Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  “A Snapple?” Dave said, standing and reaching for the refrigerator door. She smiled, his answer.

  Bailey looked at the table in front of him. “I guess I’ll go,” he said. “Sorry to barge in, I don’t know what I was doing. No, I know what I was doing. I just won sixteen grand and I had to tell somebody, I guess.” He picked up his money and stuffed it into his pocket. “Here’s the eight I owe you,” he said and handed Claire the hundreds he had taken from the roll.

  She took the money and kissed him, laughing. “You really won sixteen thousand dollars? That’s great, Bailey. Aren’t you happy? You’re going to quit now, I hope?”

  Dave let the refrigerator door fall closed and handed her a bottle of what looked like pink lemonade. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Bailey?” Claire said.

  “I gotta go,” he said, and nodded to Dave. “It was good to meet you.”

  Dave stood to shake hands. The dog got to its feet. “Good to meet you,” Dave said.

  “I’ll walk you out?” Claire said. She took a drink of lemonade and set the bottle on the table beside the hundreds, but then thought better of it and picked the bottle up again and walked out the door, leaving Bailey and the boy standing there.

  “Good night,” Bailey said and turned and followed Claire outside.

  He found her sitting with her lemonade beside her on a low concrete wall at the edge of the property, near where his car was parked. It was still not quite morning, although the air was wet and birds were already chirping and whistling all around.

  “I wanted to show you all this dumb money,” Bailey said, taking it out of his pocket in a ball, staring at it. “Isn’t that pathetic?” He settled beside her on the concrete wall, shaking his head slowly back and forth. “You’re busy doing the watata with the sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.” He threw the money on the grass.

  Claire laughed. “And you accuse me of making movie gestures?” she said, and slipped off the wall.

  “Okay,” Bailey said, “right. Give me that back. Make sure the ink isn’t running on that damn check.”

  She handed him the dewy money, yawning.

  “All the good gestures have been gestured,” he said, replacing it in his shirt pocket. “So, I mean, what are you thinking? Breeding stock? It’s not only that he’s not me, he’s not even like me.”

  “You’d like that better?” Claire said, sipping lemonade. The glass bottle clanked when she set it back down on the wall.

  “No, I guess not. But he has a dog. He has a gun. He’s a goddamn norm. He’s the enemy.”

  “He wants to have children.”

  “Oh, Jesus, it is breeding stock.” Bailey caressed the concrete wall absentmindedly, then realizing it, lifted his hand to touch his forehead with the tips of his fingers, then clapped his hand on his jeans above the knee. “Look, marry me. We’ll have children, tomorrow, or Friday. I’d like to have children. Can we use a Skinner box? We have these gahunga cat carriers for dogs at the store—perfect for children. Claire?”

  She was watching a police car cruising up the street and past the apartments. The cop, a kid wearing sunglasses even though it had barely gotten light, gave them his best stare as he passed. “Only you are good enough for me, is that it?” she said.

  Bailey’s heart sank a little. That was it. It occurred to him for the first time that maybe it wasn’t true, or that maybe the whole notion of “good enough” didn’t have anything to do with it. “No,” he said, weakly. “Don’t be silly.”

  “We’re in love,” Claire said. “Whether we meet your specifications or not.”

  “I got a new cat,” Bailey said. “Somebody here put it in my car Monday while I was talking to you. When I came out, it was in the car. I tried to leave it here. Then your precious boyfriend drove up and offered to blow it away with his big pistola. I guess he’s a dog person.” He feigned a smile. “I keep trying to figure out when my life ended. It wasn’t when we split up, it was before that. It was when I got that goddamn job, I think. I just didn’t notice because the job itself was distracting. Anything can be interesting for a while. And then you dumped me. It’s like, this money, this sixteen grand? I stopped caring about it ten minutes out of Biloxi. What good is it? I can pay off credit cards.”

  “You had another girl,” Claire said. “Did you forget? She was about twenty and very tall, if I remember correctly.” She laughed, then stopped as abruptly as she had started and rubbed her chin, a weird, mannish gesture. “I remember every damn thing about her. She had a stupid name. Dashy. One of her charms, I guess.”

