The Angry Dream (7 page)

Her hands came to her sides, palming her thighs. Then she reached up and unzippered the suede jacket. She looked into the mirror over the sink and pushed at her hair with one hand, then slipped the jacket off. She pushed at her hair, looking in the mirror again.

I came out of the chair and grabbed her by the shoulders. She dropped the jacket, looking up into my eyes with that expression of lostness, or whatever it was, that she’d always had.

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

I let her go and went back to the chair and stared at the plate with the yellow egg stains on it and the single piece of bacon rind. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was getting back at you. I’m sorry, Al. Honest.”

“Honest?” I said sarcastically.

“I wanted to hurt you. But I didn’t know what they were doing—didn’t know what—But when Dad told me what they’d done—well, I couldn’t just-how could I face you?”

I sat down on the chair.

“What are you doing here now?”

“I’m trying to help you. You need somebody to help you. I want to be near you. I’m trying to forget–”

“Stop it, Lois.”

She got the hurt look in her eyes. Her lower lip trembled faintly.

“Ever since I came home,” I said, “I’ve been getting it one way and another. There aren’t many ways left, Lois. If we’ve got anything left to salvage, let’s face it—let’s lay it out naked and look at it. Otherwise we’ve got nothing.”

“You left me.”

She stood there, fussing with a small charm bracelet on her left wrist. The sleeves on the sweater were short and tight and her arms were lightly tanned, like very pale chocolate milk with gold in it.

“I left you,” I said, mimicking her tone. “That was eight years ago.”

“You promised to marry me. We were going to be married. A woman doesn’t forget things like that. Everything was—”

“Lois, cut it out. You are not that kind of person. You never were, not really.”

“This is true,” she said. “You left me.”

“So you spent eight years wandering around that place—watching it take on an old luster?”

“I’m sorry about the other day. I didn’t mean it to be that way.”

I said it still more slowly, “You—are—lying—like-hell—Lois.” I got up again and moved over to her and said, “Listen, Lois—everybody wants something—
something
. It doesn’t matter what—but it’s something. Some little thing—or some big thing. Now, what is it you want?”

“Do you have a drink, Al?”

“That what you want?”

“Maybe that’s what I want.”

We looked at each other.

“No. I don’t have a drink,” I told her. “The stampede herd that came in here also smashed three bottles of whisky. There’s water in the pump. Try it.”

She leaned down, picked up the suede jacket and put it on. Then she went over and picked up her galoshes and leaned on one hand against the wall and pulled them on over her neat little alligator pumps.

“Damn it!” I said.

She stood watching me.

“There was something I wanted to say,” she said. “Or do—I don’t know. All of it’s gone now, isn’t it?”

“Whatever you say.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

“Go get your drink and then maybe you can think straight. Tell me about it then.”

“Goodbye, Al.”

The door closed softly and she was gone. I moved over to the table, reached across to the window and pulled aside a flap of the cardboard carton.

The sunlight outside was blinding. Lois moved down the driveway past the window, walking through ankle-deep snow. She moved slowly, her head down a little, the thick dark hair swinging across her face.

The rest of the day was a flop. I hung around the house, taking it easy, loosening up. Maybe I imagined Lois would return. She didn’t.

I tried to consider the changes in Sam Gunther. There was no real change. Sam had always been somewhat of an enigma in Pine Springs. He had brought his wife to his father’s house on the hill, begat a son and a daughter, and endured the death of his wife with no outward change. His parents had died shortly after his arrival and he had a large farm to take care of. It did not produce. He worked it some, but not much, and allowed no hired man on the grounds. The place was neat, clean, and folks wondered how he managed. By the time I was seeing and remembering, he was accepted. They joked a bit about “Gentleman Sam,” but that was all.

I quit trying to think about Sam Gunther.

During the afternoon I went outside and stood over Bunk’s unseen grave for a time. The valley was silent. The sun was hot and trees dripped with the thaw that wouldn’t last. By late afternoon the melting snow would freeze again.

It darkened early with a wind rising, the hills like paper cut-outs against the sky. I washed my topcoat in a tub of heated well-water and dried it on a line strung across the kitchen in front of the stove.

