The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  “Why can’t you? You look like a nice couple. You should see the freaks get married every day.”

  The doctor had now found an attitude; Murray knew it would be bluff and fatherly, and again he could predict failure.

  “We can’t, Doctor. Sophie’s only fifteen. We intend to get married later (the lie had been prepared), but we just can’t now.”

  The doctor nodded, and manufactured a weary sigh. “Look,” he said, “Now don’t I feel for you? But do you know what I have to lose?”

  “Yes, I do,” Murray said, pretending to be ashamed, but really sick with inadequacy. He knew this game by heart, having lost it so many times. The words were always familiar, the disrespect in his heart was always understood by his opponent and used against him: he always bought.

  “Do you? Look! Sometimes…Listen! I’ll tell you this sincerely!” The doctor became sincere. “Sometimes I do a favor for a friend, for a wife who doesn’t want—maybe can’t afford—another child. You hear that? I trust you. Come here. Look at this box.”

  Murray had to get up to look. Screwed to the side of the desk was a little black box with a red light glowing upon its side.

  “Look. I’ve got a little past, you understand? Political. Probably you don’t.” Murray nodded avidly, disgustingly eager to show that he understood. “Well, I supported the wrong party. Aren’t they after me? I’ve got to be careful. Look at the box. Take a look. Look at it.”

  And Murray looked. Lost, bored, deadly bored with his weakness, with his utter disrespect for the man he listened to and for himself, he looked. The box told, by lights and little buzzes, whether or not the phone was tapped; it also told, in some related way, whether or not the office was bugged.

  A good box. A very expensive, complicated box. Did he see how it worked? Oh, very interesting! And all the time other words were forming themselves in Murray’s mouth: You ass, do you understand how I hate you? How I cannot plead, but can only nod and nod?

  Soon they left, and the doctor had had not only the last word, but all the words; if he needed any reason he could see with his reddish eyes, smell with his reddish nose, the disgust in Murray’s heart.

  Money hadn’t even been mentioned, and Murray remembered it as they stood on the sidewalk waiting for a taxi to come by. He felt the square little lump in his watch pocket, and put his hand into the side pocket of his pants to feel the crisp, cloth-like paper there. Sophie hadn’t said a word. She stayed as close to his side as she could without touching him, and when a taxi stopped he opened the door but did not help her in.

  They had to cross Broadway, and as they waited for the traffic light the interior of the taxi was shoddy and bright. Sophie looked at him from her corner, her too mobile face plain, unprotected in the cheap, gay light, as quivery as if it had been skinned.

  “I caused all this trouble. It’s all my fault,” she said.

  “Oh, Sophie,” he said, and she slid over to him and took his hand.

  “Christ, Cousin,” she said, crying a little, “what a mess!”

  “It’s hard to undo that sort of thing, isn’t it?” he said rather coldly. She was such a big girl, and she now laid her head, her thick black hair up under his chin, on his chest. Automatically his hand went to her broad shoulder and began to pat—a sterile gesture of doubtful comfort. She sniffled. Her shoulder was as substantial as wood.

  “I didn’t even want to stop. That’s the awful thing,” she said, and it seemed that he could feel her ragged, unstable voice right on his sternum, as if she had licked him on the bare skin.

  “I just went all the way. Three times,” she said, “and I don’t even like him very much. Sometimes I think I’m a sex fiend, Murray.” She drew away and turned her face toward him. Her lips, puffy and wet, quivered, and her face again looked so naked as to be indecent—the bare young face attached to the long body that was too big, too hard for a girl’s. He patted away at her shoulder, and as he did his wrist began to get tired from the continual, idiotic patting. He found himself removed from pity; the nearer she came to him, the farther his sympathy fled from her, and he cursed himself for his callow, selfish coldness. If only she weren’t so plain, such a horse of a girl. If only, he thought, knowing this to be the cold, unjust truth of the world, he could want to have her himself—if he could feel, in her acquiescence, her passionate moans beneath the Irish boy, a rising of his own desire. But she could not occur to him that way, and therefore her mistake was without interest, without beauty.

