Thief of Dreams

by John Yount

  Oh but he was gentle and tender, his mouth upon her mouth, her eyes, her breasts and nipples. And his hands, how could they be so wise and gentle and tantalizingly slow, and where had he learned all this, and when? Had he been some nasty little boy hiding out in the barn with those pretty little dark-eyed cousins of his? How many women had he known before his wife? Since? But she had grown delirious for him to caress each new part of her. There was no spot he might wish to touch and woo that she would not gladly surrender. She would do anything he asked, she knew she would, because she was totally dotty. She knew she was. She had never in her life been so thrilled. And when, at last, he entered her, for the space of a heartbeat she lost consciousness. Gentle and wonderful he was, and on and on he went. On and on and on. But when she certainly would have reached climax, haunting the most remote boundary of thought, was Edward. She would not admit him, but she couldn’t banish the effort it took to keep him at bay, and so the moment escaped her. For some time then, the sensations, which had been so delicious, turned raw and almost painful, and the whole situation seemed ludicrous. But Leslie would not stop, and finally, as though from the wrong side, as though the whole matter had been turned wrong side out, she reached orgasm, somehow as horrid as it was wonderful.

  JAMES TALLY

  When the trouble started, James was crossing the playground toward the sycamore tree where Lester was already eating his baked sweet potato, a sweet potato being the only thing Lester had had in his lunch bag all week, except when they were small and he’d had two of them; and when James thought about it later, he figured it had all happened because he’d been so deep in his own thoughts. He was about fifty feet from Lester when he heard, or maybe just felt, a presence close by; and in the next second a jarring blow to his shoulder made him stagger.

  “Whaddaya say pissant?” Earl said. “Gettin any gravel for yer goose?”

  His arm felt half-paralyzed, and he had a crick in his neck from the impact of Earl’s bony knuckles against the point of his shoulder, but he kept walking, not even looking around, as though he’d merely stumbled or been shoved by a sudden gust of wind, although Lester and the sycamore were blurred from the moisture that pain had dashed across his eyes.

  “Hey,” Earl insisted, “answer me, boy! You gettin any poontang? Any frogjaw?” And he grasped James’s shoulder to turn him around.

  Whatever the reason, when he was forced to look into Earl’s proud, cruel face, he said, “Get away from me,” in a voice he didn’t even recognize, and when Earl opened his mouth to speak, the heels of James’s hands shot out all by themselves, hit Earl in the chest, and knocked him backwards.

  “Why you little shit!” Earl said and did exactly the same thing to James, only James’s feet left the ground and he landed on his back with the base of his skull slamming into the hard-packed earth of the ballfield with such force that he seemed to go blind and maybe a little crazy too, since he was up and swinging wildly before he knew it. He hit Earl once on the forehead, once in the neck, and once in the ribs before Earl’s fist hammered into his eye and knocked him down again. It was such a hard, bone-against-bone blow that it didn’t even hurt, exactly; instead it provided a numbing burst of color, and he hardly felt himself hitting the ground. But this time, just as he had scrambled up to his hands and knees, Earl landed on him, got an arm twisted behind his back, grabbed the hair of his head, and slammed his face into the earth, which bloodied his nose and got his mouth full of dirt. In a rage of frustration and anger, he thrashed and struggled, but Earl cursed him and rode him, forcing his face into the ground by the hair of his head.

  “Get off’n him and let him up,” James heard a calm, familiar voice say but Earl pushed his face into the dirt and said, “What’s it to you, fester fuck?”

  James gathered himself to struggle again, but his arm got twisted so far behind his back, the pain was crippling, although in the next moment, as if by magic, Earl’s weight disappeared. For a few seconds James lay where he was, trying to bring his right arm from behind his back. Aching and reluctant, his arm obeyed him, and he sat up and, suddenly very dizzy, spat again and again to rid his mouth of dirt and blood. Earl Carpenter, James was surprised to see, was also sitting on the ballfield a dozen feet away. “Don’t bother him no more,” Lester was saying. “You done aggravated him enough.”

  A strange, delighted sneer on his handsome face, Earl got up and dusted off the seat of his britches. He shook his head, as though sadly, and grinned. “You gonna get it now,” he told Lester. “I’m gonna stomp a mudhole in yore ass.”

  But as Lester and Earl came together, Earl’s constant shadows, Tom and Tim Lanich, moved in James’s way, and he couldn’t see what was happening. “Knock his head off, Earl!” Tom said.

  “Kick his ass! Kick his ass!” Tim demanded just as a small boy from a lower grade brushed past James’s shoulder and shouted: “There’s a fight! Hey, Troy! Hey, Cecil! There’s a fight!” And before James could even get up, a dozen people had gathered; and by the time his arms managed to steady him enough so that he could get his feet under him and stand, a whole cluster of people had gathered eagerly around.

  His knees didn’t feel as if they were going to hold him up, but they did, although they burned with weakness and threatened to buckle. Still, he clutched and fumbled at those in front of him until he came in sight of Lester, who was holding his fists clownishly out before him as though he were John L. Sullivan or some such old-time fighter posing for a picture, except that his lips were so puffed and broken they looked almost wrong side out, and his nose was already streaming blood. James couldn’t believe so much damage had been done in so short a time. But it was easy to see that Lester didn’t know the first thing about fighting. He pawed the air with his oversized fists in front of an enemy half a head shorter and at least twenty pounds heavier, while Earl, completely unmarked, moved easily out of the way and smirked; until, almost too fast for the eye to follow, he was somehow inside Lester’s pawing fists and match-thin arms and had hit him one, two, three times; and Lester became all arms and legs, waving and kicking out for balance. But he didn’t fall, and in a moment there he was again, serious, wordless, striking his clownish pose and pawing the air in front of Earl’s face.

  “Knock his head off, Earl,” one of the Lanich twins shouted, and then other people began to shout, and all of them for Earl. They had to be fooling themselves, hoping that, if they cheered for Earl, he might begin to think of them as friends and be less cruel, or maybe they just couldn’t bring themselves to cheer for someone so ridiculous as Lester; James didn’t know and couldn’t say. But for himself, he felt empty and sick in his stomach, and whether from the sudden passing of his inexplicable anger, or from fear, or for some other mysterious reason, there was no strength in his body, and the crowd jostled him this way and that. “Hey, kick his ass, Earl!” someone shouted, and as though on command, Earl stepped in and punched Lester squarely in the eye.

  Lester went reeling backwards, arms flailing, and might have fallen if he hadn’t managed to catch Earl’s shirtfront, so that the two of them went around and around in a violent dance with Earl yanking Lester about as though Lester had no weight at all and punching him frantically to break free. But their legs only got tangled, and they both went down where they thrashed and rolled and struggled for a long time before Earl managed to escape somehow and stand up, although his shirt was torn and, probably more through Lester’s clumsiness than anything, there was a thin trickle of blood crawling out of Earl’s nose and a lump under one of his eyes.

  Lester got up too, his arms looking as thin as twigs and his big chapped fists slowly churning the air in front of him again.

  “Say you’re whipped, fester fuck, and I’ll let you off,” Earl said.

  But Lester didn’t say anything at all. He just pawed the air, all at once launching a terrific roundhouse swing that whistled a good six inches from Earl’s face, as though all those childish, pawing blows would have set Earl up, somehow, for a knoc
kout; except that it was Lester, not Earl, who fell merely from the violence of his own effort. While he was trying to get up, Earl rushed in and shoved him backwards, and he fell again. “Say you’re whipped,” Earl demanded.

  But Lester wasn’t talking. He got on his feet again, his face showing no emotion, as if he weren’t at all bloody, and his lips weren’t swollen wrong side out, and his left eye wasn’t puffing shut. As if he didn’t even know that his silly style of fighting wasn’t working. He came at Earl as though he were doing just fine.

