Finding a Girl in America

by Andre Dubus

  Joe turned in his chair and gazed off toward the bar and shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead and murmured something he couldn’t hear and didn’t want to, and then it was over, the long bantering friendship between them, he felt it go out of him like dry tears through his ribs and for an instant, watching Joe’s profiled face that could never look at him again, he raged at the other face he had never seen, impassioned and vulnerable in the night, then the rage was gone too and he sat watching Joe rubbing his forehead, watched Joe profiled in that place of pain and humiliation where he had fallen and where the Captain could never go. Yet still he kept talking, threw words into the space, bounced them off the silent jaw and shoulder: ‘Listen, I hate the bastards. I don’t want you to see them. They’re going to tell you general court or resign, but I’m going to tell them to get the hell off my ship, and I’ll handle it. No one will know anything. Not for a while anyway. Not till you’ve written your letter and gone. And still they won’t know why. I don’t care about what they told me, I want you to know that. They brought paperwork and it was sealed and it still is and it’ll stay that way. I don’t give a good Goddamn and I never did. You hear me, Joe?’

  He waited. Joe nodded, looking at the bar.

  ‘I hear you, Captain.’

  For perhaps a minute they sat that way. Then Captain Devereaux got up and touched Joe’s shoulder and walked out.

  Corporal Swanson was sleeping in the sun, his cap over his eyes, and he did not wake when the Captain and the coxswain and crew descended into the gently rocking boat, did not wake until Captain Deveraux softly spoke his name. Then he stood quickly and saluted and the Captain smiled and asked if he’d had a good nap. All the way back to the ship he talked to Swanson; or, rather, asked him questions and watched him closely and tried to listen. Swanson was not staying in the Marines; in another year he’d get out and go to college in South Dakota. He wasn’t sure yet what he wanted to be. He had a girl in South Dakota and he meant to marry her. The Captain sat smiling and nodding and asking, and sometimes he leaned forward to listen over the sound of the engine, and it wasn’t until the launch drew within a hundred yards of the ship that he knew Joe wasn’t coming back, and then at once he knew he had already known that too, had known in the Club that Joe’s isolation was determined and forever, and now he twisted around and looked back over his shoulder, into the sky above the air base, then looked forward again at the huge ship, at its high grey hull which now rose straight above him, casting a shadow across the launch.

  At six-thirty Foster and Todd found him on the flight deck. He had been there for an hour, walking the thousand feet from fore to aft, looking into the sky and out at the sea. When they emerged from the island and moved toward him, walking abreast and leaning into the wind, he was standing at the end of the flight deck. He saw them coming and looked away. The sun was going down. Out there, toward the open sea, a swath of gold lay on the water. When they stopped behind him he did not turn around. He was thinking that, from a distance, a plane flying in the sunset looks like a moving star. Then shutting his eyes he saw the diving silver plane in the sunset, and then he was in it, his heart pounding with the dive, the engine roaring in his blood, and he saw the low red sun out the cockpit and, waiting, the hard and yielding sea.

  ‘Commander Saldi is not here,’ he said.

  ‘Not here?’ It was Foster. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s out there.’

  Foster stepped around and stood in front of him, and then Todd did, and they stood side by side, facing him, but he continued to stare at the sun on the water.

  ‘Out there?’ Foster said. ‘You let him fly? In a million dollar—’

  Captain Devereaux looked at him, and he stopped.

  ‘Iwakuni lost contact with him an hour ago,’ the Captain said.

  ‘You told him,’ Foster said. ‘You told him and let him go up—’

  This time the Captain did not bother to look at him; he stepped through the space between them and stood on the forward edge of the flight deck. He stood there, motionless and quiet, then he heard Foster and Todd going away, only a moment’s footsteps on the deck before all sound of them was gone in the wind, and still he watched as the sun went down and under the pale fading light of the sky the sea darkened until finally it was black.

  His Lover

  WHEN SCOTTY stopped the police car, Moissant opened the door and put his cane out first. He had both legs out when Scotty said: ‘Leo? It’s funny you never asked her anything. Where they went at night.’

  He did not turn his head; he had been blind for over a year, and it had taken him almost that long to break the habit of looking at people whenever they spoke.

  ‘It didn’t matter,’ he said.

  He got out and shut the door but kept his hand on it. The breeze came from the sea, and he knew from the smell of the salt marsh down the road that the tide was out. He lowered his head to the window so Scotty wouldn’t have to talk to his belt buckle, and said: ‘She really liked killing those people?’

  ‘She liked talking about it too. I didn’t mean you should have asked her anything.’

  ‘She was pretty, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She’s pretty. You give a man something to look forward to.’

  ‘That’s what her name means. In Spanish.’

