American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “Stop looking at me,” she yelled over.

  “Mrs. Thomssen, you are lovely tonight.” Thomssen didn’t have to yell; his big voice carried.

  “Your hair shines like silver and gold.”

  “Fuck you.” She turned toward Cal Jr., who was looking nervously at Thomssen. Cal Jr. was not a tough guy. Belle said, “Ignore him. He’s an asshole.”

  “She’s old enough to be your mother, Cal,” Thomssen said.

  As the bartender slipped behind the curtain leading into the kitchen, Belle swung around again and threw a glass ashtray across the room at Thomssen. Ashes and cigarette butts fell along its trajectory, and Thomssen caught it as it hit his chest, although it knocked a puff of smoke out of his lungs and would undoubtedly leave a bruise. He extinguished his cigarette in the new ashtray and found that he felt inexplicably cheerful afterward.

  “You want a drink, honey?” Thomssen called to her across the bar.

  “Fuck you, old man,” Belle said.

  “Pete,” Thomssen said, when the bartender returned. “Pete, give old Mrs. Thomssen a drink.”

  The bartender raised his eyebrows, warning Thomssen, but Thomssen didn’t want to be careful. He pulled out a ten, thought again, and pulled out a twenty and held the bill up between his middle and forefinger. Belle walked over and grabbed it.

  “Be sure to tip the bartender, Belle,” he said.

  “Give me another beer and some poison for that old man over there,” she told Pete. She put all the change in her hip pocket beneath the big sweater and carried Thomssen’s double shot to him.

  He grabbed the drink in one hand and her wrist in the other.

  “Let go,” she said.

  “Talk to me, Belle.”

  The last time he’d seen her, three weeks ago, she’d come into this bar on a Friday evening and gone home with him. Belle had not before then seen the new place he was buying on land contract, and she admired its compactness, its wood floors, and the pretty view of the stream in back. She said how glad she was to be with him. They were going to be a family, he thought after a few beers and shots; together they were going to solve their problems, maybe get joint custody of Billy—Billy was old enough to choose. They stayed together all weekend and finally made love Sunday, in the late afternoon, and then he’d fallen asleep in a blissful state. When he awoke later, he found a note on the table saying she’d gone out to get smokes, and his truck was gone. He’d picked up his wallet off the stereo and found the cash missing, over a hundred dollars. Eventually he’d walked two miles to the Beer Store, looked for his truck, and asked the counter help if they’d seen Belle. With the change from his pocket, he’d bought a forty-ouncer of Budweiser, and he’d walked home with it under his arm. The following morning the cops found his truck run out of gas beside an old factory on the north side. They said he was lucky it hadn’t been stripped.

  “Let me go, you bastard.” Belle tried to bite his arm, but only bit into the fabric of his insulated flannel shirt and the long underwear shirt beneath it.

  He enjoyed her attempts at biting him, but when he saw her hand was turning white, he loosened his grip. His calluses prevented him from feeling her skin. Her wrist was smaller and more delicate than the lengths of PVC or galvanized pipe he carried down into holes in the ground or up ladders into ceilings.

  “What do you want?” Belle asked through gritted teeth.

  His brother, to whom he had spoken on the phone last week, would have told him to say he wanted a divorce. He should have said that he wanted his Visa card for the account on which he’d put a temporary stop, that he wanted her signature on the form to remove her from his checking account, that he wanted back all the money she’d already withdrawn from it.

  “I want us to be happy,” he said, further loosening his grip.

  She relaxed her body and took a long draw from her cigarette. She let it out with a sigh.

  “People like us aren’t happy, Thomssen. I’m a drug addict, and you’re a mean fucking drunk.”

  “Please, Belle, come home with me.” He let go of her wrist, and she massaged it with the other hand. He said, “We can try one more time.”

  “Aren’t you tired of trying?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Belle was finally listening to him, and, God, she looked lost. If only she would see she was not lost, but found. He had found her again, the way he always found her after her father’s beatings, in those quiet, dark evenings when they lay together in her bedroom, or more recently when he saved her after a drug dealer pushed her out of a car onto his lawn, and he got her to the hospital.

