The Angry Dream

by Gil Brewer

  There was no sign of Gunther.

  The Maples. That was where they had spotted me and planned the waiting, the ambush. It was ridiculous, yet it was probably true.

  I climbed a tight wire fence and tripped and got hung up, one foot jammed in the wire, head down.

  Finally I managed to free my foot. I staggered across a cornfield, across a ditch and stood on the hard-packed, windy snow and ice of the highway.

  There was no sign of my car.

  I had no idea what time it was. The car had to be around here somewhere. If Gunther was so set on my leaving, he wouldn’t go off and take my transportation with him. That was why they hadn’t wrecked the car when they smashed the house.

  My legs didn’t act right, and the pain was bad all over. I started down the road toward Pine Springs. I knew I would never make it, walking.

  There was a clump of willows at the side of the road by a small frozen spring. I wandered over there and saw the top of the car behind the willows. They had hidden it from passing motorists, knowing I would find it. I got the door open and climbed in, started it and drove out onto the highway.

  I remembered nothing on the way back to the house, just gripping the wheel, guiding the car, trying not to black out again.

  Warmth from the cookstove began to bring me around. I was on the mattresses, bundled in the blankets and a rug. Several times I’d come to, then dozed off again—realizing it was cold, that I had to get the fire started, but I couldn’t seem to do it.

  “How long have you been like this?”

  Lois stood in the kitchen doorway. She wore a suede jacket zippered to the throat, her black hair thick on her shoulders. Her skirt was fawn-colored, and she wore nylons and small black galoshes. I began to smell coffee.

  “What day is it?”

  “It’s Thursday morning,” she said.

  “I came in Tuesday night.”

  “Were you drunk?”

  “Do I look it?”

  “You look as if you’d had a fight. You’re a mess.”

  I rolled over and stared at the wall. I heard her return to the kitchen, and pans clinked and clanked and there was a sizzling. I began to smell that coffee again, and pretty soon bacon.

  I heard her galoshes thump on the kitchen floor.

  “It’s a good thing I finally came over here,” she said from in there. “A darned good thing.”

  “Why?”

  “You’d have frozen to death in those thin blankets.”

  I reached out and touched the floor beyond the mattresses.

  “You would have just lain there and frozen to death.”

  She came into the dining room and I turned back and looked at her again. I didn’t ache at all. I felt pretty good, with the warmth getting to me.

  “You going to get up?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  I looked at the ceiling. It was a high ceiling, yellow plaster—darkening with age in places. I could recall this room from my early childhood, everything in it as it had been then. I could remember my mother in the kitchen, and Cy Harper coming home for dinner. We always had dinner at midday. A big dinner. He never talked much, but he ate a lot. In the summer he would drink great quantities of iced tea—pitchers full. Mother made it by the pail. I remembered how he had come home at noon one day and sat down and eaten a whole blueberry pie. I had waited all morning for a piece of that blueberry pie and when I came in, he had eaten the whole thing, sitting there, waiting for his mashed potatoes. He told me there were lots of blueberry pies, and Mother baked another that afternoon and I got a piece of that, anyway. But he hadn’t said he was sorry. He’d just grinned with his teeth all blue from that pie and said there were lots of them. Then he started on his mashed potatoes.

  I remembered how I had thought up ways to kill him. You never do, but you think of them sometimes.

  “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “Sure. How’s things?”

  She said nothing.

  “He send you here?”

  “What?”

  “Forget it. Put it out of your sweet little mind.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “No, I don’t mean to be.”

  “Are you going to get up?”

  “Yes.” I threw the blankets off, or tried to. I finally got them off and sat up and sprawled back down again, hurting.

  “Good Lord! What happened to you!”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “But I don’t know.”

  “Come off that horse, Godiva.”

  I sat up again, easy this time. I was still wearing the topcoat and it was stuck to me. I tried peeling a little of it away from my bare chest and it hurt like the devil.

  “Al—lie down. I’ll get some warm water.” She hurried into the kitchen, her heels clicking on the linoleum.

  It was warm now and it felt wonderful. I sat up, then stood up and grabbed the topcoat and ripped it off, yanked my arms out of the sleeves, dropped it on the floor and stood there. It burned, but that was all, bleeding a little in places. I was marked up, for a fact. I went out into the kitchen, walking stiffly.

  “Good Lord!” she said again.

  I went over to the sink and looked in the cracked mirror. I had a black blood-clotted beard and my hair was clotted with blood, standing up all over my head. My right eye was all right, but my left was a slit between brown dried blood and dirt. There was a gash across the side of my face, across the eye and the forehead. That was where the jack-handle landed—the one that had knocked my brain out of kilter. Half of one front tooth was gone, broken off very neatly. It felt like a cliffside when you put your tongue against it. I pumped a dishpan full of water from the creaky old pump and started splashing in it. I got most of the stuff off me to my waist, then got my razor and shaved. That was rough, but I did it anyway.

  “Are you through being heroic?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m through.” I dried off with a towel and went in and found the rubbing alcohol in one of my bags and sloshed it all over me. There was still some bleeding. I used the towel again and then the alcohol again and stripped down. My legs were banged up. I put on clean socks, shoes, blue woolen trousers and a gray flannel shirt. I burned all over and I was stiff in every joint. I went out to the kitchen.

