by Andre Dubus
“About ten, I guess. Why?”
“I was wondering what I was doing then.”
“You should have been out here. It was beautiful, really. Cool and quiet, and all the stars.”
She half-turned toward him. If he moved a hand outward, it would touch her. He folded his arms, then leaned with his side against the tree. He was so close to her now that he could only see her face and throat and shoulders, unless he moved his eyes.
“Where have you been?” she said.
He said to her eyes: “I went to Mass.” Then he said to her mouth: “I go every day.”
“You do? Why?”
“I want to be a priest.”
“Wow.”
“It’s not just that. I’d go even if I didn’t want to be one. Do you receive on Sundays?”
“On Sundays, sure.”
“So you believe in it. So do I. That’s why I go. Because it’s too big not to.”
“Too big?”
“You believe it’s God? The bread and wine?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s God, so how can I stay home? When He’s there every day.”
“I never thought of it like that.” The cigarette rose into his vision, and she turned in profile to draw from it. “You feel like you have to go?”
“No. I like it. I love it. It’s better than anything. The feeling. Do you think I’m dumb?”
“No. I wish I felt that way.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “The things I do, everybody does them.”
He unfolded his arms, and touched her cheek.
“You’re so pretty,” he said.
“So are you.”
His face warmed. “Pretty?”
“Well. You know. Good-looking.”
She looked out at the field, finished the cigarette, then called Conroy. He was at the other side of it, near the woods where Richie cross-country skied. Conroy stood still and looked at Melissa’s voice. Then he ran toward it.
“Are you going to play softball this morning?” she said.
“Probably. Are you?”
“I don’t know.”
Conroy stopped on the infield of the softball diamond, sniffed the earth, then moved, with his nose down, to short right field. He straightened, circled three times in the same spot, as though he were drilling himself into it, then squatted, with his four paws close to each other, his tail curled upward, and shat. He cocked his head and watched them, and Melissa said: “Remember that, if you play right field. Are you in a hurry to get home?”
“Not me.”
“I’ll have another cigarette.”
She withdrew her cigarettes from her blouse, and he watched her suntanned hand going down between her breasts, watched as she returned the pack, and imagined her small white breasts, and the brown from the sun ending just above and below them.
“Aren’t you playing softball?” he said.
“Late. I have to do housework first.”
“Last night—”
When he stopped, she had been frowning about housework, but her face softened and she looked at his eyes, and said: “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime.”
“Tell me.”
“Sometime.”
“Promise?”
“Yes. I just wish I had been here.”
“Was that it?”
“No.”
“You’ll tell me?”
“Yes.”
He unfolded his arms, lowered them to his sides, where they made him feel as though he were stiffly posing for a picture. Slowly he let them rise, let each hand rest on her shoulders, then move down and lightly hold her biceps. She watched him. Then he swallowed and patted her lean hard arms, and turned away from her, letting his hands slide down to her elbows and away, and he folded his arms on his breast and looked out at the field. Conroy was lying down, chewing a short piece of a branch.
“You’ve never smoked?” she said.
“No.”
“Here. Try.”
He looked at her, and she held her cigarette to his lips; he drew on it and inhaled bitter heat and waited to cough as he quickly blew out the smoke, but he did not. Then a dizzying nausea moved through him, and was gone. He shook his head.
“Did you get a kick?”
“Too much of one.”
“You have to get used to it. Want another?”
“Woo. Not today.”
She smiled at him and ground out the cigarette with her foot, and he watched her toes arch in the sandal. She called Conroy. He came with his head high, holding the stick in his jaws, and Richie walked his bicycle behind Melissa, into the trees, and onto the road. As they walked, the bicycle was between them, and she rested a hand on the seat. In front of his house he stopped.
“So maybe I’ll see you later,” he said.
“Yes. Maybe tonight too. Father Stowe.”
His cheeks were warm again, but he was smiling.
“I feel like a bad girl.”
“Why?”
“I gave you your first drag on a cigarette.” Then she leaned over the bicycle and with closed lips quickly kissed his mouth, that was open, his lips stilled by surprise, by fear, by excitement. She walked down the road, calling for Conroy, and a block away the dog turned and sprinted toward her, ears back, the stick in his jaws. Richie stood breathing her scents of smoke and lipstick and something else sweet—a cologne or cosmetic—or perhaps he only smelled memory, for it did not fade from the air. He watched her stoop to pet Conroy and nuzzle his ear, then straighten and walk with him, on the side of the road, in the shade of the arching trees.
When she turned into her lawn, he pushed his bicycle up the walk and onto the concrete slab at the front door. He crouched to lock the rear wheel and was very hungry and hoped his father was making pancakes.
