Dusk and Other Stories

by James Salter

  “Oh, Christ,” he murmured, looking around.

  It was William Hedges. Alone.

  They all began to talk at once. The owner of the Mercedes, which was blinded, fortunately was not present. A policeman was making his way along the street.

  “Well, it’s not too serious,” Hedges said. He was inspecting his own car. The taillights were shattered. There was a dent in the trunk.

  After much discussion he was finally allowed to enter the hotel. He was wearing a striped cotton jacket and a shirt the color of ink. He had a white face, damp with sweat, the face of an unpopular schoolboy, high forehead, thinning hair, a soft beard touched with gray, the beard of an explorer, a man who washed his socks in the Amazon.

  “Nadine will be along a little later,” he said.

  When he reached for a drink, his hand was trembling.

  “My foot slipped off the brake,” he explained. He quickly lit a cigarette. “The insurance pays that, don’t they? Probably not.”

  He seemed to have reached a stop, the first of many enormous pauses during which he looked in his lap. Then, as if it were the thing he had been struggling to think of, he inquired painfully, “What do you … think of Basel?”

  The headwaiter had placed them on opposite sides of the table, the empty chair between them. Its presence seemed to weigh on Hedges. He asked for another drink. Turning, he knocked over a glass. That act, somehow, relieved him. The waiter dabbed at the wet tablecloth with a napkin. Hedges spoke around him.

  “I don’t know exactly what Nadine has told you,” he said softly. A long pause. “She sometimes tells … fantastic lies.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “She’s from a little town in Pennsylvania,” Hedges muttered. “Julesberg. She’s never been … she was just a … an ordinary girl when we met.”

  They had come to Basel to visit certain institutions, he explained. It was an … interesting city. History has certain sites upon which whole epochs turn, and the village of Dornach gave evidence of a very … The sentence was never finished. Rudolf Steiner had been a student of Goethe. …

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Of course. Nadine’s been telling you, hasn’t she?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  He finally began again, about Goethe. The range of that intellect, he said, had been so extraordinary that he was able, like Leonardo before him, to encompass all of what was then human knowledge. That, in itself, implied an overall … coherence, and the fact that no man had been capable of it since could easily mean the coherence no longer existed, it was dissolved. … The ocean of things known had burst its shores.

  “We are on the verge,” Hedges said, “of radical departures in the destiny of man. Those who reveal them …”

  The words, coming with agonized slowness, seemed to take forever. They were a ruse, a feint. It was difficult to hear them out.

  “… will be torn to pieces like Galileo.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  A long pause again.

  “Oh, yes.”

  They had another drink.

  “We are a little strange, I suppose, Nadine and I,” Hedges said, as if to himself.

  It was finally the time.

  “I don’t think she’s a very happy woman.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Happy?” Hedges said. “No, she isn’t happy. She isn’t capable of being happy. Ecstasies. She is ecstatic. She tells me so every day,” he said. He put his hand to his forehead, half covering his eyes. “You see, you don’t know her at all.”

  She was not coming, suddenly that was clear. There was going to be no dinner.

  Something should have been said, it ended too vaguely. Ten minutes after Hedges had gone, leaving behind an embarrassing expanse of white and three places set, the thought came of what he should have demanded: I want to talk to her.

  All doors had closed. He was miserable, he could not imagine someone with weaknesses, incapacities like his own. He had intended to mutilate a man and it turned into monologue—probably they were laughing about it at that very moment. It had all been humiliating. The river was moving beneath his window, even in darkness the current showed. He stood looking down upon it. He walked about trying to calm himself. He lay on the bed, it seemed his limbs were trembling. He detested himself. Finally he was still.

  He had just closed his eyes when in the emptiness of the room the telephone rang. It rang again. A third time. Of course! He had expected it. His heart was jumping as he picked it up. He tried to say hello quite calmly. A man’s voice answered. It was Hedges. He was humble.

  “Is Nadine there?” he managed to say.

  “Nadine?”

  “Please, may I speak to her,” Hedges said.

  “She’s not here.”

  There was a silence. He could hear Hedges’ helpless breathing. It seemed to go on and on.

  “Look,” Hedges began, his voice was less brave, “I just want to talk to her for a moment, that’s all…. I beg you …”

  She was somewhere in the town then, he hurried out to find her. He didn’t bother to decide where she might be. Somehow the night had turned in his direction, everything was changing. He walked, he ran through the streets, afraid to be late.

  It was nearly midnight, people were coming out of the theaters, the café at the Casino was roaring. A sea of hidden and half-hidden faces with the waiters always standing so someone could be hidden behind them, he combed it slowly. Surely she was there. She was sitting at a table by herself, she expected to be found.

  The same cars were turning through the streets, he stepped among them. People walked slowly, stopping at lighted windows. She would be looking at a display of expensive shoes, antique jewelry perhaps, gold necklaces. At the corners he had a feeling of loss. He passed down interior arcades. He was leaving the more familiar section. The newsstands were locked, the cinemas dark.

