The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “The elephant?” Mother said.

  “We’ll talk later,” said Father. “Good night, Mrs. Lessing.” ”

  The animal is dead, then?”

  Father nodded. “It didn’t go off as smoothly as they’d thought. We never should’ve gone down there to see it.”

  “I wish we’d stayed home,” Livvie said. She sniffled, and wiped her nose. We crossed the lawn to our house. I looked back toward the rail yard. The first stars were twinkling above it.

  “What was she talking about?” Mother asked Father as we went inside. “What business up the street?”

  “Some black opened his mouth when he shouldn’t have. And paid the price for it.”

  It was Father, many years later, who told me what they did to Thaddeus Adams. I had to jog his memory by explaining that it happened the day they hanged the elephant. He described it all, though he wasn’t there to see it. In his estimation of things, it was unfortunate but necessary.

  He worked hard to teach me honor, the love of one’s family, the value of self sacrifice, of kindness and concern, graciousness and thrift, industriousness and hard work, the love of country.

  I never knew or found out what else might have happened, or how Thaddeus fared in his harmed life. And I never saw Anna Scott again, nor ever heard what became of her. Dewey moved away before I reached majority. One fall morning her house was empty, and new people moved in a week later. My parents lived to great age, into the early hundreds. We buried Livvie in the spring of 1958, after an automobile accident. She was sixty-seven. Mother and Father were still very healthy, even strong. Livvie’s family took good care of them, that day. Livvie had raised three handsome and successful boys. They spoke with my father and me about all the trouble the coloreds, as they were then called, were causing. I went along with their talk, fearing the disapproval I might have to face if I said anything, and, I confess, agreeing with some of what was said. But then I remembered Anna Scott, talking to me in fever, in the year 1903….

  I’ve grown so old…. Everybody’s gone now.

  Sometimes, lately, I dream that I’m in that railroad yard and I can’t see for the blinding-hot light. The elephant is dangling from the chain, under the fretwork of the derrick, the iron supporting bars making a skinny black shadow on the red sky. I’m turning to look behind me, something awful is there, but I can’t see it. Something weighs me down so heavily that my movements are terrifyingly slow. I move but nothing seems to change. I’m a statue, utter stillness, trying to turn, trying to open my eyes in the blindness, and I never do see what waits in that dream that is so threatening—other men, a man, something not human, I never know in the dream. But I think I know. After I wake up, I think I know. And I try to gather the practical matters of my present life to myself like a protective cloak: the schedule here, the time, the coming morning. Betrayal can happen miles and years away. It can go on happening, down in the heart, in the dark. So these mornings are slow, and sometimes it seems the light won’t come at all, and I lie here remembering that day so far past, when Anna Scott, crying, looked at me that way and called me “white boy,” and later I stood in a crowd that had gathered to watch the death of the beast.

  ACCURACY

  There’s a new event, an AARP women’s best ball tournament, and the crowd presses out the doors of the clubhouse—ladies in their sixties and seventies. On the lawn in front of the building, a squarish, very tan, leathery-faced woman talks into a bullhorn, naming foursomes in a raspy, cigarette-deep voice.

  Standing at the edge of the practice green, moving through a small group of others, Thomas McPherson’s thinking of canceling the morning’s round. The day’s starting wrong. “Where’s Hopewell?” he says to his companion, Jerry Barnes. “Will he know where to find us?” This is a public course the two of them have been coming to each end-of-July for years, and they expected some delay about teeing off, but nothing like this.

  They haven’t seen Hopewell since high school. Barnes and McPherson have been in touch for nearly a decade, and on occasion they’ve wondered about Hopewell, speculating that he might have passed away, since he had a bad heart (he had been excused from military service because of it). But Jerry Barnes ran into him last month at a used car lot in the city, not one pound heavier than he was in 1971, when Barnes and McPherson left for the air force, and Vietnam. Barnes stopped at the dealership to price a used truck, and Hopewell walked out of the office, twirling a set of keys and looking a little bored. They didn’t even recognize each other in the beginning. “You can put a hundred thousand miles on one of these,” Hopewell said, tilting his head to the side. “They’re built for it.” He squinted, as though looking into a distance. “Jerry?”

