The Dream Operator

by Mike O'Driscoll

  After a moment he walked into the front room where a dank mustiness hung in the chilly half-light, the kind of smell that most houses take years of abandonment to acquire. Empty beer bottles crowded the coffee table and a few sheets of paper covered in a familiar scrawl lay among them. A dozen CD cases were scattered on the floor, alongside an issue of Rolling Stone. On a metal stand in the back corner was a 1958 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120. Eugene had told him he’d bought it out of the money he’d made out of the sale of his first song. It cost him three thousand dollars. He’d told Burney that if anything ever happened he wanted him to have it. He picked it up and awkwardly strummed a few chords. They sounded dull and lifeless in the empty house. If he had not stopped playing, he wondered, might he have coaxed some slumbering refrain out of it?

  Eugene had come back to find himself, he said. Down in Texas, after the band broke up, he’d lost sight of what it was he really wanted. After a month or so, he started writing again and had a bunch of new songs he was trying out. A month back, he and Jewell went to see him play a solo set at the Jig & Reel and Burney was struck by how much effort Eugene had put into it, how strongly the fire had still burned in his eyes. After the set they drank with him and listened as he told them his plans. He was going to LA. He had a friend who’d talked to an A&R man out there and the guy wanted to see Eugene play. He was getting some cash together for the trip. “It’s a second chance,” he’d told Burney. “And not many of us get those.” Burney hadn’t had the heart to disillusion him.

  He returned the guitar to the stand and went through to the kitchen. The trash can by the back door was overflowing, and unwashed dishes and mugs were piled up in the sink. An open pack of Oreos and another of potato chips stood on the worktop alongside unopened tins of sausages, beans, and corn. The fridge was stacked with bottles of Lagunitas and a couple of cartons of OJ and not much else. He rinsed a glass beneath the coldwater tap and filled it. As he drank the water he felt a strange tension in the air, like the touch of frost against his skin.

  On the second floor he entered the small bathroom where the shower cubicle occupied almost half the floor space. A damp towel lay on the floor. In the small cabinet over the sink he found an opened pack of tampons. The spare bedroom was full with boxes of junk: old books and CDs, hi-fi separates, the frame of a mountain bike, clothes, guitars, speakers, amps and other pieces of flotsam from Eugene’s gimcrack history.

  It surprised him how much stuff Eugene had accumulated. Seeing it all stirred a dreary resentment inside him. He crossed the hall to the main bedroom, his movements slow and ritual, devoid of urgency or speculation. It was more a process of confirmation, of acting out a script he already knew. He found a couple of pairs of panties in the chest of drawers, in among Eugene’s clothes. There was an ashtray on the bedside table, full of cigarette butts and roaches. Some were coated with lipstick. Next to the ashtray was a book of matches with the logo of a bar called The Longhorn Saloon on Cumberland Avenue. On the floor beneath the bed were three or four used condoms and a pack of Newport Lights. He picked up the pack and sat on the bed. It had four cigarettes inside. He hadn’t smoked for years. It wouldn’t kill him though. It would probably take the edge off. He put one in his mouth, struck a match, lit it and inhaled. The same menthol taste as when he kissed Jewell. He smoked half the cigarette without coughing and let the remainder burn itself out in the ashtray.

  Back downstairs he put the Gretsch in its case and took it out to the truck. Heading east toward the city, his anger dissipated and an odd feeling of calm settled over him. He felt a sense of clarity for the first time in weeks. As he drove downtown, pale winter light patterned the dark surface of the Tennessee and the sheet-metal sky seemed a testament to his conviction.

  *

  He was on his second bottle of Ballantine when the kid reappeared, helping the sick man through the bar. They joined Burney and the man signalled for the waiter. He ordered steaks, and a round of beers. Beneath the brim of the hat the haggard face seemed a little more animated. There was something familiar about him but Burney couldn’t forge the glimmering into anything concrete.

