Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “That’s the bird of my dream,” Adrian said as if in a trance, “and everything’s just like that.…”

  Augie Mapes stared at the girl in the bean-bag chair and at Tamara, all the challenge and teasing gone from his manner, replaced by an expression Tamara couldn’t read. “Don’t let her dreams carry your daughter away, Miss Schoolteacher,” he warned.

  14

  Thad and his patient slept for about eighteen hours. He’d insisted she lie on a blanket on the floor of his room.

  “These village dogs aren’t housebroken, and she’s probably got fleas, ticks, worms, and everything else,” Dixie had protested.

  The dog felt weak and sick and helpless and expected to die. She was sore but not in intense pain. She was troubled by a deep longing she couldn’t put a name to, had the feeling she’d forgotten something urgent she’d planned to do before she ceased to be.

  So she was surprised to awake occasionally and find herself still inside the wooden structure and the man still asleep on the raised platform across the room. The lizard on the far wall sent the thought that surely she must die soon, and then its tongue flicked out to catch a fly and it forgot about her.

  Once she awoke to bands of moonlight striping the floor and a shimmery figure rising up from the man who still lay as he had.

  Thad dreamed he walked on railroad tracks running along a shelf on the mountain’s side. The moon shadowed the group of buildings below, and he recognized the school he’d seen in another dream. Thad placed the dream woman’s house directly beneath him. Rough rock and weeds pressed unfelt against his bare feet as he moved down to it. He was surprised to find himself dreaming that he wore pajamas, which he knew he actually was.

  The German shepherd he’d seen on another night was sniffing and digging around a little shed, and Thad could hear the mutter of nervous chickens. This time the dog saw him too, froze for a moment, gave a startled yip, and tore off between houses.

  Thad moved through the back door as easily as he had the front, and realized he could just as well have walked through the wall. He was in a sort of utility porch. A very dark one. But, as befitted a dream, he had no trouble seeing. The main room was uninhabited. He found her bedroom.

  The dream woman looked to be in a very deep sleep; the covers over her chest seemed not to move. He reached down to touch the fluff of her hair, and pondered the liberties one was allowed in a dream. But his fingertips had no sensation of touching her.

  The tiny room had one window. The closet door stood half-open, and her shoes were a jumble on the floor. An open book spread facedown on the night table, its spine aglow with the luminance shed by the digits on her alarm clock.

  The woman in the bed smiled languidly, making a gesture to pull back the covers, but they remained in place. In a slow liquid motion she rose through them and stood before him, her smile part quizzical, part invitation. At least one of her did. The other still lay under the covers.

  Shadows hinted at some interesting shapes beneath the gauzy nightgown. She spoke to him soundlessly, as if to tease, and he thought her lips and tiny even teeth formed the word “fight” on the end of whatever she said. He repeated the word but found his voice silent too.

  “You are not real,” he said slowly so she could read his lips. And as that was the case, he dared to discover more about the shadows beneath her gown. Although she didn’t move away, his arms filled with nothing.

  The bridge of his nose shot aches into his cheeks and brought tears to his eyes, one shoulder pained deep in the joint, and surface scrapes burned everywhere. His head pounded with the receding effects of the rum, and he awoke to bars of moonlight and the little cemetery bitch asleep on the floor. He staggered into the bathroom to swallow some aspirin, certain he’d never get to sleep again.

  The next he knew, Thad was putting up a basketball hoop above the garage door and Ricky was trying to hold the ladder and hand him nails at the same time. Thad reached down to take a nail and noticed how the smooth boy cheek was losing the extra flesh of childhood, the bones firming to take on the lines of the Alexander face. Odd that this boy would grow to look like Edward P., the grandfather he’d still not met.

  Molly came around the corner of the garage, honey-colored hair curving smoothly toward her face. The dimple in her cheek deepened. “Thad; I realize you have great expectations for Ricky, but don’t you think that’s a little high?”

