by Ann Beattie
Patty has trouble walking in the woods; the clogs flop off her feet in the brush. I tried to give her a pair of my sneakers, but she wears size 8½ and I am a 7. Another thing to make her feel awkward.
David breathes in dramatically. “Quite a change from the high rise we used to live in,” he says to Noel.
Calculated to make us feel rotten?
“You used to live in a high rise?” Patty asks.
He must have just met her. She pays careful attention to everything he says, watches with interest when he snaps off a twig and breaks it in little pieces. She is having trouble keeping up. David finally notices her difficulty in keeping up with us, and takes her hand. They’re city people; they don’t even have hiking boots.
“It seems as if that was in another life,” David says. He snaps off a small branch and flicks one end of it against his thumb.
“There’s somebody who says that every time we sleep we die; we come back another person, to another life,” Patty says.
“Kafka as realist,” Noel says.
Noel has been reading all winter. He has read Brautigan, a lot of Borges, and has gone from Dante to García Márquez to Hilma Wolitzer to Kafka. Sometimes I ask him why he is going about it this way. He had me make him a list—this writer before that one, which poems are early, which late, which famous. Well, it doesn’t matter. Noel is happy in Vermont. Being in Vermont means that he can do what he wants to do. Freedom, you know. Why should I make fun of it? He loves his books, loves roaming around in the woods outside the house, and he buys more birdseed than all the birds in the North could eat. He took a Polaroid picture of our salt lick for the deer when he put it in, and admired both the salt lick (“They’ve been here!”) and his picture. Inside the house there are Polaroids of the woods, the waterfall, some rabbits-he tacks them up with pride, the way Beth hangs up the pictures she draws in school. “You know,” Noel said to me one night, “when Gatsby is talking to Nick Carraway and he says, ‘In any case, it was just personal’—what does that mean?”
“When did you read Gatsby?” I asked.
“Last night, in the bathtub.”
As we turn to walk back, Noel points out the astonishing number of squirrels in the trees around us. By David’s expression, he thinks Noel is pathetic.
I look at Noel. He is taller than David but more stooped; thinner than David, but his slouch disguises it. Noel has big hands and feet and a sharp nose. His scarf is gray, with frayed edges. David’s is bright red, just bought. Poor Noel. When David called to say he and Patty were coming for a visit, Noel never thought of saying no. And he asked me how he could compete with David. He thought David was coming to his house to win me away. After he reads more literature he’ll realize that is too easy. There will have to be complexities. The complexities will protect him forever. Hours after David’s call, he said (to himself, really—not to me) that David was bringing a woman with him. Surely that meant he wouldn’t try anything.
Charles and Margaret come over just as we are finishing dinner, bringing a mattress we are borrowing for David and Patty to sleep on. They are both stoned, and are dragging the mattress on the ground, which is white with a late snow. They are too stoned to hoist it.
“Eventide,” Charles says. A circular black barrette holds his hair out of his face. Margaret lost her hat to Lark some time ago and never got around to borrowing another one. Her hair is dusted with snow. “We have to go,” Charles says, weighing her hair in his hands, “before the snow woman melts.”
Sitting at the kitchen table late that night, I turn to David. “How are you doing?” I whisper.
“A lot of things haven’t been going the way I figured,” he whispers.
I nod. We are drinking white wine and eating cheddar-cheese soup. The soup is scalding. Clouds of steam rise from the bowl, and I keep my face away from it, worrying that the steam will make my eyes water, and that David will misinterpret.
“Not really things. People,” David whispers, bobbing an ice cube up and down in his wineglass with his index finger.
“What people?”
“It’s better not to talk about it. They’re not really people you know.”
That hurts, and he knew it would hurt. But climbing the stairs to go to bed I realize that, in spite of that, it’s a very reasonable approach.
Tonight, as I do most nights, I sleep with long johns under my nightgown. I roll over on top of Noel for more warmth and lie there, as he has said, like a dead man, like a man in the Wild West, gunned down in the dirt. Noel jokes about this. “Pow, pow,” he whispers sleepily as I lower myself on him. “Poor critter’s deader ’n a doornail.” I lie there warming myself. What does he want with me?
