The Angry Dream

by Gil Brewer

  I went on out and closed the door.

  Climbing into the coupé, I noticed a dark, weaving shadow standing in snow-clotted grass beside the sheriff’s office. I turned the car’s lights on and they shone blindingly on the figure of a man. The man started running violently in a veering diagonal across the street through the thinly falling snow, lurching from side to side. It was Herb Spash again. I turned the car and followed him.

  He thought he was hidden behind a tree on the corner of a vacant lot. I drove up beside the tree, turning in suddenly, without warning.

  “Spash!” I said. “What do you want?”

  He stood rigid in the snow, his breath steaming in the night. He looked cold and wretched.

  “Nothing, damn you!” he shouted. “Nothing! Leave me alone!”

  He turned and ran off across the lot.

  I turned the engine off and sat there. Snow sifted across the street in thin eddies, blown by a strong wind coming down the valley. The outrage back there at the sheriff’s office was so strong inside me it was a kind of awe. Perhaps it’s because you never think of the law until you need it, and you never expect to have its back turned on you. You know you’ve always got that one place to turn to, just in case. The law can’t turn its back. Only it does …

  Looking out the side window, I saw I was parked near a sign in a front lawn that said:

  WHITE’S

  Room and Board

  Noraine had said she was staying here.

  I got out of the car, walked across the street to the walk leading to a three-story white house with a large, railing-enclosed veranda that circled the front and sides of the house. It was the kind of home that always looks out of place in the winter. A summer house, caught in a snowfall and uncomfortable about the whole business. A vine-covered trellis lay askew by the porch steps.

  The bell buzzed and an old woman answered the door, spry, hollow-cheeked, with wisping black hair and cold eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses.

  “Yes?”

  “I wonder if I might see Miss Noraine Temple?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t think that matters, ma’ am.”

  “You’re Al Harper. I used to chase you out of my back yard.”

  “Well-”

  “You stole my peaches.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. White. I remember now. Yes I guess I did. Everybody did.”

  “You had peaches enough of your own.” She began to close the door. I set my knee against the door. We struggled for a moment, her hands working on the edge of the door, her pinched face gasping.

  “Go away, young man—I’ll phone—I”

  “I want to see Miss Temple.”

  She ceased, panting. The wind ripped across the porch and a handful of dry snow danced about her slippered feet. It was very cold suddenly.

  “Miss Temple no longer lives here. Now, please—go away, or I’ll have to—”

  “She must live here.”

  “She rented one of my cottages. The second one down the street.”

  I stepped back. The door slammed. There was a shade over the window on the door. It rattled down sharply and the hall light went out. I walked off the porch and looked back at the house. The downstairs lights were rapidly blinking out, one by one. Soon the house was dark save for a single orange glow behind a bedroom shade …

  It was a small white cottage, all the windows dark. I stood on the tiny porch and rang the old-fashioned pull-bell. There was an odor of oldness and decay about the cottage and I recalled it having been here all my life.

  Nobody answered the door.

  Somebody called my name. It was Mrs. White. She had on a dark coat, flapping about her ankles as she bent against the wind, moving toward me on the street. There was a single streetlamp, elm limbs tossing and flinging shadows across the snow-covered grass.

  “Mister Harper?”

  I waited for her to come up to me by the curb.

  “Should’ve told you. Plumb forgot. She asked me to tell you—” She clutched frantically at a wisp of hat jammed over her head. The wind drew at the skirts of her coat. “Miss Temple—she said—”

  “What did she say?”

  “Said to tell you, if you come by—she was gone out with Mister Gunther.” She looked sharply at me. “That’s Sam Gunther. What do you want with her?”

  I said nothing, not really seeing Mrs. White, now.

  “I say, young man! What you want with Miss Temple? She’s a good girl—you keep away from her.”

  “Miss Temple is a friend of mine,” I said.

  “Friend? You’ve known her before?”

  I nodded.

  She looked at me, her pale lips working. Abruptly, she whirled and scurried back toward her house.

  “Mrs. White?”

  She did not cease running. She climbed the porch steps and moved across the porch into the house. The door slammed.

  A car was parked in front of the house. It had ceased snowing, save for an occasional flake drifting down through the cold air. I half expected Bunk to come leaping around the side of the house and it hurt to know he was buried out back, that he would never leave tracks across this winter.

  Stepping from the car, somebody called to me.

  “Harper? Would you mind coming over here a moment? I’d like a word with you.”

  The man’s voice was thin and reedy. I walked up the snow-covered drive. The car was a Buick, an inch of snow heavy on its top, parking lights glaring.

  “Yes?”

  I could see the white face and the dark-rimmed glasses shining, the sober mouth and thrust chin between the clenched collars of a heavy overcoat. I stopped by the open window on the driver’s side.

  “Like to say something to you, Harper.”

  “Oh,” I said, remembering.

  “Yes, Harper—yes.”