  Tears breaking in his throat and trembling head to foot, James forced himself inside the circle only to have Tim Lanich grab him by the collar and yank so that he stumbled back and down, his head knocking against Tim’s knees just before the whole body of onlookers moved forward, and Tim and someone else fell over him and scrambled up and went on because the fight had started up again and moved a little away, drawing everyone with it.

  And then people were coming from everywhere, until Lester and Earl had collected almost everyone on the playground, even some of the high school students from across the way, and James found himself cut off and shut out. He wanted no part of it, but it was monstrous and shameful that the fight wasn’t his anymore when he’d started it. He wanted to run as far away as possible, only he found himself pawing and fumbling at the crowd in order to get through, his ears ringing as if a shotgun had been fired just over his head.

  But people shook him off. The crowd changed shape and seemed to thicken in front of him just when he was making progress, and for minutes he couldn’t even catch a glimpse of what was happening. He couldn’t believe that Earl hadn’t been allowed to strut off in victory long ago. Even when things were equal, fights lasted only a minute or two. Maybe five if there was a lot of circling and name calling, but this one had gone on for twenty minutes or longer, when Earl had every advantage and every right to win, and it was unnatural that Lester couldn’t be made to acknowledge it. It was so unnatural and outrageous that it had put something strange in Earl’s eyes when James got close enough to see them. There weren’t any new marks on him, but he’d gotten dirty and sweaty and tired, and he’d begun to back away from Lester’s childish blows.

  “Say you’re whipped,” he would croak from time to time, but that only seemed to make Lester launch one of his outrageous, whistling swings. Maybe he would fall with it and maybe not, but he was always up again, looking absolutely certain that, sooner or later, he was going to hit Earl with one of them and knock him to Kingdom Come. Maybe Earl had begun to worry about that too.

  But it didn’t happen. All at once coach Chic Dailey from the high school was there and had shouldered himself through the crowd and caught Lester against his chest.

  “Whoa, son,” he said, because Lester was still trying to fumble toward Earl. “Whoa now, take her easy.”

  “He smart-mouthed me!” Earl said to the coach’s back. “And he tore my shirt that ain’t even a week old!”

  For a moment more Coach Dailey held Lester against his chest, which had already gotten nearly as bloody as Lester’s own, and then he held him at arm’s length to look at him. His eyes narrowed, the muscles at his jaw rippled, and he started to say something but seemed to catch himself. “One of you young’ns run and get Hagerman for me and Miss Ivey,” he said, and although he spoke to no one in particular, four people sprinted toward the school.

  “The stupid shit jumped me, that’s all,” Earl said. “Ain’t nobody pushes me around.”

  Chic Dailey turned enough to face him. He had one hand on the nape of Lester’s neck, holding Lester’s head in close as though to protect the damage that had been done, but the other hand was pointing at Earl, the forefinger extended like the barrel of a gun. “You’re missing a good chance to keep your mouth shut, boy,” the coach said. “I’ve known about you for a long time, and I already been told what went on here.”

  For minutes then, as though they were at the site of an automobile accident, everyone stood around as if they didn’t quite want to be there, but somehow couldn’t walk away either. It was as though they had to wait for Miss Ivey, who taught home economics and doubled as the school nurse, or Mr. Hagerman, who was the principal, to arrive and bring matters to a close, make pronouncements, make sense. At least that was what James was hoping for.

  But when Miss Ivey arrived, she only raised Lester’s face and looked at it, shook her head, and said, “My, oh my.” She was a big woman, Miss Ivey, bigger than most men, and maybe she couldn’t ever be pretty, but she seemed all the more gentle because of it.

  “You’ll want to look at that young’n too,” Dailey told her and nodded toward James, somehow knowing miraculously exactly who and where he was.

  And Miss Ivey came and looked at him, touching his face with soft, practiced fingers. “Mercy,” she said, “mercy, mercy. You boys come along with me this instant.”

