The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  He said, “I read somewhere that they expect it to be worse this week because the high schools are all letting out for the summer.”

  They stared ahead at the lines of waiting cars, three choked lanes going off to the blinding west, and the river. He had spoken—her mind had again wandered away from where she was. And she had been thinking about him. This seemed almost spooky to her. She started to ask what he had said, but then decided against it, not wanting really to spend the energy it would take to listen, and experiencing a wave of frustration at the attention she was having to pay to every motion of her own mind.

  “How could it be worse?” he said.

  She made a murmur of agreement, remarking to herself that soon he was going to have to turn the car’s air-conditioning off, or the engine might overheat. She looked surreptitiously at the needle on the temperature gauge; it was already climbing toward the red zone. Perhaps she should say something.

  But then there was the sudden commotion in the street, perhaps four cars up—some people had got out of two of the cars and were scurrying and fighting, it looked like. It was hard to tell with the blaze of sunlight beyond.

  “What is that?” she said, almost glad of the change.

  He hadn’t seen it yet. He had put his head back on the rest, eyes closed against the brightness. He sat forward and peered through the blazing space out the window. It was hard to see anything at all. “What?” he said.

  She leaned into the curve of the window as if to look under the reflected glare. “Something—”

  “People are—leaving their cars?” he said. It was as though he had asked a question.

  “No, look. A fight—”

  Scuffling shapes moved across the blaze of sunlight, partly obscured by the cars in front. Something flashed, and there was a cracking sound.

  “Michael?”

  “Hey,” he said, holding the wheel.

  The scuffle came in a rush at them, at the hood of the car—a man bleeding badly across the front of a white shirt. He seemed to glance off to the right.

  “What the-”

  Now he staggered toward them, and his shirt front came against the window on her side; it seemed to agitate there for a few terrible seconds, and then it smeared downward, blotting everything out in bright red. She was screaming. She held her hands, with the magazine in them, to her face, and someone was hitting the windshield. There were more cracking sounds. Gunshots. The door opened on his side, and she thought it was being opened from without. She was lying over on the seat now, in the roar and shout of the trouble, her arms over her head, and it took a moment for her to understand in her terror that she was alone. She was alone, and the trouble, whatever it was, had moved off. There were screams and more gunshots, the sound of many people running, horns and sirens. It was all at a distance now.

  “Michael,” she said, then screamed. “Michael!”

  The frenetic, busy notes of jazz were still coming from the radio, undisturbed and bright, mixed with the sound of her cries. Someone was lifting her, someone’s hands were on her shoulders. She was surprised to find that she still clutched the magazine. She let it drop to the floor of the car, and looked up into a leathery, tanned, middle-aged face, small green eyes.

  “Are you hit?” the face said.

  “I don’t know. What is it, what happened? Where’s my husband?”

  “Can you sit up? Can you get out of the car?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

  He helped her. There were many people standing on the curb and in the open doors of stopped cars. She heard sirens. Somehow she had barked the skin of her knee. She stood out of the car and the man supported her on his arm, explaining that he was a policeman. “We’ve had some trouble here,” he said. “It’s all over.”

  “Where’s my husband.” She looked into the man’s face, and the face was blank. A second later, Michael stepped out of the glare beyond him, and stood there, wringing his hands. She saw into his ashen face, and he seemed to want to turn away. “Oh, Michael,” she said, reaching for him.

  The policeman let her go. She put her arms around Michael and closed her eyes, feeling the solidness of his back, crying. “Michael. Oh. Michael, what happened?”

  “It’s okay,” he told her, loud over the sirens. “It’s over.”

  She turned her head on his shoulder, and saw the knot of people working on the other side of the car. Her window was covered with blood. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

  “We’ll need statements from you both,” the policeman said to them.

  “My God,” Ivy said. “What happened here?”

  He had been thinking about flowers, and adultery.

