Short Cuts (8 page)

In the kitchen he let his head down onto his arms as he sat at the table. He did not know what to do. Not just now, he thought, not just in this, not just about this, today and tomorrow, but every day on earth. Then he heard the children stirring. He sat up and tried to smile as they came into the kitchen.

“Daddy, Daddy,” they said, running to him with their little bodies.

“Tell us a story, Daddy,” his son said, getting onto his lap.

“He can’t tell us a story,” his daughter said. “It’s too early for a story. Isn’t it, Daddy?”

“What’s that on your face, Daddy?” his son said, pointing.

“Let me see!” his daughter said. “Let me see, Daddy.”

“Poor Daddy,” his son said.

“What did you do to your face, Daddy?” his daughter said.

“It’s nothing,” Ralph said. “It’s all right, sweetheart. Now get down now, Robert, I hear your mother.”

Ralph stepped quickly into the bathroom and locked the door.

“Is your father here?” he heard Marian calling. “Where is he, in the bathroom? Ralph?”

“Mama, Mama!” his daughter cried. “Daddy’s face is hurt!”

“Ralph!” She turned the knob. “Ralph, let me in, please, darling. Ralph? Please let me in, darling. I want to see you. Ralph? Please!”

He said, “Go away, Marian.”

She said, “I can’t go away. Please, Ralph, open the door for a minute, darling. I just want to see you. Ralph. Ralph? The children said you were hurt. What’s wrong, darling? Ralph?”

He said, “Go away.”

She said, “Ralph, open up, please.”

He said, “Will you please be quiet, please?”

He heard her waiting at the door, he saw the knob turn again, and then he could hear her moving around the kitchen, getting the children breakfast, trying to answer their questions. He looked at himself in the mirror a long time. He made faces at himself. He tried many expressions. Then he gave it up. He turned away from the mirror and sat down on the edge of the bathtub, began unlacing his shoes. He sat there with a shoe in his hand and looked at the clipper ships making their way across the wide blue sea of the plastic shower curtain. He thought of the little black coaches in the tablecloth and almost cried out
Stop!
He unbuttoned his shirt, leaned over the bathtub with a sigh, and pressed the plug into the drain. He ran hot water, and presently steam rose.

He stood naked on the tiles before getting into the water. He gathered in his fingers the slack flesh over his ribs. He studied his face again in the clouded mirror. He started in fear when Marian called his name.

“Ralph. The children are in their room playing. I called Von Williams and said you wouldn’t be in today, and I’m going to stay home.” Then she said, “I have a nice breakfast
on the stove for you, darling, when you’re through with your bath. Ralph?”

“Just be quiet, please,” he said.

He stayed in the bathroom until he heard her in the children’s room. She was dressing them, asking didn’t they want to play with Warren and Roy? He went through the house and into the bedroom, where he shut the door. He looked at the bed before he crawled in. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. He had gotten up from the couch, had come into the kitchen, had … 
sat
 … 
down.
He snapped shut his eyes and turned onto his side as Marian came into the room. She took off her robe and sat down on the bed. She put her hand under the covers and began stroking the lower part of his back.

“Ralph,” she said.

He tensed at her fingers, and then he let go a little. It was easier to let go a little. Her hand moved over his hip and over his stomach and she was pressing her body over his now and moving over him and back and forth over him. He held himself, he later considered, as long as he could. And then he turned to her. He turned and turned in what might have been a stupendous sleep, and he was still turning, marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over him.

MY HUSBAND EATS WITH
good appetite but he seems tired, edgy. He chews slowly, arms on the table, and stares at something across the room. He looks at me and looks away again. He wipes his mouth on the napkin. He shrugs and goes on eating. Something has come between us though he would like me to believe otherwise.

“What are you staring at me for?” he asks. “What is it?” he says and puts his fork down.

“Was I staring?” I say and shake my head stupidly, stupidly.

The telephone rings. “Don’t answer it,” he says.

“It might be your mother,” I say. “Dean – it might be something about Dean.”

“Watch and see,” he says.

I pick up the receiver and listen for a minute. He stops eating. I bite my lip and hang up.

