Andre Dubus: Selected Stories

by Andre Dubus

  At eight o’clock he started walking down the ridge: one soft step, then waiting, looking down both slopes; another step; after three he saw Phil: a flash of light, a movement on the skyline. Then Phil became a tiny figure, and Harry stayed abreast of him. Soon the breeze shifted, came from the sea, and he could smell it. Near midmorning he flushed a doe: froze at the sudden crack of brush, as her bounding rump and darting body angled down the side of the ridge; in the valley she ran south, and was gone.

  He sat and smoked and watched a ship gliding past Phil, its stacks at his shoulders. Then he stood and took off his jacket and sweat shirt and hung them from his belt. He caught up with Phil, and stalked again. When the sun was high and sparkling the sea, the ridge dropped more sharply, and he unloaded his rifle and slung it from his shoulder, and went down to the jeep. Phil sat on the hood. Behind him was open country and a distant range of tall hills. Harry sat on the hood and drank from his canteen.

  ‘Saved ammo,’ Phil said.

  ‘I almost stepped on a doe.’

  ‘How close?’

  ‘Three steps and a good spit.’

  ‘I’ve never been that close.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘Pretty quiet, Pop.’

  ‘She startled me. If she’d been a buck, I would have missed.’

  They ate sandwiches, then lay on their backs in the shade of the jeep. Harry rested his hat on his forehead so the brim covered his eyes.

  ‘Are you staying for dinner?’ Phil said.

  ‘No. I don’t like driving tired.’

  ‘We can go back now, if you want.’

  ‘Let’s hunt. What will you do tomorrow?’

  ‘Make sure my toothbrush is packed.’

  ‘No girl?’

  ‘There isn’t one. I mean no one. So why choose now, right? I’ll go out with the guys and get drunk.’

  ‘Only way to go. What time Monday?’

  ‘I don’t even want to say.’

  ‘They love getting guys up in the dark.’

  His boots were warm. He looked out from under the hat: sunlight was on his ankles now; he looked over his feet at the low end of Phil’s ridge.

  ‘Orientals can hide on a parade field. Chinese would crawl all night from their lines to ours. A few feet and wait. All night lying out there, no sound, nothing moving, and just before dawn they’d be on top of us. And Japanese: they were like leaves. ’

  ‘Except that tank.’

  ‘What tank?’

  ‘Your Silver Star.’

  ‘That was a pillbox.’

  ‘It was?’

  ‘Sure. Did you think I’d go after a tank?’

  ‘Not much difference. Why didn’t I know that?’

  ‘Too many war stories, too many Marines; probably a neighbor told his kid about a tank.’

  ‘I told them. Was it on Tarawa?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At least I got that right.’

  ‘It’s not important. It’s just something that happened. We were pinned down on the beach. The boxes had interlocking fire. I remember my mouth in the sand, then an explosion to my right front. It was a satchel charge, and a kid named Winslow Brimmer was the one who got it there.’

  ‘Winslow Brimmer?’

  ‘He was a mean little fart from Baltimore. Nobody harassed him about his name. He took whatever was left of his squad to that box, and all but two of them bought it. Then I was running with a flamethrower on my back. If you can call that running.’

  ‘Where did you get the flamethrower?’

  ‘The guy with it was next to me, and he was dead. So I put it on and moved out.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘It was easier than Brimmer’s because he had knocked out the one on their left. I had more fresh air than he did.’

  Not much.’

  ‘I can remember doing it, but it’s like somebody told me I did it, and that’s why I remember. The way it can be after a bad drunk. I don’t remember what I felt just before, or what I thought. I remember getting the flamethrower off him and onto me, and that should have taken a while, but it doesn’t seem like it. I remember running, but I don’t remember hearing anything, not with all those weapons firing, and I don’t remember getting there. I was there, and then I burned them. They must have made sounds, but I only remember the smell.’

  ‘Was that when you were wounded?’

  ‘No. That was the next day.’

  ‘I wish I had been there.’

  ‘No you don’t. The Navy dropped us in deep water—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Dead troops bobbing in it and lying on the reef and the beach. Fuck Tarawa.’

