Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “I think I’m scared.” Agnes’ eyes widened to fill her glasses.

  The sagging gate from which a little boy had stepped and then run through Tamara’s dream body. The house where a woman had been sweeping the stairs, her hair in even pin curls, her thonged sandals slapping as she moved from one step to the next. The storefront on a corner that she and Backra had passed when he sleepwalked to a roofless church. Its shutters stood open now, and racks of canned goods and packages of potato chips and candy bars were set out for sale. Cases of empty Coke bottles still lined one outside wall.

  She could see the ocean and the beach in patches at the other end of side streets. This street ended with a familiar thatched hut, and the jeep pulled into a courtyard of beach between it and a two-story building, its veranda paved in black and white tiles.

  The Dixie woman walked up to the jeep. “Welcome to the Mayapan, folks. My name’s Dixie, and your cabanas are …” She stared at Russ and then from Agnes to Tamara, the same way they were staring at her. “Have you been here before?”

  Tamara’s mouth was too dry to allow for speech. But she and Agnes were soon ensconced in a hut with a thatched peak in the roof, with its own bath, porch with patio chairs, twin beds, and a rush matting on the floor. Expensively primitive. Tamara figured that in two months she’d have spent every cent she had in the world.

  “Never thought I’d sleep in a little grass shack,” Agnes said as Tamara slipped into shorts and a sleeveless top and still felt damp. Her hands looked ten years younger as her dry skin drank in the moisture on the air.

  The windows were a series of wooden louvers with a screen outside and adjustable to take advantage of the ocean breeze. Agnes played with the louvers on the back window and then bent to squint through them. “Come take a look,” she said in a choked whisper.

  Tamara was shorter than Agnes and didn’t have to bend to look out at the graveyard in the sand directly behind their cabana, the tumbled concrete coffins and farther down the statue of the Virgin Mary blessing the bones of Maria Elena Esquivel.

  “That’ll be his house, then.” Agnes pointed to the farthest of two houses at the back of the cemetery. “The one with the hammock.”

  “Yes.” Tamara turned and walked to the door on rubber legs.

  “Want me to come with you?”

  “No, Agnes, not this time.”

  Russ Burnham stood outside, talking to two men sprawled across lounges and brown enough to have been here awhile. She shook her head and walked away when he made a gesture to include her. She was aware of her winter-white legs and the patch on her nose that was beginning to redden. God, Tamara, how can you even think of such meaningless things at a time like this?

  An older man in a straw hat stood in the sea, his pants legs rolled to the thigh and shirt sleeves rolled above the elbow. With a long knife he cut seaweed and threw it away from him. For a moment their eyes met and held. Then he flung the green weeds in his hand and bent back to his task. He was white. His sneer was Latin. Different, say, than that of the pilot, who definitely had an Anglo sneer. Hell, Tamara, they’re both just men looking at a woman. A sneer’s a sneer.

  Three dogs in this dreadful burial ground—two together, one alone, all of a similar tan color. Small, short-haired mongrels with sad, suspicious eyes. They looked like the kind that would yap and bark, but remained quiet as she approached, backing off just far enough to make a leisurely getaway if they had to.

  The one off by itself was fatter and spryer than the others, its look more intelligent. Tamara thought of her daughter again, fat and healthy but unacceptable—she pushed the pain of Adrian away with a grunt, stared at the Virgin Mary and ran her fingers over the dirty letters. EN SAGRADA MEMORIA DE MI HIJA, in sacred memory of my daughter.…

  Tamara turned to face the house with the hammock, felt the eyes of the man in the water. The little lone dog in front of her curled a lip and began a backward slink at her approach. Its silence was more unnerving than her awareness of the man cutting seaweed. As if this creature could not make sound. Guardians of the dead, perhaps, had no voice, because the dead cannot hear.

  Tamara worried she might be sick on the clean sand, under the ponderous sun and the black ugly bird circling above—huge, silent, intent.

