The Angry Dream

by Gil Brewer

  “You shouldn’t have come back, Al.”

  “Everybody tells me that.”

  “But this is me telling you.”

  The whisky burned faintly in my stomach. I stood up and we were very close, watching each other. I wanted to take her in my arms, and she wanted me to.

  “Everything’s changed around here,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me you had money in the bank, too?”

  “No.” She turned away, stepped over to the window again, then came back toward me. Her breasts were full and set firmly wide apart beneath the delicate blouse, the subdued smoothness of the sweater. She stood there, smoothing the sleeves of the sweater halfway up her forearms, watching me. “But my father had money in that old bank, darling. A great deal, and what happened made him unhappy.”

  “I see.

  “He wouldn’t like to know you were here.”

  “He seems to be doing well now.”

  “He’s doing well.”

  “How’s your brother?”

  “Weyman? Weyman is a case.” She did not move, staring at me. The desire to take her in my arms, to kiss the defiant lips, was very strong.

  “It’s been eight years, Al. Eight long, long years. You can’t expect me to leap into your arms, all love and abandon, after eight years.”

  “I didn’t expect anything like—”

  “Yes, you did! I can see what you’re thinking. All very dramatic. We should hurl ourselves at each other—and we could bring it all back in a fine, mad frenzy.”

  “Cut it out, Lois.”

  “Eight years is a long time. Yet that’s what you want to do—” She turned sharply away, found her glass, drained it. She set the empty glass down, then looked at me again, smiling now.

  “It would probably be wonderful, too.”

  “Lois, I thought—”

  “You thought eight years was long enough to get over it all. To forget the bad times. To remember only what we had—” She snickered softly. “What we had. Boy, didn’t we, though?”

  “Stop it!”

  I stepped close to her, put my hands on her waist. Her head went back, eyes shining at me with all the bitterness and confusion and something I didn’t know about, and I drew her to me, felt the soft impact of her body and kissed her—her throat and then her lips. Her mouth opened and her body abandoned itself to mine, her fingers clutching at my shoulders, the nails digging. She broke away, stumbled off, breathing heavily, her eyes very dark.

  “Damn you!”

  She brushed the thick hair away from both sides of her face with the palms of her hands, pressing her face, holding her hands there.

  For an instant there was something almost savage in her eyes. Then she seemed to regain a semblance of aloof untouchableness.

  “You’d better go, Al.”

  I did not move.

  “We’ll never have what we had again. It’s all gone, like the way the wind goes through this valley. That’s the way our love was—or whatever it was. It’s dead, Al. Dead and gone.”

  “Trying to convince yourself?”

  “No.”

  She laughed lightly, quietly. Then she walked lazily past me to the couch. She sprawled out on the couch on her back, her dark skirt pulling tautly over her knees. She gave a huge sigh, then turned her face halfway to the wall and was quiet.

  I moved to her side, leaned down. She was breathing heavily, sound asleep—passed out cold. There was a colorful woolen shawl at the foot of the couch. I drew this over her legs, then stood up again. She was very beautiful to me, all that I had remembered, and much more. For a moment a sense of nostalgia swept over me, the deep and poignant memories of what we’d had together once. I leaned again, kissed her on the soft lips that smelled strongly of whisky and gin. She opened her eyes wide, seeing nothing, and smiled. Then her eyes closed again.

  Coming down off the hill, the valley was a driving pale of snow obscuring the hills on the other side, obliterating trees in blankets of white. The sky was dark, snow whirlpooling and eddying seemingly of itself, because there was little wind. Out there somewhere in the bright world, the sun had not yet set, but here in the valley, night was a blue-black fall.

  Coming down the dirt road, time went back again. How many times did I recall the valley being like this? And worse. Snow house-high, and still driving down. And Lois running through it all, her cheeks flushed, promising to meet me tonight in the warmth of fragrant hay in somebody’s barn, behind the church, in the laundry room on the piles of freshly washed clothes at her father’s house, out among the pines in the glen, the snow, too, deep but warm.

