Thief of Dreams

by John Yount

  When he pulled into the driveway, he didn’t know whether to go up to the house or down to the trailer, but he hadn’t much more than gotten out of the car when the tall, stooped figure of Madeline’s father loomed briefly in the open kitchen door and then came on down the walk to meet him and offer a solemn handshake.

  “I expect he’ll wander in directly. He’s a good boy, James,” Harley said. “Lily and Madeline are on down at the trailer.”

  “Thank you,” Edward said.

  “You think of a way I can help, son, and I’ll try to do it. He’s a good boy, but just now I’m not certain you shouldn’t turn him and his momma both over your knee.”

  “I guess I need to find him first,” Edward said.

  “He’ll be on in,” Harley said. “I’m satisfied he will.”

  “I better go on,” Edward said and nodded good-bye, glad that it was dark since he was unaccountably blushing. Harley Marshall nodded too.

  When he knocked on the trailer door and went in, the two women were sitting on the couch with something especially close and conspiratorial about them. Before anyone said a word, Lily hugged Madeline, got up and gave Edward a brief fierce hug, and let herself out.

  “I feel like I just missed something,” Edward said, hoping to lighten the mood, hoping, at least faintly, for good news; but he could tell before the words were out of his mouth that he wasn’t going to get either one.

  “The girls think that James has run away,” she said.

  How her eyes could acknowledge and reject him at the same time he didn’t know, but they did. He saw in them all their years of marriage, but that history seemed wrapped in something nearly impenetrable.

  “But Lily persuaded me that you are his father, and it’s your concern as much as mine. Anyway,” she said, as though jealous, “you were with him all day yesterday. What do you think?”

  He wanted to say that it shouldn’t take her sister to tell her who James’s father was, but he didn’t. The fact was, he didn’t know what to think. All at once his son seemed as mysterious to him as his wife. “I’m as surprised as you are,” he said at last. “What with the doctors not sure if Lester’s going to make it, and those boys being so close and all, it makes no sense to me.”

  “Lester might die?” Madeline said.

  “Well,” Edward said, “he’s looking a lot better today, but James sure doesn’t know that. I just don’t understand what in hell is wrong with that boy.” But almost immediately some part of him did understand, almost.

  “Lily thinks he might be somewhere close, wanting us to find him, that he just needs us to think about him, worry about him.”

  “Maybe,” Edward said, “but, I don’t know. … He holds himself to blame for Lester in a way that’s pretty deep in his bones. I don’t know.…”

  “He didn’t take any clothes,” Madeline said. “He didn’t take anything that I can find.”

  For some reason, Edward wasn’t as comforted as he should have been, but he didn’t want to admit it. He nodded and said nothing. There didn’t seem to be any good reason for the strange brand of uneasiness he felt.

  “I want you to find him,” Madeline said suddenly. “I want you to find him and bring him home!”

  And where the hell was he supposed to look? If the boy didn’t come walking in on his own, he could be anywhere. What if he had stepped out on the highway and stuck out a thumb? Somehow he didn’t think that had happened, but he couldn’t know it. He didn’t know what he actually knew, except that maybe Madeline would always ask more of him than he could hope to deliver.

  “I’ll find him,” he said to comfort her, but in the next moment he felt such a fundamental connection between himself and his son, he believed his own promise. He would find him. What he would do after that, he didn’t know. Maybe just face the facts and go back to Pittsburgh. As he turned to leave, he noticed the roses just exactly as he had left them, the note pressed open, the festive paper still around the stems; and finding James seemed far more likely than finding a way to make peace with this woman he had married and loved.

