Thief of Dreams

by John Yount

  EDWARD TALLY

  He sat at the bar with his chin resting on his fists and a beer between his elbows. On his right, Ironfield Cox was telling Joe Hamby—who answered to the name of “Womb Broom” because of his wiry red mustache—that it wasn’t much wonder his wife had thrown him out since he’d probably gone home with his mustache looking like a glazed doughnut.

  “I never done it!” Joe insisted. “I washed good. It’s just hard to keep in mind what a nose a woman has got. I come waltzing in and give her a big kiss, and the first thing she says to me is, ‘I smell pussy,’ and then hauls off and slaps me cross-eyed before I can even unpucker.” He took a sip of his beer and shook his head. “I never smelled nuthin myself.”

  Ironfield snorted and kept his peace, and Edward Tally kept his, as he had for most of the evening, since the married condition of these two men bore no resemblance to his own. Their situations could shed no light on his and seemed to make his isolation and misery worse by comparison.

  He had known Cox ever since he, Edward, had started working construction, and as far as he could make out, Cox’s wife might just as well have been his sister. The two of them bore a strong family resemblance. They were exactly the same height, although Stella Cox probably outweighed Ironfield by fifty pounds. If you didn’t count Ironfield’s perpetually red boozer’s eyes and the veins that had broken in his nose and cheeks, they had exactly the same coloring. They both wore their glasses slipped a little down their noses, walked alike, and had many of the same mannerisms. They were both standoffish, smart, and maybe a little crazy in some way Edward could not put his finger on. Most important, they were content to be apart ten months of the year or more, since Ironfield didn’t go home unless he was trying to dry out or was otherwise out of work. But finally, Edward could not, absolutely could not, imagine them in bed together making love. He could as soon imagine a coat-rack making love to a chiffonier.

  As for Womb Broom, his wife was soft, dumpy, and mostly cheerful, even somehow in her anger. She had borne Joe five children and one monster, who was seventeen and stood about among his brothers and sisters like a stunned beef, his upper lip painted with snot, his fly half-unzipped, and his eyes the mirror of befuddlement. The whole family seemed a little soft and sticky. All of them, and especially Joe and Lois, were fond of touching, pinching, patting, and kissing each other; and a strange, friendly but mindless chaos seemed to reign in their house, so that at any minute the house itself might collapse around them, but in a gentle way that would harm no one and scarcely make a sound.

  When Lois had thrown him out, Womb Broom had spent the night at her brother’s house, where, no doubt, he and his brother-in-law had had a few beers and shaken their heads over the whole thing, unable to believe it was truly the disaster it had a right to be. And even when Broom had decided to drag up, leave Knoxville with Edward and hire on at Dunbar Electric in Pittsburgh, where Ironfield was working and had sent word they were hiring, Broom hadn’t even got to the Virginia State line when he’d had to stop and call Lois; and he had called her again from Winchester, Virginia, and was now writing back and forth and calling back and forth, so that, Edward guessed, it would not be long before things were as good as ever between them.

  So there was Ironfield and Stella Cox, who had some sort of standoffish, bloodless understanding that seemed unbreakable; and there was Womb Broom and Lois, who would go on having spats like small children, but go on playing house too, and filling the world with replicas of themselves, while their tragic firstborn stood by—befuddled, helpless, gentle—and brooded over what went on around him, like a child surrounded by funhouse mirrors.

