by Ann Beattie
“Why do you always want to be talking violence?” Bob Nails’s mother says to his father. “If you talked nicer it would be nicer for Bobby to be home.”
Before that, Bob Nails couldn’t really give her a reason for being at the Paraters’ all the time. Now he had one, so when his mother asked why he couldn’t spend more time at home, he said his father was always talking about killing people and blowing things up and he didn’t want to hear it. His mother nodded sadly. She only got mad once, when Bob Nails and Jeannie drove to another town and spent the weekend.
“Do you think your father talks violence in his sleep? At ten o’clock he goes to bed. At ten o’clock you can come home,” Bob Nails’s mother says.
He’s not sure why he never asked Jeannie to marry him. There was something crazy about her—the way she kept showing him pictures: lines and dots and landscapes, all drawn by different men. She said the idea to spend the weekend with him just came to her when they were sitting in the diner. On Monday she didn’t want to leave, but he made her get in the car, convinced now that she wouldn’t want to marry him, that she’d shown him all those pictures just to smart off. He didn’t say anything on the way back. He began to feel the way his father did—that he could kill, strangle, blow things up. But he loved her and didn’t know why. He stayed home at night and thought about it. After a while he went back to see her, but it was only for two weeks because she left in September. Later that month Bob Nails’s father had his first heart attack.
*
She’s giggling, driving too fast on purpose to confuse him. He hates her when she’s this way.
“And do you know what she told my mother? She said the day the Apollo spacecraft landed on the moon Wesley wouldn’t leave the television, even to eat.”
“What’s so funny about that?”
She’s steering with her left hand, and she’s right-handed. There’s a yellow warning sign, but she’s going too fast to notice.
“Some people don’t laugh in the face of progress,” he adds, gripping the dashboard.
“Wait! Let me tell it.”
She’s looking at him instead of the road.
“So later that afternoon Mrs. Dutton heard Wesley pacing. She looked in his bedroom and there he was walking around with two big squares of foam rubber tied under his shoes. He’d cut up the pillows!”
Why did he agree to this ride? Every time the car cuts around a curve he’s sure he’s going to die. Now they’re on a road he’s not familiar with. Neither is she. She throws the gearshift into reverse and they’re back on the main road.
“Where was the accident? I’m confused now.”
“What accident?”
“Sam might make fun of you for going deaf, but he should know you’ve gone stupid too. The murdered woman.”
They’re going around another curve. A car approaching clicks its high beam on and off.
“Is it one of the roads over top of that hill?”
They’re at the top before he has time to answer. Bob Nails is sure she’s going to kill them. “Yeah,” he agrees immediately. “That road, I think.”
She turns and slows down. “This can’t be it. There’d be some markings.”
“Why are you looking for it? What do you care?”
“I just want to know,” she says.
“Know what?” Bob Nails says.
“Listen,” Jeannie says, slamming on the brakes. “You always were after me because I wanted to find out about things. You hate books. You’re glad I came back. You don’t want me to find out about anything. You don’t want me to find out about you.”
“Me?” he says. “What are you talking about?”
They’re sitting in the dark and the car has come to a stop, not quite in the middle of the road. She’s stretched her neck toward him so she can scream in his face. There’s a surprised look on her face.
“What?” he asks.
She looks away, through the wheel. “I just wanted to see it. I’ll bet lots of people are driving there to look.”
“Sure,” he says, relieved that she’s talking quietly. “We just found the wrong road is all.”
She smiles at him and starts to drive again, carefully. Bob Nails begins to feel better, thinks about suggesting a drink. Which way is she headed … what’s closest?
“But we’ll find it,” she says evenly. “Is it this road?”
Bob Nails and Jeannie leave the bar. It’s almost midnight—Jeannie’s mother won’t stay awake any later with the babies, and she refuses to sleep in the spare bed. Bob Nails never liked Jeannie’s mother. She’s been at his mother’s house almost constantly since the funeral, when his father died after his second heart attack. Bob Nails drives the car because Jeannie’s drunk.
