Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  “Then you think it’s because of what happened.”

  “Yes.” As she spoke, she received the sensation of having lied to him. She could not look at him.

  “He wants out,” Nick said. “He wants to get as far away from here as he can and he wants to take you and the baby with him.”

  “I know,” Lily said. “We’ve talked about it—the army. Germany. Rome.”

  “We wouldn’t want to lose you, Lily. You’ve been one of the ones who understood everything. I don’t think I’d like the change. I know Sheri wouldn’t.”

  She felt suddenly as if she might begin to cry. “We’ll—we’ll always be in touch, Nick.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed and took another sip of the drink. The others had all gone out to the pool, and now the whole house was quiet. He tapped his fingers on the rim of the glass, and when Mary began to fret, he put the glass down and stood to lean over her. “Do you mind?” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  He reached down and with great care brought the baby, with her blanket, out of the bassinet, and held her, cradled, gazing with a kind of sad wonder at the small, round face. He rocked his arms slightly, and then looked at Lily, his dark eyes moist, an expression of mystified happiness in his features, as if his own emotion were some profound puzzle he couldn’t understand or explain. Lily’s heart went out to him, for what his sorrow had wrought in him. He handed the child to her and cleared his throat again, putting his hands in the back pockets of his slacks and turning a little, looking toward the window with its view of the fields, the far river, and the overpass.

  “I can’t imagine this for me.”

  Sheri called them both, from the kitchen door. “Bring the baby out here. There’s plenty of shade. And Mary can swim a little if she won’t nap or nurse.”

  Nick picked up the bassinet. “I’m sure things’ll be okay with Tyler. He just needs to get his brightness back.”

  “‘Brightness,’” said Lily. “I’ve never heard the word used quite that way.”

  “Millicent used to say it to Sheri all the time when she was a little girl. Sheri says it to me. She—she says it a lot to me.” He gave forth a small, self-deprecating laugh, shaking his head again. “You know I still wonder if your sister-in-law has it in her to forgive me.”

  3

  AFTER THE SUN dipped below the trees and the sky grew gray, the fireworks started. There were two public displays visible from the back of the house, and at all the widely separated houses of the neighborhood there were others, rockets, little explosions, Roman candles, streaking shafts of brightness, trailing fires, expanding blooms of red, white, and blue, rivaling the heavy, booming showers in the distance. The explosions rose in the sluggish air and fell to earth, the ashes already falling even as they blazed so brilliantly. In the distance, they looked strangely fatal, troublingly feeble in their rising. They gave Lily an unpleasant consciousness of the pull of gravity. She hadn’t known she was so tired. She held Mary close, with one hand alongside her head, to shield her ears from the noise.

  Finally, Millicent asked if she couldn’t take the baby inside with her. She’d had enough of the show, and the smell of the smoke and gunpowder was bothering her. Lily went with her, and she noticed that Tyler wasn’t with the others. She strode down the hallway, to the upstairs bathroom, and found the door open, the light off. So she went along that part of the house, which opened onto the den, with its empty places on the walls, and then down the steps toward their old room. There she saw Tyler sitting on the stripped bed, the bare mattress, holding one of Buddy’s rifles across his lap. He was staring at it, running one hand gingerly along the polished stock.

  “Tyler?” she said.

  And he looked up, startled. “Oh—yeah.”

  “What—what’re you doing?”

  He stood, and set the rifle against the wall. “Nothing.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was—I was looking at one of Buddy’s hunting rifles.” He walked over to her and simply waited, gazing into her eyes as if he thought she had come to tell him something.

  There was an explosion, from right outside the sliding door, that made them both jump. She said, “Tyler—” and could find nothing to say.

  His face was blank. “I was looking at a rifle. Okay?”

  She felt the tears come. But when she reached for him, he backed away.

  “Everybody’s gonna wonder where we are,” he said. “We don’t live here anymore.”

  “Tyler, tell me what to do.”

  Now, he looked almost weary. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. It’s the Fourth of July and about time we went home.”

  She moved toward the sliding door. “Why did you come down here?”

  “I don’t know. Old times? Do I have to explain everything I do?”

  She walked around him and up the stairs, though she made sure he was behind her. And her unease, the pervasive gloom that had become so general and that she had endured for so long as to begin almost not to notice it, renewed itself.

