Nightmare Country by Marlys Millhiser Page B

apartment—”
    â€œHers. Don’t feel bad about it. No one claimed it or her body. Must not have had relatives. Anyway, when she came, she threw out what was there. Other people took it in, so it’s gone. A regular moving van brought her stuff. Caused lots of excitement.”
    â€œWhat happened to Mr. Fistler?”
    â€œAbner died too.”
    â€œIn bed?”
    â€œWell, sure. Way most folks go, you know. Had emphysema real bad.”
    Pausing only to chew rolls and yell out the door at the barking dog chained to the clothesline, Mrs. Hanley rattled on about the inhabitants of Iron Mountain. Tamara was able to filter out only a few details from the welter of disjointed information.
    The Hopes, who lived in part of the triplex next to her, were without a father. Deloris, the mother; Vinnie; Bennie, the younger brother; and Ruthie, the baby. Mr. Hope had worked for the company until Ruthie was born and then had deserted. The family stayed on as squatters and lived off welfare. The apartment next to them stood empty, and the Johnsons occupied the last space in that building. The Baggettes lived in the other clapboard house, and Augie Mapes lived alone in the trailers.
    Augie collected junk cars and lived on welfare. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Baggette worked in the mines, and Agnes’ husband was the night watchman. Russ Burnham managed the company’s operations and lived in one of the blue buildings at the end of the road. The other miners drove in from surrounding ranches or settlements.
    So the Hopes supplied two students, the Johnsons one, and the Baggettes two. Two would come from a ranch. That would make the original seven students. Adrian would make it eight and be the oldest. Tamara had a fleeting fantasy of Adrian taking an interest in helping out at the school as a student assistant, blossoming with the new interest and working with her mother instead of against.
    â€œNow, Augie, for eight dollars a month, will let you hook your TV to his antenna. Only channel you can get’s Cheyenne, so there’s no ghosts from different sets tuned to different programs.”
    â€œDoes he always bathe outside? In front of a schoolhouse?”
    â€œAbsolutely no telling what Augie Mapes will or won’t do.”
    That afternoon Tamara lay down on the bed, in which Miriam Kopecky died, more out of ennui than fatigue. But she slept anyway. A few moments of that luscious tingling as the conscious mind lets go and the body begins to float away.…
    And she was walking along a narrow street of sand between little wooden houses on stilts. Some white. Others in bright pastels—yellow, green, blue, pink. Some with sand yards enclosed by board fences, lovely flowering bushes and plants growing out of the sand. Clothes hanging to dry under the houses. Poles carrying power lines aloft, looking naked and out-of-place. Footprints in the sand, and dog droppings.
    A small black boy, barefoot and in shorts, opened a sagging gate and stepped into the street. She tried to ask him what place this was, but her voice made no sound. He started to walk away, and then turned and ran through her.
    Other than surprise, she felt nothing. He disappeared down a side street. A woman swept sand from wooden steps. Her head was capped with tiny pin curls parted so symmetrically that the lines of white scalp between outlined black squares of hair to form a quilt pattern. Tamara could hear the clucking complaint of chickens pecking the earth around an overturned canoe under her house, the slapping of the woman’s thonged sandals, and the scratching of her broom as she stepped from one stair to the next. And the unmistakable sound of sea lapping against beach not far away. And a steady thumping, a mechanical background noise … and the opening strains of wild rock music, one of Adrian’s favorite songs. It introduced a discordant note, throbbed against the buildings to either side and pulsed back against her