Adultery & Other Choices (5 page)

At recess that morning the class crowded around the Coke machine, five or six hands at once waiting with a coin at the slot. Paul was toward the rear, holding his nickel in his fist and pocket too, so he didn't see Roland and Wayne until the crowd moved back from the machine with that sudden and quiet shifting that always meant a fight. He could feel the anticipation in their bodies as he squeezed between them and got toward the front. Roland was perhaps an inch taller than Wayne but much lighter; Wayne Landry was short, chubby, and strong, one of the boys the high school football coach waited for.

‘Pick it up,' Wayne said.

Then he pushed Roland's chest. In the fights Paul had seen, this pushing was a ritual: boys pushed each other until fear left their eyes, then they fought. Roland did not return Wayne's push. He hit him in the jaw with a left hook (Paul noticed that: not a round-house right but a left, and a hook at that); the second blow was a right to the stomach that would have folded Wayne if it weren't for the left and right which struck almost the same point on his chin. He went to the pavement as though he had slipped on ice. Leaning forward, Paul saw that one outstretched hand lay next to the nickel. Wayne was looking up at Roland, whose fists were unclenched, one hand going into his pocket as he turned to the machine and said: ‘I didn't hit your nickel. You dropped it.'

He bought a Coke, opened it, then he bought another. He opened that one and held it down toward Wayne. Wayne sat up and looking at some point past Roland's knees, took it. Roland walked slowly through the crowd of boys. Paul wanted to touch him as he passed. Instead he murmured: ‘You looked like Bob Steele.'

The smile Roland turned on him was friendly; Roland's brown eyes looked into his, as though asking his name.

‘Who's Bob Steele?' Roland said.

Then he walked on.

Sometimes on winter afternoons when yesterday's mud was hard footprinted earth, Paul lingered after school and watched the boxers in the gym. He sat with his books in the bleachers and watched Roland in a grey suit skipping rope and then handing the rope to an older boy and crossing the gym where, waiting at the large bag, he talked with a high school boy who fought at a hundred and forty-five pounds. Then Paul watched him working on the bag. The older boy watched too and sometimes spoke to Roland. When the boxers finished in the gym the coach took them for a six-mile run in the cold twilight. Mounting his bicycle Paul watched them leaving. They ran in a formation of two files and Roland, ninety-five pounds and shorter than everyone, ran in front. As Paul pumped past them on the opposite side of the road he could see Roland turning his head, talking to the boy beside him; he was laughing. Paul turned on his light and rode home.

‘I don't want to go,' Eddie said. ‘I've never been to one.'

‘Neither have I,' Paul said.

It was recess, and they stood with hands in their jacket pockets. Paul was looking up at Eddie's face. He liked Eddie's face but sometimes he did not like to be seen with it and now he was thinking of that face at a boxing match. The face showed Eddie's life: good grades, the state of grace, uncertainty about his body in a world of running, pushing, yelling boys, and an imagination that lifted him to other places, other deeds. Looking at Eddie he saw everything he had learned about him in their three years together and he knew that their faces were too much alike and he wished they or at least he had a sneer, a glare, a tightened jaw to show to the world.

‘We ought to see Roland anyway,' he said. ‘He's fighting first. If we don't like the rest we can leave.'

‘Your hero.'

‘He's not my
hero
,' thinking of Bob Steele, the quickest fist fighter of all the Saturday cowboys, fading, almost gone, for in the nights now it was Roland he thought of, Roland's quick fists on Larry's face, and lying in bed it was him merging with the image of Roland, him hitting Larry, only the arms were Roland's or his arms were like Roland's, hard and bulging and fast, and then sometimes his face became Roland's or Roland's his so he didn't know in his daydream whether he was watching Roland or Roland was watching him or whether he had become a stronger Paul or had become instead someone else.

‘You talk about him a lot.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Sometimes he's all you talk about.'

‘Well, I like him. Come on; let's go to the fights.'

