Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  Statues, crosses, overturned concrete slabs. Tamara followed him through a ruined cemetery, wondering why her imagination would put one on a beach, make it such a wreck. Bizarre, yet familiar from another dream.

  Backra entered a house where the porch had no floor. She stood alone outside, staring at a net hammock. She didn’t want to be alone. Her hand passed through the door when she tried to open it. That made the dream more of a nightmare.

  She put both hands through to the elbow and moved the rest of her through so she could see them.

  He was looking down at a round wooden table with thick legs. On it was a plate covered with a paper napkin and three flies. Taking a bottle from an old refrigerator, he uncapped it and sat down to a solitary meal.

  She’d always thought that when Gil Whelan ate alone, he’d talk to himself or read. But then, Gil was real.

  The dream man emptied the plate and scratched his arms.

  Tamara walked through a side door after he’d closed it behind him, and then up an outside staircase, through another door, and into a room with a bed and an open suitcase.

  Lying flat on his bed, she rolled around, trying to make herself wake up in the bed in Iron Mountain.

  He dropped his swim trunks to the floor and stepped out of them.

  “Oh, God, this isn’t going to be one of those erotic dreams?” But he didn’t hear her, because she couldn’t make sound and because he wasn’t real.

  Tamara jumped off the bed. He just scratched his buttocks and left the room.

  “Adrian, please come in here and wake me up!”

  With the stereo blaring, she’d be as soundless in Iron Mountain as she was here. But Backra wasn’t. She heard the running of a shower. He didn’t sing, even whistle. Just the thump of elbows against a wall.

  Towel in hand, he returned, making wet footprints on bare wood.

  “Mom?”

  Tamara jumped at the hand on her shoulder. Backra was clear across the room. Every last inch of him.

  “Adrian? Help me wake up. I’m having a nightmare.”

  “You’re already awake or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

  Backra’s bedroom was unpainted, colorless, dim, the light from outside allowed in only in narrow bars through wooden louvers that covered the windows. His light eyes, silvery hair, teeth between parted lips, and the swath of white that had been covered by swim trunks left an imprint on Tamara’s brain resembling the negative of a photograph, with light and dark reversed.

  Miriam Kopecky’s bedroom was dim. Adrian looked more like a shadow than someone in shadow. Wrenched from her dream world to her daughter’s, Tamara experienced a sensation of paralysis, while her mind seemed to float without vision, somewhere near the ceiling.

  “You’ve been sacked out all afternoon. I came in twice to see if you were dead.” Adrian switched on the light.

  The shock of it in her eyes helped Tamara to shove her mind and body back together in time to register Adrian’s expression shift from mild concern to anxiety. “You’re not sick or anything?”

  How old will I be before I can be sick and not feel I’ve betrayed you? “Just a dream, the longest dream I’ve ever had.”

  Dulled and empty, Tamara pulled herself off the bed and into the shower. She thought of Backra. Coffee percolated in the pot when she came into the main room.

  “I’m getting dinner tonight.” Adrian’s look dared her to make fun of the idea.

  “Well … thank you. That coffee sure smells good. Sleeping in the afternoon always makes my mouth taste like I’d eaten the pillow. Why this sudden interest in cooking?”

  “I’m just trying to do something nice. You never question when I do something bad. That you expect. Here.” Adrian shoved a cup of half-percolated coffee at her. “Go read the dictionary.”

  Tamara took her objections to the couch. She would not say that it was only four-thirty and too early for dinner or that Adrian did not know how to cook or that the coffee tasted like hot water with a touch of mud. She picked up the dictionary. “What was the name of that bird you dreamed about?”

  “Frigate bird, Frigater miner or something. Look under F.”

  “I think he was in my dream too.”

  “Big, spooky things. American Heritage says they’re also called man-o’-war birds because they attack other birds in the air and steal their food.”

  “That’s the one. We must have seen it on TV, and your dream suggested mine.”

  Dinner was fried eggs, canned pork and beans, canned peaches, peanuts, saltine crackers, and slices of cheddar. Tamara did not mention the calories or the lack of a dark leafy vegetable. “I’ll do the dishes, since you made the dinner.”

