Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  She was at the endless task of sweeping the beach back out the door. The broom paused. She had the face, plump and brown, of one who has seen all but has the strength to remain calm, the patience to remain kind. “You see this boat, Thaddeus?”

  “I had breakfast aboard her this morning.”

  “Madre mía!” Rafaela crossed herself and expelled a string of exclamations in Spanish mixed with creole. She started sweeping again.

  “You haven’t answered my question.” But in a way she had. She’d heard of the Ambergris. It existed somewhere other than the inside of his head.

  “Thaddeus, you talk to Stefano, yes?” It was unlike her to sidestep a question.

  Thad stopped the busy broom with his hand. “Why not you?”

  “I think Stefano will tell you better.” She had to bend her neck way back to look into his face as he stood above her, but she did this without quite meeting his eyes. That was not like her either. “I think this place is not good for you. You should go to your home.”

  Thad shrugged. “I’ll talk to Stefano.”

  In the cemetery the bitch lay curled in her favorite morning shade. The soggy heat seemed pressurized as he walked next door. Stefano stood between pilings under his house, drawing a line with a thin paintbrush along the wooden model of a fishing trawler.

  Placing houses high on pilings was the norm in San Tomas, Thad’s father’s house more the exception. It served many purposes, but Thad had yet to discover which were originally intended and which had been later perceived as convenient. The obvious one was the hope that a high storm wave would wash under and then recede, leaving the house standing, although any wave worth its salt would surely knock out the pilings and bring down the house.

  But it did provide ventilation and the perfect place to dry clothes out of the sun’s fading rays and the frequent rains—as his now hung on a nylon rope with those of the Pazes. It also provided storage for canoes and fishing boats and cool shade for work and play.

  Stefano Paz had white skin and a military spine, grayed hair and the dignity to carry off the long-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers he always wore. Only his hands showed the effects of tropical sun, his head never outdoors without the incongruous hat—straw, wide at the brim, flat at the crown. Skin color on Mayan Cay, as mixed as the language, ranged from white to black. And hair from black to auburn. But all the eyes were brown. Color had no pecking order here, and no prestige. The only people made fun of were the “backras,” those of white skin who cavorted in sun and water until their backs were blistered raw. In the creole-English dialect, “back raw” had become “backra.”

  “Buenos días. Señor Paz.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Alexander.” Stefano’s cultured British made the various slurs of the United States sound uneducated, and it was yet a third language used on the island. He managed to look down his nose at Thad even though he was the shorter of the two. He was as aloof as his wife was endearing. But Thad stepped under the shade of the house, leaned against a piling, and told his story. “Rafaela said I should speak to you.”

  Heedless of the open paint cans and jar of thinner on the makeshift table before him, Stefano lit a cigarette and kept it between his teeth as he added a red strip at the trawler’s waterline. He kept one eye shut to the smoke crawling up his face and managed to snort derisively around the bobbing cigarette, “Scrambled eggs.…”

  Stefano Paz put down the brush. “I think, Mr. Alexander, that you should wear a hat when out in the sun.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The Ambergris vanished two years ago. In a storm.”

  “Maybe this is a different yacht with the same name.”

  “Perhaps it is the same Ambergris and … it just vanished again.” The sound of Stefano’s laughter bounced from piling to palm tree and back. Thad was sure it could be heard all over San Tomas.

  5

  An official from the mainland and the one local policeman, Ramon Carias, had gathered most of Edward P. Alexander’s notes and put them in a box, which they handed over to Thad when he arrived on the island. He sat now sorting through them for a mention of the Ambergris or the Kellers. They were in no order, and Edward P.’s penmanship was too stylistic to be consistently legible. But it was something to do besides relive the strangest of mornings, or rest and swim and drink—the three great temptations of Mayan Cay.

  “Must remember young Ricky’s birthday” was scribbled on a list of things to do. Edward P. had never found the time to travel to Anchorage to see his grandson, but a package had always arrived for Rick’s birthday, containing some misplaced oddity. A shrunken head when the boy was two, a machete when he was four. Now Ricky was twelve. And would be so always.