That night the gym was filled. Clusters of Paul's classmates were scattered through the crowd of men and women and students; Paul and Eddie sat in front of some girls they did not know. They were from the public high school and smelled of perfume and chewing gum. The lights went off except for the light over the ring and then Roland was climbing into it, stepping through the ropes held apart by the coach; Paul's gaze fixed on that. Paul was not close enough to see Roland's eyes but he knew from his profiled jaw and lips and his arms stretched to the ropes as he worked his feet in the rosin box that he was not afraid. Then the bell rang and Paul knew it was true: Roland glided into the ring and in purple trunks and gold sleeveless jersey he danced and jabbed and hooked and crossed, and within a minute the other boy was bewildered, lunging, swinging wildly, and backing up. The sounds of Roland's large stinging gloves filled the gym, grabbed yells from the throats of men and soft cries from the girls behind Paul. In the third round the other boy's nose suddenly bled; the red spurt covered his mouth and flowed onto his shirt while Roland closed in with a flurry and the referee pranced between them and stopped the fight. Roland put his arm around the boy's back, rested a glove on his shoulder, and walked him to the corner, toward his coach who was bringing a white towel.

Every Friday night he won and when the fights were at home Paul and Eddie watched. Eddie liked it too and walking home from the Saturday serial and cowboy movies he talked about Roland last night with the speed of a striking snake. Since his fight with Wayne, Roland had moved among those boys who from the third grade had been the athletes and class officers and good students as well and who were growing into halfbacks and quarterbacks and fullbacks and ends. Larry Guidry did not go into that world. He did not seem to even look at it. Nor did they look at him. At the end of the season Roland went to Baton Rouge and won the state championship. When he came back to school, Paul waited for his chance, got it between classes, and shook his hand.

On most days when the final bell rang and they had recited the last decade of the rosary Paul got quickly out of the door and was down the corridor and outside before Larry could hurt him. Sometimes as he fled Larry kicked his rump or punched his back. But usually he escaped and rode home on his bicycle while Larry waited in front of school for the bus. One April afternoon he and Eddie walked across the front lawn of the school, Paul glancing at the boys waiting for school buses; he did not see Larry; they walked past the group and into town, to Borden's. When they got back to school licking their ice-cream cones the buses had come and the boys were gone and Larry was on the sidewalk, crouched beside his bicycle, twisting a broken spoke around one that was intact. Paul quickened his pace but Larry saw their legs and looked up. Then he stood. Paul kept looking at the bicycle. It was green and had been thickly repainted, by hand, and Paul thought of Larry with his intent face and a paint brush, painting. The rear fender was dented.

‘Broken spoke?' Paul said.

Larry watched him.

‘What's it doing, hitting the chain guard?'

Larry reached out and took the ice-cream cone from Paul's hand. It was chocolate, and Paul smiled and watched him taking a large bite. Larry's tongue darted over the ice cream, licked it till it was a smooth mound; he took another large bite and sucked it. Then he licked again. He was getting close to the cone. When the ice cream was level with the cone he bit into its rim, turning it and biting, and then with one large bite he ate the small end. He had not looked at Paul. He was turning to his bicycle when Eddie said: ‘Well, I hope you enjoyed your ice-cream cone.'

Larry had both hands on the handlebars and one foot poised at the kickstand; he spun quickly and with his right hand slapped the cone from Eddie's fist and then with the same hand a fist now he hit Eddie in the stomach and Eddie doubled over holding his stomach and gasping, but from his hurt and panicked face there was no sound. Paul knew where Larry had hit him; he had read about the body and its vulnerable spots and how he could use them, and he knew that Eddie now was not only in pain but he could not breathe. He watched Larry watching Eddie, watched the burning eyes. Eddie was shuffling in a semicircle. Still he did not make a sound. Then bent over he walked past Larry and onto the front lawn, toward the school, toward the back of it where his bicycle was. For a moment Paul watched him. Then smiling at Larry he went after Eddie and, from behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder.

‘Eddie? Are you all right?'

Eddie shook his head. Looking down from Eddie's rear Paul saw the left cheek turning red. Then with a hoarse wheeze Eddie breathed. He breathed deeply and let it out fast and still bent forward he breathed again. He kept walking and Paul's hand dropped behind him. He stopped and breathed again and stood straight; Paul moved beside him and looked at his face and the tears on his cheeks.

‘Are you okay?'

‘I'm going home,' Eddie said; his shoulders jerking, he crossed the lawn toward the school. Paul watched him go. His back was to Larry. Then he shifted so he was profiled to Larry. When Eddie had gone around the corner of the school Paul looked at Larry, who leaned on his bicycle, watching.

