Bad Dreams (26 page)

He had been caught in this place forever, only coming to life in the well-lit arena of the Bar-B-Q and Grill. Everything else was dark and skeletal, like an unremembered dream. Everything that had happened this evening, that would happen in the next few minutes, was familiar, planned, tedious. He knew that this world had been abandoned by its Creator, but he was still following the vagrant god’s orders.

Somehow, it was different this time. The old man was dead, really dead. He had not just been carried out of the door into the darkness never to be seen again. Somewhere outside the bar, outside the world, the man had really died.

When he had been talking about Sam, he had not been thinking about what he was saying, the words came automatically. But he had been thinking, sensing how different it was this time. There was no more
déjà vu.
He was free. He did not know what freedom meant yet, but it was marvellous and frightening. Maybe being free was the same as being dead.

It was clear now. He had seen Johnny shoot Angie many times, an impossible number of times. He had taken the still-hot gun away from the man, had cradled the dying woman, had spoken the speech given him, had paused for the darkness to fall on them all. There had been variations – slight differences of placing, of phrasing, of feeling – but each time the actions had been basically identical.

This time it was different. There was no tyrant god to make him stand by and watch Angie, the woman he loved but had never really met, be killed. Things could be changed.

‘Angie,’ said Johnny, taking a shaky aim, ‘this is what dyin’ is like.’

As Johnny pulled the trigger, Maish heaved himself forwards. His bum leg gave out, but he fell into the line of fire. He felt the push of the bullet going into his chest before he heard the amazingly loud crack of the gunshot. His shin hurt more than his broken ribs, his punctured heart.

There was no one to overpower Johnny, to take the gun away from him, but the young man seized up as soon as he had fired, falling into a statue state rather than go against the script. On his knees, real blood soaking his shirt, Maish looked up at Angie. It was not Angie, it was some other woman, but that did not matter. He did not know what to say. He opened his mouth, but only blood came out.

Never again.

Never again would he limp, dance, dream aloud, drink, eat, hit Jed, lean on the bar, listen to Sam’s advice, play with his switchblade, try to get a game of cards together, burst out his good news, be shattered by the bad news, watch Angie get shot, talk to the darkness, start all over again.

This was what dying was like.

F
or Angela Buonfiglia, the next five years started badly. But things got better.

The homicide lieutenant, Joe Hollis, took an immediate dislike to Johnny. He had been in Korea too, and knew that Johnny was one of the GIs who had admitted under torture that the United Nations forces had been involved in war crimes. He dug up the spurious confession that Johnny had put his name to. Hollis pursued the case with a ferocity that surprised his jaded colleagues and unearthed a witness – a patron of Sam’s who had gone unnoticed that evening – who testified against Johnny. He had overheard the young veteran swear to get even with Maish Johnson, and claimed to have seen Johnny take a deliberate aim before gunning the man down.

Angela managed to get her divorce through before Johnny’s execution, but felt obliged to visit her ex-husband on Death Row. He just sat grinning from behind the bars, playing solitaire but never winning. She went to too many funerals. Her father’s brought out the whole neighbourhood for an extravagant Italian-Irish-Jewish wake that went on for days, while Johnny and Maish were laid to rest in scarily similar, sparsely attended grey-day ceremonies, one inside a prison, one outside. Aside from her, the only person at all three ceremonies was Joe Hollis, who shook her hand at Johnny’s burial and vanished from her life.

Angela made enough out of the sale of Sam’s Bar-B-Q and Grill to set herself up in a small business in the garment centre. At first, she simply busied herself with the accounting and retail side and bought in stock from Europe, but gradually she discovered a talent for designing patterned scarves and blouses. Her signature became a brand name, and she was able to put her prices up. ‘Design by Angela’ began to mean as much as ‘Gowns by Ariadne’. Audrey Hepburn wore ‘Angela’ clothes, and Princess Grace, Peggy Lee and Jacqueline Bouvier Sinatra. When Elvis Presley and John Wayne turned up on
The Tonight Show
with identical ‘Angela’ ties, male adornment suddenly ceased to be considered unmanly.

