Someone to Watch Over Me

by Richard Bausch

  “Well,” I said. “Hey. She’ll be here soon. We better clean up a little.”

  He poured himself another drink. “What have we done in our lives?” he said, staring at the table and looking sad. “I’ve worked a few jobs. Bought a car here and there. Got married and got divorced. And you—you graduated from high school. Went to the prom, right? I mean, we haven’t really experienced anything. Imagine having your father kill himself.”

  “How’d he do it?” I asked.

  “I told you,” he said. “He shot himself. Jesus, are you listening to me?”

  A little while later, Samantha pulled in, and we went out to greet her. She’d been driving for two days, she told us. It was almost full dark, but from what I could see she looked like death itself. We all went inside, and Doke poured more whiskey. He kept watching me, waiting for some sign, I suppose. I couldn’t give him one. He’d built up so many of my expectations that I’d begun to think beyond what was really possible for a big, not too nice-looking former high school football star with a potbelly and a double chin. Samantha wasn’t pretty. Not by a very, very, very long stretch. And it wasn’t just the fact that she’d been sitting behind the wheel of a ratty carbon-monoxide-spewing car for two days. She could’ve just walked out of a beauty parlor after an all-afternoon session and it wouldn’t have made any difference. She did have nice dark skin, but her eyes were set deep in her skull, and they were crossed a little. They were also extremely small—the smallest eyes I ever saw, like a rodent’s eyes, black and with a scary glitter in them. They fixed on you as if you were something to eat and swallow. She was tall and had long legs, and she had hips wider than Doke’s. Her hair was shiny, crow-black, and stiff. She’d let it grow wild, so it appeared that it hadn’t seen a brush in her lifetime. She was not physically beautiful by any standard you care to name.

  Doke stood by, staring, all moony-eyed and weepy with the booze and love, and I guess I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my face. I had thought I was going to meet this beautiful woman; instead I’d met Samantha.

  “I have to go freshen up,” she said after we’d been through the introductions. She went into the bathroom and closed the door with a delicate little click of the latch. Then we heard what sounded like water being poured out of a big vat into other water.

  Doke turned to me. “Well?” he said. “Right?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. I thought he meant the sound.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  I said, “Right.”

  “You ever see anything…,” he said. He was standing by the table, tottering a little, holding onto the back of the chair. “You know?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He pulled the chair out and sat down, and ran his hands through his hair. “Just,” he said. “Really.”

  I nodded.

  “Right?” he said.

  I said, “Uh-huh.”

  He picked up the bottle and drank. Then shook his head. “Something.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  After another drink, and a few seconds of staring off, he said, “What’s the matter with you?” He still wasn’t looking at me.

  I said, “Nothing. Why?”

  He poured more whiskey. Then sat there and seemed to study it. “You got something to say?”

  “Can’t think of anything,” I said.

  He looked at me, and I sat down, too. “Well?” he said. “I don’t like that look.”

  “She’s been on the road,” I said. “She’s tired.”

  “Not her. You. I don’t like your look.”

  I ran my hands over my face. I thought he might think I was smirking at him. “Oh,” I said. “I’m OK.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” he said.

  I reached for the whiskey. “I think I’ll have some more of that,” I told him. “That all right with you?”

  He didn’t answer. He was thinking.

  Samantha came out of the bathroom. I didn’t know what she’d done to freshen up. Nothing had changed at all. She sat down and leaned back in the chair and clasped her hands behind her head. “So this is your brother.”

  “That’s him,” Doke said.

  “You’re so little compared to Doke. It’s strange.” She went over and got herself a glass, brought it back to the table, where Doke poured her some of the whiskey.

  “I told Ignatius about your dad and mom,” Doke said to her.

  She drank, then shook her head. “Terrible.” She looked a lot older than twenty-five. She had little gold rings piercing her ears; the rings went all the way up the side of each ear. This was the first time I ever saw that phenomenon. “I got a baby that’s severely retarded. The oxygen wasn’t right.”

  Doke seemed surprised. “You never said she was retarded.”

  “That’s what I said.” She nodded, sadly. She was watching me. “My father took me to Altamont. I was there. I know Mick Jagger.”

  “It might be his kid,” Doke said, all excited. “Right?”

  She seemed to think this over. “No. I doubt it.”

  “But it could be, though. Right?”

  She frowned. “No.”

  “Didn’t you—” Doke said, then stopped. He was confused.

  “We saw them. We were close, you know. But not that close.”

  Nobody said anything. I was watching Doke because I couldn’t look at Samantha—the difference between his description of her and the reality was too much. He said, “Well, I thought you said the kid was Jagger’s kid.”

  “I suppose it could be. I had so many lovers back then.”

  “You mean you might not’ve noticed it was Mick Jagger?” I said.

  She looked at me. “Why’d he look at me like that?” she said.

  Doke took a drink. He was thinking.

  I said something to smooth things over. “I have the kind of face that makes people think I’m being smart with them.”

  “He’s always got that look,” Doke said.

  “Where is your kid?” I asked her.

