Someone to Watch Over Me

by Richard Bausch

  I take Elvin by the arm, and we step out onto the tumbledown porch. Myra mutters a few unintelligible words, and then we hear the chink of dishes clattering against each other.

  “They’re not your dishes, Myra.” There’s a pause. I turn to see that Elvin has his hands over his ears.

  But Lionel comes to the doorway and speaks quickly to us. “Bring your stuff in from the car if you want.”

  “It’ll keep,” I say. I have no idea where I learned the phrase—it might have been at the Saturday matinees—but in the moment I say it I feel very grown-up. I feel, in fact, older than Lionel and Myra, as Lionel closes the door and the shouting begins.

  “Shit,” Elvin says, and spits into the dust.

  We walk out to the car. We hear glass shattering, their contending voices. It continues for a minute or two and then is quiet. We are old enough and experienced enough to know that this furor means nothing. We are not even upset by it; it’s an annoyance, something in the way of whatever else is next.

  Lionel comes storming out of the house, his hands shoved down into the pockets of his jeans. He comes over to us. His lips are white, his cheekbones flushed, looking blotched. “Boys, I want you to do me a favor.” He reaches into his pocket, brings out a small folding knife, and holds it toward me. “We’re on our own, boys. So I need you to go out and rustle up some grub.”

  I take the knife.

  “Go out and find something we can cook. Do it.”

  I can only stare at him, and that is what Elvin is doing too.

  “Well?” Lionel says. “What’re you waiting for?”

  “Oh, come on, Dad,” I say.

  He takes the knife from me and gives it to Elvin. “We can eat squirrel and rabbit or quail or even pheasant if you can get close enough.”

  We stare at him.

  “Go on,” he says, waving his arms. We start off toward the line of trees at the edge of the field.

  “Oh,” Myra says from the doorway of the cabin, “that’s wonderful—what’re you doing, putting it all on them?”

  “No,” Lionel says as Elvin and I move off. “They’re going to do some foraging. Out with the wild bears where it’s safe.”

  We stop, and then Elvin, thinking about the bears, I’m sure, starts back.

  Lionel won’t let him. “Go on. Ther’s no bears up here. Do as I said.”

  We head toward the woods again, and I hear the stuttering of Elvin’s breath, the thing that sometimes happens to his mildly asthmatic lungs when he’s agitated. “Bears,” he says, as though nothing could be more outlandish; it’s a hedge against the fear operating in him. We come to the first row of trees and pause together, hearing the storm go on behind us, the voices carrying across the field.

  “I suppose you think I planned it about the food.”

  “No, it was the lack of planning that I’m concerned with.”

  “Oh, you mean, like quitting one job before you have another one?”

  “I thought we’d have money from the band. How’d I know Floyd’d fink out on us?”

  “Well, I didn’t know there wouldn’t be any food.”

  The cabin door slams shut. There’s more shouting, but the words dissolve in distance as Elvin and I make our way into the trees, finding a thin path that winds through heavy undergrowth and around boulders the size of cement trucks. On one jagged wall-sized stone someone has carved the words GLASS MEADOW, 1946. We pause there, looking around.

  “Bears,” Elvin says.

  I’m beginning to feel a sense of adventure, being in the woods, on the hunt. I think of it that way. We’re on the hunt. We’re after food. I can picture the look on Lionel’s face as we trudge out of the trees with a string of killed squirrels and pheasants, a week’s worth of meat.

  “We’re going to take it slow and careful from here,” I say.

  “Let’s just go back now,” Elvin says. “I don’t like it here. There’s too many trees.”

  “Shut up,” I tell him. “Give me the knife.”

  “What’re you gonna do with it? You know they’re not serious.”

  “I’m gonna kill something to eat,” I say.

  He looks at me. I am, after all, the older brother. When he hands me the knife, I open it, crouching down—a Cheyenne, setting myself for the hunt.

  “You’re kidding,” he says. “Come on, Patrick.”

