Thief of Dreams

by John Yount

  “Whooee!” Miles called off to the north, his voice made thin and faint by the ice hissing down between them. They were no more than a hundred yards apart, but Edward seldom saw a glimmer of the other man’s light, as though the curtain of ice between them not only sliced voices thin, but turned light back nearly altogether.

  His stiff back; his pelvis, which felt perversely twisted where it hooked to his spine; his hips and legs, which felt as though they’d been beaten; his feet pressed tightly in their separate vices—all these he came to regard with a sort of distant, fond pity as though they were former friends he’d learned were unhappy, or poor countries he’d studied in a geography lesson. But he had retreated toward the center of himself where he was more or less all right and able to take the long view of things. He’d left a lot of things so far behind, he had trouble recalling what they were. He had a remote memory of waiting for a vision and a new name, such as Indian boys were supposed to receive, but he’d mostly given up now. It would have been nice, but perhaps a vision and a name weren’t going to visit. No matter. Anyway it wasn’t so hard to be alone once he’d learned that pride couldn’t help. Like guilt or fear or courage, pride wasn’t made of such sturdy stuff, and he’d left them all nearly as far behind as his feet. There was about the same amount of conceit in any one of them as there was in any other, and that was the head and tail of it.

  Finally he’d realized that the it, itself, was the most interesting thing of all. It was raining was not conceited, but very important. It was snowing. And perhaps it was too late. The most comforting part of all was that he had become a part of it, at last.

  EDWARD:

  Even when he went athwart the grade of the mountain to the north, he no longer heard Miles whoop or saw any light, although they had agreed to zigzag toward and away from each other so as to cover more ground and stay in touch. Perhaps he’d let himself slide too far south. Perhaps when he was moving north, so was Miles, and vice versa. “James!” he shouted.

  A hundred times a bush, a log, an outcropping of granite, sometimes nothing at all, had made his heart jump. But at least for the last hour the ice had quit coming down, and his flashlight, though weaker, revealed more. “James!” he called.

  When he played the light over the lean-to, he didn’t know what it was and swept the beam on past. Not until the second time he washed the lean-to with his brassy light did he see the two forked corner posts and realize what he was looking at. In the next instant he saw the cut boughs inside and the humped blanket, frosted over and completely still.

  There were filaments of ice in the boy’s hair, and a faint rim of ice in his eyelashes sealed his eyes. Gently he cleaned all this away with a hand that seemed obscenely warm against his son’s icy flesh before he tried to gather the small, stiff, terrible body against his chest as though to rock it and beg its forgiveness.

  But the boy moved and groaned. He was certain of it. “James! James!” he croaked and rubbed the boy’s small back savagely. “Son! Son?” he shouted and put his face against James’s lips. He wasn’t sure he felt any breath at all. He felt the boy’s icy neck, digging his fingers under the jawbone for the carotid artery until, at last, he felt the faint, slow jog of blood. “I gotcha,” he said, laughing and crying at the same time and holding James against his chest, “I gotcha now!”

  Fiercely, he ripped off his poncho, laid James on it, and rubbed the boy’s chest and arms and legs. Without ceasing to work, he shouted, “I found him!” to the north so ferociously, it seemed to rip the lining of his throat. He shucked himself out of his light jacket and put it on James, fearful of the awful stiffness of the boy’s limbs. Gathering him up, poncho and all, fumbling until he got hold of his flashlight, he started off down the mountain. “I found him!” he shouted again.

  Once he fell to his knees, and once he lost his footing so completely that he fell flat of his back, but he was up again almost immediately. Twice more he cried out that he had found his son, but he was so winded, he didn’t think his voice could have carried very far. Still, a few minutes later, he heard Miles whoop, and a few minutes after that he saw a light bobbing and jigging toward him.

  Miles helped him get his son across his sweating back, tying James’s wrists together around Edward’s neck with a handkerchief and ripping out the hood of the poncho until it would accommodate both Edward’s head and James’s too, which rested against the nape of Edward’s neck. Miles did the shouting after that, while Edward labored and breathed great ragged, snoring breaths like a winded horse.

  They didn’t stop at the river but waded directly in. Miles set his dog free and kept himself downstream to brace Edward at every step while they waded toward the light Harley Marshall shone toward them from the far side.

  EPILOGUE

  What she decided in the next days and weeks was this. Everyone had deep desires and strong yearnings of the heart. The important thing was to know which were to be acted upon and which were to be confined to the realm of dreams. It made her happier, although on some level sadder too, having grown so wise. It was a relief to define things in a way that didn’t put herself and everyone else in such peril and allowed her to know, as much as anyone could, what was going to happen tomorrow and the day after. And it was true that Edward had changed as well, and whatever else could be said, she would never again doubt that he loved her.

  As for James, he left the hospital diminished by three toes and part of his left heel but enhanced by the profound and pleasant aftermath of a dream he couldn’t quite recall. Still, he could not be made to add anything to the cryptic note he’d left. He’d merely grow uncomfortable and inward and say he was very sorry and would never do it again. And that was partly true. He wasn’t sorry, but he would never do it again because he’d lost all superstition, never mind that he’d gotten nearly everything he’d wished for.

  Even to Lester—who had turned handsome in the hospital although his perfect white teeth made him look a little as if he might bite—James kept his peace.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In all its larger movements and many of its smaller ones, Thief of Dreams is an act of imagination. But somehow this document seems to me, years after its first publication, almost shamefully autobiographical. Maybe I feel this way because I described my neck of the Appalachian mountains and so many people—my grandmother and grandfather, my closest childhood friend and his parents, my father, and many others (no matter what names I assigned them in these pages) as scrupulously as memory and craft allow. In most cases I did not try to record what actually happened, but what might have happened and how we would have felt and behaved if we’d had to suffer the fictional world here imposed. My mother and I didn’t truly bring that godawful trailer home to my grandparents’ pasture; I would have loved it if we had. Instead we lived in it for some years in one dreary place after another, with and without my father. And my mother never truly left my father as she often threatened, at least not for more than a few hours; although my father, I’m sure, would admit she had good and sufficient reason, many times, to do so. Nor was she ever unfaithful to him; knowing her as I do, I don’t feel in the least presumptuous in saying that. So I admit I’ve pushed the characters in this novel far beyond where the heartfelt responsibilities, culture, morality, et cetera of their real-life counterparts would have allowed them to go—their desires, their disappointments, and the longings of their spirits to the contrary. Even so, in this tale, as in fact, most of what was lost was restored—at least for man and boy—and perhaps only one character’s dreams were truly stolen, if only because they couldn’t even be properly formulated. In any case I suspect this is why the first paragraph of the epilogue has always seemed such a sad rationalization to me; it is the sort of peace we make, if not with the lives we’ve chosen, at least with the ones we could not escape.

  About the Author

  John Yount is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: Wolf at the Door, The Trapper’s Last Shot, Hardcastle, Toots in Solitude, an
d Thief of Dreams. A longtime professor at the University of New Hampshire, he has been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. According to John Irving, Yount is “a completely original voice in contemporary American fiction.”

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “Futility” from Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Copyright © 1963 by Chatto&Windus, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.The Poems of Wilfred Owen is published in Great Britain by Chatto&Windus.

  Copyright © 1991 by John Yount

  Cover design by Kat Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-6979-6

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY JOHN YOUNT

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia