Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  “I admire that about you.”

  “What, dogs?”

  “No, that you can be alone so easily.”

  “I didn’t say it was easy.”

  “But you do it.”

  “Honey, was it your idea to ‘take this break’ or his?”

  Susan glanced over at her. She looked sixteen again: decisive but unsure of herself. “He doesn’t know I feel this way. He thinks I came out here to write.”

  “That man loves you.”

  Her eyes seemed to darken and she looked back out at whatever was beyond those screens. “Have you ever had it just stop, Noni?”

  “What? The feeling?”

  “Yes.”

  “The sex part or the other?”

  “The other.”

  “I did with your grandfather, but he killed it off himself.”

  “What about with Don?”

  “I didn’t like him sometimes, but I always loved him.”

  Susan seemed to go real still in her chair. She shook her head.

  “Then maybe you never did, Suzie. You always jumped in too fast, you know.” Lois flicked her cigarette ash into the seashell tray on the table beside her. She knew she’d just run right over that line, but the hell with it. If they were going to have a talk then they should damn well have one.

  Susan was staring at her. “Something’s wrong with me.” Her voice sounded small and naked. It had been years and years since her granddaughter had allowed herself to be like this in front of Lois, not since she was eleven or twelve years old. Its unexpected arrival felt like both a gift and burden.

  “Join the club, honey. I haven’t met anyone perfect yet, have you?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know self-pity when I hear it. What good will that do you? You don’t think I’ve had reasons to feel sorry for myself? Living with a man is a job, Suzie. You go to work whether you feel like it or not.”

  “You don’t think I work?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Susan reached for the bottle and filled her glass almost to the rim.

  “In my time we didn’t put a lot of stock in feelings. We just did what we had to do.”

  Susan sipped her wine, swallowing twice. She kept her eyes on the screen and the black shadows beyond. From far off, a dog barked. Something was wrong with Susan, Lois had always known that. But why wouldn’t there be? My God, she’d seen it with her own two eyes. At three. Three years old, for Christ’s sake.

  “You gonna divorce him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can I ask you why you married him, then, Suzie? I mean, you’ve been with so many. There must’ve been something different about Bobby.”

  “I’m trying to figure that out.”

  “Some things you shouldn’t have to think about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Love, you either feel it or you don’t.”

  “I thought you didn’t put stock in feelings.”

  Lois could feel the smile in Susan’s voice. “Don’t be a wiseass.” The dog kept barking. It sounded farther away now, on the trail of something. “How come you’ve never shown me any of your writings? I do read, you know.”

  “Like what?”

  “The paper. Things on the Internet. Magazines. That’s reading.”

  Susan sipped her wine. She seemed to be listening to that barking dog getting farther and farther away. “I’m not very good at it, Noni, and I never finish anything, either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why aren’t I any good?”

  “Oh, I don’t buy that. After all those books you’ve read your whole life? If someone else can write one, then so can you.”

  “I wish it were that simple.”

  “Some things are simple, honey, which doesn’t make them easy.”

  Again, another crossing of the line, though Susan didn’t seem to care. The dog had gone quiet, and she was tilting her head and looking off to the south. “You think he’s chasing something?”

  “Some fox or a bobcat, probably.” Lois stubbed out her cigarette, but she pictured an inmate from the road prison flailing through the woods, his face scratched and slick with sweat, the dog on its trail. An old fear welled up cold inside her and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d pulled her pistol from her bedside table drawer and held it.

  She reached for the wine bottle and filled her glass. “You’ll write a book someday, Suzie.”

  Susan smiled over at her. She looked sad and resigned but also determined in some way. “I’m going to load the dishwasher.”

  “Leave it.”

  “Nope, I’m going to earn my keep.” She stood and grabbed the wine bottle and Lois’s ashtray Lois hadn’t dumped in days. She was about to ask her granddaughter how long she was thinking of staying, but she didn’t want it to come out wrong so she stayed quiet. She turned and watched Susan balance the ashtray and bottle in her left hand so she could open the door with her right. In the kitchen’s light she was a tall lean shadow with spiked hair and narrow hips, her mother’s body down to her toes.

  16

  IT’s JUST after nine in the morning, the sky a deepening blue, and Daniel drives slowly down Old Route 1. Every few seconds he glances in his rear and side mirrors at the dealer’s chairs. He’d fastened them down tight, each one separated by cardboard so there’d be no scratches, and even going thirty-five they do not waver.

  He finished the final one late last night in his shed under the glare of a halogen work lamp. He’d worked in silence, just the occasional dripping of rainwater off the pines onto the roof of his shed and the hood of his Tacoma he’d parked under his lone elm. It was one of the last ones standing from that Dutch disease years ago, and there was the feeling when he’d gone to bed that some of us live long past when we’re supposed to, his guilt about this so old it had hardened into something broken and rusted but still able to cut.

  This morning, while he stood at his toilet and waited, the smell of brewing coffee filling his trailer, there had been more burning than normal and when he was finally able to summon a few drops, the water in the bowl turned the color of roses. His doctor had asked him to be on the lookout for this kind of thing and here it was and it wasn’t good and it was about time.

