by Andre Dubus
‘I wanted to try to get together with her again.’ He was bent over the suitcase. ‘I couldn’t even talk to her. He was always with her. I’m going to jail for it; if I ever get out I’ll be an old man. Isn’t that enough?’
‘You’re not going to jail.’
Strout closed the suitcase and faced Matt, looking at the gun. Matt went to his rear, so Strout was between him and the lighted hall; then using his handkerchief he turned off the lamp and said: ‘Let’s go.’
They went down the hall, Matt looking again at the photograph, and through the living room and kitchen, Matt turning off the lights and talking, frightened that he was talking, that he was telling this lie he had not planned: ‘It’s the trial. We can’t go through that, my wife and me. So you’re leaving. We’ve got you a ticket, and a job. A friend of Mr. Trottier’s. Out west. My wife keeps seeing you. We can’t have that anymore.’
Matt turned out the kitchen light and put the handkerchief in his pocket, and they went down the two brick steps and across the lawn. Strout put the suitcase on the floor of the back seat, then got into the front seat and Matt got in the back and put on his glove and shut the door.
‘They’ll catch me. They’ll check passenger lists.’
‘We didn’t use your name.’
‘They’ll figure that out too. You think I wouldn’t have done it myself if it was that easy?’
He backed into the street, Matt looking down the gun barrel but not at the profiled face beyond it.
‘You were alone,’ Matt said. ‘We’ve got it worked out.’
‘There’s no planes this time of night, Mr. Fowler.’
‘Go back through town. Then north on 125.’
They came to the corner and turned, and now Willis’s headlights were in the car with Matt.
‘Why north, Mr. Fowler?”
‘Somebody’s going to keep you for a while. They’ll take you to the airport.’ He uncocked the hammer and lowered the revolver to his lap and said wearily: ‘No more talking.’
As they drove back through town, Matt’s body sagged, going limp with his spirit and its new and false bond with Strout, the hope his lie had given Strout. He had grown up in this town whose streets had become places of apprehension and pain for Ruth as she drove and walked, doing what she had to do; and for him too, if only in his mind as he worked and chatted six days a week in his store; he wondered now if his lie would have worked, if sending Strout away would have been enough; but then he knew that just thinking of Strout in Montana or whatever place lay at the end of the lie he had told, thinking of him walking the streets there, loving a girl there (who was she?) would be enough to slowly rot the rest of his days. And Ruth’s. Again he was certain that she knew, that she was waiting for him.
They were in New Hampshire now, on the narrow highway, passing the shopping center at the state line, and then houses and small stores and sandwich shops. There were few cars on the road. After ten minutes he raised his trembling hand, touched Strout’s neck with the gun, and said: ‘Turn in up here. At the dirt road.’
Strout flicked on the indicator and slowed.
‘Mr. Fowler?’
‘They’re waiting here.’
Strout turned very slowly, easing his neck away from the gun. In the moonlight the road was light brown, lighter and yellowed where the headlights shone; weeds and a few trees grew on either side of it, and ahead of them were the woods.
‘There’s nothing back here, Mr. Fowler.’
‘It’s for your car. You don’t think we’d leave it at the airport, do you?’
He watched Strout’s large, big-knuckled hands tighten on the wheel, saw Frank’s face that night: not the stitches and bruised eye and swollen lips, but his own hand gently touching Frank’s jaw, turning his wounds to the light. They rounded a bend in the road and were out of sight of the highway: tall trees all around them now, hiding the moon. When they reached the abandoned gravel pit on the left, the bare flat earth and steep pale embankment behind it, and the black crowns of trees at its top, Matt said: ‘Stop here.’
Strout stopped but did not turn off the engine. Matt pressed the gun hard against his neck, and he straightened in the seat and looked in the rearview mirror, Matt’s eyes meeting his in the glass for an instant before looking at the hair at the end of the gun barrel.
‘Turn it off.’
Strout did, then held the wheel with two hands, and looked in the mirror.
‘I’ll do twenty years, Mr. Fowler; at least. I’ll be forty-six years old.’