  “Well, excuse my manners,” the man said. “We ain’t been properly introduced. I’m Hank and this here’s my driver, Charley.” He stuck out a thin hand and Burney shook it.

  “Leland,” he said.

  Hank removed his hat, picked a napkin up from the table and wiped sweat from his brow. “Well, tell me this, Leland—how come you was out on such a Godforsaken night?”

  Burney shook his head. “No good reason.”

  “It ain’t none of my concern, feller, but you seem kinda troubled.”

  Burney avoided the other man’s gaze. “You could say that.”

  Hank nodded. “When I see a feller has a face as downcast as yours, only one thing has put it that way.”

  Burney resisted the note of consolation he heard in Hank’s voice. He feared that talking about what he had to do would only weaken his resolve. The waiter arrived with two bottles of Falstaff and another Ballantine. Hank took a large swallow from the bottle. “Jesus, that’s good.”

  Burney nodded. There was something about Hank that troubled him but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  “What’s her name?”

  Burney had made up his mind not to talk about his problems but Hank’s directness wrongfooted him. “Jewell,” he replied, before he even knew he’d spoken.

  “Jewell. That’s a mighty pretty name, for sure.”

  “I used to think so.”

  The food arrived and they ate in silence. Or rather, Charley ate while he and Hank just drank, taking no more than a bite or two out of their steaks.

  “It hurts real bad, don’t it?” Hank said, presently.

  “What are you?” Burney said. “Some kind of expert?”

  Hank laughed. “I know about heartache, Leland. Some folk say I been eating off it a while.”

  “It don’t matter none.” Burney’s head was fuzzy, his thoughts jumbled and barely coherent even to himself. “It’s all gonna be over soon.”

  Charley got up and walked over to the pianist.

  “You wanna tell me about it?”

  Despite himself, Burney felt the need to talk, to give voice to the hurt that was tearing him up inside. “Me and Jewell,” he said. “We been together ten years. And now she’s run off with another man.”

  Hank nodded. “Some feller you know?”

  The pianist began playing a melody that seemed familiar and when he began to sing, Burney recognised ‘Your Cheating heart.’ The synchronicity spooked him more than he’d have expected. “Used to be a friend of mine,” he said. “But not so much anymore.”

  “That ain’t so good,” Hank said, frowning. “Leaves a feller with a cold, hard feeling inside.”

  Burney shrugged and stared at his plate, feeling no appetite at all.

  “You planning to act on it?”

  “I guess I’m gonna do something.”

  “It don’t have to be that way.”

  “I don’t see no other way.” Burney laughed bitterly, drained his bottle and wiped a hand across his lips.

  Charley returned and Hank pushed his plate towards him. Charley speared the steak and slid it onto his own plate. “There’s always another way,” Hank said.

  “You make it sound easy,” Burney said.

  “It’s awful hard, is what it is. But sometimes, the right thing to do is just let it go.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  Hank shook his head. “It ain’t never too late. Let me tell you something. You still got a chance, y’know.”

  Burney shook his head. “Chance of what?”

  “Of taking another road than the one you’re on.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Take a look at me, Leland. What do you see?”

  Burney stared at Hank. The eyes were yellow and bloodshot, the cheeks pale and gaunt. The toothy grin seemed to just barely cling to his mouth, as though
at any moment it might collapse into something more like despair. “I don’t know,” he said. “You ain’t well. You got some kinda illness.”

  “I got to calling it a sickness of the heart. I’m sorta partial to it.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Hank took a slug from his bottle and stared past Burney at the pianist. “Ain’t none of us know what’s coming up next. But you can still turn right around and take some other road.”

  “You don’t know nothing about me.”

  “Look at me, feller. Can’t you see yourself in my eyes? If you can then you’ll recognise the same foolishness.”

  “I ain’t like you.”

  “Maybe not, but you keep on the way you’re headed, then I guess we’ll end up the same place.”

  Anger rose up inside Burney. “You got no idea where I’m going.”

  “I see what’s inside you, Leland. And I’m saying you gotta choice.”

