Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  3

  Tamara Whelan was awakened just before dawn by a rooster crowing and the bleating of a goat. She vaguely remembered her dreams of a moonlit beach, but the depressing aspect of Iron Mountain hadn’t eased with sleep. There was only one help for it.…

  She slipped into shorts, a loose-fitting blouse, and running shoes. Outside, the dark was fading to light, and the chill on the air surprised her. Following the dull glow of limestone road over the bridge at a slow jog, she shook down all the stiff places in her joints and spine, breathed deeply, watched for uneven ripples in the crushed rock that might turn her ankles, felt intimidated by the lack of other runners on the road. Even in Cheyenne she’d met people running at dawn.

  One cranky knee took forever to warm up, but finally all the messages from her body signaled the go-ahead and she straightened her spine, stretched out to the gentle lope that suited her best. Sucking in the clean air, no longer feeling the chill, Tamara concentrated on the gurgles and shwishes of the creek running beside her, the brightening of the sky. She pushed away the traitorous nagging of her mind, which insisted she stop at the first sign of fatigue, knowing it would take a great deal of exertion to make her blood sing above the bleakness of Iron Mountain and to keep her from snapping at Adrian.

  Birds awakened in the bushes along the creek. The sun sat on the crest of a hill. The desolate scenery took on the joy of morning. Tamara came to the paved road and turned from the creek, preparing herself for the long upward sweep ahead by thinking of the desertion of Gilbert Whelan. The rage that evoked spurred her to the top without slowing, working its poison out of her system through a patina of sweat.

  When the initial shock of Gil’s departure had worn off, Tamara began to fall apart, until one of Adrian’s teachers pointed out she couldn’t do that to her daughter.

  Bouts of depression and despair combined with self-loathing made her seek professional counsel. The doctor suggested running, even went running with Tamara. “When you can run this course without stopping to walk in between,” she’d said of the impossible, “you will know you can reeducate yourself to support your daughter, that you don’t need a man at your side to survive in this world, and that you can be proud of yourself.”

  Chaffeuring Adrian and her friends, being a Girl Scout leader and secretary of the PTA was no training for this. But one day, after months of trying, Tamara ran the prescribed course without walking.

  The rest had hardly been that simple.

  Tamara persisted now through the pain of the first fatigue until the surge of a second strength renewed her and her confidence. The sun was warm on her back when she turned around to retrace her steps. She was gasping for air and her legs were threatening revolt when she reached the creek and turned onto crushed limestone. Tamara slowed to walk her tired body in and to cool it off at something like a fourth of a mile from the rusty mountain. It didn’t look so hideous under a new sun, looked mysterious and inviting against a clean sky. Now that it wasn’t shadowed, she could see patches of grass and weeds on it.

  Her breathing and heartbeat returned to normal, new strength replaced the rubbery feeling in her legs. Anticipation of breakfast and the wonder of morning coffee … the euphoria after a good run. Iron Mountain was still a dump, but not a sinister one this morning. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  But back in the apartment, when she tried to fill the coffeepot, there was a great clanking of pipes, a gush of water that slowed to a dripping and then nothing. Poking bread into the toaster, she stared out the window over the sink. Weeds and rubble formed what passed for a backyard, a distance of perhaps twenty feet before the abrupt takeoff of Iron Mountain.

  “Nothing I can’t handle.” She spread margarine on toast with a hint of savagery.

  On each end of the duplex a shedlike back porch with wooden steps sagged into the backyard and obstructed the view to either side. In the Whelans’ apartment a door off the kitchen led to this porch, where Tamara had already discovered a washer, dryer, and freezer sitting on a concrete floor with a drain.

  Splashing water on the same red shorts she’d worn the day before, Vinnie Hope struggled past this enclosure with a pail, and up the wooden steps to the Fistlers’ porch.

  Tamara was outside waiting for her when she emerged with the pail empty. “Vinnie, we’re out of water too. Whom do I see about it?”

  “We already sent word up to Russ Burnham. I’ll bring you some soon as I feed the chickens and stuff.”