TWO
HE WAS. Greg Stowe had waked when he heard the front door shut behind Richie, and now Richie was nearly an hour late and Greg stood on the narrow east sundeck, which they rarely used because it was shaded by maples and pines and was sunlit only in the middle of the day. But he drank coffee there in the morning, all during the warm months, and often in the colder ones too, in late fall and winter, on windless sunny mornings when the temperature was over twenty. And at night when he knew or believed he was not the same man he was in the morning, he drank beer out there long past midnight, because it was darker, the trees that blocked the sun forming a good black wall between him and the streetlights nearly a hundred yards behind the house. He had bought both lots, so that no one could ever build behind him, and his lawn would always end at streets, not another man’s property, and he had left the trees on the back lot, so he had a small woods. Children played there, and teenagers hid and left behind them beer cans and bottles and cigarette butts. But the teenagers always gathered at the same spot, and their trash was contained. He thought it was funny that teenagers, except when they were in a car, did not seem comfortable unless they were stationary in a familiar spot, like an old person, or a dog, in a house.
The front sundeck was good for drinking with friends before dinner, but there was a streetlight, and the lights of other houses, and he could not feel alone there. He liked drinking alone in a place so dark he had to remember the color of his clothes, or wait until his eyes adjusted to discern at least their hue. On those nights, and last night was one of them, time stopped, while his sense of place expanded, so there were moments when the sudden awareness of the dial of his wristwatch, and of where he actually stood, beer in hand, came to him with the startling sense of being wakened by an alarm clock. In the morning, drinking coffee and standing where he had stood the night before, he simply planned his day.
Not this morning, though, for today was a continuation of last night with Larry, interrupted only by his grieving beer-drinking on the deck and a short sleep, and it would resume with Richie as soon as he ca
me home, and end with Carol. So his day was not only already prepared for him, like a road he had to follow (or, more accurately, he thought, an obstacle course), but in truth it could not be planned, for he had no idea—or too many of them—of how, and even when, it would be finished. Nor did he know what he meant by finished. What he hoped for was Carol and Larry and Richie and Brenda sitting in his kitchen while he cooked.
But he knew he had as much hope for that as for the traveling he did on the deck at night; he called them his Michelob voyages. He did not have the money for all of them, but he had the money for any one of them, even each of them in turn, if he spaced them by ten or so months and lived out a normal life. He would like to buy a boat with galley and sleeping quarters, learn to repair and maintain it, to navigate, and then go on the Intracoastal Waterway, the fifteen hundred and fifty miles from Boston to Florida Bay, then the eleven hundred and sixteen to Brownsville, Texas. His image was of Brenda on the boat, and maybe Richie, and himself on the bridge, simply steering and looking at America. But he did not want to do it as a vacation, something you had to come home from, and at a certain time. Take a year off, Brenda said.
But he could not. He was the sole owner of two ice cream stores; fifteen years ago he had bought them with a partner, and seven years ago he had bought out the partner, who retired and went to Florida and, according to postcards, did nothing but fish. These stores, one of them in an inland town and open all year, with a soda fountain and sandwiches too, and one at Seabrook Beach in New Hampshire, open from Memorial Day weekend till Labor Day, sold homemade ice cream, or as close to it as people could get without doing the work to make it in their own kitchens. Greg had learned that Russians and Americans ate more ice cream than the people of any other countries in the world, and some nights on the deck he amused himself by thinking about opening a store on the Black Sea, at Odessa or Sevastopol.
But he could not leave for a year, or even half of one, not for the Intracoastal Waterway or for any other place—Kenya, Morocco, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, places where he wanted to walk and look, to eat and drink what the natives did—because as well as owning his stores he ran them too. It was something his partner had not had the heart, the drive, to do; and that was Greg’s reason for borrowing to buy him out, figuring finally that debt and being alone responsible for everything was better than trying week after week to joke with, tease, and implore a man in an effort to get him to work; when all the time, although Greg liked him, and enjoyed drinking and playing poker with him, and going into Boston to watch games with him, he wanted every workday to kick his ass. So he bought him out, freed him to fish in Florida, a life that sounded to Greg right for the lazy old fart who liked money but not the getting of it, while he himself liked getting it but had little to spend it on, and was not free to spend it on what he would like to.
At night on the east deck, when time relinquished its function in his life, and space lost its distances and limits, he completed his travel on the Intracoastal Waterway by sending his boat from Brownsville to the mouth of the Amazon, in the hands of a trustworthy sailor for hire, then flying with Brenda to Rio de Janeiro where they would live the hotel life of sleep and swimming and drinking and eating (and daytime fucking: yes, that) until he was ready for the rigorous part that excluded Richie from the daydream. He would go with Brenda to the mouth of the Amazon, by car or train, however they traveled there. He would rendezvous with his boat and sailor at one of the towns he had looked at as a dot on the globe on his desk. Then he and Brenda would walk west along the river. They would take only canteens, and he would carry a light pack with food for the day. They would wear heavy boots against snakes, and he would wear his .45 at his waist, and carry a machete. They would see anacondas and strange aqua birds and crocodiles. At the day’s end the boat would be waiting, and they would board it, and fish, and sip drinks and cook and eat, then lie together gently rocking in the forward cabin with the double bed. Sometimes he imagined the river’s bank stripped of trees, and an asphalt road alongside it, with rest areas and Howard Johnson’s. But no: it must be jungle, thick living jungle, where each step was a new one, on new earth, so that you could not remember how you felt retracing your steps through the days of your life at home. He went there at night on this deck, and always with the focused excitement, the near-quietude, of love. Only in the mornings with his coffee, or driving from the inland to the beach store, or at other moments during his days, did he ever feel the sadness that he forced to be brief: the knowledge that he would never do it.