‘That’s nine years younger than I am,’ Matt said, and got out and took off the glove and kicked the door shut. He aimed at Strout’s ear and pulled back the hammer. Willis’s headlights were off and Matt heard him walking on the soft thin layer of dust, the hard earth beneath it. Strout opened the door, sat for a moment in the interior light, then stepped out onto the road. Now his face was pleading. Matt did not look at his eyes, but he could see it in the lips.
‘Just get the suitcase. They’re right up the road.’
Willis was beside him now, to his left. Strout looked at both guns. Then he opened the back door, leaned in, and with a jerk brought the suitcase out. He was turning to face them when Matt said: ‘Just walk up the road. Just ahead.’
Strout turned to walk, the suitcase in his right hand, and Matt and Willis followed; as Strout cleared the front of his car he dropped the suitcase and, ducking, took one step that was the beginning of a sprint to his right. The gun kicked in Matt’s hand, and the explosion of the shot surrounded him, isolated him in a nimbus of sound that cut him off from all his time, all his history, isolated him standing absolutely still on the dirt road with the gun in his hand, looking down at Richard Strout squirming on his belly, kicking one leg behind him, pushing himself forward, toward the woods. Then Matt went to him and shot him once in the back of the head.
Driving south to Boston, wearing both gloves now, staying in the middle lane and looking often in the rearview mirror at Willis’s headlights, he relived the suitcase dropping, the quick dip and turn of Strout’s back, and the kick of the gun, the sound of the shot. When he walked to Strout, he still existed within the first shot, still trembled and breathed with it. The second shot and the burial seemed to be happening to someone else, someone he was watching. He and Willis each held an arm and pulled Strout face-down off the road and into the woods, his bouncing sliding belt white under the trees where it was so dark that when they stopped at the top of the knoll, panting and sweating, Matt could not see where Strout’s blue shirt ended and the earth began. They pulled off the branches then dragged Strout to the edge of the hole and went behind him and lifted his legs and pushed him in. They stood still for a moment. The woods were quiet save for their breathing, and Matt remembered hearing the movements of birds and small animals after the first shot. Or maybe he had not heard them. Willis went down to the road. Matt could see him clearly out on the tan dirt, could see the glint of Strout’s car and, beyond the road, the gravel pit. Willis came back up the knoll with the suitcase. He dropped it in the hole and took off his gloves and they went down to his car for the spades. They worked quietly. Sometimes they paused to listen to the woods. When they were finished Willis turned on his flashlight and they covered the earth with leaves and branches and then went down to the spot in front of the car, and while Matt held the light Willis crouched and sprinkled dust on the blood, backing up till he reached the grass and leaves, then he used leaves until they had worked up to the grave again. They did not stop. They walked around the grave and through the woods, using the light on the ground, looking up through the trees to where they ended at the lake. Neither of them spoke above the sounds of their heavy and clumsy strides through low brush and over fallen branches. Then they reached it: wide and dark, lapping softly at the bank, pine needles smooth under Matt’s feet, moonlight on the lake, a small island near its middle, with black, tall evergreens. He took out the gun and threw for the island: taking two steps back on the pine
needles, striding with the throw and going to one knee as he followed through, looking up to see the dark shapeless object arcing downward, splashing.
They left Strout’s car in Boston, in front of an apartment building on Commonwealth Avenue. When they got back to town Willis drove slowly over the bridge and Matt threw the keys into the Merrimack. The sky was turning light. Willis let him out a block from his house, and walking home he listened for sounds from the houses he passed. They were quiet. A light was on in his living room. He turned it off and undressed in there, and went softly toward the bedroom; in the hall he smelled the smoke, and he stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the orange of her cigarette in the dark. The curtains were closed. He went to the closet and put his shoes on the floor and felt for a hanger.
‘Did you do it?’ she said.
He went down the hall to the bathroom and in the dark he washed his hands and face. Then he went to her, lay on his back, and pulled the sheet up to his throat.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘I think so.’
Now she touched him, lying on her side, her hand on his belly, his thigh.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
He started from the beginning, in the parking lot at the bar; but soon with his eyes closed and Ruth petting him, he spoke of Strout’s house: the order, the woman presence, the picture on the wall.
’The way she was smiling,’ he said.
