“I guess we’d better go home, Mike,” William Krause said.
Michael thought: But why should I have to? I will find Eva (with her sleeves rolled up, scouring a chipped bidet in a room of mildewed wallpaper). I will find another Eva, then; there are plenty of Evas around.
“Come on, Mike. Show me the way to go home.”
“Okay, Bill,” Michael said.
“I’m tired and I want to go to bed,” William Krause said, half-singing the words, his eyebrows raised sadly but humorously. “Us old married men got to face the music.”
Suddenly Michael despised the man, and as he spoke his voice took on a hard sound he hadn’t heard in it for years. “Face the music,” he said. Did he see a change in the dull eyes across the table? Yes, maybe there was a glint of answer, hard and wary. But he thought, So what? If the man wants to be a rug, a worm…He went on, probing a little: “So we’ll crawl back.”
But William Krause was not too easily made angry. He said, “I hope we don’t have to crawl, Mike. I can still walk, I think.” Trying to be funny.
Michael could feel the slightest part of a sneer on his own face—a tightness in his nostrils.
“Have another drink, then,” William Krause said, “but I’m afraid I’ve had it for tonight.”
“You’ve had it,” Michael said, and when he looked up at the big man it was like that dream in which you are looking at a painting, a portrait, and suddenly your bowels turn cold because the painted eyes are not really paint, they are deep and real.
“Listen to me, boy,” William Krause said in a clear, steady voice. “Don’t try to shit on me in any way. You ain’t big enough yet.” He looked steadily at Michael for a moment, observing him without any worry or fear at all, and Michael knew it. “I ain’t crawling back to my wife, but I would if I had to, and it wouldn’t make me small.”
Suddenly he laughed out loud, reached across the table, and hit Michael playfully on the shoulder. “Mike, let’s have another drink! Christ, you can carry me home!”
Michael wanted to answer the man’s forgiveness, to recognize his friendship, but he was in that frozen state, compounded of meanness and embarrassment, where he didn’t know how to say the words he knew he should say. And it didn’t help to know that William Krause knew it all, saw him clear through and pretended that the words of recognition had been spoken.
They did have another drink, paid, and left the Cujas. The air was still damp and cold, and as they started down toward the river William Krause put his big arm around Michael’s shoulder for a moment and said, “Hell, Mike. Don’t you think she knows why you can’t hit a cop?”
“I don’t know, Bill.”
William Krause laughed. “God bless ’em!” he said, and now he seemed very happy to be going back. He hummed as he walked along, his overcoat open. “Goddam, look at that pot! ” he said, patting his middle. “I’ve plainly got to lose some weight.”
“I could never explain it to her,” Michael said.
“Sure, sure. You can’t explain nothing to a woman, Mike. If it gets to the point where you have to explain, you’re licked.”
When they reached the hotel the elevator had been turned off for the night, and they walked up the narrow stairs, William Krause ahead, his powerful haunches slowly but surely moving, his broad back solid, his brown overcoat hooked over his shoulder by a finger, as a boy does it.
They came to William Krause’s door. “Goddam, look at that key,” he said, taking the big brass key from his pocket. “It’s a deadly weapon. It’s a goddam blunt instrument.”
“Good night, Bill,” Michael said.
“Good luck, Mike.” William Krause grinned as he felt around for the keyhole, and Michael went on alone down the dark hall toward his own room, where she would be waiting.
At the door he stopped. By the transom he could see that the light was on, and why should he have to prove himself? Did he really have a case after all? There was the quiet light above the door, waiting, and he must go in. But he paused, and he was afraid. It was as though he were about to be admitted to a mystery he had long postponed, and it would be terribly painful at first. The first plunge, the first breath. He unlocked the door and went in.
There had been the soft implosion of a car door’s closing, than a stirring elsewhere in the house. The scene at the window had gone to darkness, though the snow was still so white in the mind’s eye that it seemed phosphorescent, the apple trees and the pines soft black upon its diminished glow.