  “I’ll help.” Adrian stared over her mother’s head at the stained wall. “You looked so old and … tired in there on the bed all afternoon.”

  “I probably have a few years left.” Backra had gray hair, but he didn’t look old.

  Russ Burnham had called while Tamara slept, to say that Augie had been to Horse Creek, a nearby settlement with a post office, where the mail to Iron Mountain was delivered. He’d left theirs with Russ. They walked up the limestone road after the chalky air had settled from the departing miners.

  “Mrs. Hanley says Miss Kopecky is dead,” Tamara said. “No one claimed her furniture, and we should use it.”

  Adrian stopped at the metal gate with the no-trespassing sign and looked over her shoulder. “It’s nice stuff. How come none of the poverty types around here latched onto it?”

  “Now that you mention it, I wonder too.”

  They decided to knock on the door of the building with sickly petunias in flowerboxes. One had to work to make the tenacious petunia look that out-of-shape.

  Russ invited them in. A portable TV flickered on the counter next to an empty can of Franco-American SpaghettiOs. A loaf of Wonder enriched white bread and a tub of margarine and a can of Coke.

  Russ wore his usual white dress shirt and Levi’s. He was always polite enough and helpful, yet wary with them. As if closeness would cause the Whelans to become a burden.

  Maybe Gil Whelan watched TV while eating alone. But that’s the way he’d wanted it. She was surprised to feel a touch of compassion for all men who ate alone.

  They left with one letter and a week’s worth of advertising circulars and newspapers.

  “Nothing from Dad.”

  “No.”

  Iron Mountain was dingy with dark. The encampment at its base looked temporary, like something that might heal over, given time.

  “There’s not going to be anything to do here, Mom.”

  “How about tomorrow we go into Cheyenne and stock up on groceries for the freezer, buy some paperbacks, and catch a movie?” Tamara pictured the silver-haired Backra riding into Iron Mountain on a horse, looking like a cowboy, and talking like Robert Redford.

  Adrian stepped up through weeds to the burned-out foundation.

  “Careful. There might be hidden holes or broken glass there.”

  “Or boogeymen and monsters.” Forgetting her concern for her mother’s aging state, Adrian stomped across the littered humps that had once been someone’s floor. Balancing papers under each arm, she walked the strip of concrete foundation on the other side and then stopped to stare at Jerusha Fistler’s vine-covered windows. “Do you ever hear a funny noise over there? Sounds like how Great-Grandma Grace breathes.”

  “I think it’s something mechanical. Probably her refrigerator or—”

  “Do you think that’s Miss Kopecky’s blood on the wall? What they couldn’t wash off?”

  “Don’t be a nit. This place is bad enough without making it scary.”

  They went around back to say good night to Alice. Adrian was right, if all there was to do in the evening was say good night to a goat. The few inhabitants of Iron Mountain stayed behind lighted windows. Tamara thought of visiting the Hanleys, but he was not as friendly as his wife.

  Adrian opened their one letter while Tamara che
cked the latest grocery ads in the Cheyenne paper. “What’s Grandma Louise have to say?”

  “The same old glop about her back hurting and having to put Great-Grandma Grace in the nursing home soon and wondering where she’ll get the money and baking bread and a new kind of cake recipe and …”

  Tamara looked up to see her daughter’s face redden as she read on silently. “And what?”

  “I hate you,” Adrian whispered, and water came to her eyes as if she’d been slapped.

  Tamara grabbed the letter and scanned her mother’s very real worries about her grandmother and money for a nursing home, the details of baking and the neighbor’s flower garden, and came to a short paragraph almost thrown in as an afterthought:

  Oh, I talked to Lenore Woodly the other day, and she said her daughter (the one who married the Jarvises’ oldest boy, you remember), well, she lives in Columbus and heard that Gil Whelan has remarried. Somebody named Elsie, divorced with two kids. Did you know anything about it? Did he write to Adrian?

  8

  The moon played light and shadow on the Virgin Mary as she guarded the sleeping Maria Elena Esquivel. Thad stared at the unsteady light of a votive candle, heard the sound of voices from the Mayapan’s compound and the mesmerizing rhythm of the Caribbean retreating, returning, retreating upon the sand. And a tentative whine from the depths of a nearby shadow.

