Nightmare Country by Marlys Millhiser Page A

sandwiches broke at the touch.
    â€œI can’t even make a picnic lunch right,” Tamara said with disgust.
    Adrian grinned. “Now you sound like me.”
    But there was ice left in the tea in the thermos, and they managed the sandwiches in soggy lumps and ate everything else she’d brought. After washing hot faces and soaking their feet in the stream, they returned to the shade of the rock to lie with their heads on the grocery sack. They were engulfed in the snappy scent of sage, the buzz of grasshoppers. Drying grasses rustled in the faintest of breezes. They watched a lonely cloud shape and reshape, then split to become two.
    â€œWhy do we have to live here?” Adrian asked suddenly.
    â€œBecause parents have to support their children.”
    â€œYou weren’t prepared, like you always tell me I should be before I have children.”
    â€œAdrian, I was twenty-two when I married, with four years of college, and twenty-three when I had you.”
    â€œThen why did you have to go back to school for two years to reprepare to support me, and why did we end up in Iron Mountain?”
    Because your father never makes child-support payments . “Because I made the mistake of never practicing my profession. Because I trusted someone else to support us. Don’t you ever make that mistake. Don’t even think about it.”
    â€œThere you go, trying to control my thoughts again. Nobody can control somebody else’s thinking. Like today on the way here, I couldn’t control your daydreaming.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?”
    â€œYou mumble under your breath.”
    â€œI do not. Do I? I was just talking to myself.” How can I tell you I was busy heroically saving your life just to show up your father? “Don’t you ever daydream?”
    â€œNo.”
    The next morning Tamara worked up the nerve to visit Mrs. Hanley at the midmorning coffee hour, something that would have been natural in most places but which seemed an affront in this unfriendly settlement.
    Agnes Hanley welcomed her with a smile, hot coffee, and sickly bakery sweet rolls that had been in the freezer too long. “You know, this is the first time I’ve had a visit from the teacher in years.” She spread margarine a half-inch thick over the cracked frosting on her roll. Her glasses were the old-fashioned kind with two-toned plastic rims. They looked small and limiting on her large features.
    â€œI would have come sooner, but no one ever visits us, so—”
    â€œOh, I never go over there. Not since Miss Kopecky died.”
    â€œDied? I understood she left. That most of the teachers stayed for a year or two and then moved on because it’s so isolated here.”
    â€œMiriam Kopecky didn’t quite finish out the second school year. The one before, Lomba, stayed one year. ’Course she was Negro and maybe she could live next to Jerusha Fistler and be all right. And Jerusha’d just got here. Jerusha’s skin’s white, but Kalkasins don’t get features like hers.”
    â€œKalkasins?”
    â€œYeah. White people.” Mrs. Hanley wiped her hands on her apron and poured more coffee. “She’s not A-rab, but not white neither. I expect you want to know about the people who live here. Well, there’s—”
    â€œWait a minute. Miss Kopecky died? How?”
    â€œIn bed. She wasn’t young, but she wasn’t sick. Had trouble sleeping. Bothered with dreams, you know. Then again, everybody dreams—don’t kill ’em. ’Course, like you said, it’s isolated here. Me and Fred like it that way. But it’s not for everybody. If it was, me and Fred couldn’t find a place away from the maddening crowd, could we?” She beamed at this inaccurate literary allusion and opened her mouth to begin again.
    Tamara raised her arms above her head. “Wait! Miss Kopecky died in bed? Here? That furniture in our