She opened an ‘Angela’s’ in Washington DC, then San Francisco, then Chicago, then everywhere. Her designs were featured in
Vogue
, exhibited at art galleries, imitated by others. She had a small love affair, with C.D. Broome – a college graduate who thought he wanted to be a novelist – but it ended messily. Tired of New York and its ghosts, and buoyed by a ridiculously large fee from a Hollywood studio that had used her designs under the titles of a glossy romantic comedy, she took a year off to travel around the United States. At the end of that, she settled in New Orleans.

She did a quarter as many designs, and sold them for four times as much. During Mardi Gras, she had a cliché meeting cute with a French-speaking aristocrat, the owner of a prestigious but popular restaurant. On the night that they made love for the first time, she told him about Johnny and Maish, and he told her about the homosexual experiences he had had as a younger man. She understood about him, he understood about her, and, three weeks later, they agreed to marry…

F
or Angela Buonfiglia, the next five years started badly. And things got worse.

The homicide lieutenant, Barry Erskine, took an immediate liking to Johnny. He had been in Korea too, and while he was overseas his-own wife had divorced him to marry her piano teacher. He had often thought of shooting them and trying to get away with it. Erskine pursued the case with a ferocity that surprised his jaded colleagues, and unearthed a witness – a patron of Sam’s who had gone unnoticed that evening – who testified for Johnny. He had overheard Maish threaten the young veteran, and claimed to have seen the dead man pull out a switchblade before Johnny drew his gun.

Johnny stayed in jail for three weeks. No charges against him were ever brought. He was even given his gun back, with a note to remind him that he would have to renew his permit in the next few months. Angela went alone to Maish’s pauper’s funeral, and with Johnny to Sam’s. She was surprised how few of her father’s friends and patrons bothered to turn out for that dismal day. Fortunately, she was able to wear a thick veil. When Johnny had found out she had been to Maish’s funeral, he had worked her face over. Erskine turned up at the wake and exchanged nasty jokes with Johnny. He looked her over, grinning like a fiend, before leaving, and warned her to stay out of trouble.

It turned out that Sam’s habitual generosity had got him into debt, and the Bar-B-Q and Grill had to be sold off to settle up with his many creditors. The first night that Angela spent with Johnny in their walk-up apartment after he got out of jail ended up with him breaking three of her ribs. She was grateful that he was unable to rape her, but knew he would think of something to do to make her sorry. Eventually, he found out how sickened she was by his nailless toes, and started forcing her to massage his feet. He liked to reminisce about his time as a POW, and made up ever more elaborate stories of torture and degradation.

The couple could not get by on Johnny’s disability pension, and Angela had to get a job as a waitress. Of course, the owner of the diner that had replaced Sam’s took her on, and she put up with ridiculous hours, sweatshop wages, groping patrons, and an infernally filthy kitchen with all the resignation of the justifiably damned. She had a nasty little affair with Nino Kenyon, one of the cooks, that broke up when someone told him about what Johnny had done to Maish. After a while, the patrons did not even bother to grope her.

Johnny’s feet got worse, and she suspected him of opening old wounds with broken beer bottles while she was at work. He cultivated new scabs and scars, and had to hobble around the apartment on crutches. He rarely went out, but followed the televised HUAC hearings avidly. Korea had not been enough for him. He often talked about how much he would like to go out to Hollywood and shoot some Commies. When the news came through that Orson Welles had hanged himself rather than name names for Hugh Farnham, Johnny celebrated with a three bottle binge. He wrote to newspapers and politicians, naming prominent and obscure citizens as card-carrying Reds. He received a thank you letter from the desk of Hugh Farnham, but eventually Detective Erskine came round and told him to lay off.

Erskine told Angela that Johnny was becoming an embarrassment, and ought to get some sort of psychoanalysis. Angela barely made enough to feed the both of them and pay the rent, and federal subsidies for veterans’ medical care had just been slashed by the McCarran administration, so she had to ignore the advice. Often, she wondered what her father would have said. One morning, after work, she came home and found that Johnny had taken his gun out of its drawer and shot off three of his toes.

