Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  What made him feel guilty was the fact that Rita had ordered him curling shoes.

  “You don’t understand,” she had said, “you have to curl.”

  And yet still he felt that some part of her didn’t want him to. But worse was that Rita had an entertainment allowance, and she had ordered his shoes from this, and as always this simple act made him sorry for her – as if all her money and hopes, and envelopes in the kitchen drawer over the years, had come to nothing.

  “What do you mean I have to curl? I don’t have to curl at all if I goddamn don’t want to, and no one can make me. Besides, all the teams are made up – and you have a team to play on, so go out and have a good time.”

  Walking through the woods one night he thought of this. It was fine if she curled. Actually she should curl. It would be good if she did curl, and that settled it.

  Joe also wanted Adele’s opinion on this. But Adele said nothing. She just got angry at him for mixing her up when she was trying to do her new math – and she told him so. And quick as always to defend her anger, she said:

  “All’s I know if you don’t smarten up and take some stock of yourself we’ll all be living alone before New Year’s, every last one of us – and I don’t mind – but Milly can’t stand it – her whole potential is being missed – and what if you have another kid.”

  “I don’t think …”Joe began.

  “But that’s the problem with you, Joe – you don’t think very well at all, it’s as if your brain had turned to plant food or something as bad as that, and you have to take care of Mom – you shouldn’t let her go out alone because I know people and you don’t. I know a heck of a lot more than you think. I had ulcers so I should know. She curls with those lads and I don’t like them. And they have real jobs and stuff like that there – how can you let her curl with them!” she said, enraged, and standing up with one shoe on and one shoe off. “You never think – you never do, and ruin my concentration!” she yelled. And then she went about banging her shoe against the bedroom wall, and throwing cushions about and talking about the past, where everything was wrong, and everything was wrong because it disagreed with her.

  One night Joe was sitting alongside Rita in the living room. She knew his leg was bothering him, the way he was holding it. Then he got up and paced back and forth.

  “How’s yer back?”

  “Not too bad,” he said. “Pretty good – it’s okay.”

  He looked out the window as he said this, as if this glance confirmed everything he had just said – when to Rita it proved just the opposite.

  He turned about and looked at her.

  “I’m sorry I can’t curl,” he said. “But I never know when I can get down in the hack.” He smiled.

  “Goddamn back on you,” Rita said. They didn’t look at each other as they spoke.

  Joe had been to a number of doctors but now he refused to go to any. He was very stubborn now about doctors. A look of mistrust came into his eyes when someone mentioned a new back cure they had read of in a magazine. Or a new mattress. Rita was always mentioning new mattresses – and one could tell how aggravated he got over this talk. It was as if a person was discussing with him a subject where from the very moment they began the discussion they missed the entire crux of the problem – which he alone knew – and he had to listen further to theories on treatments that were like the other treatments.

  Joe had been to doctors and to therapy, and there was an operation he could have. Dr. Hennessey suggested he go to St John and have it when he decided to.

  Rita asked him if he wanted her to rub his back.

  “No no,” Joe said, “that’s Adele’s job.”

  “I can do it,” Rita said.

  “No no no,” Joe said.

  And then, resting his hands against the wall, he slid down carefully, smiling at the pain.

  “If you don’t get to the outpatients tomorrow, I’ll kill you,” Rita said.

  Joe went to the outpatients the next day. He sat in the waiting room for two hours with his cap in his hand, looking at people coming and going. Finally he got in to see Dr. Savard. The doctor got him to take off his shirt. He looked at his arms. Then he got him to move his leg back and forth.

  “Have you been into therapy?” Savard asked, in the same tone Joe had heard a dozen times before. There was always a hint that it was his fault all of this had happened.

  Savard’s small hands felt Joe’s back and got him to loosen his pants. Joe sniffed and looked about. He hated the hospital. He hated to look at the other people there – for the simple reason he felt he was intruding upon them. For instance when he’d passed by the x-ray room, he happened to see a woman in a bra folding her shirt carefully over a chair. At any other time he might have thought he was fortunate. But at this moment he felt sad. The bra was very clean and white, as if she was attempting to wear the proper things, and do things diligently now that she was here – just like everyone else in the world.

  Joe nodded as they spoke. The room was hot. The little nurse with a watch inverted on her left breast, and her hands dry and warm, took his blood pressure, and leaned against him as he sat on the gurney. He could feel the inside of her left leg.

  The doctor asked him if he was on painkillers.

  “The back is a hard machine,” Joe said, smiling in embarrassment. “Lots a days she don’t bother me none at all.”

  Savard nodded in agreement. Then he wrote Joe a prescription and Joe went home.

  He put the prescription in the pocket of his coat and forgot about it.

  One night a short time later, Joe told Rita he’d meet her at the club. But he didn’t get out of the house until late. He kept trying to find his belt, which he was sure had been on his pants earlier that day. He and Milly searched the house for it. Every once in a while Adele would stop writing her history essay – she had suddenly become much more conscientious about work – and would lift up a cushion and look under it, or feel with two fingers down the back of the lazyboy chair.