  Burney stood. “I gotta go.”

  Hank reached up and grabbed his arm. “I know how hard it is but you can still make a new life without her. But you keep on this road and there’s no going back.”

  Burney pulled free and picked up the guitar case. “Too late for that. I guess I’m already just about there.”

  “I can’t stop you,” Hank said. “But I sure wish you’d think on this.”

  “Thanks for the drink, Hank.” Burney put a hand on Charley’s shoulder. “Take care of him.”

  “I will, sir,” Charley said.

  As Burney began to walk away, Hank called after him. “You take care now, Leland. If the good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, then we won’t be seeing each other again.”

  Burney waved and went down to the ground floor. He stood just inside the entrance, which was darker now, and quiet. He looked at his cellphone and saw he had a signal. He called a taxi company and a few minutes later he saw its lights coming south. He stepped outside and fought his way through the swirl of ice and snow, feeling lost for a few moments until he reached the curb where the taxi was waiting. Disoriented he looked up at the building he’d come out of and recognised it as the Andrew Johnson Building. He wondered when it had re-opened as a hotel. The driver did a u-turn in the street and headed north beneath the familiar bright neon lights of South Gay Street. The sidewalks were crowded with laughing, singing people, waiting to count the year down. Burney watched them, feeling like he was a long way from home.

  *

  It was after midnight by the time the taxi dropped Burney at the house out on Kingston Pike. No lights fell through the window and inside the house remained empty. He took a beer from the fridge and walked into the living room and drew open the curtains. Outside, the snow had stopped falling and moonlight was pushing through the gaps in the slowly parting clouds. The trees across the street held their naked branches to the sky in frozen supplication.

  Burney sat in the darkness, facing the window. Fatigue, and something else he couldn’t quite define, moved within him. Something hard and keen, like quartz in his soul. He put the .38 on the coffee table and picked up one of the sheets of paper that lay there and read a couple of lines of the song Eugene had been working on.

  I never thought when I was dreaming

  that it was dying that we do.

  He heard a noise outside, a distant rumbling, and a few seconds later, lights moved across the sky. His gaze fell on Eugene’s guitar. It stood where he had placed it, off to the side of the window, resting against the wall. The ‘f’ holes on the body of the Gretsch stared at him like a pair of dead eyes. The rumbling noise drew closer, morphed itself into something recognisable, the sound of an engine. Headlights swept the window and dimmed, just as the engine fell silent. Burney picked the gun up from the table. Outside, car doors opened and shut and he heard familiar voices. Around him the air began to quicken as if time itself had become agitated.

  *

  Pale light smudged the purple sky back where the city lay hidden beyond the trees. Burney stood on the side of the road, cloaked in darkness and stupefied by the boldness of his actions. The night had the stillness and mystery of an old black and white photograph. As he stared toward the pallid glow over the trees he saw that it was not drunkenness but this abrupt and pitiless resolution that had left him insensate. He blew into his fists and rubbed them together, then picked up the guitar case and continued walking.

  The cold made him torpid. Headlights shone across the night, shifting and dipping as a car crested the brow of the hill behind him. He stood on the edge of the blacktop as it came on. It began to slow and he recognised the light-coloured, ragtop Cadillac. It pulled over to the side of the road thirty yards past him. Burney waited, vestiges of hope clinging to him like gossamer.

  The door opened and Hank stuck his head out. “So, you done it?”

  Burney hesitated, trying to compare two things, two worlds that would not bear comparison. What was left for him, what kind of future? “Yeah,” he said. “I have to go home now.”

  “That ain’t for you no more.”

  “I can’t just walk away from everything. There are things I need to take care of.”

  “Lord, I know that feeling,” Hank said. “I’m always trying to get some place I shoulda been yesterday, fix something I shoulda done long go.”

  Burney shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “For fellers like us it’s a debt we can’t never pay but we always keep trying.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Call it the nature of the beast. It’s who we become.” Hank disappeared inside the car.