  After the initial surprise, he told Barnes that he had just started there as a salesman, after almost twenty-five years in California—one town after another, all of it, he said, in an alcoholic haze. He’d gone there to be an actor, and failed miserably, not for his drinking but because he wasn’t much good. He came back east last year, dry, with a new young wife, who had straightened him out. He was a reclamation project. “I’ve been dry for two years. My wife is my savior.” They’d come back to Virginia to be near her mother, who had money.

  McPherson, when Barnes reported all this to him, wondered aloud how a fifty-year-old alcoholic in need of reclamation could be the object of the affections of a wealthy young woman.

  “Well,” Barnes said, “you should see him, Tom. He does not look fifty. He looks like a goddamn movie star. And he told me he’s been playing golf almost every week for the last twelve years. Said that’s the one thing he did consistently except drinking. And it’s hard to believe he did much of that from the way he looks.”

  Thomas McPherson lives in North Carolina now, where he works as district manager for Walgreen’s. He remembers that when they were in high school he spent time with Hopewell out of a kind of inertia; the other boy annoyed him without being quite aware of it. For one thing, he was always telling stories with himself as the hero, the one with all the snappy lines. McPherson thought they were exaggerations, if not outright lies. Hopewell had a tendency to be overly dramatic about himself.

  Back in high school, McPherson played catcher, Barnes pitched, and Hopewell was the shortstop. Barnes used to tease Hopewell with all the merciless persistence of an older brother. Then it seemed that Barnes and the other boy were closer. At fifteen and sixteen, McPherson harbored resentments. Remembering this now makes him uneasy. Anyway, so much time has gone by; he’s never liked this sort of thing, never even attended a high school or college reunion. He secretly wishes Barnes hadn’t asked Hopewell to join them today.

  Each year Since they moved south in 1989, he and his wife, Regina, have visited Charlottesville for two weeks—usually the last two weeks in July. They stay with the Barneses. On one of the two Saturdays, the women shop the flea markets in the valley while the men play golf. Regina hasn’t come on this trip. A week ago, she sprained her ankle in a Food Lion parking lot. McPherson suspects this isn’t why she stayed home. She did have to use crutches for three days after the fall, but she’s perfectly capable of getting around now. Nothing would persuade her to come north. It’s probably for the best. In the past few months all they’ve done is argue, and Regina drinks too much. Nothing serious, really—she never gets drunk. But her tongue turns sharp. McPherson, a gentle man, is by his own estimation of himself rather quiet and not particularly witty. He’s always admired that quality in other people, including his wife. But lately Regina, with a couple of scotches under her belt, has shown a tendency to turn on him. When she and McPherson met, in college, she was a recreational dope smoker, and tried various other illegal substances. She had a fast group of friends he didn’t much like, though he tried some of the same things, mostly for fear of seeming too tame. They were all wild, back then. Everybody they knew.

  Now most of the friends are gone, in other cities far away, or dead, and Regina has become respectable: a city council member; th
e regular organist at the Chapel Hill Methodist Church. But when she drinks, she narrows her dark green eyes at her husband and is sardonic; and something of his already meager ability for repartee abandons him in exact proportion to his increasing discomfort. He thinks of this aspect of her behavior as an attitude, something that goes back to those early days in college, when everyone was so smart. It is sometimes easy to imagine the cost of that ironic attitude, that cool, and to associate it with the drugs—it’s all begun to play itself out in the lives of friends, and friends’ children: general lawlessness and personal sloth; the belief that the rules were written for everyone else. He believes there’s some connection. He didn’t have much contact with Jerry Barnes during the first wild years with Regina, but Jerry, he knows, experimented with all sorts of illegal substances, and now Jerry and his wife, Marie, have a daughter living in their basement—past thirty, jobless, planning no future; she weighs more than three hundred pounds, and eats all day.

  The McPhersons have no children: the price of their own selfish habits of living.