‘What about it?’
‘I don’t know. Did you ever see Strout’s girl? When you saw him in town?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder who she was.’
Then he thought: not was: is. Sleeping now she is his girl. He opened his eyes, then closed them again. There was more light beyond the curtains. With Ruth now he left Strout’s house and told again his lie to Strout, gave him again that hope that Strout must have for a while believed, else he would have to believe only the gun pointed at him for the last two hours of his life. And with Ruth he saw again the dropping suitcase, the darting move to the right: and he told of the first shot, feeling her hand on him but his heart isolated still, beating on the road still in that explosion like thunder. He told her the rest, but the words had no images for him, he did not see himself doing what the words said he had done; he only saw himself on that road.
‘We can’t tell the other kids,’ she said. ‘It’ll hurt them, thinking he got away. But we mustn’t.’
‘No.’
She was holding him, wanting him, and he wished he could make love with her but he could not. He saw Frank and Mary Ann making love in her bed, their eyes closed, their bodies brown and smelling of the sea; the other girl was faceless, bodiless, but he felt her sleeping now; and he saw Frank and Strout, their faces alive; he saw red and yellow leaves falling to the earth, then snow: falling and freezing and falling; and holding Ruth, his cheek touching her breast, he shuddered with a sob that he kept silent in his heart.
PART II
THE PRETTY GIRL
But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot,
I am about to vomit thee out of my mouth ….
Saint John, The Apocalypse
For Roger Rath, out among the stars
I DON’T KNOW HOW I feel till I hold that steel. That was always true: I might have a cold, or one of those days when everything is hard to do because you’re tired for no reason at all except that you’re alive, and I’d work out, and by the time I got in the shower I couldn’t remember how I felt before I lifted; it was like that part of the day was yesterday, and now I was starting a new one. Or a hangover: some of my friends and my brother too are hair-of-the-dog people, but I’ve never done that and I never will, because a drink in the morning shuts down the whole day, and anyway I can’t stand the smell of it in the morning and my stomach tells me it would like a Coke or a milkshake, but it is not about to stand for a prank like a shot of vodka or even a beer.
It was drunk out last night, Alex says. And I always say: A severe drunk front moved in around midnight. We’ve been saying that since I was seventeen and he was twenty-one. On a morning after one of those, when I can read the words in the Boston Globe but I can’t remember them long enough to understand the story, I work out. If it’s my off day from weights, I run or go to the Y and swim. Then the hangover is gone. Even the sick ones: some days I’ve thought I’d either blow my lunch on the bench or get myself squared away and, for the first few sets, as I pushed the bar up from my chest, the booze tried to come up too, with whatever I’d eaten during the night, and I’d swallow and push the iron all the way up and bring it down again, and some of my sweat was cool. Then I’d do it again and again, and add some weights, and do it again till I got a pump, and the blood rushed through my muscles and flushed out the lactic acid, and sweat soaked my shorts and tank shirt, the bench under my back was slick, and all the poison was gone from my body. From my head too, and for the rest of the day, unless something really bothered me, like having to file my tax return, or car trouble, I was as peaceful as I can ever be. Because I get along with people, and they don’t treat me the way they treat some; in this world it helps to be big. That’s not why I work out, but it’s not a bad reason, and one that little guys should think about. The weather doesn’t harass me either. New Englanders are always bitching about one thing or another. Once Alex said: I think they just like to bitch, because when you get down to it, the truth is the Celtics and Patriots and Red Sox and Bruins are all good to watch, and we’re lucky they’re here, and we’ve got the ocean and pretty country to hunt and fish and ski in, and you don’t have to be rich to get there. He’s right. But I don’t bitch about the weather: I like rain and snow and heat and cold, and the only effect they have on me is what I wear to go out in them. The weather up here is female, and goes from one mood to another, and I love her for that.