  I don’t answer. I head off along the path, keeping low, complete stealth. He follows. For a few minutes, there’s just the sound of being in the woods. We traverse a small creek and climb a steep, rocky embankment, where we encounter a few birds. I put the knife in my belt and pick up a stone.

  “Oh, right,” Elvin says.

  I’m concentrating. It’s as though he’s merely along as a witness—a referee or judge. I try to hit a blackbird and something smaller with a dark tawny coloring in the wings. I miss, of course. At the top of the embankment we find a barbed-wire fence. We have always called it bobwire because that’s the way we’ve heard it said. I hold it up for Elvin to crawl through, and then I get down and he holds it for me. On the other side, the ground rises gradually as we come out of the trees, up into a sunny field of tall grass, swarming with flies.

  “I don’t know,” Elvin says.

  We head around the perimeter of the field, and I make a couple of passes at squirrels, who are too quick and alert to be stalked by someone like me. They chatter at each other from opposite branches of a tree, as if they are talking about us, exchanging opinions. At the far end of the fence, in a little shaded area of tall old apple trees, is a black-and-white cow, standing in a cloud of flies, tail-swishing, slowly chewing, staring at us with the placid, steady expression of the species, hardly seeming to mark our approach through the grass along the wide curve of the woods and fence. We come to within about ten feet of her and stop. Somewhere crows are getting up a racket as if they have divined our purpose and mean to sound the alarm.

  “What?” Elvin says, and I realize that he hasn’t understood why we’ve halted here.

  “The cow,” I say.

  “What about the cow?”

  “She’s not fast. She won’t run.”

  “What?” he says, looking at the cow and then at me, and then at the cow again.

  “She’s too stupid to run.”

  “So?”

  “We can get close enough,” I say.

  He merely stares at me.

  “We have to kill the cow.”

  He looks at the cow again and seems to be trying to translate what he’s heard into a language he can more readily understand.

  “It’s a year’s worth of meat.”

  “Yeah, but—” he surveys the field for a second, “doesn’t he belong to somebody?”

  “It’s not a ‘he,’” I say.

  “It’s somebody’s cow,” my brother says.

  “There’s nobody here,” I say.

  “You’re serious?” he says.

  “We have to kill the cow,” I tell him. “We were sent out here to get food. The cow is food, right? A couple of thousand pounds of beef.”

  “Couldn’t we just—milk her?”

  “Come on,” I say, and start toward her through the grass. She takes one heavy step back, watching us, blinking in the swirl of flies, still chewing. We walk slowly up to her, and she lets out a snort, shakes her head. The tail swishes against her swollen-looking side. I reach out and touch the tight curve of it. I wonder if the knife will penetrate; if there are any vital organs close enough to be struck by it.

  “How’re you going to kill this,” Elvin says. “You gonna milk her to death?” He laughs.

  It makes me angry. “I don’t know,” I say. “The knife?”

  “You’d have to stab her six hundred times. She must weigh a ton. You think she’s just going to stand here and let you work on her?”

  “I have to find a vital spot. An artery.”

  “Where? Come on, Patrick.”

  I’m beginning to feel odd, discussing the s
laughter of this cow under her very gaze. But there’s something almost patient about the way she seems to listen to us, as if she has heard all this so many times before. “You got any better ideas?” I say.

  He says nothing.

  The cow tears some grass from the ground and looks at us again, chewing. The pink tongue makes me shift my eyes away.

  “What if we hit her over the head with something,” Elvin says.

  We laugh again. But we’re thinking about it, worrying it in our minds. I walk to the edge of the woods and begin going over the ground there. He calls to me from the field. He’s found a branch, windfall. It’s too heavy for him to lift. I make my way to him, and together we lug it back to where the cow still stands, quietly chewing, watching us. I can just lift the branch myself. I can get it up to my shoulder, a crooked bludgeon, with a white ripped place at the end where it must have been wrenched from the tree. The cow takes another step back as I draw near.

  “How will we get the body back to the cabin?” Elvin says suddenly.

