The Angry Dream

I turned the coupé in at the old Standard Oil station just outside the village. I didn’t need gas; there was still a half tank registering, so maybe it was too much on my mind—what my father had done in this valley before he hung himself from the antlers of the nine-point buck mounted on the wall over his desk at the Village Trust, the one bank in Pine Springs.

There was macadam now around the rusty red pumps, and the garage had a new coat of white paint with red tr m. The same old smells were here, though–cil and grease and cold, muddy rubber tires and stale gasoline, and something forever indefinable. So this much hadn’t really changed in the eight years I had been away. The sign I recalled from school days still creaked heavily in the soft valley wind beside the garage.

WILLY WATTS
Prop.

And his father before him. Where was Willy? I sat there waiting, looking down Blue Valley, gripping the wheel as if it were a life belt.

The sun was gone. The hills on either side of the valley rose darkly against the sky through the light, steady fall of snow. Pale spirals of smoke lifted lazily into the snowing sky between skeletal, leaf-splotched limbs of trees. I got out of the car and slammed the door hard and stretched.

“Right with you!”

“Right.”

A closed, mud-covered blue convertible swept past on the road, sheets of slush fanning out, windshield wipers clapping.

Willy came around from the rear of the garage, wiping his hands on a black rag. He hadn’t changed at all. Stocky, red-faced, thin black hair blowing in the light breeze, eyes like wet ebony beads in dirty white cotton.

“What’ll it be?”

“Fill ‘er up.”

I stood there looking at him, and he looked at me. He turned toward the pump, then looked at me again.

“That’s right, Willy.”

He started to scowl. “Al?” he said. “Al Harper?”

I nodded, grinning.

He just looked at me and when he spoke, his voice was thick. “What’re you doing here?”

“Back home, that’s all.”

“You mean, back for good?”

I cleared my throat, then shrugged.

He made a short sniff through his nose and nodded, still staring at me. Then he went over and opened the car’s tank and got the hose and began pumping gas, watching the dial.

“Much snow lately?” I said.

“Nope.”

“Hasn’t really begun. Last week in October doesn’t always bring the snow. Still, it could. Used to, sometimes. This could change into something.”

He wiped his mouth, watching the dial.

I opened the door of the coupé, brushed snow and drops of water off my shoulders and sleeves and got my topcoat off the back of the seat.

“How’s the family?” I said.

“Fine. Fine.”

“Any new additions?”

“How’s that?”

“I say, have you any children. You didn’t have any when I was here last.”

“Three.”

“Good for you. How’s it feel to be a father?”

He screwed the cap on the tank, good and hard, flipped the cover shut, hung up the hose. Then he turned to me.

“Check under the hood?”

“Yeah.”

He did that. “You could use a quart of oil.”

I nodded, and he went and got it and returned and kept his head under the hood beside the warmth of the engine, breath steaming.

“Thought maybe I’d have a look at the house–maybe stay there,” I said.

He made a sound in his throat.

“I suppose it’s still standing?”

“Yep.”

He was a beaut. The hell with him.

Only I did not want to say to hell with him. What Noraine had said about my home country touched my mind.
“Every time you’ve had a few drinks, you talk like this. About the house your father left you and how terrible things were back there, and all. Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe you ought to go back there and see. But I don’t think you will—I don’t think you could stand it. You’re running away from everything—even me. Because you won’t believe me—why won’t you please believe me!”
And that was maybe a year ago after all the trouble in New York, when I found out she’d trapped me into a hell of a thing along with her old man. Only she kept saying I was wrong, and she trailed me like a beagle. Her words were bright and painful because I had loved her and she had loved me. I wondered where she was now. Nearly six months since I had seen her. I wondered if I’d finally gotten away from her.

“That’ll be two twenty-two, even.”

I gave him a five and he made change from his pocket, counting from his thick, strong, nail-broken hand.

“The—uh, Gunthers still live in town? Up on the hill?”

He blinked, watching me as I put my wallet away.

“Folks live here; they don’t move out,” he said.

“Lois Gunther? She still live here?”

He sniffed and I felt the blood spring lightly warm up my back and my throat thickened.

“Yes,” Willy said. “She still lives up on the hill.”

“Well, everybody’s married now—I suppose—”

“Lois ain’t married,” he said quietly.

I opened the door of the coupé, climbed behind the wheel, slammed the door and rolled the window down. I started the engine.

“See you around, Willy.”

He stepped over to the car and shoved his face close to the open window, his eyes absolutely without expression.

“Mister,” he said, “you got plenty gas and oil. You take my word and drive right on through town and keep going.” He breathed through his mouth, the breath steaming. “Better yet, face your car around and head back where you come from.” He looked at me a moment, wheeled away and moved toward the garage. “Wherever in the hell that was!” he said loudly.

I took the coupé onto the highway and drove toward Pine Springs. It was growing cold.

Maybe Willy was right, but I had been turning around and running the other way all my life.

Lois still lived up on the hill.

A horn began making a noise behind me. I pulled over some and a fender-dented old red tow-truck swept past me, chain swinging and clanking on the winch. It sped on through the thickening snowfall toward the village.

It was Willy Watts and he was in a hurry.

Sometimes Aunt Wilma wrote me. My father’s only sister, she got the news and saw that I heard. Because I had not wanted to hear about him. Ever.

It was in the dead-letter office in Battle Creek, an address I had once given her. I found it there over five years ago on my way to Miami from L.A. That was BN—Before Noraine, and just a little before the night-school deal in New York.