In his memory were the ranks of the dead or of the lost to him—Eva, Jewell, Jean the Czech, Bill and Hannah Krause, his own parents and grandparents. Even his children, because they were no longer children, and lived elsewhere.
He had decided once, long ago, that only in Leah, where he was born, he might find a sense of continuance—as if place could ever work that way. That had been a choice. One always had choices—like the choice of so many of his generation, and the next, and the next, to divorce and move on.
Soon a woman would enter the paneled doorway there, to the right of the fireplace column. What woman would it be, Michael? If his younger half were here, that creature of his blood, what sort of woman would he expect to see in the doorway? He might not be surprised that she would have upon her graceful bones the slight, sure indications of age. He might, however, think it somewhat strange that, given their temperaments, they were still together, the orphan and his wife.
All Trades, Their Tackle and Trim
“SUPPOSE YOU get shot?” she said.
He just grinned and sat there picking little brownish pieces of Kleenex out of his rifle, from the silvery place where it slid open. It looked clean enough to her, but the Kleenex kept turning brown.
“I should have got some patches, dammit. Hell of a note—Kleenex on a rifle.”
“I mean, suppose you get killed?”
“So I get killed. You get the insurance.”
“What insurance? Ten thousand dollars? I’m supposed to put your child through college, not to mention grammar and high school, on that?”
“It’ll take care of my funeral, anyway,” he said.
“If it weren’t a GI policy you probably wouldn’t have any at all.” She knew this wasn’t true; somehow he always made her exaggerate, and then he had the advantage.
“Lucky you,” he said. Splick, splack, went the rifle bolt. “Now I put some clean dirt back on. Cold tomorrow, so I’ve got to use powdered graphite.” His big fingers delicately tapped some black dust out of a little plastic tube.
“I don’t care what you use.”
“If I used oil the cold might gum it up.”
“I hope it does,” she said.
He just grinned some more and went on feeling the black metal, smoothing down the barrel with his hands. Then he threw the rifle to his shoulder, sighted, his whole body suddenly tight, and pulled the trigger. “Blam!” he said, and she jumped a little bit. Just a slight little jump in her chair, but she knew he saw it.
“I’m using the hundred-and-ten-grain bullet,” he said. “It’s very light for the thirty-ought-six, so it goes three thousand, four hundred and twenty feet per second, muzzle velocity, which means that in one second it’s gone nearly two-thirds of a mile.”
“Why should I listen?” she asked.
“Hell, you’ve got a great imagination. I thought you’d be interested.”
“I told you I wasn’t,” she said. She ought to get up and leave, but she hadn’t anyplace to go. She might go up to the bedroom, but what could she do there?
“So I should get mad?” he said.
“You’re completely irresponsible,” she said. She had the sinking feeling that she’d said this no more than a minute ago. And of course it never worked with him, anyway.
“I just thought you ought to know what’ll happen tomorrow when I pull the trigger.”
He leaned back in his chair, hefted his rifle with one hand, and looked at it with a satisfied, almost gloating expression. “Ma
nnlicher-Schoenauer—what a little beauty! Sometimes I wonder how it can be so accurate with only a twenty-inch barrel.” He was examining a small blemish on its stock. He took the gun up in both hands and rubbed the stock alongside his nose. “You’d be surprised how much good oil you’ve got on the side of your nose,” he said, and she could see where the grain of the stock shone a little brighter.
“Ugh,” she said, and he just smiled and went on feeling his rifle. Tomorrow’s equipment lay on the table between them—his dark cartridge belt with the leather pouches and loops for shells, his bone-handled knife he so often and so lovingly sharpened on his oilstone, his pistol in its thick leather holster; everything had been smoothed down and softened by his hands. She felt sometimes that all the things of his life were too perfect and satisfying. All of his possessions had to be of the best quality, and he treated each one with such loving care. With this thought she had a pang of jealousy, which changed at once into anger. She was better than he. She could conceive of what was true and good; yet she could never organize the truth so that it would strike him.