  Then Joe had to break up a fight because Milly called Adele fat. Adele said she was not fat, and hit her across the head. Then Ralphie came in and she got cross at him for not meeting her that morning and she roared at him that he had broken their pact. Then Joe decided to go.

  The lane was dark, yet the sky shone orange against the tops of the trees. He started the truck and it stalled, and he had to get out and open the hood and put a screwdriver into the starter. Adele watched him from the window, with a forlorn look on her face as if she realized at that moment that no matter how well her father could fix things, he never had the money to do things the way they should be done.

  He waved to her and Milly. Their house was yellow and green and its windows were larger than need be. But Joe never had the money to finish it exactly the way he wanted to, although he had done a fairly good job inside the house.

  When he was drinking he would give away what he had, only to end up borrowing it back from the person he had loaned it to, sometimes having to pay a price. He had given away ideas and information about his various businesses that the competition used to put him out of business – and he could never understand it. When he was drinking he had given away trade secrets that seemed to have done him in – and yet nothing could be said about it. He also would give away money to people who had more money than he did in their pockets. Rita would stand over him, hitting him on his big wide head, with anything she could find, a sneaker, a boot, a pan, asking him where the money was:

  “I don’t know,” Joe would say, puzzled. “I have no idea – what, don’t you have it?”

  At times she would beat him until she cut his head open and the blood flowed down over his face. But he would only shrug and not know what to say. So as she beat him he would take a stubborn turn and refuse to answer her.

  Tonight because he didn’t have any money on him, Adele had given him five dollars. She had run downstairs and handed it to him as if, since he was going up to the curling club she did
n’t want him to embarrass her mother. Or perhaps she didn’t want him to embarrass himself. Whatever the reason, it was the first time she had given him any money – or anything else.

  Adele, since she could count change, had been so stingy she squeaked. She was even mean to herself. For years she had hoarded away her Hallowe’en candy until it rotted in its pillowcase and they had to fight with her even then to throw it out.

  One night a month Adele bought a pizza from money she had saved. She might give Milly a sliver or a piece of hamburger at the bottom of the box – and Milly could have whatever dropped on the floor.

  Once, when Joe was temporarily blinded by a flash when he had his welding job, he lay on the couch with tea bags on his eyes. The house smelled of tea bags, and scribblers from school, and torn covers of schoolbooks. Outside, the river was yellow and the window rattled.

  When Adele came home from school and saw him lying on the couch, she decided at that instant that she needed to make a cup of tea. Except the only two tea bags in the house were on Joe’s eyes.

  “I need those bags,” she said.

  “Well,” Joe said, “you can’t have them. As you see, I need them and they are on me eyes.”

  “For your information, Joe, which ya are so stupid about half the time,” Adele screamed, “I’m having my period. I think for sure ya’d not know that Mom has said I’m to have tea because it stabilizes my system, up and down, so there you go.”

  With that, Joe lifted a tea bag up and looked at her and she snatched it off of his eye and ran into the kitchen.

  No one else knew that Adele was not his daughter but he and Rita. Joe had been in the woods that summer. Rita was working for the recreation council. She became pregnant before Joe ever touched her. The boy who was responsible went to Windsor without knowing of it. After this, Rita accepted the idea that she and Joe get married. That is, after he came out of the woods she began to notice him more. He loved everything about her. He loved the way she moved, the way she worked, the way she smiled. When he asked her to marry him – he had been thinking of asking her for over a year – he stuttered and flushed. She was working out in her yard. She was bent over trying to clear some bushes about this old telephone post. And Joe, before he knew what he was doing, lifted the telephone post out of the ground and held it up while she clipped. Then he set it down gently and smiled. When he looked at her she was crying, and he did not know why. Finally just before they were to be married she told him. Rita was worried, and couldn’t sleep or eat, and kept going out of her way to try and please him. And because of this he spent more and more time alone in the tavern. He always felt that he didn’t deserve her, and therefore some day she would go away.

  Her hair in a ponytail and her pink maternity top, and even the way she carried the baby, which made her gain a lot of weight, bothered Joe at this time. When Adele was born Joe left the house for a month, and came back later, knocking on the door with his hat in his back pocket.

  Adele very early tried to learn how to get him to like her and was always waiting up for him. And each time he came home (he was driving truck at this time) she would run to him. For five or six years he felt uncomfortable with her. And then one day, when he woke up after being drunk, he saw her. She was grumbling to herself, going about with a broom and a dustpan. She had her mother’s apron on and was walking around with a ribbon in her hair, grumbling and complaining about something. From that day forward his feeling changed toward her but it was not until another four years had passed that he began to love her as he did now.

  When he got to the club the game was over and Rita was at the door. She was all alone glancing back over her shoulder. When he spoke she looked at him and smiled timidly, and he felt suddenly that she was disappointed he had come. And just then her friends came around the corner. Joe smelled alcohol and he realized that they were going out the door together and that he had intruded.

  For some reason Rita looked like Milly at that moment, looking up at him and holding her broom and smiling. Then he saw Gloria Basterashe. For some reason she disliked him and Joe had always felt uncomfortable because of the way she looked at him. He never knew what to say to her and often stuttered when he spoke to her. And he felt that Gloria did not like him, and there was nothing he could do. And when he looked at Gloria now the same feeling that he had done something wrong filled him. Then he nodded and smiled.