  I started hurrying down the road toward the house.

  “Your mother was weak,” he had said. “Let’s hope you haven’t inherited her weaknesses, Al, my boy. I don’t hate her, mind you—she was very dear to me. But she was weak, a weeper. I can’t stand a weeper.

  “You’re an only child, Al. I didn’t want it that way, but she was always tired, always weeping—too sick to build babies. Fear ran through her like a trace chain; it was a motor, kind of. It ran her.

  “I should have married again, I know that now, some big-bodied woman, more to my taste. An only son can make it difficult for himself. She was a good woman in many ways. She was kind to you, certainly—too kind. She never liked me using the strap out in the barn. She’d weep then, too—remember?”

  I remembered all right, and the times then, too, when she was still alive.

  “Try and understand your father, Son,” she said. “Try. I know it’s hard, but he needs understanding same as a cow needs milking if it’s going to be any good to a soul. He’s done wrong, and you’re too young to know about that, and he’s doing wrong and he’s come to be more alone every blessed day of his life. But try and understand him.”

  And she would weep. He was right about that, but there had been a time of sunlight, when she had not wept. A time before she did understand, a time when all she did was accept and believe. So then when she saw clearly, she just went out something like a candle guttering, burning its wick to a charred core. Believed, accepted, found out, died.

  And later, he said, “I don’t want to visit her grave, Al. The house is not the same without her, but I don’t want to bring any of the dust of her back with me. She could never understand me. She hated business. ‘Business, Laury,’ I would tell her, ‘is man. You’re a woman and you’ll never understand man, so how can you fathom business?’ So she would weep, Al.”

  By the secretary in his room, he would sit in the cane-bottomed chair with pen at hand, telling me. The desk stuffed and oozing papers, all with other men’s and women’s signatures on them, and figures and amounts and sums, the transactions of corruption.

  “So they dislike you, Al. What do you care? Tell them you’ll buy them. Only tell them in a nice way, Al—with a laugh. Without money, you have nothing, Son—you are nothing. Less than that, even. So I’ll teach you how to get money. It’s entirely possible that your ma endowed you with a sense of disregard toward the dollar bill. Well, we’ve got to knock that out of you. You’re old enough to know. My daddy knocked the thought of it into my mind early. We were poor folk, Al. I know what it is not to have bread on the table. Not to have a table …

  “You say you hate me, Al. Nobody hates Cy Harper.

  “You’ve been to war, Al. Now’s the time to forget and begin. You’re a man now. I’m going to take you down to the bank and show you the vault.”

  And he did, too—the drawers of money, of currency, banded and marked.

  “Now, what place in town you want to set up business? Not big-city, boy. Take it here, where the pickings are just right. I can talk plain now, can’t I?”

  I turned in the driveway, walked past the coupé, a snow-blurred shadow, and fumbled across the lawn toward the front porch. It was growing darker.

  I stepped onto the first step of the porch, slipped, and caught the top step with both hands, then straightened. My hands came away sticky, thickly coa
ted with gobs of dark red, almost like raspberry jam, but not quite like jam.

  I went on up across the porch, my feet sliding slightly in the puddled liquid.

  Bunk hung there beside the front door, dead. His throat had been cut. A long iron railroad spike was driven through his chest, securing him to the wooden side of the house.

  Suddenly I remembered how Lois had gasped, standing at the window in her house. That was before the heavy snow had begun and she’d seen them down here.

  FOUR

  Something about the way Bunk hung there, impaled to the house wall, angered me more than anything I’d ever known. I wrenched at the railroad spike, tried to pull it out. Somebody had worked on it with a sledge. It finally began to work free and Bunk sprawled stiffly at my feet, his open throat freezing and clotted from the cold. I stood above him in a daze. What kind of people were they?

