by Andre Dubus
He had always been shy and, because of it, he had stayed on the periphery of sports for as long as he could remember. When his teachers forced him to play, he spent an anxious hour trying not to become involved, praying in right field that no balls would come his way, lingering on the outside of the huddle so that no one would look up and see his face and decide to throw him a pass on the next play.
But he found that there was one thing he could do and he did it alone, or with his father: he could shoot and he could hunt. He felt that shooting was the only thing that had ever been easy for him. Schoolwork was, too, but he considered that a curse.
He was not disturbed by the boys who were not athletes, unless, for some reason, they were confident anyway. While they sat and waited for Connie, he was cheerful and teasing, and they seemed to like him. The girls were best. He walked into the living room and they stopped their talking and laughing and all of them greeted him and sometimes they said: “Connie, he’s so cute,” or “I wish you were three years older,” and he said: “Me, too,” and tried to be witty and usually was.
He heard a car outside.
“Douglas is here,” he called.
Connie came through the living room, one hand arranging the wave of hair near her right eye, and went into the sunporch. Slowly, Kenneth wiped the rifle with an oily rag. He heard Douglas’s loud voice and laughter and heavy footsteps on the sunporch; then they came into the living room. Kenneth raised his face.
“Hi,” he said.
“How’s it going?”
“All right.”
Douglas Bakewell was not tall. He had blond hair, cut so short on top that you could see his scalp, and a reddish face, and sunburned arms, covered with bleached hair. A polo shirt fit tightly over his chest and shoulders and biceps.
“Whatcha got there?” Douglas said.
“Twenty-two.”
“Let’s see.”
“Better dry it.”
He briskly wiped it with a dry cloth and handed it to Douglas. Quickly, Douglas worked the bolt, aimed at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger.
“Nice trigger,” he said.
He held it in front of his waist and looked at it, then gave it to Kenneth.
“Well, girl,” he said, turning to Connie, “where’s the beer?”
“Sit down and I’ll get you one.”
She went to the kitchen. Douglas sat on the couch and Kenneth picked up his cleaning kit and, not looking at Douglas, walked into his bedroom. He stayed there until Connie returned from the kitchen; then he went into the living room. They were sitting on the couch. Connie was smoking again. Kenneth kept walking toward the sunporch.
“I’ll let you know when the fudge is ready,” Connie said.
“All right.”
On the sunporch, he turned on the television and sat in front of it. He watched ten minutes of a Western before he was relaxed again, before he settled in his chair, oblivious to the quiet talking in the living room, his mind beginning to wander happily as a gunfighter in dark clothes moved across the screen.
By the time the fudge was ready, he was watching a detective story, and when Connie called him, he said: “Okay, in a minute,” but did not move, and finally she came to the sunporch with a saucer of fudge and set it on a small table beside his chair.
“When that’s over, you better go to bed,” she said.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“You know what Mother said.”
“You’re staying up.”
“Course I am. I’m also a little older than you.”
“I want to see the late show.”
“No!”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’ll tell Daddy.”
“He doesn’t care.”
“I’ll tell him you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“I’ll tell him you smoke.”
“Oh, I could wring your neck!”
She went to the living room. He tried to concentrate on the Western, but it was ruined. The late show came on and he had seen it several months before and did not want to see it again, but he would not go to bed. He watched absently. Then he had to urinate. He got up and went into the living room, walking quickly, only glancing at them once, but when he did, Connie smiled and, with her voice friendly again, said: “What is it?”
He stopped and looked at her.
“Red River.”
He smiled.
“I already saw it,” he said.
“You watching it again?”
“Maybe so.”
“Okay.”
He went to the bathroom and when he came back, they were gone. He went to the sunporch. Connie and Douglas were standing near the back door. The television was turned off. Kenneth wondered if Connie had seen Red River. If she had not, he could tell her what had happened during the part she missed. Douglas was whispering to Connie, his face close to hers. Then he looked at Kenneth.