“What did I tell you?” he says. He starts to eat again, then throws the napkin onto his plate. “Goddamn it, why can’t people mind their own business? Tell me what I did wrong and I’ll listen! It’s not fair. She was dead, wasn’t she? There were other men there besides me. We talked it over and we all decided. We’d only just got there. We’d walked for hours. We couldn’t just turn around, we were five miles from the car. It was opening day. What the hell, I don’t see anything wrong. No, I don’t. And don’t look at me that way, do
you hear? I won’t have you passing judgment on me. Not you.”

“You know,” I say and shake my head.

“What do I know, Claire? Tell me. Tell me what I know. I don’t know anything except one thing: you hadn’t better get worked up over this.” He gives me what he thinks is a
meaningful
look. “She was dead, dead, dead, do you hear?” he says after a minute. “It’s a damn shame, I agree. She was a young girl and it’s a shame, and I’m sorry, as sorry as anyone else, but she was dead, Claire, dead. Now let’s leave it alone. Please, Claire. Let’s leave it alone now.”

“That’s the point,” I say. “She was dead. But don’t you see? She needed help.”

“I give up,” he says and raises his hands. He pushes his chair away from the table, takes his cigarettes and goes out to the patio with a can of beer. He walks back and forth for a minute and then sits in a lawn chair and picks up the paper once more. His name is there on the first page along with the names of his friends, the other men who made the “grisly find.”

I close my eyes for a minute and hold onto the drainboard. I must not dwell on this any longer. I must get over it, put it out of sight, out of mind, etc., and “go on.” I open my eyes. Despite everything, knowing all that may be in store, I rake my arm across the drainboard and send the dishes and glasses smashing and scattering across the floor.

He doesn’t move. I know he has heard, he raises his head as if listening, but he doesn’t move otherwise, doesn’t turn around to look. I hate him for that, for not moving. He waits a minute, then draws on his cigarette and leans back in the chair. I pity him for listening, detached, and then settling back and drawing on his cigarette. The wind takes the smoke out of his mouth in a thin stream. Why do I notice that? He can never know how much I pity him for that, for sitting
still and listening, and letting the smoke stream out of his mouth.…

He planned his fishing trip into the mountains last Sunday, a week before the Memorial Day weekend. He and Gordon Johnson, Mel Dorn, Vern Williams. They play poker, bowl, and fish together. They fish together every spring and early summer, the first two or three months of the season, before family vacations, little league baseball, and visiting relatives can intrude. They are decent men, family men, responsible at their jobs. They have sons and daughters who go to school with our son, Dean. On Friday afternoon these four men left for a three-day fishing trip to the Naches River. They parked the car in the mountains and hiked several miles to where they wanted to fish. They carried their bedrolls, food and cooking utensils, their playing cards, their whiskey. The first evening at the river, even before they could set up camp, Mel Dorn found the girl floating face down in the river, nude, lodged near the shore in some branches. He called the other men and they all came to look at her. They talked about what to do. One of the men – Stuart didn’t say which – perhaps it was Vern Williams, he is a heavy-set, easy man who laughs often – one of them thought they should start back to the car at once. The others stirred the sand with their shoes and said they felt inclined to stay. They pleaded fatigue, the late hour, the fact that the girl “wasn’t going anywhere.” In the end they all decided to stay. They went ahead and set up the camp and built a fire and drank their whiskey. They drank a lot of whiskey and when the moon came up they talked about the girl. Someone thought they should do something to prevent the body from floating away. Somehow they thought that this might create a problem for them if it floated away during the night. They took flashlights and stumbled down to the river. The wind was up, a cold wind, and waves from the river lapped the sandy bank. One of the
men, I don’t know who, it might have been Stuart, he could have done it, waded into the water and took the girl by the fingers and pulled her, still face down, closer to shore, into shallow water, and then took a piece of nylon cord and tied it around her wrist and then secured the cord to tree roots, all the while the flashlights of the other men played over the girl’s body. Afterward, they went back to camp and drank more whiskey. Then they went to sleep. The next morning, Saturday, they cooked breakfast, drank lots of coffee, more whiskey, and then split up to fish, two men upriver, two men down.