  She still didn’t see how he would always be there for her.

  Belle sat looking at him, maybe listening.

  “We need each other, Belle,” he said. “Come home with me.” He was thinking about

  grabbing her and dragging her out to the truck, holding her arm while he drove one-handed so she wouldn’t jump out. He could tie her up in his house, away from the telephone, keep her there until the drugs were out of her system, until the desire for drugs was gone from her blood. She looked scared, not of getting hurt, but scared like she might give in and come home with him if he asked again. Her face looked older up close, and he liked that; when she finally got old, she would have to stop running around. If she were old, the other guys would have no interest, and she would stay with him.

  “I’m glad you came here tonight,” Thomssen said.

  “Actually, I came here to apologize,” Belle said. She looked humble, but not defeated. It could be a pose. She might want money. He might give it to her. “I’m sorry about taking your truck a few weeks ago. I’d planned on coming right back, but then I ran into a friend at the Beer Store, and he asked me for a ride downtown, and one thing led to another. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Belle,” Thomssen said. “Whatever you do, I’ll forgive you, so long as you come back home to me.”

  “I might not be redeemable, old man.” Her body went limp in her chair. Her apology was intoxicating, but still Thomssen didn’t quite trust what she was saying. She might burst out laughing at any moment. She said, “Sometimes I don’t know why the hell I go on.”

  “Oh, Belle.” He could not forgive himself for his inaction all those years ago when her father beat her, and he could not forgive himself for pushing her down the stairs in his old apartment this summer (after he’d found out she’d fooled around with his apprentice), but he could forgive Belle, if she was really asking his forgiveness. He leaned in close to her, to smell her, to look into her eyes, although she refused to meet his gaze.

  “You’ll forgive me for anything I do?” she said. She leaned back in her chair, looked down at her fingers curled on her lap.

  “We belong together, Belle.”

  “We’re both assholes,” she said. “You think you’re not an asshole because you go to work in the morning and pay bills, but you’re as bad as me.”

  “We can change.”

  “How?”

  “With love. If we love each other enough.”

  “Love,” Belle said, with distaste. “If love is the answer, then what the hell was the question?”

  She laughed in a disembodied way.

  “I’m not divorcing you, Belle. I can’t divorce you any more than I can divorce Billy.”

  “If you’ll forgive anything,” she said, “then you’ll forgive what I did last night.”

  “Goddamn it, Belle.” After a pause, he said, “Did you screw somebody?” Thomssen felt his chest expanding, puffing out with smoke he couldn’t exhale. He lit a cigarette from the one he was about to crush out and inhaled even more deeply.

  “Yeah, I screwed Billy.” She looked into his eyes, finally.

  Thomssen’s body stiffened; his spine extended to its full height. He’d never liked the way she behaved around Billy. She’d sat on the kid’s lap one day when the three of them were watching television. He shouldn’t have been surprised that Belle had gone with Billy as
easily as she’d gone with that apprentice of his. The apprentice had gotten her some dope, and she gave him a hand job in the parking lot of the Beer Store. When he returned to work, the kid had shaken like a leaf all afternoon, and the next day he couldn’t do his job until he confessed to Thomssen. Thomssen had forgiven the kid and Belle, too. What the hell was a hand job in this life?

  “Billy who?” The liquor churned in Thomssen’s gut. He was drunker than he’d thought, had always been drunk. Maybe he hadn’t been sober a day, a minute, since getting back together with Belle at Gun Lake.

  “Your son, Billy.”

  “My Billy?”

  “But you’ll forgive me, right? You said you’d forgive anything.” She grinned weakly.

  “Forgive you, hell! I should never have let you near him.”

  His anger was even larger than he was. She stood, but she wasn’t quick enough to get away.

