Dusk and Other Stories

by James Salter

  Unseen the night had opened. The sky was revealing itself, the stars shining faintly. The town was sleeping, abandoned sidewalks, silent lawns. Far off among some pines was the gable of a barn. It was coming from there. He still could not identify it. He needed to be closer, to go downstairs and out the door, but that way he might lose it, it might become silent, aware.

  He had a disturbing thought, he was unable to dislodge it: it was aware. Quivering there, repeating and repeating itself above the rest, it seemed to be coming only to him. The rhythm was not constant. It hurried, hesitated, went on. It was less and less an instinctive cry and more a kind of signal, a code, not anything he had heard before, not a collection of long and short impulses but something more intricate, in a way almost like speech. The idea frightened him. The words, if that was what they were, were piercing and thin but the awareness of them made him tremble as if they were the combination to a vault.

  Beneath the window lay the roof of the porch. It sloped gently. He stood there, perfectly still, as if lost in thought. His heart was rattling. The roof seemed wide as a street. He would have to go out on it hoping he was unseen, moving silently, without abruptness, pausing to see if there was a change in the sound to which he was now acutely sensitive. The darkness would not protect him. He would be entering a night of countless networks, shifting eyes. He was not sure if he should do it, if he dared. A drop of sweat broke free and ran quickly down his bare side. Tirelessly the call continued. His hands were trembling.

  Unfastening the screen, he lowered it carefully and leaned it against the house. He was moving quietly, like a serpent, across the faded green roofing. He looked down. The ground seemed distant. He would have to hang from the roof and drop, light as a spider. The peak of the barn was still visible. He was moving toward the lodestar, he could feel it. It was almost as if he were falling. The act was dizzying, irreversible. It was taking him where nothing he possessed would protect him, taking him barefoot, alone.

  As he dropped to the ground, Fenn felt a thrill go through him. He was going to be redeemed. His life had not turned out as he expected but he still thought of himself as special, as belonging to no one. In fact he thought of failure as romantic. It had almost been his goal. He carved birds, or he had. The tools and partially shaped blocks of wood were on a table in the basement. He had, at one time, almost become a naturalist. Something in him, his silence, his willingness to be apart, was adapted to that. Instead he began to build furniture with a friend who had some money, but the business failed. He was drinking. One morning he woke up lying by the car in the worn ruts of the driveway, the old woman who lived across the street warning away her dog. He went inside before his children saw him. He was very close, the doctor told him frankly, to being an alcoholic. The words astonished him. That was long ago. His family had saved him, but not without cost.

  He paused. The earth was firm and dry. He went toward the hedge and across the neighbor’s driveway. The tone that was transfixing him was clearer. Following it he passed behind houses he hardly recognized from the back, through neglected yards where cans and rubbish were hidden in dark grass, past empty sheds he had never seen. The ground began to slope gently down, he was nearing the barn. He could hear the voice, his voice, pouring overhead. It was coming from somewhere in the ghostly wooden triangle rising like the face of a distant mountain brought unexpectedly close by a turn of the road. He moved toward it slowly, with the fear of an explorer. Above him he could hear the thin stream trilling. Terrified by its closeness he stood still.

  At first, he later remembered, it meant nothing, it was too glistening, too pure. It kept pouring out, more and more insane. He could not identify, he could never repeat, he could not even describe the sound. It had enlarged, it was pushing everything else aside. He stopped trying to comprehend it and instead allowed it to run through him, to invade him like a chant. Slowly, like a pattern that changes its appearance as one stares at it and begins to shift into another dimension, inexplicably the sound altered and exposed its real core. He began to recognize it. It was words. They had no meaning, no antecedents, but they were unmistakably a language, the first ever heard from an order vaster and more dense than our own. Above, in the whitish surface, desperate, calling, was the nameless pioneer.

  In a kind of ecstasy he moved closer. Instantly he realized it was wrong. The sound hesitated. He closed his eyes in anguish but too late, it faltered and then stopped. He felt stupid, shamed. He stepped back a little, helplessly. All about him the voices clattered. The night was filled with them. He turned this way and that hoping to find it, but the thing he had heard was gone.

  It was late. The first pale cast had come to the sky. He was standing near the barn with the fragments of a dream one must struggle to remember: four words, distinct and inimitable, that he had made out. Protecting them, concentrating on them with all his strength, he began to carry them back. The cries of the insects seemed louder. He was afraid something would happen, a dog would bark, a light go on in a bedroom and he would be distracted, he would lose his hold. He had to get back without seeing anything, without hearing anything, without thinking. He was repeating the words to himself as he went, his lips moving steadily. He hardly dared breathe. He could see the house. It had turned gray. The windows were dark. He had to get to it. The sound of the night creatures seemed to swell in torment and rage, but he was beyond that. He was escaping. He had gone an immense distance, he was coming to the hedge. The porch was not far away. He stood on the railing, the eave of the roof within reach. The rain gutter was firm, he pulled himself up. The crumbling green asphalt was warm beneath his feet. One leg over the sill, then the other. He was safe. He stepped back from the window instinctively. He had done it. Outside, the light seemed faint and historic. A spectral dawn began to come through the trees.