“What do you want for your birthday?” I ask.
He recites a little list of things he wants. He whispers: a bookcase, an aquarium, a blender to make milkshakes in.
“That sounds like what a ten-year-old would want,” I say.
He is quiet too long; I have hurt his feelings.
“Not the bookcase,” he says finally.
I am falling asleep. It’s not fair to fall asleep on top of him. He doesn’t have the heart to wake me and has to lie there with me sprawled on top of him until I fall off. Move, I tell myself, but I don’t.
“Do you remember this afternoon, when Patty and I sat on the rock to wait for you and David and Beth?”
I remember. We were on top of the hill, Beth pulling David by his hand, David not very interested in what she was going to show him, Beth ignoring his lack of interest and pulling him along. I ran to catch up, because she was pulling him so hard, and I caught Beth’s free arm and hung on, so that we formed a chain.
“I knew I’d seen that before,” Noel says. “I just realized where—when the actor wakes up after the storm and sees Death leading those people winding across the hilltop in The Seventh Seal.”
Six years ago. Seven. David and I were in the Village, in the winter, looking in a bookstore window. Tires began to squeal, and we turned around and were staring straight at a car, a ratty old blue car that had lifted a woman from the street into the air. The fall took much too long; she fell the way snow drifts—the big flakes that float down, no hurry at all. By the time she hit, though, David had pushed my face against his coat, and while everyone was screaming—it seemed as if a whole chorus had suddenly assembled to scream—he had his arms around my shoulders, pressing me so close that I could hardly breathe and saying, “If anything happened to you … If anything happened to you …”
When they leave, it is a clear, cold day. I give Patty a paper bag with half a bottle of wine, two sandwiches, and some peanuts to eat on the way back. The wine is probably not a good idea; David had three glasses of vodka and orange juice for breakfast. He began telling jokes to Noel—dogs in bars outsmarting their owners, constipated whores, talking fleas. David does not like Noel; Noel does not know what to make of David.
Now David rolls down the car window. Last-minute news. He tells me that his sister has been staying in his apartment. She aborted herself and has been very sick. “Abortions are legal,” David says. “Why did she do that?” I ask how long ago it happened. A month ago, he says. His hands drum on the steering wheel. Last week, Beth got a box of wooden whistles carved in the shape of peasants from David’s sister. Noel opened the kitchen window and blew softly to some birds on the feeder. They all flew away.
Patty leans across David. “There are so many animals here, even in the winter,” she says. “Don’t they hibernate any more?”
She is making nervous, polite conversation. She wants to leave. Noel walks away from me to Patty’s side of the car, and tells her about the deer who come right up to the house. Beth is sitting on Noel’s shoulders. Not wanting to talk to David, I wave at her stupidly. She waves back.
David looks at me out the window. I must look as stiff as one of those wooden whistles, all carved out of one piece, in my old blue ski jacket and blue wool hat pulled down to my eyes and my baggy jeans.<
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“Ciao,” David says. “Thanks.”
“Yes,” Patty says. “It was nice of you to do this.” She holds up the bag.
It’s a steep driveway, and rocky. David backs down cautiously—the way someone pulls a zipper after it’s been caught. We wave, they disappear. That was easy.
Gaps
Wesley has gaps between his teeth. When Wesley doesn’t have anything to do, he pokes things in the spaces to see what will fit: stems, pennies, things. Or he takes a walk to the train station, swivels the seat down in the photo-matic, and deposits a quarter. Last winter Wesley took a lot of pictures before he ran out of money. By the time he got more money, his bowler hat, which photographed well, had blown away in the wind.
In one of today’s pictures Wesley has pulled up his lip to expose the gaps between his teeth. The picture pleases him, and he studies it. That’s how he happens to have the picture in his hand to show Bob Nails.
