Devil's Dream by Madison Smartt Bell Read Free Book Online

alone,” she said. “They’re apt to mistreat him.” Her pale hand darted for the handle of the door.
    “Well,
you
can’t go in there—” John was saying, but he was too slow. Using both sticks, he struggled in after her, into the thick funk of liquor and smoke. Jerry stuck the pipe in his pocket, snatched his hat off his head and followed. Someone had risen to block Mary Ann’s path.
    “Miss, you cain’t—”
    “Don’t you dare put that hand on me.” Flaring her nostrils, she drew herself up.
    The man fell away from her. “That’s Forrest’s wife.”
    “Run the nigger out, at least!” someone called, with a curse, and another man said, “That’s Forrest’s nigger.”
    Forrest sat at a table with his back to the door, his head sunk between shoulders so stiff they seemed to tremble, lank hair running sweat into his collar. It was close in the dark room, but not so hot as all that. At his left hand was a heap of silver dollars, and a neater stack of gold eagles high enough the sight of it made her breath come short. Under his right hand was a pistol.
    She moved counterclockwise around the table till she had come within his field of vision, but he did not seem to see her. The red holes of his eyes tilted toward the spot on the table where the dice rattled between a pair of nail-bitten hands that scooped and shook and rolled them again, all to a low monotonous chant—she did not even want to make out the words of it. She had seen him so before, though seldom—when he was in his most terrible rage. Or not quite so. As a child she had once seen a fire eating away the core of a house till all its timbers were red coal and ash in the shape of a house with none of its substance, and maybe what she was seeing now was more like that.
    “Mister Forrest,” she said. “It’s time to come home.”
    The dice spun on the table, were smothered by a greasy cuff, raised and rolled another time. She called again and still he did not hear her.
    “John,” she said. “Pick up the money.”
    The other gamblers’ faces were hidden, shaded away under thebrims of slouch hats, plug hats—only Forrest was bareheaded, his hair flaming out like the mane of a lion. John nodded to Jerry, who began scooping the coins off the table edge into a bag so long and narrow it probably had once been a sock. At that Forrest coiled and clutched up his pistol, but John dropped one of his sticks to cover the gun hand.
    “Goddammit, Bedford. You’ll not shoot your own blood over a dirty pair of dice.”
    Mary Ann completed her circuit of the table and set her hand on Forrest’s other shoulder, a calming touch she meant it to be, but now he turned his red rage on her, flinching and twitching this way and that like a blind man stung by invisible bees. The man across the table had palmed the dice and scraped back his chair, beginning—“Lookahere, lady, you got no right”—but another man snatched at his sleeve to quiet him. Forrest might well remember an insult to his wife when he came to himself and if he did he would make them pay.
    “Come away, Mister Forrest,” she said. “Your children want you.”
    Still he did not seem to see her, though he’d stopped writhing in his seat.
    “Fanny wants you,” she said slowly.
    Something collapsed in Forrest’s face as he turned in the direction of her voice. “Whar is she? Whar’s little Fan?”
    “Come along with me,” Mary Ann said. “I’ll take you to her.”
    John managed to get the pistol away from Forrest as he rose, knocking over the chair he’d been sitting in; he tucked it into his own belt. Forrest’s hat had fallen under the table; Mary Ann crouched down to retrieve it. The pack of onlookers parted before them. Outside, the dawn was turning blue.
    “Go on home,” Mary Ann said to John and Jerry once they were clear. “I’ll walk him cool.”
    Jerry raised the sock of money mutely.
    “Just set that on my chest of drawers, if you would,” she said. “I’ll see to