“ ’Night,” he said.
“G’night,” Kenneth said.
He was gone. Kenneth picked up the saucer his fudge had been on and took it to the kitchen and put it in the sink. He heard Douglas’s car backing down the trail, and he went to the sunporch, but Connie was not there, so he went to the bathroom door and said: “You seen Red River?”
“Yes.”
“You taking a bath?”
“Just washing my face. I’m going to bed.”
He stood quietly for a moment. Then he went into the living room and got a magazine and sat in the rocking chair, looking at the people in the advertisements. Connie came in, wearing a robe. She leaned over his chair and he looked up and she kissed him.
“Good night,” she said.
“G’night.”
“You going to bed soon?”
“In a minute.”
She got her cigarettes and an ashtray from the coffee table and went to her room and closed the door. After a while, he heard her getting into bed.
He looked at half the magazine, then laid it on the floor. Being awake in a house where everyone else was sleeping made him lonely. He went to the sunporch and latched the screen, then closed the door and locked it. He left the light on but turned out the one in the living room. Then he went to his room and took off everything but his shorts. He was about to turn out the light when he looked at the chest of drawers and saw the magazine. He hesitated. Then he picked it up and found the girl and looked at the exposed tops of her breasts and at her navel and below it. Suddenly he closed the magazine and raised his eyes to the ceiling, then closed them and said three Hail Mary’s. Without looking at it, he picked up the magazine and took it to the living room, and went back to his bedroom and lay on his belly on the floor and started doing push-ups. He had no trouble with the first eight; then they became harder, and by the fifteenth he was breathing fast and his whole body was trembling as he pushed himself up from the floor. He did one more, then stood up and turned out the light and got into bed.
His room extended forward of the rest of the house, so that, from his bed, he could look through the window to his left and see the living room and Connie’s bedroom. He rolled on his back and pulled the sheet up to his chest. He could hear crickets outside his window.
He flexed his right arm and felt the bicep. It seemed firmer than it had in June, when he started doing pushups every night. He closed his eyes and began the Lord’s Prayer and got as far as Thy kingdom come before he heard it.
Now it was not the crickets that he heard. He heard his own breathing and the bedsprings as his body tensed; then he heard it again, somewhere in front of the house: a cracking twig, a rustle of dried leaves, a foot on hard earth. Slowly, he rolled on his left side and looked out the window. He waited to be sure, but he did not have to; then he waited to decide what he would do, and he did not have to wait for that either, because he already knew, and he looked at the far corner of the room where his rifle was, though he could not see it, and he looked out the window again, staring at the windows of the living room and Connie’
s room, forcing himself to keep his eyes there, as if it would be all right if the prowler did not come into his vision, did not come close to the house; but listening to the slow footsteps, Kenneth knew that he would.
Get up. Get up and get the rifle. If you don’t do it now, he might come to this window and look in and then it’ll be too late.
For a moment, he did not breathe. Then, slowly, stopping at each sound of the bedsprings, he rolled out of bed and crouched on the floor beneath the window. He did not move. He listened to his breathing, for there was no other sound, not even crickets, and he began to tremble, thinking the prowler might be standing above him, looking through his window at the empty bed. He held his breath. Then he heard the footsteps again, in front of the house, closer now, and he thought: He’s by the pines in front of Connie’s room. He crawled away from the window, thinking of a large, bearded man standing in the pine trees thirty yards from Connie’s room, studying the house and deciding which window to use; then he stood up and walked on tiptoes to the chest of drawers and moved his hand over the top of it until he touched the handful of bullets, his fingers quickly closing on them, and he picked up the rifle and took out the magazine and loaded it, then inserted it again and laid the extra bullets on the chest of drawers. Now he had to work the bolt. He pulled it up and back and eased it forward again.
