She nodded.
“What was it that interested you about them? If you don’t mind my asking.”
Her little eyes were on me, and her face twisted as if she smelled something bad. “What?”
“Are you making fun?” Doke asked me. His face was a total blank.
“No,” I said. I was truly curious. With that many lovers, it was hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be some sort of filing system, to keep track of the types, anyway. Doke was staring at me, so I put my hand over my mouth, which I had come to think of as the offending part of my face.
He shook his head again, then poured more whiskey. I sat back and pretended to be relaxed and interested, while Samantha talked about herself and her adventures. She was related to Crazy Horse, she said. And on her mother’s side there was a distant connection to Mary Lincoln. She had lived in Haight-Ashbery and attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in law. She’d had plans to enter the system and ruin it from the inside. The collapse of the American government was the only hope for her and her people. But her father had this thing about rock concerts, and she’d got sidetracked. For years she’d followed the Grateful Dead around from concert to concert. She knew Jerry Garcia well. She’d had a child by him that died, and it was why she left to seek out the Rolling Stones. She liked their names better. Once, when she was only thirteen, she’d met John F. Kennedy. Doke sipped the whiskey, watching me. I was beginning to get sleepy. She droned on. She’d been a member of the Weathermen, and the FBI had crushed them with bombs and fire and infiltrators. Doke was staring at me, waiting for the first sign that I wasn’t utterly charmed, but I was actively fighting sleep. He had a big stake in her, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Samantha had fixed me with her rodent’s eyes. But my eyes were so heavy. I rubbed them, put my hands over a yawn.
“I’m very sensitive to spiritual vibrations,” she said. “It’s my Indian blood.”
This was in reference to something I must have missed in the long monologue, because Doke said, “So that’s how you knew he was going to kill himself.”
“Yes,” she said. “But there wasn’t anything I could do. It was his karma.” She went on to talk about karma, and how a person’s karma caused a glow she could perceive. “I’m very perceptive,” she said. “I can sense what a person is thinking. I get vibes from people.”
I was thinking, Please stop talking.
“It’s really kind of uncanny,” she went on. “I look in a person’s eyes, and I see all their thoughts, their innermost feelings.”
Shut the fuck up, please,I was thinking. Go to bed.
She never seemed to take a breath. She said, “I learned this when I met Robert Kennedy at his house in McLean, Virginia. I was eighteen, and I think he was interested in me physically, too. It was so odd, how he met me. I just walked up and knocked on his door and his maid—Eva was her name—”
“Well I sure am beat,” I said. I was desperate now. “Guess I’ll turn in.”
“I was telling you something,” she said.
I said, “You must be awful tired.”
“I was in the middle of telling something, and you just started talking about turning in.” She seemed to pout. I caught myself actually feeling sorry for her.
“We’ve been keeping you up,” I said. “You must be exhausted.” I stood, vaguely intending to make polite conversation as I left the room.
“She was telling you something,” Doke said.
“Do you have an Indian name?” I asked Samantha.
She shook her head. “My mother insisted that I be given a white woman’s name. She knew I would have a terrible time growing up in the white man’s world.”
I didn’t say anything.
She added, “It would have split me in two. And you know how terrible it is to be split down the middle?” She reached over and played with the crown of Doke’s hair.
I said I supposed I didn’t. I yawned.
She said, “It’s much worse than you can imagine. And I’m sorry it bores you.” She seemed proud to have plumbed my feelings.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”
And then there didn’t seem to be anything else to talk about. She sat there. She was biting her nails, taking in the room with those little eyes. I had come to the realization that she was no more of Indian blood than I was the King of Spain. I had an image of her parents—a couple of Italians, probably, holding down an apartment in Brooklyn, wondering where their daughter ran off to. I said, “What’s Mick Jagger like?”
“Very grungy and nervous.” She was still biting her nails.
I said, “Everything you’ve told us is a crock, right?”
“You can disbelieve me if you want,” she said. “I don’t care.”
I looked at Doke. “Man,” I said. Then I started out of the room. “Bedtime.”
But Doke stood suddenly, and when I turned, he took me by the front of my shirt. “You think you can treat us like this?”
I said, “Okay, look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”
“Leave him be,” Samantha said. “It’s his loss.”
“Will you excuse us for a few seconds?” Doke said to her.
She got up and went outside. We could join her, she said, when we were through being babies. She closed the door and Doke walked me back against the wall, still holding my shirt in his fists.
“I saw the way you were looking at her.”
“What difference does it make what I think?” I said. A mistake.
“Oh,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Cut it out,” I said. “Come on. Let me go.”
“Not till you tell me what you think of Samantha.”
“I think she’s a liar,” I told him. “And she’s not even a very good one.” I couldn’t help myself. “And on top of that I think she’s ugly as month-old pizza.”
He commenced hitting me. He was swinging wildly, and some of his punches missed, which allowed me to get under the table. Then he started kicking. I was crawling around, trying to get away from him, and Samantha had come back in to stop him. When he stormed out into the dark, she got down on the floor and saw that I was bleeding from a gash on my forehead. I must have hit the edge of the table on my way under it. And she was really quite gentle and sweet, getting me a rag for my head, and insisting that Doke would take me down to Dutton, to the emergency room.