  He opened his eyes to the sun, and squinted away from it at the sky. A hawk glided toward the earth, veered away, and climbed west over the ridge.

  ‘You reflected the sun this morning,’ he said. ‘That’s how I saw you.’

  ‘My watch.’

  He looked at the chrome band on Phil’s wrist.

  ‘Goddamn it, leave that civilian shit at home and get one from supply.’

  ‘It’s in my room.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Okay, Captain.’

  He closed his eyes, listening to Phil’s breathing. The sun on his face woke him, and he stiffened and pressed his palms against the ground, then knew where he was. Phil was gone. He stood, wiping sweat from his eyes; Phil leaned against the back of the jeep, eating a plum.

  ‘Have some fruit.’

  Harry took a peach from the pack and stood beside him.

  ‘Do you want to swap ridges?’ Phil said.

  ‘Not unless you do.’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘Mine’s like home now.’

  ‘We’ll probably get back here around six. Thirty minutes to the camp to sign out. Then about forty.’

  ‘Plenty of time. I make it in under three hours. ’Course, there’s always the Jesus factor.’

  ‘Like getting a deer.’

  ‘If we do, I’ll help you clean it.’

  ‘And take it home with you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘All set?’

  ‘Need my hogleg.’

  He took the rifle from the back seat and slung it from his shoulder.

  ‘How do you like the .308?’ Phil said.

  ‘It’s good.’

  ‘Have you zeroed it in?’

  ‘Not this year.’

  They walked into the valley and up the hard, cracked earth of the stream bed to the pine trees, and stood in their shade.

  ‘I like the smell of pine,’ Harry said. ‘Up there I can smell the ocean. Did you see it this morning, when the sun came up?’

  ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Now we get the sunset. Ready?’

  ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Take care, then.’

  ‘You too.’

  They turned from each other and Harry walked out of the trees, into the sunlight, then he lengthened his stride toward the ridge.

  ANNA

  HER NAME WAS Anna Griffin. She was twenty. Her blond hair had been turning darker over the past few years, and she believed it would be brown when she was twenty-five. Sometimes she thought of dying it blond, but living with Wayne was still new enough to her so that she was hesitant about spending money on anything that could not be shared. She also wanted to see what her hair would finally look like. She was pretty, though parts of her face seemed not to know it: the light of her eyes, the lines of her lips, seemed bent on denial, so that even the rise of her high cheekbones seemed ungraceful, simply covered bone. Her two front teeth had a gap between them, and they protruded, the right more than the left.

  She worked at the cash register of a Sunnycorner store, located in what people called a square: two blocks of small stores, with a Chevrolet dealer and two branch banks, one of them next to the Sunnycorner. The tellers from that one—women not much older than Anna—came in for takeout coffees, cigarettes, and diet drinks. She liked watching them come
in: soft sweaters, wool dresses, polyester blouses that in stores she liked rubbing between thumb and forefinger. She liked looking at their hair too: beauty parlor hair that seemed groomed to match the colors and cut and texture of their clothing, so it was more like hair on a model or a movie actress, no longer an independent growth to be washed and brushed and combed and cut, but part of the ensemble, as the boots were. They all wore pretty watches, and bracelets and necklaces, and more than one ring. She liked the way the girls moved: they looked purposeful but not harried: one enters the store and stops at the magazine rack against the wall opposite Anna and the counter, and picks up a magazine and thumbs the pages, appearing even then to be in motion still, a woman leaving the job for a few minutes, but not in a hurry; then she replaces the magazine and crosses the floor and waits in line while Anna rings up and bags the cans and bottles and boxes cradled in arms, dangling from hands. They talk to each other, Anna and the teller she knows only by face, as she fills and caps Styrofoam cups of coffee. The weather. Hi. How are you. Bye now. The teller leaves. Often behind the counter, with other customers, Anna liked what she was doing; liked knowing where the pimientos were; liked her deftness with the register and bagging; was proud of her cheerfulness, felt in charge of customers and what they bought. But when the tellers were at the counter, she was shy, and if one of them made her laugh, she covered her mouth.