  He walked away, touching with his cane the grass and earth ahead of him. He stopped and listened to the car going east, and when he couldn’t hear it anymore he went around his trailer to the back lawn, to the hammock Linda had hung from two pines, and he settled into it and took off his sunglasses. He felt shade across his ankles and feet but that was all, and he unbuttoned his shirt and opened it to the sun. Sometimes in the afternoon Linda took him to the hammock; they left his cane inside and she held his hand. She told him the hammock and the van could not be seen from the road, they were hidden by his trailer and the woods, and it was nice to be quiet and secret back there. She sat on the ground beside him. Usually he fell asleep on the hammock and when he woke she was gone to the van where the other girl and the boy were. He could hear their radio music. She always came back to him, soon after he woke.

  He rarely spoke to the other two, and they never came to his trailer. It was Linda who had talked to him that first day, had asked if they could park their van in his backyard for a few days. They were from New Mexico and they wanted to spend some time at the Atlantic. He had put on his sunglasses and stepped out of the morning cool of his trailer to talk to her, and he liked her voice coming out of the sun. He almost said no because he knew it was the same van that had gone past his trailer three times in the last two days, once while he was pushing the lawnmower, walking barefooted so he’d know where he had been; he had stopped mowing and turned his face with the van as if he could see it. But he said yes. He had outlived everyone he cared about and now had outlived his eyes too. There was nothing they could take from him.

  Then on the first night Linda knocked on his door and he regretted saying yes that morning because now they would want more, it would start with borrowing salt and end with them swarming all over the life he had learned to live. But she did not want to borrow anything. She wanted to cook his dinner. He told her he could do it himself; and while she cooked and he waited to hear the other two coming to move the chairs around and eat with them, he told her how he cooked by smelling and time-guessing and sticking and touching with a fork. She asked how he got his food and he said the grocer’s son delivered it. The other girl and the boy did not come, and when she put the plates on the table he thought he should have been able to tell by listening that she had brought and cooked two steaks, not four. For a while they ate quietly, then she asked if he had put on his sunglasses when she knocked on the door. Yes: he didn’t wear them when he was alone. Gently she lifted them from his face: it was the first time she touched him. They must be ugly, he said. No: no, they looked like egg whites: like the white of a soft-fried egg, and the eyeballs were like blue marbles under milk.

  Sh
e washed the dishes while he sat near the screen door and felt the sun going down, the air cooling, and he imagined the long shadows of the pines on the trailer and the lawn and the road. She brought him a beer and sat at the table and asked if she could smoke. Sure, he’d given them up when he was sixty-two and that was eight years ago and if he hadn’t gone through such hell to quit he’d have one with her. A smile was in her voice: she didn’t mean a cigarette. Oh: marijuana; no, he didn’t care. He liked the smell, and he thought her inhaling was funny. Do you have to draw that deep on it? She said mmmm with her breath held. Then she let it out. Is it like booze? Better; quicker; you want to try it? He smiled. He wanted to. But maybe some other time. It took him a while to get around to something new. He had been a boozer. You could say he had been a bad one. But he had retired from whiskey a long time ago, before it caused him any more trouble with either men or women. Only a little beer now at night.

  He felt her watching him and then, incredulous and slow to hope, he felt the way she was watching him and he lowered his face to hide his eyes, and basked in her watching. Then her chair slid back and she came lightfooted around the table and stood behind him. Her hands slipped under his shirt and slowly and softly rubbed his chest. She licked his ear and whispered and his body quivered yet his loins were stalled by the question he didn’t ask: Why him? Then rising he received her arm around his waist and went with her to his bed. Slowly she took off his clothes while he touched her.

  In the morning he listened to her sleeping. Her naked back was against his side. When the trailer warmed she turned to him with her hands and tongue, and he told her he’d thought he would never have a woman again; it had been six years; six years last May. A widow up in Portsmouth. Named Florence. She wasn’t as old as he was but she might as well have been. She grew up in Alabama and she still talked like it. It was warm weather, and you could see the girls’ legs again. One day Florence saw him watching and she said the young girls come out in spring, like snakes.

  On their third night he felt her getting out of bed and he listened to her dress and creep out of the trailer; after a while the van drove slowly out to the road and toward the sea. He lay awake and told himself it was all right, it would be easy enough to start tomorrow without her. Finally he even felt peaceful, and he slept. Then the van came back, and she sneaked into the trailer and undressed and cautiously got into bed. After that he was amused when her leaving waked him; he thought of the night clubs and the beach in the moonlight; he slept until the van returned, and when she was naked in his bed he slept again. Last night he woke because the van did not return; he lay waiting until he knew it was morning, then he dressed and made coffee and was still at the kitchen table when the car came up the road and into the driveway; he put on his glasses and turned his face to the screen door, and then Scotty standing outside told him they had three young people for the murder of a summer couple in a beach house and the one girl who did all the talking said they’d stayed at his place for the past month and if that was true would he mind coming to the station just to make a statement.

