Hunts in Dreams by Tom Drury Page B

blackberries.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œTell me about ghosts.”
    They drank from their respective glasses while Colette told of traveling ghosts, who howl along with train whistles — Micah must have heard some of them, living as he did by the tracks — and paper ghosts, who mess up documents, and jealous ghosts, who call on the telephone and ask for people who aren’t there. Also touching ghosts, who give the shivers, and bridge ghosts, such as the so-called Baby Mahoney, and vain ghosts, which are the only ones that can be seen, and mumbling ghosts, who are responsible for the phenomenon of one person turning to another in a quiet room and asking, “Did you say something?”
    â€œDo the men you married ever come back as ghosts?” said Micah.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThey say Morris hit a train.”
    â€œEugene hit the train, who would have been your grandfather. Morris just fell over one day. He was before Eugene. The last to go was Jack Sandover.”
    â€œI’m scared.”
    She nodded, seemed far away. “Fear is a hard thing.”
    â€œI don’t know what to do about it.”
    â€œFinish your drink and say goodnight.”
    She picked up the tray and left. Micah was alone in the living room. The music had stopped, but at least she had left the light on. He stretched out on the davenport. Wakefulness was like a fire inside him, and if he did nothing but lie still, he knew very well, it would soon be burning out of control. Adults seemed not to understand how desperate a child could get being awake when no one else was.
    Maybe he should get a book. A cupboard by the kitchen door held a hardback guide to game animals. He took it down and returned to the davenport, where he lay on his back with his right ankle balanced on his left knee. He rested the book on his stomach and flipped the pages. Th e photographs were black-and-white and nothing special. The porcupine looked like a wig tossed in the grass, and the jaguar’s eyes were glassy from the light of a flashbulb. Micah was surprised to see the porcupine listed as a game animal. Most of the pages had no pictures, and many contained maps of North America with boring shaded areas. Impatiently he turned pages, arriving at last at the inside of the back cover. The paper had split, revealing a coarsely webbed backing. So this was how books were made.
    Micah closed the cover, behind which lay an empty triangle framed on either side by his legs and across the top by his right calf. He opened the cover again and the space was hidden. His legs, in other words, formed the archway of a mountain pass, and the book cover was a crude wooden door that had been fitted into the stone by robbers. The three robbers had dismantled a cabin and set the door into rock, and now they were coming home. He spoke their conversation softly to himself.
    â€œI’m so tired I could collapse right into bed.”
    â€œUnfortunately, we have no beds.”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter, since I can’t sleep anyway.”
    â€œYou can’t sleep because you don’t try to sleep.”
    â€œMaybe I will sleep on the stove.”
    â€œWe must steal some beds.”
    â€œYou will burn yourself sleeping on the stove.”
    â€œThat would be true if we had firewood, but as you remember, we’re fresh out.”
    â€œWe must remind ourselves to steal beds to sleep in and wood to burn in the stove.”
    He muttered on, but the game would have been more entertaining if he had had small figures to move about. He thought he remembered seeing some of his father’s or Jerry’s or Bebe’s old cowboys in a coffee can on the porch. The cowboys were made of yellow rubber, and their feet were joined by flat platforms in the shape of a peanut. In his mind’s eye, the can was in a cardboard box, along with a piston of an old car that was no longer around. But he knew he might find no piston and no