  She held Mary, and said the good-byes, took the kisses, good wishes, little jokes, smiles, and admonitions to be careful going home, and she went out and spent the cautious time getting Mary into the car seat, safe, everything in order, Tyler having loaded the playpen and the bag of bottles, diapers and formula, the teething ring and the binky, everything put away. He got in behind the wheel, started the car, gazed at the others standing on the porch, and when they waved, he waved, as Lily waved—all this accomplished in a kind of haze, and she sat in the car and watched him while he drove them home. She saw his impassive face in the silence. When they arrived at the little house, she got Mary out of the seat and went in, and put her down, changing her, getting her arranged in the bassinet. He was elsewhere, in the quiet rooms. She sat on her side of their bed waiting for him, and when he didn’t come in, she went in search of him, moving almost stealthily through the house. She found him sitting in the easy chair by the door, his head back, mouth open.

  “Tyler?” she said.

  He started. “Oh,” he said. “I fell asleep.”

  “Honey, can we talk about tonight?”

  Again, his eyes showed no emotion at all. “Lily, I didn’t like the fireworks.”

  “I’m just going to say this,” she said. But she couldn’t get her breath.

  “You want to go to New Orleans, don’t you.”

  “Tyler, I have to know what you were doing with that—that—what’s happening, please.” She had begun to cry again. She stood there, trembling.

  “What I was doing with what, Lily?” He hadn’t moved.

  “Are you thinking of—” Again, she couldn’t breathe the words out. “We can work things out, Tyler.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “Go to bed, will you? Christ.”

  “We won’t ever tell anyone. Okay? No one will ever know.”

  At this, he smiled. She thought she had never seen anything so terrible as that open, ruthless grin, that boy’s grimace, all teeth, a smile from the bottom of hell, involving only the mouth. “But we know, princess.”

  “Stop this,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “Go to bed.”

  She strained for the courage to ask him to come with her. She could feel herself working it. “Let’s both go,” was what she found the will to say.

  “I’m not sleepy.” He still stared, still had that awful grin on his face.

  She struggled for a more casual tone. “I’m not sleepy either. I wasn’t talking about sleep.” But her voice shook, and she couldn’t control her breathing. “Tyler, let’s go see someone. Let’s get in the car and go back to the house—”

  He held up one hand. “You’re panicking.”

  “No, I’m—I think we ought to go back to the house.”

  “This is our house.”

  “Yes,” she said. It was little more than a breath.

  “This is the house of the little Harrison family.”


  She could say nothing. She felt his eyes on her, but she was looking at the floor now, waiting for him to say something else, or do something else.

  He stood slowly, as if the effort of it ached and smarted in his bones, the motion of an older man, someone tired and sore. He walked across the room and when he reached her, he paused, but only for a second, then went on into the hall, toward the bedroom. She followed. He took his shirt off, and stood over the bassinet, where the baby had moved to one side, sleeping so peacefully.

  She put her hand on his shoulder, and when he didn’t respond, she took it away. “We’ll never tell a soul,” she said.

  He shook his head, but said nothing.

  “I mean it, Tyler.”

  He had walked around to the other side of the bed and sat down to remove his sandals. “I didn’t like the fireworks,” he said, without looking back at her. “Did they bother you? All those sounds, like gunshots.” He stood and removed his pants, draped them on the chair in the corner, and then got in under the cover sheet, pulling it to his chin and folding his hands over his chest. He closed his eyes.

  “I didn’t think of that, Tyler. It must’ve—it must’ve been awful for you. I didn’t see any—I didn’t see what it must have done to Nick.”

  “Nick didn’t seem to mind. I think Nick’s gone beyond minding anything. Nick gets a little drunk really early in the day and then maintains it into the nights, and nobody seems the slightest bit aware of it. Least of all his customers.”

  She got out of her clothes and into her nightgown quickly, and when they were lying side by side, he took a breath, as if steeling himself, and hauled himself up onto his elbow, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. It was a strange, cold kiss. He lay over on his side, and she turned the light off, closed her eyes, knowing she wouldn’t sleep. He was very quiet, not moving; he didn’t even seem to be breathing. The whole night had grown silent as death. In a few moments, he began to snore. The baby was making small noises, sighing, and giving forth little sleep gasps and sobs, stirring, then settling into stillness again. Lily was the only one awake. She lay in the dark, seeing the image of her husband sitting on the bare mattress in the downstairs room, with the rifle across his lap.