  “You don’t feel like your life ended? Really? I don’t mean when we split up.” Bailey looked at her, looked away. “Like what you’re doing now is just so much busy work?”

  In her white outfit, in the soft morning light, she didn’t look so much uncomprehending as horribly indifferent. She shrugged. “I got older.”

  Bailey stood up. “All that time, the time when we were together, when I was a lowlife, a slacker, every goddamn day, it was electric. Something wonderful was coming. I remember how wonderful stuff at the grocery store was, those Rubbermaid things and the little hardware display and funny vegetables. Then I got a job and a nice fat salary.” He turned his palms up and gave her a puzzled look. “All gone,” he said.

  “Bailey, I don’t—”

  “No,” he said sharply, suddenly afraid. “Nevermind. Sorry to bother you with this rot.” He smiled, a quick fake. Who knows what she might have been about to say, he thought. It was okay that she was intending to marry some perfectly ordinary young blond boy and go off to believe with him in everything that in the past they together they had not believed in. It was even okay to no longer believe in the things that they had believed in together. But he didn’t want to hear that it had never happened, that he had understood it wrong, that he had in fact been alone then, too. The idea of it made him shudder. She put her arm around him, leaning in, as if to kiss him, and hesitated. “Bailey?”

  “Anyway, this cat is skinny,” he said, “looks like he hasn’t eaten since the Bicentennial. You’ll come see him sometime. He’s black, looks a little like Otto.” He glanced vaguely out into the damp morning air, closed his eyes, and shuddered again. “Still like cats, don’t you?” he said, waiting, urgently, for her kiss.

  That Story about Freddy Hylo

  I had been gambling for more than 36 hours, begged off work the next day, called my wife and told her I wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, hadn’t slept and hadn’t eaten and was about out of money when Richie called me and told me he was coming to meet me at the casino. I was almost at the point where you can’t remember the rules of blackjack, where you have to play standing up, where you look at your cards and you’re trying to remember what the object of the game is, and how to add. I may have been seeing things, too, a little, corner of the eye stuff that wasn’t there, that sort of thing.

  Richie brought a friend, a little guy named Freddy Hylo, pronounced High-Low. They showed up around midnight. It gave me the creeps because the only time I had ever heard that name, it was in a story I heard when I was a kid, a story about a guy busting out another guy’s teeth by breaking them on a piece of sandstone in his mouth. And this guy was scary. I’m six-one, 195, and he couldn’t have been more than about five-nine, but he was sort of terrifying. I don’t know what it was, something in his face, his eyes, you looked at him and thought, this is a guy that doesn’t care about anything.

  We wandered around the casino for about four hours, playing table games, sitting in one of the clubs where the band was actually pretty good, hitting on the girls who looked like teenagers, without a lot of luck. By about three in the morning, Richie had found himself this blonde girl in a tiny gray dress that looked like it was made out of microfiber dust cloths. I had thought she was a professional, but what do I know? I was at a blackjack table with Hylo and two other people, some drunk asshole in a leather jacket
and a Vietnamese woman, who were exchanging looks when we played, complaining when Hylo hit a 12 against a dealer’s 2, a standard by-the-book draw. “Took her bust card,” the asshole would say, and the woman would agree almost imperceptibly. Hylo didn’t react, it was like he didn’t even hear.

  Richie came up behind us holding the blonde, bent over to me. “I got a room.” He pointed toward the ceiling. “In the hotel,” he said, and glanced at the girl.

  “No, Jesus, don’t leave me with this guy,” I said, as quietly as I knew how. “C’mon, Rich.” But he was already walking away with her, her wispy dress swinging back and forth.

  The drunk guy in the leather jacket was looking at me. “You gonna bet, champ?”

  I shoved a couple of greens onto my spot.

  After me, Hylo put out ten dollars, two reds.