  Did she feel this? Soon she moved back to her corner, and all the way back to Saul Weitzner’s apartment building she gazed out the quarter-window. When he happened to look at her, her face was stern; but he felt that she hadn’t made any resolutions, nor had she found any sudden strength. Did she look bare-naked at the kind of life there was for her? He never knew how deeply she had been troubled, or how well she took it all, or how badly. When they returned Mae had readied a bed, hot-water bottles, clean cloths—all for nothing. But they all appreciated what he’d done.

  Several weeks later Sophie wrote to him. They’d finally found a doctor in New Jersey, where the heat wasn’t on, and she told him all about it—about how it hurt quite a bit, and how the doctor packed her with cotton gauze and kept her overnight. The letter was cheerful, almost gossipy—as if it were really nothing but a lark. She didn’t like the doctor much, though; he was a shnook. There was nothing in the letter to suggest the big quiet girl he remembered looking out the taxi window, or the child’s gazing face. At the end, however, she said that she would always remember:

  I will always remember what you did for me, Murray, and love you always. You are my favorite.

  xxxxxx

  SOPHIE

  She would remember. Perhaps she thought he’d done his best for her. From where he sat in his dormitory room he could see the common and the dusty, graceful elms, new leaves peacefully turning in the air. Suddenly, without premeditation, he beat his hand against his ear—the gesture immediately seemed too theatrical, and it hurt too much. No, there was an alternative, and it was worse: she really didn’t mind that he had cheated her of love. She had put her awkward body in their hands, maybe, but kept like an ugly child to her cold and wounded self. Goodbye Herky; goodbye Murray. No one was too young to perceive indifference cynically, and her letter, with its six gay kisses at the end, was just to let him know that there were no hard feelings.

  Thus his real adventures refused to help him believe in his daydream journey—just as the dead bird, now cold, beginning to stiffen upon the papery leaves, did not suggest at all the excitement of its headlong flight or the fine skill of his shot.

  13

  WHEN RICHARD and Shim came down from the mountain, Murray was out in the field behind the barn with his Mauser. They heard his first zeroing-in shot, and then a stillness followed as he walked up to his target. Then they could see him standing by the bank with his target, a coffee can, in his hand. He turned and looked at them. Richard was tired, and as he looked at his tall, graceful son he felt proud and yet desperately old, as if it were himself he saw there, the old fall umbers and golds surrounding himself as if they were the tints of age. The boy was as fresh and as alive as his most youthful memory of himself. He felt, too, in that tired moment, love as a kind of fear of loss, but he could not tell if it were his own son or his own youth he feared to lose.

  Or had lost, both of them. His son was here, and could be touched (maybe) and spoken to. His youth he did not have, if one counted years, but he still had the most tangible symptom of it, a strong and obedient body. At his age it was precarious to keep whatever lilt was left in his sinews, and no more than a bad week could turn him into an old man. He had seen it happen to others; it would soon happen to him. It hadn’t yet, by God! and yet he knew too much to think that the young whippersnappers couldn’t outrun him. He had only so much time, and soon, if he were lucky enough to keep on living, he’d grow to a straight chair in a warm room, like old Zach.

  Shim
left him and went up to examine Murray’s target. Murray set the can against the bank, and he and Shim paced back, with measuring strides, seventy-five yards; across the stubble field they marched as if to a slow drum. Richard stood by the wall and watched the two younger men. Murray lay down and adjusted his sling, then aimed and fired. The sound of the shot seemed to divide itself into two sounds: ack-thuh. The first crack of it, remaining sharp in the mind, seemed also the last sound, as if the more sonorous thunder of the echo had come first, and this gave Richard the odd feeling that he knew of the shot before the explosion had occurred. Beside the can a little hump of sand had risen. Murray adjusted his rear sight, then aimed again.

  Ack-thuh! The can rolled down the bank with a flat, can sound: tankle-clink. That, evidently, was all the ammunition Murray was going to waste.