“Would you be mad if I still wanted to see where the accident was?”
“Why do you keep calling it an accident? She was murdered,” Bob Nails says.
“What’s the big deal about being so precise?”
“You’re the one who always thought you had to understand everything in detail,” Bob Nails says.
“You’re drunk. You always want to fight when you’re drunk.”
“I don’t know what I want. I’m sorry you’re having a bad time. I should of planned something.”
He looks over to see if she agrees, but she’s just smiling prettily. Her face is pretty even if her hair is messed up.
“Then if you don’t have anything planned why don’t we do what I want to do?”
“Hell,” he says, accelerating, “I’ll find the goddamn place.”
He makes a turn and drives a few miles. This is all familiar ground—where he and Tom Dutton used to hunt pheasants when they were young. He tries to remember what he read in the newspaper. Peterson’s old farm, he guesses. Around the corner he coasts to a stop.
“Okay,” he says.
“Where?” she asks, sitting forward.
“Must of been here somewhere …”
He turns the car onto the shoulder and the headlights illuminate a patch of field.
“Quiet,” she whispers, sliding close.
“Quiet? What for?”
Jeannie lights a cigarette and tosses the match into the ashtray. “How do they think it happened?”
“I don’t know. They figured she picked up a hitchhiker and he shot her.”
“She was riding along the road,” Jeannie says, before she hears his explanation, “and she picked up a man who stabbed her in the neck.”
“I thought he shot her.”
“Bang!”
Bob Nails’s hands tighten on the wheel. “What the hell was that for?”
“If you were her you’d be dead.”
What’s she doing now? What’s she starting to laugh about? But she isn’t laughing. She’s just the way she was. He shivers, feeling her finger on the back of his neck. She shivers too. Something is moving—an animal, trying to get away from the headlights. He’s not sure this is where it happened, because it could have been the other side of Peterson’s farm. He thought there would be a NO TRESPASSING sign, but there isn’t. He thought it was an animal, but it isn’t. It’s Wesley Dutton.
“Wesley?” Jeannie whispers. “What’s Wesley doing here?”
Bob Nails opens the car door. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” Wesley says.
It’s cold outside. Hunching his shoulders against the wind, Bob Nails walks into the field. Wesley has on his winter coat, a hat, and a scarf double-knotted at the throat. His hands are dirty and he’s holding something out to Bob Nails. Pictures. He’s been putting them in the ground, he tells Bob Nails. Why? Wesley tells him about a man in a movie who misses a dead lady and goes to her grave to put his picture in the ground there. Wesley’s eyes fill with tears. He sits and rubs his hands over the dirt. He says he just found out from people talking at the train station. They said it was Peterson’s farm.
Bob Nails gives Wesley a hand and tells him he’ll take him home. Wesley squats to pick up the
remaining pictures.
“Hello, Wesley,” Jeannie says when he climbs into the back seat.
“Good evening,” Wesley says.
“Why were you out there?” she asks.
Wesley smiles politely. In a moment his expression changes. He remembers. He hitched a ride. He smiles triumphantly.
They ride the rest of the way to Wesley’s house in silence. When they pull up, it’s dark inside.
“Don’t worry, Wesley,” Bob Nails says, opening the car door. So Wesley’s mother won’t hear the door slam and wake up, Bob Nails drives off holding it shut. At the end of the block, closing the door, he notices his watch and sees that it’s two in the morning.
“She’ll stay with them. She just tells me to come back to bluff,” Jeannie says.
He passes her house and keeps driving. After a while he realizes that he’s driving in circles. He’s tired, there’s something wrong, and he’s not sure what. He drives fifteen more miles to a hotel and gets a room for the night. Once in the room, they talk. Even though they stay awake for hours, they can’t understand, can’t agree on anything for sure.
