The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  Finally, Coleman says, “What happened?”

  The other man is startled, and has to take a moment to breathe. “I don’t even know. She’s tense. She didn’t want to come home.”

  Coleman is silent.

  “I mean she didn’t want to give up.”

  “Are you involved?”

  The other man doesn’t answer.

  “I guess it’s none of my business.”

  “No.”

  Coleman feels the blood rising in him. “Although this is my house, and I’m not gonna tolerate this kind of thing.”

  “We’re married, sir. That’s my wife up there.”

  He comes to his feet, but then sinks back down in the chair.

  “And I’m this close to taking a taxicab out of here.”

  Peg comes downstairs, walks through the kitchen, and pours a glass of water. She brings it into the room and offers it to Lucky.

  “No, thanks,” he says.

  “Take it,” she says, with some force. “And cool off.” Then she turns to Coleman, with the slightest motion of unsteadiness, as though she had suffered a sudden vertigo, and says, “I guess you’ve been told, too.”

  He nods.

  She sighs. “The poor kid sprayed the foam as far as it would go. And then we found another entrance, under the side porch. He thinks it’s the same nest and he’s going to need some more foam and some other kind of equipment because of where it is. And he thinks the thing extends around in the wall to the opening we saw.”

  “So the room is out,” Coleman says.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” says Lucky.

  “I wish somebody’d told me,” Peg says. “It would’ve been nice if somebody had told me about it.”

  “Maybe I can move some things out of the workroom,” Coleman says.

  “I could go look for a motel or something,” says Lucky.

  “What’s your name, anyway, son?”

  “Lucky.”

  “Tell me your name, will you? First, middle, and last, okay?”

  “Woodrow Warren Copley. But I don’t think it matters because I’m leaving.”

  “You need a lift somewhere?” Coleman asks him.

  “No,” says Peg. “He’s not going anywhere. Janine’s going to have his baby.”

  Coleman stares at him. There is nothing he can think to say or do. His vision seems to be leaching out, light seeping from the pupils of his eyes. He thinks he might keel over out of the chair, and he holds on to the arms. “Okay,” he says. “Now suppose you tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  “She just did,” says Lucky, indicating Peg with a gesture.

  “I want to hear it from you, boy.”

  “I’m not a boy. I’m twenty-nine years old.”

  “You look like you’re about fifteen. And I don’t mean it as a compliment either.”

  “Everett, that’s enough,” says Peg. “They’re having an argument. Stay out of it.”

  He looks at his wife. The disbelief and unhappiness in her face makes him wince. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “Jesus Christ.”

  Peg turns to Lucky. “An involved enough, though, to know that you brought our situation into the argument. Tell me, young man, what did you think that would do? Was it just to win? Was that it? Just to hurt your new wife and win your point?”

  “What’re you talking about?” Coleman says.

  “I shouldn’t have mentioned the—the charges,” says Lucky. “She shouldn’t’ve told you I mentioned it.” “I got it out of her,” Peg says.

  He gazes off, frowning, looking like a pouting boy. With that feminine motion he pushes the hair back over his shoulder. “We were—we were arguing about appearances. That was one of the things we were arguing about. We argue about absolutely everything.”

  Coleman stands. “Get out of here.”

  “No,” says his wife. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “If I decide to leave,” Lucky mutters, “nothing will stop me.”

  Coleman hauls himself outside with a series of lurching strides, weak in the legs and fighting the sensation that he’s about to collapse. He goes out onto the lawn, in the chilly sun, fists clenched, heart drumming. His own momentum seems part of a single staggering motion, and he’s faintly surprised to find himself at the side of the house, peering in to where the foam drips down the wall. Across the way, Wilkins is shouting at his son again. The boy is attempting to lift a loaded wheelbarrow.

  “Come on, try. You’re not even trying.”

