by Packer, Vin
“Thanks for the Coke.”
“Perhaps we’ll do it again. You have nice manners, Charlie Wright.”
“Thanks.”
“Good night.”
“Thanks,” he said again foolishly. “Good night.”
He walked slowly down the wooden steps and onto the sidewalk. Fireflies darted past in the darkness as he reached the street, and he looked back at the house as he went on down, but she was not in the doorway. He said her name to himself quietly aloud, and he thought, It didn’t happen, it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. When he reached Evans Street, he began to run for no reason.
Chapter Five
Q. Do you like your sister?
A. Evie? Sure. She’s my sister, isn’t she? Oh, we had little fights sometimes and I didn’t like the way she talked about dirty things. But I knew she didn’t mean them. I mean, she never did any of the dirty things she talked about.
Q. How do you know this?
A. Well, she’s my sister. I just know.
— From psychiatric examination of the accused by Dr. A. Jewitt
THE SKY WAS DARK, a warm wind was rising, and a man on the radio was talking about soap. Jim Prince swung the car into the soft shoulder off the highway and doused the headlights. He let the radio play. Evie’s head was on his lap, her legs curled under her on the seat. He said, “Baby? Baby?”
When she didn’t answer he took her arms gently and raised her to his chest, brushing his lips against her cheek. “Pretty girl,” he said. “Pretty girl.”
“I feel strange.”
“Sure you do.”
“So much, huh?”
He said, “Sure, so much. Five or six apiece.”
“Beer tastes awful at first. Then it tastes like water.”
“Baby-baby …”
“Jim, don’t do anything.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you. I wouldn’t — ” For a long time then he kissed her, and she kissed him. They moved themselves around in the front seat of the car so that they were not cramped under the steering wheel, and the man who was talking about soap before was playing music now, waltzes.
Evie found herself surprised. She could almost float; not away from everyone the way she wanted to before, but toward someone, toward Jim Prince. She thought, I’m drunk but I’m not sorry. I’ll be sorry tomorrow, but now I’m not sorry. Still, she was aware. She said again, “Jim, don’t do anything.”
“You don’t want me to?”
“Yes, I do, but don’t.”
“Aw, baby, Evie, sweet little pretty girl.”
“Jim.”
She tried to think back on everything she had thought about when they were in the back booth at the Golden Eagle. It was important to remember. She had never felt so alien before, so unlike anyone and alone. She had thought, Who will I marry someday and what will it be like? and she had thought, How dull it would be to marry Jim Prince! She wished she were older and she wondered vaguely, as she had all night, where Russel Lofton was, what he was doing. She was sure she had thought more, but it had all gone and now she was with Jim and she found herself surprised.
“What?” she said.
“It’ll be all right.”
“No.”
“Remember I’m a med student.”
“I never — ”
“Poor baby — afraid.”
“No, I’m not afraid. It’s just — ”
“Oh, God, Evie. God, Evie, God!”
She said, “No, no, no,” but even as she said no she knew it was too late, and she knew she no longer meant what she said, and she stopped saying it and let herself be herself.
“Jim!”
In the background the waltz stopped, and the announcer chanted, “… pure, pure, pure, pure, ninety-seven and sixty-two one hundredths per cent pure, pure, pure …”
Chapter Six
Charles Wright is believed to be suffering from incipient schizophrenia, but the complete break that marks insanity has not yet occurred…. Today he is a dangerous type of sexual psychopath. His life is directed toward nihilistic destruction, yet he pursues this purpose with a mind and manner that to the innocent and inexpert are friendly and without malice.
— From a report of the Sanity Commission prior to the arraignment of the accused
AT THE TOP OF SOCK HILL, Charlie stopped running. He cut through the path to the back where the ski slopes were in the winter and walked across the field. There was a moon. He sat down in the middle of the field in the dry hay grass and put his knuckles in his mouth.
He thought, She is a woman, she is a woman, she is a woman. Oh, God, he wanted to laugh, he wanted to cry, he wanted to smash the air with his hands and yell her name to the darkness.