  Suddenly, like the first truth of illness, the certainty left him. Had she gone back to her hotel? Perhaps she was even at his, or had been there and gone. He knew she was capable of aimless, original acts. Instead of drifting in the darkness of the city, her somewhat languid footsteps existing only to be devoured by his, instead of choosing a place in which to be found as cleverly as she had drawn him to follow, she might have become discouraged and returned to Hedges to say only, I felt like a walk.

  There is always one moment, he thought, it never comes again. He began going back, as if lost, along streets he had already seen. The excitement was gone, he was searching, he was no longer sure of his instincts but wondering instead what she might have decided to do.

  On the stairway near the Heuwaage, he stopped. The square was empty. He was suddenly cold. A lone man was passing below. It was Hedges. He was wearing no tie, the collar of his jacket was turned up. He walked without direction, he was in search of his dreams. His pockets had bank notes crumpled in them, cigarettes bent in half. The whiteness of his skin was visible from afar. His hair was uncombed. He did not pretend to be young, he was past that, into the heart of his life, his failed work, a man who took commuter trains, who drank tea, hoping for something, some proof in the end that his talents had been as great as the others’. This world is giving birth to another, he said. We are nearing the galaxy’s core. He was writing that, he was inventing it. His poems would become our history.

  The streets were deserted, the restaurants had turned out their lights. Alone in a café in the repetition of empty tables, the chairs placed upon them upside down, his dark shirt, his doctor’s beard, Hedges sat. He would never find her. He was like a man out of work, an invalid, there was no place to go. The cities of Europe were silent. He coughed a little in the chill.

  The Goetheanum of the photograph, the one she had shown him, did not exist. It had burned on the night of December 31, 1922. There had been an evening lecture, the audience had gone home. The night watchman discovered smoke and soon afterward the fire became visible. It spread
with astonishing rapidity and the firemen battled without effect. At last the situation seemed beyond hope. An inferno was rising within the great windows. Steiner called everyone out of the building. Exactly at midnight the main dome was breached, the flames burst through and roared upward. The windows with their special glass were glowing, they began to explode from the heat. A huge crowd had come from the nearby villages and even from Basel itself where, miles away, the fire was visible. Finally the dome collapsed, green and blue flames soaring from the metal organ pipes. The Goetheanum disappeared, its master, its priest, its lone creator walking slowly in the ashes at dawn.

  A new structure made of concrete rose in its place. Of the old, only photos remained.

  DIRT

  Billy was under the house. It was cool there, it smelled of the unturned earth of fifty years. A kind of rancid dust sifted down through the floorboards and fell on his face like a light rain. He spit it out. He turned his head and, reaching carefully up, wiped around his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. He looked back toward the strip of daylight at the edge of the house. Harry’s legs were in the sun—every so often, with a groan, he would kneel down and see how it was going.

  They were leveling the floor of the old Bryant place. Like all of them it had no foundation, it sat on pieces of wood.

  “Feller could start right there,” Harry called.

  “This one?”

  “That’s it.”

  Billy slowly wiped the dirt from his eyes again and began to set up the jack. The joists were a few inches above his face.

  They ate lunch sitting outside. It was hot, mountain weather. The sun was dry, the air thin as paper. Harry ate slowly. He had a wrinkled neck and white stubble along his jowl line.

  Death was coming for Harry Mies. He would lie emptied, his cheeks rouged, the fine, old man’s ears unhearing. There was no telling the things he knew. He was alone in the far fields of his life. The rain fell on him, he did not move.

  There are animals that finally, when the time comes, will not lie down. He was like that. When he kneeled he would get up again slowly. He would rise to one knee, pause, and finally sway to his feet like an old horse.

  “Feller in town with all the hair …” he said.

  Billy’s fingers made black marks on the bread.

  “The hair?”

  “What’s he supposed to be?”

  “I think a drummer,” Billy said.

  “A drummer.”

  “He’s with a band.”

  “Must be with something,” Harry said.

  He unscrewed the cap from a battered thermos and poured what looked like tea. They sat in the quiet of the tall cottonwoods, not even the highest leaves were moving.

  They drove to the dump, the sun in the windshield was burning their knees. There was an old cattle gate salvaged from somewhere, some bankrupt ranch. It was open, Harry drove in. They were in a field of junk and garbage on the edge of the creek, a bare field forever smoldering. A black man in overalls appeared from a shack surrounded by bedsprings. He was round-shouldered, heavy as a bull. There was an old, green Chrysler parked on the far side.

  “Looking for some pipe, Al,” Harry said.

  The man said nothing. He gave a sort of halfhearted signal. Harry had already gone past and turned down an alley of old furniture, stoves, aluminum chairs. There was a sour smell in the air. A few refrigerators, indestructible, had fallen down the bank and were lying half-buried in the stream.

  The pipe was all in one place. It was mostly rusted, Billy kicked aimlessly at some sections.

  “We can use it,” Harry commented.

  They began carrying pieces back to the car and put them on the roof. They drove slowly, the old man’s head tilted back a little. The car swayed in and out of holes. The pipe rolled in the rack.

  “Pretty good feller, Al,” Harry said. They were coming to the shack. He lifted his hand as they passed. No one was there.

  Billy’s mind was wandering. The ride to town seemed long.

