Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Could there have been a submarine surfacing in this area?”

  “It was too big for that.”

  “From the perspective of a boat this size, a submarine’s going to look pretty big.”

  “But it came up out of the sand on the bottom. It was buried under a mound or hill. We were diving and saw it.”

  The people doctors exchanged classic glances, and one patted Thad’s knee.

  Eliseo squinted at the sky. “What is the time, please?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you in before this weather front hits.”

  “I’ve got one-thirty,” one of the wives said.

  “That can’t be.” Harry grabbed an M.D.’s wrist. “They started their second dive about one, remember, Martha? We looked.”

  “Yes, and everything couldn’t have happened in just a half-hour.”

  But all three watches from the Golden Goose agreed that it was within five minutes of one-thirty. There were two dive watches on board that were still unbroken and running. Both of them read exactly 4:32.

  The survivors had an entire afternoon to live over again.

  The fog bank had lifted, but clouds hung low on every horizon as they cleared the reef off Mayan Cay. The yacht must have radioed ahead, because most of San Tomas had gathered in front of the Mayapan by the time they docked.

  The island policeman—Ramon Carias—Dixie Grosswyler, and four of the hotel staff were on the end of the dock with a couple of stretchers.

  “Who are the five? What happened? Eliseo? Thad?” Dixie stood brittle-straight, her eyes searching the boat. “Oh, not Aulalio? And Bo? Not Bo—what happened, for God’s sake?”

  But people crowded them apart, and the M.D.’s insisted on seeing about a plane to evacuate three of the survivors to the mainland and then to Miami. Except for monthly visits of two government nurses, there was no medical care on the island, and the hospital on the mainland wasn’t much better.

  Ignoring questions and offers of help, Thad threaded his way through the press of bodies and headed for his father’s house. A haze of exhaustion mingled with the growing cloudiness to dim his vision, and the figure of the woman in his dream—the one who’d worn her hair wrapped in a towel and listened at a stained wall—stood beside the statue of the Virgin. But now she wore blue jeans, and her hair was reddish-brown and fluffy.

  “Hey, mister? Can you help this poor dog?” A little girl with big tears looked at him beseechingly, and the dream woman vanished.

  A piercing whine sounded from beneath the cabana, and Thad lay flat, to peer into the shadows. A few plumbing pipes, some rotting coconut husks, lizard tracks, and the little cemetery bitch.

  She lay limp but still breathing, no longer straining. Placenta sac, its end partially chewed open, but dried to a leaden gray and covered by flies, outlined the shape of the stillborn within. He covered it with sand and felt her belly. Still swollen with pups. And he’d thought her new figure had been because of his feeding.

  She opened one eye, fear of him dulled by the stoic acceptance of death. But when he slid his hands under her and lifted her out, she jerked her head in an attempt to snap at him, and then fell back.

  Thad Alexander and the cemetery dog eyed each other with mutual distrust. She lay on the oilcloth-covered table and he sat on a wooden chair beside her, uncorking a bottle of cheap local rum. “You know, five people died out in that ocean today? Now, why don’t you get busy and whelp those pups so they don’t die too? And you with them.”

  He gulped straight from the bottle, and his eyes swam. The thought “resignation” or “giving up” leaped into his mind.

  “No, my lady, you are not. Dr. Alexander is just as tired as you are.” He reached into a cupboard for a bottle of Valium and crushed three of the ten-milligram tablets into a pale-blue powder and mixed it with water. “But what the hell, I got two afternoons in one day. Might as well keep busy.”

  He tilted her nose back and pulled out her cheek, spooned the liquid slowly between her cheek and gum so she couldn’t panic and inhale it. She tried to nip him, and some of the medicine trickled between her teeth and down her throat. He worked the rest through clamped teeth by teasing the cheek against them.

  Thad held her to the table until her renewed struggles ceased. He took another swig of rum and selected a kitchen knife and sharpened it against the stone doorstep his father had found somewhere.