  One of the older men in the admissions office, Saul Dornby, had sent a dozen roses to his wife, and the wife had called, crying, to say that they had arrived. Michael took the call because Dornby was out of the office, having lunch with one of the secretaries. Dornby was a man who had a long and complicated history with women, and people had generally assumed that he was having an affair with the secretary. He was always having affairs, and in the past few weeks he had put Michael in the position of fielding his wife’s phone calls. “I know it’s unpleasant for you, and I really do appreciate it. I’ll find some way to make it up to you. It would break Jenny’s heart to think I was having lunch with anyone but her—any female but her. You know how they are. It’s perfectly innocent this time, really. But it’s just better to keep it under wraps, you know, the past being what it is. After all, I met Jenny by playing around on someone else. You get my meaning? I haven’t been married four times for nothing. I mean, I have learned one or two things.” He paused and thought. “Man, I’ll tell you, Jenny was something in those first days I was with her. You know what I mean?” Michael indicated that he knew. “Well, sure, son. You’re fresh married. Of course you know. Maybe that’s my trouble—I just need it to be fresh like that all the time. You think?”

  Dornby was also the sort of man who liked to parade his sense of superior experience before the young men around him. He behaved as though it were apparent that he was the envy of others. He was especially that way with Michael Blakely, who had made the mistake of being initially in awe of him. But though Michael now resented the other man and was mostly bored by his talk, he had found that there was something alluring about the wife, had come to look forward to talking with her, hearing her soft, sad, melodious voice over the telephone. Something about possession of this intimate knowledge of her marriage made her all the more lovely to contemplate, and over the past few weeks he had been thinking about her in the nights.

  Sitting behind the wheel with the sun in his eyes and his wife at his side paging through the magazine, he had slipped toward sleep, thinking about all this, thinking drowsily about the attraction he felt for Dornby’s wife, when something in the static calm around him began to change. Had his wife spoken to him?

  And then everything went terrifyingly awry.

  He couldn’t say exactly when he had opened the door and dropped out of the car. The urge to leave it had been overwhelming from the moment he realized what was smearing down the window on his wife’s side. He had simply found himself out on the pavement, had felt the rough surface on his knees and the palms of his hands, and he had crawled between stopped cars and running people to the sidewalk. It had been just flight, trying to keep out of the line of fire, all reflex, and he had found himself clinging to a light pole, on his knees, while the shouts continued and the crowd surged beyond him and on. He saw a man sitting in the doorway of a cafeteria, his face in his folded arms. There were men running in the opposite direction of the rushing crowd, and then he saw a man being subdued by several others, perhaps fifty feet away on the corner. He held onto the light pole, and realized he was crying, like a little boy. Several women were watching him from the entrance of another store, and he straightened, got to his feet, stepped uncertainly away from the pole, struggling to keep his balance. It was mostly quiet now. Tho
ugh there were sirens coming from the distance, growing nearer. The gunshots had stopped. And the screams. People had gathered near his car, and Ivy stepped out of the confusion there, saying his name.

  He experienced a sudden rush of aversion.

  There was something almost cartoonish about the pallor of her face, and he couldn’t bring himself to settle his eyes on her. As she walked into his arms, he took a breath and tried to keep from screaming, and then he heard himself telling her it was all right, it was over.

  But of course it wasn’t over.

  The police wanted statements from everyone, and their names and addresses. This was something that was going to go on, Michael knew. They were going to look at it from every angle, this traffic altercation that had ended in violence and caused the two men involved to be wounded. The policemen were calling the wounds out to each other. “This one’s in the hip,” one of them said, and another answered, “Abdomen, here.” It was difficult at first to tell who was involved and who was a bystander. The traffic had backed up for blocks, and people were coming out of the buildings lining the street.

  There was a slow interval of a kind of deep concentration, a stillness, while the police and the paramedics worked. The ambulances took the wounded men away, and a little while later the police cars began to pull out, too. The Blakelys sat in the back of one of the squad cars while a polite officer asked them questions. The officer had questioned ten or eleven others, he told them—as though they had not been standing around waiting during this procedure—and now he explained in his quiet, considerate baritone voice that he had to get everybody’s best recollection of the events. He hoped they understood.

  “I don’t really know what was said, or what happened,” Michael told him. “I don’t have the slightest idea, okay? Like I said, we didn’t know anything was happening until we heard the gunshots.”

  “We saw the scuffling,” Ivy said. “Remember?”

  “I just need to get the sequence of events down,” the officer said.