*
Jeannie Regis’ hair is all different colors. In the sunshine it’s one color. At night, when he lights up her hair with the flashlight, it’s like … copper. He shines the flashlight down the back of her hair. In the half-dark she looks like a painting his father used to have in his bedroom. He aims the beam down her spine. Fuzz. Red fuzz when he holds the light close to the skin. She keeps the flashlight on the night table because, when the babies call for her, the bright hall light frightens them. They wake up in the middle of the night, wanting water. Bob Nails thinks about filling the baby bath and putting it on the floor, maybe sailing little plastic boats in the water, putting glasses on the floor beside it.
There are two glasses on the night table. He drinks the last quarter inch of Bourbon and clicks off the flashlight.
*
When you say “the idiot,” everybody knows you mean Wesley. Wesley acted like an idiot long before the tests confirmed it, so Wesley’s mother tells everyone there was no point in the tests. Wesley is “the idiot,” Thomas is “the normal one,” and of course Mrs. Dutton has always been “the poor woman.” She sends him in to shower and finds him sitting on the toilet, afraid to get into the water. She has to throw back the shower curtain and get all wet herself, soaping and rinsing him, turning the water off and on, off and on so that Wesley will stay in the bathtub.
When Wesley’s brother, Thomas, was eighteen, the minister took him aside and told him he should volunteer to wash his brother. Thomas enlisted in the Army instead. He was Bob Nails’s best friend, so Bob Nails thought about joining the Army too. Bob Nails’s father wouldn’t sign the papers, and he told him that if he found a way around it he’d shoot him in the back. Bob Nails told him he didn’t care—he was in love with Jeannie Parater and he didn’t really want to leave. Mr. Nails told him he’d shoot him in the back if he got married. When school was over, Bob Nails went to work in the gas station. At the end of summer, Jeannie Parater left town, and when they tried to draft Bob Nails he was rejected because he couldn’t hear in one ear.
*
“Well, I guess I’m just going to have to scream at you like you was the idiot,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says to Bob Nails. “Army says you can’t hear, I guess that means you don’t have fit hearing. Same thing with a fairy being rejected,” Sam continues, biting off the end of a Chesterfield and tapping tobacco onto his tongue.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only thing it means,” Sam Siddell, Junior, says, lighting the cigarette, “is that the Army says a man’s got something wrong with him, a man’s got something wrong with him.” He smiles at Bob Nails. Sam Siddell, Junior, has two yellow circles of tobacco stain on his front teeth.
“Well, can I have my job back or can’t I?” Bob Nails says.
Sam Siddell rocks back in the green metal chair behind his desk. “If you can hear,” he says.
“When did you notice anything wrong with my hearing?”
“I didn’t bring it up—the Army did. Army brings up things for a reason—only wants fit men. It don’t take people who lost an arm, or people who couldn’t tell when there was orders to follow, or a fairy that wasn’t like other men.”
Bob Nails doesn’t say anything. A man Sam intended to hire to replace Bob Nails keeps looking from the garage into Sam’s office.
“Knew about my brother, didn’t you?” Sam asks.
“What about him?”
“Army sent him home.”
With the toe of his boot, Sam Siddell strokes the calendar girl’s bare legs.
“Sometimes, when you know something about other people’s misfortunes, you’re willing to give them a minute,” Sam says.
Bob Nails goes home and asks his father about Sam’s brother, who works for him at the grocery store.
“That boy got sent home after he lost half his leg when he done something wrong with explosives,” Bob Nails’s father says. “I don’t know what Sam’s excuse is for losing half his mind. He ever talks to you that way, you let me know and I’ll shoot him in the back.”
*
A woman is found dead, on a deserted farm off the highway. Two hunters discover her. First they see the car, a black Chevrolet, sitting in some brambles. It might have hit the tree to one side. The car looks okay—it doesn’t seem to have hit anything. A woman is sitting in the driver’s seat. Such a strange look frozen on her face; running toward her, they both think she’s frightened of them, of the guns. The doors aren’t locked; they open easily—but the police find that out. The men look in but don’t touch the door. One of the hunters has begun to sweat; he’s afraid he might pass out, so he begins to list facts in his mind: the upholstery is red, the car black, there is a woman. The other hunter makes the telephone call and tells these things to the police.
