddy’s company makes toilet paper,” Linda said.

  “Companies,” Milt corrected her. “And we make other paper products too. But the toilet paper is what pays the bills.”

  “We live on toilet paper,” David said, and then whispered, “Tastes awful.”

  “God, let’s not start the bum-wad jokes. Milt, do something or they’ll drive Thad overboard.”

  “Sorry. Would you believe he’s eleven and she just got her B.A. this spring? Tell us about you. Come to dive the Metnál or planning to pick coconuts?”

  “I’m looking for my father.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard. Can’t go far on Mayan Cay.”

  “That’s what I thought. I made inquiries on the mainland, and I’m going through his things at the house.”

  “Can’t have been gone long. Had a beer with him at the Hotel de Sueños—what, two … three days ago? You kids were there. Remember, David, that was the night Roudan played you a game of darts and Linda got sick on Belican?”

  “I did not!”

  “And he was at that awful party at the Mayapan the night or so before. When you did your T. P. Maggot routine, Milt. And Professor Alexander was wearing his safari outfit.”

  “And he told me had a son.” Milt was relieved to find his ailing memory returning. “And a grandson in … was it Alaska?”

  Their guest lowered his toast to the plate. His fingers pushed crumbs into a neat pile. When he looked up, his eyes registered shock. “Are they hiding him somewhere, or is he—?”

  “Who’s they?”

  Some of the color returned to Thad’s tan when he inhaled deeply. “Several months ago I read that he was reported missing. I had my own problems and I didn’t do anything about it. Then I got a call from his publisher wanting to know what to do with his royalties. With the renewed interest in the Bermuda Triangle, some of his books are back in print. And finally, after a bureaucratic month, I got a letter from the government. Would I please contact the consulate in Belize City? I write, but I hear nothing, so I wind up some affairs in Anchorage and fly to Belize City to find my father presumed dead.”

  “Can’t hide in San Tomas for a day, or even on Mayan Cay. Hell, there’s nothing but beach.”

  “Mr. Keller, he spoke of a son and a grandson in Alaska?”

  “Yeah, and just a few days ago. He’d never seen the grandson, and planned to fly up there soon to do just that.”

  “My son has been dead for over a year.” Thad’s finger sent a pile of carefully arranged toast crumbs scattering.

  Myrna touched his arm. “Maybe the professor didn’t want to admit it. Sometimes people can’t accept death. Especially a child’s. It’s too much loss to swallow.”

  “I’ve still got Ricky’s first ba
by shoes and his last baseball glove.” The roughness marring the voice, the control clamped over the expressions, were intended to save them pain and himself the humiliation of public emotion. But they served only to silence the usual exuberance at the table.

  Myrna’s hand lingered on Thad’s arm. She always let important things bother her.

  Milt Keller searched for the right thing to say but couldn’t help thinking of how he’d feel if he lost David, and the subject became part of the unspeakable. “Well, there’s been some mistake about your father. Hasn’t been missing for any months. Couldn’t be more than a few days. Somebody’s pulling the wool over your eyes, boy.”

  “Boy” in a broad Texas accent was the last word Thad Alexander heard. It seemed to repeat itself in an echo chamber inside his head. Myrna Keller’s warm hand was no longer on his arm. A pressure against his ears.

  In the space of a blink, lovely Linda and her family were gone and Thad was sinking underwater, unprepared, not enough air in his lungs. A rubber fin made a lazy descent in front of him.

  Thad came up choking, nose and eyes streaming. He swam to the anchored outboard with a strength and speed only terror could produce. Not until he clung to the side of it did he look back.

  No Ambergris rocked gently inside the reef.

  It could not have sunk so swiftly. And if it had, he’d have gone down with it, trapped in the cabin with the Kellers. A lone pelican dove into the water about where he judged the Ambergris should have been. Was it possible he’d imagined an entire family? Detail down to the nubby feel of the brown cushions on the bench seats around the table?

  Thad pulled himself into Ramael’s boat, wanting only to get away from there. But he was still coughing salt water and soon he was vomiting up a breakfast he’d eaten on a red-white-and-blue yacht that didn’t exist.