Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Oh … gross!”

  “What is gross about a picnic? I just thought we might have a—”

  “Mother, shut up and come see this.” Adrian leaned over a bookcase with her forehead pressed against the window. Tamara joined her.

  Across the playground, in front of the attached house trailers, a man bathed in the old-fashioned bathtub that stood on little paw feet. His lips were pursed in a cheerful whistling which they could just hear. Even through panes clouded with dirt, he was amazingly visible.

  Sunlight caught brief sparks off water droplets flying from the end of his washcloth. Short dark hair curled to his head and grew all the way down a husky neck. Reaching over the side, he took a tough-bristled toilet-bowl brush, rubbed it across a soap bar, and scrubbed his back.

  “God, Mom, stare, why don’t you?”

  “I just can’t believe what I’m seeing. He must be wearing a bathing suit or … something.”

  “No, he’s not. I saw him get in.”

  He pulled the plug and used the brush to clean the sides of the tub while water ran downhill toward the sofa that leaned against a trailer. And then he stood up.

  Tamara had hard-boiled some eggs for a casserole but packed them now instead with tomato-and-cucumber sandwiches, carrot and celery sticks, and oranges for a picnic lunch. In les than an hour she was dragging it and her daughter up the creek and away from Iron Mountain, hoping the excursion would take Adrian’s mind off the bather. They struggled over hummocky ground in the full glare of the sun, because the short trees and bushes along the creek were too dense. When the stream branched, both rivulets wandered off at a different angle, naked across rolling treeless country.

  Tamara chose the branch that led to a rock-strewn hill, expecting to find some shade there, and, without realizing it, slipped into a dream situation in which Adrian became lost in just such a vast place. Gilbert Whelan led a search party, but Tamara went off on her own and found their child where he couldn’t, because, as she later told reporters, her mother instinct and basic knowledge of her daughter (which Gil didn’t have because of his long separation from her) had told her where to look.

  “His name’s Augie Mapes. Mrs. Hanley told me.”

  “What? Who?”

  “The faggot in the bathtub.”

  “Adrian, I want you to forget all about that!” She turned to find the girl sweat-soaked and puffing, her nose and forehead reddening.

  “Lock me up in this perverted place. And then not let me talk. Try to tell me what to think or not. I can think whatever I want, and you’d never know.” Adrian waited, teeth clenched against the threat of tears.

  Tamara felt the cutting edge of panic. It always told her she couldn’t cope alone, made her say the wrong things, or kept her from saying the right. “I’m sorry, honey. I want you to be able to talk to me always. It’s just that you use certain language to shock me, and it does. Puts me on the defensive.” She reached an arm around Adrian’s waist. “What else did Mrs. Hanley say about this Augie Mapes?”

  “Nothing.” Adrian moved off along the creek.

  “You see? I try, and you … make me feel like a child batterer.” Tamara picked up the grocery sack and hurried to catch up. “Your face is getting red. Let me soak some Kleenex in the creek and cool it down.”

  “Pampering doesn’t work anymore.” Adrian trudged on.

  “I read somewhere that children—I mean young adults—”

  “You mean zitzy adolescents.”

  “That they use foul language to get attention. I must not be giving you enough. I thought maybe we could discuss how I might give more.”

  “Oh, crap.”

  They walked on in silence; the hill with the shading rocks seemed to move off ahead of them. When they finally reached it, it was far past lunchtime. Adrian was limping. They had to search out a rock with enough shadow to accommodate two. The juice had heated out of the tomatoes and cucumbers and soaked into the bread so that the sandwiches broke at the touch.

  “I can’t even make a picnic lunch right,” Tamara said with disgust.

  Adrian grinned. “Now you sound like me.”

  But there was ice left in the tea in the thermos, and they managed the sandwiches in soggy lumps and ate everything else she’d brought. After washing hot faces and soaking their feet in the stream, they returned to the shade of the rock to lie with their heads on the grocery sack. They were engulfed in the snappy scent of sage, the buzz of grasshoppers. Drying grasses rustled in the faintest of breezes. They watched a lonely cloud shape and reshape, then split to become two.

