by Richard Ford
Burke stopped and looked up at the winged red horse still rearing over the lot, then took in the block he’d just traveled. A stooped woman in an overcoat was hobbling down the opposite sidewalk—the only person in sight. It might have been a street in his hometown, with its own bankrupt industries and air of stagnation. Burke’s widowed mother still lived in the old house. He visited dutifully with his wife, who claimed to find the town charming and soothingly tranquil, but Burke couldn’t imagine living there and wasn’t sure why anyone else did.
In fact, it seemed to him that for all the talk of family and faith and neighborliness—the heartland virtues held up in rebuke of competitive, materialistic Gomorrahs like San Francisco—there was something not quite wholesome in this placidity, something lazy and sensual Burke felt it when he wandered the streets of his hometown, and he felt it now.
He crossed against the light, quickening his pace; he would have to move smartly to make it back in time. All signs of commerce ended at the gas station. He passed several blocks of small houses squeezed together on puny lots—no doubt the homes of those who’d spent their lives in the factories. Most of them were in bad repair: roofs sagging, paint scaling, screens rusting out. No disposable income around here.
Burke knew the story—he’d bet the farm on it. Unions broken or bought off. Salaries and benefits steadily cut under threat of layoffs that happened anyway as the jobs went to foreign wage slaves, the owners meanwhile conjuring up jolly visions of the corporate “family” and better days to come, before selling out just in time to duck the fines for a century of fouling the river; then the new owners, vultures with MBAs, gliding in to sack the pension fund before declaring bankruptcy. Burke knew the whole story, and it disgusted him—especially the workers who’d let the owners screw them like this while patting them on the head, congratulating them for being the backbone of the country, salt of the earth, the true Americans. Jesus! And still they ate it up, and voted like robbers instead of the robbed. Served them right.
Burke’s pounding heart sent a rush of heat to his face and left him strangely light-headed, as if he were floating above the sidewalk. He took the hill in long, thrusting strides. A boy with blond dreadlocks was raking leaves into a garbage bag. As Burke went past, the boy leaned on the rake and gaped at him, a jarring, surflike percussion leaking from his earphones.
The whole country was being hollowed out like this, devoured from the inside, with nobody fighting back. It was embarrassing, and vaguely shameful, to watch people get pushed around without a fight. That’s why he’d taken on his little pop-eyed pug of a client with the fucked-up hand—she was a battler. Stonewalled at every turn, bombarded with demands for documents, secretly videotaped, insulted with dinky settlement offers, even threatened with a countersuit, she just lowered her head and kept coming. She’d spent all her savings going after the surgeon who’d messed her up, to the point where she’d had to move to San Francisco to live with her son, a paralegal in Burke’s firm. Her lawyer back here in New Delft had suffered a stroke and bowed out. The case was a long shot but Burke had taken it on contingency because he knew she wouldn’t back off, that she’d keep pushing right to the end.
And now it seemed she might have a chance after all. They’d gotten a break the past month, hearing about this nurse’s complaints to his now-embittered ex-girlfriend. The account Burke had of these conversations was hearsay, not enough in itself to take to court or even to compel a fair settlement, but it told him that the witness harbored feelings of guilt and anger. That he had some pride and resented being made party to a maiming. He was no doubt under great pressure to stand by the surgeon, but the witness hadn’t actually denied seeing what he’d seen or saying what he’d said. He simply claimed not to recall it clearly.
What a man forgets he can remember. It was a question of will. And even in the witness’s evasions Burke could detect his reluctance to lie and, beyond that, his desire—not yet decisive but persistent and troubling—to tell the truth.
Burke believed that he had a gift for sensing not only a person’s truthfulness on a given question, but also, and more important, his natural inclination toward the truth. It was like a homing instinct in those who had it. No matter what the risk, no matter how carefully they might defend themselves with equivocation and convenient lapses of memory, it was still there, fidgeting to be recognized. Over the years he had brought considerable skill to the work of helping people overcome their earlier shufflings and suppressions, even their self-interest, to say what they really wanted to say. The nurse needed to tell his story; Burke was sure of that, and sure of his own ability to coax the story forth. He would master this coy witness.