  She took new magazines from the rack: one at a time, keeping it under the counter near her tall three-legged stool, until she finished it; then she put it back and took another. So by the time the girls from the bank glanced through the magazine, she knew what they were seeing. For they always chose the ones she did: People, Vogue, Glamour. She looked at Playgirl, and in Penthouse she looked at the women and read the letters, this when she worked at night, not because there were fewer customers then but because it was night, not day. At first she had looked at them during the day, and felt strange raising her eyes from the pictures to blink at the parking lot, whose presence of cars and people and space she always felt because the storefront was glass, her counter stopping just short of it. The tellers never picked up those magazines, but Anna was certain they had them at home. She imagined that too: where they lived after work; before work. She gave them large, pretty apartments with thick walls so they only heard themselves; stereos and color television, and soft carpets and soft furniture and large brass beds; sometimes she imagined them living with men who made a lot of money, and she saw a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi.

  Near the end of her workday, in its seventh and eighth hours, her fatigue was the sort that comes from confining the body while giving neither it nor the mind anything to do. She was restless, impatient, and distracted, and while talking politely to customers and warmly to the regular ones, she wanted to be home. The apartment was in an old building she could nearly see from behind the counter; she could see the grey house with red shutters next to it. As soon as she left the store, she felt as if she had not been tired at all; only her feet still were. Sometimes she felt something else too, as she stepped outside and crossed that line between fatigue and energy: a touch of dread and defeat. She walked past the bank, the last place in the long building of bank Sunnycorner drugstore department store and pizza house, cleared the corner of the building, passed the dumpster on whose lee side teenagers on summer nights smoked dope and drank beer, down the sloping parking lot and across the street to the old near-yardless green wooden apartment house; up three flights of voices and television voices and the smell that reminded her of the weariness she had just left. It was not a bad smell. It bothered her because it was a daily smell, even when old Mrs. Battistini on the first floor cooked with garlic: a smell of all the days of this wood: up to the third floor, the top of the building, and into the apartment whose smells she noticed only because they were not the scent of contained age she had breathed as she climbed. Then she went to the kitchen table or the bed or shower or couch, either talking to Wayne or waiting for him to come home from Wendy’s, where he cooked hamburgers.

  At those times she liked her home. She rarely liked it when she woke in it: a northwest apartment, so she opened her eyes to a twilit room and, as she moved about, she saw the place clearly, with its few pieces of furniture, cluttered only with leavings: tossed clothes, beer bottles, potato chip bags, as if her night’s sleep had tricked her so she would see only what last night she had not. And sometimes later, during the day or night, while she was simply crossing a room, she would suddenly see herself juxtaposed with the old maroon couch which had been left, along with everything else, by whoever lived there before she and Wayne: the yellow wooden table and two chairs in the kitchen, the blue easy chair in the living room, and in the bedroom the chest of drawers, the straight wooden chair, and the mattress on the floor, and she felt older than she knew she ought to.

  The wrong car: a 1964 Mercury Comet that Wayne had bought for one hundred and sixty dollars two years ago, before she knew him, when the car was already eleven years old, and now it vibrated at sixty miles an hour, and had holes in the floorboard; and the wrong weapon: a Buck hunting knife under Wayne’s leather jacket, unsheathed and held against his body by his left arm. She had not thought of the car and knife until he put the knife under his jacket and left her in the car, smoking so fast that between drags she kept the cigarette near her face and chewed the thumb of the hand holding it; looking through the wiper-swept windshield and the snow blowing between her and the closed bakery next to the lighted drugstore, a tall Wayne walking slowly with his face turned and lowered away from the snow. She softly kept her foot on the accelerator so the engine would not stall. The headlights were off. She could not see into the drugstore. When she drove slowly past it, there were two customers, one at the cash register and counter at the rear, one looking at display shelves at a side wall. She had parked and turned off the lights. One customer left, a man bareheaded in the snow. He did not look at their car. Then the other one left, a man in a watch cap. He did not look either, and when he had driven out of the parking lot to the highway it joined, Wayne said Okay, and went in.