“Kill, kill, kill,” she said bitterly.
“I’ve been known to miss,” he said, and this was one of his infuriating tricks—that his ironic modesty disorganized all her plans.
It wasn’t that she was alone; among their social equals he was in the minority, with his murderous knives and guns. His main companions were the high school janitor and the mechanic who fixed the machines in the Laundromat, and when they came to the house they were either coming or going, and sat in the kitchen having drinks like bourbon and ginger ale in juice glasses, with their slimy fish or dead birds oozing on the drainboard of the sink. Once they’d brought back a live mallard and put it on the table, where it stood swaying. They said they thought it might live, and it stood there, its beautiful green head calm, its intelligent brown eyes watching. Somewhere beneath its smooth feathers a shotgun pellet had cut some string, some nerve of flight. She’d watched it in horror; with its duck’s head, its flat bill, and gaudy color it should have seemed alien, but it did not. It seemed the perfection of intelligence and dignity, and it watched her with unspeakable knowledge. In a few minutes it settled quietly to the table and died. “Oh, that’s too bad,” he’d said as he stroked the smooth feathers. “What a beautiful bird.”
He put his rifle carefully across two place mats and picked his knife out of its sheath. “All I want tomorrow is one tender little buck,” he said. “Old Billy can have his big rack he’s always talking about. That one I got two years ago, remember? You couldn’t cut the gravy.”
“I’d think you’d had enough of killing, by now,” she said.
“Nope, not yet.”
“Why do you want to do it? You must know how it feels to be shot. You’ve got that ugly little hole in your leg.”
“Oh, hell,” he said, smiling. “That’s nothing. That was a military bullet. Also, it was pretty well spent. A sporting bullet like this…” He undid a pouch on the belt and pushed a shiny brass-and-copper-colored shell out of its loop. “This little copper thing here is the bullet. This little mother would’ve taken my leg off like a cleaver.”
She wondered where she could go not to hear this any longer, but she couldn’t think of a place she wanted to go. She’d married him when she was eighteen, and now, at twenty-six, she had begun to think about the world. He didn’t seem to mind her League of Women Voters nights, her discussion groups; but why, back then, when she had been so young and vain, had he seemed so perfect, so much more than adequate? He was sandy-colored, strong and big. He was as clean and warm as a great piece of toast. Mild, yet always knowing how to get what he wanted—and that seemed so important in a man.
“A military bullet isn’t meant to kill outright,” he said. “It’s solid, and makes a nice, clean hole. Of course, a certain amount of hydraulic rupture occurs if it’s going anywhere near muzzle velocity. But a wounded man’s a lot more bother to the enemy than a dead man. It’s only logic. You take this bullet, though…” He held the shiny brass-and-copper thing upright, and pinched the copper tip as he pointed it at her. “It’s meant to kill, so it’s quite complicated inside. See this little bit of lead bared at the tip? And see these little splits down the sides, here? These cause it to expand nearly as big as a quarter, and when it does! They developed these things experimenting on gelatin and flesh…”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Why do you do this?”
“Do what? If you’re going to talk about my getting shot, or possibly shooting somebody, you ought to know something about it.”
“Oh, you know so much!” she said. “That’s what we got when the Mamoulians and the Wilsons were here.”
He laughed, and his laugh seemed so innocent she wondered for a moment if it really weren’t.
“The Reverend got sort of shook, didn’t he?” he said.
She felt her useless anger again. The Reverend Mamoulian, that good man, had turned nervous and pale. For frightening moment she had been able to see each stub of a whisker on his thin face, and he spilled a little of his martini onto his clean, white fingers. They had been talking in doleful voices about the violence, the dark and hateful side of our society, and the bill to prohibit the sale of mail-order guns, so that no psychotic like Oswald could get hold of one, and he’d said that Oswald had used the wrong bullet, and if he’d been Oswald he would have got Connally, too, and of course he wouldn’t have needed that third shot. That head shot was just goddam lucky.