  His voice startles me, my concentration has been so complete. I turn and look at the field, with its crown of blowing grass, the peaceful swaying tops of the surrounding trees, and for a brief space I feel dangerous—no, murderous. The brute fact of what I have been playing with and may now do runs through me like a thrill, and before I can think about it anymore, I turn myself back to the task.

  “What about it?” Elvin says. “How will we? It’s too big.”

  “This isn’t the time to worry about it,” I say. And I raise my club.

  “Wait,” Elvin says. “Don’t.”

  “We have to,” I say. “Lionel said go get food.” There’s a relish with which I say this, though at the time I don’t have the words to express such a thought. It runs through me like extra blood, a pounding in my ears and face and neck.

  “This isn’t food. It’s a cow. We can’t drag it past the fence. We couldn’t even move it. It’s a useless killing.”

  “We can cut it up and take it back in pieces.”

  “With that little knife? It’d take a year.”

  I don’t want to hear logic anymore. “Just stand over there and wait, will you?”

  “No,” Elvin says. “I mean it. Don’t.”

  The cow stands there, waiting. It’s hard not to believe she knows what we’re saying, the way her eyes take us in and in.

  I step closer and manage somehow to swing the branch. It misses, of course, and she bolts backward with a deep-chested grunt and lopes a few feet out into the field, her tail whipping high. She snorts, shakes her big head, lowers it, then seems to stumble a few more paces away. She makes a sneezing sound and coughs.

  “Come on,” I say, feeling that I can do it. I am fully capable of it. Some part of me hungers for it. I have an image of Elvin and me, dragging the carcass right up to the cabin door and knocking on it, killers, with the week’s supply of meat. “Here’s your goddamn food for you,” I’ll say.

  “Lionel didn’t mean a cow.” Elvin begins to cry. “I don’t want to kill anything.”

  “We have to,” I tell him.

  “No we don’t either.”

  “Aw,” I say, “you baby.” And I stagger with my weapon out into the field, where the cow has stopped and apparently forgotten how she came to be there. Her head is down in the grass, and the tail swishes her sides.

  I become stealthy, lugging the branch, trying for the silence of predators. When Elvin tries to tackle me, he scrapes the side of his face on my belt buckle and rolls over on his side, legs curled up, crying. The cow, disturbed by the commotion, lopes away a few more feet and looks back at us. Elvin is crying, holding his hands to his face. And then I see that he’s bleeding. It’s only a scratch, but the blood of my brother there in that field takes all the heart out of me. I drop the branch, and then, as if to protect the cow from my own freshly discovered savage nature, I run at her, waving my arms and screaming. I want her to run far away from me, and of course she only travels another slight distance, looking back with that placid, faintly consternated air. An expression almost of a kind of reproach. The sad, steady gaze of the morally superior.

  Elvin has got to his feet and is wiping his bloody face with the tail of his shirt. “I don’t care,” he says. “I won’t eat it. I’ll starve before I eat one bite of it.”

  “Relax,” I tell him. “She got away.”

  We walk back to the edge of the woods, down the steepness, into the shade, to the wire fence. He’s crying and sniffling, and when he looks at me now, it’s as if he’s uncertain what I might do next. It unnerves me.

  “Stop it,” I say.

  “I can’t.” He stands there crying.

  “Do you want them to see you like this?” I say. “Do you?”

  This convinces him. As I have said, we love Lionel and Myra, but we can never let them really know us, not really. To do so is unthinkable.

  “Careful,” I say, holding the barbed wire up for him to crawl through. He’s on all fours below me, and I see the red-splotched softness of his neck. It is laid bare, his shirt pulling back, caught on one of the teeth in the wire. I am aware of a pressure under my breastbone, a sense of possibilities I don’t want to allow into the realm of my thinking. I reach down and unhook the cloth, and I’m compelled to pat him on the shoulder, a caress. Somehow it’s a gesture I make to reassure myself. He scurries through, and I straighten and look back at the field, at the cow, watching us from its safe distance.

  “Come on,” Elvin says. There’s something grudging in his voice.