  “Sorry, pup, no scraps left tonight.” He turned away burdened with guilt. He’d known he shouldn’t have started feeding her. But it was as if she talked to him with those wary, limpid eyes. Some night bird shrieked from the bush jungle behind the village of San Tomas. The sea broke white on the reef, sounding distant but appearing nearer in a world washed flat by moonlight.

  In the Hotel de Sueños electrical light looked dull and yellow after the moon-dazzle on white coral sand. Roudan Perdomo stood behind the bar, massive and black, a red-and-white cap on his head with “International Harvester” sewn above the bill.

  “Ah, the man who dines on the Ambergris,” he greeted Thad, and broke into a lengthy dialogue in a combination creole-English and Spanish, which sent the local patrons into an uproar of laughter and left the tourists with bewildered looks. Roudan laughed too and pointed at Thad’s face. The bartender’s speaking voice was a mellow tenor he could use with hypnotic force. But when he laughed, it slipped into a grating soprano that made the listener want to squint his eyes and clamp his teeth shut. The black man’s eyes widened until Thad thought the dark iris would swim loose in the yellow-white of the eyeballs.

  Thad ignored the challenge and slid onto a solid mahogany stool at the mahogany bar, caught the brown bottle Roudan skimmed along the lacquered surface.

  The smells of fishermen, beer, tobacco, onion … Thad’s face reflected in waves from the bar top. He needed a haircut.

  Stefano Paz sat at a table across the room with his two grown sons. No one would have guessed Thad and Stefano had just shared an evening meal. Thad ate dinners with the Pazes in Edward P.’s kitchen, as his father had done, so Rafaela needn’t cook twice. But now they sat as if across a gulf. Roudan’s was the most popular of the bars, where tourists and islanders mingled. The only islanders in the bar at the Mayapan were those who served behind it.

  Roudan slapped open palms on the mahogany bar in time to Seferino Munoz’s guitar and the waist-high drum thumped by an island youth, and excited the parrot, whose cage hung next to the Budweiser sign. Always silent unless hanging upside down from the wires of her home, she now upended and began her one song—“Hoppy bur-day to you, hoppy bur-day to you.”

  Thad tried to visualize his father sitting at the bar in his dramatic safari suit, probably recounting his adventures to women schoolteachers or his wild theories to some compatriot like Milt Keller of the Ambergris.

  Seferino Munoz started in on his hypocrite song, the verses so creole that only the natives could follow, the chorus so plaintive and clear it stayed in the visitor’s head for days. Something about people who have it all and want to be your friend. They eat with you and laugh with you and then go home and don’t think about you again, or the way you live.

  “Jeeroosha,” said Chespita, the parrot, and fixed Thad with a shiny bead eye as if to ensure that her nonsense be remembered.

  “I hypocrite dem,” sang Seferino as Thad left the Hotel de Sueños and walked into the cemetery.

  “Hey, turkey?” A man squatted on a sarcophagus near where the little bitch usually lay. “Name’s Smith. Bo Smith. B-o—as in Beauregard?” He rose in a clean movement that belied beginning layers of loose flesh around his middle. “Dixie at the Mayapan said you might be interested in a dive tomorrow? We need an extra partner. Guides at the Mayapan’re hung up somethin’ else on the buddy system. Thought we’d go down and take a peek at some of the wrecks in the Metnál.”

  “That’s a long way.”

  “Yeah, well, we thought we’d make a day of it. You know, two-tank dive, take a lunch and all. We could get in a morning dive, and one in the afternoon. Hear most of it ain’t more’n fifty, sixty feet. Bunch of us going, but the numbers come out uneven.”

  The man’s stance, his overfamiliarity made Thad bristle. But he had wanted to dive the Metnál. “I’m not certified.”

  “Hell, who is? This ain’t Florida. Come on over and I’ll buy you a drink.” Bo Smith hummed a few bars of “I hypocrite dem” as they threaded their way through tombstone shadows and the lap of the sea on the beach kept time with Seferino’s high and distant voice.