As I said, it was while I was in the hospital that I met Hildie. “That’s a nasty cut” was the first thing she said to me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I thought she was perfect. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to think so, necessarily.
“How’d it happen?” she said.
“My brother and I got in a fight.”
She shook her head, concentrating on her work, cutting a bandage to size for me. “Two grown boys like you.”
“I could tell you about it,” I said.
That was all it needed. My mother used to say, when the time is right you don’t need to have a committee meeting about it.
When I eventually returned to the cabin, I found that Samantha had gone. She had picked up and headed off into the West, with a few of Doke’s records and tapes and most of the money he’d saved. He took it pretty hard. For a while that summer, he had himself convinced that because she’d taken those things she was planning on coming back. But the months turned into the rest of the year, and I stayed on through the next spring and part of that summer, and she was just gone. His drinking got pretty bad, and I started having to look out for the boy a lot on the weekends.
“It’s not fair, I know it,” Doke said to me. “I can’t shake it, though.”
“You’ve got to get ahold of yourself,” I told him. I’d been seeing Hildie.
We were married at the end of that next summer, and for a while Doke’s boy lived with us while Doke dried out in rehab. The boy’s mother was in some sort of rehab herself. Drugs. Sometimes, back then, it seemed to me that the whole count
ry had gone crazy.
Hildie and I were together almost twenty years. We never had any children. Doke left Montana and lives in Seattle now. He’s happy. Some stories do have happy endings, for a while, anyway. He’s got a wife, and another boy, and a girl. He probably never thinks about Samantha. I used to imagine the Italian couple in Brooklyn, reunited with their wayward little girl, who pulled up one day, driving a car full of music and money. She was such a bad liar. Doke’s son married a nice girl from Catalina, then moved to New York City. Everybody got along fine, really.
Hildie and I lived for a few years in a little three-bedroom rambler on Coronado Street in Sandusky, Illinois. Those first years we had a lot of fun, usually. Now and then she’d lose her temper, and my old trouble would return: something about my face would cause her to start swinging at me. And I never hit back. But it doesn’t, as the saying goes, take two to make a fight. One person with an urge to hit somebody else is enough. For the person getting knocked out, it might as well be the heavyweight championship.
One night, when we were drinking, I told her about Samantha. I must have been a little careless in how I talked about Samantha’s physical qualities, because I upset Hildie. These days, you say something about one woman and you’ve said it about all of them.
“Is that the way you see us?” she says.
“Us.” I said. “What?”
“Is that how you judge women? You see that I’m gaining weight, don’t you? And do you see me like this Samantha person?”
I said, “I’m just saying she wasn’t what Doke said she was.”
“It just kills me that that’s how you think.”
For about a year, things had been going sour. Hildie had ballooned to about two hundred fifty pounds. I had lost weight. And I was worried all the time about money. So was she, but her worry came out differently. She kept asking me what I thought of her. “You think I’m ugly now,” she’d say. “Right? That’s how you see me. Why don’t you come out and say it?”
“I think you’re fine,” I’d say.
“Tell me the truth. I’m too big.”
“No,” I’d say. “Really, hon.”
“You’re lying. I can see it in your face.”
My face again. There was nothing I could say. And besides, I was about half her size by now.
Once I said, “Do you think you’re too big?”
“It’s not important what I think,” she said. “Because, goddamn it, I know how you think. All of you.”
We needed extra income, and she hated the idea of nursing anymore, so she got a job serving food at a hospital cafeteria across the river in Missouri. There were nights we didn’t say a thing to each other, and after a few months she started doing things to get shut of me. That was okay. I think I even understood. She made dates with the janitor on her floor, a man fifteen years older than I am and a lot bigger. She told people she was leaving me. She had friends over at all hours of the day and night. When I walked in and someone asked who I was, she’d wave me away. “That’s my soon-to-be ex,” she’d say. It was always said like a joke, but you could feel the edge to it.
I never answered. I went about my business and tried not to get mad. She was as big as a Buick. She weighed more than my whole family put together, including Doke. I never mentioned that the bed sagged on her side, and that I was having to replace the mattress every six months. I’d watch her settle into her seat in a steak joint, order a porterhouse the size of an infant, and I wouldn’t say a word. I said nothing about her jeans, which were big enough to throw over a rhinoceros and keep it dry in the rain.
The night she kicked me out, she came home with a new friend. A new lover, she told me. She made her lover wait out on the front lawn while she broke the news. “Do you understand me, Ignatius? I want you out. I’ve decided I don’t need a man to tell me who I am. You can stay until you find a place. Sleep on the sofa. But Grace is moving in with us.”
Grace had walked into the hospital cafeteria several weeks before, after having been bandaged up in the emergency room. She’d been in a traffic accident, and her nose and upper lip were cut. Hildie and she got to talking, and pretty soon they were meeting for drinks after Hildie’s shifts. It was just like Hildie and me, in a way, except that now she was deciding that she wanted a woman and not a man. I never thought much of myself, but this hurt me. “She’s the most interesting person I’ve ever been around,” Hildie said, “and you and I haven’t been anything to each other for a long time.” This was true. Grace walked up to the door, and Hildie opened it and stepped back for her to come in, acting like this was the grand entrance of her happiness. Grace had a big white bandage over her nose, but we weren’t in the same room more than fifteen minutes before I recognized Samantha. Blond this time. A few pounds heavier, a little fuller in the face. But unmistakably her.
