Something Is Out There

by Richard Bausch

  Work on the boat takes up the hour before dinner. The family moves through the shade of the lawn in the sound of it.

  Finally their mother shakes her head and makes her slow way into the house, to sit with Jenny and play gin rummy. Walker tolerates Sean’s teasing and banters with him, not really attending to what is said, feeling only annoyance with the other’s constant chatter. Sometimes they toss a baseball back and forth. Walker wonders if Jenny can see him from the window. Now and then Max joins in the talk—that is, when he’s not rattled and aggravated, trying, he says, to focus on the work. He allows Walker only a boy’s tasks, really: holding tools and fetching things.

  Jenny serves the evening meal out in the yard, and they all sit in the striped shade of the unfinished boat, and Walker attempts to see past her, around her, away from her. He knows that this thing he’s struggling with is not a crush. This is a passion so deep it has taken everything else out of him; it feels like a form of starvation—or, no, a form of drowning. Something wells up in his spirit, and leaves him inwardly gasping. She talks about trying to sleep in the ruckus at night, Max with his boat, his manic dream of maritime riches, the floodlights pouring in the window, her weekends and evenings sacrificed to this set of ribs on scaffolding. Her husband treats the talk as a form of mockery. Nothing gets through to him. It occurs to Walker that Max has one obsession and he, Walker, has his. Walker desires to set the older man straight, and then, like part of the same thought, hopes that Max will never get it and that Jenny’s discontent will grow. This thought makes him sorry and sick inside.

  Most days now, after Sean gets home from school, Walker will play a little distracted basketball with him, and then leave him with their mother and, when there’s no job site to go to, will drive over to the park or into the city center to walk around, and finally he ends up at Max’s. He tells his mother and his younger brother that it’s to help with the boat. Sometimes he can find a way to believe it himself: a brother is supposed to be there for a brother.

  “They’re gonna get tired of seeing you,” his mother says. “They are a married c-couple you know.”

  “I’m helping out. You want me to stay here?”

  “They both work all day. They n-need time alone.”

  “I’ll stay here if you want me to. I won’t go anywhere at all.”

  “I’m t-talking about what they might want. Stop it.”

  “They’re fine with me coming over. Max says he wants my help.”

  “Let’s hope—so.” She manages well enough on the cane, and her speech, which was slightly damaged by the stroke, is getting better fast. She’s a lady who has little tolerance for weakness, even in herself. Having lived through a bad marriage to a mentally unstable, increasingly alcoholic, and sporadically violent husband, and having raised the boys mostly alone, she’s got a streak of iron in her. Max, who is fourteen years older than Walker, remembers a lot of what went on before the old man died. More than he likes. He understands Minnie, and admires her, and he calls her by her first name, as if they are old friends rather than mother and son.

  Minnie would side with Max.

  Walker keeps having this thought, while trying not to think at all.

  Max and Jenny have been married nine years. Sean, who just turned fifteen, doesn’t really remember them any other way. Walker can recall the years of their going back and forth, the two early miscarriages, several of the bad fights, and a trial separation, when Jenny took a bus to Florida to be with her parents for part of a winter, trying to deal with the fact that she was still childless and that her husband wasn’t the romantic she’d thought he was. This is how she has recently described it to Minnie and Walker, casually, standing in the kitchen with a glass of orange juice in her hand and gazing out the window at Max working on the boat.

  One afternoon Walker goes over to help Max with some hand-sanding, and Jenny comes home early from her job at the antiques shop. Walker hears the car, and keeps his eyes fixed on the sandpaper under the heel of his hand. She stays in the house for a time, and then comes to the door and calls out: “I need something, Max.”

  “Put me down for tonight,” Max says.

  “Funny. And you wish.”

  “Go see what she wants,” he says to Walker.

  She watches Walker approach, and holds the door open for him. “I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the effing boat,” she says.

  He goes into the house, turns, and waits. She leans out the door and says, “Hey Max, did I tell you I’m running away with Walker?”

