Outer Banks

by Russell Banks

  The man stood up and grabbed Alvin’s right shoulder. “Let’s go. Out.” His voice was hurried but low and smooth, almost pleasant, as if he were putting his cat out for the night.

  At the bar, Feeney, the sailors, the bartender, and three or four other customers, all older men, were watching intently. Only Feeney looked frightened. He got off his stool and took a step toward the booth, then a sideways step toward the door that led out to the street and Alvin’s car. From the juke box at the back Frank Sinatra was singing “On the Road to Mandalay,” but otherwise the place was silent, still, and waiting.

  Alvin looked down at the man’s hand clamped to his shoulder. He said, “You wanta step outside with me, pal? ’Cause that’s the only way I’m goin’.”

  “Some other time, kid. I ain’t got time to play games with punks like you. Now get outa here.”

  “Screw you. Either you step outside with me, mister, and get the shit pounded outa you, or you just pick up your little lunch-box there and trot home alone. I plan to sit here awhile an’ have a drink an’ a talk with Mary. Is that your name, honey? What’s your name?” he asked the woman with the vanilla ice cream hair.

  “Helen.”

  “Terrific. Terrific. What’s you say you were drinkin’? Gin an’ tonic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, honey. Bartender, let’s have a gin an’ tonic an’ a Seven-an’-Seven over here!”

  “Okay,” the man in khakis said. “You want your head beat in, you’re gonna get it. Let’s go, sonny. Outside,” he said, and he let go of Alvin’s shoulder and strode angrily for the door in back that led to the alley.

  Alvin grinned and slid out of the booth without looking back at the woman.

  Feeney grabbed him by the arm. “C’mon, Al, let’s get the fuck outa here. Whaddaya doin’, for chrissakes? That guy’ll kill ya!”

  Pulling silently away, Alvin started for the exit to the alley, and Feeney shrugged his shoulders and followed his friend, averting his eyes as he passed the woman in the booth.

  Jumping from their stools, the pair of sailors followed. “I hope the bastard gets creamed,” the red-headed one said.

  The bartender, wiping up the bar with a dirty gray cloth, shook his head as if disgusted and slightly bored by the whole thing. “Fuckin’ kid drinkers,” he mumbled to one of the men at the bar. “Who needs ’em?” Then he called over to the woman, who was lighting a cigarette from a lit butt in the ashtray in front of her. “Hey, Helen, you still want that drink?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s payin’ for it?” the bartender asked, winking to the men along the bar.

  “Whichever one comes back, Freddie. Whichever one comes back.” She laughed and started studying her pink fingernails again.

  The man in the khaki work clothes was at least six feet tall and broad-shouldered, but still he wasn’t as tall as Alvin or anywhere near as wide. He was thick and compact, though, one of those men whose muscles are flat and short, an efficiently built, heavy-boned man with thick wrists and large hands.

  When Alvin stepped out of the bar into the alley, he saw the man standing, facing him, a half-dozen paces away at the edge of a circle of light thrown by the single bulb burning over the door. In back of the man was a cinderblock wall about nine feet high, and beyond that was a belt of the dark gray, almost black sky that rose straight up from the river below. Next to the back door of the bar on either side were overflowing garbage cans and collapsing, rain-soaked, card-board boxes. The ground was puddled and muddy, and a nasty, erratic wind was blowing.

  Alvin shed his suit jacket and handed it to Feeney, who tried to lean himself casually against the side of the building. The sailors came out and stood next to him, grinning, their arms folded over their chests. With one hand Alvin unknotted his necktie and passed that to Feeney.

  Feeney said, “Thanks.”

  Alvin said, “Yeah.”

  The man said, “C’mon, kid,” and crouched slightly, his fists in front of him, his head pulled down into his bulky shoulders, his feet planted firmly on the ground. A puncher.