  Fatigue and rum and the mind-chill of his other afternoon left him almost as groggy as she looked. Her eyes followed him, expecting the worst. Thad concentrated on what needed doing now so he couldn’t dwell on what had happened before. But the thought that Bo Smith hadn’t lived to enjoy his hoped-for grandchildren overtook him as he pulled down the ropes that held the hammock. He thought again of how the man had reached out to him on the dive boat. When he stepped back into the house, she hadn’t moved but she was panting heavily.

  Thad put a pan of water on to boil and went up to his room for a sheet, a pillowcase, some handkerchiefs, his travel mending kit and razor. When he returned, the dog was almost to the edge of the table, had lost control and urinated. Her eyes rolled. She drooled.

  He cleaned up the mess with some of Rafaela’s rags and placed her on the folded sheet.

  “First Ricky, then Bo. Probably old Edward P. III, too. But not you, my lady.” He threw the sharpened knife, a needle, and the little scissors from the mending kit into the boiling water to cook, and strips of thread into a bowl of rum to soak.

  “I may be completely helpless when it comes to the giants of the deep”—he took a long swig from the bottle—“and I may be getting more anesthetized than the patient …”

  He cut a rough hole out of the crease of the folded pillowcase with another kitchen knife. When he unfolded it, there was a vertical oblong hole in the center. He stuffed it in another bowl of rum. “And I’m probably losing my mind.…

  “And we’re likely to have a real mess when it comes to tying off.” He tapped the inside corner of one of her eyes, pinched the webbing between two toes for pain response, and decided she was sufficiently sedated. “Because we don’t have any forceps and because the surgeon’s getting a tish blurry.…”

  He tied each of her feet with a piece of rope, turned her onto her back, and tied the ropes taut to the table legs, leaving her spreadeagled and trembling, helpless and dozy but not out.

  He lathered her from umbilicus to vulva with soap and shaved her belly, thinking—not for the first time—how obscene this all could look to a bystander, and feeling almost like a violator as he splashed her with rum, wrung the rum out of the pillowcase, and draped it over her. Only the area of the incision remained visible through the hole—and her head and roped feet on the ends. “Let us just pray that we do not run out of rum.”

  Bringing everything he needed to a chair next to the table, he opened another bottle, scrubbed his hands, and wondered what some of his colleagues in Alaska would think of this whole thing. Thad took the hot knife from the pan on the chair and tossed it back and forth between his hands to cool it. He swore at the burning.

  She jerked slightly but didn’t cry out as he cut into her just below the umbilicus to well down in the groin. His hands felt naked reaching inside her bare-handed without the protection of rubber gloves. He pulled out one horn of the uterus and laid it on the drape next to the incision. It looked like a fat sausage with thin purple-gray skin. Three distinct lumps with corresponding greenish bands indicated the number of pups in this horn.

  She whimpered softly.

  Thad began to describe to her the horrors of his other afternoon, punctuated by occasional pulls on the rum. He slit the wall of the uterus at its lower end and milked a pup down and out, ripped open the sac, and kneaded the tiny body. When it did not respond, he shook it. Again no response. He laid it aside and milked down the next, mopping the oozing incision with a handkerchief dipped in rum. And all the while babbling on about giant eyeballs and little eclipses that could neutralize gravity.
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  The babbling grew louder and more animated, and was for his own benefit, not the patient’s. He could revive none of the pups in the right horn, so he pulled out the left, where two bands remained, and looked up to see Dixie Grosswyler standing in the doorway, her face pale and her eyes wide with horror.

  One of the M.D.’s from the Golden Goose slid in behind her, the one with the stringy legs and caved-in chest of the dedicated runner. He had a fashionable mustache and pointed beard. He took in the scene with one glance, and his lips smiled reassuringly. But his eyes turned wary.

  Thad looked at the bloody knife in his hand, at the shreds of his father’s wet suit that hung between and around swollen abrasions and scabbing cuts, at the little dog roped to the table next to a bottle of rum. He noticed for the first time that it was getting harder to see around his nose. A sudden sober embarrassment swept over him.

  “We came to see if you … needed anything,” Dixie said blankly.

  “Get out of my surgery.”

  “What kind of surgery are you performing?” The M.D. took a few steps toward him, keeping watch on the knife.