I wrote to the address on the envelope and there was no answer, so one time I telephoned Aunt Wilma and she had been dead over two years. I did not want to go back then because I still didn’t want to know any more about him even after he was in his grave.

Finally I knew I had to go back.

I had left that town and
him
, because of his greed and the town’s hate, and maybe because Lois was beginning to talk too much of marriage, too. But more because he wanted me to be like him—a money-grubbing despot. I got out. I went on the bum, trying to forget. I was still working at odd jobs, bumming, when he died.

There was word about how the old house was mine—it began to pull a little, even then.

But it was still later that I had to do something, become something—anything. I started a course in accounting and business English at a night school in the University Heights section of the Bronx. And it wasn’t right.

So then, Noraine. I answered an employment advertisement in the Home news, went and talked with this expansive, sober-faced, gray-haired man who needed somebody to drive him around in his Lincoln sedan. He could no longer renew his license because of poor sight, which turned out to be a laugh of high order. His name was Fred Temple, and he was a salesman for a jewelry firm out in Sandusky, Ohio. He and his daughter, Noraine, lived in a three-room apartment in Flushing.

“All I ask of you, Al,” he said, “is that you be ready when I want you. Punctual. Time is an important element in my business.”

So I took the job at sixty-five a week, which seemed somehow too much. We canvassed New Jersey towns and sometimes went into New England—one weekend to Boston, and that was how Noraine and I found each other. She came along. After that, she often rode with us. It wasn’t long before Noraine and I had it—very real, very good, very complete.

I told her all about Pine Springs.

Sometimes Temple called me during the day. I picked the car up at the garage, met him, took him to different stores around New York, always in a hurry. I would wait outside a store and when he came out we were off for a new address. Like that.

“Let’s go, Al!”

One afternoon about two-thirty, over in Queens, he came tearing out of a jewelry store and the Lincoln wouldn’t start.

“Al—get this car moving!”

“Take it easy,” I said. “It’s flooded, or something.”

He had his briefcase with him. Somebody ran out of the store. Fred Temple swore, ran around the car and out into traffic. I was still trying to get the car started when they arrested me.

Fred Temple had good eyes and carried a small pocket camera. He photographed precious stone settings in their cases, made up fakes, returned to the stores and made a little substitution. I was an accomplice.

Noraine and Fred Temple vanished while my name made the papers. A good lawyer finally got me off because they couldn’t find Temple.

I went on the bum again.

She found me in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with the help of a private detective she’d hired.

“He’s dead,” she said. “He had a bad heart, Al. Al, he made me stay with him—he forced me! Al, I never knew what he was doing—I never knew!”

She still had some money, left over from her father. Wherever I went, she trailed me. I never hated anybody quite the way I hated Noraine Temple. Noraine, slimly quick, flaxon-haired, with the shut-off valve missing. We’d been too close, I’d told her too many things.

I didn’t belong anywhere. And I had to belong somewhere, even if it was back in Pine Springs. It got to be like a sickness—running and knowing I had to get back there if only long enough to leave again. So finally I drove home.

The town was much the same as I remembered, suppertime with those dim streetlights flickering through the snow. Lamps shining in windows against the dark shapes of houses, the road humped and full of potholes, the pastureland, the paddocks, the smell of horses and the old cars.

I drove slowly. You could feel the hills out there to right and left, kind of shouldering you in. There were no sidewalks yet.

I stopped at the diner, got out and walked toward the steaming windows. The Tea Pot, they called it now. It used to be Pete’s.

They froze at the counter like a row of wooden Indians, their backs like boards, five of them. Willy had stopped along the way with the news. As I opened the door, their voices raked out upon the snowy night. They quit like breaking glass.

I walked past the wooden tables to the counter and climbed on a stool. I didn’t look at them, just the counterman whom I had never seen before.

“What’ll it be?”

“Coffee.”

He was looking toward them from the corners of his clear blue eyes. Then he looked at me, his cheeks shining in the blue-white neon as if he had buttered them.

“Anything else?”

“That’s all.” As he drew coffee from the nickeled urn and set it on the counter, I said, “You know if the general store stays open nights?”

“Yes, it does,” he said. “Herb’s been keeping it open till nine.” He looked quickly toward them as money clanked on the counter. “You men going already?”

They said nothing. I turned then and watched them leave; the old familiar faded denim backs with the heavy sweaters raveled and poking out at sleeves and collars, and the one leather jacket. No faces. The door closed and I was alone with the counterman and my black coffee.

“Herb who?” I said.

“Herb Lowell. Runs the general store.”

I remembered Herb. Scapegoat to a score of snipe hunts in the cemetery on the river road back in grammar-school days. Fat, always cheerful, his personality larded with fine country humor, only boxed in and forever the butt of jokes. Somebody had to be, and Herb was too fat. Pine Springs had placed him in his niche before he was twelve. I wondered what had happened to Ackerman, who used to run the general store.

“Your name Harper?”

“Yes.” I drank some of the coffee, hot and bitter.

He leaned above the counter, staring at me. “I’m Jake Weston.”

I nodded and kept at the coffee. He watched me, blinking pale lids over the clear blue eyes. His voice was Midwestern, maybe Nebraska.

“Going to be here long?”

I looked at him and his face reddened slightly.

“You going to eat here regularly?” he asked.

I set the coffee mug down. I was trying to think of something to say when he shook his head, turned away and began whistling through his teeth. He did not speak again. I finished my coffee, paid up, and went out to the car.