  But by daylight the next morning, bone-tired, wearing a filthy and ragged work jacket and high-top work shoes he’d dug from the trunk of the car, he wasn’t so sure. He’d tramped all over the Marshalls’ property and beyond, and then gone down to the Bucks’ and talked to Roy and searched his barn and buildings too, and then climbed up into the woods behind the Bucks’ habitation, just as he had behind the Marshalls’, calling out until his voice was hoarse and weak and the flashlight he’d taken from the glovepocket of the car had lost its beam and would hardly light his footsteps. But he kept searching, if only to give the obscure and ambiguous promptings of intuition a chance, if only to give sheer luck a chance.

  Earlier, climbing the ladder into the Bucks’ haymow, he felt certain James was there, but he wasn’t. And much later, when he was crossing a bridge over Sugar Creek—Roy had told him how much the boys use to fish together—he felt absolutely sure James was camped on the broad sandbar underneath, and he stopped the car, walked back, and climbed down the embankment. “Son?” he’d said in a voice filled with emotion. “Son?”

  He was convinced James was hidden close by, perhaps within a few feet of him. The flashlight he carried was useless by then, showing only a thin, gold worm of light behind its dim face, and he could see very little. But after a while he understood the space under the bridge was empty. Nothing was there except the cold muttering of water.

  Twice during the night he’d gone back to the trailer to see if James had come home by himself, and each time Madeline had looked more pale and tortured. When he presented himself at daylight, he could tell she had been crying, and they looked at each other a long time before he said, “I’m going over to the sheriff’s office in Cedar Hill, and then I’m going to talk to Lester in the hospital to see if he’s got any ideas. But I’ll find him.”

  “You need some breakfast. Sit down,” she said.

  Exhausted, he sat; and exhausted, he was certain, she fixed his breakfast. She even sat with him while he ate, although she only held a cup of coffee listlessly between her hands. Still, somehow, they seemed almost married to him again. At least some barrier was gone, even if it was only replaced by a sad helplessness, even if the marriage only felt contractual and thin.

  “What should I do?” she asked him after a while.

  “Stay here,” he said. “Be by the phone. I’ll find him,” he told her. “Don’t you worry. I’m going to find that boy.”

  When he’d eaten, he stood up, and she stood up too, and they considered each other for a moment before, at exactly the same time, they came together and embraced. Neither of them said anything, and the embrace was not made of what his heart desired; but he was grateful for it, and it gave him hope. Still, he thought it best to relinquish her before something went wrong or she said anything he didn’t want to hear.

  “I’ll call you if there’s any real news,” he told her and opened the door to leave. “If he comes in, you can leave word at the hospital.”

  He hadn’t slept during the night except to doze for a few minutes at a time. Once he’d heard a thumping behind his shelter, even felt it through the ground, and so he knew something heavy had approached. But, benumbed and impassive, he sat where he was until whatever it was seemed to pass on by. Twice, although he’d thought he’d gathered enough wood for the night, he’d had to roam the dark woods to gather more, coaxing his fire closer and closer to his lean-to until in those last hours before dawn it was only inches from his shins. All night he’d sat up, wrapped in his blanket, his arms around his legs and his forehead on his knees.

  Just before daylight he discovered that his shirt and undershirt were dry. They were stiff and pocked with soot and small holes that sparks and popping embers had made, but they helped a great deal against the cold when he put them on. Just a little after dawn, the thumping came again in front of him, and he looked dully over his knees, seeing nothing except the dim wo
ods, until the doe, perhaps thirty yards away, moved her head and then cocked her ears this way and that. She was looking directly at him, and spiritlessly he looked back. She took a tentative, dignified step in his direction, turned her head to watch from the side, and then abruptly began to make off, followed by two more deer he hadn’t seen either; but his forehead was back on his knees long before they were gone. Still, the sun was well up before he got warm enough to lie on his side and fall asleep.

  MADELINE:

  Just let him be all right, please let him be all right, she thought, if only to keep down the shameful and desolate feeling that it was too late for changes because she’d long ago designed who and what she had become.

