straight down from the sky. 'What a schmuck,' he added distantly.
'Give the man a break, Garth,' I said irritably. 'Veil chooses to live the life of a monk so that people he cares about won't be hurt, and you call him a schmuck.'
'I wasn't talking about Kendry.'
'Then who's a schmuck?'
'Anybody who'd camp out on the side of a mountain in weather like this.'
'What are you talking about?'
Garth crouched down to my eye level, pointed toward a mountain in the distance. 'About eleven o'clock, near the top of the second mountain. There's a fire up there. See it?'
I looked along the direction of his pointing finger, squinted into the gloom, but could see nothing but snow falling and the barely discernible outline of the mountains. 'No. You must be on drugs.'
'I don't see it now, but I'm telling you that I did see a fire up there.'
'Bullshit.'
Our argument about nothing was interrupted by the sound of a door opening and closing behind us, and we spun around. Jan Garvey, looking pale and with melting snow glistening on her face and clothes, stood just inside the doorway. A brown paper bag stuck out of her open purse. 'Forgive me,' the woman said softly. 'I still have so much feeling inside, and there's so much hurt associated with… the things you want me to talk about. I got scared. Thank you for understanding, and thank you for waiting. I do want to help in any way I can.' She set her purse down on a desk top, took out the bag. Inside was a bottle of bourbon and three plastic glasses. 'I can't fool around with the ghost of Veil Kendry without a little booze,' she continued with a wry smile. 'I hope you two like bourbon.'
'I love bourbon,' Garth said, 'and Mongo will drink anything that has alcohol in it.'
'Sorry there's no ice.'
'Ice will only ruin good booze,' Garth replied, bringing me my drink. We sat down in two of the student desks, watched as the woman downed her drink, immediately poured herself another.
'I feel him in this room,' she said with a shudder. 'We sat in this classroom together, in those desks back by the window.'
'How long did you know him?' Garth asked quietly.
'We grew up in this town together. He was my first lover, and he made me pregnant for the first time. I had to have an abortion. I went to some butcher who damn near killed me.'
'Jan,' I interrupted, 'those aren't the things we need to hear, and you certainly don't have to talk about them.'
'Please,' she whispered. 'You asked me to tell you anything and everything I remember. There's so much that I just didn't know where to start… so I started there.'
'Go ahead,' Garth said. 'You tell us anything you want, any way you want to.'
The woman nodded, sighed. 'It's all right. I can talk about it now-after a lot of craziness on my part and two broken marriages. There was always a lot of madness in this town. Maybe that's why I decided to come back here to teach; I'd finally defeated it, the madness, and I was proud of that.' She paused, passed a hand across her eyes. 'He may have come back for the opposite reason-the madness had finally defeated him.'
Suddenly I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. I straightened up in my desk, but it was Garth who asked the question.
'Who are you talking about, Jan? Veil Kendry?'
The teacher shook her head, gazed down into her drink. 'No, not Veil. Veil never came back.'
We waited for her to tell us whom she'd been referring to, but she resumed where she had left off, and neither Garth nor I wanted to interrupt her.
'I probably wound up with Veil because we were both wild,' Jan Garvey continued after a period of silence. 'But there was a big difference between the two of us. I was just a bad-ass kid out of control, with no self- discipline. A lot of Veil's craziness wasn't really his fault. He was born brain-damaged, you know.'
Garth and I looked at each other. 'We didn't know that, Jan,' I said. 'We'd like to hear about it.'
We watched as the woman slowly walked across the room to stand by the window. It had grown too dark in the room to see her features, but I figured she knew where the lights were if she wanted to turn them on.
'He almost died at birth of a very high fever,' she said in a low voice. 'He wasn't supposed to live more than a few hours. It's how he got his name; his parents gave it to him as a kind of prayer that he would pass safely through the veil separating death and life. Obviously, he did, but the fever damaged a part of his brain and he ended up with a curious affliction. He was-is-what physicians and psychiatrists call a 'vivid dreamer.' To Veil, his dreams have always been as real as everyday life. It was years before anybody realized it. As a child, when Veil would have a nightmare, he wouldn't wake up like a normal child when he had monsters of all sorts chasing him. His first hospitalization in a mental institution came when he was ten years old; he'd drunk gasoline in an attempt to kill himself.'
I shuddered, trying to imagine the unspeakable terror of a child when the ogres that chase all of us through dreams always caught him, perhaps did things to him; I wondered if phantom teeth sinking into dream flesh could cause real pain, suspected that they could.
'They kept him there six months during his first stay,' the woman continued, 'and it was there that they discovered his vivid dreaming. They treated it with medication, stabilized him, and sent him home. But this is a small town, and everyone knew where he'd been. By the age of eleven he'd been permanently branded as crazy, and the other kids constantly teased him.
'The medication helped, but one of its side effects was that it made him sleepy all the time. He had a choice-exist in a drug-fog most of the time and not have terrible nightmares, or do without the drug and suffer the consequences when he went to sleep at night. Veil was always incredibly gutsy, even as a kid. He kept challenging himself, trying to wean himself off the drugs. Then, finally, he found something to replace the medication.'
'Violence,' I said softly.
The silhouette of the woman's head against the window nodded. 'Yes. Without the medication, Veil was in a constant state of tension. He began to fight all the time. He almost always fought older and bigger boys, and-in the beginning-usually got beaten up. But he kept fighting, because he'd discovered that the fighting drained off the psychic poison in him, and he could sleep at night without suffering from the nightmares. Then he got sent back to the mental hospital, after he'd been kicked out of his house and gone to live with his aunt, when he almost killed the captain of the football team, who'd made the mistake of challenging a much smaller and younger Veil Kendry to fight. This time he was referred to the hospital by the courts.
'He spent almost all of his junior year in the hospital. We wrote each other constantly, I went to visit him, and he was sometimes allowed to come back for home visits. He changed a great deal during that year. He was still like a time bomb waiting to go off, but he was far more controlled and self-contained than he had been. He had new medication, which was far better than the stuff he'd been given before. Also, he had something else; someone at the hospital had begun teaching him the martial arts as an outlet for his aggression and a means of obtaining self- control. Veil practiced his martial arts and read about them every free moment. That second stay at the hospital saved him. He had tremendous respect for the teachers and therapists there, and maybe it was the way he talked about them that made me finally get my act together years later, go to college and get a degree in order to become a teacher myself. But that was a long time coming. I still had a lot of wildness to get out of my own system.
'Veil liked to roam at night on his motorcycle-and I roamed with him. By this time he'd gained a very big rep around the area as a fighter, and there was always somebody who wanted to take him on. Veil always obliged all comers, whether it was in the parking lots of bars or in some field where a fight had been prearranged. It wasn't long before a lot of money started changing hands at these matches, with Veil making a lot by betting on himself and giving large odds. Sometimes he'd fight three or four men in one night. I didn't understand something-not then. I thought Veil was fighting for the money, but he wasn't. The others were fighting for money, or a reputation as the man who beat Veil Kendry. Veil was literally fighting for his life, his sanity; fighting was the only way he could keep his demons at bay.'
There was a prolonged silence, and once I thought I heard Jan Garvey try to stifle a sob. However, when she spoke again, her voice was clear and strong.
'Then he got in trouble with some local sheriff's deputies. He was only seventeen, but he really was an incredible fighter, what with the karate he'd learned and the moves he was always making up. A lot of macho men around here didn't like the fact that a seventeen-year-old kid should have such a big rep. When one of the deputies