  “He is a veterinarian, Dr. Morrison,” Dixie said uncertainly. “But, Thad, you haven’t even cleaned up your own wounds. You know you can’t do that in this climate.”

  “A C-section?” Dr. Morrison looked interested in spite of himself.

  “That was the original idea,” Thad said defensively. “But I think I’ll do a hysterectomy while I’m in here. Pups are dead, and she doesn’t need this.”

  “Why, it’s just one of the village dogs.” Dixie’s horror had not altogether abated. “She’s still awake.”

  To humor him, they agreed to assist, and with another set of hands to serve as forceps when it came time to pinch off the blood supply and with Dixie on mop-up, Thad soon had the uterus and ovaries removed, blood vessels tied off, the bitch’s belly sewn up with simple interrupted sutures and splashed down with rum.

  Dixie and the M.D. sent him to shower while they cleaned up, and then they went to work on him.

  “I have known shock to cause people to do weird things”—Dr. Morrison looked at Thad curiously and prodded the swelling on the bridge of his nose—“but you are one for the books.”

  13

  Russ Burnham took the Whelans into Cheyenne in his pickup when their trunks arrived. The outing was such a welcome change, even Adrian livened up. They stopped for dinner before coming home, and Tamara asked Russ, “Do you think Jerusha Fistler is on some kind of drug?”

  “Don’t know where she’d get it.”

  “She came back from her ‘trip’ so emaciated. And she doesn’t have a car. Have you ever seen her coming or going?”

  “She hops a ride now and then with one of the men from the mine or Augie. I think she comes in for groceries with Deloris Hope. They both get food stamps.” He watched his knife and fork carefully.

  “But when she’s supposed to be gone, how do you know she isn’t just holed up in her apartment and going on a binge?”

  Russ speared the piece of steak with an upside-down fork, slipped it into his cheek, and pointed his knife at her. “I don’t know nothing about Jerusha Fistler. What she does or where she goes.”

  He wore his hair in a flat-top. Tamara hadn’t seen that haircut in years. A streak of pale skin just below the hairline showed the shading of the hard hat he was rarely without. He looked from her to Adrian. “I make a point of staying out of her way. I suggest you two do likewise.”

  He normally seemed stuffy and withdrawn, but then a spurt of humor would crinkle up the corners of his eyes and he was almost handsome. The open manner in which he watched women walk by their booth and the way he would forget himself and speak his thoughts gave him an air of uncomplicated honesty.

  “’Course, it was probably nothing to do with Abner’s going …” He crunched down into gristle and blinked when he realized he’d said it aloud.

  “Abner Fistler? Mrs. Hanley said he died of emphysema.”

  “He’d been a miner all his life and smoked a couple of packs a day. Lungs were in awful shape.” Russ’s eyes slid away.

  “How old a man was he?”

  “Abner? Oh, must’ve been sixty-three anyway. Company pensioned him off early because of his health.”

  “But Jerusha can’t be thirty yet.”

  “Yeah, he was a lot older.” Russ refused to answer any more questions about the Fistlers.

  Tamara tried a new tack. “Mrs. Hanley says that B & H might close down Iron Mountain.”

  “Wish they would, and transfer me someplace else.” He talked then in a choppy, no-nonsense tone about himself. His family lived in Kearney, Nebraska. He had never married because he didn’t approve of and didn’t think he could handle divorce.

  That night Tamara dreamed Backra was in Iron Mountain and wore pajama bottoms and a strip of tape across his nose that shimmered white like his teeth against tanned skin.

  She dreamed she was asleep, and awoke to find him standing beside the bed, his chest and arms still covered with scrapes and bruises. Tamara’d had several ongoing dreams in her life, nightmares. But they had not been consistent, and they’d been repetitive. This one unfolded new aspects each time, and she always knew she was dreaming.

  Now she dreamed she lay very still while he touched her hair. She couldn’t feel his touch, but things stirred elsewhere and reminded her of how long she’d been without a lover.

  She spent a delicious moment tracing the muscle in his upper chest, the sandy mat of hair that formed a T—the bar stretched above his breasts and the tail extended down to his navel. Then she drew back the covers and stood, her motions slow, fittingly dreamlike because her body seemed so languid.