  Coleman turns, stares. Wilkins cuffs the boy on the back of the head, and stands there shouting at him. “When’re you gonna stop being a baby!” The boy is crying. And for Coleman, now, suddenly something breaks inside, a shattering, deep. He starts across the wide space between the two lawns. He’s halfway across the gravel lane before Wilkins turns from the boy. Wilkins seems curious, and not unfriendly, until he discerns the expression on Coleman’s face. Then he draws himself inward slightly, stepping back. The boy looks frightened, white-faced, mouth agape, crying. Coleman hears his wife calling his name from the house behind him.

  “What is it?” says Wilkins, raising one hand to protect himself.

  Coleman strikes across the raised arm, hits the other man a glancing blow, but then steps in and connects with a straight left hand, feeling the bones of that fist crack on the jaw, and Wilkins goes down. Wilkins is writhing, dumbstruck, at Coleman’s feet, then lies still, half-conscious, on the fresh-cut grass. There is the shouting coming from somewhere, and a small flailing force, clamoring at his middle. He takes hold of swinging arms and realizes it’s the boy, trying to hit him, crying and swinging with everything he has, all the strength of his ten-year-old body.

  “Stop,” Coleman tells him. “Wait. Stop it, now. Quit—quit it.” He grabs hold, and the boy simply glares at him, tears streaming from his eyes.

  “Everett,” Peg calls from the yard, standing at the edge of it, arms folded, her face twisted with fright. “Everett, please.” A few feet behind her, holding tight to each other, his daughter and new son-in-law are approaching.

  He lets the boy go, watches him kneel to help his father, crying, laying his head down on his father’s chest, sobbing. Wilkins lifts one hand and gingerly places it on the back of the boy’s head, a caress.

  “Everett,” Peg says, crying. “Please.”

  And now Wilkins’s wife shouts from their porch. “I’ve called the police. Do you hear me, Everett Coleman? I’ve called the police. The police are on their way.”

  Coleman walks across to his own yard and on, toward the house. Wilkins is being helped up, wife on one side, the boy on the other. Peg, still crying, watches them, standing at the edge of the gravel lane. Janine/Anya and Lucky are a few feet behind her, arm in arm, looking like two people huddled against a cold wind. Peg turns and looks at him, and then the others do, too.

  “I’m waiting here,” he shouts, almost choking on the words. “Just let them come.”

  “God,” Peg says.

  “I’m waiting,” he calls to her, to them. To all of them.

  GUATEMALA

  Mother explained it this way: They were all going out to eat. This, Lauren knew, meant that her mother’s boyfriend Dalton was included. Mother wanted this to be the kind of family gathering where things got established. Which meant of course that she was about to take the next step with Dalton. The big step: she was going to introduce him to Lauren’s grandmother Georgia.

  “Did you say anything to Dalton about what he’s in for?” she asked Mother.

  “What do I say to him? ‘Watch out for Georgia’?”

  “You say—” Lauren stopped herself, then decided to go on. “Well, yes. Yes. You say, ‘Watch out for Georgia.’ You say, ‘Look out. Duck! Get out of the way.’”

  Mother smirked at her. “We’re not going to be throwing baseballs.”

  This was a reference to the fact that Lauren was good at the sport, and could throw a baseball harder than all the boys at
Wilson, where she was only a sophomore, and had been asked to try out for the varsity team. “It’d be better and easier if we were throwing baseballs,” she said. “I could bean Georgia.”

  Her mother frowned. “Lauren, honey. Please.”

