The Westerling
In the dream Spenser walked toward the fading sun, already in motion and exhausted when the dream began, trudging mile after mile through heat and dust and long shadows and when he ran out of sun he also ran out of earth, and so he scavenged some dried brush and set to making a fire. Night rising cold and sharp-edged, as if it seeped from the black rock of the canyon walls that loomed on all sides. The night sky insane with stars. His thirst was a fearsome, living thing. One last mouthful from his bottle, blades of whiskey scratching the length of his throat, then pooling in his gut, bloodwarm.
He heard the baby before he saw it. Heard it mewling and thought the sound was coming from somewhere out in the immense darkness. Tiny whimpers, vaguely feral. Close by. Someone left a baby out here in the wilds. Spenser thinking in the dream.
He stumbled away from his makeshift camp, fireblind, arms outstretched in the black. The baby’s cries continued, but he couldn’t locate them. They seemed to be coming from all around. When Spenser made it back to the fire, the baby was there, wriggling in the dirt, straining against tattered swaddling.
The baby did not look at Spenser but it moved its lips and what came out was an old woman’s voice. It said, “I’ve been here since the beginning. Waiting. I’ll be here until the end.”
“What happened to you?” Spenser said.
“I burned. Puddles of flame lapped my life away.”
Spenser wanted to pick the baby up but found he couldn’t move, and then the baby was gone. In its place stood a young girl. Her hair was long and tangled and she wore a ratty cotton shift that was far too long for her body and hid her feet. Smoke purled from the corner of her mouth. Spenser thought she was drawing on a cigarette, but when he looked again he saw that the girl’s face was burned, the corner of her charred mouth fishhooked into a permanent black snarl. The girl stood there, staring at Spenser. Staring, snarling, smoking.
The fear in Spenser’s dream mouth tasted like an old penny.
“What should I do?” Spenser asked.
But the girl was gone. In her place stood an old woman in a rancid grey shawl, her body hunched at a cruel angle.
The old woman gabbled babytalk but somehow Spenser understood her and this is what she said: “I’m a baby. I’m your sister. I’m your baby sister. I burned in the fire.”
“I don’t have a sister,” Spenser said. “I have a brother. I have a brother but he is dead. He drowned.”
The old woman swayed in place. “Fire or water. It don’t much matter. It’s all black in the end.”
Spenser woke and remembered all of this, remembered the dream in full, not in words but in images, sensations. He doubted he could write it all down, so he didn’t try.
As terrifying as it was, there were nights later in his life when Spenser drifted off trying to will himself back to that ragged landscape. He thought he would like to say something different to that baby, that girl, that old woman. He thought he might ask them if they were witches, though he believed the answer to this question was yes, and he didn’t know what difference it would make. Perhaps if he could just paint the back of his eyelids with the setting sun hammering the underside of clouds purple and orange then he would fall asleep and find himself walking toward the fading light. Some evenings he denied himself fluids so he went to bed thirsty. But it didn’t make a difference. He never got back.
And the dream faded. As he aged, the dream fell away from Spenser’s mind like rotten parchment. At first Spenser started getting details mixed up. He couldn’t remember if his boots had been brown or black (they were deep blue), then couldn’t remember if it was the young girl or the old woman who sagged from the weight of a broken back.
Eventually Spenser thought the dream began with him starting the fire, forgot all about the painful walk through scrub and tumbleweed and dirt, then forgot all about starting the fire and thought the dream began with the fire already hissing and snapping, thought the dream began with him sitting beside the fire.
Slowly, relentlessly, the dream mouldered in the corners of Spenser’s mind until all that was left was his thirst, and the cut and burn of the whisky. Until the day before the day he died, Spenser remembered the whisky. The amber thieving of his ambered breath.
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