  4

  SHE WOKE with a start in the light of morning, with Mary playing and babbling next to her, and Tyler gone. It was after nine o’clock, a dismal, hazy day. In the kitchen she found a half-eaten pear and a glass with milk in the bottom of it. There was no note. The house had the feel of a place just vacated by someone who lived alone. She called the dealership and asked for him, and waited a few minutes. When he didn’t come to the phone, she hung up and dialed again, and asked for Nick. Once more, she waited, and she was about to hang up when Nick came on the line. She said, “Nick—I need to talk to Tyler.”

  “He’s not here, Lily. I’ll tell him you called when he gets here.”

  “He hasn’t been there?”

  “No.”

  She began to cry. She did not know how she kept from sobbing. “When he comes—if he comes—will you tell him to call me at his mother’s?”

  “Lily, what’s wrong? Why hasn’t he come in?”

  “He left before sunup, Nick.”

  “Did you call Millicent?”

  “I’m going over there,” she told him.

  “I’ll have him call you there if he comes in. I’ll make him call you.”

  She fed and dressed Mary, then got dressed herself. The sky threatened storms, big black thunderheads lowering to the east, at the treeline. Heavy, lightning-laden clouds so thick they looked as though they would topple the trees in the foreground. She put Mary in the car seat and drove to the Galatierre house. The rain began before she arrived, gusting in wind and blown leaves. For a few minutes, she sat in the car waiting for it to subside. She glimpsed Sheri in one of the windows at the front of the house. Sheri waved. A moment later, Millicent came out with an umbrella, and helped her get the baby into the house.

  Sheri was dressed for work, but hadn’t gone. She wasn’t feeling well. She kissed Lily on the cheek, and then went out of the room.

  Millicent said, “She had too much to drink last night after you-all left. She’s hungover and she ought to be ashamed of herself.”

  Lily held back her panic.

  Rosa came from the kitchen, and for half a second Lily thought the other woman had gone to work for Millicent again. But Rosa was carrying her own cup of coffee, and she sat on the sofa and took a polite sip of it. The baby made a small fluting sound from the back of her throat, and Millicent said something soft to her that Lily didn’t hear. She waited for Rosa to speak to her, and wished she weren’t there. Rosa blew across the surface of the coffee, and then sipped loudly from it. “Sheri and I are supposed to go into town,” she said. “I guess that’s off now. It’s bad out there. And it’s bad in here. Remind me never to get drunk.”

  “Rosa,” said Lily. “I—I have to talk to Millicent. Do you mind?”

  Rosa put her coffee down and looked from one to the other of them with frank curiosity. It was Rosa’s way with everything, and there was nothing personal in it; she might’ve been gazing at a pair of birds on a branch. She picked up her coffee and went back to the kitchen door. Before she closed it, she looked back in and said, “I’m going into town when this lets up. Tell Sheri for me?”

  Millicent said she would, her voice brittle with uncertainty.

  When they were alone, she turned to Lily and said, “I hope there’s nothing wrong? You look upset.”

  Lily realized, as she drew in air to begin, that she couldn’t speak freely. She felt hamstrung. It was hard to muster any words at all. Her throat caught. She was fighting back tears. She said, “I’m—oh, there’s nothing. It’s just—”

  Millicent waited for her to go on.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Millicent said, pushing a strand of hair from the side of her face. “Are you two having some trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” Lily said, and as she spoke, the frustrations of the past weeks rushed in on her. She sat down on the sofa and wept, her hands to her face. She was aware of the other woman moving around in the room, and soon Millicent was sitting next to her, gathering her into an embrace.

  “It’s the baby,” Millicent said. “Remember, I said they have trouble adjusting to the responsibility sometimes.”

  “It’s not that,” Lily said. But she could not bring herself to go on. She was painfully conscious of the confining fact that further revelations would lead inevitably to the central, unsayable one. And it seemed now, even in her unhappiness, that to tell the other woman about the scene with Tyler and the rifle would be to give in to her own hysteria, to let her anxieties get the better of her at Millicent’s expense. She wanted urgently to believe that her mind had run away with her.

  Millicent gave her a handkerchief, and waited for her to compose herself. “Can you talk about it?”

  Lily knew that to say it out would mean the saying out of everything; she should never have allowed herself to speak at all.

