The Angry Dream (4 page)

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.

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 blinked 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.

I went on out and closed the door.

Climbing into the coupé, I noticed a dark, weaving shadow standing in snow-clotted grass beside the sheriff’s office. I turned the car’s lights on and they shone blindingly on the figure of a man. The man started running violently in a veering diagonal across the street through the thinly falling snow, lurching from side to side. It was Herb Spash again. I turned the car and followed him.

He thought he was hidden behind a tree on the corner of a vacant lot. I drove up beside the tree, turning in suddenly, without warning.

“Spash!” I said. “What do you want?”

He stood rigid in the snow, his breath steaming in the night. He looked cold and wretched.

“Nothing, damn you!” he shouted. “Nothing! Leave me alone!”

He turned and ran off across the lot.

I turned the engine off and sat there. Snow sifted across the street in thin eddies, blown by a strong wind coming down the valley. The outrage back there at the sheriff’s office was so strong inside me it was a kind of awe. Perhaps it’s because you never think of the law until you need it, and you never expect to have its back turned on you. You know you’ve always got that one place to turn to, just in case. The law can’t turn its back.
Only it does …

Looking out the side window, I saw I was parked near a sign in a front lawn that said:

WHITE’S
Room and Board

Noraine had said she was staying here.

I got out of the car, walked across the street to the walk leading to a three-story white house with a large, railing-enclosed veranda that circled the front and sides of the house. It was the kind of home that always looks out of place in the winter. A summer house, caught in a snowfall and uncomfortable about the whole business. A vine-covered trellis lay askew by the porch steps.

The bell buzzed and an old woman answered the door, spry, hollow-cheeked, with wisping black hair and cold eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses.

“Yes?”

“I wonder if I might see Miss Noraine Temple?”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t think that matters, ma’ am.”

“You’re Al Harper. I used to chase you out of my back yard.”

“Well-”

“You stole my peaches.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. White. I remember now. Yes I guess I did. Everybody did.”

“You had peaches enough of your own.” She began to close the door. I set my knee against the door. We struggled for a moment, her hands working on the edge of the door, her pinched face gasping.

“Go away, young man—I’ll phone—I”

“I want to see Miss Temple.”

She ceased, panting. The wind ripped across the porch and a handful of dry snow danced about her slippered feet. It was very cold suddenly.

“Miss Temple no longer lives here. Now, please—go away, or I’ll have to—”

“She must live here.”

“She rented one of my cottages. The second one down the street.”

I stepped back. The door slammed. There was a shade over the window on the door. It rattled down sharply and the hall light went out. I walked off the porch and looked back at the house. The downstairs lights were rapidly blinking out, one by one. Soon the house was dark save for a single orange glow behind a bedroom shade …

It was a small white cottage, all the windows dark. I stood on the tiny porch and rang the old-fashioned pull-bell. There was an odor of oldness and decay about the cottage and I recalled it having been here all my life.

Nobody answered the door.

Somebody called my name. It was Mrs. White. She had on a dark coat, flapping about her ankles as she bent against the wind, moving toward me on the street. There was a single streetlamp, elm limbs tossing and flinging shadows across the snow-covered grass.

“Mister Harper?”

I waited for her to come up to me by the curb.

“Should’ve told you. Plumb forgot. She asked me to tell you—” She clutched frantically at a wisp of hat jammed over her head. The wind drew at the skirts of her coat. “Miss Temple—she said—”

“What did she say?”

“Said to tell you, if you come by—she was gone out with Mister Gunther.” She looked sharply at me. “That’s Sam Gunther. What do you want with her?”

I said nothing, not really seeing Mrs. White, now.

“I say, young man! What you want with Miss Temple? She’s a good girl—you keep away from her.”

“Miss Temple is a friend of mine,” I said.

“Friend? You’ve known her before?”

I nodded.

She looked at me, her pale lips working. Abruptly, she whirled and scurried back toward her house.

“Mrs. White?”

She did not cease running. She climbed the porch steps and moved across the porch into the house. The door slammed.

A car was parked in front of the house. It had ceased snowing, save for an occasional flake drifting down through the cold air. I half expected Bunk to come leaping around the side of the house and it hurt to know he was buried out back, that he would never leave tracks across this winter.