  There’s trouble brewing. They have never been separated for more than a day or two. Maybe Regina is deciding to leave him. When he arrived here, last week, he told Jerry and Marie about the sore ankle, and left it there. Perhaps significantly, they sought no further explanation. They’re circumspect enough about their own trouble—the tension and lack of trust between them now, mostly having to do with disagreements and recriminations concerning the daughter, Drinda, who still depends on her mother for laundry and the daylong process of providing meals. Drinda can go for weeks without leaving her bed. There doesn’t appear to be much communication between members of the family. Neither Barnes nor his wife speaks about it very specifically. And the bickering over meaningless things goes on: Drinda’s “finding herself.” Drinda’s “studying.” It’s been seven years—and two hundred eleven pounds—since she moved back home, following a brief affair with her college music professor. She took a job, seemed to be doing fine, and then, near the end of the second year, quit everything and started her solitary life in the basement.

  The one thing she does do is read. Her musty room is stacked with an odd assortment of thick tomes: the secret lives and loves of Hollywood stars, mixed in with books about the assassination of President Kennedy, portrayals of the now-dead Princess Diana, and volumes of philosophy: Wittgenstein, Hegel, Sartre. She told her mother she’s preparing for the day she discovers what she wants to do for a life’s work. Her mother is mortified by how indolent the girl has become, but spends time facilitating the basement arrangements, proceeding almost automatically as if from force of habit. Regina has gleaned this much from her time with Marie Barnes, and on occasion the McPhersons have puzzled about it during the hours of driving back south from their yearly visit.

  Now, standing on the practice green, McPherson desires to be elsewhere. The day’s not right. It’s unlucky; he feels it, lining up a putt and trying not to think. He says, “I don’t know why you felt the need to include Hopewell.”

  Barnes says, “If you’d seen his face when he found out we were still in touch. Said he’d been hoping he might run into one of us. His face lit up like a little kid’s, Tom. It was like he grabbed at it. I couldn’t bring myself to disappoint him. Hell, we used to have some fun together, didn’t we? I still think I spent more time with him on a baseball diamond than I’ve spent with Marie in bed.”

  “All you ever did was needle him,” McPherson says. “Does he have kids?”

  “I didn’t ask. We talked about golf. He said he loves the game and plays every chance he gets. We’ll look pretty silly to him, bad as we are.” Barnes squints in the direction of the parking lot. “Take a look at your old high school buddy.”

  Hopewell has pulled in, driving a red Miata with the top down. A woman rides with him—blond, young looking, slender. She gets out first and stretches, slow. She wears tight cream-colored slacks, a sleeveless white blouse, and a red scarf. She says something, and Hopewell gets out and walks around to the trunk, pops it open, removes an enormous golf bag on a fold-up two-wheeled cart, then sits against the frame of the open trunk, taking off his loafers and putting on golf shoes. She stands with her arms folded. Briefly, they seem only faintly aware of each other. Hopewell straightens, closes the trunk, and looks around until Barnes and McPherson come into his line of sight. He waves, indicates them to her, reaches for her hand, which she does not give. They approach.

  Everything they wear is brand-new—as are the golf clubs, the bag, the little towel hanging from it. Everything. She’s thirty-five or so. Lovely, flawless dark skin and sharp, classic features, full lips. A wonderfully attractive face, yet McPherson thinks he sees a look around her eyes of a kind of dissatisfaction, as though she has just been denied something. He has this thought, shaking hands, getting through the introductions.

  Hopewell stares at him. “Gosh, Tom. It’s so good to see you after all these years. I feel like a resurrected man.” He stands next to his wife, saying her name again. “Darlene’s the lady who saved me. Literally saved me.”

  “Oh, please, Eugene,” she says, “can that stuff.” Her accent is of the North, Chicago. She bows and her amazingly soft, liquid-looking hair slips down over one eye. The sun strikes it, little blazes in the facets of each strand. Then she turns to gaze at the crowded first tee.

  Hopewell says, “I just can’t believe it, Jerry. Tom. Look at us. After all this time.”

  Barnes says, “Is that a new car?”