  “Why do we have to live here?” Adrian asked suddenly.

  “Because parents have to support their children.”

  “You weren’t prepared, like you always tell me I should be before I have children.”

  “Adrian, I was twenty-two when I married, with four years of college, and twenty-three when I had you.”

  “Then why did you have to go back to school for two years to reprepare to support me, and why did we end up in Iron Mountain?”

  Because your father never makes child-support payments. “Because I made the mistake of never practicing my profession. Because I trusted someone else to support us. Don’t you ever make that mistake. Don’t even think about it.”

  “There you go, trying to control my thoughts again. Nobody can control somebody else’s thinking. Like today on the way here, I couldn’t control your daydreaming.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You mumble under your breath.”

  “I do not. Do I? I was just talking to myself.” How can I tell you I was busy heroically saving your life just to show up your father? “Don’t you ever daydream?”

  “No.”

  The next morning Tamara worked up the nerve to visit Mrs. Hanley at the midmorning coffee hour, something that would have been natural in most places but which seemed an affront in this unfriendly settlement.

  Agnes Hanley welcomed her with a smile, hot coffee, and sickly bakery sweet rolls that had been in the freezer too long. “You know, this is the first time I’ve had a visit from the teacher in years.” She spread margarine a half-inch thick over the cracked frosting on her roll. Her glasses were the old-fashioned kind with two-toned plastic rims. They looked small and limiting on her large features.

  “I would have come sooner, but no one ever visits us, so—”

  “Oh, I never go over there. Not since Miss Kopecky died.”

  “Died? I understood she left. That most of the teachers stayed for a year or two and then moved on because it’s so isolated here.”

  “Miriam Kopecky didn’t quite finish out the second school year. The one before, Lomba, stayed one year. ’Course she was Negro and maybe she could live next to Jerusha Fistler and be all right. And Jerusha’d just got here. Jerusha’s skin’s white, but Kalkasins don’t get features like hers.”

  “Kalkasins?”

  “Yeah. White people.” Mrs. Hanley wiped her hands on her apron and poured more coffee. “She’s not A-rab, but not white neither. I expect you want to know about the people who live here. Well, there’s—”

  “Wait a minute. Miss Kopecky died? How?”

  “In bed. She wasn’t young, but she wasn’t sick. Had trouble sleeping. Bothered with dreams, you know. Then again, everybody dreams—don’t kill ’em. ’Course, like you said, it’s isolated here. Me and Fred like it that way. But it’s not for everybody. If it was, me and Fred couldn’t find a place away from the maddening crowd, could we?” She beamed at this inaccurate literary allusion and opened her mouth to begin again.

  Tamara raised her arms above her head. “Wait! Miss Kopecky died in bed? Here? That furniture in our apartment—”

  “Hers. Don’t feel bad about it. No one claimed it or her body. Must not have had relatives. Anyway, when she came, she threw out what was there. Other people took it in, so it’s gone. A regular moving van brought her stuff. Caused lots of excitement.”

 
“What happened to Mr. Fistler?”

  “Abner died too.”

  “In bed?”

  “Well, sure. Way most folks go, you know. Had emphysema real bad.”

  Pausing only to chew rolls and yell out the door at the barking dog chained to the clothesline, Mrs. Hanley rattled on about the inhabitants of Iron Mountain. Tamara was able to filter out only a few details from the welter of disjointed information.

  The Hopes, who lived in part of the triplex next to her, were without a father. Deloris, the mother; Vinnie; Bennie, the younger brother; and Ruthie, the baby. Mr. Hope had worked for the company until Ruthie was born and then had deserted. The family stayed on as squatters and lived off welfare. The apartment next to them stood empty, and the Johnsons occupied the last space in that building. The Baggettes lived in the other clapboard house, and Augie Mapes lived alone in the trailers.

  Augie collected junk cars and lived on welfare. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Baggette worked in the mines, and Agnes’ husband was the night watchman. Russ Burnham managed the company’s operations and lived in one of the blue buildings at the end of the road. The other miners drove in from surrounding ranches or settlements.

