Read Online I Don't Like Where This Is Going by John Dufresne - Free Book Online Page A

mask, stuffed in myearplugs, and stretched out under the covers. Django hopped up on my chest, stuck his wet, cold nose under mine to see if I was breathing. I’ve had insomnia since I was a kid. Cam, up on the top bunk, slept like the dead. My frustrated father once whispered in my ear, “Why won’t you sleep, honey?” I said I didn’t want to sleep because I didn’t want to be alone. And nothing has changed.

4
    W HAT WOULD SLEEP be without a monster lurking in the dark?
    I was wrong, of course, to think I ever slept alone. Every night the people I unconsciously contrived visited me in dreams, and last night’s dreams were uniformly distressing. In one, I made several annoyingly shy toddlers weep by asking them hideously avuncular questions like, What is your favorite subject in school? and, What do you want to be when you grow up? My words were met with mute disdain, but I wanted them to like me so badly that I felt compelled to impart some palliative wisdom that they might groove on. Children, I said, be bright in your lavish youth because time darkens everything. And that’s when one sobbing boy bit his lip, shut his eyes, and told me I was stealing his childhood.
    I woke when I heard the bee wranglers setting up their ladders and estimating the gallons of honey they’d harvest from this job. I tried to remember which Renaissance artist it was who first proffered the artistic and philosophical advice I’d inflicted on the children in the dream. After I’d dressed, I e-mailed Elwood Wingo, the TV reporter, explaining who I was and why I wanted to speak with him. He answered immediately and told me to meet him ata certain food truck parked on Fremont at noon. Bay came home from his long and successful night at the tables with breakfast burritos, Bloody Marys, and a lovely young woman named Mercedes Benz. I made coffee and set the table. “Your name,” I said.
    â€œMy father had a droll sense of humor,” Mercedes told me.
    I passed on the Bloody Mary.
    â€œHe was so droll my mother left him and joined a cult.”
    I said, “Which?”
    â€œBranch Davidians. She took me with her.”
    â€œWaco.”
    â€œWe had been disfellowshipped by that time. When Koresh started raising the dead, Mom packed our bag. We took the bus to Colorado City, Arizona, and Mom married an FLDS Mormon with three other wives and two mentally retarded sons. One of the wives was fourteen.”
    â€œHow old were you?”
    â€œTwelve.”
    Django brushed up against Mercedes’s leg. I refreshed our coffees. She lifted Django to her lap, and he allowed her to scratch him under the chin.
    I said, “Were you worried you’d be next at the altar?”
    â€œYes, but by then my whimsical father had come to rescue me, and we moved here to Vegas. I went to school for the first time.”
    Django looked deeply into Mercedes’s eyes and bit her finger. She said, “He’s a naughty boy.”
    One of the bee wranglers whooped. He’d located the queen. In ancient Egypt, a man like Arthur was called the Sealer of Honey. The harvesting of honey began in Lower Egypt in first dynasty, and the pharaoh was called the Bee King, and Osiris was worshipped in the Mansion of the Bee. Mercedes tapped Django’s nose and told him, “No!” He sprang from her lap and shot off for theliving room, but slid into the cabinet beneath the sink making his turn. He just lay there like he’d meant to do it, dignity intact. Mercedes said her mom was still in Colorado City and had four other children whom Mercedes had never met. Her dad, she said, was a nomad. He called every few months. Last call came from Alberta. He keeps drifting farther north. The cold seems to comfort him.
    Mercedes worked as a waitress at Yardbird Southern Table at the Venetian and shared an apartment in Spring Valley with another waitress. She took creative writing classes at UNLV. I said