  Edward P. Alexander III had been an indifferent father, too, dragging Thad and his mother all over the world on his once-famous jaunts. Until Dorothy Alexander, worried about the constant interruption in their child’s education, had put her foot down in Anchorage, Alaska. Edward stayed with them long enough to write a book on his adventures in the Klondike and then moved on.

  He’d drop in every few years, and when Thad graduated from high school, Edward took him on a trip to the outback of Australia, a sort of sentimental visit to the place where Thad was born—in a tent on an archaeological dig—delivered by his own father.

  Thad had seen Edward P. only twice in all the years since. Once at his mother’s funeral. And the last time on the day he’d married Molly. Edward’s wedding gift to the young couple had been the royalties from his new book, which made a big splash at the reception, where the famous adventurer announced it in his booming voice. After the first year there’d been little in the way of royalties.

  The elder Alexander was a showman. He’d caught the people’s imagination for a while, been the subject of several early TV documentaries. Scholars put down the theories of a self-educated man who claimed to be an expert on everything, and Thad agreed with them. He considered his father, if not a knowing fraud, at least a genial con man.

  He flipped through a three-by-five notebook. “Order new lens cap.” “More film.” “Write to Pearsons for latest on Mayan hieroglyphs.” “Roudan is the key!”

  If Thad did find mention of the Ambergris or her owners, the note wouldn’t make sense. They weren’t even dated. Roudan was the key to what?

  He picked up another box, containing a manuscript in progress, and took it out to the hammock. The upper story of the house overhung the lower by six feet on the side fronting the beach, and the net hammock was strung between two of the supporting posts set in concrete blocks in the sand. Here Thad had done a great deal of daydreaming, telling himself he was thinking. Now he determined to read his father’s words carefully, even attempt to decipher the scribbles in pencil in the margins or between double-spaced type. He’d already skimmed parts of it but hoped a thorough reading would hint at Edward’s latest escapade and offer a clue as to what had become of him.

  The manuscript consisted of a group of essays, one to a chapter, each relating certain aspects of the places to which Edward had traveled and presumably leading to some central conclusion. And if Thad knew his father, that conclusion would be outlandish. Von Daniken and others had covered similar territory to exhaustion, and he’d have to come up with some new kinky kink to warrant publication.

  Thad found himself skimming again. The cenotes in Chichén-Itzá—Mayan ceremonial pools where Edward had dived in a commercial hard-hat suit. Hardships in the unexplored regions of Quintana Roo, where he had lost his way and very nearly his life from starvation and disease. Diving for sunken treasure, for the lost continent of Atlantis. Exploring the famous Blue Hole in the reef off Belize. He’d been imprisoned in Tibet and shipwrecked off Cape Horn.

  Next door, Roudan, the bartender and owner of the Hotel de Sueños, laughed in his peculiar high pitch. Thad scratched at the welts left by tiny sand flies. He was shaded by the porch overhang, but sun drove heavily against a placid sea. He pushed agains
t the house, and the hammock swayed, causing a soft breeze to play across his moist skin. His thumbs left light smudges on the manuscript’s margins. Thad dozed … and awakened with a thirst that put his father’s loony ideas right out of his head. What he needed was a cool Belican. He put away the manuscript and headed for the Hotel de Sueños.

  The Mayapan catered to the more affluent, with individual thatched cabanas, a separate bar hut, and a tiny fleet of pleasure craft for deep-sea fishermen or scuba divers. The Hotel de Sueños was locally owned and all of a piece. Bar and dining room on the first floor, double and single rooms on the two remaining floors, with a bathroom at each end of the hallway. It often filled with package tours of schoolteachers from the States, British sailors on R and R, and wandering college students from almost everywhere.

  It also had an attic loft with worn-out mattresses on the floor and no bath. This was the stopover home for some on their illegal journey to the Land of Promise. They came from all odd points of South and Central America, spoke various forms of western-hemisphere Spanish, wore crucifixes on slender chains under their shirts, and carried transistor radios that told them of a world they would not have known otherwise because few were able to read. They were already homesick for their families.

  Afternoons at the bar of the hotel were more subdued than the evenings, when the men of the village joined the tourists, but for Roudan Perdomo the afternoons were often the most interesting. He could study the tourists and not worry about performing for the locals.

  The professor’s son came every afternoon to drink Belican. He was as tall as Roudan and as curious behind a quiet, watchful face. But he was not as strong or as clever. Roudan found him intriguing. He already showed the signs of disturbed sleep it had taken his aging father months to reveal. The professor’s son came often in the evenings, too, but Roudan had more time to needle him in the afternoons.

  “I think what you need is not your father, Meester Alesandro, but a woman,” he said now, and watched for signs of worry or at least recognition on a sun-bronzed face born to be pasty white. But the shuttered eyes merely watched him back, reminded Roudan of a dog he’d seen in a picture—a husky with empty eyes that seemed to reflect the light.

  Roudan thought of the five men in the loft, weeping over their crucifixes and their memories. Did the professor’s son have no memories? “Do you never dream of a woman, Meester Alesandro?”

  “Ever hear of the Ambergris?” he countered as Roudan slid a brown bottle without label across to him. Beer brewed in a government brewery on the mainland, favored by the locals because of its price and by visitors because Roudan kept it better refrigerated than the Budweiser. Why did people who came here to get warm want their drinks so cold?

  “I did hear, backra, of your most interesting breakfast.” Roudan turned away, noting the slight quickening in the dulled expression, knowing now just how to twist the knife. He made kissing sounds against the bird cage hanging above the bar, and his parrot clung to the wires so that he could stroke her feathered belly. “You are not the first man invited aboard that ghost ship.”

  A heat-drugged white couple gravitated from a table in the corner to ask about his Chespita of the flaming colors, and Roudan used their intrusion to irritate the professor’s son further. He clapped his hands and whistled, and Chespita sang “Happy Birthday” for the couple.

  “Ramael, the fisherman, ate scrambled eggs aboard the Ambergris also, Meester Alesandro.” Roudan laughed until it hurt the back of his throat as the concrete facade broke into an expression of surprise. He turned away again to the door leading to the dining room, where his assistant still sat at lunch. “Aye, Seferino, come and sing for these nice people, yes?”

  Seferino Munoz rose from his meal reluctantly. Three meals a day and the use of a cot in the storeroom behind the kitchen were all the wages he earned at the Hotel de Sueños, and all for the unique privilege of singing for the tourists.

  “Sing for us your prison song, mon.” Roudan watched Alexander’s growing impatience out of the corner of his eye.

  Seferino had great dreams of becoming a recording star in the United States and had spent three years in a Mexican prison for trying to cross the border into the land of his dreams without papers. He’d returned home hoping to persuade a U.S. citizen visiting the island to act as his sponsor. But whenever a possible candidate learned that he became completely responsible for any alien under his sponsorship, the offer of help disappeared. Still Seferino dreamed and sang. He sang now a sad song of a young woman brutalized to death in a Mexican prison before her expected child could be born. The white couple looked horrified and then grew misty-eyed.

  “And while Ramael, the fisherman, was dining on scrambled eggs,” Roudan whispered to the man at the bar while the couple clapped for Seferino and motioned for another round of rum-Cokes, “the Ambergris disappeared.”

  The professor’s son grabbed Roudan’s wrist and almost made him spill Coke. “When did Ramael eat breakfast on the Ambergris? Before the storm or—”

  “After she was at the bottom of the sea. The mystery, backra, is where do they get the eggs on the bottom of the sea. Yes?”

  In his dreams that night, Thad saw again the rusty mountain. He walked along a chalk-colored road at its base. He knew he was dreaming. He tried hopping, took a few running steps. But the impact of his feet on the road seemed more a remembered response than an actual happening.