At six-thirty, I took the car out and drove toward the village.

Lew Welch had said Spash lived in a shack behind the sawmill. Three times I drove past the sawmill and on down past Kirk Hartmann’s. There was an inviting air of rich content emanating from Kirk’s home. Soft lights shone in all the windows, the windows steamed, and I realized that his home was much larger than it might seem.

Each time I drove past the mill, I felt a little foolish. Trying to locate a drunk. Maybe all he wanted was to vent some alcoholic spleen on me for something my father had done to him. It could be that.

Finally I turned the car and stopped just inside the mill grounds near the large sawdust pile. Far down between the head-high stumps of ancient pine, I saw a flicker of yellow light.

I walked on around the sawdust pile. Sheds and stacked lumber were spaced here and there. There was a good smell, clean and humid and sweet with slain wood. I walked past two pickup trucks, trying to keep the flicker of yellow light in sight.

Trees had been cut in patches, and the stumps were high. I reached a fence, found a gate, went on through. I moved along an ice-packed narrow path. It zigzagged crazily. The yellow light was still a flicker in darkness above the snow.

The shack was on Cat Creek under pine and the wind seethed and cried up there. The path veered in close along the creek on the high bank and you could see the formations of ice and snow on the water, the water itself trailing darkly cold, gurgling a little over rocks and snags.

“I seen you!”

I stopped.

“Go on back where you come from, damn you!”

“Look, Herb—I just want to talk with you.”

Nothing. There was no sign of him. Then I saw his head below the bank of the creek, his body shielded by a heavy growth of brush.

Herb Spash climbed up the bank and stood by the brush pile, silently watching me. He was bareheaded and he was drunk. I wondered if he had any sober moments.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I might ask that same question.”

He turned and walked toward his home, opened the door.

“I don’t want to talk with you,” he said. “Go away.”

He started to close the door. I got there just as the door scraped on the latch and put my shoulder against it. He began to curse. He let go of the door and I heard him crash into something.

I went inside.

The room was very neat. It was warm. There were two rooms, one a cooking and living area, the other letting off through a broad door into a tiny room with a bunk against the wall. A patchwork quilt of countless colors covered the bunk. The quilt looked clean.

He was sitting on the floor. He had knocked a frying pan from a bare wooden table in the center of the room. To the left was a potbellied stove, cherry-red. Neatly cut wood was stacked in a large wooden box behind the stove. A pail of water with a dipper floating in it sat on the floor near the door. There were no curtains at the windows and the walls had been covered with newspaper.

“You got no right to come in here,” he said.

He turned over and came to his knees, grasped the table and heaved himself up. The odor of his breath was nauseating. He stood trying to focus his eyes for a moment, then lurched across the room and fell into a large wicker chair.

“Didn’t they?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

He reached beneath the wicker chair, came up with a fifth of whisky, half-full. He tilted it up and let it run down his throat. Then he jabbed the bottle at the floor. The whisky had made a new man of him—he was master again. He must have been without a drink for fully fifteen minutes to get in that shape. He thrust his jaw out belligerently.

“What’re you doing here, Harper?” He was the big man, now. He slapped his left trouser pocket, then slapped his shirt pockets, looking for cigarettes. “I said to what do I owe this visit, Harper?”

He had forgotten everything, except suddenly seeing me standing there before him. I found a pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket, offered him one. His hand missed the pack by a good five inches, the fingers closing on empty air. I moved the pack, he caught a cigarette, and jabbed it nonchalantly at his mouth and hit his cheek. He smeared it into his mouth, then leaned forward as I struck a match and fell on his face on the floor.

He lay there, the cigarette crumpled beside his head.

I hauled him up and sat him in the chair again. But he was gone. His eyes stared, but they didn’t see.

I slapped his face hard. His head rocked, the eyes trying to focus, trying very hard. He began to sweat. He suddenly looked at me and knew who I was and there was fear in those eyes, now.

“Why don’t you tell me?” I said.

“All right!” He screamed it. He was desperately trying to gain a hold on himself.

“It was Sunday night,” he said in a clear voice, looking straight at me. “Not late on Sunday night—” He paused and swallowed. “Telling you,” he said carefully. “Telling you because I got to tell you.”