Ćalm down, fellow, calm down. She’s just the lousy owner of the Red Clover Bookshop in Azrael, Vermont, and you are Charlie Wright! Age sixteen, fool!
Then Charlie shut his eyes and saw her coming across the meadow in an ice-blue dress shimmering its soft light in the light of the moon, coming toward him, calling his name, and he was on his feet to meet her. Listen, there are harps and violins and slow guitars humming as she crosses to him, holding her hand out to him, saying his name, “Charles Wright,” dignified, solemn. “Charles Wright.”
He kneels then, kneels before her, his forehead brushing the hem of her dress, and it is a very beautiful time now, a very beautiful and serious time.
“Stand up, Charles Wright. Stand here beside me.”
He rises, rises and then, oh, for the love of Pete, oh, goddamn, oh, hell, why the hell did he have to sit around in a clump of weeds thinking all this stuff?
Jill! Jill! Jill! He didn’t want to say her name. Why did he? In fact, he was tired of her, tired of thinking of her, tired of hanging around in a field in the moonlight on a crazy July night making something out of nothing. She could go to the devil if she didn’t trust him enough to tell him about herself!
Take it easy, Charles, Charles. Now just a minute. You’re lucky! Do you know that? You’re plain lucky! You can make a good friend now. You never had a good friend who understood you. A good mature friend. Charles, Charles, what’s the matter with you, anyway?
That’s right. Gee, sure, that’s right.
Of course it’s right.
I’m a fool.
You’re all right. You’re a little too bright for your age, that’s all. You have to slow down, Charles, Charles. Slow down and look the facts in the face. You’re not crazy. There’s nothing wrong with you.
I get excited.
Everyone does. It’s O.K. It’s all right.
I ought to go home.
Sure. Get some sleep, boy. Sleep that knits up the ravel’d sleave of care.
Charlie laughed. Shakespeare. My conscience is a literate fellow.
Darn right, Charles, Charles. Darn right.
Charlie stood up and stretched. He didn’t feel sleepy, he felt good, and gee, it was pretty where he was. Once, when he had been standing on this exact spot in January when the tows were running, one of Evie’s silly girl friends cut a curve short, fell, and punctured her cheek with the pointed edge of her ski pole. The blood had run down the whiteness of her soft cheek and it was red and white, and her eyes lost their sparkle and she looked sad and hurt and she didn’t cry. But she was ready to. There was a hole in her cheek with the blood oozing out of it, dropping to the snow, and Evie had said, “Well, what’s the matter with you?” to Charlie. Evie had said, “You afraid of blood? Don’t just stand there like an old woman. Get a doctor!”
No, he wasn’t afraid of blood. He just couldn’t stop looking at that girl’s face. There was nothing smart about her any more, nothing mocking, nothing gay. She was afraid. Charlie had wanted to kiss her. It was the first time he had ever wanted to kiss any girl he knew. He had wanted to kiss her where the blood was and say, “I’ll help you now. I’ll help you.”
It was summer, though. Why think of winter? Why think of all that was past, and why not think of all that was happe
ning now?
He said aloud, “Her name is Jill.”
Charlie dug his hands in the pockets of his trousers and walked back across the path to the road. He felt good and he thought that when he got home he would talk to his mother. Gee, he never talked to her very much, but tonight he would. He might even tell her he met Miss Jill Latham and she had asked him in for a Coke. That would depend. He might, though.
He hoped Evie would not be home. He could never talk around Evie, he had never been able to. She was all right for a girl, but she was young, she was like Jill said, “young, but invariably children. Wild. No tenderness.” The matter with Evie was that she only thought about one thing. It made Charlie feel buggy and disgraced.
“Her name is Jill.”
Conrad Street was quiet and Charlie was aware suddenly of the time, that it must be late. Eddie Watkins was standing on Janice Poynton’s porch in a clinch. Charlie made a rhyme. It’s a cinch to be in a clinch. Ridiculous! Fool! He saw the lights in his house and quickened his pace, a mood of expansiveness starting up inside of him.