  A car horn goes off behind him. In his rearview he can see a blond woman in a black Range Rover, and he should probably pull to the shoulder and let her pass, but what’s her fucking hurry? He eases up on the gas till she’s right on his bumper, her pretty face contorted the way they get, then he flicks on his blinker and pulls into the asphalt lot of the fish shop where he sometimes buys himself a salmon steak he’ll later grill on his small hibachi at the foot of his trailer under the pines. But his appetite isn’t what it used to be. He hardly feels like eating anything at all these days.

  The lady in the Rover leans on her horn as she accelerates past him. Daniel sits there feeling calm yet up against the clock. There were quite a few years when he’d thought about doing it himself. That day back in Boston when he almost did. It was a Sunday in late spring, the barbershop closed, and he’d walked himself under a rising sun to the top tier of the Tobin Bridge and stared down at the swirling water far below. The bridge had no sidewalk, just a thin ribbon of concrete for past and future workers, and behind him the traffic was light but fast, their exhaust wind pulsing at his back, the speeding roll of their tires a refrain in his head: Do it or don’t do it, we don’t care. Do it or don’t do it, we don’t care.

  On both sides of the river were industrial docks and acres of empty cargo containers from all over the world. There were hangar-sized buildings and hundreds of parked cars and a massive mountain of sand for city trucks, and maybe that’s what began to give him pause, the thought that he wouldn’t see snow again. Or maybe he was just a chickenshit piece of trash who didn’t even have the balls to climb over that steel railing and jump off. That was what cons said inside when something bad was going down. Hey, somethin’s ju
mping off. And standing at that railing, there came to Daniel the flash of his first cell near the trap to the Visitors’ Room. Visiting hours had just finished, and he was sitting on his bunk when he saw Queenie and Diaz hurry by, a dark intent in their faces that made him stand and walk to his doorway and glance down toward the trap just as Mike White left it. His face was pale from all he’d ingested, one of the screws in on it because there was no way Mike could have swallowed so many coke balloons in Visiting in any other way. He was famous for it, this skinny kid from Bunker Hill who would shit out and clean fifteen or sixteen of them for the Charlestown boys, but now Queenie walked up and threw a right into Mike’s face, dropping him, and Diaz pulled a shank and straddled White and tore open White’s shirt and stabbed him in the abdomen, ripping upward, Queenie reaching into White’s gut and yanking out as many bloody balloons as he could, stuffing them into his pockets, Mike lying there with his mouth open, staring up at the tiers he could no longer see.

  “Jesus saves, brother.” It’s what Mike White said all the time, the way others said, “How’s it hanging?” or “Catch you later.” Jesus saves, but of course Jesus did not save Mike. Nor did his “father,” and Daniel had always had little patience for anyone who believed otherwise. No, each of us gets spit out into a life as random as rushing gutter water after a long rain nobody saw coming, and you should count yourself lucky if you land someplace dry at all, no matter how small and dirty that place may be.

  But he was still here, wasn’t he? Alive on that bridge on that Sunday morning? He had no right to be, he knew that. Nor had he any right to be living back on the outside. But he was on the outside, the river below glinting the morning sun back at him, the smells of engine exhaust and rusted steel and pigeon shit, the men and women behind the wheels of those rushing cars at his back maybe driving off to church somewhere but ignoring the poor bastard at the railing only feet away. I’m still here, motherfuckers. I’m still here. And so it was his hatred of his life that made him stay.

  But now he has grown to like his life too much—his small caning business, the trailer he owns under the pines, his shop and fenced-in yard and driving old people around and listening to books on tape till late into the night. The truth is he’s ashamed he ever went to a doctor in the first place. His time was coming for him, and he went running. But if he’s stand-up, he’ll do the right thing and he’ll let his body do to him what it aims to do because there’s still enough time to drive south, and there’s still enough time to deliver and get paid for these eight Victorian chairs strapped into the bed of his truck.

  Daniel waits for the traffic to clear, then he pulls slowly back out onto Route 1. He picks up speed and passes the tattoo parlor and auto body shop, a lone gull hovering over the salt marshes and dropping out of sight.

  THE DEALER’S shop is in an old warehouse on the river, its parking lot half asphalt, half rain-rutted gravel, and Daniel stays on the asphalt as he backs his Tacoma slowly into the bay. The dealer steps out of his small office. He’s nearly as wide as he is tall, his white beard needing a trim at the throat and neck, his pipe stem sticking out the front pocket of his work shirt. Daniel unhooks the last of the bungee cords, and the dealer takes the first two chairs from Daniel and looks over the rest. “You do good work, Ahearn.”

  Daniel says nothing, just climbs up into the bed of his Tacoma and starts setting the rest of the chairs onto the tailgate for the dealer to set down next to the others.

  “Just sold that rattan you did for me.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Got a set of split rails coming in. You good with Danish?”

  “I’ve done it.” Daniel’s not sure he has, but there’s the library and the Internet and that’s all he’ll need.

  “This week?”

  “Can’t. I’m going on a trip.” He feels as if he’s just told a lie, though he has not. His work glasses dangle from his neck, and there are the smells of fresh cane and varnish.