Staying close to the wall, he tiptoed back to the window, stopping at the edge of it, afraid to look out and see a face looking in. He heard nothing. He looked through the windows in the opposite wall, thinking that if the prowler had heard him getting the rifle, he could have run back to the road, back to wherever he had come from, or he could still be hiding in the pines, or he could have circled to the rear of the house to hide again and listen, but there was no way of knowing, and he would have to stand in the room, listening, until his father came home. He thought of going to wake Connie, but he was afraid to move. Then he heard him again, near the pines, coming toward the house. He kneeled and pressed his shoulder against the wall, moving his face slightly, just enough to look out the screen and see the prowler walking toward Connie’s window, stopping there and looking over his shoulder at the front yard and the road, then reaching out and touching the screen.
Kenneth rose and moved away from the wall, standing close to his bed now; he aimed through the screen, found the side of the man’s head, then fired. A scream filled the house, the yard, his mind, and he thought at first it was the prowler, who was lying on the ground now, but it was a high, shrieking scream; it was Connie, and he ran into the living room, but she was already on the sunporch, unlocking the back door, not screaming now, but crying, pulling open the wooden door and hitting the screen with both hands, then stopping to unlatch it, and he yelled: “Connie!”
She turned, her hair swinging around her cheek.
“Get away from me!”
Then she ran outside, the screen door slamming, the shriek starting again, a long, high wail, ending in front of the house with “Douglas, Douglas, Douglas!” Then he knew.
Afterward, it seemed that the events of a year had occurred in an hour, and, to Kenneth, even that hour seemed to have a quality of neither speed nor slowness, but a kind of suspension, as if time were not passing at all. He remembered somehow calling his father and crying into the phone: “I shot Douglas Bakewell,” and because of the crying, his father kept saying: “What’s that, son? What did you say?” and then he lay facedown on his bed and cried, thinking of Connie outside with Douglas, hearing her sometimes when his own sounds lulled, and sometimes thinking of Connie inside with Douglas, if he had not shot him. He remembered the siren when it was far away and their voices as they brought Connie into the house. The doctor had come first, then his mother and father, then the sheriff; but, remembering, it was as if they had all come at once, for there was always a soothing or questioning face over his bed. He remembered the footsteps and hushed voices as they carried the body past his window, while his mother sat on the bed and stroked his forehead and cheek. He would never forget that.
Now the doctor and sheriff were gone and it seemed terribly late, almost sunrise. His father came into the room, carrying a glass of water, and sat on the bed.
“Take this,” he said. “It’ll make you sleep.”
Kenneth sat up and took the pill from his father’s palm and placed it on his tongue, then drank the water. He lay on his back and looked at his father’s face. Then he began to cry.
“I thought it was a prowler,” he said.
“It was, son. A prowler. We’ve told you that.”
“But Connie went out there and she stayed all that time and she kept saying ‘Douglas’ over and over; I heard her—”
“She wasn’t out there with him. She was just out in the yard. She was in shock. She meant she wanted Douglas to be there with her. To help.”
“No, no. It was him.”
“It was a prowler. You did right. There’s no telling what he might have done.”
Kenneth looked away.
“He was going in her room,” he said. “That’s why she went to bed early. So I’d go to bed.”
“It was a prowler,” his father said.
Now Kenneth was sleepy. He closed his eyes and the night ran together in his mind and he remembered the rifle in the corner and thought: I’ll throw it in the creek tomorrow. I never want to see it again. He would be asleep soon. He saw himself standing on the hill and throwing his rifle into the creek; then the creek became an ocean, and he stood on a high cliff and for a moment he was a mighty angel, throwing all guns and cruelty and sex and tears into the sea.