  Taking two quick steps forward, Alvin drew his fists up in front of his face, quite high up, leaned slightly off the balls of his feet and then, for the first time in his life, he started to fistfight. As if he were in a trance, thinking consciously of the mechanics of what he was doing no more than he would if he were eating a meal, he slid to his left, feinted once, and jammed his right fist, twice, as if firing it, under the man’s left arm, crashing his fist against the rib cage, driving the man off-balance to his side, where Alvin caught him with a knee slammed into the crotch as the man fell away. The man grunted and swung a couple of slow punches at Alvin’s head, both missing weakly, and Alvin started moving swiftly in and out, his fisted hands attacking the man’s neck, chest and belly, like a pack of dogs tearing at the sides of a wounded deer, moving too fast, too relentlessly, too automatically, for the man to avoid them. As he started to collapse backward toward the cinderblock wall, with Alvin driving on like a crowd, the man, spitting blood, groaned, “Enough!” Alvin grabbed him by the shirtfront, held him at arm’s length, and whacked him, hard, across the temple with one enormous paw, flipping the man out of his grasp into a heap in the mud. Walking over to him, he picked him up again and threw him back down again. He kicked him once on the shoulder. Then he left him alone.

  “Jesus Christ!” Feeney yelled. “You did it! You really took the guy!” He was clapping Alvin on the shoulder and staring down at the man on the ground.

  Alvin pulled his jacket and tie out of Feeney’s other hand and shoved his arms into the jacket and slung the necktie around his neck without knotting it. He turned and started straight down the alley toward the street.

  “Hey! Where ya goin’? What about the broad? Where ya goin’?”

  “Home,” Alvin grunted and kept on moving, head down, for the street.

  “Okay, I’ll get your raincoat. You left it inside,” Feeney called to him.

  “Yeah.” Then he was gone from sight.

  Feeney turned around, a puzzled but still exhilarated expression on his face. “Jesus.” The sailors had gone back inside. The man on the ground was slowly, awkwardly getting to his feet. “You okay?” Feeney asked him quietly.

  The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose. He stood, bent over, clutching his left side, breathing laboriously. His clothes were smeared with mud and fresh blood. “I gotta … busted … rib. I think… Tell Freddie… C’mere. Th’ bartend-er…”

  “Sure.” Feeney walked somberly inside, told the bartender he’d better check the guy out and maybe get him a doctor or something, the guy seemed pretty busted up. Plucking Alvin’s tan raincoat from the coatrack, he pointedly avoided even a glance at the woman in the booth next to it and started walking out the door at the front.

  “Where’s the other one?” the bartender asked. He had come out from behind the bar and was on his way toward the back door. “I don’t wanta see him in here again. You tell him that.”

  “No sweat,” Feeney said, grinning. “No sweat at all.” Then he looked down at the woman. Serious-faced, she was sipping from her gin and tonic. She caught him staring, and without removing her pink lips from the rim of the glass, gave him the finger.

  Feeney laughed and strolled happily out. When he reached the car and got in, he looked over at Alvin behind the steering wheel. He was smiling and the car motor was running.

  “Feelin’ pretty tough, ain’t ya?” Feeney observed.

  “Yeah. Like a bucket full of nails.” Then he jammed the car into gear, and they headed back to New Hampshire.

  I WAS GRATEFUL for the story, grateful to Rochelle for having delivered it to me, for having written it in the first place. But the story complicated things for me far more than it simplified them. I asked Rochelle if it complicated things for her, too, and she said no, not really, which surprised me.

  “But he sounds so ordinary,” I pointed out to her, “like almost any young man alr
eady determined at adolescence by social and familial past, one of those angry American youths locked into patterns of violence, drunkenness and sexual exploitation. Even if he eventually raised his consciousness to the point where he could direct his anger politically, rather than mutely against himself,” I observed to her, “he’d still be little more than another feeble example of the type called ‘working-class hero.’” And both Rochelle and I were claiming much more for him than that.