Hi, Mom. You know where I’ve been?
Usually he went to his room when he got in nights, but this evening he would sit in the parlor and talk. Even though Russel Lofton was there. He saw his car in the driveway.
As he entered the hallway of the bungalow, he collided with Lofton, who was on his way out, his face furrowed in frowns, his legs moving swiftly. Lofton said, “Where the deuce have you been?”
Startled, Charlie only stood there staring at Lofton, saying, “At the library,” in a meek, shocked tone. Russel Lofton had never reproached him for anything, never raised his voice or glared at him.
He brushed Charlie aside and called back over his shoulder, “Now, don’t worry, Em.” Then he disappeared out the front door, and as Charlie went on into the living room he heard the roar of Lofton’s automobile as it started and shot off the driveway at a fast speed, kicking up gravel so that it riddled the car’s sides.
“He’s got some nerve!” Charlie said hotly to his mother. “What business is it of his where I go and what I do, for the love of Pete?”
Emily Wright was standing at the window of the living room staring out. When she turned to face her son, her eyes were hard and anxious. She said, “You have a nerve too.”
“What the — ”
“Where have you been until eleven o’clock?”
“I — took a walk after the library. What’s the matter with you, anyway?” He could not believe what he saw. His mother’s face was ripped with worry and he could not believe that she had really worried about him. His feeling was mixed with incredulousness and a slow, seeping pleasure. It was true he usually returned home immediately after the library closed, but he had never thought she would worry if he were late. It was a whole new idea to him and he was trying to adjust his thinking to this idea. A grin came uncontrolled to his lips and he said, “Why, Mom, what’s the matter? Why are you worried?”
“It isn’t funny. It isn’t funny at all. If it weren’t for Russ, sometimes I think I’d have no one. No one I could depend on.”
“You know you don’t have to worry about me,” Charlie said. If she did worry about him, he wondered what she imagined could happen to him. Did she imagine he would be in trouble? She was always saying he kept his nose in books and she never seemed to think he was — capable. That was the word that occurred to him. Capable of trouble. He was surprised and amused and proud too.
“Well, you could be here when I needed you. Evie’s in trouble. Mr. Bates from the Golden Eagle called and said Evie left with Jim Prince over an hour ago, and they were both — intoxicated. He couldn’t stop them.” Mrs. Wright’s eyes were glassy with tears she tried to conceal, and she turned her back on Charlie again and stared out the window. Her shoulders shook slightly with sobs she held back. “I had to call Russ, and then you weren’t around and Russ didn’t want me alone and we didn’t know where you were.”
The realization that it was Evie his mother was worrying about hit Charlie like a rock in his stomach and he felt weak and sick and he thought he didn’t give a goddamn what happened to Evie and Prince. He didn’t give a good goddamn what they were doing. He could imagine. He could just imagine. And she was worrying about them. Lofton was out chasing them and she was worrying about them.
“Where’d they go?”
“How do I know? It’s the most embarrassing — Mr. Bates calling me to tell me my daughter — ” She could not finish the sentence and Charlie sighed heavily and stood looking at her back, at the jade-green dressing gown and the gnarled brown hair, the quivering shoulders. “Well, heck, what am I supposed to be able to do?”
“Just be here when you’re supposed to be.”
He was not used to being talked to that way by his mother. She had never said anything like this to him before, and it paralyzed his thinking, made him go numb. He had seen once in a movie how he was supposed to act. He was supposed to go to her and put his arm around her shoulder and say, “Don’t cry, Mom,” or say, “Cry it out, Mom. You’ll feel better.” The idea was repugnant to him and he could not move. He just stood there.
“Since when have you been taking walks?”
It was unfair. He was sixteen and he had a right to take a walk. God, he wasn’t out doing what Evie was doing! He was not sure what she was up to, but he thought it must be dirty. Not very dirty, but dirty. Somewhere in a car. The thought made him feel excited, but mad too — at his mother.
“I’ve got a right,” he answered feebly.