  Darker brick showed where a third porch had been torn off the middle of the building to make a triplex into a duplex.

  “I’d like to meet the Fistlers.”

  “Only Jerusha lives here, and she’s gone. I’m taking care of things.”

  “Then why carry water into the house?”

  “For the plant. Takes lots of water.” A shy grin on a pretty but dirty face. Vinnie skipped off.

  Roads cut into the side of Iron Mountain. A row of derelict gondola cars rusted on weed-laced tracks near the bottom. And just below them a small goat, jet black with a blaze of white licking up each side like white fire. He sprinted around the fenced yard, tiny hooves meeting beneath him so hard they clicked. A final leap brought him to a standstill on top of a doghouse. Black horizontal pupils in gold-brown irises. Chickens pecked about in another fenced area.

  On the other side of the Fistler porch a crumbling sidewalk bordered the building. Two windows here, both densely curtained on the inside with leaves. Elongated leaves with scalloped edges and browned ends. Jerusha Fistler must be a house-plant nut. Tamara stepped closer to peer in at the leaves. They looked thick and waxy and were coated with dust. A faint whooshing sound came from within and then stopped. Through the foliage she could just make out the edge of a bed and a portion of a bare arm lying out of the covers. The whooshing sounded again.

  Tamara backed away, embarrassed. Perhaps it had been a roll in the sheet, and not an arm. Sun flashed off a silver propane cylinder at the corner of the house. There were two windows on the front of the apartment, and they too were coated with the long narrow leaves.

  “Odd thing to do, grow the same plant in every room, Tamara thought aloud. She looked around to see if anyone had heard, and remembered Russ Burnham talking to himself the day before. But not a soul stirred in Iron Mountain, and she could see it all from where she stood. Sunshine and white dust coated car bodies and weeds, the roofs of two squat clapboard houses across the road by the school, and the double trailer with the gargantuan TV antenna.

  Up the road past the gate and the chain-link fence, the company buildings were painted a bright unlikely blue in poor competition with the color of the sky. The aluminum contours of the hopper building towered above water-storage tanks. Its elevator shaft reached diagonally across railroad tracks. And no sound of machinery, of men at work or children at play. If the creek still sang down by the bridge and the birds conversed in the bushes, she couldn’t hear them. It was as if sound was swallowed up in so much empty space around and so much cloudless sky above.

  “This is no place for the lonely,” she said aloud, this time to make sound and to hear it. Tamara slipped into a favorite fantasy, and red bricks and silver propane cylinders blurred in her outer vision. Inner vision focused on a redwood house with a deck, surrounded by pine trees and overlooking a small lake, where Adrian rowed contentedly with a girlfriend. Gil Whelan stood on the deck with her, watching his daughter, the misery in his voice barely suppressed.

  “Listen, Tam, give me a chance. I’ll make it work. I’ve admitted the whole thing was a mistake—”

  “I’m not sure it was, Gil. Since you left, Adrian and I have discovered we can do very well without you.”

  “There’s someone else.”

  She checked her earrings and picked up a purse and briefcase off the picnic table. “It’s just that I like my freedom. I have responsibilities now, both with Adrian and my career, and I just can’t take on any more. That includes you. Stay and have a chat with your dau
ghter. I’m already late to an important meeting.”

  Tamara had seen a house much like the one in her fantasy in a magazine, the stunning outfit she would have worn that morning in a store window.

  The grating screech of monstrous machinery somewhere in the mining area sundered the silence of Iron Mountain and her dream. The red brick and the propane tank snapped into focus. You’ll never be in a position to buy a house like that. And it would take a lot more than a house to straighten out Adrian. But she felt so good in that dream, so relaxed.

  Walking back the way she’d come, Tamara found Vinnie Hope scattering grain in the chicken yard, and the goat butting a wooden fence post to attract attention. The piquant odor of manure blended with that of earth and sun-scorched vegetation, helped to fill the odd impression of void that seemed to empty Iron Mountain of enough sensations to credit existence. That and the clamor of machinery and the ordinary child doing mundane chores while humming a tune from a TV commercial.

