The Angry Dream Read Online Free PDF

according to rule. With other people’s money, yes—with surety of his own success.
    That was not gambling. He was too much of a businessman to owe any gigantic sum, and less man enough to pay what he owed without somehow coming out on top. Where did the money go?
    As I passed the sawmill, a man ran suddenly into the road. He staggered and lurched drunkenly, running directly at the car down the middle of the road, waving his arms.
    I hit the brakes hard and Bunk began barking, short, strident yaps, his nose pressed to the windshield, paws up on the dash. The car slid in the wet-clay road, fishtailed as I tried to bring it to the shoulder. It caught in ruts, straightened out. The man kept waving his arms, shouting, and I managed to stop the coupé not three feet from him.
    “Harper!”
    He was a tall, broom-thin man, wearing a dark ragged suit, dirty white shirt and a knotted rag of tie. His hands looked skinny and cold, his dirty gray hair a thick mat on his head. He needed a shave, and across the car’s hood I could see the raw beeflike look to his eyes.
    “Al Harper?”
    I checked the rearview mirrow. No cars in sight. I got out and walked toward him.
    He was very drunk, his clothes wet. He looked as if he’d slept out all night.
    “Al Harper?” he said again.
    “Yes?”
    He stood by the front bumper of the car, cringing a little. He smelled strongly of the barnyard, and of fierce liquor.
    “What do you want, man?”
    He was grinning, saliva running from one corner of his mouth, his eyes slyly watchful.
    “Herb Spash,” he said.
    I still did not understand. Then something about him, some attitude, brought it back. Herb Spash, newly married just before I left town. He had been the town barber, and a good barber—taking up the trade from his father before him.
    “Herb,” I said. “Yes.”
    He suddenly began to weep, standing there. Tears sprang to his eyes, his nose ran. He coughed, lurched around and laid his head on his arms across the car’s grill. His shoulders hunched and rocked.
    “What is it, Herb?”
    He looked up, tears running down his whiskered, dirty cheeks. He began shaking his head.
    There was agony in his face. He turned and began running off toward the sawmill buildings, hulked over there under broken-limbed elms and sparse hickory.
    “Herb.” I started after him, then stopped.
    Spash was running in a blind stagger. He tried to leap the ditch off the road and fell headlong. He crawled up the far side, got to his feet, ran into the lot where the mill buildings stood and vanished around the wet side of a huge sawdust pile.
    All this time, Bunk had been barking. As I got beneath the wheel, he ceased and whimpered faintly.
    Herb Spash had wanted something. He had not been able to bring himself to say what.
    I suddenly wanted to get back to the house, clean it up, then sit and think. The sky was gray again, the sun was gone, the hills dark with cold shadows.

THREE
    The hound had vanished.
    I cleaned the kitchen and dining room, closed the glass doors between the dining room and the living room. I shoved the table and chairs out of the dining room, brought in a couch and an easy chair. The old kitchen wood cookstove would keep the room warm. Already it was much colder than yesterday. I avoided the rest of the house, but once I’d got the shelves stacked with food, everything else in order, I went into my father’s den, where I’d slept last night.
    Dirt layered tables and chairs, bookcases, and the gigantic old secretary. This was what drew me. It had been his desk, forever stuffed and jammed to bursting with papers and ledgers that marked his personal history in Pine Springs.
    I opened the desk below the glass doors.
    The desk was empty. There was not a single shred of paper, not a letter, nothing. I went through all the drawers, including the two secret back panels I’d discovered as a child. There were four marbles, a line and fishhook still holding the dried carcass of a worm that had