  I throw the knife as far as I can into the field, Lionel’s knife, and then I get down on my belly and pull myself along the ground to the other side of the fence.

  We go back to the cabin. Myra and Lionel have made up and are sitting on the porch steps holding hands. They’ve been necking, Lionel tells us, and then he asks what we’ve brought back from our safari.

  “I’m hungry,” Elvin says. “I hurt my face.”

  Myra hurries over to him and walks inside with him to wash the scratch. “Well, son,” Lionel says to me. “No luck?”

  “No luck,” I tell him.

  “Tough out there.” He smiles, turns at the sound of Myra’s voice calling from the cabin, “It’s just a little scrape. It’ll be fine.”

  “Good,” Lionel says, seeming to watch me. “You OK?”

  “Yes,” I tell him, though I feel as though I’m going to start crying. I have an urge to tell him what I did with his knife. I want to hurl the fact of it at him like a curse. I walk back to the car and around it, to where we left the dirt road. I’m walking in the tire tracks, crying a little without quite understanding why, managing to keep it quiet. Something has been stirred up in my soul; it confuses and frightens me while at the same time making me feel weirdly elated too. I look back, and there’s Lionel, hands on his knees, clearly content, listening to his wife’s voice from inside. Myra’s singing to Elvin.

  I don’t remember what happened the rest of that week, or what we ever did with the Madonna, the angel, the deer. In the time since then, I’ve been married twice. One wife left me to pursue a career in broadcasting and wound up living with a doctor in California in a big ranch-style house with an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Our son spends his summers there. Regarding the second marriage, I confess I’m the one who did the leaving, for reasons which would take too long to explain (and indeed it seems that we are all always explaining these things to each other, as if we might somehow charm our failures out of existence by the sheer volume of words). We had a daughter before we dissolved ourselves in acrimony and silence. We’re both so much better apart: there is air to breathe again. My daughter lives with her mother in New York. Elvin, who keeps a small house alone in Bedford Hills, runs into them now and again on his way into the city, his job with Macy’s department store.

  Elvin has been in and out of relationships over the years, and at times we joke about how they seem always so tangled and troubled and nervous. Wo
und up like a spring with discontent and worry. When he talks to me about these complex and frangible connections, I listen, I sympathize, and I remember how it was all those years ago with Lionel and Myra, when we were growing up. Often I receive an unbidden image of Lionel sitting in the sun on that weed-sprung porch at Glass Meadow, as he listens to Myra’s voice, her singing. It was so long ago, and I see it so vividly. He smiles, shaking his head. This ordinary day in their lives is ending.

  There will be more serious troubles, of course.

  In five years they will open a business—a Cajun food store on a busy street in the city. Neither of them knows a thing about running a store—or, really, much about Cajun food, and it will fail within a month. They are destined to lose everything three separate times over the next twenty years. We’ll live in six other rented houses, and they’ll mortgage and lose two. In their late sixties, when Elvin and I are long gone, with our separate troubles, our two sets of complications, they’ll decide on a disastrous move to Seattle—this one the result, Elvin and I are fairly certain, of a professional con, which misleads them into thinking they can get started in the computer industry out there.

  Elvin will travel to Washington State to bring them home. We grow in admiration for them, even as they continue to trouble us.

  They sail through each disaster as they’ve sailed through all of their other predicaments—the same, always: humorous, passionate, odd, still in love, and still completely innocent of the effect they have on us with their indulgence in each other’s whims and dreams, wishes and fantasies and impulses, their jokes and idiocy. Their happiness.

  PAR

  What John Dallworth liked about it at first was being outside in the dewy morning among shade trees and perfectly cut grass, the soft peaks and swells of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. He liked the sounds—different birdcalls, the tattoo of a woodpecker, the breezes in the leaves, the cleats on the cart paths, the metallic song of the clubs in the bag, the hum of the carts, even the brush-swish and rattle of the ball washers. And the smells, too—earth and grasses and pine, leather and wood, and the pungent turf-and-fertilizer odor of the carpet-smooth greens.