Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (49 page)
Then he looked at her eyes. She liked to watch him when they made love, and sometimes he opened his eyes and saw on her face that eerie look of a woman making love: as if her eyes, while watching him, were turned inward as well, were indeed watching his thrusting from within her womb. Her eyes now were of the counselor’s office, the psychiatrist’s office tomorrow, they held no light for him; and in his mind, as she told him she had to stop dope and alcohol and balling, he saw the school: the old brick and the iron fence with its points like spears and the serene trees. All his life this town had been dying. His father had died with it, killing himself with one of the last things he owned: they did not have a garage so he drove the car into a woods and used the vacuum cleaner hose. She said she had never come, not with anybody all these years, she had always faked it; he finished his drink in a swallow and immediately wished he had not, for he wanted another but she didn’t offer him one and he only had three dollars which he knew now he would need for the rest of the night; then he refused to imagine the rest of the night. He smiled.
‘Only with my finger,’ she said.
‘I hope it falls off.’
She slid out of the booth; his hand started to reach for her but he stopped it; she was saying something that didn’t matter now, that he could not feel: her eyes were suddenly damp as standing she put on her parka, saying she had wanted to talk to him, she thought at least they could talk; then she walked out. He drank her tequila sunrise as he was getting out of the booth. Outside, he stood looking up the street; she was a block away, almost at the drugstore. Then she was gone around the bend in the street. He started after her, watching his boots on the shovelled sidewalk.
Now he walked on the bridge over the river and thought of her lying on the small one over the pond. The wind came blowing down freezing over the Merrimack; his moustache stiffened, and he lowered his head. But he did not hurry. Seeing Robin on the bridge over the pond he saw the dormitory beyond it, just a dormitory for them, rooms which they crowded with their things, but the best place he had ever slept in. The things that crowded their rooms were more than he had ever owned, yet he knew for the girls these were only selected and favorite or what they thought necessary things, only a transportable bit of what filled large rooms of huge houses at home. For four or five years now he had made his way into the dormitory; he met them at Timmy’s and they took him back to the dormitory to drink and smoke dope and when the party dissolved one of them usually took him to bed.
One night in the fall before Robin he was at a party there and toward three in the morning nearly all the girls were gone and no one had given him a sign and there were only two girls left and the one college fag, a smooth-shaven, razor-cut boy who dressed better than the girls, went to Timmy’s, and even to the bar side of it, the long, narrow room without booths or bar stools where only men drank; he wore a variety of costumes: heels and yellow and rust and gold and red, and drank sloe gin fizzes and smoked like a girl. And Mike, who rarely thought one way or another about fags but disliked them on sight, liked this one because he went into town like that and once a man poured a beer over his head, but he kept going and joking, his necklaces tapping on his chest as he swayed back and forth laughing. That night he came over and sat beside Mike just at the right time, when Mike had understood that the two remaining girls not only weren’t interested in him, but they despised him, and he was thinking of the walk home to his room when the fag said he had some Colombian and Mike nodded and rose and left with him. In the room the fag touched him and Mike said twenty-five bucks and put it in his pocket, then removed the fag’s fingers from his belt buckle and turned away and undressed. He would not let the fag kiss him but the rest was all right, a mouth was a mouth, except when he woke sober in the morning, woke early, earlier than he ever woke when he slept there with a girl. A presence woke him, as though a large bird had flown inches above his chest. He got up quickly and glanced at the sleeping fag, lying on his back, his bare, smooth shoulders and slender arms above the blanket, his face turned toward Mike, the mouth open, and Mike wanted to kill him or himself or both of them, looking away from the mouth which had consumed forever part of his soul, and with his back turned he dressed. Then quietly opening the door he was aware of his height and broad shoulders and he squared them as glaring he stepped into the corridor; but it was empty, and he got out of the dormitory without anyone seeing him and ate breakfast in town and at ten o’clock went to the employment office for his check.