“I understand, Herb.”

“I came by the bank, down the field, and a light was lit in his office window. I stopped by the window and looked in at him, at that stinking rich there in the chair, just sitting. He saw me.”

“My father?”

“Cy Harper. He saw me looking in the window. I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn one way or the other. I was on the bottle. I was still cutting hair, had my shop. But Alma had gone gack to her folks—with the kid. Kid. I couldn’t quit drinking.” He lost track of what he was saying and though he looked at me, he did not see me. I reached down and jarred his shoulder. “I didn’t care,” he said.

“You looked in the window and he saw you,” I prompted.

“Alma won’t never come back,” he said.

“I’m sorry.

“It don’t matter now. Not any more it don’t. He called my name. But you know something?” He straightened in the chair, his face a gray, wrinkle-shot mask. “He never hurt us and I kind of liked the old man. So I went in.”

“In the bank?”

“Right to his office, I went.”

Spash’s hand prowled over the edge of the chair for his bottle, almost as if the action were performed without volition, without knowledge of what he was doing. The fingers fiddled and clawed, pawing for the bottle as he talked.

“He was setting behind his desk, right there.” Spash lifted his hand and pointed, then resumed the search for the bottle, his fingers dancing just above the uncorked neck. If he got it, he would likely pass out cold—

“What was he doing?” I asked.

“Setting there, that’s all. ‘Herb,’ he says. ‘Herb, I want you to do a little chore for me.’ Them are his exact words. ‘A little chore.’ I told him whatever I could do I’d be glad to do it. I recall it so plain—” He clenched his eyes tightly, then looked at me again. “Cy Harper told me to go to Sam Gunther’s house down on the hill. He said to tell Sam to come to the bank in about an hour, that he wanted to see him. Said to tell Gunther it was urgent, that he would be waiting.”

He was concentrating hard and his eyes began to glaze with the effort. A sheen of perspiration coated his face.

“Sunday night,” I said.

“Yep. Sunday night—just dark. Said he’d give me five bucks if I’d go do that for him—see Sam Gunther and tell him. So I did.”

“And then?”

“Then what?”

“Afterwards, what did you do—where did you go?”

“I bought a quart—a fi’th—down to Augostino’s, and opened up shop and sat in the chair and tied one on. There in the chair. Opened up shop.” He put his head back and grimaced horribly and made noises in his throat which probably were supposed to be laughter. “In the morning I’d drunk two and a half bottles—and everybody was yelling out there. They found him hanging, right on that Monday morning. Lew Welch, him and Jeannie Hayes—they found him.”

“So you think—?”

He came out of the chair, lunging at me. I tried to grab him. He wheeled like an animal, dodged into the other room and dived at the bunk. He turned and he held a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun pointed at me.

“Get out!” he yelled. “Get out of here, damn you! I told you. You didn’t come back, and that was all right. But now you come back so I had to tell you.”

I did not move. I tried to make my voice calm, but there was nervousness in it. “What have you been drinking on all this time, Herb? Where do you get your money? Do you work?”

“Work!” He said the word with bitter sarcasm. He held the gun levelly on me and made the grimace and the sickening throat-noises again. “I earned it and that’s enough. Don’t need to work. Now, get out of here.”

“Herb, you’ve got to tell me all of it.”

He lay back against the bunk, holding the gun, and something bad came into his eyes. You could tell he meant to use the gun and that he did not care—that nothing mattered to him now. It was there in his face.

“I swear it,” he said quietly. “I’ll kill you if you don’t go away.”

“All right, Herb. Tell me one thing—did you see Gunther? What did he say?”

“Said he didn’t go to the bank—couldn’t make it. Said to forget about it—it would make folks maybe think wrong.”

“And he paid you?”

He lurched to his feet, the shotgun swinging straight at my chest. I turned and went outside quickly. I half expected to get shot in the back. He rushed across the room and slammed the door. I could hear him reeling around, knocking against things. Then he shouted:

“Stay away from me! I told you—that’s all I’m going to tell you!”

