Dreams That Burn In The Night (9 page)

His dreams did not
terrify him but he did wake up a lot of times in the morning with the feeling that the entire
population of Mintfrappe had walked across his tongue in their socks.

As blood dripped
from his thorn-damaged knuckles, waves of
gray matter fluttered like clouds in his brain. He just had to man­gle something, to bash
its stupid breathing face in. Tear its legs off, get hair between his teeth, see pulp, pulp. The
more he thought of it, the more he felt like going berserk.

He cursed like a
madman and went boiling off into the jungle again. He smashed through a particularly thick clump
of bushes and fell like an old stuffed duck with loose wings into the river. The river was dry,
choked with dust and boulders. He missed the dust.

He sat there, numb
from the bruised hip up, numb down to the toes too. There he was, a once reasonably intelligent
chiropodist, living a comfortable life among the feet of other people, maybe a guy a little too
hung up on ... Who the hell was doing all that screaming?

He looked up on the
bank and saw a dimpo bird shrieking like a five-alarm fire. Oh Christ, if he only had a gun! He
used to have a gun but one of the damn aliens ate it. He'd found the pearl han­dles with teeth
marks in them. That was all that was left.

He picked up a rock
and heaved it with all his might at the bird but he missed it completely and it flew off
screaming even louder. Sanderman gave it up.

Every day Sanderman
went a little bit berserk in the jungle. All it had to do was rain. Just once. Just one little,
insignificant day of rain and he could get out of there. The river was the only way out and the
only way out was dry. The time when the rains should have come was already gone. Long since gone.
The only way into the village of Mintfrappe was down the river after the rains came. He had been
assigned there until the rains came and his replacement could boat in as he, Sanderman, rode the
river out.

The village he was
stranded in was surrounded by impenetrable jungle. A hundred times he had set out to beat his way
back to civilization only to find himself back at the village of Mintfrappe. He had tortured
dreams of being stuck there forever. What if it never rained ever? What if Candy Boxes ran off
and married a lunar-module salesman? His life was a nightmare of just those sorts of hideous
possibilities, all the more hideous because he was, so to speak, up the river without a
river.

His anger spent,
his hip bruised, he limped back into the village
compound with his hands over his ears. He was unable to shut out the inevitable
sound of the nutcracker birds the natives kept as pets. There was a continuous cracking sound.
Crack. Crack. It continued unabated twenty-four hours a day. Crack. Crack. When they ran out of
nuts, they did impressions. Crack. Crack. It brought tears into his eyes.

An old
purple-headed man crawled out of one of the doorways to the huts. One of his legs looked like a
CARE package for Dr. Frankenstein.

"I hurts my
hoofer," said the old man, smiling like he deserved praise. "Will Master look, see, view, get
eyeball of, leg?"

The old man shook
his purple head from side to side like a dog suppressing a sneeze.

"Nuts!" said
Sanderman with a look of disgust. "Can't you see I'm crazy?"

"Eye is
twenty-twenty," said the old man. "You describe, I tell you if see it. What colors is it most
of?"

"Nuts," said
Sanderman with very little feeling left in the statement by now.

"Colors of nuts,
most sure," said the old man, and he fell over when his bad leg collapsed under him without
warning.

Sanderman bent over
him and unwrapped the strip of bark that one of the native women had tied around it. An old dead
rat fell out of the wrappings. It was a dead rat of the long-dead variety.

"What the hell is
this doing in there!" screamed Sanderman.

"Lunch," said the
old man innocently.

Without a moment of
hesitation, Sanderman turned around and tossed his cookies all over the ground. He tossed them in
one beautiful, continuous stream that splashed merrily over his shoes.

The old man stared
at the remains of Sanderman's lunch on the ground with the respectful eye of the gourmet, with
the specula­tive eye of the comparison shopper. Fortunately, Sanderman was unaware of it or he
would have been bent over even longer, pumping long after his well was dry.