Through the years he had stolen from them: usually cash from the girls he slept with, taking just enough so they would believe or make themselves believe that while they were drunk at Timmy’s they had spent it. Twice he had stolen with the collusion of girls. One had gone ahead of him in the corridor, then down the stairs, as he rolled and carried a ten-speed bicycle. He rode it home and the next day sold it to three young men who rented a house down the street; they sold dope, and things other people stole, mostly things that kids stole, and Mike felt like a kid when he went to them and said he had a ten-speed. A year later, when a second girl helped him steal a stereo, he sold it at the same house. The girl was drunk and she went with him into the room one of her friends had left unlocked, and in the dark she got the speakers and asked if he wanted any records while he hushed her and took the amplifier and turntable. They carried everything out to her Volvo. In the car he was relieved but only for a moment, only until she started the engine, then he thought of the street and the building where he lived, and by the time she turned on the heater he was trying to think of a way to keep her from taking him home.
All the time she was talking. It was the first time she had stolen anything. Or anything worth a lot of money. He made himself smile by thinking of selling her to the men in the house; he thought of her sitting amid the stereos and television sets and bicycles. Then . he heard her say something. She had asked if he was going to sell his old set so he could get some bucks out of the night too. He said he’d give the old one to a friend, and when she asked for directions he pointed ahead in despair. He meant to get out at the corner but when she said Here? and slowed for the turn he was awash in the loss of control which he fought so often and overcame so little, though he knew most people couldn’t tell by looking at him or even talking to him. She turned and climbed up the street, talking all the time, not about the street, the buildings, but about the stereo: or the stealing of it, and he knew from her voice she was repeating herself so she would not have to talk about what she saw. Or he felt she was. But that was not the worst. The worst was that he was so humiliated he could not trust what he felt, could not know if this dumb rich girl was even aware of the street, and he knew there was no way out of this except to sleep and wake tomorrow in the bed that held his scent. He had been too long in that room (this was his third year), too long in the building: there were six apartments; families lived in the five larger ones; one family had a man: a pumper of gasoline, checker of oil and water, wiper of windshields. Mike thought of his apartment as a room, although there was a kitchen he rarely used, a bathroom, and a second room that for weeks at a time he did not enter. Some mornings when he woke he felt he had lived too long in his body. He smoked a joint in bed and showered and shaved and left the room, the building, the street of these buildings. Once free of the street he felt better: he liked feeling and smelling clean; he walked into town. The girl stopped the Volvo at another of his sighed directions and touched his thigh and said she would help him bring the stuff in. He said no and loaded everything in his arms and left her.
Robin had wanted to go to his room too and he had never let her and now for the first time grieving for her lost flesh, he wished he had taken her there. Saw her there at nights and on the weekends, the room—rooms: he saw even the second room—smelling of paint; saw buckets and brushes on newspaper awaiting her night and weekend hand, his hand too: the two of them painting while music played not from his tinny-sounding transistor but a stereo that was simply there in his apartment with the certainty of something casually purchased with cash neither from the employment office nor his occasional and tense forays into the world of jobs: dishwashing at Timmy’s, the quick and harried waitresses bringing the trays of plates which he scraped and racked and hosed and slid into the washer, hot water in the hot kitchen wetting his clothes; he scrubbed the pots by hand and at the night’s end he mopped the floor and the bartender sent him a bottle of beer; but he only worked there in summers, when the students were gone. He saw Robin painting the walls beside him, their brushstrokes as uniform as the beating of their hearts. He was approaching the bar next to the bus station. He did not like it because the band was too loud, and the people were losers, but he often went there anyway, because he could sit and drink and watch the losers dancing without having to make one gesture he had to think about, the way he did at Timmy’s when he sat with the girls and was conscious of his shoulders and arms and hands, of his eyes and mouth as if he could see them, so that he smiled—and coolly, he knew—when girl after girl year after year touched his flesh and sometimes his heart and told him he was cool.
He went into the bar, feeling the bass drum beat as though it came from the floor and walls, and took the one untaken stool and ordered a shot of Comfort, out of habit checking his pocket although he knew he had three ones and some change. Everyone he saw was drunk, and the bartender was drinking. Vic was at the end of the bar, wearing a bandana on his head, earring on one ear, big fat arms on the bar; Mike nodded at him. He drank the shot and pushed the glass toward the bartender. His fingers trembled. He sipped the Comfort and lit a cigarette, cold sweat on his brow, and he thought he would have to go outside into the cold air or vomit.