  But before they could move, Hagerman arrived, his gray, vested suit the color of iron and looking just as stiff except around his thighs where it was an accordion of wrinkles. The students automatically gave him space, and any mutterings and whisperings going on among them ceased while he looked first at Lester and then at Earl and finally at James. He was a short man with a proud paunch and a face that was never seen to smile. From Virginia and Clara, James had learned that he had a big wooden paddle in his office with holes drilled in it which left bright red rings on the buttocks, and he paddled the smaller children with it; but as the boys among them reached a certain size or age when they might have offered resistance—and he seemed to know without fail when this was—he no longer whipped them. He sent them home.

  “I can’t have this kind of shenanigan at my school, and I won’t have it,” he told them. “When Miss Ivey gets finished with the three of you, I want you off school grounds, and I don’t want you here the rest of this week or next.” He gave each of them another long look. “Monday a week, you can come to my office, and we’ll have a talk.”

  “Two’s enough for Miss Ivey to clean up. I’ll take this one to the high school first-aid room,” Chic Dailey said and grasped Earl’s elbow, only Earl pulled free.

  “I ain’t hurt,” he said.

  “Well, you two young’ns come on with me then,” Miss Ivey said to James and Lester.

  “If you’re not hurt, young man, I want you off school grounds right now,” the principal told Earl.

  “I got to catch the bus home!” Earl said.

  “I’ll tell the driver to pick you up on the highway,” Hagerman said and pointed out the spot. Turning to the others then as though they were also somehow mysteriously at fault, he said, “And it’s time the rest of you went on about your business.”

  But it was all so beside the point, James felt the whole world was out of focus, and when he followed Lester and Miss Ivey toward the school, he jarred himself when he walked, as if he no longer even quite knew where the ground was, and the feeling wouldn’t leave him.

  “Oh, you boys,” Miss Ivey sighed as she tended them in her little first-aid room, cleaning and dabbing and applying antiseptic. “Mercy, mercy, you boys,” she’d say and shake her head as if she knew exactly who and what they were, as if they had acted just as she’d known all along they would. But none of it made any sense to James, and it was a long time later, while he and Lester were walking down the railroad bed, that something seemed to wake him, and the world he knew, the true and legitimate world he recognized, came rushing back from wherever it had gone.

  Perhaps they were struck too dumb to speak, but they had been walking together, just as always, as if an ordinary school day had passed with its ordinary woe, and there was nothing to be said about it, when whatever it was—the warm, earnest sun on his back, maybe, or the insistent and cumulative effect of birdsong—woke him, and he stopped in his tracks and looked about. “I don’t believe it!” he said all at once.

  Had he really shoved Earl Carpenter and tried to fight him? And Lester, who was perfectly innocent and didn’t kn
ow the first thing about fighting, how did he get sucked in to rescue him so that he had to struggle on and on as though he couldn’t quit, as though Earl were another impossibly painful school assignment to be endured? And how could that seem so ordinary and expected to Miss Ivey? And what sort of blind formula for justice was Hagerman following? It seemed impossible that any of it could have happened. But sure enough his left eye had begun to ache in a dull, far-off sort of way, and he could glimpse his own cheek under it. Also his upper lip was as tight and sore as if he’d been stung by a bee. And Lester—who had stopped walking too—James could hardly stand to look at Lester. Yet with his broken lips and his left eye swelled shut and weeping pink tears, Lester seemed to ponder the mystery too and find it more believable.

  “I’m sorry,” James said. “It was my fault.”

  After a moment Lester said, “Nawh. Don’t talk crazy.” With his shirtsleeve he wiped away the pink serum leaking from the slit of his eye. “Earl Carpenter’s been ridin’ you since you got here,” he said. “’Tweren’t nary fault of yours.”

  “You shouldn’t have got beat up though,” James said.

  Lester made a soft sound, almost like laughing. “Couldn’t seem to help it,” he said.

  “But, God, why didn’t you quit?” James said. “Why didn’t you just quit?”

  Lester looked at the ground and shook his head slightly; and after a minute, he shook it again. “I reckon I didn’t like the way he asked me.”

  “I’m going home with you to tell your folks what happened,” James said.