  Hopewell turns to look at it. “Oh, no, it’s a ninety-six.”

  “How about the clubs?”

  “I’ve had the clubs awhile, too.”

  “You two look like new money,” Barnes says, obviously meaning to be jovial. “All crisp and fresh-minted.”

  Hopewell seems embarrassed. “Well, it’s Darlene’s car.”

  “My mother gave it to me,” Darlene says. “You know Tex-Mex Mary’s Restaurant chain? We’ve got seven of them, all over Virginia.”

  “And you play golf every week?” Barnes says to Hopewell.

  “Every chance I get. Maybe not every week.”

  McPherson feels a little shock that this man is the same person he knew as a boy, eighteen years old and worried about a heart murmur. He can’t bring himself out of himself; can’t force the casual pleasantness that’s obviously required. He believes he heard something like a huff come from Darlene, who seems more interested in the road and the entrance to the parking lot than anything else. Hopewell is slim, tan, with a white, white smile. He doesn’t look quite forty yet.

  “These shoes are new,” he says. “Five hundred fifty bucks.”

  “I picked them out,” Darlene says, with a strange little unidentifiable edge in her voice. “Yesterday.”

  “Do you play, too?” McPherson asks her.

  “I hate the game.”

  “She’s agreed to come learn about it, though,” says Hopewell. “That’s how sweet she is.” He reaches for her, and kisses the side of her face. She moves her head aside, but lets him nuzzle her. She’s really stardingly beautiful.

  “You’re here to learn about golf?” McPherson asks her, wanting to go on and say that from present company, she could learn how to do it badly. But as usual, he can’t form the words quickly enough, and she interrupts him. Her tone is that of a person making an admission for which she’s been steeling herself.

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “Well,” says Barnes, “actually, Tom and I hate golf, too. We do it for the remission of our sins. We think it’s the most ridiculous thing ever invented by man.”

  “How do you know it was a man?” Darlene says quietly.

  Hopewell looks nervously from one to the other of the two men. “She’s kidding you. My sweetie’s actually very tolerant of new experiences. I mean, look at me. She tolerates me, a fifty-year-old former—a dumb guy like me who plays golf.”

  “Eugene likes to describe me to myself,” she says, with a
small smile, watching Jerry Barnes line up a putt.

  “I admit it,” says Hopewell.

  Jerry strikes the ball and it wobbles a little, glides to the edge of the cup and drops in. He lines up another, and misses.

  “I’m very close to my mother,” Darlene says.

  McPherson finds himself going over what she’s said so far, looking for a thread of something to latch onto for a response. He says, “I’m thinking maybe we ought to punt this morning’s round of golf.”

  The others stare at him. “Punt?” Darlene says.

  “It means cancel the game,” says her husband. “He’s just kidding, sweetie.”

  Darlene’s still looking at McPherson and Barnes. “You both play a lot?”

  “Not all that often,” McPherson says. “I was about to say we’re the wrong crowd to learn much from.”

  “Do your wives play?” she asks. Hopewell nuzzles her on the side of the face again, and this time she pushes him away. “Eugene.”

  Barnes says, “Our wives already teed off.”

  “That’s too bad, if it’s true.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be true?” Barnes says. “You think I’d lie about a thing like that? I mean I am lying, but I’m surprised that you’d think I’d lie. We’ve barely been introduced.”

  “Darlene’s mom is coming out, too,” Hopewell says, too brightly. “I hope you guys don’t mind. I’ll rent an extra cart.”

  Barnes turns to McPherson, his red face showing nothing. “You’re not gonna crap out on us, are you, Tom? Miss a chance to meet Darlene’s mother?”

  “Are you being sarcastic?” Darlene says.

  “Hell, I don’t believe so. I’m trying to get Tom, here, to say he’s not gonna crap out on us this morning.

  “Language,” Darlene says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I wish you’d please watch your language.”

  Hopewell rubs his hands together and says, “Let’s practice some putting.”

  “What exactly were the words you didn’t like?” Barnes says to Darlene. “You let me know what they are and I won’t say them.”