He finished the shot then moved through the crowd to Vic and spoke close to his ear and the gold earring. ‘I need some downs.’ Vic wanted a dollar apiece. ‘Come on,’ Mike said. ‘Two.’ Vic’s arm left the bar and he put two in Mike’s hand; Mike gave him the dollar and left, out onto the cold street, heading uphill, swallowing, but his throat was dry and the second one lodged; he took a handful of snow from a mound at the base of a parking meter and ate it. He walked on the lee side of buildings now. He was dead with her. He lay on the bridge, his arm around her, his face in her hair. At the dormitory the night shift detectives would talk to the girls inside, out of the cold; they would sit in the big glassed-in room downstairs where drunk one night he had pissed on the carpet while Robin laughed before they went up to her room. The girls would speak his name. His name was in that room, back there in the dormitory; it was not walking up the hill in his clothing. He had two joints in his room and he would smoke those while he waited, lying dressed on his bed. When he heard their footsteps in the hall he would put on his jacket and open the door before they knocked and walk with them to the cruiser. He walked faster up the hill.
W
HEN THE ALARM
rings the room is black and grey; I smell Kevin’s breath and my eye hurts and won’t open. He gets out of bed, and still I smell beer in the cold air. He is naked and dressing fast. I get up shivering in my nightgown and put on my robe and go by flashlight to the kitchen, where there is some light from the sky. Birds are singing, or whatever it is they do. I light the gas lantern and set it near the stove, and remember New England mornings with the lights on and a warm kitchen and catching the school bus. I won’t have to look at my eye till the sun comes up in the bathroom. Dad was happy about us going to California; he talked about sourdough bread and fresh fruit and vegetables all year. I put water on the stove and get bacon and eggs and milk from the ice chest. A can of beer is floating, tilting, in the ice and water; the rest are bent in the paper bag for garbage. I could count them, know how many it takes. I put on the bacon and smoke a cigarette, and when I hear him coming I stand at the stove so my back is to the door.
‘Today’s the day,’ he says.
They are going out for sharks. They will be gone five days, maybe more, and if he comes back with money we can have electricity again. For the first three months out here he could not get on a boat, then yesterday he found one that was short a man, so last night he celebrated.
‘Hey, hon.’
I turn the bacon. He comes to me and hugs me from behind, rubbing my hips through the robe, his breath sour beer with mint.
‘Let me see your eye.’
I turn around and look up at him, and he steps back. His blond beard is damp, his eyes are bloodshot, and his mouth opens as he looks.
‘Oh, hon.’
He reaches to touch it, but I jerk my face away and turn back to the skillet.
‘I’ll never do that again,’ he says.
The bacon is curling brown. Through the window above the stove I can see the hills now, dark humps against the sky. Dad liked the Pacific, but we are miles inland and animals are out there with the birds; one morning last week a rattlesnake was on the driveway. Yesterday some men went hunting a bobcat in the hills. They say it killed a horse, and they are afraid it will kill somebody’s child, but they didn’t find it. How can a bobcat kill a horse? My little sister took riding lessons in New England; I watched her compete, and I was afraid, she was so small on that big animal jumping. Dad told me I tried to pet some bobcats when I was three and we lived at Camp Pendleton. He was the deer camp duty officer one Sunday, and Mom and I brought him lunch. Two bobcats were at the edge of the camp; they wanted the deer hides by the scales, and I went to them saying here, kitty, here, kitty. They just watched me, and Dad called me back.
‘It wasn’t you,’ Kevin says. ‘You know it wasn’t you.’
‘Who was it?’
My first words of the day, and my voice sounds like dry crying.
I clear my throat and grip the robe closer around it.
‘I was drunk,’ he says. ‘You know. You know how rough it’s been.’
He harpoons fish. We came across country in an old Ford he worked on till it ran like it was young again. We took turns driving and sleeping and only had to spend motel money twice. That was in October, after we got married on a fishing boat, on a clear blue Sunday on the Atlantic. We had twenty-five friends and the two families and open-faced sandwiches and deviled eggs, and beer and wine. On the way out to sea we got married, then we fished for cod and drank, and in late afternoon we went to Dad’s for a fish fry with a fiddle band. Dad has a new wife, and Mom was up from Florida with her boyfriend. Out here Kevin couldn’t get on a boat, and I couldn’t even waitress. He did some under-the-table work: carpenter, mechanic, body work, a few days here, a few there. Now it’s February, a short month.
