Machine Dreams

and sounds came indescribably close; his breathing was all she heard. They lay down fully clothed and he moved against her until he came, so hard in his pants that she could move her legs slightly apart and feel the shape of him. Danner had still never touched a man. Riley stroked her thighs, moving his hands higher in subtle circles until she clasped his fingers. He would major in business at LynchburgState, forty miles away; already, Danner knew she couldn’t stay with him. She didn’t confide in him, not really.
    “What do you think about this moving idea of your mother’s?” The cigarette smoked in the ash tray. Mitch drove with one hand and kept the other on the back of his neck, as though to cushion some blow.
    “Well, the house she’s picked out is nice.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with our own house. It was good enough for her when I built it. I don’t know what your mother is doing. She needs a good slap.”
    Danner turned to look at him. He’d combed his gray hair back with water; under the band of his hat it had dried in the teeth marks of the comb. The hat was a summer baseball hat with a green bill. In the shadow of the bill, his face was profiled. “Don’t you ever hit her,” Danner said evenly.
    Mitch tilted the hat back on his head and raised his voice. “I said a slap. I didn’t mean I was going to break her jaw.”
    “It doesn’t matter what you break. A man shouldn’t hit a woman.” Danner smoothed her skirt nervously, then asked, less assured, “Don’t you think I’m right?”
    “Hell,” Mitch said quietly.
    “Think how you’d feel if Riley hit me.”
    Mitch stubbed the cigarette out. The smell of ash mingled with the odor of mechanical air. “Riley shouldn’t be having anything to hit you about. If he could get that mad at you, you’re way too involved.”
    “We aren’t too involved.” Danner drew a deep breath, and she could taste a tinge of tobacco. “Why don’t you ever say these things to Billy? He goes out on dates.”
    “Your brother is just a kid, and that girl is his age. Riley is going off to college. I wasn’t born yesterday. If you’re going to go out, you should go out with someone in your own class.”
    Danner sat back in the seat and said nothing. Now he’d have words with Jean, a cold tense scene, while Gladys Curry sat at the kitchen table pretending not to listen. Danner knew the look on her mother’s face exactly: she would keep her expression impassive, her lips set hard. Danner felt the expression stealing over her own face, and she focused only on the road. The concreteglistened in the noon heat, a bright white band bending away toward Bellington.
    There was silence between them.
    Finally she said to her father, “You don’t have to worry about Riley, and that’s the truth.”
    He didn’t reply, but they drove along and the atmosphere gradually lightened. Danner dreaded working another ministers’ banquet, and the voyage to work became an interlude of privacy. Her father’s cars were always big and luxurious, not quite new, impeccably clean and cared for. The motor of the Chevrolet hummed evenly; they rode so smoothly that Danner felt lulled, almost sleepy. She leaned her head back on the seat. “Dad,” she said, “do you remember your dreams?”
    “Well, yes, don’t you?”
    “What do you dream about?”
    He looked out the window to his left, considering, then said slowly, “Haven’t remembered any in a long time.”
    Danner touched the air-conditioning vent and turned it toward her knees, then left her hand in the stream of cold. The heat outside was thick and fluid like clear paint. Bellington’s wooden frame houses flowed by, their big porches shaded and still with heat. “What’s the last dream you remember?” Danner asked.
    He tipped his hat back and ran his fingers along the curve of the bill. “Dreamed I was in a snowstorm,” he said.
    “Alone?”
    He was hesitant, or maybe responding to the pull of silence that punctuated most of his remarks in conversation. He looked over at Danner, half-frowning, half-smiling, as though she should already have known the answer. “I was driving in a snowstorm along a road,” he said, “and snow was flying at the windshield so fast you couldn’t see where you was going.”
    “Were you in this car?”
    “I don’t know. I was only watching the road.” He laughed. “Couldn’t see a damn thing.”
    “What happened next?”
    “Nothing, Hon. That’s all there was to