  “There’s some food for you.”

  She’d cooked eggs and bacon. There was bread and strawberry jam and coffee. She just stood there, leaning against the sink, watching me eat.

  “Like an animal,” she said. “Just like an animal.”

  I leaned back in the chair. “Got a cigarette?”

  She found her purse and handed me one and lit it for me.

  “Now, I want to know why you’re here, Lois.”

  “I came inside to see if you’d left. Your car wasn’t out there. Where is your car?”

  “I put it in the barn. Maybe they burned the barn down. Did they?”

  “Will you please stop talking like that! They! Who they?”

  “Stop pretending.”

  “Al—for goodness’ sake.”

  “All right, then.” I rose from the table and stepped over to her and looked deeply into those dark eyes, trying not to remember again, and wanting to remember. I looked into her eyes and saw only a kind of shame, if shame was what it was. I went back to the table and sat down in the chair. “Tell me why this. You stood at a window up there at your place, the other day. I knew you were looking at something. And you were. You know you were. So I asked you and you said it was nothing. Only you saw them down here, the whole caboodle of them in the front yard. Didn’t you?”

  Her hands came to her sides, palming her thighs. Then she reached up and unzippered the suede jacket. She looked into the mirror over the sink and pushed at her hair with one hand, then slipped the jacket off. She pushed at her hair, looking in the mirror again.

  I came out of the chair and grabbed her by the shoulders. She dropped the jacket, looking up into my eyes with that expression of l
ostness, or whatever it was, that she’d always had.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  I let her go and went back to the chair and stared at the plate with the yellow egg stains on it and the single piece of bacon rind. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was getting back at you. I’m sorry, Al. Honest.”

  “Honest?” I said sarcastically.

  “I wanted to hurt you. But I didn’t know what they were doing—didn’t know what—But when Dad told me what they’d done—well, I couldn’t just-how could I face you?”

  I sat down on the chair.

  “What are you doing here now?”

  “I’m trying to help you. You need somebody to help you. I want to be near you. I’m trying to forget–”

  “Stop it, Lois.”

  She got the hurt look in her eyes. Her lower lip trembled faintly.

  “Ever since I came home,” I said, “I’ve been getting it one way and another. There aren’t many ways left, Lois. If we’ve got anything left to salvage, let’s face it—let’s lay it out naked and look at it. Otherwise we’ve got nothing.”

  “You left me.”

  She stood there, fussing with a small charm bracelet on her left wrist. The sleeves on the sweater were short and tight and her arms were lightly tanned, like very pale chocolate milk with gold in it.

  “I left you,” I said, mimicking her tone. “That was eight years ago.”

  “You promised to marry me. We were going to be married. A woman doesn’t forget things like that. Everything was—”

  “Lois, cut it out. You are not that kind of person. You never were, not really.”

  “This is true,” she said. “You left me.”

  “So you spent eight years wandering around that place—watching it take on an old luster?”

  “I’m sorry about the other day. I didn’t mean it to be that way.”

  I said it still more slowly, “You—are—lying—like-hell—Lois.” I got up again and moved over to her and said, “Listen, Lois—everybody wants something—something. It doesn’t matter what—but it’s something. Some little thing—or some big thing. Now, what is it you want?”

  “Do you have a drink, Al?”

  “That what you want?”

  “Maybe that’s what I want.”

  We looked at each other.

  “No. I don’t have a drink,” I told her. “The stampede herd that came in here also smashed three bottles of whisky. There’s water in the pump. Try it.”

  She leaned down, picked up the suede jacket and put it on. Then she went over and picked up her galoshes and leaned on one hand against the wall and pulled them on over her neat little alligator pumps.

  “Damn it!” I said.

  She stood watching me.

  “There was something I wanted to say,” she said. “Or do—I don’t know. All of it’s gone now, isn’t it?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Go get your drink and then maybe you can think straight. Tell me about it then.”

  “Goodbye, Al.”

  The door closed softly and she was gone. I moved over to the table, reached across to the window and pulled aside a flap of the cardboard carton.

  The sunlight outside was blinding. Lois moved down the driveway past the window, walking through ankle-deep snow. She moved slowly, her head down a little, the thick dark hair swinging across her face.

  The rest of the day was a flop. I hung around the house, taking it easy, loosening up. Maybe I imagined Lois would return. She didn’t.

  I tried to consider the changes in Sam Gunther. There was no real change. Sam had always been somewhat of an enigma in Pine Springs. He had brought his wife to his father’s house on the hill, begat a son and a daughter, and endured the death of his wife with no outward change. His parents had died shortly after his arrival and he had a large farm to take care of. It did not produce. He worked it some, but not much, and allowed no hired man on the grounds. The place was neat, clean, and folks wondered how he managed. By the time I was seeing and remembering, he was accepted. They joked a bit about “Gentleman Sam,” but that was all.

  I quit trying to think about Sam Gunther.