George Mamoulian had just come back from Arlington, Virginia, where he’d participated in a voter registration drive, and he told them about it in a slightly tremulous voice, as though, right here in her house, he was in the presence of enemies. A man had followed him for blocks, calling him “nigger lover” and every filthy thing. But even as he told them this he was unsure of himself, as though he expected the wrong response. It was a terrible evening, and all because of him. He’d sat there, alert and interested, but somehow bigger and firmer and redder than all the rest of them, so that they all felt frail, and their hopes felt frail, too. He’d insisted upon telling them about the fifty million rifles left over from World War II, and how modern ammunition could stay fresh for decades. That law was ridiculous, he’d told them; maybe they ought to work for a law against the Marine Corps; that was where Oswald learned to point a rifle. He didn’t seem to mind at all when they were silent, or when Maude Wilson got terribly upset and called his hunting “atavistic.” “That’s right!” he’d said, pleased. Though she wasn’t certain he knew the meaning of the word.
The Mamoulians and the Wilsons left early, and she’d been so sick and angry she didn’t speak to him at all that night. He hadn’t seemed to notice.
He put his knife back into the sheath and grinned at her. She had married this man. Somehow she had married him, and what could she say? He had never been any different.
He looked at his watch. “Early up tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve got a date at dawn with a husky little buck. Let’s go to bed.”
“It’s only eight-thirty,” she said. When she looked up he was grinning at her, and as he came around the table she saw reflected in his straightforward gaze the beauty and value she must once have wanted him to see.
“I’m not your toy,” she said as coldly as she could. “I’m not a thing. I’ve got a mind!”
“You don’t think I’d have married an idiot, do you?” he said, and at her waist she felt, even before he reached for her, the warm prints of his admiring hands.
Voices
ON A whim, Richard Adgate’s wife, Nora, bought a cordless telephone, which you could supposedly carry seven hundred feet away from its base station inside the house. The idea was that you could take it to the garden, or to the bathroom, or out to the mailbox, and if someone called, there you were.
It hung upon a little white box when it was recharging, with a muted green indicator to say that all was well. But it often made strange yelps and squeaks. “Quippy quippy quip
py,” it would say all by itself in the dark room. “Queep, queep. ” When it legitimately rang, it was not a ring at all, but a soft yowl, like a cat one could hear behind the brash, simultaneous ringing of the other two phones in the house—one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom upstairs. Sometimes, when it muttered to itself and he picked it up, he could hear voices that seemed to come from far away: a woman’s calm voice saying, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe Thursday if the alternator thing gets fixed. Of course Charlie can’t because of Lillian.” Or another woman, her excited happiness plain: “Isn’t it nice? We’re going to Rumling, after all these years!” He wanted to ask where Rumling was, and why it was so marvelous, but he couldn’t break into the mysterious ordinary flow of those other lives.
After a while they exchanged that phone for another with a different wavelength; the new one only queeped once in a while, and had no other voices. It was on the new one that he received a call from Sun City, Arizona, from one of his mother’s nurse’s aides, who said that his mother could no longer make out checks for her nursing care. Actually the rules of the Garden Residential Hotel, where she lived, forbade invalids who needed such care, but Joyce, the manager, was kind, and knew his mother’s resistance to the idea of a nursing home.
They knew she had broken her leg, and had been in the hospital, and was now back at the Garden, because she had called and told them these things, sounding on the telephone whatever way she decided that she wanted to sound, and evidently she had wanted to sound competent and in control. They didn’t know that her fingers no longer had the strength to write, and that the money left her by her husband was quickly running out. The nursing care alone was costing more than a thousand dollars a week.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 20