  Thomssen might be big, but he wasn’t slow. He worked all day long in the heat or cold, caught pipes before they hit the ground, balanced on ladders, reached above his head to make fine adjustments with a pair of ten-pound pipe wrenches. He grasped her neck in one of his big hands, rested his calloused thumb against her windpipe, and sat her back down. Her chair tipped, slipped out from under her and she was on her knees grasping the table, her pale throat offered up to him. Her face darkened. She did not utter a sound, did not fight him. Cal Jr. and Pete the bartender pulled on his forearms, but they couldn’t break his hold. Pete finally hit Thomssen over the head twice with a half-full whiskey bottle. It didn’t break, but it hurt like hell, and Thomssen let go at the shock of the second blow.

  Belle pulled away and panted until her face cleared and she caught her breath. Then she ran behind the bar and grabbed the big knife Pete used for slicing sandwich onions. Pete sent Cal Jr. out the back door to meet the cops, whom he’d called the moment Thomssen’s hand had touched Belle’s neck. Belle returned to Thomssen’s table and held the knife in front of his face. He grabbed her arm and squeezed until she dropped the knife. The blade fell straight down, punctured the tip of her tennis shoe, and then bounced and sliced a bit of skin off her naked ankle before it settled.

  By the time the cops came through the door, Thomssen had let go of Belle, and she was back at the bar.

  “He tried to kill me,” Belle told them. “Ask anybody in here.”

  “They damage anything?” the fat cop asked the bartender.

  “Nope.” Pete righted the chair that they had tipped over. From the officers’ casual manner, Thomssen had to assume Pete had told the cops that the fight was between a husband and wife.

  “He threw me down the stairs this summer, now he tries to strangle me.”

  “Is ever-body calmed down now?” asked the skinny cop, licking his teeth.

  Thomssen was silent, but he didn’t feel calm. He could forgive anything except this. A woman who would do what she did was a monster. The soul had choked its way out of her scrawny body, and now she was nothing more than a stinking, drugged-up whore. His hand had blood on it, he noticed, and over at the bar, Belle was dabbing her bleeding nose with a wet rag. Her wide-open eyes looked vacant. He didn’t remember hitting her. Cal Jr. was saying something quietly in her ear.

  Thomssen considered tossing down his double whiskey, but he thought of the Breathalyzer and reconsidered.

  “Isn’t it about time to go home, sir?” the fat cop said.

  Thomssen realized they might let him go with a warning, no hassle, no Breathalyzer. He could apologize and slip Pete a twenty-dollar tip on the way out, promise to stay away for a while.

  Thomssen would head home without Belle and let the distance between him and her grow larger.

  He needed only to keep quiet, say good night, and then file for divorce. He could leave this bar a free man, go home, sober up, and beg Billy’s forgiveness for ever letting Belle near him. He’d take Billy on a vacation with the money he’d save from not drinking. Billy wanted to go to Cedar Point amusement park, and Thomssen would take Billy and a neighbor kid he hung around with. All Thomssen had to do now was contain his anger.

  But his life with Billy was only one day a week at most, and every other day would be empty, the way his life had been empty after his divorce and before he’d found Belle again. When Billy and Belle weren’t there, Thomssen’s life outside of work amounted to sitting alone and worrying. His marrying Belle was supposed to have filled his life, and more importantly, it was supposed to have rescued and protected her—if he gave up on her now, he would have failed again. Without him to hunt her down when she was missing too long, without him to take her to the emergency room when somebody dumped her out of a car, Belle would die. If he divorced her, he would not have any right to know where she was. He wouldn’t have a right to see her if she were in the hospital.

  Why wouldn’t she let him help her?

  Belle shook back her hair, looked into his face, and flipped him her middle finger.

  “How could you do that?” Thomssen said, his own voice lower and more threatening than he meant it to sound. “He’s just a goddamned kid.”

  “Whoa, big fellow,” the fat cop said.

  “At least your son’s pretty dick still works,” Belle said. “Unlike your sorry, shriveled whiskey-soaked thing.”

  Thomssen lunged across the room, and the movement was a profound release, an action born of inaction, a way of finally striding across the driveway separating the houses and taking Belle’s father’s neck in his hands. A way of breaking into that drug dealer’s house, kicking him bloody, dragging Belle out of there once and for all, and bringing her home to stay. The cops grabbed him before he reached her, and the big cop twisted one arm artfully behind his back, put Thomssen on one knee with his head bent down. Thomssen heard one pool ball click against another and then no other sounds from the table.