A Love Song
CALL HER CATHERINE. WHEN HER HEART truly broke, she was thirty-seven years old, she had two teenaged girls, and her husband loved another woman. She smelled the woman’s love on his clothes; it was a perfume she could name but did not. Even the woman’s name, when she learned it from her husband’s lips, was not large enough, only two words for the breath and flesh and voice and blood of only a woman, only part of what she had traced by smell on his sweater one night, his jacket another, and traced by intuition and memory when he was with her and when he was away at his normal times and when he was away on the evenings and weekend days he lied about; and what she had not traced but simply known long before she smelled another’s love on him. Had simply known, as a person with a disease may know without giving it a name or even notice, long before its actual symptoms and detection.
The woman’s name could not encompass what was happening. Nor could the words love and lie and sorry and you, nor could her own name on his tongue, on the night he told her in the bright light of their kitchen the color of cream, while upstairs their daughters slept. Nor could tears, nor any act of her body, any motion of it: her pacing legs, her gesturing arms, her hands pressing her face. The earth itself was leaving with her sad and pitying husband, was drawing away from her. Stars fell. That was a song, and music would never again be lovely; it was gone with the shattering stars and coldly dying moon, the trees of such mortal green; gone with light itself.
These words in the kitchen, these smoked cigarettes and swallowed brandy, were two hours of her life. What began as the scent of perfume on wool, then frightened and sorrowful ratiocination that led her beyond his infidelity, into the breadth and depth of the river that was their sixteen years of love—its falls and rushing white water and most of all its long and curving and gentle deep flow that never looked or even felt as dangerous as she now knew it truly was—ended with not even two hours of truth in the kitchen, for truth took most of the two hours to appear in the yellow-white light, and the gray cirrus clouds of blown and rising and drifting smoke, or perhaps took most of the two hours to achieve. Then it was there, unshadowed, in its final illuminance.
Two hours, she figured with pen and paper and numbers, sitting at one in the morning in the kitchen, weeks later, adding and multiplying and dividing, smoking and drinking not brandy but tea: one hundred and twenty minutes that were six ten-thousandt
hs of one percent of her life from the day of her birth until her husband turned his pale and anguished face and walked out the door, into the summer night.
She never again perceived time as she had before, as a child, then an adolescent: a graceful and merry and brown-haired girl, in infinite preparation, infinite waiting, for love; and as a woman loved and in love: with peaceful and absolute hope gestating daughters, and bravely, even for minutes gratefully, enduring the pain of their births; a woman who loved daughters and a man, would bear her daughters’ sorrow and pain for them if she could, would give up her life to keep theirs; and loved him with a passion whose deeper and quicker current through the years delighted her, gave at times a light to her eyes, a hue of rose to her cheeks; loved him, too, with the sudden and roiling passion of consolable wrath; and with daily and nightly calm, the faithful certainty that was the river she became until it expelled her to dry on its bank.
For weeks, months, seasons, she was dry, her heart was dry, save with her daughters. Their faces, their voices, their passing touch in a room or hall of the house, their ritual touch and kiss of the days’ greetings and good-byes, brought for an instant the earth back to her, and for an instant restored balance to time. Looking into the eyes of a daughter, she actually said to herself, but silently, as though reading the words even as she wrote them in her brain, her heart: I am here. Now. Then above the girl’s eyes, beyond her head and shoulders, she saw through the window the large green willow, and the darkened grass beneath its hanging branches, and the blue sky. Clearly saw those, and the hazel light of the girl’s eyes looking into her own, and listened to the sounds of the girl’s voice, giving shape to words about school or a date or a blouse.
This happened often enough with her daughters; then in that first year it began to happen with certain friends: women—one of them, then a second, then a third. Only those three, and not often with them; for most of the time she was with her friends as she was with herself, feeling as though she stood somewhere beside or behind her body, never in front of it. She listened to the sentences she spoke in a low voice that did not rise toward breaking, watched her fingers’ patience as they pinched the handle of a cup, spread to hold a cigarette, and did not tremble. In bed at night she lay beneath the weight of herself, held her body up so it would not sink, as it wanted to, into the mattress. She closed her eyes and breathed.