Read The Reincarnation of Peter Proud for Free Online

rolling hills, immaculate fairways, white sand traps bleaching in the sun. Marcia was wearing a white skirt, white blouse, and sneakers, white bandanna around her black hair. The lady in white. They were not playing a regular game, but simply volleying. He was dominating the game. Shouting instructions at her.
Hit it back
, he kept saying,
hit it back
. She showed no pleasure at what he told her. Her face, shining with perspiration, was taut, serious in its concentration.
Hit it back
, he yelled at her.
Hit it back
….
    Suddenly he was driving a car. Moving fast over a narrow road lined with tall, stately trees. The car had its top down. A woman was in the seat beside him. It was not Marcia, but some other woman—a redhead. They were going very fast. The moon was a thin crescent. The woman’s hair was flying back in the wind. She was as beautiful as Marcia, but in a different way. She seemed ecstatic with the sensation of speed and the wind. She had her head thrown back, and shewas singing an aimless, nameless tune. But it was the car that really interested him. It was an absolute beauty—red leather upholstery, black broadloom carpeting, burled walnut-grain instrument panel, a color-indicator speedometer needle that changed color according to speed. The needle was green from zero to thirty miles an hour, yellow from thirty to fifty, and red over fifty. He even noted the exact mileage. There was a pushbutton radio mounted in the center of the dash. The car was long, low, racy. It had a long vertical grill with small horizontal bars, big disc hubcaps, large, curving fenders. The steering wheel was low and below the cowl. Overlarge tires, whitewall. Classic design. He looked at the redhead, smiled at her. He stepped on the gas and they started to fly.
    Suddenly a bell was ringing, steady and insistent. He opened his eyes. Through the window he could see the red sky. The timer had just gone off, and now he was aware of Marty Stein standing over him. The peppermint fingers pried into his mouth again.
    “All right, Pete. Let’s have a look.”
    They were all very familiar. The Window Dream, the Street Dream, the Tower Dream, the Prison Dream, the Tennis Dream. And, of course, the Cotton Mather Dream, the one with the big Puritan staring down at him. Funny thing about that one. The giant figure never moved. Maybe it was a clue of some kind. It seemed to suggest a still life. A painting perhaps? It could be. He’d ask his father. Maybe there was a portrait of his Puritan ancestor somewhere around. Old Increase Proud. The old hypocrites may have been short on tolerance, but they were long on ego. He knew, because once he had gone to the Research Library and dug up a rare volume on the Puritan oligarchy in America. Everybody who was anybody in the Old Massachusetts Bay Colony seemed to have had his portrait painted.
    He’d had all these dreams before, and he knew he would have them again. But this time something new bad been added. A new entry in this crazy pantheon, a shiny new hallucination to add tothe others he kept in his black book. Instantly, he gave it a name: The Automobile Dream.
    He sat there in the dentist’s chair, shaken. The small fragments in his unconscious, the mysterious but familiar pictures, always seemed to hover over him like roosting vultures. But this time they hadn’t come in deep sleep. For the first time they had slipped in just over the edge. For the first time they had invaded a daydream. And for the first time there had been another woman, someone else besides Marcia.
    Score Three for Edna
.
    Later that night, after Nora had gone off to a meeting, he decided to work on the book he was writing:
The Red Man: Origins and Culture. His Ethnic Role in America, Present and Future
. He hadn’t done any work on the project in weeks.
    He fumbled through his pile of research folders. Finally he made a few notes and wrote a couple of paragraphs on a new raid some Indians had made on the building housing