  She cooked all his meals, and she ate with him. She bought fish and fresh vegetables and fruit in town; she never placed an order with the Peters boy, was never in the trailer when he delivered groceries. One night Moissant said he’d smoke with her. He let her roll it for him but he lit it himself, slowly moving the flame’s heat up to his mouth. He laughed and wanted a shower and they stood under the spray till the water turned cold, then went to bed without drying and he pressed his face into her long wet hair. Then all the nights after dinner he smoked with her.

  Last night she had blood on her clothes when she talked to Scotty. She couldn’t even count the houses they had broken into up and down the coast. She didn’t want to talk about that. She wanted to talk about stabbing the man and woman. She said she liked it. She had killed a man they robbed in a motel in Colorado. He was a stupid man. He thought they were junkies and if he gave them money they would go away. He was surprised when she stuck her knife in his fat stomach. She would like to stab the chief of police and his two cops. She would save the chief for last. It was nothing personal. She would just like to do it. The other girl was waiting in the van and she and the boy were in the bedroom looking for the money. They were very quiet; they were quieter than the sea. She could hear the waves outside. But the man woke up. She was near the bed when she heard him move. Before he could get his feet on the floor she stabbed him. She stabbed him again while the boy grabbed the woman and put his hand over her mouth. The woman was on her stomach and he was sitting on her back and holding her arms behind her and she was moaning into his hand. He told Linda to look for something to tie her with. Linda said okay and reached across the man and stabbed her in the back. The boy ran out of the house but she kept stabbing till the moaning and jerking stopped.

  Lying in the hammock Moissant loved her hands: going down his shirt that first night and combing the hair of his chest while her tongue wet his ear and she whispered; her hands taking off his clothes; her small soft hand stroking slow and patient until she could not close it. In the long nights he kneeled astride her legs and his hands caressed her body, like a child on the beach smoothing a figure made of sand. Under the high sun he was sleepy, was going, a dream starting, pines and fetid marsh breath and seawind in the dream; her smell; her breathing; he was swelling, then erect, and the dream was gone like fog burned away by the sun on his face. Then he slept.

  Townies

  THE CAMPUS SECURITY guard found her. She wore a parka and she lay on the footbridge over the pond. Her left cheek lay on the frozen snow. The college was a small one, he was the only guard on duty, and in winter he made his rounds in the car. But partly because he was sleepy in the heated car, and mostly because he wanted to get out of the car and walk in the cold dry air, wanted a pleasurable solitude within the imposed solitude of his job, he had gone to the bridge.

  He was sixty-one years old, a tall broad man, but his shoulders slumped and he was wide in the hips and he walked with his toes pointed outward, with a long stride which appeared slow. His body, whether at rest or in motion, seemed the result of sixty-one years of erosion, as though all his life he had been acted upon and, with just enough struggle to keep going, he had conceded; fifty years earlier he would have sat quietly at the rear of a classroom, scraped dirt with his shoe on the periphery of a playground. In a way, he was the best man to find her. He was not excitable, he was not given to anger, he was not a man of action: when he realized the girl was dead he did not think immediately of what he ought to do, of what acts and words his uniform and wages required of him. He did not think of phoning the police. He knelt on the snow, so close to her that his knee touched her shoulder, and he stroked her cold cheek, her cold blonde hair.

  He did not know her name. He had seen her about the campus. He believed she had died of an overdose of drugs or a mixture of drugs and liquor. This deepened his sorrow. Often when he thought of what young people were doing to themselves, he felt confused and sad, as though in the country he loved there were a civil war whose causes baffled him, whose victims seemed wounded and dead without reason. Especially the girls, and especially these girls. He had lived all his life in this town, a small city in northeastern Massachusetts; once there had been a shoe industry. Now that was over, only three factories were open, and the others sat empty along the bank of the Merrimack. Their closed windows and the dark empty rooms beyond them stared at the street, like the faces of the old and poor who on summer Sundays sat on the stoops of the old houses farther upriver and stared at the street, the river, the air before their eyes. He had worked in a factory, as a stitcher. When the factory closed he got a job driving a truck, delivering fresh loaves of bread to families in time for their breakfast. Then people stopped having their bread delivered. It was a change he did not understand. He had loved the smell of bread in the morning and its warmth in his hands. He did not know why the people he had delivered to would choose to buy bread in a supe
rmarket. He did not believe that the pennies and nickels saved on one expense ever showed up in your pocket.