  She said, “With my mother’s family, back East. My father was killed by the government for protesting against them.”

  “I thought your father killed himself,” Doke said.

  “He did.”

  We waited for her to clear up the mystery.

  “The government drove him to it.”

  “Hell,” I said.

  She nodded importantly. “The government is not legitimate, you know. As long as there are whites living on Indian lands.”

  “Which Indian lands?” I said.

  “The whole country.”

  “Oh, you mean—like the Constitution and all that. That’s not valid.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Not much chance of that going away,” I said, meaning to sympathize with her.

  “My father was a full-blooded Cherokee,” she said. “Doke told you, I’m sure.”

  “I told him,” Doke said. “I told him about that and I told him about the Rolling Stones.”

  “It wasn’t just the Rolling Stones. I traveled a lot. I had three hundred lovers before I was twenty-two.”

  Doke shook his head.

  “Looking for love,” I said.

  She said, “At least three hundred of them.”

  “Lovers,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “What was it that interested you about them? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Her little eyes were on me, and her face twisted as if she smelled something bad. “What?”

  “Are you making fun?” Doke asked me. His face was a total blank.

  “No,” I said. I was truly curious. With that many lovers, it was hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be some sort of filing system, to keep track of the types, anyway. Doke was staring at me, so I put my hand over my mouth, which I had come to think of as the offending part of my face.

  He shook his head again, then poured more whiskey. I sat back and pretended to be relaxed and interested, while Samant
ha talked about herself and her adventures. She was related to Crazy Horse, she said. And on her mother’s side there was a distant connection to Mary Lincoln. She had lived in Haight-Ashbery and attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in law. She’d had plans to enter the system and ruin it from the inside. The collapse of the American government was the only hope for her and her people. But her father had this thing about rock concerts, and she’d got sidetracked. For years she’d followed the Grateful Dead around from concert to concert. She knew Jerry Garcia well. She’d had a child by him that died, and it was why she left to seek out the Rolling Stones. She liked their names better. Once, when she was only thirteen, she’d met John F. Kennedy. Doke sipped the whiskey, watching me. I was beginning to get sleepy. She droned on. She’d been a member of the Weathermen, and the FBI had crushed them with bombs and fire and infiltrators. Doke was staring at me, waiting for the first sign that I wasn’t utterly charmed, but I was actively fighting sleep. He had a big stake in her, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Samantha had fixed me with her rodent’s eyes. But my eyes were so heavy. I rubbed them, put my hands over a yawn.

  “I’m very sensitive to spiritual vibrations,” she said. “It’s my Indian blood.”

  This was in reference to something I must have missed in the long monologue, because Doke said, “So that’s how you knew he was going to kill himself.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But there wasn’t anything I could do. It was his karma.” She went on to talk about karma, and how a person’s karma caused a glow she could perceive. “I’m very perceptive,” she said. “I can sense what a person is thinking. I get vibes from people.”

  I was thinking, Please stop talking.

  “It’s really kind of uncanny,” she went on. “I look in a person’s eyes, and I see all their thoughts, their innermost feelings.”

  Shut the fuck up, please, I was thinking. Go to bed.

  She never seemed to take a breath. She said, “I learned this when I met Robert Kennedy at his house in McLean, Virginia. I was eighteen, and I think he was interested in me physically, too. It was so odd, how he met me. I just walked up and knocked on his door and his maid—Eva was her name—”

  “Well I sure am beat,” I said. I was desperate now. “Guess I’ll turn in.”

  “I was telling you something,” she said.

  I said, “You must be awful tired.”

  “I was in the middle of telling something, and you just started talking about turning in.” She seemed to pout. I caught myself actually feeling sorry for her.

  “We’ve been keeping you up,” I said. “You must be exhausted.” I stood, vaguely intending to make polite conversation as I left the room.

  “She was telling you something,” Doke said.

  “Do you have an Indian name?” I asked Samantha.

  She shook her head. “My mother insisted that I be given a white woman’s name. She knew I would have a terrible time growing up in the white man’s world.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She added, “It would have split me in two. And you know how terrible it is to be split down the middle?” She reached over and played with the crown of Doke’s hair.

  I said I supposed I didn’t. I yawned.

  She said, “It’s much worse than you can imagine. And I’m sorry it bores you.” She seemed proud to have plumbed my feelings.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”

  And then there didn’t seem to be anything else to talk about. She sat there. She was biting her nails, taking in the room with those little eyes. I had come to the realization that she was no more of Indian blood than I was the King of Spain. I had an image of her parents—a couple of Italians, probably, holding down an apartment in Brooklyn, wondering where their daughter ran off to. I said, “What’s Mick Jagger like?”

  “Very grungy and nervous.” She was still biting her nails.

  I said, “Everything you’ve told us is a crock, right?”

  “You can disbelieve me if you want,” she said. “I don’t care.”

  I looked at Doke. “Man,” I said. Then I started out of the room. “Bedtime.”

  But Doke stood suddenly, and when I turned, he took me by the front of my shirt. “You think you can treat us like this?”