  Backra looked stunned. And then amused.

  “Why are you so beat-up?” Tamara’s lips said, but her voice made no sound. “Have you been in a fight?”

  “Fight?” His voice was silent too. “You are not real,” he mouthed, and grinned. Then he made a grab for her.

  Tamara didn’t bother to sidestep his arms as they passed through her. Wasn’t that just like a man? It’s my dream, but he thinks he’s the one who’s real.

  She glanced down at the bed. Her body still slept in it.

  Panic rose with mute cries, and she lunged at the bed, horrified by the thought that she might not be able to get back. She awoke sweating and dry-mouthed—Backra gone, herself back together, her heart thumping.

  Tamara had worked hard to exorcise her other self, who wanted to share life’s joys and problems with another, to be dependent, to lean, to be held. But now she knew regret at not having felt Backra’s arms. And that made her feel silly. And old.

  The next evening, Augie Mapes appeared on the doorstep to invite Tamara and Adrian over to watch television. Images of him standing up in his outdoor bathtub flashed repeatedly on the retina of her mind, and she wondered if the same thing was happening to her daughter.

  Adrian had been disappearing for long periods and being sullen and uncommunicative. She wanted to go, and Tamara accepted, hoping to lighten their boredom and find a way to cajole Augie into putting his bathtub inside during the school year.

  They threaded their way among car bodies and other questionable humps in the weeds to the door of one of the house trailers.

  “It is certainly nice of you ladies to join a lonely old man for an evening of telly-vision in his humble abode,” his voice said, but his eyes turned to Tamara and said: Call you and raise you three.

  The interior had been gutted and rebuilt into one large living room with a kitchenette and bar at one end. The wall of the trailer had been cut away where it attached to the shedlike building that connected the mobile homes, and in the shed stood the largest television Tamara had ever seen. It faced the cushions and couch-lined walls of the living room.

  “Awesome,” Adrian pronounced it, and settled into a bean-bag chair.

  The bean-bag chair and studded stools at the bar were black plastic. Various
low tables and the cupboards were brown. Refrigerator, stove, and sink were white. Everything else—walls, carpet, curtains, couches, cushions, pillows, tile in the kitchen-bar—was powder blue.

  Tamara stifled a giggle as Augie handed her a can of beer and Adrian a soda. He switched on the TV by a remote control built into the arm of a corner couch and set to making popcorn.

  “You must be a real TV fan … all this for one channel.”

  “KYCU selects shows from two networks for my entertainment pleasure.”

  “Welfare must pay pretty well.”

  “Oh, enough to keep skin and bones together. But I have to admit inflation’s eating into my life-style.”

  “How is it you qualify?” She resented this strong healthy man living so contentedly off tax money while she struggled to make a subsistence living for herself and her child and then had to pay taxes.

  “I suffer from a mental and emotional illness that prevents me from securing and holding down employment to support my meager needs, and I must rely upon the kindness of our good government for the—”

  “I don’t suppose it would be any use asking you to stop taking baths—”

  “Ma’am? You would deprive me of my constitutional right to cleanse the filth from this poor body just because I number among the poverty-stricken?” He stretched his magnificent loins suggestively, and Tamara was glad Adrian had become immersed in an old Cousteau special.

  “No, but do you have to do it out in front of a schoolhouse?”

  He merely crossed his arms and glowered at the TV screen.

  That screen was too large to convey a clear picture. The colors were bright but not sharp, tended to melt together at the edges and give everything a liquid aura—even the scenes on shipboard or land. Given this and the blending of the aqua waves of the Caribbean with the powder blue of the room, Tamara felt drawn into the watery world of Jacques Cousteau, felt herself among the cavorting fish and black-suited divers.

  Backra’d worn part of such a suit, but it had been in ribbons.

  A man-o’-war bird glided over and around a white beach, never seeming to move spread wings, a streak of white along its throat and chest, as silent as a dream. And Tamara could smell the sea salt on humid air, the excretions of thickly growing plant life.