Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  Backra waited.

  Bugs hummed on the dense air, causing a vibrating sensation in her ears. A bird shrieked some exotic message and drew an echoing reply from deep in the jungle. It was a little like Jerusha’s party. But Tamara lost track of only seconds rather than minutes. She did not forget about Adrian, but she did experience a certain feebleness in her legs, a wilting of her self-control. Twinges in her lower stomach set off aching spasms like the onset of menses and lit up cravings she thought she’d forgotten the name of.

  She shook her head no, but then just sort of crumbled into him when he reached for her.

  35

  The cool, slimy feel of the stela beneath her, the hot damp feel of Backra above. The massaging of his body against her.

  And after all the cautionary words she’d flung at Adrian about this very thing, Tamara didn’t even put up a flimsy resistance to his needs or hers. He was leaving tomorrow, and she was powerless. And ashamed.

  Not even the fear of unknown creatures lurking in the shadows of tangled leaves and grasses or preparing to swoop down from trailing fronds and dipping branches above could dilute the drugged feeling spreading over her. Not even the thought of crawling furry insects creeping out of the weeds that choked the base of the stela to walk across her bare flesh and probe for a place to bite or sting or poison—in fact, these fears made the act all the more erotic and urgent.

  She’d gone past the point of caring about anything more than the man and the moment, knowing that within minutes all the responsibilities of the adult world would return and she’d regret this act as she had few others in life.

  Meanwhile Tamara Whelan savored the forbidden just like a dumb kid. His breath. The stab of sharp bone in her back as his forearm forced her to arch under him. The pressure of his entry, which sent pleasing little cramps throughout her pelvis and a shower of sensations flowing along her thighs. The press of his weight on her stomach. Even the harsh prickling on the length of her backside as carved edges in the alien rock cut through its moss cover when Backra crushed her down into it. Just the enveloping touch of him in this breathless muggy world.

  Sensual memories of his naked form approaching her on Iron Mountain, the way his muscles had tensed all along his body as he’d held Dixie in much the same position in Tamara’s dream floated unbidden but unhindered through her mind. And the little shock of realization that she wouldn’t have to fantasize to reach orgasm because she was living her fantasy and with the man who’d haunted her dreams and in a setting exotic beyond anything she could have created.

  “I don’t believe you’re real,” Backra whispered.

  Tamara wrapped her legs around him, tightened herself against him, and drew him in so deep it hurt. His release came before hers, but not long. Even as she twisted and the narcotic effect streamed through her, the image of how ridiculous they must look to an outsider invaded her pleasure. And when he withdrew, pulled her up to sit beside him, she wished she could cry.

  He kissed the top of her head, stroked down her arm and along her hip, picked his shirt up off the ground, and wrapped it around her as if he understood. “It’s all right.”

  With her eyes closed, she could shut out everything but sounds, smells, and thoughts. She could think of nothing to say to this man that wouldn’t sound as ridiculous as they looked. He must think her an adolescent. And what would Adrian think if she saw them now? Tamara couldn’t face any of it so she stayed hidden in his shirt and his chest and his arms.

  He placed two fingers on the cavity of her navel, ran them slowly down to the reddish patch of pubic hair, let them tickle through it and then slip between her legs. She twisted to look up into his face and squeezed her thighs tight together to force him out, but only locked him in instead.

  “No, I don’t—”

  His lips cut off her words, and his arm drove her breasts against his ribs to lock her whole body into the kiss. He spread his fingers and caused single pubic hairs to tug away and tease, and eventually pulled her across his lap until she sat astride him. When they finished this time, she did cry.

  Something, perhaps it was a sound, caused her to look up. Tamara thought she saw, through tears and over Backra’s naked shoulder, the shadow of a goat running along the side of the temple mound. A small figure the size of Alice. But there was no body to make the shadow.

  Roudan Perdomo watched the couple. Their white skin contrasted with the depth of green surrounding them. For all their assumed superiority, these Yankees were no better than the beasts. But he watched their performance with a certain interest only partially puerile. It must be close to three years since he’d held Maria Elena in any real sense of the word.