“Now you stand and argue with me when you know I’m upset.”
Charlie said earnestly, “Well, what can I do?”
“Nothing! That’s just it. You’re the only man in the house and you’re helpless.”
Her words cut him up inside like a knife. He thought, why does she hate me, why does she really hate me now? I am a man, he thought. I’m not Jim Prince, either, out with Evie. I am a man. He felt as though he were going to cry and he wanted to get out of the room. Angrily he walked to the hall. He shouted back, “Treat me like a man and I’ll be one someday,” and his voice broke, and he wondered what in hell he had meant. He wondered why he wasn’t a man. How he could have helped. What was he supposed to do?
Slowly he walked down the back hall to his bedroom. He shut the door behind him and stood by the window looking out at the hills with the moon shining on them. The tears that were in his eyes stayed there and he blinked so that one streamed down his cheek. A line from a Kipling poem came to his mind: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …” He said the line over to himself, and he remembered that the poem ended: “And what is more, you’ll be a man, my son.”
In the back of his thoughts was the memory of Jill Latham, but he postponed that memory consciously, withholding it until he could fully savor the injustice done him by his mother and by Russel Lofton. He imagined himself coming home exactly as he had a few minutes ago, with Lofton shouting at him in the hall the way he had, and Charlie answering him, “Where have I been? I’ve been out chasing down my sister and that no-good Jim Prince, and they’re right outside now. That’s where I’ve been!” He imagined his mother smiling at him with a certain calm adoration in her eyes, Russel Lofton fumbling for words, the whole scene bigger, better, completely the opposite of the way it had happened.
He kicked the chair lightly, shook his head, and flicked on the overhead light. He thought, What a dreamer I am! Dream. Dream. Dream.
When he took off his shirt he went to the mirror and stared at himself bare-chested. He kicked his loafers under the bed, gave two rolls to the cuffs of his pants, and stood arms akimbo before his own reflection, his jaw stuck forward, an eyebrow arched, a leer on his lips. He looked tough. He said to the mirror, “I’m Charlie Wright. Age sixteen. In love with a pretty little girl named Jill Latham. What’s it to you?” Then his face broke into an embarrassed grin and he said again to his reflection, “You crazy
character. Charlie boy, you’re nuts, Charlie boy.”
He got tired of watching himself and he moved away and sat on the bed, undid his pants buckle, and pulled them down, leaving them in a heap on the floor. In his white jockey shorts, he stretched himself out on the bed without taking off the cover. Then he inspected the hair on his arms and on his legs, holding them up so he could see them in the light. He had a lot of hair. Men with a lot of hair were virile. What the hell! Who gave a damn?
For a long time he lay there looking up at the bulb, staring at it until his eyes hurt and ran. He wondered how long he could look at the bulb before he lost sight of everything but the special red color he saw eventually. If his mother thought he wasn’t a man, why should he try to act like a man? He could spend the rest of his life staring at light bulbs and not go to Harvard or do anything. Stare at light bulbs.
Think about Jill.
He wasn’t ready yet. He got up and went down the hall to the bathroom, ran water on his face, and again watched the mirror as the water dripped down his chin and over his lips. He winked at himself, grabbed the toothbrush, and ran it lightly across his teeth. He took a long time with his toilet. Man! The word made him sick. What did his mother know? He didn’t even have a father, did he?
Back in his bedroom he put the light off, tore the cover from the bed, and stripped it to a single sheet. He sank his head down on the pillow and lay on his stomach. Now he could think about her.
The moon gave a fork of light to his room and he did not feel sleepy. He wanted to be sure exactly what he would think about her before he started, and to begin with he went through the whole evening again, reviewing everything. He could not remember the song.
He took the pillow and put it beside him, putting his arm around it very gently. “Jill, tell me,” he whispered. “I’ll understand.” The linen cover of the pillow brushed against his lip uncomfortably, and he put his own wrist up and touched his lips against it. “Tell me, Jill. It’s all right,” he said. He kissed his wrist lightly.