  Edward listened while D’Fonzio, the owner of the bar and the rooms Edward, Joe, and Ironfield rented upstairs, gave Womb Broom advice. D’Fonzio knew a lot about trouble between husbands and wives, since a great deal of it started, one way or another, right in front of him with some man drinking up his pay or going off with a woman he wasn’t married to. Sometimes the trouble got brought to him later. Like thirst. Like an empty glass. His advice to Womb Broom? “Take a little gasoline, bub, rub it on your hands and give your shirt and face a wipe. Nobody can smell anything important through gasoline.” D’Fonzio did not give philosophical and moral advice. He left that sort of thing to the priest. He was a practical man. When there was a telephone call for anyone in the bar, whether the voice on the phone was male or female, he would cup the receiver in his meaty palm, ask the customer if he was there, and reply to the caller accordingly. “Nope, haven’t seen him all day.” Or, “You just missed him; he left about ten minutes ago.” Or, “Yeah, he’s right here; just a minute.” Even D’Fonzio’s wife, who sometimes kept bar for him, in this matter at least, did exactly as he wished. The bar was sanctuary, and that was that.

  Gasoline, Edward thought bitterly, well, it just might help Womb Broom. As for himself, he could dunk himself in it like sheep dip, and it would do no good whatever. The problem between him and Madeline was deep and unreachable by any method he knew. As far as he was concerned they had more passion than Womb Broom and Lois ever dreamed of, and in some strange way were more standoffish than Ironfield and Stella.

  Out of sheer desperation, Edward said, “Hey Broom, how about some eight ball?” already off his stool with his beer and on his way into the next room where two pool tables stood at right angles to one another. But he was so aggravated that he might, just as easily, have thrown a punch at someone.

  “No beer on the table, boys,” D’Fonzio said.

  Edward set his beer on the low partition between the two rooms, snapped on the light over a table, and found himself a cue stick that didn’t flop around on the felt when he rolled it. He flipped a coin, won the toss, and broke the rack with such violence that two stripes and one solid ball went down. The solids were in better position, however, and he chose them, shooting with great accuracy and violence until he had run them all and pocketed the eight ball, something he rarely did.

  “Mercy,” Joe said, laid a dollar on the table, which was what they always played for, and dropped fifteen cents in the small padlocked box on the partition, which was what D’Fonzio charged per rack.

  Edward was only remotely aware of the curious and apprehensive attention of people in the bar, but he didn’t connect it with the unusually loud smacks of his cue ball into the object balls and the jarring thunks of the object balls into the back of the pockets; but when he broke for the second game and his cue ball skipped off the rack and hit the wooden partition like a cannon shot, everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at him, D’Fonzio in particular, and he understood.

  Joe won the second game, as though, when Edward tried to shoot gently, something tentative and ambiguous happened to his otherwise dead aim. Sometimes even the simplest shot defied him, and he missed the pocket by inches. He just couldn’t please her, he was thinking. No matter what he did, some part of her seemed to harbor a grudge, some part of her was not pleased but resentful, so that it became spooky and dangerous to be around her. Not that there weren’t good times, wonderful times, when that resentment, or whatever in God’s name it was, would recede for a little while and they could have joy. Times when they made love as though they had invented it new out of the raw materials of emotion and need and flesh, so that anything he’d ever had with anyone else seemed a sad imitation and a poor copy. But those times had grown fewer and fewer, and the mistrust and resentment had grown so large that it came to haunt her face like a subtle restructuring of the bones beneath her skin. It took up residence behind her eyes. And after a while, he did not wish to come home and see it. All this he knew and could think into words.

  But playing eight ball with Womb Broom—loosing four straight games and winning the fifth only because Womb Broom scratched on the eight ball and therefore beat himself—other fears tormented him that he couldn’t always put into words. They seemed to haunt the chambers of his heart more than his brain, and struggling with them exhausted him. They appeared and disapp
eared like ghosts, sometimes before he could quite discover their proportions or begin to test their validity, and they made him feel weak and more than a little crazy. One of them seemed to insist that she, Madeline, wished, with a hopelessness equal to his own, to change him, to alter him; but that, even if she were granted such liberty and license, she would not love what she had made, because she had had to make it. She would resent him all the more. His son also haunted him, as though the boy had become a part of this terrible, hopeless, and complicated struggle, so that sometimes when he looked at him, he saw an extension of her, and sometimes he saw an extension of himself. He didn’t wish it so, but there it was. And even when he knew their son was neither of them but a third person altogether, and merely a child, the boy could not be kept clear of trouble. How often had he come home from work to have her tell him that James had driven her nearly crazy, had done this or that, had been disobedient. And how often had he taken his belt to the child only to have her stop him in the midst of a punishment she’d promised James he would deliver, flying to the rescue, herself already in tears: “Oh that’s too much, too hard! It’s enough! Stop it! Stop it right now!” Who did she want punished after all, and what? And whose behavior did he think he was altering to suit her, since he seemed unable to alter his own? And didn’t he always feel the odd man out? And what did it mean that he sometimes saw his son as a weakling, a momma’s boy, inclined to tears, dejected and sensitive in ways that were oblique, feminine, and frustratingly unreachable?

