Short Cuts (5 page)

“Good friends,” Nelson said. “Real good friends.” He unscrewed the cap on his whiskey.

“Watch it, Nelson,” Benny said. “Keep that out of sight. Nelson just got off the plane from Nam,” Benny said.

Nelson raised the bottle and drank some of his whiskey. He screwed the cap back on, laid the bottle on the table, and put his hat down on top of it. “Real good friends,” he said.

Benny looked at me and rolled his eyes. But he was drunk, too. “I got to get into shape,” he said to me. He drank RC from both of their glasses and then held the glasses under the table and poured whiskey. He put the bottle in his coat pocket. “Man, I ain’t put my lips to a reed for a month now. I got to get with it.”

We were bunched in the booth, glasses in front of us, Nelson’s hat on the table. “You,” Nelson said to me. “You with somebody else, ain’t you? This beautiful woman, she ain’t your wife. I know that. But you real good friends with this woman. Ain’t I right?”

I had some of my drink. I couldn’t taste the whiskey. I couldn’t taste anything. I said, “Is all that shit about Vietnam true we see on the TV?”

Nelson had his red eyes fixed on me. He said, “What I want to say is, do you know where your wife is? I bet she out with some dude and she be seizing his nipples for him and pulling his pud for him while you setting here big as life with your good friend. I bet she have herself a good friend, too.”

“Nelson,” Benny said.

“Nelson nothing,” Nelson said.

Benny said, “Nelson, let’s leave these people be. There’s
somebody in that other booth. Somebody I told you about. Nelson just this morning got off a plane,” Benny said.

“I bet I know what you thinking,” Nelson said. “I bet you thinking, ‘Now here a big drunk nigger and what am I going to do with him? Maybe I have to whip his ass for him!’ That what you thinking?”

I looked around the room. I saw Khaki standing near the platform, the musicians working away behind him. Some dancers were on the floor. I thought Khaki looked right at me – but if he did, he looked away again.

“Ain’t it your turn to talk?” Nelson said. “I just teasing you. I ain’t done any teasing since I left Nam. I teased the gooks some.” He grinned again, his big lips rolling back. Then he stopped grinning and just stared.

“Show them that ear,” Benny said. He put his glass on the table. “Nelson got himself an ear off one of them little dudes,” Benny said. “He carry it with him. Show them, Nelson.”

Nelson sat there. Then he started feeling the pockets of his topcoat. He took things out of one pocket. He took out some keys and a box of cough drops.

Donna said, “I don’t want to see an ear. Ugh. Double ugh. Jesus.” She looked at me.

“We have to go,” I said.

Nelson was still feeling in his pockets. He took a wallet from a pocket inside the suit coat and put it on the table. He patted the wallet. “Five big ones there. Listen here,” he said to Donna. “I going to give you two bills. You with me? I give you two big ones, and then you French me. Just like his woman doing some other big fellow. You hear? You know she got her mouth on somebody’s hammer right this minute while he here with his hand up your skirt. Fair’s fair. Here.” He pulled the corners of the bills from his wallet. “Hell, here another hundred for your good friend, so he won’t feel
left out. He don’t have to do nothing. You don’t have to do nothing,” Nelson said to me. “You just sit there and drink your drink and listen to the music. Good music. Me and this woman walk out together like good friends. And she walk back in by herself. Won’t be long, she be back.”

“Nelson,” Benny said, “this is no way to talk, Nelson.”

Nelson grinned. “I finished talking,” he said.

He found what he’d been feeling for. It was a silver cigarette case. He opened it up. I looked at the ear inside. It sat on a bed of cotton. It looked like a dried mushroom. But it was a real ear, and it was hooked up to a key chain.

“Jesus,” said Donna. “Yuck.”

“Ain’t that something?” Nelson said. He was watching Donna.

“No way. Fuck off,” Donna said.

“Girl,” Nelson said.

“Nelson,” I said. And then Nelson fixed his red eyes on me. He pushed the hat and wallet and cigarette case out of his way.

“What do you want?” Nelson said. “I give you what you want.”

Khaki had a hand on my shoulder and the other one on Benny’s shoulder. He leaned over the table, his head shining under the lights. “How you folks? You all having fun?”