He had told the truth. Walking through the thinly crusted snow, I felt old and helpless and full of calamity. So far as was known, nobody had seen Cy Harper since Saturday noon, when the bank closed. For all I knew, Gunther was telling the truth, too—perhaps he didn’t go there Sunday night. Yet why would he insist on covering it—and what was it exactly that worried Herb Spash so much? Just the not telling didn’t seem enough.

I walked on through the sawmill grounds, conscious of aches and pains and stiffness. Thinking about that, about Gunther standing above me in the night, gloating, didn’t help.

I came across the grounds, past the shadowed sheds, around the sawdust pile, and approached the coupe. Something occurred to me that I should have thought of before. It was an almost certain fact that this trouble I found myself facing wasn’t Pine Springs as a whole. It couldn’t be. There would be some strong resentment, people would perhaps dislike me—but would they go out of their way physically to make me leave the town? I didn’t think so.

I climbed into the coupé, started the engine and backed swiftly out onto the road. I wanted to talk with Noraine.

Noraine had followed me all over the country, proclaiming her love. It seemed odd that she would suddenly turn it off in favor of a man like Sam Gunther. This troubled me more than I liked to admit.

There was something in my mind just out of reach, something I did not see …

I stopped the car in front of the cottage near Mrs. White’s boarding house, not far behind the black shape of a large sedan. It was the Gunther Buick. I laid my hand on the hood and looked up toward the house. The hood was not very warm. The lights were dim through the livingroom window.

There were puddles reflecting a nearby streetlight in the front yard, and the snow was fast melting. Slush ridged the road, sparkling faintly.

I came along the wet grass and snow, my feet sucking into the earth, then paused by the front steps. A faint murmur of a man’s voice reached me.

I stepped softly up onto the porch, moved across the porch to the living-room window. I edged around the jamb and peered inside. It was like being kicked in the stomach.

They stood in the middle of the room. Noraine was wearing black lounging pajamas, her rich blonde hair rumpled on her shoulders, twisted in Sam Gunther’s meaty hands. They were kissing. Her body moved in his arms and his hands slid down across her back to a white sash tightly drawn at her waist. The fingers hooked into the sash. She pulled away from him and laughed up into his face, her hands on his shoulders.

“Would you like to come up to the house?” he said.

There was a thickness to his voice. I watched her, knowing I should leave, hating the whole sight as badly as I’d ever hated anything—yet I couldn’t move.

She shook her head, smiling at him.

“Why not?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know.

“Sure?”

She grinned at him, put both hands up behind her hair and loosened it across her shoulders, leaning far back, and I saw the perspiration on Sam Gunther’s face.

“How long before you’ll be ready?” he said.

“It won’t take long, Sam. Where are we going?”

“Riverton?”

“All right. I’ll go in and change.”

He looked down at her, his arms still around her.

“I don’t need any help, Sam.”

“All right.” He kissed her cheek, stabbed for her throat, but she dodged, still smiling at him. He released her, started for the front door. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

I made it fast across the porch, touched the rail lightly and sailed down into the yard. I raced across the lawn to the coupé, started it, made a swift U turn and headed back into town.

I stopped off at the diner and drank a cup of coffee in silence, while Jake Weston tuned back and forth on the radio dial, now and then glancing at me. He had not spoken. My hands were shaking badly.

The sight of Noraine in Gunther’s arms, looking at him the way she had, was like knives.

“Jake?”

He turned slowly. “Yes?”

“Who sells liquor out here?”

“There’s a bar just outside town, up past Watts’.”

I remembered. I paid for the coffee, took the car out there and had two double whiskies. It was a road-house, but it was oddly empty. Two young girls and an older man talked quietly in a booth over beer. It was a dead night. I bought two fifths, and started home.

People were running out of houses, herding toward the sawmill road. I slowed at the corner and looked. A spotlight glared on a crowd of people. I stopped.

Brakes squealed faintly beside me. I turned in the seat and looked into the wide eyes of Noraine, staring at me. Then I saw Sam Gunther behind the wheel of his Buick.

“Harper—get on down there by the mill. Sheriff Luckham’s looking for you.”

Noraine continued to stare at me over the rim of the door, her lips dark and slightly pouted.

“You hear me, Harper? You get down there! They just found Herb Spash—he’s been murdered. Luckham wants to talk to you.”