The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “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 okay 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?”

  “Okay,” 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?”

  “Okay. 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 know 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, and 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?”<
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  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.

  THE MAN WHO KNEW BELLE STARR

  Mcrae picked up a hitcher on his way west. It was a young woman, carrying a paper bag and a leather purse, wearing jeans and a shawl—which she didn’t take off, though it was more than ninety degrees out, and Mcrae had no air conditioning. He was driving an old Dodge Charger with a bad exhaust system, and one long crack in the wraparound windshield. He pulled over for her and she got right in, put the leather purse on the seat between them, and settled herself with the paper bag on her lap between her hands. He had just crossed into Texas.

  “Where you headed,” he said.

  She said, “What about you?”

  “Nevada, maybe.”

  “Why maybe?”

  And that fast he was answering her questions. “I just got out of the air force,” he told her, though this wasn’t exactly true. The air force had put him out with a dishonorable discharge after four years at Leavenworth for assaulting a staff sergeant. He was a bad character. He had a bad temper that had got him into a load of trouble already and he just wanted to get out west, out to the wide-open spaces. It was just to see it, really. He had the feeling people didn’t require as much from a person way out where there was that kind of room. He didn’t have any family now. He had five thousand dollars from his father’s insurance policy, and he was going to make the money last him awhile. He said, “I’m sort of undecided about a lot of things.”

  “Not me,” she said.

  “You figured out where you were going,” he said.

  “You could say that.”

  “So where might that be.”

  She made a fist and then extended her thumb, and turned it over. “Under,” she said; “down.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Does the radio work?” she asked, reaching for it.

  “It’s on the blink,” he said.

  She turned the knob anyway, then sat back and folded her arms over the paper bag.

  He took a glance at her. She was skinny and long-necked, and her hair was the color of water in a metal pail. She looked just old enough for high school.

  “What’s in the bag?” he said.

  She sat up a little. “Nothing. Another blouse.”

  “Well, so what did you mean back there?”

  “Back where?”

  “Look,” he said, “we don’t have to do any talking if you don’t want to.”

  “Then what will we do?”

  “Anything you want,” he said.

  “What if I just want to sit here and let you drive me all the way to Nevada?”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “That’s just fine.”

  “Well, I won’t do that. We can talk.”

  “Are you going to Nevada?” he asked.

  She gave a little shrug of her shoulders. “Why not?”

  “All right,” he said, and for some reason he offered her his hand. She looked at it, and then smiled at him, and he put his hand back on the wheel.

  It got a little awkward almost right away. The heat was awful, and she sat there sweating, not saying much. He never thought he was very smooth or anything, and he had been in prison: it had been a long time since he had found himself in the company of a woman. Finally she fell asleep, and for a few miles he could look at her without worrying about anything but staying on the road. He decided that she was kind of good-looking around the eyes and mouth. If she ever filled out, she might be something. He caught himself wondering what might happen, thinking of sex. A girl who traveled alone like this was probably pretty loose. Without quite realizing it, he began to daydream about her, and when he got aroused by the daydream he tried to concentrate on figuring his chances, playing his cards right, not messing up any opportunities—but being gentlemanly, too. He was not the sort of person who forced himself on young women. She slept very quietly, not breathing loudly or sighing or moving much; and then she simply sat up and folded her arms over the bag again and stared out at the road.

  “God,” she said, “I went out.”

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What’s your name?” he said. “I never got your name.”

  “Belle Starr,” she said, and, winking at him, she made a clicking sound out of the side of her mouth.

  “Belle Starr,” he said.

  “Don’t you know who Belle Starr was?”

  All he knew was that it was a familiar-sounding name. “Belle Starr.”

  She put her index finger to the side of his head and said, “Bang.”

  “Belle Starr,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said. “Annie Oakley. Wild Bill Hickok.”

  “Oh,” Mcrae said. “Okay.”

  “That’s me,” she said, sliding down in the seat. “Belle Starr.”

  “That’s not your real name.”

  “It’s the only one I go by these days.”

  They rode on in silence for a time.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  He told her.

  “Irish?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “Where you from, Mcrae?”

  “Washington, D.C.”

  “Long way from home.”

  “I haven’t been there in years.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Prison,” he said. He hadn’t known he would say it, and now that he had, he kept his eyes on the road. He might as well have been posing for her; he had an image of himself as he must look from the side, and he shifted his weight a little, sucked in his belly. When he stole a glance at her he saw that she was simply gazing out at the Panhandle, one hand up like a visor to shade her eyes.

  “What about you?” he said, and felt like somebody in a movie—two people with a past come together on the open road. He wondered how he could get the talk around to the subject of love.

  “What about me?”

  “Where’re you from?”

  “I don’t want to bore you with all the facts,” she sa
id.

  “I don’t mind,” Mcrae said. “I got nothing else to do.”

  “I’m from way up North.”

  “Okay,” he said, “you want me to guess?”

  “Maine,” she said. “Land of Moose and Lobster.” He said, “Maine. Well, now.”

  “See?” she said. “The facts are just a lot of things that don’t change.”

  “Unless you change them,” Mcrae said.

  She reached down and, with elaborate care, as if it were fragile, put the paper bag on the floor. Then she leaned back and put her feet up on the dash. She was wearing low-cut tennis shoes.

  “You going to sleep?” he asked.

  “Just relaxing,” she said.

  But a moment later, when he asked if she wanted to stop and eat, she didn’t answer, and he looked over to see that she was sound asleep.

  His father had died while he was at Leavenworth. The last time Mcrae saw him, he was lying on a gurney in one of the bays of D.C. General’s emergency ward, a plastic tube in his mouth, an I.V. set into an ugly yellow-blue bruise on his wrist. Mcrae had come home on leave from the air force— which he had joined at the order of a juvenile judge—to find his father on the floor in the living room, in a pile of old newspapers and bottles, wearing his good suit, with no socks or shoes and no shirt. It looked as if he were dead. But the ambulance drivers found a pulse, and rushed him off to the hospital. Mcrae cleaned the house up a little, and then followed in the Charger. The old man had been steadily going downhill from the time Mcrae was a boy, and so this latest trouble wasn’t new. In the hospital, they got the tube into his mouth and hooked him to the I.V., and then left him there on the gurney. Mcrae stood at his side, still in uniform, and when the old man opened his eyes and looked at him it was clear that he didn’t know who it was. The old man blinked, stared, and then sat up, took the tube out of his mouth, and spat something terrible-looking into a small metal dish which was suspended from the complicated apparatus of the room, and which made a continual water-dropping sound like a leaking sink. He looked at Mcrae again, and then he looked at the tube. “Jesus Christ,” he said.