  Weyman Gunther, trying to appear nonchalant and master of the universe. For some reason my mind went back to the Weyman I’d known in school days. The thin, anxious-looking fellow who was so quiet and shy with the girls. The boy who never had a date, who wasn’t around when others took girls into the woods up behind the school, who didn’t seem to care for off-color jokes. That is, not until that summer evening just before vacation, when Linda Jenkins was on her way home from school. Linda was fifteen, the early-flowering type of country girl who develops large and ripe. Linda always took a short cut past the Methodist church. On this evening, she was surprised when Weyman Gunther sprang from behind a woodpile.

  The janitor at the church, Frank Parsons, caught them. Linda hadn’t said a word, she had not even had time enough to draw breath to speak, it happened so quickly. Parsons grabbed Weyman and by then it was all over, anyway. Nothing was ever done and Weyman lived it down. After that, though, he retired into a shell from which only his eyes stared.

  “I don’t have much time,” he said.

  “Perfectly all right by me. It’s cold out here.”

  “I’m not here to discuss the weather, Harper.”

  A hand covered with one of these one-fingered sheepskin mittens curled over the rim of the door. “I’m here to speak straight,” he said. “It will pay you to mind what I have to say.”

  “Varnish away.”

  He waited patiently, watching me, letting me know by the tight-lipped precision of his mouth that he would have absolutely no foolishness.

  “We know all about you,” he said. “We’ve had a report, Harper. We know what you were before you came back here. Mixed up in robbery—we saw the papers. A petty criminal. Not even big-time, just a—”

  “Is this all you have to say?”

  “No.” The mittened hand tightened on the door rim and he hunched himself up behind the wheel. “A bum—a hobo. And now you’ve come back here. Why? To hide from something we were unable to find out about? Is that it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I killed fourteen men and they all looked just like you.”

  “Very funny, Harper. Very funny. But we’ve kept
some track of you since you left Pine Springs. You’ve been a bum.”

  “It’s cold out here. You can have one more minute—you and your big new car.”

  “This is my father’s car.”

  I looked at him and sighed.

  “I’ve come to warn you,” he said. “Don’t come around trying to see my sister again. Don’t set foot on the grounds, Harper. I’m warning you, you hear?”

  “Maybe Lois has something to say about that.”

  “She has and she did. Coming around like you did, getting her drunk—we don’t want you in this town, Harper!”

  “Good night, Weyman.”

  “I mean it!” he shouted. “I mean it, Harper! Stay away from Lois! Take that woman who’s here with you and leave town, you hear?”

  I stepped back and grabbed the collars of his coat and yanked. His chin smashed against the edge of the door. I let him loose, then smashed it against the door again. I could easily have broken his jaw.

  “Watch what you say, Weyman.”

  I held him up off the seat by the collar of his coat.

  “Don’t ever say that again,” I told him. Everything that was inside me seemed to swell inside my head and I wanted to drag him out of the car and really wreck him. His glasses were hanging by one ear. I let him go and started walking through the snow along the drive.

  “You heard me, Harper!” he shouted. His car started up and roared off down the road.

  As I opened the back door and stepped into the kitchen, I was still shaking. I stood there trying to calm down, looking at the cold stove, feeling the black cold of the house.

  They were really concerned about me. Concerned enough to find out what I’d been doing since I left here eight years ago. It was becoming interesting and Weyman was more than just a case—he was a whole carload.

  FIVE

  Tuesday morning was freezing. The sun was up, but a strong wind blew through the valley, the air very cold, everything looking a little like glass. I notified the light company about turning on the juice, and asked a very grim clerk if he knew where Lew Welch lived.

  “He’s not in the town proper,” the man said. “He lives down the valley road at his father’s farm.”

  I looked at him. Town proper. “Thanks.”

  I drove out along the Riverton road. The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t like the way the Gunther family was behaving. Sooner or later I’d meet Sam, and I wished it weren’t necessary. Lois’ father and I had never got along well. He had never liked me—never wanted me hanging around Lois. But Lois had had something to say about things even in those days.

  I wondered about Weyman coming to see me last night. Something was disturbing him and I knew it would be a good idea to see Sam Gunther. I wondered if he had changed.

  I slowed the car, approaching the Welch farm, drew up on the shoulder of the road. There was a two-story frame house with lightning rods sparkling in the sun on the peaks of a steeply slanted roof. The house was painted a fresh white and two nearly leafless elms stood naked in the front yard. There was a frazzled-looking red barn, an aged silo, a ramshackle garage. A man was standing at the side of the house, gazing off across fenced pastureland.

  He heard me coming, and turned. It was Lew’s father, red-faced, overalled, holding a pitchfork and chewing tobacco.

  “Mister Welch?”

  He looked at me, pulled his head back something like an overgrown rooster and looked at me harder through squinched blue eyes. Then he turned his head and spat. He folded his cud into his other cheek and began bouncing the long springy tines of the pitchfork against the hard ground.

  “Good to see you again,” I said.

  There was a large splash of red paint along the left leg of his overalls and I thought about that. He might actually be one of the men who had wielded the brush against my hall wall.

  “Lew around?”

  He chewed quietly, watching me.

  “I say, is your son, Lew, around?”