  So the Hopes supplied two students, the Johnsons one, and the Baggettes two. Two would come from a ranch. That would make the original seven students. Adrian would make it eight and be the oldest. Tamara had a fleeting fantasy of Adrian taking an interest in helping out at the school as a student assistant, blossoming with the new interest and working with her mother instead of against.

  “Now, Augie, for eight dollars a month, will let you hook your TV to his antenna. Only channel you can get’s Cheyenne, so there’s no ghosts from different sets tuned to different programs.”

  “Does he always bathe outside? In front of a schoolhouse?”

  “Absolutely no telling what Augie Mapes will or won’t do.”

  That afternoon Tamara lay down on the bed, in which Miriam Kopecky died, more out of ennui than fatigue. But she slept anyway. A few moments of that luscious tingling as the conscious mind lets go and the body begins to float away.…

  And she was walking along a narrow street of sand between little wooden houses on stilts. Some white. Others in bright pastels—yellow, green, blue, pink. Some with sand yards enclosed by board fences, lovely flowering bushes and plants growing out of the sand. Clothes hanging to dry under the houses. Poles carrying power lines aloft, looking naked and out-of-place. Footprints in the sand, and dog droppings.

  A small black boy, barefoot and in shorts, opened a sagging gate and stepped into the street. She tried to ask him what place this was, but her voice made no sound. He started to walk away, and then turned and ran through her.

  Other than surprise, she felt nothing. He disappeared down a side street. A woman swept sand from wooden steps. Her head was capped with tiny pin curls parted so symmetrically that the lines of white scalp between outlined black squares of hair to form a quilt pattern. Tamara could hear the clucking complaint of chickens pecking the earth around an overturned canoe under her house, the slapping of the woman’s thonged sandals, and the scratching of her broom as she stepped from one stair to the next. And the unmistakable sound of sea lapping against beach not far away. And a steady thumping, a mechanical background noise … and the opening strains of wild rock music, one of Adrian’s favorite songs. It introduced a discordant note, throbbed against the buildings to either side and pulsed back against her head, absorbing all the other sounds.

  Tamara rose into the air, made helpless swimming motions to keep her balance. She looked down on the woman’s pin curls and then on the corrugated-metal roofs of the houses, the gray concrete shell of a roofless building with concrete floor and foot-thick gray partitions. A lean black bird, its wings motionless and as long as her arms, glided by unperturbed at the awful noise and her awkward presence.

  The lopsided heads of coconut palms, their fronds parted at the crown and flopping over in all directions. Slashes of violent green jungle. Blue-green glitter of ocean. Improbable white of the beaches. All too intense under the glaring sun, and bulging with the savage pulse of the music.

  An inkling that she dreamed. Because this was all impossible if not. But still she fought, panic overriding any direction logic might suggest. She began to tire. The bright scene below dulled to gray and disappeared into a blackness that was even more frightening.

  The feel of her weight pressing against Miriam Kopecky’s bed brought such a surge of relief that Tamara lay still—almost enjoying the tingles of shock running over her at the sudden cessation of her battle. Sweat under her hair and along the back of her neck made her shiver.

  Music from Adrian’s stereo glutted the apartment and probably all of Iron Mountain. She’d have to make her daughter turn it down, but for the moment it was comforting just to know the source of the grating noise.

  Tamara opened her eyes to Miriam Kopecky’s tiny room, and she breathed deeply of the powder-dry air. But she still had the memory impression of tropic air so thick and damp it left a taste on her tongue—the combined taste of sea salt, mixed fragrances of flowering plants, and the overripe greenness of vegetation. Since she’d never been farther south than Kansas, she was impressed at the creativity of her subconscious.

  Her imaginary struggles had left her mildly achy, and she stretched. Running her hand through wet hair, she prepared to take on Adrian’s love affair with decibels. But her arm fell back on the pillow, and she was drawn into sleep. Against her will. As if she’d been drugged. One moment she was alert and awake, and the next, drifting away again. She fought to waken, but even the music from the stereo began to fade.