  The front door was gone. It had been torn from the hinges, ripped out of the casing. It lay across the porch floor. I moved inside, found the flashlight where I’d stood it in a corner by the entryway. The flashlight seemed to be the only thing that hadn’t been touched. They’d come in here with axes, wandering from room to room, wild, drunk with destruction.

  Each room had been systematically ravaged. The carpets ripped up and torn in long strips. Walls gouged and axed. Pictures smashed. Furniture broken and splintered, wrecked. The stair bannister had been torn from its moorings and lay like a row of skeletal teeth over on a slant against the hall wall. The old secretary in my father’s room was tipped over, stove in. Upholstery in all the chairs and couches oozed broken guts. Bookcases tipped over, books torn and stomped in scattered piles. The dining room, where I had set up quarters, was demolished. My clothes only had not been touched. The bags I had unpacked were packed, set together, ready to go in the center of the room.

  In the kitchen, the old cookstove had been ripped loose, doors broken; stove-lids lay in the cabinets where they had been scaled to shattering mother’s old china. The cans of food I’d purchased at the general store had been thrown on the floor, and each one bore an axe slice. There was an odor of beans and tomato soup, or jams and jellies, of fresh coffee scattered like brown dust over everything.

  Upstairs, it was the same. Every window in the house had been shattered. Snow drifted in on the floors. The old attic trunks had been ripped open, contents scattered and torn.

  Down in the front hall on a large expanse of wall, painted hurriedly in red paint, were the words:

  GOODBYE HARPER

  I went on out to the coupé. It had not been touched. I went around to the back of the house and into the old woodshed, found a shovel and an old burlap sack.

  I wrapped Bunk in the sack and carried him out beyond the garage and dug a hole in the hard ground and buried him.

  In the house, I got the cartons I’d used to carry things from the store, measured the broken windows, and sealed them with the pieces of carton. Then I managed to get the stove back in place, straighten out the buckled pipe and put that back up. I cleaned the house with a quick once-over, spending most of the time in the dining room and kitchen. Then I nailed the front door back on, deciding to use the back door. All the time I kept getting hotter and hotter about what they had done.

  After getting rid of the destroyed food, binding a couple mattresses in the corner for a bunk, unpacking my clothes and hanging them again, I went outside and brought wood into the house, started a fire in the stove. The place began to warm up. I washed, dressed in dark woolen trousers, flannel shirt and my topcoat. Then I went out to the car and started for the sheriff’s office.

  I could not get it out of my mind that Lois had watched through the window and seen them down there. She must have known what they were doing, yet she’d told me nothing.

  He was alone in the office when I got there, his gray sedan parked outside in the snowy street. There was a plate-glass window, and before entering, I looked inside through the steaming glass. There was a large roll-top desk, and he sat leaning far back in a big desk chair, his feet on the desk. I went inside. It was like stepping into a furnace. There was a red-glowing potbellied stove in the center of the room, a few chairs, a small table, two brass spittoons, a pile of magazines on the floor under an enormous calendar carrying an air-brush painting of a lush bathing beauty.

  “Hello?”

  “My name’s Harper. I’ve got a complaint.”

  “I see,” he said, not looking up. “I’m Tom Luckham, Harper. Heard about you.”

  He still did not look up. He was working on his left thumb with a small pearl-handled pocket knife. His hair was thin and red, his face an enormous blossom of health that heavy white pouches beneath the eyes belied. He wore khaki shirt and pants, low leather high-tops over the pants, and a white and blue striped mackinaw hung from the back of the chair he sat in. On top of the desk was a Stetson hat that looked new. He was a huge man, his breathing harsh and rapid with concentration above the thumb. A heavy over-oiled gun belt and holstered .38 lay dully gleaming on the desk top beside his booted feet.

  Heat was flowing in waves from the potbellied stove. I began to sweat. Luckham’s face was red and dry.

  “Complaint, eh?”

  “That’s right.”

