Someone to Watch Over Me

by Richard Bausch

  “Yes, sir.”

  The doctor helped him stand. A little smattering of approving sounds went through the crowd. Michael turned in a small circle and located his wife. He looked directly at her, and then looked away. She saw this, and waited where she was. He was talking to the doctor, nodding. Then he came toward her, head down, like a little boy, she thought, a little boy ashamed of himself.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They walked down the street, to where the car had been moved. Someone had washed the blood from it, though she could see traces of it in the aluminum trim along the door. She got in and waited for him to make his way around to the driver’s side. When he got in, she arranged herself, smoothing her dress down, not looking at him. He started the engine, pulled out carefully into traffic. It was still slow going, three lanes moving fitfully toward the bridge. They were several blocks down the street before he spoke.

  “Doctor said I had mild shock.”

  “I saw.”

  They reached the bridge, and then they were stopped there, with a view of the water, and the rest of the city ranged along the river’s edge—a massive, uneven shape of buildings with flame in every window, beyond the sparkle of the water. The sun seemed to be pouring into the car.

  He reached over and turned the air-conditioning off. “We’ll overheat,” he said.

  “Can you leave it on a minute?” she asked.

  He rolled his window down. “We’ll overheat.”

  She reached over and put it on, and leaned into it. The air was cool, blowing on her face, and she closed her eyes. She had chosen too easily when she chose him. She could feel the rightness of the thought as it arrived; she gave in to it, accepted it, with a small, bitter rush of elation and anger. The flow of cool air on her face stopped. He had turned it off.

  “I just thought I’d run it for a minute,” she said.

  He turned it on again. She leaned forward, took a breath, then turned it off. “That’s good.” She imagined herself going on with her life, making other choices; she was relieved to be alive, and she felt exhilarated. The very air seemed sweeter. She saw herself alone, or with someone else, some friend to whom she might tell the funny story of her young husband running off and leaving her to her fate in the middle of a gun battle.

  But in the next instant, the horror of it reached through her and made her shudder, deep. “God,” she murmured.

  He said nothing. The traffic moved a few feet, then seemed to start thinning out. He idled forward, then accelerated slowly.

  “Mind the radio?” she said.

  He thought she seemed slightly different with him now, almost superior. He remembered how it felt to be lying in the middle of the sidewalk with the orange crate under his legs. When he spoke, he tried to seem neutral. “Pardon me?”

  “I asked if you mind the radio.”

  “Up to you,” he said.

  “Well, what do you want.”

  “Radio’s fine.”

  She turned it on. She couldn’t help the feeling that this was toying with him, a kind of needling. Yet it was a pleasant feeling. The news was on; they listened for a time.

  “It’s too early, I guess,” she said.

  “Too early for what?”

  “I thought it might be on the news.” She waited a moment. The traffic was moving; they were moving. She put the air-conditioning on again, and sat there with the air fanning her face, eyes closed. She felt him watching her, and she had begun to feel guilty—even cruel. They had, after all, both been frightened out of their wits. He was her husband, whom she loved. “Let me know if you think I ought to turn it off again.”

  “I said we’d overheat,” he said.

  She only glanced at him. “We’re moving now. It’s OK if we’re moving, right?” Then she closed her eyes and faced into the cool rush of air.

  He looked at her, sitting there with her eyes closed, basking in the coolness as if nothing at all had happened. He wanted to tell her about Saul Dornby’s wife. He tried to frame the words into a sentence that might make her wonder what his part in all that might be—but the thing sounded foolish to him: Saul, at work, makes me answer his wife’s phone calls. He’s sleeping around on her. I’ve been going to sleep at night dreaming about what it might be like if I got to know her a little better.

  “If it’s going to cause us to overheat, I’ll turn it off,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  Well, he could pout if he wanted to. He was the one who had run away and left her to whatever might happen. She thought again how it was that someone might have shot into the car while she cringed there alone. “Do you want me to turn it off?” she said.

  “Leave it be,” he told her.

  They were quiet, then, all the way home. She gazed out the front, at the white lines coming at them and at them. He drove slowly, and tried to think of something to say to her, something to explain everything in some plausible way.

  She noticed that there was still some blood at the base of her window. Some of it had seeped down between the door and the glass. When he pulled into the drive in front of the house, she waited for him to get out, then slid across the seat and got out behind him.

  “They didn’t get all the blood,” she said.

  “Jesus.” He went up the walk toward the front door.

  “I’m not going to clean it,” she said.

  “I’ll take it to the car wash.”

  He had some trouble with the key to the door. He cursed under his breath, and finally got it to work. They walked through the living room to their bedroom, where she got out of her clothes, and was startled to find that some blood had got on the arm of her blouse.

  “Look at this,” she said. She held it out for him to see.

  “I see.”

  The expression on her face, that cocky little smile, made him want to strike her. He suppressed the urge, and went about changing his own clothes. He was appalled at the depth of his anger.

  “Can you believe it?” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “I’d like to forget the whole thing.”

  “I know, but look.”

  “I see it. What do you want me to do with it?”

  “OK,” she said. “I just thought it was something—that it got inside the window somehow. It got on my arm.”