‘Hon,’ he says behind me.
‘It’s three times.’
‘Here. Let me do something for that eye.’
I hear him going to the ice chest, the ice moving in there to his big hands. I lay the bacon on the paper towel and open the door to pour out some of the grease; I look at the steps before I go out. The grease sizzles and pops on the wet grass, and there’s light at the tops of the hills.
‘Here,’ he says, and I shut the door. I’m holding the skillet with a pot holder, and I see he’s wearing his knife, and I think of all the weapons in a house: knives, cooking forks, ice picks, hammers, skillets, cleavers, wine bottles, and I wonder if I’ll be one of those women. I think of this without fear, like I’m reading in the paper about somebody else dead in her kitchen. He touches my eye with ice wrapped in a dish towel.
‘I have to do the eggs.’
I break them into the skillet and he stands behind me, holding the ice on my eye. His arm is over mine, and I bump it as I work the spatula.
‘Not now,’ I say.
I lower my face from the ice; for awhile he stands behind me, and I watch the eggs and listen to the grease and his breathing and the birds, then he goes to the chest and I hear the towel and ice drop in.
‘After, okay?’ he says. ‘Maybe the swelling will go down. Jesus, Les. I wish I wasn’t going.’
‘The coffee’s dripped.’
He pours two cups, takes his to the table, and sits with a cigarette. I know his mouth and throat are dry, and probably he has a headache. I turn the eggs and count to four, then put them on a plate with bacon. I haven’t had a hangover since I was sixteen. He likes carbohydrates when he’s hung over; I walk past him, putting the plate on the table, seeing his leg and arm and shoulder, but not his face, and get a can of pork and beans from the cupboard. From there I look at the back of his head. He has a bald spot the size of a quarter. Then I go to the stove and heat the beans on a high flame, watching them, drinking coffee and smoking.
‘We’ll get something,’ he says between bites. ‘They’re out there.’
Once, before I met him, he was in the water with a swordfish. He had harpooned it and they were bringing it alongside, it was thrashing around in the water, and he tripped on some line and fell in with it.
‘We’ll get the lights back on,’ he says. ‘Go out on the town, buy you something nice. A sweater, a blouse, okay? But I wish I wasn’t going today.’
‘I wish you didn’t hit me last night.’ The juice in the beans is bubbling. ‘And the two before that.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing, hon. I’ll never get that drunk again. It’s not even me anymore. I get drunk like that, and somebody crazy takes over.’
I go to his plate and scoop all the beans on his egg yellow. The coffee makes me pee, and I leave the flashlight and walk through the living room that smells of beer and ashtrays and is grey now, so I can see a beer can on the arm of a chair. I sit in the bathroom where it is darkest, and the seat is cold. I hear a car coming up the road, shifting down and turning into the driveway, then the horn. I wash my hands without looking in the mirror; in the gas light of the kitchen, and the first light from the sky, he’s standing with his bag and harpoon.
‘Oh, hon,’ he says, and holds me tight. I put my arms around him, but just touching his back. ‘Say it’s okay.’
I nod, my forehead touching his chest, coming up, touching, coming up.
‘That’s my girl.’
He kisses me and puts his tongue in, then he’s out the door, and I stand on the top step and watch him to the car. He waves and grins and gets in. I hold my hand up at the car as they back into the road, then are gone downhill past the house. The sun is showing red over the hills, and there’s purple at their tops, and only a little green. They are always dry, but at night everything is wet.
I go through the living room and think about cleaning it, and open the front door and look out through the screen. The house has a shadow now, on the grass and dew. There are other houses up here, but I can’t see any of them. The road goes winding up into the hills where the men hunted yesterday. I think of dressing . and filling the canteen and walking, maybe all morning, I could make a sandwich and bring it in my jacket, and an orange. I open the screen and look up the road as far as I can see, before it curves around a hill in the sun. Blue is spreading across the sky. Soon the road will warm, and I think of rattlesnakes sleeping on it, and I shut the screen and look around the lawn where nothing moves.