  I said, “OK, look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Leave him be,” Samantha said. “It’s his loss.”

  “Will you excuse us for a few seconds?” Doke said to her.

  She got up and went outside. We could join her, she said, when we were through being babies. She closed the door and Doke walked me back against the wall, still holding my shirt in his fists.

  “I saw the way you were looking at her.”

  “What difference does it make what I think?” I said. A mistake.

  “Oh,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “Cut it out,” I said. “Come on. Let me go.”

  “Not till you tell me what you think of Samantha.”

  “I think she’s a liar,” I told him. “And she’s not even a very good one.” I couldn’t help myself. “And on top of that I think she’s ugly as month-old pizza.”

  He commenced hitting me. He was swinging wildly, and some of his punches missed, which allowed me to get under the table. Then he started kicking. I was crawling around, trying to get away from him, and Samantha had come back in to stop him. When he stormed out into the dark, she got down on the floor and saw that I was bleeding from a gash on my forehead. I must have hit the edge of the table on my way under it. And she was really quite gentle and sweet, getting me a rag for my head, and insisting that Doke would take me down to Dutton, to the emergency room.

  As I said, it was while I was in the hospital that I met Hildie. “That’s a nasty cut” was the first thing she said to me.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I thought she was perfect. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to think so, necessarily.

  “How’d it happen?” she said.

  “My brother and I got in a fight.”

  She shook her head, concentrating on her work, cutting a bandage to size for me. “Two grown boys like you.”

  “I could tell you about it,” I said.

  That was all it needed. My mother used to say, when the time is right you don’t need to have a committee meeting about it.

  When I eventually returned to the cabin, I found that Samantha had gone. She had picked up and headed off into the West, with a few of Doke’s records and tapes and most of the money he’d saved. He took it pretty hard. For a while that summer, he had himself convinced that because she’d taken those things she was planning on coming back. But the months turned into the rest of the year, and I stayed on through the next spring and part of that summer, and she was just gone. His drinking got pretty bad, and I started having to look out for the boy a lot on the weekends.

  “It’s not fair, I know it,” Doke said to me. “I can’t shake it, though.”

  “You’ve got to get ahold of yourself,” I told him. I’d been seeing Hildie.

  We were married at the end of that next summer, and for a while Doke’s boy lived with us while Doke dried out in rehab. The boy’s mother was in some sort of rehab herself. Drugs. Sometimes, back then, it seemed to me that the whole country had gone crazy.

  Hildie and I were together almost twenty years. We never had any children. Doke left Montana and lives in Seattle now. He’s happy. Some stories do have happy endings, for a while, anyway. He’s got a wife, and another boy, and a girl. He probably never thinks about Samantha. I used to imagine the Italian couple in Brooklyn, reunited with their wayward little girl, who pulled up one day, driving a car full of music and money. She was such a bad liar. Doke’s son married a nice girl from Catalina, then moved to New York City. Everybody got along fine, really.

  Hildie and I lived for a few years in a little three-bedroom rambler on Coronado Street in Sandusky, Illinois. Those first years we had a lot of fun, usually.
Now and then she’d lose her temper, and my old trouble would return: something about my face would cause her to start swinging at me. And I never hit back. But it doesn’t, as the saying goes, take two to make a fight. One person with an urge to hit somebody else is enough. For the person getting knocked out, it might as well be the heavyweight championship.

  One night, when we were drinking, I told her about Samantha. I must have been a little careless in how I talked about Samantha’s physical qualities, because I upset Hildie. These days, you say something about one woman and you’ve said it about all of them.

  “Is that the way you see us?” she says.

  “Us.” I said. “What?”

  “Is that how you judge women? You see that I’m gaining weight, don’t you? And do you see me like this Samantha person?”

  I said, “I’m just saying she wasn’t what Doke said she was.”

  “It just kills me that that’s how you think.”

  For about a year, things had been going sour. Hildie had ballooned to about two hundred fifty pounds. I had lost weight. And I was worried all the time about money. So was she, but her worry came out differently. She kept asking me what I thought of her. “You think I’m ugly now,” she’d say. “Right? That’s how you see me. Why don’t you come out and say it?”

  “I think you’re fine,” I’d say.

  “Tell me the truth. I’m too big.”

  “No,” I’d say. “Really, hon.”

  “You’re lying. I can see it in your face.”

  My face again. There was nothing I could say. And besides, I was about half her size by now.

  Once I said, “Do you think you’re too big?”

  “It’s not important what I think,” she said. “Because, Goddamn it, I know how you think. All of you.”

  We needed extra income, and she hated the idea of nursing anymore, so she got a job serving food at a hospital cafeteria across the river in Missouri. There were nights we didn’t say a thing to each other, and after a few months she started doing things to get shut of me. That was OK. I think I even understood. She made dates with the janitor on her floor, a man fifteen years older than I am and a lot bigger. She told people she was leaving me. She had friends over at all hours of the day and night. When I walked in and someone asked who I was, she’d wave me away. “That’s my soon-to-be ex,” she’d say. It was always said like a joke, but you could feel the edge to it.