  Roudan turned back to the body on the altar. The gods of the temple had been too generous of late. After all these years of only shadows and dreams and phantoms, there was suddenly a plethora of solid gifts. All but the particular one he longed for. Not even her phantom had paid a visit in too long a while. In his dreams he couldn’t find her. Had something happened to Maria Elena?

  Roudan did not really believe anything so esoteric as gods had much to do with any of this, but it was a way to explain the impossible and to keep Stefano Paz and the others happy.

  He spooned a solution of canned milk and thin meal into the little mouth, sliding the spoon to the back in hopes that the animal’s body would swallow from reflex and habit. He’d been successful with about every third spoonful. Roudan didn’t know how long he could keep the body alive while its spirit cavorted about. He didn’t know how to force them back together, and couldn’t reason with even the spirit of a goat. Pouring water into a plastic funnel with a slender rubber tube connected, he aimed the other end of the tube at the back of the goat’s throat. The body shuddered, choked, but then swallowed the water.

  Roudan hoped the two lovers on the mossy stela would not go exploring, discover the freshly dug grave he’d hastily prepared for the body whose spirit had not arrived on Mayan Cay to reunite with it.

  He carried the goat body behind the stone barrier as the altar began to whir and its light to flash. He closed stone shutters as quietly as he could to keep the sounds within and away from the hearing of the interlopers outside. Perhaps she was on her way at last.

  As he led her from the jungle, Thad Alexander had spoken gently but firmly about learning to live with the awful weight of the death of one’s child, to expiate the guilt, to dampen the grief, and to survive. He talked to Tamara as if she were a child who’d lost a doll or a teddy bear. She’d stumbled along beside him saying nothing, too shocked and guilty at what they’d done and too amazed that a man could be so sensitive and caring—so convincing that she allowed herself to consider the possibility of Adrian’s death.

  She hadn’t mentioned Alice’s shadow, but hugged the secret to herself until she could make sense of it, speak to Russ and Agnes.

  Thad said he had business in the village and pointed her way toward the Mayapan. Tamara floated along the sand street as she had in her dreams, the sense of unreality almost stronger. She’d actually made love to Backra in the jungle. A feeling of the release of things too long pent up and a certain tenderness when she walked proved the last few hours no illusion. She imagined the women taking in clothes off their under-house clotheslines, the children playing in the streets, the man hammering a repair board on his sagging fence, knew her guilty secret. And that their shy grins were really knowing leers.

  Her head felt light, airy; her legs like saggy elastic. She’d had no sleep the night before. Heat and moisture shimmered on waves of sunlight, distorting the building and people shadows on the street, making them seem other-worldly, chimerical.

  She was able to slip into her cabana unnoticed. Tamara showered, changed into clean shorts and top, and fell across her bed, to dream of Adrian. An Adrian who wavered as the shadows on the street had in the heat. “Mom? Mommy!”

  Stiff skin that complained when she moved told Tamara she’d had too much sun that day as she walked acro
ss the compound to the bar hut. She was still groggy from too little sleep too late, but she could appreciate the unreality of snow in the morning and moonlight through balmy air and palm fronds that night.

  Dark polished tables, a black in a white coat behind the bar, and stuffed sharks with cold dead eyes leaping up the walls.

  “Did you find him?” Agnes peered over a green, unhusked coconut with its top chopped off and a straw stuck in it. “What happened?”

  “He doesn’t have Adrian and doesn’t know where she is. But he’s been dreaming about Iron Mountain.”

  “Those two guys over there from Alabama have seen you and Adrian and Jerusha Fistler in their dreams.” Russ set a coconut with a straw in front of Tamara. “I don’t figure there’s much chance of finding Fred or Adrian here, but there sure is something funny going on.”

  “I saw Alice’s shadow on the island today.” Tamara sipped at the rum drink with little interest. “Except there wasn’t any Alice to go with the shadow.”

