Beginners

by Raymond Carver

  Before the drinking had turned bad on him and he’d prayed to be able to stop, he’d prayed on occasions some years before that, after his youngest son had gone off to Vietnam to fly jet planes. He’d prayed off and on then, sometimes during the day if he thought about his son in connection with reading something in the newspaper about that terrible place; and sometimes at night lying in the dark next to Edith, turning over the day’s events, his thoughts might come to rest on his son. He’d pray then, idly, like most men who are not religious pray. But nevertheless he’d prayed that his son would survive and come home in one piece. And he had returned safely too, but James hadn’t ever for a minute really attributed his return to prayer—of course not. Now he suddenly remembered much farther back to a time when he’d prayed hardest of all, a time when he was twenty-one years old and still believed in the power of prayer. He’d prayed one entire night for his father, that he would recover from his automobile accident. But his father had died anyway. He’d been drunk and speeding and had hit a tree, and there was nothing that could be done to save his life. But even now he still remembered sitting outside the emergency room until sunlight entered the windows and praying and praying for his father, making all kinds of promises through his tears, if only his father would pull through. His mother had sat next to him and cried and held his father’s shoes which had unaccountably come along in the ambulance beside him when they’d brought him to the hospital.

  He got up and put his basket of embroidery away for the night. He stood at the window. The birch tree behind the house was fixed in the little area of yellow light from the back porch lamp, the treetop lost in the overhead darkness. The leaves had been gone for months, but the bare branches switched in the gusts of wind. As he stood there he began to feel frightened, and then it was on him, a real terror welling in his chest. He could believe that something heavy and mean was moving around out there tonight, and that at any minute it might charge or break loose and come hurtling through the window at him. He moved back a few steps and stood where a corner of light from the porch lamp caused the room to brighten under him. His mouth had gone dry. He couldn’t swallow. He raised his hands toward the window and let them drop. He suddenly felt he had lived nearly his whole life without having ever once really stopped to think about anything, and this came to him now as a terrible shock and increased his feeling of unworthiness.

  He was very tired and had little strength left in his limbs. He pulled up the waist of his pajamas. He barely had energy to get into bed. He pushed up from the bed and turned off the lamp. He lay in the dark for a while. Then he tried praying again, slowly at first, forming the words silently with his lips, and then beginning to mutter words aloud and to pray in earnest. He asked for enlightenment on these matters. He asked for help in understanding the situation. He prayed for Edith, that she would be all right, that the doctor wouldn’t find anything seriously wrong, not, please not, cancer, that’s what he prayed for strongest. Then he prayed for his children, two sons and a daughter, scattered here and there across the continent. He included his grandchildren in these prayers. Then his thoughts moved to the hippie again. In a little while he had to sit up on the side of the bed and light a cigarette. He sat on the bed in the dark and smoked. The hippie woman, she was just a girl, not much younger or different-looking than his own daughter. But the fellow, him and his little spectacles, he was something else. He sat there for a while longer and turned things over. Then he put out his cigarette and got back under the covers. He settled onto his side and lay there. He rolled over onto his other side. He kept turning until he lay on his back, staring at the dark ceiling.

  The same yellow light from the back porch lamp shone against the window. He lay with his eyes open and listened to the wind buffet the house. He felt something stir inside him again, but it was not anger this time. He lay without moving for a while longer. He lay as if waiting. Then something left him and something else took its place. He found tears in his eyes. He began praying again, words and parts of speech piling up in a torrent in his mind. He went slower. He put the words together, one after the other, and prayed. This time he was able to include the girl and the hippie in his prayers. Let them have it, yes, drive vans and be arrogant and laugh and wear rings, even cheat if they wanted. Meanwhile, prayers were needed. They could use them too, even his, especially his, in fact. “If it please you,” he said in the new prayers for all of them, the living and the dead.

  So Much Water So Close to Home

  MY husband eats with good appetite but 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, and wipes his mouth on the napkin. He shrugs, goes on eating. Something has come between us though he would like to believe otherwise.

  “What are you staring at me for?” he asks. “What is it?” he says and lays 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, responsib
le 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 against 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 heavyset, 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 she 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. Afterwards, 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 washed them a few yards from where the girl lay in the water. They drank again and then they took out their cards and played and drank until they couldn’t see their 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’d 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, and then, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Sunday, a day earlier than they’d planned, 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. Afterwards, 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 that 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. 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? 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.

  Dean wanted to know what he’d done while he was gone, and Stuart took some fish out of the freezer to show him.

  “I’m taking him to your mother’s for the day,” I said.

  “Sure,” Stuart said and looked at Dean, who was holding one of the frozen trout. “If you want to and he wants to, that is. You don’t have to, you know. There’s nothing wrong.”

  “I’d like to anyway,” I said.

  “Can I go swimming there?” Dean asked and wiped his fingers on his pants.

  “I believe so,” I said. “It’s a warm day so take your suit, and I’m sure Grandmother will say it’s okay.”

  Stuart lighted another cigarette and looked at us.

  Dean and I drove across town to Stuart’s mother’s. She lives in an apartment building with a pool and a sauna bath. Her name is Catherine Kane. Her name, Kane, is the same as mine, which seems impossible. Years ago, Stuart has told me, she used to be called Candy by her friends. She is a tall, cold woman with white-blond hair. She gives me the feeling that she is always judging, judging. I explain briefly in a low voice what has happened (she hasn’t yet read the newspaper) and promise to pick Dean up that evening. “He brought his swimming suit,” I say. “Stuart and I have to talk about some things,” I add vaguely. She looks at me steadily from over her glasses. Then she nods and turns to Dean, saying, “How are you, my little
man?” She stoops and puts her arms around him. She looks at me again as I open the door to leave. She has a way of looking at me without saying anything.

  When I returned home Stuart was eating something at the table and drinking beer…

  After a time I sweep up the broken dishes and glassware and go outside. Stuart is lying on his back on the grass now, the newspaper and can of beer within reach, staring at the sky. It is breezy but warm out and birds call.

  “Stuart, could we go for a drive?” I say. “Anywhere.”

  He rolls over and looks at me and nods. “We’ll pick up some beer,” he says. “I hope you’re feeling better about this. Try to understand, that’s all I ask.” He gets to his feet and touches me on the hip as he goes past. “Give me a minute and I’ll be ready.”

  We drive through town without speaking. Before we reach the country he stops at a roadside market for beer. I notice a great stack of papers just inside the door. On the top step a fat woman in a print dress holds out a licorice stick to a little girl. In a few minutes we cross Everson Creek and turn into a picnic area a few feet from the water. The creek flows under the bridge and into a large pond a few hundred yards away. There are a dozen or so men and boys scattered around the banks of the pond under the willows, fishing.

  So much water so close to home, why did he have to go miles away to fish?

  “Why did you have to go there of all places?” I say.

  “The Naches? We always go there. Every year, at least once.” We sit on a bench in the sun and he opens two cans of beer and gives one to me. “How the hell was I to know anything like that would happen?” He shakes his head and shrugs, as if it had all happened years ago, or to someone else. “Enjoy the afternoon, Claire. Look at this weather.”