  You’re just afraid to face him. What kind of a mother are you? Poor Agnes probably watched her between wooden louvers. Tamara was small, but she wasn’t helpless. She’d seen that fact register in Russ Burnham’s eyes and was still trying to digest its import.

  The treacherous thought that not everyone had the opportunity to confront a fantasy … She hoped he wasn’t home. She hoped he was different from the man in her dream. She hoped she could go through with this.

  The frayed ends of loose strings in the net hammock on the porch trembled on a breeze from the sea in time to the trembling in her. But her hand was steady as it reached for the screen door. She could remember walking through it without opening it in her dreams. She didn’t knock now, but barged in before she had time to think it over.

  Everything here, too, was as she remembered. Backra sat at the round table with the oilcloth, eating and looking at some papers. He set down a fork filled with food and stared at her. His suntan was even deeper than she’d dreamed it, and made the light metal-colored eyes and hair seem to glow in the shuttered room.

  Blood thundered in Tamara’s head. She ordered herself to stomp over to him and demand to know what he’d done to Adrian, but she froze, balancing with one hand against his refrigerator, realizing how stupid she must look, and wondering why he didn’t look more sinister. He just looked stunned.

  Backra opened his mouth to speak but shrugged instead, pushed back his chair, and stood. He came to stand over her, and still she couldn’t move. His fingers felt hot on her cheek when he touched her. He drew them away, stared at them and then at her.

  She’d been screaming at him inside her head, but when her repeated words finally found voice, they came out as a whisper: “Oh, God, where is she?”

  And then she was pounding on him and sobbing childishly. “You have her. I know you have her somewhere. Give her back to me. Please!”

  He held her away and lifted her to look into his eyes. Suspicion replaced the shock on his face. “Where do you come from?” he said in that familiar raspy voice, but as if he expected the answer to be Mars.

  “Iron Mountain.” Tamara, who’d never fainted in her life and didn’t believe in it, felt herself going and began gulping in air to ward it off.

  “Iron Mountain. Does it have railroad tracks and tunnels?”

  “Yes. Please give her back to me.” She started slipping through his hands and toward the floor; the buzzing in her ears threatened to snap something in her brain. She was suddenly on one of the hard kitchen chairs, her head pressed down between her knees, staring at pieces of sand dotting the unpainted boards of the floor between her running shoes.

  “All right now?” His voice was cold, but the pressure of his hand on her back eased.

  “I think so.” Tamara hated herself for being so weak, hated him for being so in control and ignoring her repeated pleas for Adrian. He helped her to sit up, brought her a glass of water, watched her drink it, long elegant fingers clasped in front of him. Everything about him was long and elegant. The sleek Backra of her dreams. Walking. Speaking. Real.

  “You are one dream I never wanted to come true,” he said cruelly, and took the glass from her hand. He wore powder-blue swim trunks and a short-sleeved white shirt open in the front and he needed a haircut and he bent over and kissed the raw patch on the end of her nose.

  Then he lifted her to her feet and off them, held her up against him as effortlessly as Augie Mapes had done at Jerusha’s party, and kissed her on the lips and then down her neck. Her head kept calling for Adrian, but every other traitorous, aching cell in her body responded to Backra.

  34

  “All I can tell you is I don’t have your daughter, don’t know where she is. I do h
ave some idea of how you feel, though.” They walked along the beach away from San Tomas. Tamara had practically to run to keep up with his long strides. “I’ve dreamed of her as I have of you, a large girl, likes to eat in the middle of the night, gives you a rough time.” He spoke rapidly, as if he were more used to keeping silent. “But I don’t have any evil way of transporting sleeping children here from anywhere. And I don’t know any Jerusha Fistler, and …” He stopped suddenly, and she ran into him. He pulled her around in front of him and wouldn’t let her move away. “And I’m having one hell of a time believing in you, lady.”

  “It’s Tamara.”

  “Tamara. But you must be right about there being some connection between this place and Iron Mountain, or we wouldn’t know each other.”

  “Please stop walking. I’m out of gas.”

  Humor etched a trace of lines around his eyes and then spread inside to take away the protective leaden quality. “Not used to the heat.”

