Danny
Danny had the same dream again. It seemed to visit him when he was scared or confused or missed his folks a whole bunch. The dream always started in the middle of the pond. Wind snapped across the hard surface of frozen water, flurries of snow whizzing past. He stared down at his skates with two different-colored laces and watched them slice over the ice that blurred under them. He was laughing even though his nose stung and his ears throbbed from the cold. Then everything changed. The ice groaned and shifted under his ice skates, followed by the sound of snow crunching under his feet, and then the crackling of breaking ice filled the air. Above him the sky drifted clear as a bell jar. He tried running from the sound, but the crackling just got louder and louder no matter how fast his legs took him, until that was all he could hear. Breaking ice.
The world below him gave way, and he got sucked into cold darkness. The cold touched every part of him, water soaking through his winter clothes. His arms flailed in the ice water as it wrapped around his body like a wet sleeping bag. Screams were cut short as water was sucked down into his lungs, and he kicked and thrashed, but he sank deeper and deeper into the black abyss. Above him he could make out the shadows of his desperate parents, reaching down for him and yelling for help. They were surrounded by a cone of light. The same sunlight penetrated the dark water’s surface, creating a hazy shaft of brightness that stopped short of reaching Danny. He kicked desperately to try to reach it. His hands stretched up toward the two shadowy forms that seemed to lean through the light. Under the water Danny could hear another cracking sound. It was louder than the one that had sucked him in. It sounded like hard claps of thunder. Loud and thick, and he could feel it in his bones. Ice collapsed all around the cone of light, and the shadowy figures plunged into the water over him. Their bodies twisted and swirled above him, creating clouds made up of thousands of tiny white bubbles of air. More water filled Danny’s lungs, and he sank deeper. He let it take him and stopped fighting. Just gave up. The image of the sun above him grew smaller and smaller until it was a tiny point of light.
Then voices broke through his dream. Men’s voices. They sounded familiar, but he had never heard them before in this dream.
“His jaw is broken in a few places. That much is for sure. Probably needs to be wired. Possibly surgery, but he’s gonna have to go to the hospital for X-rays to determine all that.” The man sighed with a hint of a dry chuckle. “I’ll be damned. Your deputy gave him a good walloping for sure.”
“Hell.” It sounded like the sheriff’s voice.
Danny’s eyes slowly flickered open. He stared up at the ceiling, where a bright exam light shone down on him. He tried to lift his head up, but a shock of searing, red-hot pain ripped through his body from crown to toe. It kinda felt like when he was playing with that yellow jackets’ nest behind the house when he was just a kid, but even worse. A few dozen angry wasps took after him and stuck their stingers in his face and neck and back. Danny had never felt pain like it again. Not until now.
Doc Pete put a warm hand to his chest. “Easy, boy.” Doc Pete always had a smile for Danny, but he wasn’t smiling now. His pockmarked face and smudged-up glasses stared down at him, real sad like.
Doc Pete looked over to Lester. “You going to run him up to the hospital?”
Lester shook his head. “This situation’s a little bigger than me right now. A homicide makes for state business. Fixing to put a call in to the Towanda state police office. Guess I need to call for an ambulance, too. Hell.”
“You want me to run over and take a look at Mindy?”
Lester shook his head again. “No need. She’s gone. No way around that.”
Danny turned to look at Lester and tried to speak. He wanted to know where Mindy had gone to. Maybe she was okay after all. He opened his mouth, but his tongue stuck thick in his throat and another shot of pain made his skull flinch with a flare of white light.
“Never thought this boy could hurt a fly. Can hardly believe he would do such a thing.” Doc Pete spoke to Lester like Danny wasn’t even there.
“Yup. Missus said the same sort of thing. But he was never the same after the accident. Losing his folks and all. Who knew what was ticking inside that brain of his?” The sheriff reached into his shirt pocket and grabbed his smokes. Tapped one out and offered one to Doc Pete. The doctor accepted and both men lit up and sucked on their cigarettes.
“Well. Mind if I use your phone? Need to make a couple of calls.”
“Help yourself. Might just as well brew us a pot of hot coffee. Figures to be a long night. A long night.”
Lester sighed again and followed Doc Pete out of the exam room, neither one of them turning around to look at Danny.
