Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

  My rage comes white hot and as loud in my head as the storms outside my window at night. I walk out onto the rock on feet that have grown fur and claws. I feel the cool wind on my naked skin. I stand there with my fists knotted at my sides. My feet grip stone still hot from the sun. I wait, the last of my boy giving way to the wild thing that swam the river and climbed the bluff, and then I howl rage to the moon. I scream the name of wild, outrageous insult to the moon, and then I run.

  Ten strides to go, but they’re ten miles. It’s a year, and it’s over in an eyeblink. As I near, I see him crouch between her legs and see him rise. I see him shove his hands out to defend. I see her push back from under him, crabbing back with the shape of her moan still on her lips. I don’t look at his face, I look at my target. It’s his bare middle, white and muscled in the moonlight. That’s where I hit him, and I hear the breath go out of his body, and the hitting takes my breath, too. I’m lying face down on the rock, my eyes banged shut. I open them, and he’s doing his tightrope walk out on the edge, and it’s not until I hear my Aunt Delia scream, “Bick! No!” that I look at his face.

  He doesn’t speak as he goes over. He doesn’t cry out, and his eyes say only that he’s trying hard to stay with us. I close my eyes and see the Widow’s black veil spreading out into all that nothing. I see the wings of a big dying bird in its last clumsy mating with earth. I don’t hear him hit. I don’t know if he splashes or lands blunt. I push over onto my back and look up at stars and moon. I feel the cool wind from the river on my hot skin, and I know I’m not sorry.

  Thirty-two

  Everything is quiet. My mind holds no pictures. I’m only the animal boy with bleeding feet and cool, windy skin, and I know for the first time the still, empty feeling of a thing finally and completely done. I want this moment to last forever, but I know it won’t. Nothing does.

  I roll and look at Delia. She’s standing now, looking out at the edge. She holds her face in her hands, and she tries to get her breath. She starts toward the edge, and her eyes, dead in the moonlight, call me back to the world I left for the wild. I get up and stand in her way. She tries to shoulder around me, and I wrap my arms around her naked waist. She tries harder, and I push her back. “No,” I say, “don’t look. It’s too far down. It’s too dark to see.” But it’s not her looking I’m worried about. I remember when she told me, “I don’t come up here alone anymore.” I didn’t know what she meant then, but I know now.

  She fights me hard. She kicks and hits at me, but I move her back. I push her to the rock where we sat the first day, and I sit her down. “Listen,” I say, but she shakes her head and covers her ears. She moans. I say it again, “Listen, we’ve got to get out of here. Somebody might come.”

  She looks at me for the first time. Her eyes are blurry, and her face is slack like it is when she sleeps. She whispers, “Nobody comes up here at night. The path’s too hard at night. That’s how we knew we’d be safe.”

  She’s not making sense, but I want her to talk. Anything but the moan. Screaming his name again. Better the blurry eyes and the sleeping face. I say, “We’ve got to get out of here right now. Put your clothes on.” I tug at her hands to pull her up, but she won’t move. She looks at me again, and her eyes go sharp and hot. She says, “Travis, why did you do it? Why?”

  “He was hurting you.”

  I know it’s true, and I know it’s not. And I know most things are that way now. I know what I have to live with.

  She shakes her head. “I never thought…I never thought you’d do it.”

  I look at her. My eyes say there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. The thing in my chest is big now, an unbearable weight I know I’ll always carry. The night is a big radio, and the songs are all playing in my head, and they all say you do anything for the one you love. My eyes try to say all this, but it’s dark, and the moon’s at my back, and I don’t know what she can see. I say, “I’d do anything for you, Delia. You know that.”

  I pull her hands again, and she gets up, and her shoulders fall like she’s run a long race and she’s tired. She stands in front of me, and I take her hand and lead her over to her clothes. They’re all mixed with Bick’s, and I can smell him and her on them as I kneel and pick up her bra and underpants, her jeans, blouse, and socks. Her tenny pumps are under Bick’s shirt with his penny loafers. Their shoes were her pillow.