  “High roller,” the drunk guy said. “Be a man, man.” He was betting a hundred a hand, winning most of them. The rest of us were above water, but that’s all.

  • • •

  I was driving the car and Hylo had the asshole in the backseat and was instructing him in etiquette with a razor. I didn’t want him in my car, but they must have come in Richie’s. Richie and the blonde girl were long gone. I could see the attraction. I wouldn’t have been in the car with Freddy, in fact I never would have been anywhere with Freddy if I could’ve avoided it, but I hadn’t been able to get out of it when he asked me to drive. He was not really asking, exactly.

  “Pull it over,” he said.

  “You want a Whataburger?”

  “Yeah, I want a Whataburger. You want a Whataburger, champ?” he said to his companion in the backseat. The guy, who had been giving us shit at a blackjack table, had disappeared and then later, when we stopped in the last men’s room before the parking garage, he had walked into the men’s room and said something to Freddy about the long coat he had on, something suggesting Freddy was a flasher. Freddy said, “You’re some kind of expert in that area?” and then out came the razor, and here we are now, behind the Whataburger, dazzlingly bright lights around the restaurant, some kind of service road in front of us, a strip center, dark, behind us.

  The parking lot was empty, but I parked to the side and toward the back and got out of the Citroen and turned toward the Whataburger. We were beside what looked in the dark like five thousand dollars’ worth of pointless landscaping, a Japanese garden with sand and pebbles, stone and sago palms. There was nobody in the place, near as I could see. “Open 24 Hours” was painted on the window, in orange and white. Everything was orange and white. It was four in the morning.

  “Hey,” Freddy said, standing on the other side of the car.

  “Where you goin’?”

  “Hamburger,” I said. “Right?”

  Freddy shook his head. “Stay here. Keep an eye out.”

  “Freddy, let the asshole go. Let’s eat.”

  He gave me a look. “Wouldn’t be right,” he said.

  At that point the other guy took a half hearted swing at him and Freddy turned and knocked him backward about three feet, handed me the razor, and then hit him three or four more times, very fast, with his fists and his elbow, and the guy went down. On the ground, the guy was whimpering. All the fight gone out of him in two seconds—it was bizarre. Freddy had his hair in his hand, and with his other arm reached out toward me. “Give me the knife,” he said.

  I looked at him. My hands were shaking. “Fuck no, what’re you, crazy? Let him go.”

  “Give me the knife.”

  I handed it to him.

  I thought, Oh, fuck, and looked quickly into the restaurant and then up and down the street. There was nobody. When I turned back around, Freddy was shoving a flat piece of sandstone from the landscaping into the guy’s mouth, and then he raised his boot way up and brought it down on the guy’s head. Teeth or something scattered around Freddy’s feet. I stood staring at the pristine, almost fastidious little garden with its squat palms inside a perfect rim and then the blood on the concrete and blood all around the guy’s mouth. Freddy flipped the razor open and whacked a hunk of the guy’s hair off, looked at it and stretched, slipped it into his pants pocket. This seemed to satisfy him and he let the guy’s head hit the pavement and looked at me.

  I didn’t know what to do. He waved toward the restaurant, asking, then turned back around and kicked the moaning guy on the concrete again.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “No, I’m hungry.” He stared at me. Behind him, the guy got up and sort of half ran, half crawled away toward the dark shops of the strip center. Hylo laughed.

  • • •

  Everything in the place was weird orange and white stripes. I kept waiting for cops to show up but they never did. Freddy was eating onion rings. He had asked for two orders of them, but the black kid who brought the food to the table brought three. The kid stood, with an orange plastic tray on a strap around his neck, like a cigarette girl, approving. When he put the stuff down in front of us, he said, “These are so good … I just really love these onion rings.”

  “They’re good all right,” Freddy said.

  The kid was maybe seventeen and there was about him this huge, terrible sweetness and you looked at him and thought, This poor kid is just gonna get crushed. He took his tray and walked back to the counter, behind it, and disappeared.

  Now Hylo was talking to me. “What did you learn tonight?” He smiled.