  He grunted, snapped the knife closed and tossed it to the desk. He dropped his feet, whirled the chair, looked up at me with muddy gray eyes.

  “Let’s hear it, Harper.” The pouches beneath his eyes crinkled. He was a man of perhaps forty, a sick man, riding on old strength and much nerve. His pale-lipped mouth turned up at the corners. “Let’s hear this complaint.”

  I told him. “They killed a dog,” I said. “Not alone killed him—they nailed him to the side of the house!”

  “Your dog, Harper?”

  “Not exactly, no.” I told him how Bunk had been hanging around.

  “What you so all-fired riled up about somebody else’s dog for? He wasn’t your dog: what do you care?”

  I looked at him for a time.

  “What do you want me to do?” He hadn’t changed expression. It was almost as if I were telling him a story he’d heard over and over long before.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Sure, I believe you, Harper.”

  “Well, what do you mean—what do I want you to do?”

  “Exactly.”

  He sat there watching me. When he spoke, his voice was very soft.

  “Who did all this, Harper?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “If you don’t know who did it, I don’t see what I can do. Did you see them do it?”

  “No, I–”

  He scratched his head with the fingers of his right hand, then shook his head.

  “That surely is a bad thing to have happen,” he said. “I surely do sympathize with you, Harper.”

  “Something’s got to be done!”

  “I surely do sympathize. That’s a fact.”

  “Who do I go to about a thing like this?” I tried to keep from shouting but I was close to it.

  “Well,” Luckham said quietly, “me, I guess. I’m the law, here, I guess—I figure you see me, Harper.”

  “All right,” I said. “I want to file a complaint.”

  “Against who?”

  We stared at each other.

  He said, “Against Pine Springs?”

  I turned and walked over to the window and stood there staring outside into the snowing night. It was still early. It wasn’t snowing so hard now. The ground was covered a few inches deep. There was no snow on the hood of Sheriff Luckham’s sedan.

  “You’d better come out and look at the place,” I said.

  “Like to do that,” he said. “But I can’t. Something else on the books for tonight. Really should be home—usually am.”

  “How come you’re here, then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—figured maybe somebody like you might just happen along with some complaint, or something.”

  He bli
nked at me, the gray eyes slowly folding closed and open, the uptilted lip-corners maddeningly still.

  “Do you let things like this go on around here?”

  “Why, no, sir. I certainly don’t,” he said.

  “Why don’t you do something?”

  The door behind me opened. A stocky man in a black jacket and gray felt hat walked in, glanced at me, raised his eyebrows at Luckham, then moved over to the far wall and leaned there, looking at me. The room was very still. The man took his cap off, jammed it into a pocket of the jacket, found a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose.

  “Cole,” Luckham said to the man, “this here fellow’s name is Harper.” Luckham glanced at me. “Cole’s my number one deputy.”

  Luckham, speaking mildly to the scarred plank floor between his feet, repeated all that I’d told him about the house and the slain hound. “It’s pretty awful,” he said.

  “Mighty awful,” Cole said. His voice was hoarse.

  “He wants I should do something,” Luckham said.

  “Well, he certainly would,” Cole said. “I’d sure as hell want to do something. Thing like that.” Cole shook his head, his gaze momentarily on the girly calendar. “One person couldn’t have done all that.”

  “No,” Luckham said. “It was more than one person, all right.”

  “Probably a lot of people,” Cole said. “Must of been riled mightily. Never heard of such a thing.”

  I was looking at Cole when his gaze met mine and held.

  “Why doesn’t he just leave town?” Cole said quietly, in that hoarse voice. “Then he wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

  “Now, that’s a good solution,” Luckham said. His head turned up to me, the muddy eyes blinking calmly. “Why don’t you try that, Harper?”

  I said nothing, and they watched me with their self-satisfied faces, with all their wonderful, shining knowledge inside them. I went over to the door and started out.

  “That’s mighty good advice, Harper,” Luckham said.