  “You see what an animal he is?” Belle said. Blood still dribbled out of her nose, and she smeared it across her face with her hand.

  “Jesus, Belle,” Thomssen said. He took a deep breath and sighed. “Why won’t you let me help you?”

  “He wants to help me,” Belle said to the cops and snorted. “Ask him why he wants to help me right after he tries to kill me.”

  “Honestly, Belle. That’s all I ever wanted to do, save you.” Thomssen turned to the cops.

  “When she was a girl, her dad used to beat her up.”

  “Sure. When I was a girl, he’d wait until my dad beat the hell out of me, and then he’d come over and fuck me.”

  The bar was silent. Thomssen felt his heart stop. That was not what he’d done. Was it?

  Those tender moments that he treasured above all other moments in his life. The feel of her body trembling beneath him, those glittering eyes open in the dark. Her hands had reached for him; her fingers had pushed those buttons through the buttonholes. Her fingertips had unfastened his jeans.

  He had not forced himself on her. Had he?

  “You ought not hurt a lady, Mister,” the skinny cop finally said and cleared his throat.

  Thomssen said, “You can hate me. I deserve to be hated. But not Billy.”

  “I didn’t screw Billy, you asshole. I just wanted to see if you really trusted me. If you’d really forgive me for anything, like you said. You won’t forgive me. You’ll hold everything I’ve ever done against me the rest of my life.”

  “Oh, Christ, Belle.” He felt his bulk turn to dead weight. What had he been thinking? Billy had been with him all day and all night, and before that, with his ma. Billy wouldn’t have gone off with her, anyway. Billy didn’t really like Belle.

  “Why would you tell me that? Why would you test a person that way?”

  “This doesn’t seem to be settling down,” the fat cop said.

  “Why did you really come here?” Thomssen asked.

  “Let’s get you out to the car. Maybe a night in lock-up will calm you down.”

  Belle said, “I wanted to ask if I could stay with you.”


  Thomssen didn’t resist when they handcuffed him. He stared down at those bare ankles of hers, blood trickling into her shoe from where the onion knife had sliced her. The ankles were pocked with needle marks; she had used up the veins in her arms, and the rest of her body would fail her soon enough. She would be lucky if she survived the winter without him.

  “Go to my house, Belle. You can stay there.”

  “I don’t have a key,” she said.

  “Let her take the key out of my pocket,” Thomssen said.

  “There’s been enough give and take between you two,” the skinny cop said.

  “Break the window, Belle,” Thomssen said, over his shoulder. “Break the window on the stream side of the living room. Then cover it with plastic to keep the heat in. There’s a roll of plastic by the washing machine. The staple gun is in the top drawer in the utility room. And there’s duct tape.” They led him out into the snow and wind, and pulled the door closed tightly behind them.

  She probably would be able find his house again, break the window’s lower sash, and slip in over the glass shards, unseen by the neighbors. Once inside, she’d turn up the heat, sit and hug herself on the couch, hunker in a nest of whatever blankets were within easy reach, huddle like a creature not quite human, a member of a doomed species who knows safety and warmth are always temporary. She would chain-smoke his cigarettes until the carton was empty, her eyes glassy, furtive, listening for sounds of danger, sounds of his return. She would take what easy comfort she could, but she would not look for the roll of plastic or the staple gun; never in a million years would she fix the plastic over the broken window to keep the snow and cold from rushing in after her.

  Falling

  On his first day out of the hospital, that no-good son of a bitch Jonas comes walking up the driveway beside the garden. He’s got a lot of nerve coming here. Considering he’s been on dialysis for a month, he looks okay, although older than his forty-one years. Maybe his neck is a little more bent; maybe his coarse hair has a few more gray strands. Not sure why, but my eyes water at the sight of him. I take the bandana off my hair and wipe my eyes before he reaches me in the bush beans. He drank a cup of antifreeze, the girl at the grocery told me, mixed it with orange juice so he could get it down.