by Ed Gorman
Behind me once, I think I hear something and I stop. I'm scared now, the way I am when monster movies come on TV. You shouldn't watch that crap, Dad always says, snapping off the set when he sees that I'm getting scared. The forest is vast. Dark. Slither and crawl and creep, the things in the forest, possum and snake and wolf. And maybe monsters, the way there are in forests on TV. The Indians always believed there were beasts in the woods.
I start running again. Need to find Dad. Warn him.
Now I think of the things Mom read me about the Indians who used to live here. I like to pretend I'm an Indian. I wish I could wear buffalo masks the way they did when they danced around their campfires. Or the claws of a grizzly bear as a necklace signifying that I am the bravest brave of all. Or paint stripes of blood on my arm, each stripe meaning a different battle. They had to come get me sometimes, Mom and Dad, at suppertime, scared I'd wandered off, but I was always up at the old line shack playing Indian, talking to the prairie sky the way the Indians always had; and watching for the silver wolves to stand in the long grasses and sing and cry and nuzzle their young as the silver moon rose in the pure Iowa night.
I see the shape of the little cabin through the cedars now. It sits all falling down in the middle of a small clearing. No lights; no sound but an owl and the soft soughing of the long grasses; and the smell of rotted wood still wet from the rain last week.
I know he's in there. I sense it.
I crouch down, the way an Indian would, and reach the clearing.
And then I start running fast for the cabin.
I am halfway across the clearing when I hear a voice say, "You go back home, Bobby. Right now."
Dad. Inside the cabin.
I am chill with sweat. And shaking. "Mike, he came out to the house, Dad and said—"
"I know what he said."
"He says you killed Mr. Ohler."
"I had to, son. He didn't have no right to take our farm back. He said he was our friend but he wasn't no friend at all."
I don't say anything just then; just the soft soft soughing of the wind, like the breathing of some invisible giant, sleeping.
"Mike, he says he's afraid you'll get killed."
"I don't want to go to prison, Bobby."
"I wish I could see you."
He's in the window, in darkness. He's like Mom now. I can talk to him but I can't see him. It's like death.
"I want to see you, Dad."
"You just go on back, Bobby. You understand me? You just go on back to the farm and wait there."
And then I hear something again, and when I turn I see Mike coming out into the clearing.
He looks all sloppy, his shirt untucked and his graying hair all mussed. He carries his shotgun, cocked in his arm now.
"I figured you'd lead me to him, Bobby."
"He won't let me see him, Mike."
He nods and then says to the cabin. "I want to come in and talk to you."
"Just stay out there, Mike."
"You don't need to make this any worse than it already is. I'm supposed to be your friend."
"Yeah, just the way Ohler was my friend."
"He didn't have nothing to do with taking your farm back. It was those bastards in Minneapolis."
"That's what he liked to say, anyway."
"I'm coming in."
"I'll shoot you if you try."
"Then you'll just have to shoot me, you sonofabitch."
One thing about Mike, he makes up his mind, there's no stopping him. No sir.
I say, "Can I go with you?"
He shakes his head. "You just stay here."
"He's my dad."
"Bobby, goddammit, I got enough on my mind right now, all right? You just stay right here."
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry I swore at you like that."
"Yes, sir."
"I won't be long."
From the cabin, my dad shouts, "You just stay out there, Mike. You hear me?"
But Mike walks toward the cabin.
My dad fires.
The shot is loud and flat in the soughing prairie silence.
"Next time I'll hit you."
"You'll just have to hit me, then."
This time, the bullet comes a lot closer. This time it echoes off the hills.
But Mike doesn't slow down.
He walks right up to the one-room cabin and kicks in the front door and then goes inside.
I walk back to the edge of the clearing and look at trees. Mom always used to read me the names of trees, too, white oak and shagbark hickory and basswood and pin oak and green ash and silver maple and honey locusts and big-tooth aspens. Say them over and over and they're like a song, too.