"What you say,
Master? You cure leg up? Put the fix cure up?" said the old man, wanting to know.

Sanderman, holding
his stomach with one hand, picked up the rat with the other and tossed it over his
shoulders.

"Lunch," said the
old man sadly as it flew over Sanderman's shoulder.

Sanderman ground
his teeth together so hard his gums got flesh wounds and bent over to examine the wound again. It
reminded him of a girl he knew in New York. The city, not the state. She always wore red socks.
She had a pimple on her right knee. Or was it her left? He couldn't remember her face but the
knees were very familiar.

"Filthy!" said
Sanderman. "You're dying! I told you! I told you! How many times did I tell you?"

"At least," said
the old man calmly.

The whole leg was
rotten. It was falling off. It was so rotten moss was growing on one side of it. It was so rotten
the wood­peckers would be after him in a week or two, thought Sanderman with what was hardly a
rational thought since there were no woodpeckers in Mintfrappe.

Everybody was sick
with something. It was the national pas­time. The climate of Mintfrappe was lousy. The weather
featured mild and balmy diseases, festering tomorrow with fever highs in the low hundreds. The
village idiot used to have worms in his ears. He had put them there himself. They kept crawling
out. He was the only one too stupid to catch something. He was the only healthy one in the whole
village and was universally despised. The village idiot was the old man. He finally settled on a
surprise amputation which didn't work. At least not completely. He fainted before he got halfway
to the bone of his leg. In that sense, he had failed, but the resultant infection had brought him
into his own socially. The fact that he was dying of it was the height of fashion. Of late,
however, the old man had begun to show a markedly hostile attitude toward the prevailing notions
of what was considered fashionable. That was why he was the village idiot. He had a short
attention span and could never finish any­thing.

"Will you cure, fix
up, me with the stinger in seat box?"

"Get out of here!"
roared Sanderman. "I hope the toes on your other foot fall off too!"

"Why, thanking you
most much," said the old man, smiling happily at the thought of further deterioration of his
body.

Sanderman watched
him limp away and he didn't know whether he was supposed to be angry or disgusted or depressed.
He worked at trying to be all three but then he thought about the
picture on the wall of Candy Boxes' legs and he settled on being
suicidally depressed.

He still had the
urge to kill something, a feeling in no way dampened by the legs on the wall of his cabin. If
anything, Candy Boxes' legs were a further incitement to riot. Aren't legs always what cause
riots? It seemed that it must be so to Sanderman.

A drop of moisture
splashed coolly against his forehead. It struck softly but had the effect of an explosion on
Sanderman.

He leaped into the
air, head reared back, mouth open to re­ceive the liquid. Rain! Rain! Rain! His blessed rain! His
ticket back to Candy Boxes! A drop of liquid melted on his tongue and his eyes sunk into his
head. He looked like he had just been mounted and stuffed. His eyes looking up, his ears hearing
that sound. He gagged. Crack. Crack. He threw up with nothing left to throw up. Those damn
nutcracker birds! He fell to the ground, completely fagged from gagging. He'd had quite a day.
Sander­man closed his eyes wearily. He could just see it

At this very
moment, Candy Boxes would be putting a slug in the jukebox back on earth, U.S.A. Back there in
Mother Flicker's Bar and Billiards room. She'd be shooting pool, leaning over the table, her
boobs sometimes hanging right down into the side pockets when she was lined up just right. It
drove him crazy just thinking about it. And she had a pitcher of beer at her table. Ice-cold beer
and the glass she was pouring it in was almost clean by at least two days. It was driving him
crazy.

Someone tapped him
on the shoulder. It was the old man again.

"Can I eats belt
buckle?" asked the old man.

"What?" screamed
Sanderman, his hand unconsciously straying to the worn metal buckle of his Planetary Foreign
Legion-issue belt. "What!"

"Owed me for lunch
rat throwed without being to find," said the old man, teetering on one leg in front of Sanderman.
The old man looked determined.