*
Jeannie? No. She’s home, but she’s unbuttoning one of the babies’ coats and can’t answer the phone. What’s wrong with Bob Nails? What’s he doing here in the middle of the afternoon? He’s talking so loudly that the babies wake up and cry. What’s wrong with him? He tells her all he knows: a woman is dead in a Chevrolet. But her Chevrolet is parked outside—didn’t he notice? Bob Nails looks out the kitchen window.
“If you’d miss me so much, why don’t you marry me?” she says.
Late in the afternoon he’s still there. He doesn’t want to frighten her by telling her that more people might be dead. He doesn’t want to know himself, so he doesn’t turn on the radio. He stays for dinner, and as they eat she says it again. He thinks about it. Jeannie? No.
*
On the day of the murder, Wesley Dutton walks to the train station. The people coming into town don’t know there’s been a murder, and Wesley doesn’t either because no one has told him. He goes into the photo-matic as usual and sits, waiting for his pictures to develop. He sits there too long. There are girls waiting. He knows it, but he doesn’t move. One of the girls giggles and tells her friend to open the curtain, that maybe it’s just a pair of legs in there and they can toss them out. Wesley thinks that’s funny. When he laughs, the girls get quiet. A little while later a man who works in the train station pulls open the curtain.
“Come on out now, Wesley,” he says.
The girls are standing in back of the man. Wesley smiles and stands, reaches into the metal slot for the pictures, nods, and walks away. But his heart is racing. How did the man know his name? The pictures are too dark. Only the last one is any good. He tears it off to study, but something else attracts his attention. It’s Bob Nails, running toward him. Bob Nails is out of breath. He slows down and raises a hand. Wesley raises his hand too, to give Bob Nails the picture. Bob Nails nods, returns the picture, and goes on running.
If Wesley keeps it, he’ll leave it in a pocket and his mother will ruin it when she does the wash. She’s told him she isn’t going through his pockets any more; she’ll wash what he gives her. Tissues get washed and dried, pennies brighten from wash to wash. Today Mrs. Dutton found a dollar bill she’d washed and said she wouldn’t give Wesley any more mon
ey. She screamed. That’s why he went to the train station.
*
Sam Siddell is speaking to Bob Nails. He speaks normally to the other men, but backs off from Bob Nails and speaks in a whisper. At first Bob Nails was convinced that Sam was looking for an excuse to fire him, but Sam gives him the most interesting jobs and never criticizes his work. He stands under the lift, across the shop from Bob Nails, and whispers—Bob Nails thinks it’s something about a woman who’s come in with an old Chevy. But what would that have to do with Sam’s brother going hunting? Bob Nails finally has to stop work and ask Sam what he’s said.
“I said a girl got killed,” Sam shouts.
“Not somebody from town?”
“Might of been,” Sam hollers.
Bob Nails goes into the office to call Jeannie.
“Young woman,” Sam murmurs as he walks in behind him. “Young woman,” he repeats loudly, nodding in agreement with himself.
She doesn’t answer. Bob Nails tells Sam he’s going to check, he’ll be right back.
“It ain’t his faulty hearing that disturbs me,” Sam Siddell says to the other men. “It’s his faulty ideas of who’s good women and who ain’t.”
Sam walks up to a car that’s being repaired and spits on the hood.
“Not that it ain’t a tragedy he’s got failed hearing.”
*
It’s 1966 and Bob Nails is at Jeannie Parater’s house and she’s showing him pictures of paintings in a book. Bob Nails is going to ask her to marry him before she goes away to college. He’s going to join the Army so they’ll leave town, which is what she always talks about. Tom Dutton likes the Army; he says he’s never getting out. Bob Nails’s father has told him that if he gets married and joins the Army he’ll shoot him in the back, no matter what country they send him to. When Bob Nails’s father isn’t going to shoot someone in the back, then he’s going to get an incurable cancer, and when he gets that, then he’s going to wire everybody’s car and all the people in the business world who’ve cheated him will be blown sky high; or he’ll get two heart attacks and hang the loan shark he’s into before he gets the third.