  Agnes pushed her glasses back up her nose and wiped her hands on the front of her dress as if she still wore a bibbed apron. She slid Russ a nervous look. “Can’t have the shadow without the goat.”

  “You’re just tired. Probably all kinds of goats in this damn place.” But Russ returned Agnes’ look.

  The two men from Alabama snagged some chairs from another table and sat down uninvited. “Don Bodecker here.” He said it “hee-ah.” “He’s Harry. We thought as long as we all been dreamin’ about each other, we might get our heads together to figure out why.”

  Russ leaned his chair back on two legs and rested his drink on his belt buckle. He drank from a glass, not a coconut. “Sure hope you know more than we do.”

  “See, Don and me figured it out that when you are dreaming of someone who’s asleep, they don’t make any sound, and neither do you, because their mind’s off traveling to dreamland.” Harry wore a straw hat with a Budweiser band. Tamara watched the scar that angled up his neck and over his chin move as he talked. It looked like raw meat next to the well-done tones of his tanned face. “The mind without the body makes no sounds, and the body without the mind can’t either. But when you dream about somebody who’s awake, you can hear ’em because they’re all together. But they can’t hear you because you’re not. Right, Bodecker?”

  “I was planning on going home in a couple of days. But now that you are here and real and that mountain with all the tunnels in it exists, I feel like staying and getting to the bottom of this. I’d never get another decent night’s sleep if I didn’t. Put fifty years on me already.”

  “Somebody filled in those tunnels,” Russ said mysteriously.

  But the men from Alabama began telling stories that put that and the subject of dreams to shame. Something that rose up out of the ocean and tipped over boats, blocked out the sun. Something that Tamara couldn’t believe—and she’d thought there was nothing left on earth like that.

  And she couldn’t see how any of it related to Adrian’s disappearance. And she waited for Backra to walk through the door. The next move was his. But she listened, doggedly keeping Adrian and Backra in mind to hold on to her sanity. She hoped the stable Russ could make some sense of it all.

  Unlike the lunch she’d had with Backra, Tamara’s dinner seemed tasteless. Backra didn’t show up. She should have organized a search for Adrian, but her strength was gone, and she went to bed hoping that reality and sanity would come with the morning and a rested head. The picture would come into focus if she could just sleep.

  I haven’t deserted you, honey, she promised Adrian before she dropped off.

  Adrian watched the door. A fire burned in the fireplace, and its light picked out the copper in her hair. Her long lashes left shadows on her creamy cheeks, and she squealed when Gil walked in the door. Too young to tell time, she always seemed to know when he was due home. Tamara mixed his martini as he made a great thing of hanging his raincoat in the closet. Adrian waited patiently, knowing she was next.

  The same comforting ritual every night. Gil winked at Tamara and feinted toward the mail but suddenly noticed the pretty, plump child and he swooped down the steps of the sunken living room to sweep her up and make her giggle and squeal some more. Tamara had a disconcerting thought: what if their daughter were not small and pretty, conventionally lovable—would he still be so delighted with her?

  She looked at the drink in her hand, at the rain dripping down from the window, and back at the fire’s glow on her handsome family, and couldn’t understand what could have put such an ugly idea in her head.

  There was ice in Iron Mountain. The snow was thin and spotty, but ice coated the trees along the creek, and weed stalks bent over with the weight. Moonbeams snapped the ice crystals to life on the giant TV antenna, but the buildings stood dark and empty.

  Augie Mapes and Fred Hanley’s German shepherd walked on the school playground. The dog whimpered steam into the air, and Augie knelt to stroke his coat. Tamara was surprised to realize she didn’t even know the animal’s name. Augie stood up and hunched his shoulders, his chin dark with beard stubble. No coyotes yipped tonight. Only the cold prairie wind made sound as the lonely figures of man and dog turned toward the house trailers and Tamara rolled over between sweat-damp sheets in the tropic night of Mayan Cay.