I need to pee again.
I go into the woods.
I wish I could wash my hands. It always makes me feel bad not to do what Mom says, even when she's gone.
In the clearing again, I hear them yelling at each other inside the cabin and I get scared. And they're starting to fight. They slam up against the walls and the whole cabin shakes. I want to run down there but I'm too scared. I don't want to see Dad hurt Mike or Mike hurt Dad. This shouldn't ought to be like this.
And then the shot.
Just one.
And it's louder and the echo is longer and then there is this terrible silence and you can't even hear the wind now.
And then the cabin door opens up and Dad comes out.
He walks to the center of the clearing, his .45 dangling from his right hand. "You get back to the farm, you hear me, Bobby?"
But I can't help myself. I go up to him. And I put my arms around him. And the funny thing is, this time he doesn't push me away or tell me grown men shouldn't hug each other. He holds me real tight and I can feel how raw-boned he is, all sharp shoulders and bony elbows and gaunted ribs.
He holds me tight, too, just as tight as I hold him, and says, "I messed it all up, Bobby. I messed it all up."
And then he starts choking and crying the way he did at Mom's funeral and I hold him and let him cry the way Mom used to hold me and let me cry.
And then he's done.
And standing in the clearing. And staring up at the moon the way Mom told me Indians used to. She said they believed they could read things in the moon, portents for what would happen to them in the future.
Then he looks at me, and he speaks very very softly, and he says, "You get on back now, Bobby. And you call Mr. Sayre, the lawyer, he'll know what to do."
"Is Uncle Mike dead?"
"Yes, he is, Bobby."
"How come you shot him, Dad?"
"I'm not sure why, Bobby. I'm not sure why at all. I just wish I hadn't."
I wanted to say something but I was afraid I would start crying again.
And Dad was already looking back toward the cabin.
"You go on back to the farm now, Bobby, and you call Mr. Sayre."
I reach out gently for his .45 but he pulls it back. "Maybe I should take that from you, Dad."
"You just go on, Bobby."
"I'm scared, Dad, you havin' that forty-five and all."
"You just go on. You just hurry and call Mr. Sayre."
"I'm scared, Dad."
"I know you are, Bobby. And I'm scared, too." He nods to the woods and says, very final now, "Git, boy. Git and git fast. You understand?"
"Yessir."
"You run till you get to the farm and then you call Mr. Sayre. You understand?"
"Yessir."
And that is all.
He turns away from me, his face lost in moonshadow, and he goes on back to the cabin.
I know better than to argue or disobey.
I start walking slowly toward the woods again and by the time I reach the front stand of trees, the shot rings out just as I thought it would, and I try to imagine what it must look like, their two bodies there inside the cabin, blood and flies and stink the way it is when any kind of animal is dead like that, and then I get scared, real scared, and I start crying
.
I want my dad to hold me again the way he did just a few minutes ago, the way my mom used to hold me anytime I asked her. I want somebody to hold me, and hold me tight, and hold me for a long long time because the night is coming full now, and there is a beast in these woods, just the way the Indians always said, a beast in the dark dark woods.
ONE OF THOSE DAYS, ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS
The thing you have to understand is that I found it by accident. I was looking for a place to hide the birthday gift I'd bought Laura—a string of pearls she'd been wanting to wear with the new black dress she'd bought for herself—and all I was going to do was lay the gift-wrapped box in the second drawer of her bureau . . . and there it was.
A plain number ten envelope with her name written across the middle in a big manly scrawl and a canceled Elvis Presley stamp up in the corner. Postmarked two days ago.
Just as I spotted it, Laura called from the living room, "Bye, honey, see you at six." The last two years we've been saving to buy a house so we have only the one car. Laura goes an hour earlier than I do, so she rides with a woman who lives a few blocks over. Then I pick her up at six after somebody relieves me at the computer store where I work. For what it's worth, I have an M.A. in English Literature but with the economy being what it is, it hasn't done me much good.