He oversleeps and goes to work hours late, leaving Jeannie at the hotel. She said she was going home in the morning, but when they woke up they both knew she wouldn’t. Bob Nails is exhausted. He begins to explain why he’s late to Sam. When he tells Sam about finding Wesley Dutton on Peterson’s farm, and what Jeannie thinks, Sam’s mouth drops open. His mouth drops open even before he hears what Jeannie thinks. He tells Bob Nails to get the hell out in the garage to fix the car on the lift before the customer shows up and the job isn’t done.
Bob Nails is surprised when the police show up at the garage. Later, Sam tells him that he was too dead tired to know right from wrong, so he decided to take care of it for him.
*
Bob Nails’s mother tells him on the telephone that Wesley was sent to the state hospital. According to Mrs. Dutton, when they were taking him away, Wesley just smiled politely and tried to help the detective into his coat, and the detective misunderstood and thought Wesley was trying to take it. The detectives exchanged looks. Bob Nails says he’ll listen to the rest of it when he comes home for his things. He hangs up and paces around the room, remembering the story his mother told him years ago about what Wesley did when he heard a TV newscaster say that Mrs. Kennedy put her wedding ring in her husband’s casket. He went to the graveyard the next day, and someone asked him what he was doing there. Wesley said he had his mother’s diamond ring and that he had to give it to someone who was dead. The man took the ring away and called Mrs. Dutton, but Wesley tried to fight, so the man held it on his tongue until Mrs. Dutton arrived.
Jeannie wants Bob Nails to buy her an engagement ring. That’s always on his mind, and Wesley Dutton is always on his mind. It’s quiet out on the street, quiet in the room. Jeannie’s sulking because he won’t drive to Peterson’s farm. She said it would be exciting, like criminals returning to the scene of the crime. They aren’t criminals; can’t she understand that?
He looks out the window. He’s started to hate the cheap room, the lousy furniture, the plastic lampshades. It will be better when they move to an apartment. The room is too cold. Jeannie sits wrapped in her coat, reading the same magazines again. His father died reading a magazine; when his mother came into the room his face was all red and he was staring at the page, but his mother knew he didn’t look that way from anything he read in Consumer Reports.
“Let’s get a drink,” he says.
“You know,” she says slowly, “there never was any such movie.”
“I don’t want to talk about Wesley Dutton.”
He wants to talk about what’s going on, but he doesn’t know how to do it. She’s going to get the babies when they move. Is that when he’s supposed to marry her? She looks so pretty. Her hair shines. He thinks about asking why her hair shines. When she stands, her hair covers her shoulders. Her coat is wrinkled because it’s been bunched up underneath her. In high school the girls used to call her “Queen Jean” because her clothes were wrinkled and her sweaters never had enough buttons. It makes him angry to remember her being ridiculed.
“If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to,” she says, turning and walking across the room. He gets his jacket and follows her down the stairs. When he pushes open the door a wind hits them. She bows her head and starts across the street.
“Not that bar,” he says. “Someplace nice.”
Doesn’t she hear him? He catches up with her, grabs the back of her scarf.
“I don’t notice that that bar smells any particular way,” she says.
“I didn’t say anything about that.”
“You said that was why you wouldn’t go there last night, didn’t you?”
What should he say? He drives past several bars, hoping she’ll be in a better mood when they stop, but she hasn’t spoken since they got in the car. They pass a row of bars, and later another bar pointed to by a red neon arrow shooting through a blue neon waterfall. He can’t tell if she likes any of the bars, because she’s looking at her hands in her lap. At the next bar he pulls in.
All the booths are taken, so they sit at a little wooden table covered by place mats soaking in puddles. They serve food here. He orders two cheeseburgers. Jeannie just looks at hers, so he eats that too. They sit in silence, pouring from a pitcher of beer. There’s a clock advertising Schlitz above the bar. A foam of tiny lights constantly overflows the beer mug. Every so often a man sitting at the bar below the light looks at them—at him, or at Jeannie? Bob Nails decides the man must be looking at her.