And as he considered how he would do this he felt himself moving with ease for the first time that day. He had his rhythm and his wind, a pleasant sense of strength. But for his flimsy, very expensive Italian loafers, he might have broken into a run.
The houses were growing larger as he climbed, the lawns deeper and darker. Great maples arched high above the street. Burke slowed to watch a sudden fall of leaves, how they rocked and dipped and stalled in their descent, eddying in gusts so light and warm he hardly felt them on the back of his neck, like teasing breaths. Then a bus roared past and pulled to the curb just ahead, and the doors hissed open, and the girl stepped out.
Burke held back—though barely aware of holding back, or of the catch in his throat. She was tall, to his eyes magnificently tall. He caught just a glance of lips painted black before her long dark hair swung forward and veiled her face as she looked down to find her footing on the curb. She stopped on the sidewalk and watched the bus pull away in a belch of black smoke. Then she set her bag down and stretched luxuriously, going up on her toes, hands raised high above her head. Still on tiptoe, she joined her fingers together and moved her hips from side to side. She was no more than twenty feet away, but it was clear to Burke that she hadn’t noticed him, that she thought she was alone out here. He felt himself smile. He waited. She dropped her arms, did a few neck rolls, then hiked her bag back onto her shoulder and started up the street. He followed, matching his pace to hers.
She walked slowly, with the deliberate, almost flat-footed tread of a dancer, toes turned slightly outward. She was humming a song. Her knee-length plaid skirt swayed a little as she walked, but she held her back straight and still. The white blouse she wore had two sweat-spots below her shoulder blades. Burke could picture her leaning back against the plastic seat on the bus, drowsing in the swampy air as men stole looks at her over their folded papers.
The tone of her humming changed, grew more rhythmic, less tuneful. Her hips rolled under the skirt, her shoulders shifting in subtle counterpoint. On the back of her right calf there was a dark spot the size of a penny—maybe a mole, or a daub of mud.
She fell silent and reached into her bag. It was a large canvas bag, full to bulging, but she found what she was after without looking down and brought it out and slipped it over her wrist, a furry red band. She reached both hands behind her neck and gathered her hair and lifted it and gave her head a shake and let her hair fall back. She was moving even more slowly now, languorously, dreamily. Again she reached back and lifted her hair and began twisting it into a single strand. In one motion she gave it a last twist and slid the red band off her wrist and up the thick rope of hair, pulled it forward over her shoulder, and commenced picking at the ends.
Burke stared at the curve of her neck, so white, so bare. It looked damp and tender. She went on in her slow glide and he followed. He had been walking in time with her but such was his absorption that he lost the beat, and at the sound of his footsteps she wheeled around and looked into his face. Burke was right behind her—he had closed the distance without realizing it. Her eyes went wide. He was held by them, fixed. They were a deep, bruised blue, almost violet, and darkly rimmed with liner. He heard her suck in a long ragged breath.
Burke tried to speak, to reassure her, but his throat was tight and dry and not a sound came. He swallowed
. He couldn’t think what to say.
He stood looking into her face. Blotchy white skin, the pathetic hipness of the black lips. But those eyes, the high and lovely brow—beautiful; more beautiful even than he had imagined. The girl took a step back, her eyes still holding his, then turned and began angling across a lawn toward a large white house. Halfway there she broke into a run.
This somehow released Burke. He continued on his way, deliberately holding himself to a dignified pace, even stopping for a moment to put on his suit jacket—shoot the cuffs, shrug into the shoulders, give a tug at the lapels. He did not allow himself to look back. As the tightness in his throat eased he found himself hungry for air, almost panting, and realized that he’d taken hardly a breath while walking behind the girl. How frightened she seemed! What was that all about, anyway? He put this question to himself with a wonderment he didn’t actually feel. He knew; he knew what had been in his face. He let it go.