  They were in the master bedroom, door shut, speaking in low tones. Mother was trying on different outfits, half turning and gazing at herself in the mirror of her dressing table. Georgia was in the house, back from her afternoon walk. Seventy-four years old, and she never missed a day, rain or shine. Neighbors watched her march down the street and back, her gait like that of a military man at drill, arms swinging back and forth, head low, mouth set, an expression of resolve that looked more like anger at something just in front of her, often muttering to herself—counting strides, mostly, but it looked like a kind of low-voiced raving. Lauren knew some people in the neighborhood assumed the old woman must be suffering from some sort of mental trouble. She was not. As Mother put it, Georgia was just one of those people who were difficult, not happy unless stirring things up, particularly hard on those they loved, and no amount of negative reinforcement ever changed a thing about them. Although, it was true, she had recently developed an eccentricity far in excess of her daily forced march: several months ago, as one of those interests and passions about which she was capable of a fanatical embrace, she had taken to the keeping of exotic animals in large wire cages in her room, which she had decorated with enormous tropical plants and fronds, warmed by a sunlamp, and sprayed so often and so copiously that the whole house felt humid as a rain forest. Lauren and Mother had encouraged her at first, because she had seemed to be sinking into a depression, and no one was harder to be with under those circumstances than Georgia. According to Mother, Georgia, as a little girl, had been passed from relative to relative while her mother and father tried to solve a fractious marriage that never did quite take. Her unstable childhood was the family explanation. Lauren sometimes believed it was just perversity, a studied weirdness.

  “Well?” she said now. “You’re really going to do this?”

  “Don’t stand there sounding so demanding.”

  “This is so not wise.”

  Mother didn’t respond to this, taking off a cream-colored blouse and trying on a dark blue one, with star-shaped little swirls of white in it.

  “I’m only saying people ought to be warned, Mother.”

  “All right. You’ve expressed your opinion. You know she can be fine. She might surprise you. She has before.”

  “Oh, it’s all surprises. We’re talking about somebody—when she’s not terrible, it’s a big happy surprise.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  From down the hall came the sound of one of the birds in its cage, a nearly articulate shriek, like a shouted word in another language.

  “Well—do you want to drive Dalton away? Because if you do—”

  Mother interrupted. “Stop being so melodramatic. It’s an evening together. All of us. He’s going to have to meet her sooner or later isn’t he?”

  “That’s what gets you in trouble.”

  Now she turned and glared. “To use your vernacular, you are so in an area you know absolutely nothing about. I don’t have to explain any of this to you.”

  “It’s fine to have a room of the house looking like Guatemala, complete with a crow, a monkey, a macaw, and a ferret. That’s all just great.”

  They paused, hearing Georgia at the bottom of the stairs. “Joannie. Where is everybody?”

  Lauren’s mother yelled back. “We’ll be right down.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Lauren said. “Joannie.”

  “Stop it,” said Mother. “Stop being a teenager. Please—just for tonight.” Lauren went to the door of the room and opened it, intending to walk out and go to her room and be alone.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I have to get ready.”

  “Does this look all right?” Joan modeled the dark blue blouse.

  “It’s fine,” Lauren said. Then: “Honest.”

  “I didn’t mean that about the teenager. But she’s my mother. Just please control it a little tonight—I’d like this evening not to be complicated.”

  “It’s complicated already.”

  “All right, I’d like it to be less so.”

  She closed the door and went down the hall. In her room, she put the radio on, then felt annoyed by it and turned it off again, flopping down on the bed and staring at the ceiling. On the shelf next to her bed were several trophies she had won playing Little League. The room was crowded feeling now. Nothing felt right. She heard her grandmother’s crow cawing in its cage on the other side of the wall, like a reminder. You never dared ask anyone to this house; no one ever wanted to come back. It was the surest way to lose a friend. Back when she had felt confident enough to say she had any friends. These days, people at school seemed never to be anything more than curious about her. She knew they talked about her. Well, they talked about the fact that she played baseball the way she did, and she was sure some of them talked about the weirdness of where she had to live, too. Mostly, though, it was the baseball, her natural ability, as it was called. That made the picture of her as an oddity. People had no trouble with girls playing the sport—it was just that she was so much better than all the others. Everyone defined her by this. Everybody had one subject of talk with her; nobody ever changed the subject. And she had been more lonely than she could believe; lonely in crowds, lonely at home and at school, lonely everywhere she went. No one understood.