‘You sure got him,' Paul said. ‘Right in the solar plexus.'

Larry moved his hands to the handlebars and kicked up the kickstand.

‘You could probably beat Roland. Do you think you could beat Roland?'

There was neither fear nor challenge in Larry's eyes, only the dark watching, so quiet and removed that looking into Larry's eyes Paul seemed to be watching himself. They stood perhaps forty feet apart but Paul felt Larry's closeness, as though they were seated in school, with Larry at his back through the years, and he seemed to smell the starched khakis, the hair oil, the sweat, and the mustard and milk after lunch. Then Larry rode away.

That summer on a July afternoon Larry Guidry drowned in Black Bayou. The police found his bicycle and snowball cart on the bank, and beside them were his clothes and sneakers. That was the day after his parents told the police he had not come home. In the evening paper there were front-page photographs of policemen on the bank of the bayou, and men in outboards, dragging the muddy bottom. There was also a school picture of Larry; Paul remembered the day last fall when they had combed their hair and lined up to sit on the stool. He remembered he had hay fever that day and while the photographer took his picture he held his breath so he wouldn't sneeze. They found Larry at the bottom of the bayou. It was a hot afternoon and he had gone swimming alone.

‘He was in your
class
?' Amy said at supper.

‘He should never have gone in the bayou,' his mother said. ‘It's treacherous.'

‘Did you know him well?' Barbara said.

‘I sat right in front of him for three years.'

That night he calmly prepared for sleep: kissed his father and mother and sisters and kneeled in prayer while inside the vast cavern of his body he shivered and tingled in anticipation of what waited for him in bed. He did not think Larry had committed any real mortal sins, with all the conditions they required, so he would not be in hell but in the fire of purgatory where souls thrashed in pain but their faces gazed with the serenity of hope; caressing his heart with a prayer he asked God to take Larry out of purgatory soon, and he saw him in khakis in the flames, his small hard hands clasped beneath his upturned housedust face. Then in bed Paul saw in the dark between him and the pale ceiling Larry getting off his bicycle and looking at the muddy bayou. For a while Larry stood looking at it; in the middle a stick swirled and went downstream. Then he undressed and walked down the bank and into the water. The bottom was soft and slippery and he threw himself forward in the shallow water and began to swim. Near the middle of the bayou the current hit him. He turned and stroked toward shallow water but the current pushed and twisted him, a thousand hands on his body, and in moaning panic he swallowed water and his arms weakened, his legs dragged heavily behind him, then he was under, somersaulting down and down, an acrobat slowly sinking in thick muddy water that rushed into his throat as he sank until he lay at the bottom, in the deep soft mud. He lay on his back, his arms angling out from his body, his mouth open and eyes closed, as in sleep. He lay in the dark cold all afternoon and all night and when the sun rose he was down there and he lay all morning until a grappling hook came slowly toward him in a cloud of mud like brown smoke.

Graduation

S
OMETIMES
, out in California, she wanted to tell her husband. That was after they had been married for more than two years (by then she was twenty-one) and she had settled into the familiarity so close to friendship but not exactly that either: she knew his sounds while he slept, brought some recognition to the very weight of his body next to her in bed, knew without looking the expressions on his face when he spoke. As their habits merged into common ritual, she began to feel she had never had another friend. Geography had something to do with this too. Waiting for him at the pier after the destroyer had been to sea for five days, or emerging from a San Diego movie theater, holding his hand, it seemed to her that the first eighteen years of her life in Port Arthur, Texas had no meaning at all. So, at times like that, she wanted to tell him.

She would look at the photograph which she had kept hidden for four years now, and think, as though she were speaking to him:
I was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, and I got up that day just like any other day and ate Puffed Wheat or something with my parents and went to school and there it was, on the bulletin board
—But she didn't tell him, for she knew that something was wrong: the photograph and her years in Port Arthur were true, and now her marriage in San Diego was true. But it seemed that for both of them to remain true they had to exist separately, one as history, one as now, and that if she disclosed the history, then those two truths added together would somehow produce a lie which in turn would call for more analysis than she cared to give. Or than she cared for her husband to give. So she would simply look at the picture of herself at sixteen, then put it away, in an old compact at the bottom of her jewelry box.