by William Gay
I really am sorry, she said.
Forget it, the plumber said. He tossed the pipe into the van and climbed behind the wheel.
She got in the station wagon and put it in gear and drove cautiously away.
If Daddy’s there, don’t run in telling him about the accident the first thing, she said. I’ll tell him after supper.
Can I tell him?
You can even tell him you were driving if you want to, she said.
She was hoping it wouldn’t be, but Charles’s pickup was in the driveway loaded down with tents and camp stoves and fishing gear. He was in the living room drinking a beer and reading through the daily copies of the Tennessean she had saved for him. He laid the papers aside and grasped Stephen and tossed him into the air and caught him. Stephen came down laughing and yelling to be thrown again.
Don’t do that, Charles. I’m always afraid you’ll hurt him.
You’re next, Charles said. He set down Stephen and grinned at her. While you’re getting supper, I aim to take a bath, he said. Haven’t seen you in a week, and you might appreciate me more tonight if I smelled a little better.
She sat on the couch and closed her eves. He hadn’t said anything about her mouth. But the cut was inside her lip, and he hadn’t kissed her. Her head hurt. Maybe she’d slammed it harder than she’d thought. She could hear Charles clattering around in the bathroom. Stephen turned the TV on and put a cartridge into his video game console. She could hear the music from his Mario Brothers game.
For a moment terrible in its intensity, she thought of leaving them both. Just for an instant. Slipping into the night and leaving them sleeping, shoes in her hand like that midnight rambler, just another hard traveler down the line and gone. She knew it was going to be a long night, and she didn’t know if she could take it: shouting, cursing, crying, perhaps he’d beat her, she hoped he’d beat her, that might make going easier. All she knew for certain was that she and Stephen were leaving.
You could save me, Robert had said a long time ago, if you could call five months a long time. By then she was attuned to nuances in his voice, and he’d said it in the self-mocking tone he used when he wanted you to think he didn’t mean it. He had been drinking whiskey then, but he was not drunk.
It seemed a terribly presumptuous thing to say, laid out like that. You can save me, you can let me slide. Having someone lay their life in your hands was oddly embarrassing, like accidentally walking in on someone naked. She did not want this weight on her, and she brushed all these implications lightly aside.
I can’t even save myself, she smiled.
You could save two birds with one stone, Robert said and smiled at that to show her it had all been a jest to see what her response would be. And that it hadn’t been the one he wanted to hear, but he’d have to settle for it.
She rested her head against the upholstery, and after a few moments she dozed. She must have slept for only a moment, but the dream she had seemed to encompass an enormous amount of time.
In the dream she was swinging somehow far above the earth, so high she could see the hazy ellipse of its curvature, the azure blue of the oceans. She was descending, arcing back and forth, the distance of the arc controlled by whatever suspended her by the left ankle. She looked up. A thin silver strand led up and up, tended away to nothingness in the high, cold air. When she looked down again, the earth was closer. The countryside was covered with snow, detail was rushing at her, fences, a pasture, a tarnished brass river snaking through cedar and cypress.
She was still swinging out, and she felt the moment of pause when her body strained against its tether. Then the pull of momentum back. She had no control over it. She was just arcing on the silver strand of cord. There was a snow-covered beech tree on the side of a wet black bluff, its branches reaching earthward as a beech’s will. It was in her path. She was going to slam into it hard, it was physics, it was gravity, it was fate. At the speed she was moving the impact would kill her, impale her on broken branches.
When she struck the tree, she felt only a rush of cold air, but the tree exploded into broken crystal glass that went glittering away in the light of a sun she couldn’t see and dimpled the snowy earth for miles when they fell.
Are you going to get that or not? Charles yelled.
The phone was in the kitchen. She answered it leaning against the counter. She turned on the tap and began to fill a glass with cold water. It was someone from the sheriff’s department, she didn’t get the name. Someone wanted to know her name, and she told them. There seemed to be too much noise. Water was running in the bathroom, water was running in the sink, Mario and Luigi were bouncing around the living room.
