Nebraska

“Have you hurt somebody?” Avis asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Is this a nightmare, or are you telling me something you've done?”

“A nightmare.”

“You're sure you know the difference?”

He didn't answer.

“Have you been in prison, Gary?”

“You could say that.”

“You out now?”

“At night.”

She ignored that; she thought he was trying for petty mystery by being intentionally vague. “You said she speaks, the sleeping woman. Could you tell me what she says?”

“Don't know.” She could hear him becoming more passive, pitying himself. His voice was like that of a punished child.

“Here's something you can try, Gary. Next time you get your nightmare, just look at your hand. You right-handed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Look at your right hand. You'll get power over your nightmare. You'll get rid of those people and you'll sleep. Could you try that?”

Gary wasn't paying attention. She could imagine his green eyes wildly straying, his lewd hand petting himself as he said, “I could try a lot of things with you.”

She sighed. “You're getting into trash talk now.”

“You think you could handle it?”

“Just be yourself, Gary.” She could hear nothing but quiet for such a long time that Avis said, “Are you there?”

And then she had an overpowering feeling that she wasn't alone downstairs, that his sleeplessness was phony, his night call a trick, that she was only being set up for harassment or rape, and a white boy who called himself Gary was creeping toward her even then. She heard his footsteps on the dining-room carpet, heard the soft bump and rasp of a wooden chair being slightly brushed by his jeans, but she was too frightened to turn. Her skin prickled and her heart trip-hammered, but she was otherwise stymied, her own body shrinking inside itself. She couldn't scream or run upstairs or even release the telephone from her ear. She smelled an overindulgence in Old Spice cologne and heard Gary say over the phone, “She's you.” And then his cold palms cupped her large breasts as though weighing them and, in his ignorance of women, crushed them painfully in his caress. Her legs mellowed and she nearly collapsed, but Gary lunged against her, holding her against the doorjamb as his chill lips skipped over her short hair in pecks, and she heard him whisper, “In my nightmare. She's a girl I know. And then she's you.”

Avis could only hang up the telephone, and with that his hard pressure eased up, his kiss disappeared. She spun around and the room was empty. Even the Old Spice fragrance was gone. And then the telephone was ringing again and she wept until it stopped.

His nightmare became hers, and she saw herself walking through a big house at night. Cold wallpaper on her fingertips, the steps yawping as she went up

stairs, fragrant rose bath salts in the air, a strip of light beneath one door, a girl singing along with The Temptations, and when Avis opened the door, an hour had passed and there was a pool of blood on milk-white bed linens and on the floor the horrible, hacked-apart body of a pretty young nurse. Her skin a cocoa brown.

Avis jerked up and pressed her racing heart with her hands as she placed herself in her own room, her nail polish on top of the dresser, the old, deep chair in the right spot, Claude's coveralls in a heap, and Claude piled up like railroad ties beside her.

She couldn't sleep. Avis looked in on the girls, pulling a green blanket up on Lorna, and then she went down to turn the gas up under a teapot. She got back all she could of the nightmare and again recognized her feelings as she looked at the young nurse's good body: jealousy, loathing, sexual passion. She ought to be for me.

She got a cup as the hot water piped and then stooped over with a pain in her side that wasn't her own. Her pain was a needle, then a spike, and the pain opened up wider than her own hips, and Avis dropped to the floor. His mother. She clasped her pelvis, crossing her arms. “Hush,” she said, and the pain was only a soreness, and then the soreness passed.

Avis opened her eyes and reached to the kitchen counter-top to pull herself up. “You poor old woman,” she said.

Claude sipped his coffee as Avis scrambled eggs for him in a measuring cup. A light mist grayed the morning. The yellow eggs sputtered when she poured them into the skillet. Claude said, “Could be a prank, you know. Could be white people want us outa here. Niggers movin’ in, wreckin’ the neighborhood.”

“Isn't just the phone calls, Claude.”

“Except you been havin’ days you seen right and days you seen wrong. You ain't at a hunnert percent yet. You could be messin’ up.”