  “It was snowing this morning. I came to find my child. You tell me she isn’t here. Which means I’m supposed to believe she’s dead.”

  “They do die, you know.”

  “She’s missing! Not … dead.” Tamara sank to a sitting position in the hot sand and stared at his knees.

  “’Least you can say the word. When was the last time you had a meal?”

  “I don’t know. What are you, a doctor or something?”

  “Or something. But not a witch doctor like you’ve been treating me. Let’s see, lunch is over at the Mayapan … if we sprint, we could just make it back to the Hotel de Sueños in time for scraps at least. Roudan’s notoriously relaxed about schedules.”

  Tamara wasn’t up to sprinting, but did manage to walk back along the beach. She recognized the unfinished church as they passed it. Just before they reached the cemetery, he guided her into a cool dark barroom and through it to a dining room with long tables. It was about half full, and the very smell of spice and tomato and other things she couldn’t name almost took the last bit of starch from her legs. What am I doing sitting down to eat with this man?

  Steaming bowls of fish stew were set before them, and brown bottles of beer. How can I enjoy food when Adrian …? Guilt and all, Tamara ate and drank everything offered. Her grateful body sent back rounds of zipping-good feelings to equal any she’d known running. She didn’t pause until they sat over coffee.

  Backra, who’d managed to put away a second lunch, smiled a smile she’d never forget. “You wonder how you can still feel hunger, pleasure—anything but pain when you’ve lost somebody. Makes you want to punish yourself.”

  “She’s not dead. I’d know.”

  “Still think I have her hidden away?”

  “Maybe that was just an easy answer.” The coffee was half hot sweetened milk, but still thick with flavor. It and the food were so revitalizing she began to enjoy the heat, the bright colors around her, and the man beside her. She had the urge to compare dreams with him, but there was still something guarded in his manner, as there should have been more in hers.

  “Why am I a dream you wished would never come true?” she asked him.

  “I’m about to embark on a new life, carefree and unattached, and you look like a little bundle of responsibility and strings.”

  “Gee, where have I heard that before?”

  As they entered the bar, a big parrot turned upside down and wished Tamara a “Hoppy burday.”

  “What I really want to do,” Tamara said when they were once again out on the beach, “is to search every house, run up and down the streets screaming her name. Anyway, thanks for the lunch.”

  “I owed it to you after, uh … treating you that way when we met.”

  “You don’t look sorry about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “We probably don’t even like each other. It’s just the dream-fantasy.”

  “That’s got to be it.”

  “I followed you one night, when you were sleepwalking—at least I dreamed I did. And when I woke up, I’d been sleepwalking too. And a snake wound down from a vine onto your shoulders.” Somehow they’d angled back to his door.

  “You’re lucky. That was one of the nights I was wearing pajamas.”

  I remember a few when you weren’t.

  He opened the door, and she stepped in. She noticed the boxes now. The Sahsa Airline folder on the table. “You’re going somewhere? Moving?”

  “This is my father’s house, and that’s a long story. I’m flying home tomorrow—Anchorage.”

  That stifling disappointment she’d felt when she stepped off the plane returned. Over a man? “What kind of a mother am I?”

  “I don’t know.” He reached into a cupboard for a tube, smeared sun cream on her nose, forehead, shoulders—without asking or explaining. As she would have done for Adrian.

  “Would you have time to take me into the place with the snakes?”

  “If that’s what you want, Tamara.” He reached back into the cupboard for a spray can, and she stood docilely while he sprayed sickly-smelling bug spray all over her skin and clothes and hair. “Sand fleas have probably eaten you alive by now, but there’s ticks and such in the jungle.”

  “Do you have to go home so soon?”

  “I think it’s for the best.” He sprayed his front, handed her the can, and turned around for her to spray his back.

  She should have returned to the Mayapan long enough to explain her absence to those she’d dragged down here, but she just followed him through San Tomas. By a different route than the dream walk, but they came to the chain-link fence and the source of the background rumble.