  “Good,” he calls. “Tell him to leave the truck.”

  She slams the door and comes by Walker, who follows her through the kitchen. He sees her supple, curved, solid shape under the lime-green skirt and white blouse. They cross through the small parlor, with its pictures of Jenny’s family on the walls and its magazine baskets, three of them ranked next to one another in a row under the one window, stuffed with issues of O and Redbook. She stops at the entrance to the living room and puts her forehead softly against the door frame, holding on there. “Oh, hell,” she murmurs, and then straightens and gives him a weak little sad-eyed smile. He imagines putting his arms around her. Then he hears Max drop something outside, wood clattering against wood, and everything seems to collapse inside him. He’s stripped clean under the skin, raw and stinging.

  “Jenny?” he says. “Oh, God.”

  She says, in almost the exact same instant: “Boy, I’m tired.”

  He waits.

  She says. “Did you say, Oh, God? What’s going on, Walker?”

  “Can I do something, Jenny?”

  “Something wrong?” she says.

  “Can I do anything for you,” he gets out.

  “Tell me I’ll get through this boat business. It’s killing me.”

  He takes her gingerly by the elbow, feeling despondent and false. “You okay?”

  “I’m not great,” she says, then lightly, unmindfully, casually pats his shoulder. “I’m very, very tired.” She leads him to the dining room, the hutch, and indicates a Crock-Pot on the top shelf.

  He carries it back into the kitchen for her.

  “Coming back for dinner?” she says.

  “Mom said she wants to cook tonight. Wants me to be there.”

  “Oh.” Jenny bows her head slightly, disappointed or simply, as she says, tired. Her eyelashes are so long and dark. “Well, I guess I’ll go to bed and read, then.” She moves one strand of hair away from her forehead, and smiles, as if it costs her. “See you tomorrow?”

  “I think Max is out of his mind,” he tells her, just able to breathe the words out. “Staying out there with you in here.”

  Now it will happen, he thinks.

  But she steps offhandedly, face turned to one side, into his arms; the embrace is sisterly, like all the others. Still, he holds her for a second longer, saying nothing, feeling her pull back. He breathes in the scent of her hair, the sunscreen on her neck and shoulders, his hand wide on the small of her back. Finally he lets go and she dismisses him, almost brushing him away with her hands, busying herself with the dinner. “Tomorrow, then. There’ll be barbecue left over.”

  “Good,” he starts to say. But his voice catches, and he makes his way out of there.

  Night, and sleeplessness. Ablaze inside. Fever. Fright. He drowses, and comes out of it with a start, wide-eyed, breath-caught, sick. The ordinary objects in the room seem to expand, and his mind presents them to him as grotesque twisted shapes, though they are perversely only themselves, giving forth nothing but their plainness: dresser, lamp, lamp shade, alarm clock, books, the half-open door, the sliver of light leading into the hall. He hears Sean, one room away, shifting and turning in his bed, and he hears his mother’s late-night television.

  He closes his eyes and sees Jenny standing with him in the kitchen of his brother’s house.

  He tries to make his mind go elsewhere, but it keeps showing him her face, with those eyes—that look, the something confiding i
n it, yearning. I’m his brother, he says to himself. I’m his goddamned brother. But she’s closer to my age than his. She’s only four years older. Stop this. Stop it.

  The slow hours of the night pass this way, and if he sleeps at all he is aware of it only as a kind of stupor, waiting for the real thing or some semblance of it, something like rest—a lull that will make him sink past the constant play of her image across his mind, and stop the sudden waking, those repeated stirrings, looking at the strangeness of what he knows, to his horror, is nothing more than a plain, quiet bedroom at night.

  • • •

  His own brief romantic history is complicated. He’s had several girlfriends, none of whom stayed long, and he was engaged to one, Milly Sparks, a couple of years ago. Milly Sparks had been a friend of the family, the youngest daughter of Minnie’s best school chum, and she changed her mind the day before the planned wedding, with several members of her far-flung family having spent considerable sums of money gathering from distances.