He left Candy Boxes
with one of her breasts in the side pocket. He tore the belt off with a kind of lethal frenzy and
thrust it at the old man with a vicious swing. The old man fell over sideways with the belt
wrapped around his neck. Sanderman seemed un­aware of the old man's tumble. Just as the old man
began gnawing on his belt buckle, Candy Boxes sank the eight ball and an astronaut reached out
and dragged her under the table.

Sanderman screamed
with impotent fury and went dashing madly off in the direction of the jungle again. He ran
headfirst into a tree and that brought him back to his senses, in the sense that he imagined that
it knocked the astronaut out. He slid down the side of the tree and rested.

Almost in front of
him, the bushes parted and a lizard shaped like a Volkswagen with a tongue stepped out into the
sunlight. The perfect victim. Sanderman's hands squeezed imaginary pulp in anticipation of the
lunge. Just as he was ready to spring all two hundred pounds of him on the helpless lizard, his
attention was distracted by a rather large snake of the unkissably poisonous va­riety. It was one
of those snakes in the who-to-avoid-and-what-not-to-touch category. It had an unpleasant talent
for being fa­tally poisonous. It was a foogi snake, the most dreaded reptile in
Mintfrappe.

The snake oozed
toward the lizard, which promptly froze in its tracks, its tail going limp like a stock market
quotation.

"Kill it," shouted
Sanderman, aware that the snake needed no cheerleading section.

The snake moved on
oiled gears, coiling like a crocheted doily just inches from the doomed lizard's snout. The snake
moved its head from side to side in a hypnotic, sleep-inducing rhythm.

"Kill it for me!"
whispered Sanderman.

Suddenly, a shadow
fell over Sanderman and he looked up at the sky. For the first time in months, the sky was full
of clouds.

"The rain!" he
shouted. "The rain!" He was in an absolute de­lirium, overjoyed to tears.

He brought his head
back down, taking his eyes off the sky, and looked once more at the doomed lizard and the foogi
snake.

The foogi snake had
fallen asleep and the lizard had already ingested a third of him.

Two days later,
Sanderman pulled what was left of the roof of his shack off of what was left of the rest of his
body. It had been one hell of a storm. It had been a real frog strangler. Yes, sir, a dust storm
like Mintfrappe had never seen before and gale winds up to ninety miles an hour. Dust and more
dust and nothing but dust. He spat out dust like an upchucking Sphinx.

If there had been
something left standing, he would have hanged himself from it immediately, but the whole place
was flatter than Lizzie Borden's love life. He crawled out from under the building slowly. There
was a persistent buzzing in his ears. It was increasing in volume.

It seemed to be
coming from above him. He was afraid to look up for fear his head, when once bent back, would
continue back­ward until it fell off. He took a chance anyway.

It was a spaceship.
It was preparing to touch down. He blinked his eyes to make sure it was real. It was real. He let
out a whoop, staggered to his feet, and began tottering in the direction of the ship.

It touched down in
a great uprush of dust as the jets fanned the ground, easing the big ship to a soft, near-perfect
touchdown.

The ramp was down
before he got there. The hatch opened as he hit the edge of the ramp. Candy Boxes stood framed in
the hatchway, her head the only thing visible.

Sanderman's head
stuck to the roof of his mouth. He had her legs etched indelibly on his mind. How he had ached
for the touch of them! The sight of them! Glorious legs, wonderful legs of the evening! Like two
poles of pearls shifting toward the center of the universe! Legs! Legs like drink-stirring rods
made out of honey and satin! Legs that were win, place, and show at the hundred-dollar window!
Legs that played the tuba in the back seat of his mental car! Legs! Legs!

He stood paralyzed
at the edge of the ramp. Her face didn't exist. The dog had eaten it away much too long ago. It
was her legs that were his memory of her. How he longed to tie his tongue around her dimpled
knees! How he ached to encircle her ankles with his socks!