  “Vinnie, when will this Jerusha be back?”

  “When she wants to be.” Vinnie disappeared into the chicken coop.

  “But I thought I saw someone inside lying in bed. You sure she’s gone, and not sick or something?”

  A face appeared at the doorway, partially hidden by stringy curls, the expression less ordinary now, rather too old and knowing. “Don’t be like Miss Kopecky. Jerusha don’t like snoops.”

  “Vinnie …” But the face was gone, and Tamara waited for the girl to appear with a basket of brown eggs. “I just wanted to be sure she’s not lying in there sick and needing help.”

  “Jerusha can take care of herself. And when she gets back, she’ll be hungry.” Vinnie held up the basket, which looked like a veteran from last Easter. “And she’ll want lots of eggs and peanut butter.”

  “You have checked the bedroom?”

  “I’ve been all over the house since she’s gone. She left me in charge.”

  “Where did she go? Or is that considered snooping?”

  “On a search trip. She’s a scientist.”

  What kind of scientist would live in a place like this? “You mean a research trip?”

  “Yeah.” Vinnie’s tone suggested new respect for the teacher. “You know about scientists?”

  “Only that they’re very hungry when they return from research trips and they like eggs and peanut butter and they raise chickens.”

  “And goats.” Vinnie moved the Easter basket away from the fence, where the little goat was trying to eat it through the wires. “His name’s Alice.”

  “Of course.” Tamara turned back to the duplex. “I mean … why not?”

  Adrian awoke in the strange bed, remembering the dream she’d just had of a skinny bird, black with a streak of white along its throat and chest, a long tapering tail. It had glided above her in slow-wheeling silence, seeming never to move spread wings. The wings had a batlike arch about halfway along their incredible length.

  She tried to hold on to the musty feeling of sleep, but reality intruded. Thoughts of Iron Mountain seemed to seep through the cracks in the corners of the godawful aqua room. Adrian knew she would die of boredom in a place like this. She would soon know everyone in a community so small. She couldn’t for a moment escape to a place where there were strangers who wouldn’t mind that she was fat because they wouldn’t know her.

  Rolling over to face the wall, she pictured a white room and a bed with bars at the sides, bottles with tubes hanging upside down. Herself in the bed, thin, emaciated, cheeks hollow, eyes sunk in dark shadows.

  “Adrian, hang on, baby. Dad’s here. Things are going to be all right now.” Gil Whelan leaned over the bars to hold a limp bony hand. He looked up at Adrian’s mother on the other side of the bed, his cheeks wet. “Oh, God, Tam, what have we done to her?”

  Adrian let herself cry until she heard a door slam. Her mother had probably been out running. Adrian hated to exercise and hated all those superior asses who made such a big deal of doing it. She’d have liked to lie in bed and dream some more, but she was hungry. And breakfast was one of the few times in the day Tamara would let her eat.

  Warmed sweet rolls with thick frosting and melting butter, like her grandma made, and foamy hot chocolate would have made Adrian much less depressed, but old goody-two-shoes, small, trim, firm-muscled, old perfect-mother-Whelan would probably serve her an apple and a glass of juice. And a thin slice of birdseed bread, dark and hard, because it was healthy. Adrian wanted to cry some more, but her mother appeared in the doorway.

  “Hi, honey. Get dressed and make your bed. I’ll fix you some breakfast. And don’t flush the toilet. There isn’t any water.”

  Adrian dressed and did not make her bed. The soft-boiled egg, seedy toast, and juice didn’t touch bottom. Her stomach still growled when she flopped onto the couch and picked up the book on the coffee table. The only book in the crummy place.

  American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Not much of a read to help her escape Iron Mountain and make dragging time go away. Bookmarks lodged in various parts of the dictionary, and she absently opened it to the first. It was an F page, and at the bottom of the right-hand margin was a picture of the bird in her dream. But this one had more white on its chest. “Frigate bird, Fregata minor,” the caption read. Had the previous tenant marked this page because of the bird, or some other word?