  “Get it out of here,” he said. “Put it away.”

  She went into the bathroom and threw the blouse into the trash. Then she washed her face and hands and got out of her skirt, her stockings. “I’m going to take a shower,” she called to him. He didn’t answer, so she went to the entrance of the living room, where she found him watching the news.

  “Is it on?” she asked.

  “Is what on?”

  “OK. I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Ivy,” he said.

  She waited. She kept her face as impassive as possible.

  “I’m really sorry. I did think you were with me, that we were running together, you know.”

  It occurred to her that if she allowed him to, he would turn this into the way he remembered things, and he would come to believe it was so. She could give this to him, simply by accepting his explanation of it all. In the same instant something hot rose up in her heart, and she said, “But you didn’t look back to see where I was.” She said this evenly, almost cheerfully.

  “Because I thought you were there. Right behind me. Don’t you see?”

  The pain in his voice was weirdly far from making her feel sorry. She said, “I could’ve been killed, though. And you wouldn’t have known it.”

  He said nothing. He had the thought that this would be something she might hold over him, and for an instant he felt the anger again, wanted to make some motion toward her, something to shake her, as he had been shaken. “Look,” he said.

  She smiled. “What?”

  “Everything happened so fast.”

  “You looked so funny, lying on the sidewalk with that crate of oranges under your legs. You k
now what it said on the side? ‘Fresh from Sunny Florida.’ Think of it. I mean nobody got killed, so it’s funny. Right?”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Michael, it’s over. We’re safe. We’ll laugh about it eventually, you’ll see.”

  And there was nothing he could say. He sat down and stared at the television, the man there talking in reasonable tones about a killer tornado in Lawrence, Kansas. She walked over and kissed him on the top of his head.

  “Silly,” she said.

  He turned to watch her go back down the hall, and a moment later he heard the shower running. He turned the television off, and made his way back to the entrance of the bathroom. The door was ajar. Peering in, he saw the vague shape of her through the light curtain. He stood there, one hand gripping the door, the rage working in him. He watched the shape move.

  She was thinking that it was not she who had run away; that there was no reason for him to be angry with her, or disappointed in her. Clearly, if he was unhappy, he was unhappy with himself. She could not be blamed for that. And how fascinating it was that when she thought of her earlier doubts, they seemed faraway and small, like the evanescent worries of some distant other self, a childhood self. Standing in the hot stream, she looked along her slender arms, and admired the smooth contours of the bone and sinew there. It was so good to be alive. The heat was wonderful on the small muscles of her back. She was reasonably certain that she had dealt with her own disappointment and upset, had simply insisted on the truth. And he could do whatever he wanted, finally, because she was already putting the whole unpleasant business behind her.

  1951

  One catastrophe after another, her father said, meaning her. She knew she wasn’t supposed to hear it. But she was alone in that big drafty church house, with just him and Iris, the maid. He was an Episcopal minister, a widower. Other women came in, one after another, all on approval, though no one ever said anything—Missy was seven, and he expected judgments from her about who he would settle on to be her mother. Terrifying. She lay in the dark at night, dreading the next visit, women looking her over, until she understood that they were nervous around her, and she saw what she could do. Something hardened inside her, under the skin. It was beautiful because it made the fear go away. Ladies with a smell of fake flowers about them came to the house. She threw fits, was horrid to them all.

  One April evening, Iris was standing on the back stoop, smoking a cigarette. Missy looked at her through the screen door. “What you gawkin’ at, girl?” Iris said. She laughed as if it wasn’t much fun to laugh. She was dark as the spaces between the stars, and in the late light there was almost a blue cast to her brow and hair. “You know what kind of place you livin’ in?”

  “Yes.”

  Iris blew smoke. “You don’t know yet.” She smoked the cigarette and didn’t talk for a time, staring at Missy. “Girl, if he settles on somebody, you gonna be sorry to see me go?”

  Missy didn’t answer. It was secret. People had a way of saying things to her that she thought she understood, but couldn’t be sure of. She was quite precocious. Her mother had been dead since the day she was born. It was Missy’s fault. She didn’t remember that anyone had said this to her, but she knew it anyway, in her bones.

  Iris smiled her white smile, but now Missy saw tears in her eyes. This fascinated her. It was the same feeling as knowing that her daddy was a minister, but walked back and forth sleepless in the sweltering nights. If your heart was peaceful, you didn’t have trouble going to sleep. Iris had said something like that very thing to a friend of hers who stopped by on her way to the Baptist Church. Missy hid behind doors, listening. She did this kind of thing a lot. She watched everything, everyone. She saw when her father pushed Iris up against the wall near the front door and put his face on hers. She saw how disturbed they got, pushing against each other. And later she heard Iris talking to her Baptist friend. “He ain’t always thinkin’ about the Savior.” The Baptist friend gasped, then whispered low and fast, sounding upset.

  Now Iris tossed the cigarette and shook her head, the tears still running. Missy curtsied without meaning it. “Child,” said Iris, “what you gonna grow up to be and do? You gonna be just like all the rest of them?”

  “No,” Missy said. She was not really sure who the rest of them were.

