Slowly, dazedly, I looked around me. A couple of children were watching
me in owlish wonder; a man had stopped some thirty yards away, staring
at me over his shoulder; the woman in the next-door trailer was frozen
at her window; even the birds were silent in the trees overhead. The
whole world around me seemed to be arrested, waiting for me to come
back to it.
My gaze shifted to my mother's face. I moved and the scene came alive
again, like a motion picture that has been momentarily stopped and then
resumes, the figures jumping into motion to complete the half-finished
gesture, the interrupted phrase.
"I don't know," I said slowly. "I don't know."
I lit a cigarette and opened a can of beer and took a long cool drink,
all the while trying to organize the confusion in my mind, trying to
understand what had happened to me. My mother kept pressing me to
explain what had made me cry out, and I had an impulse to assure her
that it had just been a dream. It was several minutes before I felt
capable of trying to put into words what I had seen. I still felt oddly
detached, as if I had been away on a long trip and had only just got
back so that I hadn't had time to unpack or re-orient myself to the old
familiar setting.
I told her the story without softening its raw edges, quietly and
dispassionately, trusting in a mother's willingness to believe that
her son was neither a liar nor a madman. When I had finished I looked
at her expectantly, even a little apprehensively. In the telling, the
story had begun to sound fantastic. For the first time, I thought that
maybe I had actually fallen asleep in the sun without realizing it
and been awakened by the nightmare. But my mother's reaction was so
startling that I forgot my doubts.
For several seconds, she stared at me in silence. Without warning her
eyes filmed over and a tear spilled through her lashes to trickle down
her cheek. In dumb fascination, I watched the slow progression of that
single tear down her weathered skin.