  I stand up with her clothes in my hands and turn to her. I say, “Go over there and get dressed.” I point to the seat in the rock.

  My mind is telling me now about the things I didn’t plan. She can’t swim the river in her clothes. Should I turn and tell her not to get dressed? That I’ll carry her clothes down with me? I’ll swim across the river with them held high in one hand? I can’t swim the river with her clothes and keep them dry. I barely made it fanning with both arms. She’ll have to get dressed and go down and wait for me by Bick’s car. We’ll just have to hope no one comes.

  I turn, and she’s standing by the rock seat with her clothes bundled in her hands. She’s so pretty even now. Looking at her stops my planning mind and makes the thing in my chest too big to hold. I drag a big breath and stagger drunk and wait ’til the hum in my heart for her stops, and I say, “Delia, go ahead and put them on. Do you want me to help you?”

  Her eyes snap to me sudden and cold. “No,” she says. “I don’t need your help. I don’t need you anymore.”

  I know why she’s saying it. I know it’s not true. I watch until she leans to fit her chests into her bra, and then I turn back to the bed of Bick’s clothes. I think: What did Bick do? What did he do here in the middle of the night? Alone.

  I hear a scrape of shoe and feel a rush of air, and Delia passes me running for the edge. I think she’ll go over, but she stops, and I hear her fingernails scratch rock as she claws Bick’s clothes up into her arms. She raises them above her head to throw them after him, but I’m there behind her. I seize her arms and twist the clothes from her hands and drop them where they were. She turns and stares at me with crazy eyes, and I say, “Listen to me. He was alone. Don’t you see? He was here alone.”

  Her eyes close, open. “Alone,” she says.

  I push her away, back toward the rock seat.

  I turn to the edge again and think, What did Bick do? What did he do here alone in the middle of the night? Nothing comes to me. All I know is Delia wasn’t here. I kneel and gather Bick’s clothes, and I start to fold them. I don’t know why, but I do. I fold the shirt that smells of sweat and aftershave and Delia’s secret skin. I fold the pants, the socks, and the underwear. I put the pile of clothes on top of the shoes. I look at them. There’s something wrong.

  I move the underwear to the bottom of the pile. That’s how he’d do it. I stand and look at the clothes, at the edge, the dark well of night out there over the river, and I think about what Bick Sifford did here by himself.

  After a while, I’m Bick, and I’m doing what he did. He came because it’s beautiful up here at night. It’s cool, and even though this town is in a lonely country, there aren’t so many good places to be alone. And so Bick came here, and he thought about being a boy again, and he thought about the way it feels to be naked in the wild night under the moon, and he took off his clothes and stood here feeling how good it is, and then he went out to the edge. He stood out there drunk with the wind and the cool and the stars high and bright, and he looked down into the well of nothing, and it called to him…and he slipped. He slipped and fell into the river.

  That’s it, and it will have to do.

  I turn back to Delia. Dressed, she stands there looking at me. I tell her, “I put the car where we parked when we went skinny-dipping. I swam across. I have to go back and get the car. Can you get down the hill and wait for me by Bick’s car?”

  She just looks at me. For the first time, I get scared. What if she runs away? What if she wanders into the woods? What if she won’t move
and they find her here in the morning when they come looking for Bick? And the worst thing: What if she tells? I’m bigger than I was an hour ago, a lot bigger, but I can’t fight her down this hill. I go and stand in front of her and take her hands. She tries to pull them away, but I hold them. I know I have to take her to her fear before she’ll move. I say, “Delia, we’ve got to go right now. If someone finds us here, we’ll go to jail. They’ll put us in the electric chair.”

  I don’t really know what the electric chair is, but I’ve heard about it. I’ve seen the men in movies walk down the long, dark hallway with the priest whispering beside them and the guards watching to see if they’ll go like men or boys.

