The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams by Richard Sanders Page A

and fish and conspiracy over and over to
himself—and she made up her mind. “Wooly, the rock.” The two of us
set out on the same paths we’d taken four long days ago, the woods
all furred with shade, heading toward the swamp reeds and tannin
waters of the original hidden lake.
    “It’s like everything’s
moving too fast,” he said. “I try to hang onto things they just
keep moving away from me.”
    “You mean
today?”
    “I mean everything, my
whole life. It’s like my whole life went by when I wasn’t looking.
It’s like, I’m standing here, I’m running out of
memories.”
    There was no drama in his
words. He was somber, reflective, low energy. He was in his dormant
phase.
    Past the lake, we moved
through a crazy Paumanok mix of tupelos, red maples and wild
raspberry bushes. The air was diamond clear.
    “I’m thinking too much,”
he said. “There’s too much pondering going on, too much
cerebration. And the things I’m thinking about, I can’t believe
it.”
    “Like what?”
    “You don’t want to know.
Shit, I don’t even want to know.” He took three more steps, eyes
down on the pine-needled trail. “Growing up. Been thinking a lot
about being a kid, the growing-up days.”
    “Nothing wrong with
that.”
    “In my case, best not to
bring it up.”
    I told him again about
Jen, the woodsy I’d met, how she was trying to get along after the
death of her father. Nearly a minute went by without him saying
anything.
    “My mother,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about her.”
    “She still
around?”
    “No. She passed a long
time ago, I was 10. Cancer. Only I didn’t know it at the time. No
clue. That’s mostly what I’ve been thinking about.”
    “Bad time to
go.”
    “I knew something was
wrong. I knew she was sick with something . I asked my father, the
shithead. He tells me oh it’s nothing, she ate some bad swordfish.
To this day I’ve never touched swordfish again. Then she starts
losing weight, starts losing her hair. She’s fucking bald around
the house. I ask my father what’s going on. Nothing—she was wearing
a defective hat and that’s why the hair. I still won’t wear a hat.”
    “Was it just
you?”
    “No. Me, my brother and
sister. I was the oldest. We didn’t know shit. My mother starts all
this weirdness. She starts eating Vaseline. Eating it right out of
the jar with a spoon. We don’t know why. We got a Christmas tree
that year. We get up one morning, she’s taken all the dirty socks
out of the laundry and hung ‘em on the tree. I go to my father. He
says nothing’s wrong. She’s fine—what’re you talking
about?”
    “Dementia, from the
treatment.”
    He nodded. “Bout a month
after that she went away. Who knows where? He hired a woman to take
care of us. I figured he was going to see her everyday, but he
wouldn’t say a thing about it. One afternoon, I’m coming home from
school, I see him pull up. I could see by his face that something
had happened. I say how is she? He tells me she’s dead. Just like
that—she’s dead. I say what? He says you knew what was going on—she’s dead.
But I didn’t. I didn’t know. I had no idea it was anything like
that. And he walks in the house and doesn’t say another thing. He
never said a word about her again. I just stood there. I just stood
there like a stone.”
    He kept walking, head
down, showing no emotion for once. He was a plane wreck of a man,
and I was looking into the black box of his soul.
    “He didn’t know how to
deal with it,” I said. “A lot of people don’t.”
    Wooly shook his head. “It
was more than that. It was a lot more than that. He was just a
bastard. He was a cold, no-heart bastard. One of my earliest
memories of him, I was about 3, I’m sitting in the back seat of the
car while he’s getting a blow job from a hooker in the front. I
didn’t know what it was at the time—it was years later when I
figured out what so to speak was going down, but that’s what