I saw a sci-fi movie once where a guy could set something on fire simply by staring at it intently enough. That's what I was trying to do with this letter my wife got. Burn it so that I wouldn't have to read what it said inside and get my heart broken.
I closed the drawer.
Could be completely harmless. Her fifteenth high school reunion was coming up this spring. Maybe it was from one of her old classmates. And maybe the manly scrawl wasn't so manly after all. Maybe it was from a woman who wrote in a rolling dramatic hand.
Laura always said that I was the jealous type and this was certainly proof. A harmless letter tucked harmlessly in a bureau drawer. And here my heart was pounding, and fine cold sweat slicked my face, and my fingers were trembling.
God, wasn't I a pitiful guy? Shouldn't I be ashamed of myself?
I went into the bathroom and lathered up and did my usual relentless fifteen-minute morning regimen of shaving, showering and shining up my apple-cheeked Irish face and my thinning Irish hair, if hair follicles can have a nationality, that is.
Then I went back into our bedroom and took down a white shirt, blue necktie, navy blazer and tan slacks. All dressed, I looked just like seventy or eighty million other men getting ready for work this particular sunny April morning.
Then I stood very still in the middle of the bedroom and stared at Laura's bureau. Maybe I wasn't simply going to set the letter on fire. Maybe I was going to ignite the entire bureau.
The grandfather clock in the living room tolled eight-thirty. If I didn't leave now I would be late, and if you were late you inevitably got a chewing out from Ms. Sandstrom, the boss. Anybody who believes that women would run a more benign world than men needs only to spend five minutes with Ms. Sandstrom. Hitler would have used her as a pin-up girl.
The bureau. The letter. The manly scrawl.
What was I going to do?
Only one thing I could think of, since I hadn't made a decision about reading the letter or not. I'd simply take it with me to work. If I decided to read it, I'd give it a quick scan over my lunch hour.
But probably I wouldn't read it at all. I had a lot of faith where Laura was concerned. And I didn't like to think of myself as the sort of possessive guy who snuck around reading his wife's mail.
I reached into the bureau drawer.
My fingers touched the letter.
I was almost certain I wasn't going to read it. Hell, I'd probably get so busy at work that I'd forget all about it.
But just in case I decided to. . . .
I grabbed the letter and stuffed it into my blazer pocket, and closed the drawer. In the kitchen I had a final cup of coffee and read my newspaper horoscope. Bad news, as always. I should never read the damn things. . . . Then I hurried out of the apartment to the little Toyota parked at the curb.
Six blocks away, it stalled. Our friendly mechanic said that moisture seemed to get in the fuel pump a lot. He's not sure why. We've run it in three times but it still stalls several times a week.
Around ten o'clock, hurrying into a sales meeting that Ms. Sandstrom had decided to call, I dropped my pen. And when I bent over to pick it up, my glasses fell out of my pocket and when I moved to pick them up, I took one step too many and put all 175 pounds of my body directly onto them. I heard something snap.
By the time I retrieved both pen and glasses, Ms. Sandstrom was closing the door and calling the meeting to order. I hurried down the hall trying to see how much damage I'd done. I held the glasses up to the light. A major fissure snaked down the center of the right lens. I slipped them on. The crack was even more difficult to see through than I'd thought.
Ms. Sandstrom, a very attractive fiftyish woman given to sleek gray suits and burning blue gazes, warned us as usual that if sales of our computers didn't pick up, two or three people in this room would likely be looking for jobs. Soon. And just as she finished saying this, her eyes met mine. "For instance, Donaldson, what kind of month are you having?"
"What kind of month am I having?"
"Do I hear a parrot in here?" Ms. Sandstrom said, and several of the salespeople laughed.
"I'm not having too bad a month."
Ms. Sandstrom nodded wearily and looked around the room. "Do we have to ask Donaldson here any more questions? Isn't he telling us everything we need to know when he says 'I'm not having too bad a month?' What're we hearing when Donaldson says that?"
