Nebraska

She took the 30th Street bus to Ames and walked up Larimore Avenue with groceries from the Safeway, getting winded as the street tilted up, and watching curtains part as scornful widows frowned out at her. An old Austrian in a cardigan sweater was weakly scratching a garden rake across his bluegrass lawn just east of her place, and she could see him tilting against the upright rake and angrily judging her skin and attitude. Everyone white on the block was sickly and old and scared about how much they could get for their properties now that the colored were moving in. Four homes were just recently for sale. The Walker house was white, two stories high, with a green screened porch and a great, sick elm in the yard, and halfway up the slope of Larimore, at exactly the spot where boys had to stand hard on their bicycle pedals in order to try the hill.

Avis couldn't go another step with her heavy groceries, so she put the sack on the sidewalk and angled across the yard with just the spoiling things until she got the sense she was being stared at from her own house. Her purple eyes went upstairs to the sewing room and to a joyless girl of eighteen in a yellow nightgown sitting there at the windowsill with her jaw in her brown right hand. And then, as though she'd been ordered elsewhere, the girl turned aside and slowly withdrew, anxiously tying the nightgown strings over significant breasts. And half a minute later Priscilla was greeting her on the green screened porch in her own slippers and an overlarge yellow nightgown that she got from her mother's closet.

“Were you upstairs?” Avis asked.

The girl said yes, she'd been sick.

“You know why you're wearing my nightgown?” she asked, and Priscilla considered herself with surprise.

Avis couldn't sleep, so she went down to the front parlor to work. She paper-clipped a snapshot to her press release and slipped in a note about her willingness to appear without fee, and then she printed the addresses of Omaha television and radio stations on some manila envelopes. Cold air passed over her and she got up to close the kitchen door. And then she had a premonition. She looked into the pantry room and just then the telephone rang.

She picked up the receiver, and Gary was already speaking. “A great big white house and green trees. A ceiling light on in an upstairs window, and I'm on the sidewalk looking up as some woman in an overcoat—she's a doctor, I think—she's moving the drapes aside. And then I'm inside the house on the upper floor. And I know the people there.”

“Are they your family?”

“She passed away.”

“Your mother?”

“She was in a lot of pain. And she passed away and it was easier for her.”

“Is it your mother you see?”

Quiet. She could practically see him. His green eyes were squinched up, stopping his tears; his open mouth was twisted with pain. She skipped ahead by asking, “How about your father?”

Gary governed himself a little and said, “Dad was just coming in from the night shift.”

“Was?”

“You know, night shift? Overtime?”

“Just then you talked like you weren't actually dreaming.”

Gary didn't say anything.

“And then what happens?”

Gary said bitterly, “As if you actually wanted to hear.”

“Only if this is helping.”

He sighed. “Another room and this colored girl is sleeping on a cot. No. She's not sleeping, she's pretending to sleep. Her back is to me. And I lie down next to her and she's hot for it. She knows what she wants and so do I. And one thing leads to another and I'm touching her, and then she spoils it. She speaks. Her speaking is how I wake up.”

“You recognize her?”

“She's not the girl. She's changed. She says angry things.”

“Angry things?”

He gave that some thought before saying, “I mean, things that make me angry.”

“You keep calling it a nightmare.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How come you're scared?”

He paused before replying. “It's how I look when I get up from the bed, the bed where the girl was sleeping. My jeans and sweatshirt are soaked with blood. You can hear it dripping onto my shoes, and there's a pool of blood on the carpet. And I've got an ax in my hand.”