  During the afternoon I went outside and stood over Bunk’s unseen grave for a time. The valley was silent. The sun was hot and trees dripped with the thaw that wouldn’t last. By late afternoon the melting snow would freeze again.

  It darkened early with a wind rising, the hills like paper cut-outs against the sky. I washed my topcoat in a tub of heated well-water and dried it on a line strung across the kitchen in front of the stove.

  At six-thirty, I took the car out and drove toward the village.

  Lew Welch had said Spash lived in a shack behind the sawmill. Three times I drove past the sawmill and on down past Kirk Hartmann’s. There was an inviting air of rich content emanating from Kirk’s home. Soft lights shone in all the windows, the windows steamed, and I realized that his home was much larger than it might seem.

  Each time I drove past the mill, I felt a little foolish. Trying to locate a drunk. Maybe all he wanted was to vent some alcoholic spleen on me for something my father had done to him. It could be that.

  Finally I turned the car and stopped just inside the mill grounds near the large sawdust pile. Far down between the head-high stumps of ancient pine, I saw a flicker of yellow light.

  SEVEN

  I walked on around the sawdust pile. Sheds and stacked lumber were spaced here and there. There was a good smell, clean and humid and sweet with slain wood. I walked past two pickup trucks, trying to keep the flicker of yellow light in sight.

  Trees had been cut in patches, and the stumps were high. I reached a fence, found a gate, went on through. I moved along an ice-packed narrow path. It zigzagged crazily. The yellow light was still a flicker in darkness above the snow.

  The shack was on Cat Creek under pine and the wind seethed and cried up there. The path veered in close along the creek on the high bank and you could see the formations of ice and snow on the water, the water itself trailing darkly cold, gurgling a little over rocks and snags.

  “I seen you!”

  I stopped.

  “Go on back where you come from, damn you!”

  “Look, Herb—I just want to talk with you.”

  Nothing. There was no sign of him. Then I saw his head below the bank of the creek, his body shielded by a heavy growth of brush.

  Herb Spash climbed up the bank and stood by the brush pile, silently watching me. He was bareheaded and he was drunk. I wondered if he had any sober moments.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I might ask that same question.”

  He turned and walked toward his home, opened the door.

  “I don’t want to talk with you,” he said. “Go away.”

  He started to close the door. I got there just as the door scraped on the latch and put my shoulder against it. He began to curse. He let go of the door and I heard him crash into something.

  I went inside.

  The room was very neat. It was warm. There were two rooms, one a cooking and living area, the other letting off through a broad door into a tiny room with a bunk against the wall. A patchwork quilt of countless colors covered the bunk. The quilt looked clean.

  He was sitting on the floor. He had knocked a frying pan from a bare wooden table in the center of the room. To the left was a potbellied stove, cherry-red. Neatly cut wood was stacked in a large wooden box behind the stove. A pail of water with a dipper floating in it sat on the floor near the door. There were no curtains at the windows and the walls had been covered with newspaper.

  “You got no right to come in here,” he said.

  He turned over and came to his knees, grasped the table and heaved himself up. The odor of his breath was nauseating. He stood trying to focus his eyes for a moment, then lurched across the room and fell into a large wicker chair.

&nbs
p; “Didn’t they?” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  He reached beneath the wicker chair, came up with a fifth of whisky, half-full. He tilted it up and let it run down his throat. Then he jabbed the bottle at the floor. The whisky had made a new man of him—he was master again. He must have been without a drink for fully fifteen minutes to get in that shape. He thrust his jaw out belligerently.

  “What’re you doing here, Harper?” He was the big man, now. He slapped his left trouser pocket, then slapped his shirt pockets, looking for cigarettes. “I said to what do I owe this visit, Harper?”

  He had forgotten everything, except suddenly seeing me standing there before him. I found a pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket, offered him one. His hand missed the pack by a good five inches, the fingers closing on empty air. I moved the pack, he caught a cigarette, and jabbed it nonchalantly at his mouth and hit his cheek. He smeared it into his mouth, then leaned forward as I struck a match and fell on his face on the floor.

  He lay there, the cigarette crumpled beside his head.

  I hauled him up and sat him in the chair again. But he was gone. His eyes stared, but they didn’t see.

  I slapped his face hard. His head rocked, the eyes trying to focus, trying very hard. He began to sweat. He suddenly looked at me and knew who I was and there was fear in those eyes, now.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” I said.

  “All right!” He screamed it. He was desperately trying to gain a hold on himself.

  “It was Sunday night,” he said in a clear voice, looking straight at me. “Not late on Sunday night—” He paused and swallowed. “Telling you,” he said carefully. “Telling you because I got to tell you.”

  “I understand, Herb.”

  “I came by the bank, down the field, and a light was lit in his office window. I stopped by the window and looked in at him, at that stinking rich there in the chair, just sitting. He saw me.”

  “My father?”

  “Cy Harper. He saw me looking in the window. I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn one way or the other. I was on the bottle. I was still cutting hair, had my shop. But Alma had gone gack to her folks—with the kid. Kid. I couldn’t quit drinking.” He lost track of what he was saying and though he looked at me, he did not see me. I reached down and jarred his shoulder. “I didn’t care,” he said.