Free The Angry Dream by Gil Brewer Page B

bundled in the blankets and a rug. Several times I’d come to, then dozed off again—realizing it was cold, that I had to get the fire started, but I couldn’t seem to do it.
    “How long have you been like this?”
    Lois stood in the kitchen doorway. She wore a suede jacket zippered to the throat, her black hair thick on her shoulders. Her skirt was fawn-colored, and she wore nylons and small black galoshes. I began to smell coffee.
    “What day is it?”
    “It’s Thursday morning,” she said.
    “I came in Tuesday night.”
    “Were you drunk?”
    “Do I look it?”
    “You look as if you’d had a fight. You’re a mess.”
    I rolled over and stared at the wall. I heard her return to the kitchen, and pans clinked and clanked and there was a sizzling. I began to smell that coffee again, and pretty soon bacon.
    I heard her galoshes thump on the kitchen floor.
    “It’s a good thing I finally came over here,” she said from in there. “A darned good thing.”
    “Why?”
    “You’d have frozen to death in those thin blankets.”
    I reached out and touched the floor beyond the mattresses.
    “You would have just lain there and frozen to death.”
    She came into the dining room and I turned back and looked at her again. I didn’t ache at all. I felt pretty good, with the warmth getting to me.
    “You going to get up?” she said.
    “Sure.”
    I looked at the ceiling. It was a high ceiling, yellow plaster—darkening with age in places. I could recall this room from my early childhood, everything in it as it had been then. I could remember my mother in the kitchen, and Cy Harper coming home for dinner. We always had dinner at midday. A big dinner. He never talked much, but he ate a lot. In the summer he would drink great quantities of iced tea—pitchers full. Mother made it by the pail. I remembered how he had come home at noon one day and sat down and eaten a whole blueberry pie. I had waited all morning for a piece of that blueberry pie and when I came in, he had eaten the whole thing, sitting there, waiting for his mashed potatoes. He told me there were lots of blueberry pies, and Mother baked another that afternoon and I got a piece of that, anyway. But he hadn’t said he was sorry. He’d just grinned with his teeth all blue from that pie and said there were lots of them. Then he started on his mashed potatoes.
    I remembered how I had thought up ways to kill him. You never do, but you think of them sometimes.
    “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
    “Sure. How’s things?”
    She said nothing.
    “He send you here?”
    “What?”
    “Forget it. Put it out of your sweet little mind.”
    “Are you being sarcastic?”
    “No, I don’t mean to be.”
    “Are you going to get up?”
    “Yes.” I threw the blankets off, or tried to. I finally got them off and sat up and sprawled back down again, hurting.
    “Good Lord! What happened to you!”
    “As if you didn’t know.”
    “But I
don’t
know.”
    “Come off that horse, Godiva.”
    I sat up again, easy this time. I was still wearing the topcoat and it was stuck to me. I tried peeling a little of it away from my bare chest and it hurt like the devil.
    “Al—lie down. I’ll get some warm water.” She hurried into the kitchen, her heels clicking on the linoleum.
    It was warm now and it felt wonderful. I sat up, then stood up and grabbed the topcoat and ripped it off, yanked my arms out of the sleeves, dropped it on the floor and stood there. It burned, but that was all, bleeding a little in places. I was marked up, for a fact. I went out into the kitchen, walking stiffly.
    “Good Lord!” she said again.
    I went over to the sink and looked in the cracked mirror. I had a black blood-clotted beard and my hair was clotted with blood, standing up all over my head. My right eye was all right, but my left was a slit between brown dried blood and dirt. There was a gash across the side of my face, across the eye and the forehead. That was where the jack-handle