  Frigate bird. Any of various tropical sea birds of the genus Fregata, having long, powerful wings and dark plumage, and characteristically snatching food from other birds in flight. Also called “man-o’-war bird.”

  “Hey, Mom, do you know anything about frigate birds? I had a dream about one, and there’s a bookmark in this … Mom?”

  Her mother stood with her face and clenched fists against the refrigerator, as if she were going to beat on it. Adrian put down the dictionary and went to her. That niggling anxiety: what does a twelve-year-old do if the one parent present is disabled somehow? “You all right?”

  “You could have at least said ‘good morning.’”

  “I’m sorry.” Adrian drew her mother away from the refrigerator and held her. Why am I always the one who has to be sorry?

  “I can’t help this awful place, Adrian. And you treat me like a … I’m just doing the best I can.”

  It was embarrassing to be so much bigger than her mother. I should be crying on her shoulder. But I’d have to bend over too far.

  “You know I love you,” Adrian said. And that was true, even if she found Tamara the most irritating person in the world. “Everything’s going to be all right.” Adrian wished desperately that that could be true too.

  4

  Thad Alexander stood in his father’s house, tingling where he wasn’t numb, the grit of sand between his toes, the Ambergris and the Kellers playing like a movie behind his eyes, hunger chewing on a recently emptied stomach. Sea breeze slithered through the slatted windows, warm yet raising chills on his skin. He was sweating, breathing too hard. Fever? Some tropical disease he’d picked up that made him hallucinate? “Bullshit! I was there.”

  Milt Keller was a balding, good-natured man. Bushy eyebrows. Proud of his family. Slightly absentminded. His daughter, almost too perfect, dark hair, long slender legs, blue eyes … or were they hazel? Already the Kellers were fading.

  He’d wanted to ask Ramael if he’d seen the Ambergris. But the fisherman hadn’t been around when Thad returned the outboard.

  If his life had not been so bizarre since the shattering of his home, Thad’s first reaction would have been to doubt his sanity. Unexplainable things did happen. He had an inkling they always had, but he’d explained them away or ignored them before Ricky’s death made him vulnerable. His wife, Molly, had turned to religion. Religion explained everything. Molly’d left him and moved back to San Diego to live with her mother. Molly’s mother had all the answers too, and there was no need to question. He hoped they were happy. He wished they’d stop sending him the tracts.

  The first sto
ry of this house was one room, the kitchen divided from the living room by a waist-high double bookshelf. The inner skeleton of the house’s construction was bared, studs and some of the nails exposed. Open joists and beams overhead, all unpainted. The floor—just bare boards of indestructible mahogany from the mainland.

  “Good morning, Thaddeus. You want breakfast now?” Rafaela Paz, his father’s housekeeper, entered by the screen door. She wore the island uniform for women—two brightly colored pieces of cotton sewn up the sides and ending just above the knees, flat-thonged sandals on her feet.

  “Please, and no eggs this morning, huh?” The islanders assumed Yankees ate nothing but eggs or cornflakes for breakfast. “Fix something like you would for Stefano.”

  Thad stepped out the side door and climbed the exposed stairs to the second floor. Odd arrangement, but practical unless it rained. Rafaela and Stefano Paz’s house sat across a courtyard of sand. Both houses were enclosed on all but the cemetery side by the same board fence and shared the same water tank and cistern.

  There were two bedrooms upstairs, with a jerry-rigged bathroom tacked onto the back and supported by stilts. Thad showered in a tepid, brackish trickle and could see daylight through the drain at his feet. The sand far below would soak up the water. In Anchorage the whole construction would have spelled poverty. In San Tomas it was sufficient, and sensible on an island where a hurricane wiped the slate clean every twenty years or so and all building began anew. On Mayan Cay, survival was not as hard as it was uncertain.

  He brushed away the sour taste of a returned first breakfast and, dizzy with hunger, went downstairs for his second—a tasty mixture of highly seasoned rice and pieces of leftover tortillas fried together. And an orange cut into slices. His plate clean, Thad Alexander leaned back and sipped harsh, invigorating coffee. “Rafaela, have you ever heard of a yacht named Ambergris?”