  Yesterday, on the practice field, because they had challenged her, she went through the first-team varsity boys, getting them out one by one, eight of them by strikeouts. Her fastball came in at more than eighty miles an hour and it usually veered, or moved. The boys’ team captain, Bo Brady, missing a low one that had sunk even lower, uttered the phrase “son of a bitch,” and on the other side of the backstop, Kelly Green, one of the cheerleaders, said “You mean ‘butch,’ don’t you?” Lauren heard the chattering and laughter that followed, toeing the rubber and looking down, trying to seem unaffected by it, trying to see their smirks as envy: that thing people who have no gift feel for all those who do.

  Now she sat up, thinking about that moment, because it hadn’t meant a thing in the face of what she knew was the general opinion of her, that she was a freak of nature. It made her stomach hurt. They had clocked her fastball and put her in the local newspapers and in the Washington Post. She was officially a freak. No one wanted to talk about anything else. She turned on her side, and thought of going far away, where she could start over and be someone new.

  Mother opened the room door, after knocking twice, lightly. She had changed into faded jeans, and a white cotton blouse with blue water lilies printed on it. “Hey, I am sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Lauren told her.

  “Is there something you want to talk about, honey?”

  “It’s fine. You look fine.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Lauren, and, darling, you know that.”

  “I understood what you meant.”

  “You know, this—all this confusion, these confused feelings—it’s all perfectly normal for your age.”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  How she hated it when Mother got philosophical talking about teenagers and nature and the inevitability of certain things. It was annoying to be told all the time that in spite of her freaky gift she was normal. It only underscored the fact that she was not normal, not close to it—no one could be anything of the kind in this house, anyway. Yesterday at school she had been sitting across the desk from Mr. Grayfield, the vice-principal, listening to him explain endlessly why it was a great opportunity for her and the school if she tried out for boys’ baseball, and she had felt a sudden, nearly uncontrollable urge to get up, reach across the desk, take hold of him by the ears, and plant a big wet kiss on his spotted, heavy-browed forehead.

  Baseball. She had loved it, and now she felt weighed do
wn by it. And she felt such sadness about everything. And a strange, confusing embarrassment, as if it were something too personal to talk about. She had been trying for days to decide how to tell everyone. Trying to do it so that she wouldn’t seem like a teenager secreting hormones, which was how she couldn’t help but think of it, since Georgia had been referring to it that way for years, anticipating her adolescence. Maybe the thing to do was to make up some big lie. Tell them all she was thinking of running away, or that she was depressed or sick or on drugs or pregnant (she recalled that time she let Bo Brady look at her and fondle her down there, and she had lived in terror that she was pregnant until her mother, with no slightest idea of the relief she was providing, sat her down and explained the way it all worked).

  Lately, as Georgia had ceased speaking about secreting hormones, Mother had begun this infuriating habit of referring to her as a “normal” teenager, when not accusing her of behaving like one.

  Mother seemed always to be teasing almost seriously, or serious almost teasingly.

  In each instance the signals were mixed, no matter the context, and no matter who was around. “Inevitably,” she’d said recently in front of Dalton, “the, like, number of likes in a sentence will, like, increase, like, in direct proportion to the, like, number of, like, years one has traveled from, like, twelve, to, like, nineteen. At which time the likes will, like, begin slowly to, like, subside.”

  She loved to run that riff, as she called it, in company. People laughed when she did it and Dalton had laughed, too. Lauren had heard her do it enough to know she was leading up to it, and still found herself standing there while it went on. And of course she also knew that her mother meant it, too. Twenty times a day she was after Lauren, working on her speech patterns, not just the word like but her use of go or goes for said or says, and for the phrase you know what I mean, with which Lauren had begun unconsciously to end all her sentences. Being corrected all the time was intensely exasperating, as it was maddening to be spoken of in the third person, as though you weren’t even in the room. These aspects of life at home had put a distance between them; they were repeatedly getting things wrong, misunderstanding each other.