Burke walked on. He had just reached the top of the hill, some nine or ten long blocks from where he’d left the girl, and was about to turn right toward the law office, already in view at the end of the cross street, when a siren yelped behind him. Only one sharp, imperative cry, nothing more—but he recognized the sound, and stopped and closed his eyes for a moment before turning to watch the cruiser nosing toward the curb.
He waited. A gray-haired woman glared at him from the rear window. The girl was beside her, leaning forward to look at him, nodding to the cop in front. He opened a notebook on the steering wheel, wrote something, then laid the notebook on the seat beside him, set his patrolman’s cap on his head, adjusted its angle, and got out of the cruiser. He walked around to the back door and held it open as the woman and the girl slid out. Each of these actions was executed with plodding deliberation, performed. Burke understood, as an unnerving show of method and assurance.
He nodded as the cop came toward him. “Officer. What can I do for you?”
“Identification, please.”
Burke could have objected to this, but instead he shrugged, fetched his wallet from his jacket pocket, and handed over his driver’s license.
The cop examined it, looked up at Burke, lowered his eyes to the license again. He was young, his face bland as a baby’s in spite of his wispy blond mustache. “You’re not from here,” he finally said.
Burke had a business card ready. He held it out, and after eyeing it warily the cop took it. “I’m a lawyer,” Burke said. “Here to take a deposition, in, let’s see . . .” He held up his watch. “Three minutes ago. Four-thirty. Right down there on Clinton Street.” He gestured vaguely. “So what’s the problem?”
The gray-haired woman had come up close to Burke and was staring fiercely into his face. The girl lingered by the cruiser, pallid, hands dangling awkwardly at her sides.
“We have a complaint,” the officer said. “Stalking,” he added uncertainly.
“Stalking? Stalking who?”
“You know who,” the woman said in a gravelly voice, never taking her eyes off him. She was handsome in a square-jawed way and deeply tanned. Ropy brown arms sticking out of her polo shirt, grass stains on the knees of her khakis. Burke could see her on the deck of a boat, coolly reefing sails in a blow.
“The young lady there?” Burke asked.
“Don’t play cute with me,” the woman said. “I’ve never seen anyone so terrified. The poor thing could hardly speak when she came to my door.”
“Something sure scared her,” the cop said.
“And what was my part in this?” Burke looked directly at the girl. She was hugging herself, sucking on her lower lip. She was younger than he’d thought; she was just a kid. He said, gently, “Did I do something to you?”
She glanced at him, then averted her face.
In the same voice, he said, “Did I say anything to you?”
She stared at the ground by her feet.
“Well?” the cop said sharply. “What’d he do?”
The girl didn’t answer.
“Aren’t you the smooth one,” the woman said.
“I do remember passing her a while back,” Burke said, addressing himself to the cop. “Maybe I surprised her—I guess I must have. I was in kind of a hurry.” Then, speaking with absolute calm, Burke explained his business in New Delft, and the forty-five-minute break, and the route he’d taken and the necessity of moving right along to get back on time, even if that meant overtaking other people on the sidewalk. All this could be confirmed at the law office—where they’d be already waiting for him—and Burke invited the cop to come along and settle the matter forthwith. “I’m sorry if I surprised you,” he said in the girl’s direction. “I certainly didn’t mean to.”
The cop looked at him, then at the girl. “Well?” he repeated.
She turned her back to them, rested her elbows on the roof of the cruiser, and buried her face in her hands.
The cop watched her for a moment. “Ah, jeez,” he said. He gave the driver’s license another once-over, handed it back with the card, and walked over to the girl. He murmured something, then took her by the elbow and began to help her into the backseat.