  “This is the island generator.” He pointed to the building behind the fence.

  “You walked this way, feeling the fence till you could walk around it.”

  “In my dream I was inside your mountain.”

  He led the way into the jungle, and it looked even more foreign with the sharper edges of day color.

  “The snake didn’t hurt me,” he reassured her when she paused so long he had to come back for her. “But someone else did. Did you see anybody else here?”

  “No. I rushed forward to save you from the snake, and woke up in the snow.”

  “And I came to back at the generator with a whacked-up head. Snakes don’t whack. Do you realize how this conversation would sound to anybody who wasn’t us?”

  “I haven’t had an intelligent conversation since the day I drove into Iron Mountain. What happened to you when you were all scratched and bruised and hurt your nose?”

  “I had a diving accident and decided it was time to go home. And I can’t find my dad. So he must be dead.” Thad explained he’d come to Mayan Cay to search for his father.

  “If he’s missing too, maybe he and Adrian are together somewhere.” She followed him again, and remembered that dream day on the beach when she’d first seen him. She’d followed him then too, reached out to touch his back, hadn’t been sure if she really felt it or not … realized now she’d just done it again. This time she could feel his warmth through his shirt. This time he turned and caught her up.

  They stood holding each other in the steamy place with the sun pressing down on their heads and the rank growth all around them exuding odors so dense they almost overcame the chemical smell of the bug spray. Tamara buried her face in the sandy mat of hair that formed a T on his chest, the bar stretching over his breasts and the tail extending down as she’d traced it with dream eyes the night he’d come to Miriam Kopecky’s bedroom in Iron Mountain. She stood on tiptoe to kiss the dip in his throat beneath his Adam’s apple, and pushed herself away, his salt still on her lips.

  “Good thing I’m leaving tomorrow.” He turned back along the path.

  They entered the relative coolness of a shaded place, and she recognized the wall of vine even in daylight and with the blossoms closed. The scent that had so overwhelmed her the night of Jerusha’s party was now a faint, muted reminder of the last time she had
seen Adrian, her sleeping head on the pillow next to Vinnie’s.

  “Chomp down on it. Think of other things.”

  “You must have been very close to your father—to pick up on my feelings so fast.” She looked up at him, her head cocked to one side, and sweat squeezed into the crinkles that formed in her neck.

  “My son died a little over a year ago. He was twelve.”

  “So is Adrian. What do you think about to take your mind off your hurt for your son?”

  “Once or twice I thought of you.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Yes and no.” He turned away, parted the vine to peer through.

  For a moment Tamara heard a sound that reminded her of traffic on a distant highway, the roar of engines and the angry buzz of tires on pavement. Even as she concentrated on it, it faded away. Insects swarming, perhaps. This was, after all, a jungle.

  Thad led her to an opening in the vine wall, next to the trunk of a palm tree.

  “I thought of you sometimes even before Adrian … vanished. Once I visualized you riding into Iron Mountain on a horse.”

  He laughed. The first time she’d heard that sound. It had a raspy, husky quality, like his voice. “My legs are too long. I look silly on a horse.” There was a cone-shaped hill on the other side of the wall, and a slight but refreshing breeze. A few trees angled drunkenly from the sides of the cone. Several grew on top. “This, I think, is a Mayan stela.” He gestured toward a mossy rock, long and narrow, with a corner sliced off. “They used to write on them, like a book made out of stone. And that”—Thad stared up at the hill—“is, I’m guessing, the tiniest of Mayan temples or pyramids, all grown over.”

  Her running shoes sank into ooze, and she stepped sideways to firmer ground.

  “The snake seems to have moved on. Or he’s hiding in the foliage.” Thad looked from the mound to her and said softly, “Even predators are sneaky when afraid, or hunting, or both.”

  Tamara knew they weren’t talking about snakes.

  The mound rose behind him, an intense jade framing his silver head. A breath of breeze nudged broad-leafed plants and separated palm fronds, changing the light-and-shade patterns that played across his body and his face, highlighting pale eyes one moment, hiding them the next.