  “High? It’s regulation height. He’s going to be tall, Molly. That’s already where they are at school.”

  “I still think you’re jumping the gun a little. Come on, baby, Mommy’ll warm your bottle.”

  “Bottle!” Thad turned with the hammer still poised against the backboard, to see his wife pick up a drooling baby, fit him comfortably over a hip, and carry him toward the front door. One pudgy leg shaped itself perfectly down the curve of her buttock, one fat little arm waved “bye-bye” to Thad.

  He clamped sore loosened teeth together and tried to shout “No!” between them. It came out sounding more like a growl, and his eyes shot open to unpainted rafters and the whimper of the cemetery dog as she struggled to her feet. His heart tried to pound through the top of his skull when he sat up too fast. Dizziness whirled him around inside his head.

  Thad carried the dog down the outside stairway, ringing her muzzle with the circle of one hand. When he set her down, she swayed and then squatted, giving tiny yips as she voided in the sand.

  She tried to stagger off, but he scooped her up and carried her into the house, where Rafaela stood at the stove stirring something that smelled delicious. Thad remembered he’d had no food since the cheese sandwich he’d eaten while the Golden Goose towed in the dive boat.

  “You should be with your family. I can take care of myself for—”

  “The living must eat, Thaddeus. The angels look after my Aulalio now. And I look after you.” She eyed the dog with something less than enthusiasm but made no protest as he placed the animal in the corner and put a bowl of water beside her. “He is with his brother and sister, my Aulalio, and has much hoppiness.”

  Thad downed a tumbler of papaya-and-pineapple juice and poured himself another. It barely mollified the rage of his rum-induced thirst. “I didn’t know you’d lost children before.”

  “A wave comes that sweeps them out to sea, and they are no more.”

  Thad thought the sea that provided so bountifully in food and climate for this paradise did, nevertheless, exact quite a toll. Rafaela set a plate before him of rice and pieces of barracuda and tomatoes and herbs, all fried together with a side of black beans and another of doughy tortillas just right for scooping the solids and sopping the juices.

  “How old were they when you … lost them?”

  “Marina she had six años and little Marcos had four years. The sea took many children and the old ones and the sick. And many of the dead.” She gestured toward the graveyard outside. “But the sea can have only the body to keep. Las almas … the souls, God takes to heem.”

  “She has all the answers too,” Thad said to the little dog when the housekeeper had left. “Somehow her answers don’t explain what happened out there yesterday, though, do they, My Lady of the Rum-Soaked Belly?”

  She’d lapped water when she thought he wasn’t looking. Now her chin settled on her paws. Her eyelids drooped but snapped open again whenever he moved.

  He finished a cup of the thick sweet coffee, slipped upstairs to dress. The sky was cloudy and the sea gray. For the first time since he’d come to the Cay, Thad put on long pants and a sweatshirt. He picked up the blanket the dog had used in the night. When he covered her with it, she stirred but didn’t waken.

  Taking down the box with his father’s manuscript, selecting certain books from the bookshelf, and hunting up the shoe box full of bits and pieces and his father’s notes to himself, Thad placed them all on the table, boiled himself another cup of coffee, and set to work. His father’s desk top was too small to contain all this material.

>   That evening, when Rafaela came to cook dinner, he had to pile everything on the floor so she and Stefano could sit and eat with him. Steamed lobster and crabmeat, breadfruit, and candy-coated sea grapes.

  Stefano sat in his usual superior silence. One would never guess he’d just lost the third of his four children. He glanced at the dog in the corner and then at Thad, as if he’d expected as much from a stupid Yankee. When he left, Thad knew he would go to sit at Roudan’s as always. But this time with only one son.

  He fed the dinner scraps to his patient, the first food she’d accepted that day. Not every dog was lucky enough to recuperate from surgery on lobster and crab.

  When he was alone again, he arranged the books and papers back on the table. Closing all the slats in the windows against the chill, he could still hear the crashing of the sea on the coral reef, talk and laughter at Roudan’s bar, even Chespita, the parrot. It had never ceased to amaze Thad how life could go on so normally, no matter how recent the calamity.