Do you know a man named Robert Vandaveer?
Yes.
Why is there no soap in here? Charles yelled from the bathroom. How about bringing me a bar of soap?
… Meter reader found him. Of course, it could be an accident, but it’s under investigation. The thing of it is, there was a sealed letter with your name on it in his pocket. I don’t actually have to have your permission, considering the circumstances, but I thought as a courtesy …
Cold water was running in the glass, running out of the glass.
No, she said viciously into the phone. If it’s sealed and it has my name on it, it’s mine. It’s mine, and you leave it alone.
She slammed the phone down. Stephen had come into the room, and he was staring at her. He seemed to be rising into the air, floating, growing as tall as she was. Then she felt the cold linoleum against the calves of her legs, the handle of a cabinet door against her back, and realized she was sitting on the floor. The phone began to ring.
Are you getting the goddamned soap or not? Charles had come into the room. She looked up. Charles looked ludicrous with water streaming off him and a towel clutched in front of his loins. She saw that Charles was getting fat.
I leave for a week and this place just … Charles’s face was altering, anger that had been rushing toward rage shifted to uncertainty, confusion, finally to consternation.
She folded Stephen into her arms so hard he cried out arid tried to twist away. He couldn’t, she was holding him so tightly. She thrust her face against the hollow of his throat. She could smell him, feel his hair, the poreless texture of his skin.
I’m getting your goddamned soap, she cried against the coarse fabric of Stephen’s sweater. I’m looking for it, I’m looking for it, Fm looking for it.
The Lightpainter
JENNY’S MOTHER once shot her husband in the thigh with a small-caliber pistol. She had been aiming higher but she was angry and the target was in desperate motion so she missed. She told it about the town with a kind of grim humor. If it had been anything like normal size I would have brought it down with one shot, she said. Who could hit a teensy old thing like that?
Tidewater heard this story or its myriad variations in disparate places. In the barbershop, in the county courthouse waiting in line to renew his license plates, in a Mexican restaurant on South Maple. He even heard a truncated version from Jenny herself. Mama tried to shoot Daddy in his thing but she got him in the leg, she said, laying the phrase out for their inspection as emotionlessly as a dealer turning up a card and awaiting betting or folding. Tidewater did not know which to believe but there was an irrevocability about the remark that seemed to call for one or the other.
Tidewater had studied her face. Jenny was a child then and her face had not yet assumed the impassivity of still waters that masked it in adolescence but still he could not read it. What response did she expect from the remark? Humor, honor, compassion? Tidewater was touched in varying degrees by all these things but he wanted to know her intent. Beneath the dark fringe of lashes her violet eyes told him nothing. Her pale heart-shaped face held only the promise of beauty and its customary vulnerability. It said what it always said: Well, here it is. Help me or hurt me, it’s all the same to me.
Jenny in those early years lived an ambivalent existence. She was part of the time with Tid
ewater and his wife Claire and his daughter Lisa and part of the time with her mother and whatever live-in boyfriend she was involved with at the time. Jenny’s father had wisely moved on in search of an environment where his drunken abuse would be dealt with more tolerantly. She seemed to move effortlessly from chaos to the order that Tidewater insisted upon, that in fact he had created by an act of sheer will.
Once there was a showdown of sorts in Tidewater’s front yard. Tidewater and his wife and daughter aligned on the porch with Jenny, the mother and her boyfriend standing on the brick sidewalk before the porch.
Are you Jenny’s father? Tidewater asked.
Hell no, the man said. He wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and Tidewater couldn’t see his eyes.
What is it to you?
The woman stood before the doorstep looking up at them. Like some show she was watching from the first row.
If you think you can come between me and my daughter, the woman began, listing slightly to the northeast as if she stood in the force of a strong southwesterly wind that nobody else felt, if you think you can just step in and take my child away from me then you’re living in a goddamned dream world.