The woman didn’t move. Burke felt her eyes on him as he replaced the license and card in his wallet. Finally he looked up and met her stare, so green and cold. He held it and did not blink. Then came a flash of bursting pain and his head snapped sideways so hard he felt a crack at the base of his neck. The shock scorched his eyes with hot, blinding tears. His face burned. His tongue felt jammed back in his throat.
“Liar,” she said.
Until Burke heard her voice he didn’t understand that she’d struck him—he was that stunned. It gave him a kind of relief, as if without knowing it he’d been gripped by fear of something worse.
He heard the doors of the cruiser slam shut, one-two! He bent down with his hands on his knees, steadying himself, then straightened up and rubbed at his eyes. The cruiser was gone. The left side of his face still burned, hot even to the touch. A bearded man in a black suit walked past him down the hill, shooting Burke a glance and then locking his gaze straight ahead. Burke checked his watch. He was seven minutes late.
He took a step, and another, and went on, amazed at how surely he walked, and how lightly. Down the street a squirrel jabbered right into his ear, or so it seemed, but when he glanced up he found it chattering on a limb high above him. Still, its voice was startling—raw, close. The light in the crowns of the trees had the quality of mist.
Burke stopped outside the law office and gave his shoes a quick buff on the back of his pant legs. He mounted the steps and paused at the door. The blow was still warm on his cheek. Did it show? Would they ask about it? No matter—he’d think of something. But he couldn’t help touching it again, tenderly, as if to cherish it, as he went inside to nail this witness down.
Richard Yates
A GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT
For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it—the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around—and refined the game to its essence. It became a matter of individual performance, almost an art. One of them at a time would run dramatically along the crest of a hill, and at a given point the ambush would occur: a simultaneous jerking of aimed toy pistols and a chorus of those staccato throaty sounds—a kind of hoarse-whispered “Pk-k-ew! Pk-k-ew!”—with which little boys simulate the noise of gunfire. Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poised for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse. When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (“Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,”
or “Didn’t look natural”), and then it would be the next player’s turn. That was all there was to the game, but Walter Henderson loved it. He was a slight, poorly coordinated boy, and this was the only thing even faintly like a sport at which he excelled. Nobody could match the abandon with which he flung his limp body down the hill, and he reveled in the small acclaim it won him. Eventually the others grew bored with the game, after some older boys had laughed at them; Walter turned reluctantly to more wholesome forms of play, and soon he had forgotten about it.
But he had occasion to remember it, vividly, one May afternoon nearly twenty-five years later in a Lexington Avenue office building, while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired. He had become a sober, keen-looking young man now, with clothes that showed the influence of an Eastern university and neat brown hair that was just beginning to thin out on top. Years of good health had made him less slight, and though he still had trouble with his coordination it showed up mainly in minor things nowadays, like an inability to coordinate his hat, his wallet, his theater tickets and his change without making his wife stop and wait for him, or a tendency to push heavily against doors marked “Pull.” He looked, at any rate, the picture of sanity and competence as he sat there in the office. No one could have told that the cool sweat of anxiety was sliding under his shirt, or that the fingers of his left hand, concealed in his pocket, were slowly grinding and tearing a book of matches into a moist cardboard pulp. He had seen it coming for weeks, and this morning, from the minute he got off the elevator, he had sensed that this was the day it would happen. When several of his superiors said, “Morning, Walt,” he had seen the faintest suggestion of concern behind their smiles; then once this afternoon, glancing out over the gate of the cubicle where he worked, he’d happened to catch the eye of George Crowell, the department manager, who was hesitating in the door of his private office with some papers in his hand. Crowell turned away quickly, but Walter knew he had been watching him, troubled but determined. In a matter of minutes, he felt sure, Crowell would call him in and break the news—with difficulty, of course, since Crowell was the kind of boss who took pride in being a regular guy. There was nothing to do now but let the thing happen and try to take it as gracefully as possible.