  “Don’t be an asshole?”

  “Exactly,” he said, smiled, looked around. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

  I just caught what he said. I was shaking, my whole body trembling, just a little. “This can’t be,” I said. “It’s not. It can’t be. I heard this story twenty-five years ago, when I was twelve. The stone in the guy’s mouth, the whole thing. The reason I know it can’t be is that—In the story, the guy’s name was Hylo.”

  He was eating. He didn’t seem to hear me, but then he shrugged. “When you heard that story, who did you imagine yourself to be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you imagine yourself to be the guy smashing the other guy’s teeth, or did you imagine yourself to be the guy getting a limestone sandwich?”

  I looked at him. I had the car keys in my hand.

  “That’s really all there is,” he said. He was looking out the big plate glass windows, in a weary sort of way, at the bright, clean parking lot. The restaurant was new, looked sort of like Alphaville. “You go on. I’ll get a cab.”

  I looked around the place for someone else, but there was nobody anywhere, just, out there, the empty 4 a.m. streets and the lights and a stupid stoplight pointlessly changing colors, red to green. Outside I got into the car and glanced back through the restaurant windows half expecting Hylo to be gone, turned to vapor. But he was still in there.

  Telephone

  It’ll be like this. The phone will ring, at some wrong time, some time the phone never rings, six o’clock in the evening or four a.m., or noon. It’s Ben, my brother. Ben always knows everything first, makes it his business to know things, so it’ll be him. How is he going to sound? Cool? Weeping? That high-serious voice he gets whenever something terrible happens? No, that voice isn’t for truly terrible things, but for those things we treat as terrible, talisman to protect us from the really terrible. The phone rings, it’s Ben. “Tommy,” he says, “I just got a call from Baltimore. It’s Pop—”

  No, that’s not it. It’ll be a message on the answering machine, the rectangular red light blinking when I go into the kitchen in the morning, and I’ll see it and I’ll think it’s something else, someone I want to hear from, something maybe I want to hear, something that I’ve been waiting for, something good. It’ll be Ben, of course, leaving a message. The message will say, “Pop died this morning at—” and then there’ll be some time, he’ll say “5:55 a.m.” the way people do, as if it made any difference. It’ll be some picturesque time, like 5:55 a.m., some time which stays i
n your brain forever after, not a time you can forget.

  Then the message will continue, Ben sounding like a cop. “Call me. I’m flying over there this afternoon, and if I haven’t heard from you, I’ll call you when I get there. Mom is okay, just crazy. Laura is taking care of her, she’s at Laura’s house. That number is—well, you have Laura’s number …” Then the message will change, his voice will change, he’ll say, “I didn’t know this was going to be this way, I didn’t know …” and he won’t be able to finish the thought. “Call me,” he’ll say.

  I am standing in the kitchen, listening to my brother on the answering machine. I’m half awake. I don’t feel anything. I have to wait for some place where I’m safe enough to feel something. I have been waiting for this message for twenty-five years, since my father was about sixty. This is what it’ll be like. Twenty-five years of waiting wasted. This is it. What is it like? Standing in my kitchen. I will punch the rewind and play the message again. “… at 5:55 a.m.,” my brother says. “I didn’t know this was going to be this way,” he says. It’s over, I will think. As a child, when my mother wasn’t home, I used to listen to sirens, stand looking out the big windows of the front room, looking into the empty carport, waiting for her car to be back in its place, and it always came back.

  As a child, I got to play chess with him. He would lie on his elbow on the kingsize bed and I would sit on a low stool, the wooden chessboard on another stool between us. Sometimes he was in pajamas. Maybe he was letting me win, those times I won. Now, middle-aged, I remember things he said, advice, some of it. He did not say, It’s bad and then it gets worse. Once he took one of his records, with “Unbreakable” printed on the label, and bent the record in half until it broke. “Not unbreakable,” he said, and then he laughed. What kind of person would do that? I think. I like to think that twenty-five years anticipating has immunized me against emptiness, but it isn’t so.