If you weren’t there, on the job, they either stole from you, at the least by giving away your ice cream to their friends and taking some home as well, or they screwed up in other ways, and the operation went lax, and you had two stores selling ice cream but something was wrong. So he was at both stores every day, and he sometimes worked the counters there too, and washed dishes, and swept floors, all of this to keep things going, Goddamnit, and because he could not be idle while others worked, and every night he was there to close out the register; he took the money with him for night deposit, the .45 in his belt till he was in the car, then on the seat beside him. He carried the pistol in his hand when, at the bank, he walked from the car to the night depository. He had a permit. When he told the police chief, who approved the permit, how much money he carried to the bank each night, the chief asked if he had ever thought of buying a safe. Greg shrugged. He said he liked doing it this way, but that each store did have a safe he used only on nights when he couldn’t get there, but anybody could get money from a safe if they wanted to so badly that they’d take the whole damn thing. He alternated the stores, taking the money from the inland one on one night, the beach store on the next, so his manager at one store would not always be last to be relieved of the money, and so last to go home. But most nights, when he reached the second store, his people were still cleaning up anyway, and he helped them with that. Some nights he thought he did not use a safe because he hoped some bastard, or bastards, would try to take his money. His pattern was easy enough to learn, if anyone were interested.
Larry was the only man he knew whom he could trust to do everything, and Larry had never wanted to give himself fully to the stores. During college he had needed his days free, and after college he needed his nights for dance or play rehearsals. This was not a disappointment for Greg; when he felt anything at all about Larry’s lack of involvement with the stores, it was relief, for he wanted Larry to be his own man and not spend his life following his father. He believed the business of fatherhood was to love your children, take care of them, let them grow, and hope they did; and to keep your nose out of their lives. He did not know, and could not remember if he had ever known, whether Larry hoped to be a professional actor or dancer, perhaps even an established one with all the money and its concomitant bullshit, or if he was content to work with the amateur theater and dance companies in the Merrimack Valley. As far as he knew, Larry had never said, and he had never asked, and Larry’s face had always been hard for him to read.
But before Brenda, when with no woman or a faceless one for his daydream he rode the Waterway and walked the Amazon on his dark sundeck at night, he had hoped that a time would come when Larry would want or need a break from performing, and would want to work the stores for a few months, and earn much more money, perhaps for an adventure of his own, a shot at New York or Hollywood or wherever else the unlucky bastards born with talent had to go to sell themselves. But not after last night. Probably, after last night, he would not ever show up at the store again, unless it was to collect his final paycheck. As difficult as it was for Greg to believe, as much as his heart and his body refused to accept it, both of them—the heart surrounded by cool fluttering, and the body weary as though it had wrestled through the night while he slept—threatening to quit on him if Larry simply vanished, that was what Larry had said he would do.
Greg had phoned him to come and have a nightcap, at ten at the earliest, saying he had work to do till then.
He had no work, unless waiting for Richie to go to bed was work, and finally he supposed it was. Greg had phoned his two managers and told them to put the money in the safes. He did not know what he expected from Larry. An unpredictable conversation or event was so rare in his life that, as well as shyness, guilt, and shame, he felt a thrill that both excited him and deepened his guilt. He brought Larry up to the living room and tried to begin chronologically. He saw his mistake at once, for early in Greg’s account Larry saw what was coming and, leaning forward in his chair, said: “Are you going to tell me you’ve been seeing Brenda?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe this.”
Greg looked at the floor.
“It’s divorce that did it,” he said.
“Whose?”
“Yours. Mine.” He looked at Larry. “Fucking divorce. You think I chose her?”
“What am I supposed to think?” Larry said, and was out of the chair: he never seemed to stand up from one, there was no visible effort, no pushing against the chair arms, or even a forward thrust of his torso; he rose as a snake uncoils, against no resistance at all, and Greg fixed on that detail, finding in it his son of twenty-five years, holding that vision while the room and Larry and Greg himself faded in a blur of confusion and unpredictability.
“It just happened,” Greg said. “It always just happens.”
“Beautiful. What happened to will?”
Greg stood and stepped toward him.
“Don’t talk to me about will.” And they were lost, both of them, in anger, in pride, facing each other, sometimes even circling like fighters, then one would spin away, stride to a window, and stare out at the dark trees of the back lawn; and it was at one of those times when Larry was at the window, smoking, silent, that Greg watched his back and shoulders for a moment, then took their long-emptied and tepid beer cans down to the kitchen, returned with beer and opened and placed one, over Larry’s shoulder, onto the windowsill, then opened his own and, standing halfway across the room from Larry, spoke softly to the back of his head.