  Floodlights in coconut palms washed the Mayapan’s compound free of moonlight and made it hard on the tourist kids trying to play flashlight tag. The bar was an individual hut with bougainvillea climbing the walls outside and stuffed sharks the walls inside. A tall woman with long dark hair and a notebook sat alone in a corner. Her husband too was to join the “boys from L.A.” on the dive. “L.A.” stood for lower Alabama, Smith explained, and introduced Thad to the other “turkeys.” The boys from L.A. took up most of the room and had pulled tables together for a couple of poker games.

  Bermuda shorts, dark socks halfway to the knee, and sandals. Expensive knit shirts. Affable. Competitive. Eyes that laughed and at the same time held a chilly alertness. They all reminded Thad of younger, trimmer Milt Kellers. He felt as much an outsider with them as he did with the locals of San Tomas.

  “Haven’t got the pecking order established yet.” Bo Smith nestled in beside Thad with a cozy humor that was beginning to show the liquor. “Just what is it you do, sir?”

  “I’m a veterinarian.”

  “Hey, no shit? Listen up, you turkeys, this man here is a doctor of veterinary medicine.”

  Dixie Grosswyler, who managed the Mayapan, came in wearing a colorful shapeless thing that reached to the floor. She carried her usual goblet of white wine to ward off drink offers from convivial guests.

  “Hey, Miss Dixie, what you drinking there?”

  “It’s water, can’t you see? She’s a lapsed fish.”

  Dixie’s smile was tired, her blond Afro a little limp. “Thad, if you’re diving with these crazies tomorrow, help the guides keep an eye on them, will you?”

  “You worry too much. Besides, I’m the nut who ate scrambled eggs on the Ambergris, or hadn’t you heard?

  “The Mayapan doesn’t need any accidents, Thad.”

  The cemetery dog whined a soft good night when Thad stepped into his father’s house.

  “Like hell I’m a veterinarian,” he said to the bare-board wall as he prepared for bed. No practice maintained itself for long if the doctor was away. Thad practiced out of an office in his home and performed his surgeries at a nearby clinic. Honald from the clinic was covering for him. And Honald was very good.

  Thad could sell the house, split the proceeds with Molly. He could sell his practice, too. With that and savings and what would come to him if his father was proven dead, he could live here and do nothing for a long time, just look forward to his increasingly intriguing dreams.


  Later that night Thad dreamed of the same brick building he had before. This time he walked without hesitation through the door. The room was the same; the female in it—different. An overweight girl sat at the table, her eyes and cheeks puffy, a handwritten letter in her hand. She stared over it at some inner torment. Crumpled Kleenex littered the table, and a half-eaten sandwich, so colossal it looked as if she’d emptied the contents of the refrigerator between two slices of bread.

  She finally blinked, laid down the letter, and picked up the sandwich. Fresh tears welled as she tipped her head to get her mouth around it. A slice of tomato, smeared with mayonnaise slipped out the other end.

  The cemetery dog was not in her usual place the next morning, and Thad walked around the burial ground at the sea’s edge looking for her. Finally he laid the breakfast in the sandy hole hollowed out by her body and went back for his father’s extra mask and snorkel and the top half of a wet suit. When he came out, two other dogs were fighting over her food. Had something happened to her in the night?

  On the dock in front of the Mayapan, Stefano Paz’s sons carried air tanks to the dive boat, an open craft with shelf seating rimming the gunwales and wooden boxlike affairs running down the center with holes to hold the tanks safely in place. Everything else was open deck, already littered with masks, fins, wet suits, Styrofoam coolers, picnic hampers, and two watermelons.

  “The iceman cometh,” said one of the men softly to Bo Smith, and Thad was surprised to find them looking at him.

  “Hey, turkey, we got you air. Need anything else?”

  “Fins. Tens. Lost mine having breakfast.”

  “Teach you to eat with frogs. Can you outfit him, Eliseo?”

  Both the Pazes were grinning at the breakfast remark. But Thad got his fins, and the boat soon filled. The only woman aboard was the lady with the notebook, introduced to him as Martha Durwent. Her husband, Greg, sat between two of the boys from lower Alabama. She was the only other one who looked out-of-place, so he sat beside her.

  Two girls called from the beach, and running and giggling, carried a giant crock covered with aluminum foil. They managed to shove the crock into the hands of the divers before the boat swung away.