That night, after they had cooked their fish and potatoes and had more coffee and whiskey, they took their dishes down to the river and rinsed them off a few yards from where the body lay in the water. They drank again and then they took out their cards and played and drank until they couldn’t see the cards any longer. Vern Williams went to sleep, but the others told coarse stories and spoke of vulgar or dishonest escapades out of their past, and no one mentioned the girl until Gordon Johnson, who’d forgotten for a minute, commented on the firmness of the trout they’d caught, and the terrible coldness of the river water. They stopped talking then but continued to drink until one of them tripped and fell cursing against the lantern, and then they climbed into their sleeping bags.

The next morning they got up late, drank more whiskey, fished a little as they kept drinking whiskey. Then, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Sunday, a day earlier than they’d planned, they decided to leave. They took down their tents, rolled their sleeping bags, gathered their pans, pots, fish, and fishing gear, and hiked out. They didn’t look at the girl again before they left. When they reached the car they drove the highway in silence until they came to a telephone. Stuart made the call to the sheriff’s office while the others stood
around in the hot sun and listened. He gave the man on the other end of the line all of their names – they had nothing to hide, they weren’t ashamed of anything – and agreed to wait at the service station until someone could come for more detailed directions and individual statements.

He came home at eleven o’clock that night. I was asleep but woke when I heard him in the kitchen. I found him leaning against the refrigerator drinking a can of beer. He put his heavy arms around me and rubbed his hands up and down my back, the same hands he’d left with two days before, I thought.

In bed he put his hands on me again and then waited, as if thinking of something else. I turned slightly and then moved my legs. Afterward, I know he stayed awake for a long time, for he was awake when I fell asleep; and later, when I stirred for a minute, opening my eyes at a slight noise, a rustle of sheets, it was almost daylight outside, birds were singing, and he was on his back smoking and looking at the curtained window. Half-asleep I said his name, but he didn’t answer. I fell asleep again.

He was up this morning before I could get out of bed – to see if there was anything about it in the paper, I suppose. The telephone began to ring shortly after eight o’clock.

“Go to hell,” I heard him shout into the receiver. The telephone rang again a minute later, and I hurried into the kitchen. “I have nothing else to add to what I’ve already said to the sheriff. That’s right!” He slammed down the receiver.

“What is going on?” I said, alarmed.

“Sit down,” he said slowly. His fingers scraped, scraped against his stubble of whiskers. “I have to tell you something. Something happened while we were fishing.” We sat across from each other at the table, and then he told me.

I drank coffee and stared at him as he spoke. Then I read the account in the newspaper that he shoved across the table:
“… unidentified girl eighteen to twenty-four years of age … body three to five days in the water … rape a possible motive … preliminary results show death by strangulation … cuts and bruises on her breasts and pelvic area … autopsy … rape, pending further investigation.”

“You’ve got to understand,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that. Be careful now, I mean it. Take it easy, Claire.”

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?” I asked.

“I just … didn’t. What do you mean?” he said.

“You know what I mean,” I said. I looked at his hands, the broad fingers, knuckles covered with hair, moving, lighting a cigarette now, fingers that had moved over me, into me last night.

He shrugged. “What difference does it make, last night, this morning? It was late. You were sleepy, I thought I’d wait until this morning to tell you.” He looked out to the patio: a robin flew from the lawn to the picnic table and preened its feathers.

“It isn’t true,” I said. “You didn’t leave her there like that?”

He turned quickly and said, “What’d I do? Listen to me carefully now, once and for all. Nothing happened. I have nothing to be sorry for or feel guilty about. Do you hear me?”

I got up from the table and went to Dean’s room. He was awake and in his pajamas, putting together a puzzle. I helped him find his clothes and then went back to the kitchen and put his breakfast on the table. The telephone rang two or three more times and each time Stuart was abrupt while he talked and angry when he hung up. He called Mel Dorn and Gordon Johnson and spoke with them, slowly, seriously, and then he opened a beer and smoked a cigarette while Dean ate, asked him about school, his friends, etc., exactly as if nothing had happened.