  EDWARD:

  When he’d shot a grouse he couldn’t find, it had been his practice to drop his hat where he’d last seen the bird and then begin to circle, searching every inch of ground and widening the circle with each revolution until he found what he’d killed or wounded. Sometimes even that didn’t work, but he used the trailer, where James had left his note, for a dropped hat, and began.

  The sheriff had agreed to put James’s description on the radio and request that anyone who had seen him call his office. And after Edward had explained the circumstances, the sheriff softened a little about not committing manpower until James had been gone forty-eight hours. Children, he said, grinning, often thought they were going to run away, but usually only hid in some friend’s basement or in some safe place close by, and the only harm done was to their parents. So Edward had had to explain more than he cared to about his son, about his marriage, about Lester being James’s only friend, and about the boy being sensitive and unhappy and having no place to go, until the sheriff agreed to send two deputies out to the Marshalls’ as soon as they could be freed from other duties, probably sometime that afternoon.

  But Lester hadn’t been much help at all. He had no idea where James might have gone, although he was ready to leave the hospital to hunt for him. One of his doctors, just coming into the room at the time, agreed that he was much better, but not as well as all that. Still, Lester had none of the special information Edward was hoping for. The boys didn’t have a hideout or secret place where James might be found, and James had given no hint to Lester of what he might be planning. So, although Edward talked to Lester for quite a while, trying to learn anything that might help him, he came away with little more than a strong feeling for the depth of friendship between the two boys. He was touched by the reverence Lester had for James, whom Lester thought a little peculiar only because he was so smart.

  Feeling more fearful for his son than ever, he found himself driving Effie Buck home, just as he had driven Roy to the hospital that morning. As for Effie, although she had spent two nights sitting in the waiting room and was haggard and pale, now that her own son was out of danger, she seemed ready to transfer her enormous capacity for worry to James. When Roy Buck offered to help look for James, Effie agreed he should do exactly that. She would simply spend a third night at the hospital. It would be easy as pie, she’d told them. She could look in her boy’s eyes and tell by the light in them and by the color in his face that he was out of danger, so she’d be able to rest no matter where she was.

  But Edward had insisted otherwise, exaggerated what the sheriff’s office was going to do, pretended he thought James was going to come walking in with nothing wrong with him—at least until he got the hiding that his father was going to give him. Yet everything he’d said had sounded so false and thin that by the time he’d convinced them there was no real cause for worry, he himself was more worried than ever.

  And by the time he had delivered Effie, gotten back to the Marshalls’, and started Madeline making phone calls to all James’s former friends in Cedar Hill—something he’d promised the sheriff he’d do—there was fear deep in his bones. Lester’s reverence had helped put it there almost as much as his own bluff speech to the Bucks.

  Circling down through the scrub growth between the cow pasture and the trailer, he felt the fear. He wasn’t finding anything at all useful. The pasture was a museum of prints Madeline, James, and the cow had made, and none of them were yesterday’s. They couldn’t be, since yesterday had been so cold the ground had been frozen. It was warmer today, and still only the topmost layer of earth had grown soft. It was hopeless, but he didn’t know what else to do. In the scrub between the fence and the highway, there were no marks at all to read.

  Yet half an hour later when his circling had grown large enough to include the fence at the southern end of the pasture, he found himself staring at two marks beyond the fence and just under the lip of the gully where the soil was loose and grainy. The first one looked like someone might have set the edge of his foot against the steep pitch. The second looked a little more like a full footprint, except it was too large for James. Unless perhaps he’d slipped, and the side of the gully was very steep. A little way down from the top, the sides of the gully were made of hardpan and showed no marks at all, and there were none up the other side, not even toward the top where the sun hadn’t hit and the looser soil was still raised with frost. On his side the frost had melted, and that too, he thought, could have made the impressions larger than the feet that made them. He looked at the marks a long time, trying to be reasonable, trying to be smarter than he was, wondering if they’d truly been made yesterday or sometime before, wondering if they were footprints at all. He climbed through the fence and slid down the bank as though it had been greased.