  The sudden scream of a seagull.… Tamara could smell the sea once more.

  7

  Several sea gulls screamed, and others kept their bills closed around flapping fish tails or tried to swallow quickly.

  The cause of the excitement was a black bird like the one she’d seen before, but larger. Its wingspan must have been seven or eight feet. The gulls scattered at the sight of it, but one luckless victim, tiny in comparison, seemed to vomit from fright in midair. The slimy dinner never reached the water. The black monster caught it without pausing, and floated on to another gull just rising from the water. More sinister than its size, slender shape, and forked tail was the attacking bird’s silence in the midst of screaming gulls.

  Tamara stood on the beach next to a tall man, who was also watching. He held a hand above his eyes to shield them from the sun. They’d have looked like an ordinary couple if he’d really existed.

  She knew she was dreaming now. It would have been intriguing if it weren’t so foreign. She had to wake up and get Adrian to turn down the stereo, which Tamara could no longer hear, so she must be very deep in sleep. Fortunate that Jerusha Fistler was away, but still …

  The man who wasn’t real walked off down the beach. She followed, hoping he would do something that would wake her.

  The man who wasn’t real left footprints and a shadow on the sand. She, who was real, did not.

  He bent to pick up a shell, and a white line of skin showed above the rim of his swim trunks, hid again when he straightened. Tamara touched his back, but wasn’t sure she felt it or just remembered what a man’s back felt like. He obviously felt nothing.

  He walked on, and then stopped. She moved in front to look up at him as he stared over her head. It wasn’t until she noticed the gloss of skin oils and sweat on his face that she thought she might be overwarm herself. The man was too complete, and at the same time unfamiliar, for the subconscious workings of a dream.

  Tamara stepped aside so he wouldn’t walk through her as the boy had done, and once more followed him along the beach. It seemed strange to feel in control of her dream. Could she control him? “I command you to stop.” Her voice was soundless.

  But nothing else was. It was as if her dream was real and she wasn’t. Water made a flushing sound as it rolled up onto the beach. Segments of palm fronds shaped like
swords clattered against each other in a breeze she couldn’t feel.

  Ahead of them a tiny house sat on the end of a dock, and beyond that the beach came to a point where trees and their roots grew down into the water. A dugout canoe rounded the point; the man standing in it pushed it along with a pole.

  “Ramael!” the man called, and hurried toward the dock to help pull the dugout onto the land beside an outboard with its motor flipped up. He started talking about something called an “ambergris.”

  Tamara recognized the little building on the end of the dock as an outhouse—a one-holer, by the size of it. A heavy woman rubbed clothes against a washboard under a cabin on stilts and watched the men grimly. A toddler threw a stick, and chickens scattered.

  Ramael pointed out to sea, made diving motions, and then spread his arms and shook his head. He was a handsome Latin with pants too tight and his shirttails tied up in front to expose a sleek midriff. He kept calling the other man “Backra.”

  Tamara had the sensation of too much time passing, and hoped the residents of Iron Mountain hadn’t lynched Adrian yet, but when she tried to slap herself awake, there was not enough feeling to provide the needed shock. She attempted to throw herself around on Miriam Kopecky’s bed, but merely whirled above the dream sand.

  She followed Backra down the beach and through water around the tree roots on the point. He dripped water from the knees down. She made no impression on the water, had no feeling of being wet.

  They came to a longer dock, this one painted white, with expensive pleasure boats tied up to it. Identical thatched huts formed a semicircle facing the sea. The well-groomed beach had a long, porched building at the back, and strategically planted palms and flowering bushes.

  A group of men sat in deck chairs in the shade. Loud voices in Southern accents. Boisterous laughter. Plastic glasses. One of them waved tentatively at Backra, who merely nodded and looked away, as if shy. Even in a dream she recognized the odd male ritual of the offer of comradeship tinged with challenge. Apparently her companion wasn’t up to either.