  She was institutionalized later in the summer—disambiguation, psychosis, schizophrenia of the delusional variety. Walker visited her in the hospital, and her ravings seemed so classically nutty that he found himself wondering if she was staging them for his benefit. But no, she was gone, believing her visions utterly and simply, stridently, with the confidence of a child. Minnie said it wasn’t much different from her own history with his father, though, she said with some relish, having survived it all, he was never diagnosed as anything but a drunk.

  They do not, any of them, speak of Milly Sparks anymore. And Walker sometimes senses the others being careful not to mention her in their talk when he’s present.

  He never thinks of Milly Sparks. Not ever.

  Saturday morning he rises from the badness of the night, puts on the clothes he wore the day before, steps out in the hall, and looks at Sean in his cluttered little room. Sean’s still asleep, blankets tangled around him like something tying him down, sun pouring on him through his window. Walker gazes at the boy, envying his ability to sleep through anything. Then he walks into the living room, to the screen door that looks out onto the little front porch. His mother’s sitting on the top step there, sipping coffee and watching the trucks crossing the bridge to Arkansas. There’s clean, clear light up high over that way, where the sun is just hitting the spars of the bridge. Arkansas is a strip of bare trees and dirt yonder, across the far, gray running of the Mississippi in the early morning mist. He opens the door, and it protests slightly.

  “You want b-breakfast?” she says without looking back.

  He lets the door slap to. “Not hungry,” he says.

  “You got a—l-lot on your mind.”

  He steps below her and sits on the bottom step, reaches and pulls a stalk of knife grass from the lawn. He plays with the whitening green blade, stretching it and looking at the color of it in the light.

  “Talk to me, son.”

  “Pretty morning.”

  “I’m not t-talking about the-the gu-goddamn weather.”

  “Okay, then what are you talking about, Ma?”

  “You been going around here like a—z-zombie. What’s got h-hold of you?”

  “Well, damn. You tell me. Because I don’t have a clue.”

  She sighs and leans back. “Ok-kay. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. I’m fine. I feel fine.”

  “Half the time y-you don’t know what day it is.”

  “That’s not a sign of anything, is it?” He has the upsetting thought that Jenny has gleaned something, too, from watching him. “Have you been talking to somebody?”

  “Who?”

  He shrugs exaggeratedly, meaning it to be sardonic. “I wouldn’t know that.”

  “N-nobody.”

  “Well, you’re imagining things, I guess.”

  “Don’t insult me, boy.” Her gaze is direct and cold. “You got something on your mind y-you don’t want to t-talk about. That’s fine. But don’t—lie to me about it. I ain’t s-stupid.”

  He gets up and walks past her to the door. The telephone is ringing in the house. “It’s personal,” he says. “So can we please drop it?”

  “Like it’s r-radioactive,” his mother says.

  It’s Max on the phone. “Can you pick Jenny up at the dealership? She took the car in there to get it inspected and they found a problem with the water pump. Says it’ll take at least two hours and that she’ll wait for it, because she knows I don’t want to stop work on the boat. I hung up before I realized I could call you. You don’t mind, do you, man? I mean, I can’t do anything anyway unless you drive the truck over here. And she’s sitting there with two hours’ dead time. You’re not doing anything right this minute, are you?”

  “Sean and I were going to go play ball in a while. And I got a call about a carpentry job. Supposed to go over there and talk about it.”

  “Big job?”

  “Apartment complex. Twenty stories high. Swimming pool on the roof. Helicopter pad for emergencies. Twelve billion dollars for the oak floors and framing alone and more than that for all the roofing and wiring and painting. You working on the boat today or coming with me?”

  “We’re millionaires.”

  “Just about. You coming?”

  “How ’bout you tell me what it really is.”

  “Kitchen cabinets. And maybe knocking a wall out. If we get the bid.”

  “I’m coming with you—so please pick Jenny up. I don’t want to interrupt things now. She’ll be waiting for the car in the maintenance and repair shop.”