  It was not exactly what I had been looking for in a story about Hamilton’s brush with a college education. I had wanted him to be offered a full scholarship, say, by Harvard or Princeton or Yale, and after visiting one of those campuses and encountering there for the first time an example or two of the academic mind, to reject the offered scholarship with some sort of truth-telling gesture of defiance. It would have made a marvelously effective vehicle for social satire.

  “My father is not Holden Caulfield all grown up,” Rochelle said, sounding a little hurt.

  I couldn’t tell if it was her author’s pride that had been bruised or the pride of a daughter who believes that she understands her parent better than any stranger can. In either case, though, she was justified in feeling hurt, so I apologized, first for my persistently soft-headed expectations that Hamilton’s past could be anticipated any more than could his future, and second, for not having immediately expressed my enthusiasm for the skill and restraint with which she had told her story.

  “As always,” I explained to her, “your literary gifts amaze and delight me. Especially when placed next to my own awkward attempts.”

  She smiled politely.

  “Look,” I brightly said, “the sun has risen above the trees! Shall we go downstairs for breakfast? Or would you like to let me make love to you?”

  “Oh, you devil. Don’t you ever get tired?”

  “Eventually,” I confessed.

  “You some kind of billy goat, honey,” she purred in that southern accent of hers, the one that stiffens me with lust.

  CHAPTER 8

  100 Selected, Uninteresting Things Done and Said by Hamilton Stark

  1. He drove past a hitchhiker without picking him up. The hitchhiker was a long-haired youth in an army field jacket whose stance and bulky physical proportions reminded him for a second, as he later said, of the author’s younger brother, now dead, whom Hamilton had met only once, several years before.

  2. He bought a new saxophone (tenor) but still preferred the old one.

  3. After placing a classified ad in the Concord Daily Monitor, he sold his new saxaphone for $25 less than he had paid for it. He considered the loss not bad at all. “Self-knowledge always has a price.”

  4. Between his second and third wives, he perfected a technique for getting out of bed in the morning in such a way that he had to make the bed only once every ten days or so. The technique involved spreading his legs under the covers to the far corners of the bed and then dragging his long body toward the top of the bed, where, springing his weight with his arms against the brass rail headboard, he lifted himself to the floor. When he married for the third time he ceased this activity, but when the woman left he resumed it until he married again. He also employed the technique between his fourth and fifth wives and after his fifth wife had left.

  5. He changed his brand of cigarettes twice in his life—from Chesterfields to Camels to Lucky Strikes, which he now smokes at the rate of one pack a day.

  6. He never learned to fly an airplane, though he often expressed a desire to do so.

  7. When he was twenty-six years old he learned to drive a bulldozer, an activity he still enjoys. So much so that when he was thirty he purchased his own bulldozer, a small Caterpillar that he painted black and keeps waxed and shiny, even the blade, which he retouches with black enamel after each use.

  8. In winter he usually wears a navy blue woolen watchcap. He rarely covers his ears with it. They are small and turn red from the cold, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care.

  9. He cut down a dying maple tree behind his barn and that winter used the wood for his fireplace. He remembered having looked at the tree from his earliest childhood, and he thought of this while he was cutting it into fireplace-length pieces. He used his chain saw for the cutting, used it expertly, especially for a man who was not a bona fide woodcutter.

  10. He never in his entire life wore a pair of sandals. Never even tried them on in a shoestore.

  11. He never defaulted on a debt, and his checking account was never overdrawn. Once, however, he was tempted to default on a television set he had bought on time from Sears, Roebuck & Co. He made his payments punctually for fourteen months, and when the set broke down for the fifth time, he threw it away in anger, tossed it over the fence into the field in front of the house. With ten months remaining, and no television set to be repossessed or repaired, he threatened in a letter not to make any more payments, but instead sent his checks in nine days late each month until the balance was paid. After that he was reluctant to purchase any more appliances on time; he said it made it more difficult for him to get rid of them when he wanted to.

