Nightmare Country by Marlys Millhiser

nothing for a long time, just look forward to his increasingly intriguing dreams.
    Later that night Thad dreamed of the same brick building he had before. This time he walked without hesitation through the door. The room was the same; the female in it—different. An overweight girl sat at the table, her eyes and cheeks puffy, a handwritten letter in her hand. She stared over it at some inner torment. Crumpled Kleenex littered the table, and a half-eaten sandwich, so colossal it looked as if she’d emptied the contents of the refrigerator between two slices of bread.
    She finally blinked, laid down the letter, and picked up the sandwich. Fresh tears welled as she tipped her head to get her mouth around it. A slice of tomato, smeared with mayonnaise slipped out the other end.
    The cemetery dog was not in her usual place the next morning, and Thad walked around the burial ground at the sea’s edge looking for her. Finally he laid the breakfast in the sandy hole hollowed out by her body and went back for his father’s extra mask and snorkel and the top half of a wet suit. When he came out, two other dogs were fighting over her food. Had something happened to her in the night?
    On the dock in front of the Mayapan, Stefano Paz’s sons carried air tanks to the dive boat, an open craft with shelf seating rimming the gunwales and wooden boxlike affairs running down the center with holes to hold the tanks safely in place. Everything else was open deck, already littered with masks, fins, wet suits, Styrofoam coolers, picnic hampers, and two watermelons.
    â€œThe iceman cometh,” said one of the men softly to Bo Smith, and Thad was surprised to find them looking at him.
    â€œHey, turkey, we got you air. Need anything else?”
    â€œFins. Tens. Lost mine having breakfast.”
    â€œTeach you to eat with frogs. Can you outfit him, Eliseo?”
    Both the Pazes were grinning at the breakfast remark. But Thad got his fins, and the boat soon filled. The only woman aboard was the lady with the notebook, introduced to him as Martha Durwent. Her husband, Greg, sat between two of the boys from lower Alabama. She was the only other one who looked out-of-place, so he sat beside her.
    Two girls called from the beach, and running and giggling, carried a giant crock covered with aluminum foil. They managed to shove the crock into the hands of the divers before the boat swung away.
    Bo lifted a corner of foil and made a face. “Potato salad? In the Caribbean?”
    One cooler harvested bottles of beer before the boat got to the reef. Thad thought of all the warnings he’d heard about drinking and diving being more dangerous than drinking and driving. But he’d rarely come across a harder-drinking group than American sport divers on vacation. Maybe Dixie had reason to worry.
    The only cigarettes aboard were lit by Martha and the two Pazes.
    Aulalio Paz stood at the rear of the boat, his feet to either side of the rudder, a four-foot horizontal pipe about two inches off the floor. His eyes searched out coral landmarks and passages in the shallow lagoon. His brother, Eliseo, worked the engines up front. Barrel-chested men with short legs and protruding, sagging stomachs. The only sign of Stefano in them was their perfect teeth.
    Aulalio swayed back and forth as he guided the boat between his ankles. Behind him Mayan Cay looked like a jeweled paradise by Walt Disney. Thad wondered how it looked in a hurricane. Martha Durwent shivered as if she’d heard his thought. She turned toward the surf breaking on the reef ahead of them. Foam fingers crawling into the lagoon were all that was left of the broken sea.
    The dive boat shuddered as it entered a narrow channel, rose to crest the first roller in the real ocean, and swooped down to spill spray across the divers before rising for the next swell.
    Martha closed a wet notebook. “I knew I shouldn’t have come. But they”—her gesture included