  It would be a while before dinner, and Richard went to his room and lay down, then raised his legs, unlaced and took off his boots. His stockinged feet, slightly damp—humid warmth upon them—quickly cooled as he lay there, and he drew the spare blanket over him, feeling his exercised body cool out and then need the nice pressure of the hard wool. The blanket, Shim had told him, had once been a section of the long-drying felt of the Leah Paper Mill. Hard, beautiful wool, it had once run at great speed over the humming rollers. Now he rubbed the hemmed edge of it and let it keep him warm.

  After dinner, according to Shim’s custom, they would again examine the guns, then gather their equipment together and place each hunter’s gear upon a chair in the kitchen. Tonight, full of game (he and Shim had each shot two birds), they would let Shim pamper his excitement, even help him, and have a drink—one, maybe two, no more. Zach would watch, perhaps regaining, perhaps enjoying, some excitement about what he could no longer do. Before his laryngectomy he used to tell stories of bear-paw snowshoes and of rifles with obsolete cartridge designations such as forty-four forty, or forty-five seventy—the first number caliber, in hundredths of inches; the second, grains of black powder—and the old, heavy bullets, in Richard’s mind, flew slowly out of their ancient smoke and into the sides of great gray bucks. This always in the deep snow of an old winter.

  Tomorrow—and he thought: How few first days there were in a lifetime—even one as long as old Zach’s—of deer seasons! Thirty or forty, at the very most. Tomorrow there would probably be no snow at all, and he could imagine only, on bare ground, the buck he had startled in his headlights, a fat, tawny modern buck, plump and muscular. Not that he wouldn’t gladly settle for a doe; he had hunted deer enough to know that one man was presented with few daylight glimpses of the animal.

  How strange they were, how stupid sometimes, and how crafty! When they were wary a man was made to feel as clumsy, as slow as an addled monster out of its element, yet when they were stupid their gift of opportunities was so freely, so often given that it seemed to go beyond stupidity and become nothing but generosity—as if they asked for a bullet as a man might ask for food, or love. The white-tailed deer: he tried to make himself, who had been a near stranger to most people in his life, and who often had to approach others by way of a transference that was not quite natural—almost telepathic—tried to place his consciousness with the vivid animals now in the dark spruce, now in a geometrical slash of blowdown trees. Tall ears hearing constantly, with fantastic preception of depth and direction, the subtle meanings of rhythms, dark eyes seeing great light without the lessening filter of color perception, black noses smelling upon the always moving air time, distance, danger: he might himself have been a fair, great buck. Might have, if the energy given his loins had been by accident the more desperate, direct energy of the hooved deer. He would have been a buck to grow old and triumphant; he felt that his energy and his senses—translated, still mammal—would have allowed him much success as a deer.

  But as a deer how gray, how old would he now be? No matter; the problems of his life—those problems he had not been able to solve—would never have arisen. A buck was far too grand, too much of an egoist to care for anything but the sheen of his own pelt, the roundness of his own haunches. A buck let his does test the safety of his path, and felt no guilt after the sacrifice; his life itself was his only worthy concern—his life and his dominance in the rut.

  God, how simple! And then, for a long moment in which he did not, as he usually did, hold tight to his slippery version of himself as a civilized man, he felt himself to be a great buck in the forest. It was as if his body changed, the fulcrums of his joints grew deerlike, the flesh slid back along his lower limbs, his shoulders and his haunches turned massive above the delicate, hard cannon bones, his thick neck grew erect above the bunched muscles of his brisket. The illusion of this change was so strong he had to roll over onto his side, and he lay there impatient to rise and leap; he could even feel (half dreaming of the inevitable return to manhood) a thickening, a wrinkling of the dura of his skull, as if grand antlers grew down through it into bone.