  He tried to shout and could feel the strain on the muscles of his jaw and neck, yet he made no sound.

  But there was sound in the dream. A baby cried in one of the houses to his left, and on the right a door opened and a German shepherd ran out, the tags on his collar jingling. His toenails clicked on the pebbly surface of the road as he crossed in front of Thad to lift a leg on the tire of a Toyota. Nose to the ground, he crossed again to scamper around a blocky concrete building, unaware of the dream walker behind him.

  Thad followed to see how much his will could affect his movements. He probably just thought he willed himself to do what his subconscious had already decided he would do anyway.

  A flagpole and playground equipment indicated this was a school. A huge mound of crushed rock looked ready to engulf the structure. As the dog brushed past it, a swing creaked and continued to sway after he’d disappeared over an embankment.

  Thad pushed at one of the chains of the swing. He thought he felt it against his hand, but couldn’t stop the movement or accelerate it. He wandered back across the road. Could he walk through the closed door near the lighted window of the brick building he faced?

  He walked up the steps to the porch—clumsily, because he wasn’t sure he really felt them beneath him or just thought he did because he could see them and remembered what steps were like. Putting his hands in front of him, expecting a jolt on contacting the door, he started forward and found himself inside the room without having felt the door.

  A woman in a terry-cloth robe, with a towel wrapped around her head, stood at the far end of a sparsely furnished room, her ear against a wall as if listening for sound or conversation on the other side. She backed away and ran her fingers along streaks of some kind on the paint. He could hear the faint swish of her robe as she turned.

  Thad grimaced, waved his arms to get her attention, but felt himself begin to float away. He had just enough time to notice her preoccupied expression, her obvious ignorance of his presence, before the room and the woman and his awareness disappeared.

  6

  When water service was restored, Tamara and Adrian cleaned the apartment. They were unable to wash most of the stain from the partition wall.

  Then they started on the schoolhouse. Vinnie and Deloris Hope worked with them for a day and lost interest. A Mrs. Hanley, who lived in the clapboard house with the dog, joined them but spent more time gabbing than scrubbing. A plump woman in her sixties who still wore cotton housedresses and changed her apron every day, Mrs. Hanley worried aloud about what they’d do when B & H shut down
its operations in Iron Mountain (rumor had it this catastrophe could befall any day) and the state of the world where the “damned Arabs” were allowed to buy up all the land in Wyoming.

  Tamara wondered why the Arabs would want it and why the state maintained a school here for so few students, but had to concede a two-and-a-half hour bus ride each way was a lot to ask of young children. She and Mr. Curtis had agreed it would be too much even for Adrian, who’d be the oldest student. At least she’d have full control over the influences on Adrian for a year. They were truly marooned together here. It could tighten their relationship. And without having to pay rent or for any entertainment, she could save most of her meager salary.

  The basement of the school had two rooms, one for storage and the other a gymnasium. There were two corresponding classrooms above, with a hall in between. Tamara selected the room used by Miss Kopecky the year before, because the other one was coated with more years of grime and its windows looked out on the ugly mountain.

  This one had windows on three sides—the ones in back looking directly into the mound of crushed limestone and forever shaded. Adrian stood before the ones at the front of the room, swiping at dust on the books and shelves beneath them. “Mom, you know all that fancy furniture and stuff in our dumpy apartment? It’s got to be Miss Kopecky’s.”

  “I’d thought of that too.” It was too expensive and personally selected to have been furnished by an impersonal company.

  “Then why didn’t she take it with her when she left?”

  “I’ve tried to ask Deloris Hope, but she suddenly has to run home to baby whenever I bring it up. I’ll have to ask Mrs. Hanley—if I can get a word in edgewise.” Tamara realized they were discussing something without arguing. A pleasant lull in the battle. Could she lengthen it? She dropped her gritty rag onto the teacher’s desk and leaned back in the chair. A stack of textbooks hid Adrian from view. “Honey, let’s take the rest of the day off, pack a picnic lunch, and—”