  When Myhrra saw Joe come into the curling club she started to speak in an animated and unnatural way, as if everything they had been talking about was some special thing that he, a mere sober person, would not understand. This was almost always the case with those who did not drink a lot. Myhrra wore eye shadow that sparkled over her eyes tonight, and purple lipstick that matched her purple gloves, and yet this made her not younger looking but older. She talked as if she had organized everything, and they were all going somewhere special together.

  “Oh, Joe – you’re too late, your wife has been captured. We’re a real drunken crew, I’m afraid.” Then she looked away.

  Vye was standing in the background with a sober expression. He said they were all off to have a drink, and just to prove he had drunk more than he had, he grabbed Gloria and kissed her. Joe smiled, and looked over at Myhrra, who suddenly looked glum. Rita said nothing, she only clung to her wallet, which was in her left hand.

  Rita wanted to go. And if she wanted to go, Joe wanted her to, only he couldn’t go with her. Everyone was happy, everyone was drinking, and therefore they should go. But he couldn’t go with them.

  “I have the deciding vote on this,” Vye said. “And I say Rita comes with us.”

  “And I’m head of the campaign,” Myhrra said, looking about and nodding.

  Rita smiled and looked at Joe.

  “I’ll pay, honest I will,” Myhrra said for some reason.

  “Did you win?” Joe asked looking at them, as if this was what he was supposed to say, and yet feeling he was being forced into saying that.

  “Yes, Joe, we won, we won. Now, are you coming?” Gloria asked, somehow put out by the innocent question.

  “Come on – I bet Rita wants you to go,” Vye said.

  Joe looked at Vye, his eyes half closed, but he said nothing for a moment. It didn’t matter to him, yet every one of them believed it did.

  “Not tonight,” he said.

  “Well, good,” Gloria said. “You won’t mind if she comes with us, will you? I promise to take good care of her.”

  “She doesn’t have to ask my permission,” Joe said, stuttering and trying not to look at Gloria at all.

  “It’s a new age,” Myhrra said. “Everyone can have fun!” Then she took a curt step up, beside Vye.

  Joe cocked his head a little and still didn’t look Rita’s way. He just smiled.

  He felt that something awful was happening that had nothing to do with the conversation, or Rita going, it had nothing to do with that. It had much more to do with whether or not Joe proved to them that he was the person they already assumed he was. And this was – always, when it came down to it, what a person such as Joe had to prove, or disprove.

  He looked about, nodded to no one in particular, and left.

  Rita followed Joe outside. Snow was coming down gently, and Vye carried his gloves in his hand and walked out into the soft dark snow behind them, singing a new song. Joe was angry, and when he put the hood of the truck up to start it with a screwdriver, he tore one side of the hood off.

  “What is it?” Rita asked, looking worried.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  And, angrier still, he wrenched the hood with his arms and tried to lift it completely off. “Won’t the truck start?” Rita said.

  “Yes, the truck will start,” he said. He took some snuff and put it into his mouth, and then spit.

  “Well, Rita can come home with us,” Vye said, standing behind him.

  “Go on – with them,” Joe whispered. “Go on, go with them. I can fix the sonofabitch.”

 
“I’ll stay here,” she said, holding the handle of her new curling broom. And Joe felt that he wasn’t understood and had nothing more to say. And besides this, he had upset Rita for no reason.

  Rita got into the truck and sat there with a scarf tied under her chin, and looked out the window at him.

  It wasn’t her fault if he did not feel comfortable doing the things she wanted to do. He always felt uncomfortable with people she knew because he could never think of anything to say to them. And Rita was afraid he was going to say something or do something that would embarrass her. Yet he knew people didn’t care why someone didn’t drink when they themselves were having a good time. The only thing was, that in everyone who presumed because of drink that they had suddenly become authentic, Joe saw himself.

  The next morning when he woke up he decided to go hunting. They had just had a snowfall and there was a week left in the season. It did not really matter if he went alone or brought Milly with him. The only thing that mattered to him at this moment was to get out of the house. He went into the old part of the basement where he kept his fishing rods and reels, his trophies and guns. The window above him was green, and snow had piled up over it. He packed his knapsack with compass and rope, with his skinning knife and a small whetstone. Everything he did at this moment, however, seemed deliberate – as if it wasn’t really him packing up to go.

  Rita did not have the kids that morning and decided to go to the new mall. After he started the truck for her and shoved the screwdriver into her back pocket, Joe went back into the house and sat at the table, rolled a cigarette, and suddenly picked up an ashtray and threw it against the wall.

  Sometimes when Joe took Milly with him to the woods, they’d sleep under a lean-to. He’d make it with tarp between two trees, brace it with rope or wire, and light a fire out front, spread the coals at the entrance, place boughs in the back, make him and Milly a bed, and hunker in for the night. He would stare up at the stars, and smell smoke, and listen to Milly’s stories. He’d do this whenever they were too far from camp to make it back. He did this often when he was alone, just to do it.