Nobody’s trying to take anybody, Tidewater said. She’s Lisa’s friend and she likes staying over here. Nobody tries to persuade her one way or the other, but I’m not about to refuse to let her stay. She does what she wants to.
Well right now she’s doing what I want her to, the woman said. She’s going home. Come on, Jenny.
Jenny glanced at Tidewater then started toward the steps.
Tidewater said: Wait a minute.
The man in the yard laughed and spun his cigarette away. He wore a white shirt with the cuffs folded two careful turns over his forearms. His forearms were thick and the right bore a tattoo of the Marine Corps insignia. The tattoo was blurred as if the ink had run in the rain or as if the man was drawing sustenance from it, using it up, assimilating it into his bloodstream.
She’s not getting in that car with you, Tidewater said.
Charles, Tidewater’s wife said. She had never particularly cared for Jenny, as if she sensed something about her that Tidewater did not. I think you may be getting in over your head here.
I’ll drive her home myself, Tidewater said. You two go ahead. I’ll follow you.
I’d like to know why she’s not going to get in my car, the mother said.
Because you’re drunk, Tidewater told her.
On the way to the Harrikin the car Tidewater followed drifted across the centerline, whipped back, slipped onto the shoulder with gravel singing off the fenders. Tidewater gave them plenty of room. The car sometimes drifted into the path of oncoming traffic as if it were driverless, controlled by some deathwish volition of its own.
I don’t know if they’re going to make it or not, Tidewater said.
Jenny sat small and shrunken against the passenger-side door of the van. Her face was turned toward the sliding autumn scenery and he could see only the dark straight fall of her hair.
If they don’t I guess we could always go back to your house, she said.
TIDEWATER SAT in a hard-backed wooden chair across a littered desk from a soft-looking woman with hair the color of flax.
It’s an unpleasant situation, the woman said.
It’s a dangerous situation. She could be killed in a drunken car wreck. She could be abused sexually by a boyfriend. They could burn the house down over their heads while they sleep.
The woman shuffled the papers. Applications for help, field reports, evaluations. As if after false starts and side roads and dead ends lives had come down to this, all the identity there was contained in these neatly typed government reports.
I’m not sure precisely what you expect us to do.
I’m just reporting it. I don’t expect you to do anything. I’ve never done this before, interfered in people’s lives. I have a daughter of my own.
What he wanted done was something to eliminate the inequity in people’s lives. A balancing out of things. Jenny’s life did not seem fair. It seemed to bear little relation to Lisa’s life or the lives of other young girls who came and went in Tidewater’s house. Their lives seemed controlled, assured, as if they possessed some sort of celestial insurance policy. Jenny’s life seemed random, open-ended, unstable as quicksilver.
The flaxen-haired woman had no control over the inequity of lives. Tidewater was sorry that he had come, that he had even interfered. People’s lives went the way they went. They conformed to some law no physicist had yet devised a formula to explain.
The woman took up a form and a pen. Do you know of a specific incident of abuse? she asked.
Her life is an incident of abuse, Tidewater said.
THE LIFE THAT JENNY aspired to had been created solely by Tidewater. It was order pressed on chaos. Tidewater had fallen out of love with the world. The world no longer wanted to do his bidding. The world was going to hell in a handbasket and Tidewater wanted no part of it.
He was sick of violence. He was sick of wars, and politicians’ rationalizations for wars, of politicians themselves. Beyond Tidewater’s fences the world was falling apart. Chaos swirled like the smoke off a battlefield. Bloody insurrection stirred in the rubble of great industrial cities. In the mountains of Montana grim-faced men caressed their hoarded weapons and waited for Armageddon the way a teenager awaits a phone call. Strangers crossed in the night and gave each other AIDS as casually as handshakes. Mothers basted their children in ovens and burned them with cigarettes because there was nothing good to watch on television, drove them into deep cold waters with their safety belts thoughtfully secured.