  He’d been working for several hours under the dim light of the one unshielded bulb that hung above the table when he heard a knock at the door over the thrashing the wind was giving nearby palm fronds. Harry Rothnel, the man who owned a “slew” of bakeries, stood outside cradling four bottles of Belican, the dark so thick behind him Thad could barely make out the gravestones and the sea beyond.

  “Have a beer and chat, Doc?” Harry’s eyes looked chiseled out in shadow. Of the various scars that were visible, the one running from his chin and down his neck was definitely the kind he’d wear for life. But the few long hairs that had hung in his face the last time Thad had seen him were once more swept neatly back over the bald spot.

  “Sure, why not?” Thad didn’t know if he was ready to talk to a fellow survivor yet, but he couldn’t ignore the plea in Harry’s voice. “Thought all the boys from lower Alabama that are left would have headed for safer waters by now.”

  “Couple of us stayed behind to … mediate with the authorities and families back home and …” Harry shrugged and handed Thad two of the Belicans. “You know, there might still be word on the others. Could of been another boat out there we didn’t see that picked somebody up, and word hasn’t got back yet.”

  “After yesterday, I wouldn’t swear to anything’s being impossible.”

  “Heard about the dog,” Harry said as the little bitch left her corner and walked fairly steadily to the darkness under the couch. “Boy, the dogs down here sure know how to slink, don’t they?”

  “I suppose the surgery yesterday is the talk of the island.”

  “Well, you were upset. We all were. A crazy vet carving on a stray dog’s a lot easier to talk about than …”

  “Two afternoons in one day?”

  “Yeah, and that … thing that came up out of the water.”

  Thad pushed aside his work again so they could sit at the table.

  “I just can’t believe ol’ Bo’s really gone. The others maybe, but not Bo. He was so alive and tough. You’d have to work overtime to kill a guy like that.” Harry looked at the window that was slatted shut, at the corner where the dog had been, at the table—obviously making an effort to keep his eyes dry. “And poor Sue Ellen trying to ride herd on that bunch of hell-raisers of theirs.”

  He emptied the bottle and rolled it around in his hand, staring at it but not seeing it. “’Course, they ain’t going to hurt financially. That’s one thing. Ol’ Bo was worth bucks.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Owned a string of fast-food joints. Used to kid him about bein’ the hamburger king of Alabama.” He lost the battle of the tears, and they streamed down his cheeks. “Shit!”

  Thad decided it took someone from the deep South to give that word the proper inflection. “Martha gone home yet?”

  “Won’t budge. Dixie keeps trying to get her on a plane for the States, but she’s still waiting for her Greg—like she expects him to walk on the waters or something.”

  “Like you waiting for Bo?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Did you know Martha pulled you into the boat almost single-handed? We all thought you was dead, and we were busy just hanging on. She wouldn’t give up, and it was either help drag you in or lose her over the side. Saved your life’s what she did.”

  Thad regretted the few impatient thoughts he’d had of Martha Durwent. “I’ve been going through my Dad’s writings and research, hoping he had a lead on all this. Haven’t been able to put anything coherent together yet.”

  “Beats cuttin’ up dogs. Think something happened to him like what happened to the others?”

  “Maybe. But no one’s come up with any boats missing with him.”

  “The Metnál isn’t in the Bermuda Triangle, is it?”

  “Most of these writers place it east and slightly north of here. One of them charts the western edge as far as the tip of Yucatan, which is probably something like three, four hundred miles north of the Metnál. But there are stories of people and craft missing, time getting all mixed up, and people and navigational instruments getting confused in the Triangle—similar to what we experienced.”

  “So what else did you dredge up, even if it isn’t coherent?”

  Thad scanned his notepad. “This is going to sound dumb.”

  “Hell, I was out there, man, you don’t get any dumber than what happened.”