A
ngela dreamed. Even tucked in comfortably next to Didier in the big old safe bed in the big old safe house she could only think of as a mansion, Angela dreamed. In the morning, she could never remember where her night thoughts had taken her. Didier could extemporize forever his dreams, their amusing quirkiness, their disorientating surrealism, but she suffered from instant amnesia. But she knew that she did dream, of Something, of Somewhere, of Someone…

‘Perhaps, Angel,’ Didier said one morning, ‘it is you who are dreamed of…’

That kind of pseudo-insight was not at all like Didier. It was the sort of thing she would expect from one of Rod Serling’s
Twilight Zone
introductions. Immediately, her husband slipped back into character, and started pressing exactly the right buttons. She was won over, and, their elaborate breakfast forgotten, they decided that Didier did have an hour or two to spare before he was needed in his office…

Later, alone in the newly-unmade bed, Angela thought again about her dreams. Several of her friends were in analysis, and she knew from them that dreams could be important as a key to your character. Of course, she did not need analysis. Everybody she knew would cite her as an absolute model of fulfilment and balance. Perhaps, she thought, she was not very good at being happy. Perhaps that was why she needed to dream, to fulfil a deep-seated and perfectly natural desire to have some misery in her life.

Her husband, former homosexual or not, was as flawless a part of her world as a robot designed to act like Rossano Brazzi or Gregory Peck. He accorded her all the reverence due to a Victorian angel in the kitchen, and never disapproved of her need to have compartments of her life separate from him. Her career was important to her, and she had kept it going after the marriage. And yet, it did seem strange that doodles which came out of her unconscious when her mind was at its emptiest magically turned into unimaginable amounts of money.

In her sunken marble bath – a marvellously stupid luxury she was almost ashamed of – she thought about the symmetries of her life. She was entering middle-age with the body she had had as a twenty-year-old. Her financial security was assured for a lifetime. Their doctor saw no reason why they could not have children if they did not put it off too long, and she was tempted by the prospect of motherhood. She was never alone, except when she wanted to be; she was never bored, except when she wanted to be.

…and who could ask for anything more.

Later that summer, they started going to the movies like teenagers. The film that made the most impression on her was
North by Northwest
, a chocolate box-coloured romantic thriller with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. She had found other Alfred Hitchcock films boring and cynical, but this was, on the whole, lovely. Grant was charming, but she was also attracted to James Mason, who was a civilized villain and had many of the qualities she liked in Didier. In one scene, she had a delightful buzz of recognition, realizing that she had designed one of the scarves worn by Saint. But there was a snake in Eden, a disturbing presence among the thrills and comedy. One actor – the man who played the villain’s male secretary (and former lover?), the man who trod on Grant’s hand as he dangled off the faces of Mount Rushmore in the climax – frightened her more than any monster in any horror movie she had ever seen.

If there was a cast list at the end of the film, the projectionist closed the theatre curtains over it, and so Angela did not get the actor’s name. Didier, a film addict who often sneaked out of his business in the afternoons to catch matinees of war films and Westerns she did not want to see, could not remember the name of the actor who played the secretary, but thought he had been in
Pork Chop Hill
, playing a soldier in Korea.

Korea. Of course. That was who the actor reminded her of. Johnny. He was older, smoother, less explosive, but the wide, sneering lips and scarily glowing eyes were the same.

Oddly, unnervingly, the actor turned up again within a week. On a summer re-run of
The Twilight Zone.
Angela did not really like the Serling show, but found it affected her, unlike a lot of the network pap television had been churning out since the industry switched from live television in New York to filmed series from Hollywood. The episode was a weird Western, ‘Mr Denton on Doomsday’, with Dan Duryea as a drunk given miraculous gunslinging abilities by a travelling salesman. The scary actor loitered around the cramped studio barroom in sinister black leather outfits, sadistically tormenting Duryea. In the inevitable shoot-out, the man who frightened her was shot in the hand by the suddenly superskilled Duryea, but she could not watch any more and had Didier turn off their receiver. While he was brushing his teeth, she got out the
TV Guide
and found out the actor’s name.