So as long as I’m working out, I have good days, except for those things that happen to you like dead batteries and forms to fill out. If I skip my workouts I start feeling confused and distracted, then I get tense, and drinking and talking aren’t good, they just make it worse, then I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. I’ve had days like that, when I might not have got up at all if finally I didn’t have to piss. An hour with the iron and everything is back in place again, and I don’t know what was troubling me or why in the first place I went those eight or twelve or however many days without lifting. But it doesn’t matter. Because it’s over, and I can write my name on a check or say it out loud again without feeling like a liar. This is Raymond Yarborough, I say into the phone, and I feel my words, my name, go out over the wire, and he says the car is ready and it’ll be seventy-eight dollars and sixty-five cents. I tell him I’ll come get it now, and I walk out into the world I’d left for a while and it feels like mine again. I like stepping on it and breathing it. I walk to the bank first and cash a check because the garage won’t take one unless you have a major credit card, which I don’t because I don’t believe in buying something, even gas, that I don’t have the money for. I always have enough money because I don’t buy anything I can’t eat or drink. Or almost anything. At the bank window I write a check to Cash and sign both sides and talk to the girl. I tell her she’s looking good and I like her sweater and the new way she’s got her hair done. I’m not making a move; I feel good and I want to see her smiling.
But for a week or two now, up here at Alex’s place in New Hampshire, the iron hasn’t worked for me. While I’m pumping I forget Polly, or at least I feel like I have, but in the shower she’s back again. I got to her once, back in June: she was scared like a wild animal, a small one without any natural weapons, like a wounded rabbit, the way they quiver in your hand and look at you when you pick them up to knock their heads against trees or rocks. But I think she started to like it anyways, and if I had wanted to, I could have made her come. But that’s Polly. I’ve known her about twelve years, since I was fourteen, and I think I knew her better when we were kids than I ever did after
high school when we started going together and then got married. In school I knew she was smart and pretty and tried to look sexy before she was. I still don’t know much more. That’s not true: I can write down a lot that I know about her, and I did that one cold night early last spring, about fifty pages on a legal pad, but all of it was what she said to me and what she thought I said to her and what she did. I still didn’t understand why she was that way, why we couldn’t just be at peace with one another, in the evenings drink some beer or booze, talking about this and that, then eat some dinner, and be easy about things, which is what I thought we got married for.
We were camping at a lake and not catching any trout when we decided to get married. We talked about it on the second night, lying in our sleeping bags in the tent. In the morning I woke up feeling like the ground was blessed, a sacred place of Indians. I was twenty-two years old, and I thought about dying; it still seemed many years away, but I felt closer to it, like I could see the rest of my life in that tent while Polly slept, and it didn’t matter that at the end of it I’d die. I was very happy, and I thought of my oldest brother, Kingsley, dead in the war we lost, and I talked to him for a while, told him I wished he was here so he could see how good I felt, and could be the best man. Then I talked to Alex and told him he’d be the best man. Then I was asleep again, and when I woke up Polly was handing me a cup of coffee and I could hear the . campfire crackling. Late that afternoon we left the ground but I kept the tent; I didn’t bring it back to the rental place. I had a tent of my own, a two-man, but I rented a big one so Polly could walk around in it, and arrange the food and cooler and gear, the way women turn places into houses, even motel rooms. There are some that don’t, but they’re not the kind you want to be with for the whole nine yards; when a woman is a slob, she’s even worse than a man. They had my deposit, but they phoned me. I told them we had an accident and the tent was at the bottom of Lake Willoughby up in Vermont, up in what they call the Northern Kingdom. He asked me what it was doing in the lake. I said I had no way of knowing because that lake was formed by a glacier and is so deep in places that nobody could know even how far down it was, much less what it was doing. He said on the lake, what was it doing on the lake? Did my boat capsize? I said, What boat? He had been growling, but this time he barked: then how did the tent get in the fucking lake? I pitched it there, I said. That’s the accident I’m talking about. Then he howled: the deposit didn’t cover the cost of the tent. I told him to start getting more deposit, and hung up. That tent is out here at Alex’s, folded up and resting on the rafters in the garage. This place was Kingsley’s, and when his wife married again she wanted to give it to me and Alex, but Alex said that wasn’t right, he knew Kingsley would want her to do that, and at the same time he knew Kingsley would expect us to turn it down and give her some money; their marriage was good, and she has his kid, my niece Olivia who’s nearly ten now. I was still in school, so Alex bought it.