  “We saw the scuffle,” said Ivy. “Or I saw it. I was reading this magazine—”

  “Look, it was a fight,” Michael broke in. “Haven’t you got enough from all these other people? We didn’t know what was happening.”

  “Well, sir—after you realized there was gunfire, what did you do?”

  Michael held back, glanced at his wife and waited.

  She seemed surprised for a second. “Oh. I—I got down on the front seat of the car. I had a magazine I was reading, and I put it up to my face, like—like this.” She pantomimed putting the magazine to her face. “I think that’s what I did.”

  “And you?” the policeman said to Michael.

  “I don’t even remember.”

  “You got out of the car,” said his wife, in the tone of someone who has made a discovery. “You—you left me there.”

  “I thought you were with me,” he said.

  The policeman, a young man with deep-socketed eyes and a toothy white smile, closed his clipboard and said, “Well, you never know where anybody is at such a time, everything gets so confused.”

  Ivy stared at her husband. “No, but you left me there. Where were you going, anyway?”

  “I thought you were with me,” he said.

  “You didn’t look back to see if I was?”

  He couldn’t answer her.

  The policeman was staring at first one and then the other, and seemed about to break out laughing. But when he spoke, his voice was soft and very considerate. “It’s a hard thing to know where everybody was when there’s trouble like this, or what anybody had in mind.”

  Neither Michael nor his wife answered him.

  “Well,” he went on, “I guess I’ve got all I need.”

  “Will anyone die?” Ivy asked him.

  He smiled. “I think they got things under control.”

  “Then no one’s going to die?”

  “I don’t think so. They got some help pretty quick, you know—Mr. Vance, over there, is a doctor, and he stepped right in and started working on them. Small-caliber pistols in both cases, thank God—looks like everybody’s gonna make it.”

  Michael felt abruptly nauseous and dizzy. The officer was looking at him.

  “Can you have someone wash the blood off our car?” Ivy asked.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Michael said.

  The officer seemed concerned. “You look a little green around the gills, sir. You could be in a little shock. Wait here.” He got out of the car, closed the door, and walked over to where a group of officers and a couple of paramedics were standing, on the other side of the street. In the foreground, another officer was directing traffic. Michael stared out at this man, and felt as though there wasn’t any breathable air. He searched for a way to open his window. His wife sat very still at his side, staring at her hands.

  “Stop sighing like that,” she said suddenly. “You’re safe.”

  “You heard the officer,” he told her. “I could be in shock. I can’t breathe.”

  “You’re panting.”

  In the silence that followed, a kind of whimper escaped from the bottom of his throat.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Will you please cut that out.”

  She saw the officer coming back, and she noted the perfect crease of his uniform slacks. Her husband was a shape to her left, breathing.

  “Ivy?” he said.

  The officer opened the door and leaned in. “Doctor’ll give you a look,” he said, across her, to Michael.

  “I’m okay,” Michael said.

  “Well,” said the officer. “Can’t hurt.”

  They got out, and he made sure of their address. He said he had someone washing the blood from their car. Michael seemed to lean into him, and Ivy walked away from them, out into the street. The policeman there told her to wait. People were still crowding along the sidewalk on that side, and a woman sat on the curb, crying, being tended to by two others. The sun was still bright; it shone in the dark hair of the crying woman. Ivy made her way to the sidewalk, and when she turned she saw that the polite officer was helping Michael across. The two men moved to the knot of paramedics, and the doctor who had been the man of the hour took Michael by the arms and looked into his face. The doctor was rugged-looking, with thick, wiry brown hair, heavy square features, and big rough-looking hands—a man who did outdoor things, and was calm, in charge, perhaps five years older than Michael, though he seemed almost fatherly with him. He got Michael to sit down, then lie down, and he elevated his legs. Michael lay in the middle of the sidewalk with a crate of oranges under his legs, which someone had brought from the deli a few feet away. Ivy walked over there and waited with the others, hearing the muttered questions bystanders asked—was this one of the victims?

  The doctor knelt down and asked Michael how he felt.

  “Silly,” Michael said.

  “Well. You got excited. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Can I get up now?”

  “Think you can?”

  “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.”r />
  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.”