  “Nick told us that he’s noticed a little apathetic something—well, a distance.”

  She nodded.

  “Men, and their inability to express how they feel.”

  “He tells me how he feels. He says he doesn’t feel anything.”

  “For you?”

  “For anyone. Anything. The world—all of it.”

  “Well, he’s still thinking about what happened. They’re both going to have trouble for the rest of their lives. Tyler and Nick.”

  Lily nodded.

  “Can’t the two of you talk about it?”

  “We’re—we’re not—it’s all—oh, I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just a bad morning.”

  “What is it that you can’t say to him?”

  She couldn’t return Millicent’s gaze. She pulled the handkerchief nervously through her fingers.

  “Nick was going to have T
yler call here when he got to the dealership.”

  Millicent was silent. There was thunder outside, now, breaking across the top of the sky, flashes from far off.

  “It’s me,” Millicent said, “isn’t it.”

  Lily said, “What?”

  “It’s me—what I did all those years ago.”

  “No,” Lily said, almost impatiently, even as it struck her as containing an element of the truth.

  There was a clap of thunder that made them both jump.

  “I have a bad feeling,” Millicent said. “A chill. I wish we—I wish this would go away. From the beginning, I felt it was better if we all went along and got used to each other and nobody thought too much about it.”

  Another thunderclap struck, after a bright flash. The rain ran down the big window, and then beat against it in a gust of wind. It was coming down in sheets, and the tops of the trees in the distance were waving back and forth, a chaotic perturbation, a titanic agitation.

  Millicent sighed. “So—what do you want me to do? You want me to explain to him that I’m a fault-riddled human being who fell in love with someone not her husband and got pregnant by him and couldn’t see any other way out? Because that’s what happened, and there really wasn’t any other way out, because if I had taken—if I had hauled my son away with me, we would’ve had to be running—would’ve spent all our lives running away from Tyler’s father. Do you know what Tyler’s father was like?”

  “Tyler has said some things about him,” Lily told her.

  “I’d like to hear what Tyler says about him. I would. But let me tell you about Geoffrey Harrison. First and foremost, he was always quite exacting about what belonged to him. Guns, cars, property of every kind, appliances, a parcel of land and the sticks thereon, as we used to say. Everything. And of course he thought I belonged to him, too. And I think that if I had stayed, carrying Buddy’s child, and Geoffrey’d had to deal with that fact every day of his life, eventually he might’ve killed me.”

  Lily stared, and she could feel the blood leaving her face.

  “Oh, not that way—not in the way you’re thinking, although Tyler’s father, along with being possessive, was a violent, frightening man who didn’t suffer restrictions on his choices very well. No, he wouldn’t have done anything like that, no physical violence—he’d have killed me with noble behavior. He’d have killed me with forgiving me and letting me know I was forgiven every single solitary little minute of my life. And poor Sheri—he would have punished her with kindliness, while finding ways of letting her know that of course he didn’t begrudge her anything. It would’ve been in everything he ever did with her, and everything he ever said to her, too. Because Geoffrey had the sort of rehearsed benevolence that always somehow allows the reasons for it through, even as it’s happening, you know? An upright, religious, helpful man who couldn’t manage one lone act of unconscious generosity if his soul depended on it. Do you know what he did when he found out I had fallen in love with Buddy? He took me aside, in our room, asked me to kneel down with him and pray. Which I did, since I was only twenty-three and quite horrified by what had happened to me. So we knelt there in our little bedroom and said a Hail Mary, and then he looked at me and said he forgave me. He forgave me. I was confused and partly relieved—I had seen his violent side—and at the same time filled with the knowledge that I had to get away from him. That I had to get as far away from him as I could. For my own life. And I also knew that if I took Tyler with me, I would have both Tyler and Geoffrey to contend with—that Geoffrey would’ve followed me to the ends of the earth, and Tyler would’ve been so unhappy and wanting to go back all the time. Because Tyler was really his child. Tyler belonged to him in the most complete way, even as an infant. He was always Daddy’s boy. And so, I left him. Left them. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. And through the years, with Buddy’s help, I kept up with Tyler as best I could. The reports were that he was happy with his father, that the two of them had a special bond. It broke my heart not to have him with me, but at that age, he didn’t want to be with his mother. He wanted his daddy and the woods and the games and the roughhouse play. The boy had his own fishing rod and tackle by the time he was four.”