They leave the bar at midnight. Tomorrow she starts her job with the telephone company. What’s she going to do with the babies if she gets a job? What makes her hair shine? Couldn’t Wesley have gone to the farm to see what it looked like, the way they did?
“Well?” Bob Nails says.
He’s holding the car door open, but she hasn’t gotten in. She’s looking over his shoulder.
“What do you think that says?”
Jeannie’s looking at a sign across the street. He squints, trying to focus. Jeannie squints too, but walks down the gravel driveway toward it. He wants to call after her to find out if she’s that unsteady from drinking, or if it’s because the driveway is so full of holes. Instead, he follows her.
The sign is in the window of a little house. A light glows in one of the rooms, but the sign has been turned off.
“She’s a fortune teller!” Jeannie says.
“Come on,” Bob Nails says.
“There’s a light inside.”
“Jeannie, it’s late at night.”
But she’s already knocked on the door and is knocking again, harder. He grabs her hand and holds it at his side. Inside the house a dog barks, then is quiet.
“Satisfied?” he says, leaning against the door.
He stumbles for balance when the door is opened. In the corner of his eye he sees an old man with a rifle, but the next second he isn’t sure there was any old man. A young girl is facing them, wearing a quilted robe, her hair rolled in curlers. Her face is very pink. Bob Nails smells incense, or musk perfume. The girl cocks her head.
“Is it too late to have our fortunes told?” Jeannie asks.
The girl’s mouth moves oddly, as if she might be chewing gum. Very softly, very precisely, she says, “You are going to die,” and closes the door.
It’s Just
Another Day
in Big Bear City,
California
Spaceship, flying saucer, an hallucination … they don’t know yet. They don’t even notice it until it is almost over their car. Estelle, who has recently gone back to college, is studying Mortuary Science. Her husband, Alvin William “Big Bear” Benton, is so drunk from the party they have just left that he wouldn’t notice if it were Estelle, risen from the passenger seat, up in the sky. Maybe that’s where she’d like to be—floating in the sky. Or in the morgue with bodies. Big Bear B
enton thinks she is completely nuts, and people who are nuts can do anything. Will do anything. Will go back to school after ten years and study Mortuary Science. It’s enough to make him get drunk at parties. They used to ask his wife about the children at these parties, but now they ask, subtly, about the bodies. They are more interested in dead bodies than his two children. So is Estelle. He is not interested in anything, according to his wife, except going to parties and getting drunk.
Spaceship, flying saucer, an hallucination … Big Bear concentrates on the object and tells himself that he is just hallucinating. There is a pinpoint of light, actually a spot of light about the size of a tennis ball, dropping through space. Then it is the size of a football … he is trying to think it is a real object, no matter what it is doing up there … but maybe it’s a flying saucer. Or a spaceship. He looks at Estelle, who is also drunk. She is staring at her hands, neatly folded on her lap. Those hands roam around in dead bodies the way coyotes roam around the desert—just for something to do. This is the first time he has ever been glad to concentrate on Mortuary Science. Like reading the stock pages in the bathroom.
“What is that?” Big Bear says, fighting to stay calm.
“Well, you know what it looks like,” Estelle says. “It looks like a spaceship.”
“Yeah, I know. But what is it really?”
Now that Estelle is becoming educated and urbane, he has become more childish. He is always asking questions.
“I don’t know. It’s a spaceship come to take us to Mars.”
Big Bear begins to worry about the car being blown over. The car is a 1965 Peugeot, a real piece of crap that Big Bear would have gotten rid of long ago if it had not belonged to his wife’s brother, who died in Viet Nam. His wife won’t hear of getting rid of the car. She has some of her brother’s underwear that she won’t take out of the drawer. It’s in Big Bear’s drawer, in fact—not hers—and her reason for that is that it’s men’s underwear. But her brother’s car is done for now, because the wind is going to blow it over and mash the roof.