  She looks at me, and her eyes open wide, and the fear pours into them. She says, “All right, Travis. I’ll meet you down at Bick’s car.” She shivers and hugs herself, and with that hug, she’s the old Delia again. The one who knows the secrets. She whispers, “But hurry. Promise me you’ll hurry.”

  I nod. I’ll never break a promise to Delia.

  The river’s not so bad this time. I don’t fight the water. For every yard I make across, it takes me three yards downstream, but I don’t worry. I let the river take me. I swim when I can and rest when I have to. The cold water feels good on my bleeding feet. When I find the bank, I walk back up in the shallows looking for the dead beast’s white bones. When I see them, I know it’s only twenty yards to my clothes. I don’t dress. I can’t explain wet clothes. The air will dry me. I run through the woods to the white Chevy. I stand beside it, all dry but my hair, and put on my clothes.

  There’s dew on Bick’s car when I stop beside it. Delia steps out of the dew-dripping woods into my headlight beams. She gets in on the passenger side, but I get out and come around to her window. “Slide over,” I say. “You’ve got to drive. Everything’s got to look like normal.”

  She slides over and backs us up, and we pull out onto the red clay track that leads to the county hardroad and freedom. My heart is rattling like nuts and bolts in a coffee can because we’ve made it through the hard part now. A few more minutes and everything will be all right.

  We come to the place where we turn onto the hardroad, and I whisper, “Stop. Turn off the lights.” She stops. She looks at me, confused. I lunge across her lap and slam the light switch into the dash with the heel of my hand. Grandpa Hollister’s white Buick Roadmaster stops at a crossroads two hundred yards down to our right. He sits there, idling in the moonlight, and I can see the gray fog of his exhaust crawl under the car on the night wind and become solid in his headlight beams. He sits for a long time, and I know he’s looking both ways up and down the road, looking for the trouble he always expects. I hope the hope of heaven and hell that the palmetto scrub along this cow track rises high enough to keep us hidden from him.

  His exhaust pumps gray fog, and he turns right, away from us, and when his taillights are tiny red points in the night, Delia turns onto the hardroad.

  At the decision place, Delia starts to turn toward home. I reach over and straighten the wheel. “No, we’ve got to go to Warrington. We’ve got to get Cokes and fries and sit there like we said we would. Everything has to be like we said.”

  She looks at me, and her eyes send me letters of misery and love, and she pushes the accelerator down, and we head for Warrington.

  Thirty-three

  Some high school boys from Warrington find Bick Sifford’s abandoned car. The next day when they read in the paper that Bick’s father reported him missing, they tell their parents what they saw. Sheriff Hollister goes out to the foot of the bluff and examines the car. The keys are in the ignition. He drives the red Oldsmobile back to town and parks it, locked, in front of his office across from the barber shop.

  The town knows all this. People walk past the red Oldsmobile and stop and stare. They talk about Bick’s disappearance in Tolbert’s, and they talk about it at the Baptist and the Presbyterian churches. They talk about it in the barber shop and at the Curl Up and Dye Beauty Parlor. People who never speak to each other stop and talk about it on the street. People who never even talk, talk about it.

  Some say Bick was kidnapped for ransom. Some say he went lunatic on bad moonshine and ran away. These say he’ll show up in a day or two awfully damned embarrassed and very glad to be leaving soon for Princeton.

  Most say he’s in the river. Some of these say he’ll never be found. Others say the river only gives up its dead after three days, and that’s when Bick will be found. His body will rise, they say. Bodies always do.

  Some of the older men talk about other times and other drownings. How the bodies look, white and bloated and gnawed by snapping turtles and alligator gar, when they finally rise. They tell stories of men dragging the river with grappling hooks and divers going down to look for the drowned. Mothers cry and tell about sons lost in car crashes and in farm accidents and to any old scratch or bug in the days before the wonder drugs were invented. For the town, it’s a time of inward sight and reconciliation. It’s a fine time for the preachers.