  He blinked once. Otherwise there was no reaction. He wasn’t deaf, and suddenly I knew it was going to be useless to keep asking him. He’d made up his mind to stand there and look at me and bounce that damned pitchfork.

  I turned away from him toward the house. The door opened and a man stepped out.

  “Lew Welch?” I said.

  He came to the edge of the top step on the porch and looked down at me and nodded. I didn’t recall him. He seemed young, thin, pale for this country.

  “That’s right. What did Dad say to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Welch obviously was doing farm work now, and not liking it. He looked tired, worn-out. His eyes had that fuzzy, nonexistent look and the blue jeans were drawn to his waist in tucks by a thin leather belt.

  I told him who I was. “You were working at the bank when my father died. Wonder if I could talk to you about that?”

  He looked across at his father, then at me. “I don’t think I’d better ask you in.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Wait till I get a coat. It’s cold this morning.” He vanished inside the house, returned bundled in an old sheepskin jacket, the worn collar turned high against the back of his head. We moved around to the front of the house.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I’d like to know anything you can tell me about my father’s death.”

  “A bit late for that, isn’t it?”

  His eyes were a little like his father’s. Someday they would be a lot like his father’s.

  “They won’t take me on for work anywhere in town,” he said. “Just because I worked for him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just because of that, I’ve got to do this damn farm work.” His voice was mild and, looking at the ground, he told me what he knew. It was the same as Kirk Hartmann’s story, except that Welch had been one of the first to see my father hanging from the antlers. He reddened up when he told me how he had walked in and seen him “strung up like that.”

  “How much money was there in the vault at the time?”

  “Over two hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “Supposed to be there,” he added. “Only it wasn’t. There were some bags of coin, though. He’d have been seen carting those bags of coin if he—”

  “You’re assuming, aren’t you?”

  “I ain’t assuming!” His mild voice was abruptly shrill. “The vault was open, wasn’t it? All these damned years here on this stinking farm!”

  “Take it easy.”

  His voice was mild again. “Jeannie and I were going to—well, hell, it’s done. Done and gone and all over—”

  “You say ‘over two hundred thousand.’ How much over?”

  “Two hundred twenty-one thousand, three hundred and forty-two, thirty-three,” he said. “That’s what was missing.”

  “Somebody told me it was mostly pennies that were left.”

  “No. That’s not right. There were dimes, nickels, some quarters and one sack of halves left.”

  “Where does Jeannie Hayes live?”

  “Live?”

  “What place?”

  “Down the road, first curve by the river—about seven miles down the road. Place they sell grapes, grape juice. They’ve got a liquor license—got a jukebox in there, couple booths. Called the Maples. There isn’t a maple tree within a half mile. That’s their name, the folks who run the place. From Chicago. I hear he was one of the Capone mob, still hiding out, or something.”

  “Do you know Herb Spash?”

  “She still comes to the dances, sometimes.”

  “Do you know Herb Spash?”

  “Sure. Drunk all the time. Got him a shack out back of the sawmill. Drunk day and night.”

  “Where does he get his money?”

  Welch shrugged. “Works at odd jobs sometimes. Not often, though, come to think of it.”

  “How often?”

  Welch shook his head. “Old Herb,” he said. “He’s really a souse. Li
es right out in the road, sometimes-last summer he was lying out in the road and a funeral came by and he wouldn’t move. They had to go around him.”

  “Lew?”

  Lew whirled at the sound of his father’s voice.

  “Lew, you get down to the barn!”

  “I’d better,” Lew said. He turned abruptly away and then paused. “You see Jeannie, say hello for me—tell her I’ll be down Saturday night, early.”

  “All right.”

  I started out toward the car. Lew was walking toward the barn and his father still stood with the pitchfork, examining the pasture beyond the fence.

  I’d just turned on the ignition when a beat-up black Ford convertible came peeling along and whoever was driving it hit the brakes hard.

  I sat there and the Ford backed up.

  “Hi, All”

  Noraine. She backed the Ford half into the ditch across the road and sat there smiling at me. There was a patch of the canvas top ripped out and flapping in the wind.

  “Come here, Al.”

  Old Welch was watching us. Then he jabbed the pitchfork into the ground and stomped off toward the house.

  “What’re you doing out here?” Noraine said as I laid my hands on the rim of her door.

  “Learning how to breathe again.”

  She kept looking at me and she wasn’t smiling now. She looked fresh this morning, her eyes very clear, the blonde hair brushed to a sheen and waving across her shoulders. She had on a thin tan coat buttoned tightly at the throat.

  “I’m sorry I missed you last night, Al. Is everything all right?”

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”

  She kept looking at me. She swallowed and looked at the horn button and thumbed it lightly.

  “You have a good time with Lois?” she asked. “I heard you got her plastered and left her on a couch. Sam’s real burned up about that.”

  Sam?”

  “Yes. Sam.”

  “How is Sam?”

  “He’s just fine.”

  “I see. What did you stop here for?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know, Al.”

  The corners of her lips tightened a little. Somehow, Noraine seemed a little different from what I remembered.