The trees fascinated her, held her, dominated her. She thought trees, painted trees, dreamed trees. George cut trees, burned trees. The great American pioneer was to the creek, and spreading out, clearing around the clear pond now, being noisy and sweaty and happy, bellowing his songs as he worked, calling to Gwen to get the lead out with the cold beer.
Gwen dreamed that a furry little animal with long, sharp teeth was crawling over her body, chewing, taking her flesh, biting into her soft breasts, decapitating her nipples. She woke, screaming.
“Wha, wha,” George mumbled, sitting up.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just a dream.”
“Honey, go to sleep,” he said, wrapping her in his arms, all warm and moist and very male and dear to her. She slept in his arms and did not wake.
5
April’s warmth produced a forest of bracken fern in the cleared areas. George frowned at them. They were messing up his personal park. With malice in his eyes for all intruding plants, he attacked, pushing the big-wheeled lawnmower over the clearing and wrapping it around trees to cut the small shoots which grew next to the trunks, bare-headed, a handkerchief knotted as a sweatband around his forehead, chest bare, muscles being hardened by his work.
Gwen watched from the deck. She hadn’t been sleeping well. The power company people were digging a catch basin for spoil material directly across the waterway. On quiet nights the sound of earth movers and drag lines came and went with the movements of the wind. Fortunately, the work on the ocean side had been discontinued temporarily, so the drag line there, a huge thing, was quiet.
The warm sun lulled her into relaxation. The angry snarl of the lawnmower, close at hand, was a friendly noise, their own noise. It was steady. She dozed.
She heard a voice, perhaps George’s voice, but deepened, made hollow as if it reverberated inside a tin tunnel. “Underneath all fear is the fear of death. Pain is bearable, if we know it is a temporary pain. We have faith in our healing ability, but when we feel some irreparable happening, that is true terror.” A bulky form came at her. As in her childhood dreams, she seemed to be rooted to the ground, unable to move, swaying, making scant progress, fighting the force which held her. The mass roared down on her, huge teeth snapping at her. The mouth closed, clashing metal teeth, and she screamed once before she felt the tender flesh being punctured and rendered. Her upper body fell, ripped from her legs and stomach and hips, and blinding terror caused beads of perspiration as she sat upright with a jerk. There was a terrible pain in her chest. She called weakly, then screamed, her lungs emptying themselves in the effort. George heard her over the snarl of the mower, cut off the engine and ran to her.
“Maybe you’re pregnant,” he said, when she’d explained her fright. “Does it still hurt?” He was kneeling beside her, his hair damp with his sweat and his forehead band blackened and wet. “We’ll run into town and see a doctor.”
“No,” she said, eased. “It’s all right now.”
However, after more nights of eerie dreams, she went to work with George and then sat in a doctor’s office for most of the morning before being escorted into an examination room. She described her symptoms, the sleeplessness, the constant feeling of tiredness, and the unexplained pains which seemed to disappear when she was fully awake. She was not pregnant, although she and George were doing nothing to prevent it. Her major organs seemed to be working well. Her red cell count was a little low. She left the office after being assured that she was in basic good health and filled a prescription for vitamins and iron.
“He said I’m nuts,” she told George, as he puttered, head and face hidden inside a TV set.
“For that we have to pay money?”
“No, really. He said it was probably a reaction to the change. He said that whether or not I realized it I was probably deeply affected by the death of your parents and then the move into totally new surroundings, the excitement of building a new house and all. In short, he said it was just nerves.”
“What have you got to worry about?” George asked, coming up for air and looking at her seriously. “You’ve got a rich, charming, handsome sex fiend for a husband, a beautiful house, two hundred three and a quarter acres of swamp cut off from the world by a radioactive canal. You’re probably the best painter of twisted oak trees in the Western world. So what’s the worry?”
“No worry,” she said. “It’s just—” There was no word for it. It was just. Just that she was a fruitcake having nightmares which freaked her out?
She shopped for groceries, spent a pleasant hour talking with a dirty old man in a fantastic little junk shop, examined new books in the library, parked the M.G. on the waterfront and watched the working fishing boats come home with huge king mackerel, dolphin, and snappers, picked up George at four-thirty. At home she threw two club steaks into the oven, fried potatoes, opened a can of small green peas, and served a good Spanish wine. After dinner, George, feeling happy, stuffed, and relaxed, opened the gin and tonic season. She drank too much too fast, danced to thunderous music with the amplifier turned up full blast, so loud that the music could probably have been heard across the marsh and waterway in Ocean City, got gloriously giddy and silly, and wrestled on the rug with George, losing, of course. She slept soundly, to wake with a sour stomach and an aching head.
George was infuriatingly cheerful. He ate four eggs and drank half a tall can of V-8 juice and kidded her about her hangover. “At least I slept well,” she said.
“So the answer is to become an alcoholic,” he said.
“God, the cure is worse than the ailment,” she moaned, coming back to life slowly with a tall glass of ice water on top of coffee and V-8 juice.
That was the day Mandy died.
Feeling yucky and slightly suicidal, the usual after too much booze, she put on her private sun-bathing bikini and lounged on the balcony over the clear pond, letting the sun help, her sweat out the booze.
The dogs drank from the clear pond. This had worried Gwen at first, but George had sampled the water himself and declared it “fittin’.” He’d even sent a sample off to the state lab to have it analyzed. It showed a few harmless bacteria and some phosphates, which explained the clear green color, but it was pronounced harmless to livestock. So the dogs drank there and played there. Mandy, part hound with, perhaps, a bit of Labrador, loved the water and went into it often with great, bounding splashes. She was a loving dog, always full of spirit. So when Gwen noticed her staggering toward the clear pond, her attention was engaged immediately.
The big, black dog drank endlessly, and then staggered, feet crossing, to vomit into the sand. Gwen called her. The dog lifted her head but fell weakly. Gwen hurried to her. The dog’s eyes were large, the pupils dilated. As Gwen neared, she saw the dog squat to urinate and then stagger back to drink from the pond.
Gwen half-carried the animal to the balcony, where she petted her, talked to her, and offered sympathy. When the dog’s rapid breathing slowed early in the afternoon, Gwen thought she was recovering, but the breathing lessened until, just before Gwen ran in to dress, it was painfully infrequent and the dog seemed almost comatose.
Gwen strained to lift the dog into the back of the pickup truck, drove hurriedly into town, and stopped by the repair shop to tell George that Mandy was terribly sick. Mandy died on the way to the nearby small city, convulsing and then going into a coma from which she did not recover.
“Do you have any neighbors who don’t like dogs?” the veterinary asked.
“No neighbors at all,” Gwen said, having dried her tears.
“I hesitate to suggest it,” the veterinary said, “but the way you describe her symptoms makes it sound like poison. Do you put out rat poison or anything?”