  “They give him a lot of trouble,” Harry said. He was watching the road, the empty road which connects all these towns.

  “There’s none of that stuff much good out there,” he said. “Sometimes he tries to charge a little for it. People feel like they ought to be able to carry it off for nothing.”

  “He didn’t charge you.”

  “Me? No, I bring him a little something now and then,” Harry said. “Old Al and me are friends.”

  After a while, “Claims to be a free country, I dunno …” he said.

  The cowboys at Gerhart’s called him the Swede, but he never went in there. They would see him go by outside, papery skin, dangling arms, the slowness of age as he walked. He may have looked a little Swedish, pale-eyed from those mornings of invincible white, mornings of the great Southwest, black coffee in his cup, the day ahead. The ashtrays on the bar were plastic, the clock had the name of a whiskey printed on its face.

  It was five-thirty. Billy walked in.

  “There he is.”

  He ignored them.

  “What’ll it be, then?” Gerhart said.

  “Beer.”

  On the wall was the stuffed head of a bear with a pair of glasses on its nose and a red plaster tongue. Above it hung an American flag with a sign: NO DOGS ALLOWED. Around the middle of the day there were a few people like Wayne Garrich who had the insurance agency, they wore straw rancher’s hats rolled at the sides. Later there were construction workers in T-shirts and sunglasses, gas company men. It was always crowded after five. The ranch hands sat together at the tables with their legs stretched out. They had belt buckles with a gold-plated steerhead on them.

  “Be thirty cents,” Gerhart said. “What’re you up to? Still working for old Harry?”

  “Yeah, well …” Billy’s voice wandered.

  “What’s he paying you?”

  He was too embarrassed to tell the truth.

  “Two fifty an hour,” Billy said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Gerhart said. “I pay that for sweeping floors.”

  Billy nodded. He had no reply.

  Harry took three dollars an hour himself. There were probably people in town would take more, he said, but that was his rate. He’d pour a foundation for that, he said, take three weeks.

  There was not one day of rain. The sun laid on their backs like boards.

  Harry got the shovel and hoe from the trunk of his car. He was tall, he carried them in one hand. He turned the wheelbarrow right side up, the bags of cement were piled beneath on a piece of plywood. He flushed out the wheelbarrow with the hose. Then he began mixing the first load of concrete: five shovels of gravel, three of sand, one of cement. Occasionally he’d stop and pick out a twig or piece of grass. The sun beat down like flats of tin. Ten thousand days of it down in Texas and all around. He turned the dry mixture over upon itself again and again, finally he began adding water. He added more water, working it in. The color became a rich, river-gray, the smooth face broken by gravel. Billy stood watching.

  “Don’t want it too runny,” the old man said. There was always the feeling he might be talking to himself. He laid down the hoe. “Okey-dokey,” he said.

  His shoulders were stooped, they had the set of labor in them. He took the handles of the barrow without straightening up.

  “I’ll get it,” Billy said, reaching.

  “That’s all right,” Harry muttered. His teeth whistled on the “s.”

  He wheeled it himself, the surface now smooth and shifting a little from side to side, and set it down with a jolt near the wooden forms he’d built—Billy had dug the trench. Checking them one last time, he tilted the wheelbarrow and the heavy liquid fell from its lip. He scraped it empty and then moved along the trench with his shovel, jabbing to fill the voids. On the second trip he let Billy push the barrow, naked to the waist, the sun roaring down on his shoulders and back, his muscles jumping as he lifted. The next day he let him shovel.

  Billy lived near the Catholi
c church, in a room on the ground floor. It had a metal shower. He slept without sheets, in the morning he drank milk from the carton. He was going out with a girl named Alma who was a waitress at Daly’s. She had legs with hard calves. She didn’t say much, her complaisance drove him crazy, sometimes she was at Gerhart’s with someone else in a haze of voices, the bark of laughter, famous heavyweights behind her tacked on the wall. There were water stains near the ceiling. The door to the men’s room slammed.

  They talked about her. They stood at the bar so they could see her by turning a little. She was a girl in a small town. The television had exhibition football coming from Grand Junction. They were thinking of her legs as they watched the game, she was like an animal they wanted. She smoked a lot, Alma, but her teeth were white. She was flat-faced, like a fighter. She would be living in the trailer park, Billy told her. Her kids would eat white bread in big, soft packages from the Woody Creek Store.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  She didn’t deny it. She looked away. Like an animal, it didn’t matter how pure they were, how beautiful. They went down the highway in clattering steel trucks, wisps of straw blowing clear as they passed. They were watched by the cold eyes of cowboys. They entered the house of blood, its sudden bone-cleaving blows, its muffled cries. He didn’t spend much money on her—he was saving up. She never mentioned it.

  They poured the side of the house that faced Third Street and started along the front. He thought of her in the sunlight that was browning his arms. He lifted the heavy barrow and became strong everywhere, like a tightened cable. When they finished in the evening, Harry washed off everything with the hose, he put the shovel and hoe in the trunk of his car. He sat on the front seat with the door open. He smiled to himself. He lifted his cap and smoothed his hair.