  Suddenly he heard the floor creak. Someone was there, a figure in the soft light drained of color. It was his wife, he was stunned by the image of her holding a cotton robe about her, her face made plain by sleep. He made a gesture as if to warn her off.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  He backed away making vague movements with his hands. His head was sideways, like a horse. He was moving backward. One eye was on her.

  “What is it?” she said, alarmed. “What happened?”

  No, he pleaded, shaking his head. A word had dropped away. No, no. It was fluttering apart like something in the sea. He was reaching blindly for it.

  Her arm went around him. He pulled away abruptly. He closed his eyes.

  “Darling, what is it?” He was troubled, she knew. He had never really gotten over his difficulty. He often woke at night, she would find him sitting in the kitchen, his face looking tired and old. “Come to bed,” she invited.

  His eyes were closed tightly. His hands were over his ears.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  Beneath her devotion it was dissolving, the words were spilling away. He began to turn around frantically.

  “What is it, what is it?” she cried.

  The light was coming everywhere, pouring across the lawn. The sacred whispers were vanishing. He could not spare a moment. Hands clapped to his head he ran into the hall searching for a pencil while she ran after, begging him to tell her what was wrong. They were fading, there was just one left, worthless without the others and yet of infinite value. As he scribbled the table shook. A picture quivered on the wall. His wife, her hair held back with one hand, was peering at what he had written. Her face was close to it.

  “What is that?”

  Dena, in her nightgown, had appeared in a doorway awakened by the noise.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Help me,” her mother cried.

  “Daddy, what happened?”

  Their hands were reaching for him. In the glass of the picture a brilliant square of blue and green was trembling, the luminous foliage of the trees. The countless voices were receding, turning into silence.


  “What is it, what is it?” his wife pleaded.

  “Daddy, please!”

  He shook his head. He was nearly weeping as he tried to pull away. Suddenly he slumped to the floor and sat there and for Dena they had begun again the phase she remembered from the years she was first in school when unhappiness filled the house and slamming doors and her father clumsy with affection came into their room at night to tell them stories and fell asleep at the foot of her bed.

  DUSK

  Mrs. Chandler stood alone near the window in a tailored suit, almost in front of the neon sign that said in small, red letters PRIME MEATS. She seemed to be looking at onions, she had one in her hand. There was no one else in the store. Vera Pini sat by the cash register in her white smock, staring at the passing cars. Outside it was cloudy and the wind was blowing. Traffic was going by in an almost continuous flow. “We have some good Brie today,” Vera remarked without moving. “We just got it in.”

  “Is it really good?”

  “Very good.”

  “All right, I’ll take some.” Mrs. Chandler was a steady customer. She didn’t go to the supermarket at the edge of town. She was one of the best customers. Had been. She didn’t buy that much anymore.

  On the plate glass the first drops of rain appeared. “Look at that. It’s started,” Vera said.

  Mrs. Chandler turned her head. She watched the cars go by. It seemed as if it were years ago. For some reason she found herself thinking of the many times she had driven out herself or taken the train, coming into the country, stepping down onto the long, bare platform in the darkness, her husband or a child there to meet her. It was warm. The trees were huge and black. Hello, darling. Hello, Mummy, was it a nice trip?

  The small neon sign was very bright in the grayness, there was the cemetery across the street and her own car, a foreign one, kept very clean, parked near the door, facing in the wrong direction. She always did that. She was a woman who lived a certain life. She knew how to give dinner parties, take care of dogs, enter restaurants. She had her way of answering invitations, of dressing, of being herself. Incomparable habits, you might call them. She was a woman who had read books, played golf, gone to weddings, whose legs were good, who had weathered storms, a fine woman whom no one now wanted.

  The door opened and one of the farmers came in. He was wearing rubber boots. “Hi, Vera,” he said.

  She glanced at him. “Why aren’t you out shooting?”

  “Too wet,” he said. He was old and didn’t waste words. “The water’s a foot high in a lot of places.”

  “My husband’s out.”

  “Wish you’d told me sooner,” the old man said slyly. He had a face that had almost been obliterated by the weather. It had faded like an old stamp.

  It was shooting weather, rainy and blurred. The season had started. All day there had been the infrequent sound of guns and about noon a flight of six geese, in disorder, passed over the house. She had been sitting in the kitchen and heard their foolish, loud cries. She saw them through the window. They were very low, just above the trees.

  The house was amid fields. From the upstairs, distant barns and fences could be seen. It was a beautiful house, for years she had felt it was unique. The garden was tended, the wood stacked, the screens in good repair. It was the same inside, everything well selected, the soft, white sofas, the rugs and chairs, the Swedish glasses that were so pleasant to hold, the lamps. The house is my soul, she used to say.

  She remembered the morning the goose was on the lawn, a big one with his long black neck and white chinstrap, standing there not fifteen feet away. She had hurried to the stairs. “Brookie,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Come down here. Be quiet.”