“Everything all right, Khaki,” Benny said. “Everything A-okay. These people here was just fixing to leave. Me and Nelson going to sit and listen to the music.”

“That’s good,” Khaki said. “Folks be happy is my motto.”

He looked around the booth. He looked at Nelson’s wallet on the table and at the open cigarette case next to the wallet. He saw the ear.

“That a real ear?” Khaki said.

Benny said, “It is. Show him that ear, Nelson. Nelson just stepped off the plane from Nam with this ear. This ear has traveled halfway around the world to be on this table tonight. Nelson, show him,” Benny said.

Nelson picked up the case and handed it to Khaki.

Khaki examined the ear. He took up the chain and dangled the ear in front of his face. He looked at it. He let it swing back and forth on the chain. “I heard about these dried-up ears and dicks and such.”

“I took it off one of them gooks,” Nelson said. “He couldn’t hear nothing with it no more. I wanted me a keepsake.”

Khaki turned the ear on its chain.

Donna and I began getting out of the booth.

“Girl, don’t go,” Nelson said.

“Nelson,” Benny said.

Khaki was watching Nelson now. I stood beside the booth with Donna’s coat. My legs were crazy.

Nelson raised his voice. He said, “You go with this mother here, you let him put his face in your sweets, you both going to have to deal with me.”

We started to move away from the booth. People were looking.

“Nelson just got off the plane from Nam this morning,” I heard Benny say. “We been drinking all day. This been the longest day on record. But me and him, we going to be fine, Khaki.”

Nelson yelled something over the music. He yelled, “It ain’t going to do no good! Whatever you do, it ain’t going to help none!” I heard him say that, and then I couldn’t hear anymore. The music stopped, and then it started again. We didn’t look back. We kept going. We got out to the sidewalk.

I opened the door for her. I started us back to the hospital. Donna stayed over on her side. She’d used the lighter on a cigarette, but she wouldn’t talk.

I tried to say something. I said, “Look, Donna, don’t get on a downer because of this. I’m sorry it happened,” I said.

“I could of used the money,” Donna said. “That’s what I was thinking.”

I kept driving and didn’t look at her.

“It’s true,” she said. “I could of used the money.” She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. She put her chin down and cried.

“Don’t cry,” I said.

“I’m not going in to work tomorrow, today, whenever it is the alarm goes off,” she said. “I’m not going in. I’m leaving town. I take what happened back there as a sign.” She pushed in the lighter and waited for it to pop out.

I pulled in beside my car and killed the engine. I looked in the rearview, half thinking I’d see that old Chrysler drive into the lot behind me with Nelson in the seat. I kept my hands on the wheel for a minute, and then dropped them to my lap. I didn’t want to touch Donna. The hug we’d given each other in my kitchen that night, the kissing we’d done at the Off-Broadway, that was all over.

I said, “What are you going to do?” But I didn’t care. Right then she could have died of a heart attack and it wouldn’t have meant anything.

“Maybe I could go up to Portland,” she said. “There must be something in Portland. Portland’s on everybody’s mind these days. Portland’s a drawing card. Portland this, Portland that. Portland’s as good a place as any. It’s all the same.”

“Donna,” I said, “I’d better go.”

I started to let myself out. I cracked the door, and the overhead light came on.

“For Christ’s sake, turn off that light!”

I got out in a hurry. “ ’Night, Donna,” I said.

I left her staring at the dashboard. I started up my car and turned on the lights. I slipped it in gear and fed it the gas.

I poured Scotch, drank some of it, and took the glass into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth. Then I pulled open a drawer. Patti yelled something from the bedroom. She opened the bathroom door. She was still dressed. She’d been sleeping with her clothes on, I guess.

“What time is it?” she screamed. “I’ve overslept! Jesus, oh my God! You’ve let me oversleep, goddamn you!”

She was wild. She stood in the doorway with her clothes on. She could have been fixing to go to work. But there was no sample case, no vitamins. She was having a bad dream, is all. She began shaking her head from side to side.

I couldn’t take any more tonight. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’m looking for something,” I said. I knocked some stuff out of the medicine chest. Things rolled into the sink. “Where’s the aspirin?” I said. I knocked down some more things. I didn’t care. Things kept falling.