  36

  Tamara woke feeling drugged and listless. She decided to take a dip off the ladder at the end of the dock to force her senses back into working order, and dug a swimsuit out of her suitcase. She had so much to do, and no idea where to start. The thought of Adrian seemed to tear at her chest with every breath.

  Grabbing a hotel towel, she slipped out without waking the snoring Agnes and came to a dead halt on the little bamboo porch. Arms folded, legs crossed at the knee, her Backra stood leaning against the trunk of a palm tree as if he’d been waiting there all night. He wore swim trunks and T-shirt.

  “It is about time,” Thad Alexander said. “Let’s get going.”

  “I am going to do what I came here to do today, talk to people about Adrian.” She knew she was blushing her embarrassment over shared memories as she walked down the little wooden steps. “I should have done it yesterday.” She moved to walk past him toward the dock, but stopped at his touch.

  “You’re evidently going swimming. And you do have to eat breakfast. Dining room doesn’t open until eight. It’s only seven.” He bent at the waist to pick up a cloth duffel and a plastic picnic bag by their strings with one hand. The other he slipped around her waist and led her down the beach. “I doubt if anyone’s seen her except in dreams anyway.”

  “Now, just a darn minute!” But she didn’t exactly dig in her heels. Tamara seemed to have absolutely no resistance around this man.

  “A little swim and then breakfast and you’ll be all juiced-up to run around accusing people of kidnapping your daughter while she slept thousands of miles away.”

  Tamara moved at his side, in the circle of his arm, like a tongue-tied klutz, trying to find voice for several hundred objections. Why didn’t the man who’d seemed shy or at least distant in her dreams seem so now? The answer was only too obvious—she felt a twinge of the previous afternoon.

  “I’d advise you not to start beating at them before you even introduce yourself, though, like you did me,” Backra said, as if tuned to a similar wavelength. “Look where that got you.”

  She giggled without meaning to, and he looked down from his great height. “A sense of humor. And under great stress.” His voice softened, his arm squeezed gently. “As a friend of mine once said, ‘You’re going to be all right. One of these days you’re going to start over. Not everybody gets another chance.’ His name was Bo. Bo didn’t get another chance.”

  He grew quiet at that, and they walked along a beach route she’d traveled before with him, but in a dream and in a reverse course. This time she noticed the line of blackened seaweed.

  Backra lifted the bags to wade around the fingerlike tree roots to enter the c
learing. This time she got wet, left an impression in the water. This time they both were real.

  He placed some money under a coconut husk on the steps of the cabin and pushed the outboard into the water along the dock with an outhouse on the end of it. Backra stretched a hand to her.

  “Where do I begin? To ask about Adrian. Whom do I talk to?” But Tamara stepped into the boat, let him pole it out until he could lower the motor.

  “When I began looking for my dad—but remember now that he was living here on Mayan Cay and disappeared from here—anyway, I started with Dixie Grosswyler, who manages the Mayapan.”

  “I noticed you did more than just start.” But the engine came to life and he didn’t hear her.

  He stood with the tiller between his legs and pulled off his T-shirt, glanced quickly around the lagoon, and sighed. “No scrambled eggs this morning.” He sat to steer, checked the shoreline and then the line of reef. “But she was no help, so I checked out Rafaela Paz, my dad’s housekeeper, her husband—Stefano. Drew a blank. And then I talked to Roudan Perdomo, owns the hotel where we had lunch yesterday before we went into the jungle and—”

  “Then who?”

  “Oh, Ramael, whose boat you’re sitting in. It often runs out of gas, by the way.”

  “Please be serious. You must know how heartsick I am about Adrian.”

  “Well, then I talked to everyone I met on the street, in bars, stores. They all speak English—a few of them even speak a form of it you can understand.” He killed the engine, dropped the anchor, began to pull things from the duffel bag. “No answers from anyone, no clues. Even talked to Ramon Carias, the island cop. You have to listen closely to the various island lingos at least two weeks to understand him at all. Nothing. My father existed for breakfast one day. Never showed up for dinner.”