  “How long?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “A week? A month?”

  “The first one.”

  The dealer writes him a check and tells him he’ll be in touch, and Daniel climbs into his Tacoma and drives out of the warehouse into the sun. At Water Street, he waits for a city truck to rumble by, then he turns right and follows it deeper into downtown Port City, both windows cracked, the dealer’s check in his front shirt pocket. Daniel keeps hearing what he told him back there in his cool, dim warehouse. Can’t. I’m going on a trip.

  Now that these words were said out loud, they seem like a declaration that both binds him and lets him go. Or maybe it was that blood in his toilet water early this morning, or that he has finished his letter to his daughter.

  At the teller counter of the bank, Daniel asks a young woman whose nameplate says Laura to give him his checking balance too. She nods at him and smiles and taps her keyboard as quickly as if she were part of the machine herself. She smiles automatically at him and pushes toward him his blue deposit slip, Daniel thanking her and walking outside into the sunlight. For years that was the kind of smile he’d taken all he could from. It came from bank tellers like that young Laura. It came from waitresses and middle-aged women behind convenience store registers; it came from busy mothers on the streets of Port City and the women who worked at his library and old women through the Council on Aging like Elaine Muir and a few others. Those brief flashes of warmth, sincere or not, they were better than nothing ever again, and he took them in like air through a straw. But, standing here on the sidewalk and pulling on his slightly bent work glasses to read his deposit slip, there comes a tilting, in-between feeling that those years are ending, that things are about to get better or worse and in no particular order.

  $12,647.43.

  The trailer and land are paid off. But who knows how long he’ll be gone? He should pay the next quarter’s property taxes ahead of schedule, then throw some extra to the electric company, water, and propane too.

  And he should take some out to give to Susan, if she’ll take it. If she’ll even see him.

  A man and woman are laughing. Daniel peers over his glasses across the street. They’re standing in front of the Starbucks, the man in a shirt and tie, the woman in blue jeans and a light sweater, a pocketbook over her shoulder. The man holds a cup of coffee and leather satchel, and he’s clearly making time with this woman, but he also looks like a lawyer and why hadn’t Daniel given that any thought before? A will. He needs to put into writing where his property should go.

  A burning weight has dropped into his groin, and he needs to find a damn toilet.

  A Port City cruiser drives slowly past. The cop is looking straight ahead and not even glancing in his direction. Daniel takes this as an encouraging sign, and he stuffs his deposit slip into his shirt pocket, lets his work glasses drop back around his neck, and crosses the street for the lawyer and the pretty woman and a piss in a coffee shop toilet bowl he will not look into or even think much about.

  17

  TO SIT alone in the empty house of your youth, it was like having died years earlier and nobody remembered you any longer. After Lois drove off to the shop, Susan dumped her grandmother’s hazelnut and brewed some dark roast and carried a cup up to her air-conditioned bedroom. Outside her window the sky was gray, the air thick and heavy. Earlier, she’d eaten yogurt on the screened porch while Noni drank her sweetened coffee and smoked her Carltons and told her a dream she’d had about her old dog Lilly.

  “She was carrying a gun in her mouth and she dropped it at my feet. Strange, huh?”

  Susan nodded, though she hadn’t told her her own dream. She and Gustavo were making love again. In the dream she was no longer sixteen but forty-three and Gustavo was also Bobby with Phil Bradford’s gray tufts of chest hair, this man who was three men. She opened the new file on her laptop. She sipped her coffee and began to read:

  My father’s parole officer had an office above a shoe store in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The
street was a wide two-lane of sparse traffic, cars parked in front of parking meters built in the 1950s, and the buildings on both sides were made of the same red brick as the mills along the river.

  There was her long description of the town and her sitting at the window seat of that greasy spoon for two days, of boys and men staring at her, her growing hatred of them, and then the moment she finally saw him, stepping off the curb into the street, and his arms hung still, or moved but did not move much, and she could smell fried clams and the ocean and she knew.

  She did not want to read the rest, but she did anyway, quickly, and it was like parting a cut in your skin with two fingers and peering inside. She scrolled to the last line.

  she had been carried to where she had never before allowed herself to go: the final moment of her mother’s suffering.

  No, there was so much more to this. Other things behind this and before it. She had started too late. She needed to go back. Susan began to see the palm trees of her campus, the way the sunlight made them look so green, even when they were dry.

  My college senior year was my time of two Dannys.

  I was living off campus with my friend Andrea then. We were renting a condo across the street from another complex where one of the Gainesville Five had been murdered. She was a girl my age, and after raping her, the killer, Danny Rolling, made her kneel on the floor of the bathroom and he stabbed her in the back and then he cut off her head.

  Those murders were all anyone talked about. A thousand students left the campus and over seven hundred never came back. There were counselors everywhere, and professors encouraged us to talk about it in class, and there were symposiums on the causes of violence, on serial killers, on violence against girls and women, in particular. A lot of the boys offered to walk us wherever we wanted to go, though it became just another way to get into our pants.

  I never took any of them up on walking me home. I was too angry to be scared.