  Walking carefully to one side of center, he followed the gully a long way up the mountain before he saw anything else. But then, on the bottom edge of a little skiff of sand not much bigger than a dinner plate, he found a faint crescent. He knelt and pondered it, rubbing his chin gently against his thumb and the side of his hand. It wasn’t much of a mark, but it was the perfect size and shape to have been made by the toe of a boy’s shoe, and that knowledge made his eyes wet.

  After a while he got up and went on, but he found nothing else. As he climbed, the gully got more and more shallow until it ceased to exist, but somehow he felt sure the boy had come this way, never mind that he’d twice been sure the night before and been wrong both times. The evidence he had, slim as it was, signified. He felt it.

  The tufted grass where the gully played out had been scorched by frost and teased by the wind and bore no sign that he could read, but it didn’t matter. He turned back toward the Marshalls’, thinking of the state penitentiary a dozen miles away and the dogs they kept to track down escaped prisoners. He didn’t know how he was going to get them, but he meant to do it, and fuck the sheriff’s office if they wouldn’t cooperate. It seemed important that he get them at once because he’d already lost half a day and it was making up to rain or snow. He couldn’t tell which, but the heavy clouds that had begun to gather didn’t look as if they were going to blow away without trouble.

  MADELINE:

  When the police car pulled into the driveway, she went out to meet them at once. She told them she’d had no luck with her phone calls—she hadn’t expected to, although she’d called more than a dozen households in Cedar Hill, and a few of them, to her embarrassment, had trouble remembering just who James Tally was and never did seem to understand why they should have been chosen for a call—but, worse, she realized the deputies didn’t know what she was talking about either. The sheriff, it was clear, hadn’t bothered to tell the deputies much of anything. One of them took out a notebook and began to ask her questions about how long James had been gone, whether or not she’d just punished him or had a particularly bad argument or fight with him, whether there were relatives close by that the boy might have gone to. She would have hated them if she hadn’t been in shock and so exhausted and eaten up with worry she hardly knew what she was doing. Even so, she wanted to slap the notebook and pen from the deputy’s hands, only Edward came walking up just then and changed everyone’s focus of attention.

  “I think I’ve found which way the boy went,
” he told them in a voice that was calm, intense, and very tired all at the same time. “He slipped off into a gully at the end of the cow pasture and turned just about straight east, but we’ll need to get dogs from the penitentiary.”

  “Well, Mr.…” the deputy flipped back a page in his notebook with his clean, square, freckled hand, “Mr. Tally, we need to ask just a few questions here and gather some information.” He smiled politely at Edward and then at her. “I’m afraid we don’t have any authority over the penitentiary people; they’re state and we’re county. But we’ll look at what you found in just a second.”

  “We need those dogs,” Edward said. “I doubt my son weighs much more than eighty pounds, and the ground was frozen yesterday.”

  She heard what was in his voice, but apparently neither of the deputies did.

  “Now,” the deputy said to her, “you say you’ve checked with all his friends?”

  But before she could answer, Edward was standing almost on top of the deputy and had closed his hand over the deputy’s, crushing the notebook. “Do you know how goddamned cold it was last night?” Edward asked him.

  The deputy looked taken aback and Madeline thought she saw anger flare behind his eyes.

  “Look at the sky!” Edward was saying. “If it snows, the dogs can’t …” But he didn’t finish. “We need to get started quick. We don’t have any time,” he said and released the deputy’s hand and the disfigured notebook.

  Edward wasn’t angry, Madeline realized, only urgent. Perhaps the deputy realized that too, but whatever Edward saw in the deputy’s face didn’t satisfy him because he turned, started back up the driveway, and said: “I’ll call the damned penitentiary myself.”

  “Rafer,” the second deputy said, “the warden’s name is Rafer.”

  “Bill Rafer,” the deputy with the notebook added. “We’ll bring what pressure we can from the sheriff’s office.”