  “I told Sean I’d take him to play ball.”

  “You’ll have time for that,” Max says. “Come on—it’s for a good cause.” This has been his phrase over the past year, to excuse himself. “I can’t keep track of the time here, anyway,” he adds.

  “I’ll be there. But I’ve got to shower and dress.” He hangs up. It’s fifteen minutes to nine. His mother has gone out into the little garden in back. He sees her there from his bedroom window. She’s put on a big floppy cloth hat. She bends, with the help of her cane, and pulls a weed out, then straightens and gazes toward the pond on the other side of the road. Lately, all her movements have this faintly pensive feature, as though she’s trying distrustfully to commit everything to memory. Often, in midmotion, she pauses, as if listening for a sound she can’t be certain she heard. Walker watches her awhile, and then he hears his little brother moving around in the other room. He gets out of his clothes, showers, dresses, makes his bed, puts his dirty clothes in the hamper in the hall. In the kitchen, he makes coffee, and takes it out on the front porch, where he finds Sean sitting on the top step, tying his tennis shoes.

  “Don’t tell me,” Sean says. “You have to go over there.”

  “I have to pick Jenny up in town.” Walker rejects the enticement of this chance to be alone with Jenny. “You want to ride along?”

  “Whatever.”

  Their mother comes around the house from the garden, and as she nears them, Walker tells her where he and the boy are going.

  “Well, tell them—I said ‘H-hey.’”

  He finishes the coffee, and she walks over and takes the empty cup from him. Habit. Living at home is hard sometimes.

  He taps the horn as they make the turn out of the drive, and Sean waves to her from the back window. The morning has remained cool and bright, with little breezes and the scent of new grass and flowers in the air. Walker leaves the windows open. His younger brother climbs into the well behind the front seat, lying back on his neck, wrapping weighted leather bands around his wrists: he’s readying himself for shooting baskets. The bands will improve his strength; he wears the same sort of thing around both ankles. He’s exactly five feet tall, and hopes to grow much taller, though Walker and Max have both told him he probably won’t, that he’ll have to learn to take advantage of being small. It’s Max who got all the size and strength in the family—the only son to inherit those g
enes of their father.

  “I’ve got an idea,” the boy says, concentrating on getting his wrist wrapped tight. “Let’s go over to Max’s tonight and burn the thing to the ground.”

  “You’re just mad because we’re picking Jenny up instead of playing ball.”

  “You’d tell Max to pick her up himself if it wasn’t for Jenny. You like being around Jenny.”

  “Okay, maybe. Yeah. I like her. But if I didn’t like her I’d still do it for a brother. You’re a brother, and as a brother I’m suggesting that you shut your stupid mouth.”

  Sean concentrates on the wrist bands.

  “Okay, little bro?”

  “Okay,” he says. “Take it easy. I think she’s hot, too. God.”

  In Midtown, there’s a flea market going on, and traffic is slow. They wait behind a line of cars going up past the courthouse. The traffic moves, and they travel forward a few feet. The air smells of exhaust. Everything is stopped again. Sean gets to his knees, folds his arms on the seat back, and rests his chin on his forearms. “We’re gonna be late.”

  “Well, then we’ll be late,” Walker says.

  “You don’t have to be mad at me anymore.”

  “Quit breathing down my neck,” Walker says.

  A little later, Sean says, “You do think Jenny’s hot, though.”

  “Yeah,” Walker tells him. “And? You? What’re you telling me?”

  “You know.”

  “Hey,” Walker turns to glare at him. “If you think you’ve got a handle on something why don’t you shake it and see what happens?”

  Two blocks before they reach the dealership, they see her.

  She’s talking to a man in jeans and a cowboy hat and boots. They’re standing by a small red car. “Get a load of Disco Bill,” Sean says, as Walker slows the truck.

  Jenny is clearly very surprised, even upset, to see them. She moves quickly away from the man, who stands there motionless, watching them pull up in the truck.

  Walker reaches over and opens the passenger side door. She glances back at the cowboy and then gets in.