  The Baptists have altar call, and their preacher says it’s time for a revival, a good-old-fashioned tent meeting with pitch-pine flares and gospel music and marathon preaching. He says it’s time to bring back the old-time religion. He says the disappearance of the fine young son of the town’s most prominent citizen is a sign. He doesn’t read the sign, but the town knows it’s not a good one.

  At the Presbyterian church, the Reverend Laidlaw preaches love and loss and the tragedy of youth cut down in its prime. He preaches how brief and meaningless is this life compared to the majesty and beauty of the next. He closes with a reading from Isaiah, about the green grass of morning cut down by the hard blade of the midday sun, and there is no man or woman under the stifling arch of his sanctuary whose eye is dry.

  Sheriff Hollister is a man of few words, but says he is pressing his investigation. He leads a group of volunteers to the foot of the bluff. They spread out in a long line and climb to Widow Rock looking for any sign of what happened that night. They find nothing. After that, the sheriff says he’ll drag the river and canvas the entire county. Bick’s father gives the box factory a holiday and organizes his own search. He and two hundred factory workers search the hills and bluffs and comb the woods on both sides of the river. At sunset, exhausted, they quit as planned and congregate at the foot of Widow Rock. Men bring forward spent shotgun shells, tatters of clothing, pieces of soaked illegible paper, and there is one ancient New York Yankees baseball cap. Mr. Sifford extends heartfelt thanks, promises bonuses, and sends his men home.

  On the morning of the third day, it rains. It’s a steady, soaking rain, and the town sees it, too, as a sign. On the afternoon of the third day, Mr. Sifford demands to have his son’s car back. He wants it examined by experts from Tallahassee. Sheriff Hollister refuses. He says the car may be evidence in a crime, and it’s his right to keep it until such time as he, and anyone else he chooses to ask, have properly examined it. The town knows all this, and the town isn’t surprised.

  At sundown on the third day, a man returns from fishing in a rented boat. The fisherman, a veteran of two wars the newspapers say, lives in Milton, downriver from Widow Rock. Walking the dock past rows of tethered boats to return his red gas can and oars to Mr. Johnny Barnes, the veteran notices something odd floating in the shallows, wedged between a piling and the bow of a boat. The body is naked, bloated, and white, and there is no recognizable face, though the funerary arts will provide one later. The veteran is shocked but does the right thing, helping Mr. Johnny Barnes pull the body out and wrap it in a tarpaulin. And so, Bick Sifford is found.

  The town knows all this only hours after it happens. The town knows that the damage to Bick Sifford’s handsome face, most likely from his fall from Widow Rock, is so ghastly that anything the snapping turtles and the alligator gar have done is not immediately apparent. Widow Rock has no mortuary, so the body is taken to the
one in Warrington.

  This is what is known: at eight-thirty on the last night of his life, Bick Sifford told his parents he was going for a drive with Ronny Bishop. Ronny Bishop said he didn’t hear from Bick that night. They had no plans for a ride, though it would not have been unusual for Bick to drop by anyway. No one has come forward to say that he or she saw Bick Sifford between the times when he left home and when he was found in the river.

  The town has a great many things to say about all of this. The moonshine theorists maintain that Bick was drunk when he fell from Widow Rock. Those who are for kidnapping say that desperate men waylaid Bick, then panicked and threw him from the rock before they fled the scene. When the talk comes to the fact of Bick Sifford’s nakedness, voices are lowered. The people of Widow Rock do not ordinarily speak of such things. Who does? Such things may be the dark side of love, and though many must know them, their names are rarely spoken aloud.

  But a naked body in the river forces Sheriff Hollister to speak. For the first time, he tells of finding Bick Sifford’s clothes the same day he brought in the red Oldsmobile. He says he found them neatly folded there on the white limestone in the morning sunshine.

  Me and Delia have things to talk about.

  We’ve laid low.

  The night Bick died, we had french fries and Cokes at the Dairy Queen in Warrington. Kids from around the county came and went while we were there. We smiled and waved and called out, “Hey, ya’ll!” We listened to the radio, and Delia drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and didn’t eat or drink and didn’t look at me.