  “You gonna shoot or stand there and chalk your stick away to nuthin?” Womb Broom asked him.

  He looked dumbly at the table and the arrangement of balls, not quite able to make sense of them or recall how the game was played.

  “What the fuck are you a-gruntin and groanin about anyway?”

  He didn’t know he was grunting and groaning or why, except that it concerned his son in a way that burdened his heart and weakened his knees. “What am I?” he said, “stripes or solids?”

  His once white T-shirt soiled over the roll of his belly and under his arms as if with faint rust, his khaki work pants dirty too and bagged at the knees, a faint and constant mist of sweat under his eyes and mingled with his mustache, Womb Broom regarded him with puzzled amusement. “You’re a fuckin fish,” he said. “Playin pool with you tonight is like stealin money.”

  “Right,” Edward said and let out a long sigh of held breath that tasted of brass and ashes. “I give up.” He dropped another dollar on the table and dropped a quarter in the locked box on the partition since he didn’t have fifteen cents.

  “But, hell,” Womb Broom said, “I’m a good sport. I’ll buy you a beer.” He patted his soft belly fondly and grinned.

  “A drink,” Edward said.

  “Sure,” Womb Broom said. “You done lost enough for a bottle.”

  Settled on his bar stool again, half a double shot of whiskey warming his stomach, chased and smoothed by a swallow of his almost empty beer, Edward began to feel better. He figured he’d probably always wanted to live over a bar, maybe in a room exactly like the one he occupied with its shabby, worn furniture; a lace doily, gone gray with Pittsburgh grime, on the dresser; the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung on the wall above it to preside over his pocket change, billfold, and keys; and beneath his feet, the click of pool balls and the friendly confabulation of the bar, if he didn’t happen to be down there himself.

  What more could a fellow ask than to get off a hard day’s work and return to bar and home, all under the same roof? They were all sinners here, all fuck-ups and misfits. There were no innocents, no wives and children to accuse and mystify them. There were no debts they owed each other that couldn’t be paid. He drank off the last of his whiskey, and his eyes teared in gratitude.

  JAMES TALLY

  A little more than two weeks after Lester Buck had appeared out of nowhere to fetch his raccoon, he and James were friends. Clara and Virginia seemed to think such a friendship was predictable and bitterly amusing, and so James found himself sitting at his grandmother’s table listening with burning ears to the girls describe how ridiculous, peculiar, and probably feebleminded Lester was. What was worse, James didn’t feel he had the right to argue or make a fuss. Since his mother had gotten her job at Green’s Department Store in Cedar Hill and begun to work late, he ate six nights a week at the house and felt like a charity case. Perhaps because they were disinterested, or maybe because they were entertained, James’s grandmother and grandfather made no comment either. But his aunt Lily, who had flunked Lester in the fourth grade, had a much more generous opinion of him.

  “He doesn’t wear clothes that are too small for him or too big or worn-out because he’s peculiar,” she told her nieces. “He just doesn’t have anything better.” She gave each of them a significant glance, but there was no malice in it. “I shouldn’t really have to explain that,” she told them.

  Virginia had had the most to say about how peculiar Lester always looked, and she had the decency to blush, but Clara took another tack.