“Hello, Grace.”
She looked at me with those little black eyes, and then sat on the couch next to Hildie. I went into the bedroom and started packing, throwing shirts in a suitcase, and some slacks and socks and underwear. I wasn’t sure what I should take with me. I could hear Samantha/Grace in the next room. She had built her own house, she was saying, and had learned how to play several musical instruments but then forgot how. She had spent the night with Sting during a thunderstorm and power outage in Atlanta. By the time I got back to the living room, she was talking about Mount Saint Helens. She was there when it blew. She almost died.
“Ever been on the reservation?” I asked. I was putting a few of my books into my suitcase.
They both looked at me as though I had trees growing out of my head.
“Reservation?” Samantha/Grace asked.
I couldn’t tell if she recognized me. She stared, and then she smiled. So I smiled back, then resumed packing.
She said, “I’ve done so much wandering around. I’ve been in almost every state of the union, and made love in each one of them, too.”
“I always wanted to go to Hawaii,” Hildie said, laughing.
“Oh, absolutely. I’ve been there. I was married and lived there, but I got divorced.”
“Must’ve been a tough week,” I put in. It was a nasty thing to say. And it was the wrong time to say it. It made me look bad. I said, “Little joke, girls.”
“Oh,” Samantha/Grace said. “Haw.”
Hildie shook her head. “Men.”
“Haw, haw,” Samantha/Grace said.
“Ever been to Montana?” I asked her.
“I worked in the emergency ward at the hospital in Dutton,” Hildie said. “A terrible lonely job. That’s where I had the misfortune of meeting Ignatius.”
And Samantha/Grace smiled and leaned back in her chair. My name is not one that a person forgets easily. And you remember somebody as small as I am, too. She stared at me with those little wolverine’s eyes, and kept smiling.
Clasping her hands behind her blond head, Samantha/Grace said, “Well, you know, I guess to be truthful I’d have to say I never was actually in Montana. That’s one of the few places I’ve never been.”
I couldn’t help it.
A laugh came up out of me like a sneeze. I laughed and laughed and went on laughing—so hard that Hildie got mad, and the madder she got the more I laughed. Before I had stopped laughing, she’d thrown all my things out on the lawn. This was the last night of my marriage, I knew that, and that was all right with me. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was complaining.
VALOR
After it was all over, Aldenburg heard himself say that he had never considered himself the sort of man who was good in an emergency, or was particularly endowed with courage. If anything, he had always believed quite the opposite. The truth of this hurt, but there it was. Problems in his private life made him low, and he’d had no gumption for doing anything to change, and he knew it, way down, where you couldn’t mask things with rationalization, or diversion, or bravado—or booze, either. In fact, he would not have been in a position to perform any heroics if he ha
d not spent the night sitting in the bar at whose very door the accident happened.
The bar was called Sam’s. At night, the neon Budweiser sign in the window was the only light at that end of the street. Aldenburg had simply stayed on past closing, and sobered up playing blackjack for pennies with Mo Smith, the owner, a nice gentleman who had lost a son in the Gulf War and was lonely and had insomnia, and didn’t mind company.
It had been such a miserable winter—gray bone-cold days, black starless nights, ice storms one after another, and a wind blowing across the face of the world like desolation itself. They talked about this a little, and about the monstrosities all around. Monstrosity was Smitty’s word; he used it in almost every context to mean vaguely that thing he couldn’t quickly name or understand. “Bring me that—monstrosity over there, will you?” he’d say, meaning a pitcher of water. Or he would say, “Reagan’s presidency was a monstrosity,” and sometimes it was as though he meant it all in the same way. Smitty especially liked to talk about the end of the world. He was perpetually finding indications of the decline of everything, everywhere he looked. It was all a monstrosity.
Aldenburg liked listening to him, sometimes, and if on occasion he grew a little tired of the dire predictions, he simply tuned him out. This night he let him talk without attending to it much. He had been struggling to make ends meet and to solve complications in his marriage, feeling depressed a lot of the time because the marriage had once been happy, and trying to work through it all, though here he was, acting bad, evidently past working to solve anything much—staying out late, giving his wife something to think about.
The present trouble had mostly to do with his brother-in-law, Cal, who had come back from the great victory in the Gulf needing a cane to walk. Cal was living with them now, and the victory didn’t mean much. He was as bitter as it was possible to be. He had been wounded in an explosion in Riyadh—the two men with him were killed instantly—less than a week before the end of hostilities, and he’d suffered through three different surgical procedures and eleven months of therapy in a military hospital in Washington. Much of his left knee was gone, and part of his left foot and ankle, and the therapy hadn’t helped him much. He would need the cane for the rest of his life. He wasn’t even twenty-five and he walked like a man in his eighties, bent over the cane, dragging the bad leg.
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 2