WHEN HE WAS EIGHTEEN
and was leaving home for the first time, Ralph Wyman was counseled by his father, principal of Jefferson Elementary School and trumpet soloist in the Weaverville Elks Club Auxiliary Band, that life was a very serious matter, an enterprise insisting on strength and purpose in a young person just setting out, an arduous undertaking, everyone knew that, but nevertheless a rewarding one, Ralph Wyman’s father believed and said.

But in college Ralph’s goals were hazy. He thought he wanted to be a doctor and he thought he wanted to be a lawyer, and he took pre-medical courses and courses in the history of jurisprudence and business law before he decided he had neither the emotional detachment necessary for medicine nor the ability for sustained reading required in law, especially as such reading might concern property and inheritance. Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in business, Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came. It was during this time – his lowest ebb, as he referred to it later – that Ralph believed he almost had a breakdown; he was in a fraternity and he got drunk every night. He drank so much that he acquired a reputation and was called “Jackson,” after the bartender at The Keg.

Then, in his third year, Ralph came under the influence of
a particularly persuasive teacher. Dr. Maxwell was his name; Ralph would never forget him. He was a handsome, graceful man in his early forties, with exquisite manners and with just the trace of the South in his voice. He had been educated at Vanderbilt, had studied in Europe, and had later had something to do with one or two literary magazines back East. Almost overnight, Ralph would later say, he decided on teaching as a career. He stopped drinking quite so much, began to bear down on his studies, and within a year was elected to Omega Psi, the national journalism fraternity; he became a member of the English Club; was invited to come with his cello, which he hadn’t played in three years, and join in a student chamber-music group just forming; and he even ran successfully for secretary of the senior class. It was then that he met Marian Ross – a handsomely pale and slender girl who took a seat beside him in a Chaucer class.

Marian Ross wore her hair long and favored high-necked sweaters and always went around with a leather purse on a long strap swinging from her shoulder. Her eyes were large and seemed to take in everything at a glance. Ralph liked going out with Marian Ross. They went to The Keg and to a few other spots where everyone went, but they never let their going together or their subsequent engagement the next summer interfere with their studies. They were solemn students, and both sets of parents eventually gave approval to the match. Ralph and Marian did their student teaching at the same high school in Chico in the spring and went through graduation exercises together in June. They married in St James Episcopal Church two weeks later.

They had held hands the night before their wedding and pledged to preserve forever the excitement and the mystery of marriage.

For their honeymoon they drove to Guadalajara, and while they both enjoyed visiting the decayed churches and the poorly lighted museums and the afternoons they spent shopping and exploring in the marketplace, Ralph was secretly appalled by the squalor and open lust he saw and was anxious to return to the safety of California. But the one vision he would always remember and which disturbed him most of all had nothing to do with Mexico. It was late afternoon, almost evening, and Marian was leaning motionless on her arms over the ironwork balustrade of their rented
casita
as Ralph came up the dusty road below. Her hair was long and hung down in front over her shoulders, and she was looking away from him, staring at something in the distance. She wore a white blouse with a bright red scarf at her throat, and he could see her breasts pushing against the white cloth. He had a bottle of dark, unlabeled wine under his arm, and the whole incident put Ralph in mind of something from a film, an intensely dramatic moment into which Marian could be fitted but he could not.

Before they left for their honeymoon they had accepted positions at a high school in Eureka, a town in the lumbering region in the northern part of the state. After a year, when they were sure the school and the town were exactly what they wanted to settle down to, they made a payment on a house in the Fire Hill district. Ralph felt, without really thinking about it, that he and Marian understood each other perfectly – as well, at least, as any two people might. Moreover, Ralph felt he understood himself – what he could do, what he could not do, and where he was headed with the prudent measure of himself that he made.

Their two children, Dorothea and Robert, were now five and four years old. A few months after Robert was born, Marian was offered a post as a French and English instructor at the junior college at the edge of town, and Ralph had
stayed on at the high school. They considered themselves a happy couple, with only a single injury to their marriage, and that was well in the past, two years ago this winter. It was something they had never talked about since. But Ralph thought about it sometimes – indeed, he was willing to admit he thought about it more and more. Increasingly, ghastly images would be projected on his eyes, certain unthinkable particularities. For he had taken it into his head that his wife had once betrayed him with a man named Mitchell Anderson.