In his youth Tidewater had courted violence like a lover but these years he wanted it out of his life, scalpeled cleanly out of his body and the clean living flesh cauterized by fire. He owned sixtyfive acres and a lot of fences and a century-old farmhouse. He renovated the farmhouse and converted a screened-in porch to a studio where he painted and these years he hardly left it. His hair grew long, the ends turned up loosely on his shoulders. The soft blond beard that covered his cheeks made him look ascetic and intense as a devout young monk, photographs taken of him during this period in Tidewater’s life looked like photographs of Jesus, if Jesus had ever taken the time to have his picture made.
Yet if the farm was an island of calm, disorder flourished beyond its borders, chaos lapped constantly at its shores.
He had once been far back in the woods, carrying a sketchpad and pencil, headed for a grove of beeches he wanted to paint. Halfway across a barbed-wire fence a voice out of the trees hailed him.
Hey.
Hey, Tidewater said. He climbed down the fence.
A man came out of the bracken with an unbreeched shotgun in the crook of his arm and a brace of squirrels strung on his belt.
Did you not see that sign? the man asked.
What sign?
That sign that said, trespassers will be shot, survivors will be prosecuted. Did you not see that?
No. No such sign existed but Tidewater did not say so. He waited.
What are you? Some kind of goddamned hippie, livin off the government?
I don’t live off anybody. I work.
You work? You look like a wild man to me, like you run wild in the woods for a livin.
I’m a painter, Tidewater said.
The man was half a head shorter than Tidewater and fully twenty-five pounds lighter but there was an outsized belligerence about him, as if he perpetually needed more space than he had been allotted, as if he’d suck a room dry of oxygen just by entering it. He hit Tidewater on the muscle of the arm, not lightly, a solid blow. He struck again, in measured insistence, like someone knocking at a door that just won’t open.
Suddenly he dropped the shotgun and shoved Tidewater hard and hit him while he was off balance. Tidewater slung the sketchpad and went backpedaling away and fell on his back in the dry leaves with the man astride him. He was trying to cover his face and the man kept slapping him
, not hard, just contemptuously flicking his face.
Say I’m sorry I trespassed on posted land, the man said out of clenched teeth.
Tidewater had a crazy urge to laugh. What?
Say it goddamn you, or I’ll pound your head into the ground.
All right, Tidewater said, not lying, I’m sorry I trespassed on posted land.
The man seemed dissatisfied, perhaps with Tidewater s inflection. His grip tightened. Say I’m sorry I trespassed on posted land and I promise never to do it again, he said.
Oh for Christ’s sake, Tidewater said. You don’t know when to quit, do you?
He began to strain against the man’s weight, the arms pinning him seemed banded by iron but little by little he began to rise, the man pushing as hard as he could and his arms trembling and cords standing out in his throat but being lifted inexorably upright, his face congested and his eyes going crossed and peculiar.
Tidewater threw him aside and grasped up a windfall tree branch and began to whip the man with it. The man cursed and flailed both-handed at the branch then tried to crawl out of its reach, Tidewater following beating him until the man was crazed with sweat and leaves and squirrel blood.
Tidewater threw the branch across him. The man was cringing away in something akin to horror. Who the hell are you? he cried.
Tidewater was sick at heart at what he’d done. He’d firebombed his good intentions back to ground zero and so had to begin again. He took up the fallen shotgun by the barrel and slammed it against a tree trunk. The stock shattered.
I’m The Lightpainter, you son of a bitch; he wanted to scream, needing some trademark with which to mark the folks he beat up like the Z of Zorro’s rapier. Perhaps he’d have cards printed up and leave them stapled to the foreheads of the victims of his wrath.
IN TRUTH HE WAS the light painter. In the years when Lisa and Jenny had been children he had painted while Claire worked. She was an accountant and the money she earned balancing folks’ books and preparing their income tax returns made their living while Tidewater painted. He painted one picture after another that no one wanted. He’d paint and frame all year then in the fall load up the van to its ceiling with paintings and make a circuit of the craft shows and art fairs throughout rural Tennessee.