  Burney looked toward the south-west where Knoxville had been. The light that had glowed there beyond the trees had burned out, leaving an empty space in the night. Already there seemed to be something unreal about the city, as if it had closed itself off to him. It reminded him of a place he’d read about in a science fiction novel, a place where the future lay. He could not be there. Shifting the guitar from one hand to the other, he walked to the car. Charley sat behind the wheel. He pulled the back of the passenger seat forward and nodded for Burney to get in the back. He stood the case next to Charley and climbed in the back where Hank sat with an old Martin D-28 across his lap.

  “I really wished I wouldn’t have to see you again,” Hank said. The guitar had more bulk to it than he did. “But now you’re here, I’m awful glad to have you along. We got a ways to go and the road gets awful lonesome this time of night.”

  “Yes,” Burney said. “Yes it does,”

  “How about we make the most of it? I got this song I can’t seem to finish. I could use a new perspective.”

  Burney nodded, believing that he might have some insight to offer.

  “That’s mighty fine,” Hank said. He clapped Charley on the shoulder. “Get her rollin’, Charley. On to Canton.”

  13 O’Clock

  The days were beginning to stretch out. Another couple of months and it would be surf and barbecue, cold beer out on the deck listening to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Play some silly tunes on the guitar for Jack, teach him his first chords. Make some other kind of music for Polly. The sweet kind for which the diminishing nights left barely enough time. The cold still hung in the air at this hour though. Caleb Williams could feel it on his face as he followed Cyril across the rising field. He bent down, scooped up the mostly black mongrel terrier and boosted him up the stone ditch. He climbed up and over while the dog, resenting the indignity of having to be lifted, scrambled down by itself.

  They crossed the dirt track to the garden, where Caleb paused to lean against the unpainted block wall. The sun was a ball sinking below Cefn Bryn, leaving the mid-April sky streaked with red. Gazing up at the house, he felt a sudden, unaccountable yearning. The otherness of dusk made the cottage seem insubstantial. Shrugging off this unexpected sense of isolation, he opened the back gate and let Cyril bolt through. They got the dog two years ago for Jack’s birthday, but whether Jack had tired of
it, or the dog had tired of the boy, it had ended up attaching itself to Caleb. Only now was he getting used to the idea of himself as a dog person.

  In the living room, Polly was curled up on the sofa, dark red hair breaking in waves over her shoulders, ebbing across her blouse. She was channel hopping as he came in, and had opened two small bottles—stubbies, she called them—of San Miguel. “Saw you coming from Jack’s room,” she said, her grey eyes lucent with mischief. “You looked like you need one.”

  Caleb took the beer and sat next to her. “Is it me,” he said, “or is the climb up from the bay getting steeper?”

  His wife swung her feet up into his lap. “It’s decrepitude,” she said.

  “Good. For a moment there I thought I was getting old.” He tapped his bottle against hers and took a sip.

  She smiled for a moment, then her expression changed. “You didn’t hear Jack last night?”

  “No. What?”

  “I meant to tell you this morning. He had a bad dream.” She frowned. “More than that, I guess. A nightmare.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Of course there is, fool.” She jabbed a foot playfully into his thigh. “This was a nightmare.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “I’m serious, Cale. He was petrified. He screamed when I woke him.”

  “Was he okay?”

  “After a while, yes.”

  “What did he dream?”

  “He was alone in the house at night. That’s scary enough for most eight year olds.”

  “Poor Jack. How is he tonight?”

  “He’s fine. Has been all day. I was half-expecting him to say something but he never mentioned it. I guess he’s already forgotten.”

  “Good,” Caleb said, feeling a vague sense of guilt. Should have been there for him, he thought.

  Polly sighed and rubbed her foot across his belly. “So, how was your day?”

  Caleb said nothing. He was thinking about Jack’s nightmare, trying to imagine how he must have felt. A yellow woman moved across the TV screen. He wondered where nightmares came from. What caused them?