I hadn't noticed till this morning how much Ms. Sandstrom reminded me of Miss Hutchison, my fourth grade teacher. Her favorite weapon had also been humiliation.
Dick Weybright raised his hand. Dick Weybright always raises his hand, especially when he gets to help Ms. Sandstrom humiliate somebody.
"We hear defeatism, when he says that," Dick said. "We hear defeatism and a serious lack of self-esteem."
Twice a week, Ms. Sandstrom made us listen to motivational tapes. You know, "I upped my income, Up yours," that sort of thing. And nobody took those tapes more seriously than Dick Weybright.
"Very good, Dick," Ms. Sandstrom said. "Defeatism and lack of self-esteem. That tells us all we need to know about Donaldson here. Just as the fact that he's got a crack in his glasses tells us something else about him, doesn't it?"
Dick Weybright waggled his hand again. "Lack of self-respect."
"Exactly," Ms. Sandstrom said, smiling coldly at me. "Lack of self-respect."
She didn't address me again until I was leaving the sales room. I'd knocked some of my papers on the floor. By the time I got them picked up, I was alone with Ms. Sandstrom. I heard her come up behind me as I pointed myself toward the door.
"You missed something, Donaldson."
I turned. "Oh?"
She waved Laura's envelope in the air. Then her blue eyes showed curiosity as they read the name on the envelope. "You're not one of those, are you, Donaldson?"
"One of those?"
"Men who read their wives' mail."
"Oh. One of those. I see."
"Are you?"
"No."
"Then what're you doing with this?"
"What am I doing with that?"
"That parrot's in here again."
"I must've picked it up off the table by mistake."
"The table?"
"The little Edwardian table under the mirror in the foyer. Where we always set the mail."
She shook her head again. She shook her head a lot. "You are one of those, aren't you, Donaldson? So were my first three husbands, the bastards."
She handed me the envelope, brushed past me and disappeared down the hall.
There's a park near the river where I usually eat lunch when I'm downtown for the day. I spend most of the time
feeding the pigeons.
Today I spent most of my time staring at the envelope laid next to me on the park bench. There was a warm spring breeze and I half hoped it would lift up the envelope and carry it away.
Now I wished I'd left the number ten with the manly scrawl right where I'd found it because it was getting harder and harder to resist lifting the letter from inside and giving it a quick read.
I checked my watch. Twenty minutes to go before I needed to be back at work. Twenty minutes to stare at the letter. Twenty minutes to resist temptation.
Twenty minutes—and how's this for cheap symbolism?—during which the sky went from cloudless blue to dark and ominous.
By now, I'd pretty much decided that the letter had to be from a man. Otherwise, why would Laura have hidden it in her drawer? I'd also decided that it must contain something pretty incriminating.
Had she been having an affair with somebody? Was she thinking of running away with somebody?
On the way back to the office, I carefully slipped the letter from the envelope and read it. Read it four times as a matter of fact. And felt worse every time I did.
So Chris Tomlin, her ridiculously handsome, ridiculously wealthy, ridiculously slick college boyfriend was back in her life.
I can't tell you much about the rest of the afternoon. It's all very vague: voices spoke to me, phones rang at me, computer printers spat things at me—but I didn't respond. I felt as if I were scuttling across the floor of an ocean so deep that neither light nor sound could penetrate it.
Chris Tomlin. My God.
I kept reading the letter, stopping only when I'd memorized it entirely and could keep rerunning it in my mind without any visual aid.
Dear Laura,
I still haven't forgotten you—or forgiven you for choosing you-know-who over me. I'm going to be in your fair city this Friday. How about meeting me at the Fairmont right at noon for lunch? Of course, you could contact me the evening before if you're interested. I'll be staying at the Wallingham. I did a little checking and found that you work nearby. I can't wait to see you.