  “Okay … uh, some people, including my father, believe man didn’t descend from the ape but had a high level of civilization before the Mediterranean cultures developed. It was lost or destroyed or just died, and the Phoenicians and Greeks and Egyptians and Mayans, et cetera, were merely tiny outposts of survival for a dying culture. Everything we know now was known better tens of thousands of years ago and is just being rediscovered.”

  “Horseshit. Man, you sure don’t read your Bible. That’s where the truth is at. There’s just no question. And what’s all this got to do with the thing in the water out there?”

  “Nothing, as far as I can see—I think it’s all hogwash, and for different reasons. But my father thought there are some hidden vestiges of this civilization in the form of machines left that still work or get out of control. Why these machines didn’t oxidize and turn to dust like everything else that old, he didn’t explain. But he claims to have seen one of these things himself.”

  “Where?”

  “That he doesn’t say. Or if he does, I haven’t found it.”

  Harry Rothnel stared at Thad with a full measure of pity, looked away as if embarrassed, and then said very quietly, “Your dog’s peeing on the floor, Doc.”

  15

  Tamara drove across dry rolling plain toward Cheyenne, morning sun in her eyes, edginess playing along her nerve ends because she’d not had time for her run and because she’d left Adrian alone.

  Three full days of teachers’ meetings before the start of school the next week. But Adrian was twelve. She’d had jobs in Iowa City taking care of other people’s children. So stop fretting, Mother.

  There was little in the way of fattening food in the apartment, no stores to buy any. She’d be happy with her stereo and books. Adrian had been ignoring her whenever possible anyway, so Tamara’s absence shouldn’t increase her loneliness.

  Tamara slowed the Toyota to watch a small band of antelope leap the fence on one side of the ditch, cross the road, and bound over the opposite fence. Their pronged horns reminded her of old-fashioned can openers. They had strawberry-brown coats, white bellies, and streaks at the throat.

  The creatures brought a sense of proportion to her day. Tamara could use some time away from Adrian and the shoddy settlement where every problem loomed so large because there was nothing else to think about. She straightened her spine and began to look forward to a day of intelligent adult company, not that of crazies like Augie and Jerusha. She was a professional now, and about to take part in professional meetings. Tamara hummed to the tune of tires on asphalt.

  Coming back that evening, her stomach growled with hu
nger and with anger at all the coffee she’d downed to keep awake. Her bladder shot warning pains at her groin. Her tailbone ached with too much sitting, and her shoulders drooped with fatigue. Tamara’d had no idea boredom could be so tiring.

  “The total waste of a whole day!” she said to a windshield aglare this time with the setting sun.

  As the ugly mountain came in sight and her stomach, bladder, and aching head all demanded immediate attention, Tamara understood why her working-women friends used to say they wished they had a wife. It would have been wonderful to come home now to dinner prepared, to put her feet up afterward and read the paper while someone else did the dishes, to shower and go to bed early in order to build up the stamina to endure another day like this one.

  Adrian stood at the sink when Tamara entered the apartment and dashed for the bathroom. It wasn’t until she stepped out that she registered the smell of cooking food and an elegantly set table. Adrian was tossing a salad in Miriam Kopecky’s silver salad bowl and had lit candles. The oven door stood open, and the fragrance of roasting beef forced Tamara to swallow squirting saliva.

  “I didn’t know how to make gravy,” Adrian said matter-of-factly, “so I baked the potatoes and we can have them with margarine.”

  “But how did you know how to do the rest? That roast was frozen …”

  “Jerusha told me how to thaw it and when to put stuff in the oven.” Adrian took out a covered dish of string beans and tomatoes. “Sit down.”

  The next day Tamara returned to find the leftover roast chopped up in a delicious casserole with rice and vegetables. And the stereo playing softly!

  Jerusha didn’t like too much noise. Jerusha had helped Adrian think of something to do with the leftover roast.

  “Honey, you don’t hang around Jerusha’s apartment all day, do you?”