  12. At the end of each year he threw away the old calendar and posted a new one, making a careful point of using a different calendar altogether, different size, picture, advertiser, etc. He preferred calendars from plumbing and heating wholesale supply houses. The pictures were usually of New Hampshire winter scenes, though sometimes they were of bathrooms or furnaces.

  13. One winter morning, as he prepared to leave for work, he observed that he always put his left glove on before his right. He reasoned that this was because he was right-handed. For the same reason, he reasoned, he always shaved the right side of his face before the left.

  14. One summer afternoon, a Sunday, he tried to draw a picture of his house from the field in front of it. He made three careful attempts but wasn’t satisfied with any of them, so he threw them away.

  15. “If I was governor of this state, I’d let them all go to hell. That’s the only way to govern.” (He was speaking to Democratic and liberal Republican critics of the present governor’s policies.)

  16. The most horned-pout* he ever caught in one night was twenty-two, on June 17, 1964, on Bow Lake, alone.

  17. Because of his size, he often had difficulty buying clothes until he was about thirty, when he came across an L.L. Bean catalogue in a privy. After that he always bought his clothes by mail order from L.L. Bean.

  18. This is the sequence in which he read the several sections of the Sunday newspaper: comics; sports; obituaries; headlines and front page; editorial page; letters to the editor; classified ads. He followed this pattern with the weekday editions too. On Sundays, however, he was more conscious of there being a pattern and of his being free not to follow it if he so desired.

  19. He talked to dogs in a gruff voice that seemed to send them cowering away. Once, however, he was almost bitten by a friend’s unusually courageous dog, which ended the friendship, such as it was.

  20. Drawn into a leather-goods shop in Concord by the attractive window display, he was about to purchase an eighty-dollar briefcase, but at the last minute he changed his mind and bought a new wallet instead. “I like the smell of new leather,” he later explained.

  21. To an insurance salesman as the man stepped from his car: “Get the hell outa here! If I’d wanted to buy anything, I’d have sent for you!” The frightened salesman drove off quickly enough to satisfy him.

  22–39. Once a week, at various, though unvarying, times, he performed the following chores:

  a. dumped his rubbish in the field in front of his house;

  b. buried his garbage in a pit in the field in front of his house (except in winter, when the ground was frozen solid, in which case he simply permitted the garbage to freeze solid, until spring, when he could cover the moldering heap with earth);

  c. swept out the barn and cleaned off his workbenches;

  d. added a quart of STP additive to the crankcase of his ca
r;

  e. checked the tire pressure of all four tires, plus the spare, of his car;

  f. in summer, mowed the lawns; in winter, chipped off any ice or snow that had accumulated on the gutters and scraped away any ice or snow on the walks and driveway that he had missed during the week (he shoveled and plowed out his walks and driveway immediately after every snowstorm, but often, because of the lateness of the hour or other responsibilities, had to leave the finish-work for the weekend); in the fall, raked any leaves that had fallen that week into a pile, which he burned (the ashes he piled next to the garden in back of the house until spring, when, before turning the soil, he spread them); in the spring, worked at least three hours cutting and pruning in the wooded areas surrounding the house and along the path up the mountain.

  g. drove to Pittsfield, where he bought groceries at the IGA for the coming week, filled his car with Shell gas, stopped at Maxfield’s Hardware Store for any tools, nails, screws or other items he might need or had run out of during the previous week, stopped at the state liquor store for a half-gallon of Canadian Club and at Danis’s Superette for a case of Molson ale, and returned home;

  h. except in winter and late fall, tended his flower beds and vegetable garden, usually between 4:00 and 6:30 P.M. on Saturday; in the late fall and winter, during these same hours, he cut and stacked firewood for the fireplace and the two wood stoves in the kitchen and barn;

  i. read the New Hampshire Times (the Sunday edition of the Manchester Union-Leader);

  j. repaired any furniture, appliances, tools, machinery, lamps, cupboard doors, faucets, shutters, shingles, gates or fence posts that, during the previous week, had broken or had begun to malfunction, leak, buzz, flap, or lean;