  They went to the window and then on to another, looking out breathlessly.

  “What’s he doing so near the house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s big, isn’t he?”

  “Very.”

  “But not as big as Dancer.”

  “Dancer can’t fly.”

  All gone now, pony, goose, boy. She remembered that night they came home from dinner at the Werners’ where there had been a young woman, very pure featured, who had abandoned her marriage to study architecture. Rob Chandler had said nothing, he had merely listened, distracted, as if to a familiar kind of news. At midnight in the kitchen, hardly having closed the door, he simply announced it. He had turned away from her and was facing the table.

  “What?” she said.

  He started to repeat it but she interrupted.

  “What are you saying?” she said numbly.

  He had met someone else.

  “You’ve what?”

  She kept the house. She went just one last time to the apartment on Eighty-second Street with its large windows from which, cheek pressed to glass, you could see the entrance steps of the Met. A year later he remarried. For a while she veered off course. She sat at night in the empty living room, almost helpless, not bothering to eat, not bothering to do anything, stroking her dog’s head and talking to him, curled on the couch at two in the morning still in her clothes. A fatal weariness had set in, but then she pulled herself together, began going to church and putting on lipstick again.

  Now as she returned to her house from the market, there were great, leaden clouds marbled with light, moving above the trees. The wind was gusting. There was a car in the driveway as she turned in. For just a moment she was alarmed and then she recognized it. A figure came toward her.

  “Hi, Bill,” she said.

  “I’ll give you a hand.” He took the biggest bag of groceries from the car and followed her into the kitchen.

  “Just put it down on the table,” she said. “That’s it. Thanks. How’ve you been?”

  He was wearing a white shirt and a sport coat, expensive at one time. The kitchen seemed cold. Far off was the faint pop of guns.

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s chilly out here.”

  “I just came by to see if you had anything that needed to be taken care of before the cold weather set in.”

  “Oh, I see. Well,” she said, “there’s the upstairs bathroom. Is that going to be trouble again?”

  “The pipes?”

  “They’re not going to break again this year?”

  “Didn’t we stuff some insulation in there?” he said. There was a slight, elegant slur in his speech, back along the edge of his tongue. He had always had it. “It’s on the north side, is the trouble.”

  “Yes,” she said. She was searching vaguely for a cigarette. “Why do you suppose they put it there?”

  “Well, that’s where it’s always been,” he said.

  He was forty but looked younger. There was something hard and hopeless about him, something that was preserving his youth. All summer on the golf course, sometimes into December. Even there he seemed indifferent, dark hair blowing—even among companions, as if he were killing time. There were a lot of stories about him. He was a fallen idol. His father had a real estate agency in a cottage on the highway. Lots, farms, acreage. They were an old family in these parts. There was a lane named after them.

  “There’s a bad faucet. Do you want to take a look at that?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It drips,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  She led the way upstairs. “There,” she said, pointing toward the bathroom. “You can hear it.”

  He casually turned the water on and off a few times and felt under the tap. He was doing it at arm’s length with a slight, careless movement of the wrist. She could see him from the bedroom. He seemed to be examining other things on the counter.

  She turned on a light and sat down. It was nearly dusk and the room immediately became cozy. The walls were papered in a blue pattern and the rug was a soft white. The polished stone of the hearth gave a sense of order. Outside, the fields were disappearing. It was a serene hour, one she shrank from. Sometimes, looking toward th
e ocean, she thought of her son, although that had happened in the sound and long ago. She no longer found she returned to it every day. They said it got better after a time but that it never really went away. As with so many other things, they were right. He had been the youngest and very spirited though a little frail. She prayed for him every Sunday in church. She prayed just a simple thing: O Lord, don’t overlook him, he’s very small. … Only a little boy, she would sometimes add. The sight of anything dead, a bird scattered in the road, the stiff legs of a rabbit, even a dead snake, upset her.

  “I think it’s a washer,” he said. “I’ll try and bring one over sometime.”

  “Good,” she said. “Will it be another month?”

  “You know Marian and I are back together again. Did you know that?”

  “Oh, I see.” She gave a slight, involuntary sigh. She felt strange. “I, uh …” What weakness, she thought later. “When did it happen?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  After a bit she stood up. “Shall we go downstairs?”

  She could see their reflections passing the stairway window. She could see her apricot-colored shirt go by. The wind was still blowing. A bare branch was scraping the side of the house. She often heard that at night.

  “Do you have time for a drink?” she asked.

  “I’d better not.”

  She poured some Scotch and went into the kitchen to get some ice from the refrigerator and add a little water. “I suppose I won’t see you for a while.”

  It hadn’t been that much. Some dinners at the Lanai, some improbable nights. It was just the feeling of being with someone you liked, someone easy and incongruous. “I …” She tried to find something to say.

  “You wish it hadn’t happened.”

  “Something like that.”

  He nodded. He was standing there. His face had become a little pale, the pale of winter.

  “And you?” she said.