Thief of Dreams by John Yount

Author:John Yount
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497669796
Publisher: Open Road Media

EDWARD TALLY

He pulled the Packard up to the curb, turned off the ignition, and stared through the windshield down the street of row houses. But he didn’t know he was staring until sometime later when he caught himself at it. After he had forbidden himself to think of Madeline and James, his mind often seemed to go altogether blank, and he would discover himself gazing dry-eyed and numb into space. Not even glancing up to Paris’s third-floor windows, he got out of the car and opened the trunk where he’d hidden the enormous pink elephant from Womb Broom and Ironfield since he wouldn’t have been able to tolerate the slightest teasing about it. Paris had two days off before she went on the night shift and was fixing his supper for the first time ever, but he knew he’d bought the elephant for strange and possibly perverse reasons he himself didn’t understand. It was a ridiculous-looking thing, google-eyed, cotton-candy pink, and as big as a hog, so she was sure to like it. He tucked it under his arm, gathered up a fifth of Canadian whiskey, and slammed the trunk lid with his elbow. Across the sidewalk he went and, after some difficulty getting through the door, up the narrow, creaking stairs, the elephant pressing against the wall, pushing him off balance, and making him stumble as though it were another person trying to jostle past him. Madness. If he wasn’t thinking about Madeline, how come he could feel her with him every single moment? Nitwit, he told himself, asshole, don’t think of anything that ever happened to you. Think of the future. No. Not good. No good at all. Paris, he told himself, think of Paris, and he struggled toward the third-floor landing, he and the elephant like two fat men trying to get through a narrow doorway at exactly the same time.

Just yesterday Ironfield and Womb Broom had gotten their one and only glimpse of Paris, waving and throwing kisses from the sidewalk in front of her hotel as the three of them drove past on their way home from work. “Mercy,” Womb Broom said, although he disapproved. It was all right for a man to be unfaithful only if everything was fine between him and his wife. If not, then being unfaithful was evil and destructive and menacing to all things sacred.

But Ironfield’s scalded eyes had studied Paris only a second. “Mercy, shit!” he said. “If that sweet-looking bitch had as many dicks sticking out of her as she’s had stuck in her, we’d all take her for a goddamned porcupine.”

On the next-to-the-last step, he barely stubbed his toe, but it was enough to make him stumble headlong against her door. He rested a moment, sweat crawling, like secret misery, out of his sideburns. Don’t think at all, he told himself and knocked on the door with his forehead before he bothered to get his feet under him. It didn’t feel bad.

“Is that you, cutie?” Paris called. “You get in here.

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