  “Well you weren’t in the first grade with him!” she said. “You ask Miss Teasdale if he didn’t jump out the window and run home every time she turned her back. In about an hour his momma would come marching him back into the classroom where he’d sit, all red-faced and snotty-nosed, and then he’d do exactly the same thing again. Miss Teasdale finally had to keep every single window shut and locked because of him, and for two weeks we nearly died of the heat. But that didn’t even do any good, because the moment we were let out for recess or lunch, he’d hit the front steps running, and by the time the rest of us got outside, he’d be all the way across the playground on a beeline for home, couldn’t anybody catch him!”

  Grandfather Marshall laughed at that, one short laugh almost like a cough, his chin into his chest and his eyes merry.

  “He never got one bit better!” Clara said, looking at Harley Marshall as though this were no laughing matter. “I’ll bet he wasn’t in class one full day all year. He never spoke a single word to anyone or even looked at anybody that I can remember. He was just a little red-faced lump, watching his chance to run, and he had to do the whole first grade over because of it. Now I call that peculiar,” Clara said, suddenly staring into James’s eyes.

  “I don’t think it’s peculiar,” James said, and he didn’t, although he noticed that everyone at the table gave him a surprised look, as though he might have had the grace to admit the obvious—everyone, anyway, except his grandfather, who had slipped behind his wall of privacy again. What Lester had done seemed wonderfully brave and pure to him. He himself had hated first grade; it was a prison sentence, an unreasonable and arbitrary punishment he’d suffered only because he hadn’t thought it possible to do otherwise.

  “And I thought you were supposed to be bright,” Clara said.

  “Well, I’m sure I never in my life met a shier boy than Lester Buck,” his aunt Lily said, “but I never found the least bit of harm in him. I don’t think there is a mean bone in that child’s body, and I think it’s just grand that the two of you made friends.”

  “He’s cracked,” Clara said, “and being poor or shy doesn’t have a thing to do with it!”

  “That will be sufficient, missy,” Grandmother Marshall said.

  Lester was not cracked, James knew that much, but he took his grandmother’s remark to include anything he might have to say on the subject too and kept his peace. Still, the silence that followed was painful and awkward, and it seemed, as well, his fault; so, trying not to be obvious, he hurried to finish his supper and asked to be excused. After he had carried his plate, glass, and silverware to the sideboard by the sink, he left by the kitchen door, grateful to be outside in the long, oblique twilight. He didn’t know how he felt, but he knew he didn’t want to shut himself up in the trailer, so he got no further than the stile where he sat on the top step and listened to the crickets making little shivers of sound as though they were having chills. Across the fence, milked and
contented and chewing her cud, the cow added a gourdy rhythm of her own.

  He didn’t know how or why people became friends, but he decided at once that it had to do with the eyes, something in them held in common that each could see and recognize, even if they couldn’t name it. He’d seen that Lester was all right from the beginning. Sure, the first times they’d run into each other fishing, they hadn’t spoken, but they’d managed to raise their hands in greeting, and it wasn’t long before they’d said a word or two, and now they were real friends. As for his old friends in Cedar Hill, twice he’d gone in with his mother, and while she worked, he’d rushed off to spend the day in the neighborhood where he’d lived; but that had only taught him just how long five years could be, at least when it came between the time when you were eight and the time when you were thirteen. Standing around in someone’s yard who wasn’t sure they cared to remember you wasn’t much good. Oh they had been nice enough, he supposed, but the last couple of times his mother had asked, he hadn’t wanted to go back to Cedar Hill. There wasn’t any way it was going to earn back the investment of homesickness he’d put into it.

  He heard something stir behind him, and when he looked over his shoulder, he was surprised to see Clara coming through the dusk of the side yard.

  “We’re supposed to apologize,” she said, “although I don’t see the point since we were only trying to help you out. Anyway, Ginny said she’d do the dishes by herself if I came, so here I am.”