  She looked in the rearview mirror, but snow had covered the window; she looked to both sides. To her right, at the far end of the shopping center, the doughnut shop was open, and in front of it three cars were topped with snow. All the other stores were closed. She would be able to see headlights through the snow on the rear window, and if a cruiser came she was to go into the store, and if Wayne had not already started, she would buy cigarettes, then go out again, and if the cruiser was gone she would wait in the car; if the cruiser had stopped, she would go back into the store for matches and they would both leave. Now in the dark and heater-warmth she believed all of their plan was no longer risky, but doomed, as if by leaving the car and walking across the short space through soft angling snow, Wayne had become puny, his knife a toy. So it was the wrong girl too, and the wrong man. She could not imagine him coming out with money, and she could not imagine tomorrow or later tonight or even the next minute. Stripped of history and dreams, she knew only her breathing and smoking and heartbeat and the falling snow. She stared at the long window of the drugstore, and she was startled when he came out: he was running, he was alone, he was inside, closing the door. He said Jesus Christ three times as she crossed the parking lot. She turned on the headlights and slowed as she neared the highway. She did not have to stop. She moved into the right lane, and cars in the middle and left passed her.

  ‘A lot,’ he said.

  She reached to him, and he pressed bills against her palm, folded her fingers around them.

  ‘Can you see out back?’ she said.

  ‘No. Nobody’s coming. Just go slow: no skidding, no wrecks. Jesus.’

  She heard the knife blade sliding into the sheath, watched yellowed snow in the headlights and glanced at passing cars on her left; she held the wheel with two hands. He said when he went in he was about to walk around like he was looking for something because he was so scared, but then he decided to
do it right away or else he might have just walked around the store till the druggist asked what he wanted and he’d end up buying toothpaste or something, so he went down along the side wall to the back of the store—he lit a cigarette and she said Me too; she watched the road and taillights of a distant car in her lane as he placed it between her fingers—and he went around the counter and took out the knife and held it at the druggist’s stomach: a little man with grey hair watching the knife and punching open the register.

  She left the highway and drove on a two-lane road through woods and small towns.

  ‘Tequila,’ he said.

  In their town all but one package store closed at ten-thirty; she drove to the one that stayed open until eleven, a corner store on a street of tenement houses where Puerto Ricans lived; on warm nights they were on the stoops and sidewalks and corners. She did not like going there, even on winter nights when no one was out. She stopped in front of it, looked at the windows, and said: ‘I think it’s closed.’

  ‘It’s quarter to.’

  He went out and tried the door, then peered in, then knocked and called and tried the door again. He came back and struck the dashboard.

  ‘I can’t fucking believe it. I got so much money in my pockets I got no room for my hands, and we got one beer at home. Can you believe it?’

  ‘He must’ve closed early—‘

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘—because of the snow.’

  She turned a corner around a used car lot and got onto the main street going downhill through town to the river.

  ‘I could use some tequila,’ she said.

  ‘Stop at Timmy’s.’

  The traffic lights were blinking yellow so people would not have to stop on the hill in the snow; she shifted down and coasted with her foot touching the brake pedal, drove over the bridge, and parked two blocks from it at Timmy’s. When she got out of the car, her legs were weak and eager for motion, and she realized they had been taut all the way home; and, standing at the corner of the bar, watching Johnny McCarthy pour two shots beside the drafts, she knew she was going to get drunk. She licked salt from her hand and drank the shot, then a long swallow of beer that met the tequila’s burn as it rose, and held the shot glass toward grinning McCarthy and asked how law school was going; he poured tequila and said Long but good, and she drank that and finished her beer, and he poured two more shots and brought them drafts. She looped her arm around Wayne’s and nuzzled the soft leather and hard bicep, then tongue-kissed him, and looked down the bar at the regulars, most of them men talking in pairs, standing at the bar that had no stools; two girls stood shoulder to shoulder and talked to men on their flanks. The room was long and narrow, separated from the dining room by a wall with a half-door behind the bar. Anna waved at people who looked at her, and they raised a glass or waved and some called her name, and old Lou, who was drinking beer alone at the other end of the bar, motioned to McCarthy and sent her and Wayne a round. Wayne’s hand came out of his jacket and she looked at the bill in it: a twenty.