  “Well, you’ll miss me until you forget me,” said Iris, wiping her eyes.

  Missy pushed open the screen door and said, “Hugs.” It was just to say it.

  When Iris went away and swallowed poison and got taken to the hospital, Missy’s father didn’t sleep for five nights. Peeking from her bedroom door, with the chilly, guilty dark looming behind her, she saw him standing crooked under the hallway light, running his hands through his thick hair. His face was twisted; the shadows made him look like someone else. He was crying.

  She didn’t cry. And she did not feel afraid. She felt very gigantic and strong. She had caused everything.

  NOBODY IN HOLLYWOOD

  I was pummeled as a teenager.

  For some reason I had the sort of face that asked to be punched. It seemed to me in those days that everybody wanted to take a turn. Something about the curve of my mouth, I guess. It made me look like I was being cute with people, smirking at them. I am what is called a late life child. My brother, Doke, is twenty years older and played semipro football. But by the time I came along, Doke was through as a ballplayer and my father had given up on ever seeing a son play pro. I was a month premature, and very, very tiny as a child. Dad named me Ignatius, after an uncle of his that I never knew. Of course I didn’t take to sports, though I could run pretty fast (that comes with having a face people want to hit). I liked to read; I was the family bookworm. I’m four feet nine inches tall.

  Doke married young, divorced young, and had a son, Doke Jr., that the wife took with her to Montana. But Doke missed the boy and went out there to be near him, and when I graduated from high school, he invited me for a visit. That’s how I ended up in Montana in 1971. I’d gone to spend the summer with Doke, in a hunter’s cabin up in the mountains. It was a little cottage, with a big stone hearth and knotty-pine paneling and color photos of the surrounding country. On the shelf above the hearth were some basketball trophies belonging to the guy who owned the place, a former college all-star now working as an ophthalmologist down in Dutton.

  Doke taught me how to fly-fish. A fly rod had a lot of importance to Doke, as if being good with the thing was a key to the meaning of life or something. He had an image of himself, standing in sunlight, fly rod in hand. He was mystical about the enterprise, though he didn’t really have much ability.

  While I was staying with Doke, I met Hildie, my eventual ex-wife. She was a nurse in the hospital where Doke took me the night I met his new girlfriend, Samantha. I met Samantha about two hours before I met Hildie.

  Samantha had come home to Montana from San Francisco, where she’d been with her crazy mother. Before I met her—many days before—Doke had talked about her, about how beautiful and sexy she was. According to Doke, I just wasn’t going to believe my eyes. He’d met her in a bar he used to frequent after working construction all day in Dutton. She was only twenty-five. He told me all about her, day after day. We were drinking pretty heavy in the evenings, and he’d tell me about what she had gone through in her life.

  “She’s so beautiful to have to go through that stuff,” he said, “suicide and insanity and abuse. A lot of abuse. She’s part Indian. She’s had hard times. Her father was a full-blooded Cherokee. She’s a genius. He killed himself. Then her mother went crazy, and they put her in this institution for the insane over in San Francisco. Her mother doesn’t know her own name anymore. Or Samantha’s. Pathetic, really. Think about it. And she looks like a goddess. I can’t even find the words for it. Beautiful. Nobody in the world. Not even Hollywood.”

  At the time, I was worried about getting drafted into the army and was under a lot of stress. They were drafting everybody back then,
and I was worried. I didn’t want to hear about Doke’s beautiful girlfriend. “Man,” he said, “I wish I had her picture—a snapshot of her—so I could show you. But the Indian blood means she has this thing about having her picture taken. Like it steals part of her soul. They all believe that.”

  He was talking about her the night she arrived, the traveling she’d done when she was a back-dancer for the Rolling Stones (“She knows Mick Jagger, man”) and the heavy things she’d seen—abused children and illicit drugs and alcohol—and also the positions she liked during sex, and the various ways they had of doing it together.

  “She’s an Indian,” he said. “They have all kinds of weird ways.”

  “Could we go out on the porch or something?” I said.

  He hadn’t heard me. “She wears a headband. It expresses her people. When she was six her mother went crazy the first time. A white woman, the mother, right? This poor girl from Connecticut with no idea what she was getting into, marrying this guy, coming out here to live, almost like a pioneer. Only the guy turned out to be a wild man. They lived on the reservation, and nobody else wanted anything to do with them because of how he was. A true primitive, but a noble one, too. You should hear Samantha talk about him. He used to take her everywhere, and he had this crazy thing about rock concerts. Like they were from the old days of the tribe, see. He’d go and dance and get really drunk. Samantha went with him until she was in her teens. She actually has a daughter from when they traveled with the Rolling Stones. The daughter’s staying with her mother’s sister back East. It’s a hell of a story.”

  “She’s only twenty-five?”

  He nodded. “Had the daughter when she was seventeen.”

  “The Rolling Stones,” I said. “Something.”

  “Don’t give me that look,” he said.

  I smiled as big as I could. “No,” I said. “Really, I wasn’t. I’d just like to go outside. It’s kind of stuffy in here, isn’t it?”

  “Could be Mick Jagger’s kid,” my brother said, significantly. “Samantha knew him.”