  The night is important, as is the season; it is cold, and in fall. The apples are not yet frostbitten and therefore not yet soft enough to crush against the toothless upper palate, but the moon is so bright it is almost irritating to the wide eyes with their lightenhancing internal mirrors; the deer’s eyes gleam back at it. Each opening between the thick orchard trees is as bright as a little day, but beneath the branches it is quite dark, for the light is from a single source, and the clear air of the night, like empty space, does not seem to diffuse light, to soften shadow. But the buck’s senses are one instrument, and when pure dark crosses a part of sense he does not care or know that his other senses still perceive; he has oriented his night and he knows with a pure perception beyond imagination where each source of odd sensory irritation springs. The only darkness of his mind, the only partial doubt, is a certain wedge which begins downwind (although the air hardly moves) and extends, widening, out toward the field beyond the brook until it becomes, to him, indefinite and beyond—beyond the range of his enemies’ ability to kill him. He knows who makes each sound. He is beginning to feel his intoxication—the poison, of course, is any part of carelessness, any lessening at all of his great preoccupation with his sacred body. A cold night for mad heat; there is the buck he chased away, there are the does who keep a certain wary distance. He is about to become drunk, and it is as if he feels constrained, somehow predicting his madness, for he circles and checks again. This takes him downwind of a doe, and suddenly he leaps back toward her, his prancing strangely awkward, the energy of his hoofs prodigal and careless, so that the leaves fly, and small rocks crack together. He is brutal, and somehow gawky—aggressive, and it does not quite fit him, as if he were really gone mad. The doe is there, and his nostrils are full of her. There is a still moment not of consideration but of farewell, perhaps, to the last idea not compulsive.

  You! Now! the eye, the breath declare.

  He leaps at her just as she turns, and he clasps nothing but branches and brush, which sting him. He is gawky and stiff, full of rage: he would kill her with his hoofs or antlers if his madness did not strike him through his nose. He leaps again, and her sudden compliance means nothing but the fastness of his locking, scissoring forelegs and the deep, ungraceful constricture of his back. She shudders and is deep and open to him, and he shoves, slips, pierces her, and his clasping foreknees are rigid in her nervous flanks as she leans into his short, monstrous stroke….

  Richard rolled off the bed. Caught in the hard wool of the blanket, he fell heavily to his knees. Outraged at himself for the wild dream, he tore the blanket from around his legs and threw it across the bed. He trembled, frightened by his precarious mind; he had nearly had an orgasm.

  Yet he trembled, too, out of danger. Not the danger of his imagination, but a deeper danger that might or might not have been inspired by the dream (and was it a nightdream or a daydream?): as the buck rutted in the dangerous moonlight were his enemies attracted by his random sounds? He remembered that the most handsome buck is still, to some, mere meat: sustenance.
His dignified, excellent defense—and there was no rut now left in Richard, only wariness—is perhaps against this image of himself as a meal. Or is such dignity in harmony with that idea? What he felt was danger, and he still felt it, as if someone were looking, like a hunter, at the mirrors of his eyes.

  Although he would have locked the bathroom door anyway, he felt that by carefully turning the lock he was ensuring himself of a slightly unnatural privacy, and it felt good. He took a fairly long bath, shaved, then put on his expensive slacks and cotton flannel shirt. In a way that reminded him of the insight of puppy love—that pure and naked jittering of the nerves—he knew that Opal would also be taking care how she looked. He knew that this meant nothing like a contract, but she would be doing it partly for him, and they would both know it. As he went downstairs he felt strong and clean.

  It was one of his eccentricities, he had always thought, that he had never had sexual intercourse with any woman he didn’t in some way love. Even if he hadn’t liked the girl too well, when it came to the time—to the final welcome she made him, when she put her arms around him and at the same time did not hold back at all—especially when she opened to him the soft, wonderfully smooth insides of her thighs, and when in all that lovely softness his hard sex penetrated—how could he feel anything but love for such generosity? And perhaps that was the reason he did not have an orgasm the one time he tried a whore, during the war. What generosity was there when the gift was so directly purchased? “What’s the matter with me?” the whore had asked, in such a polite, unwhorelike voice; she was one of those people who take themselves seriously, who want to be good at what they do. She then offered to do anything his quirks or perversions demanded, but he quickly professed inadequacy, and said that he had drunk too much. He couldn’t say that he hadn’t felt something like love then—or maybe what he felt was pity instead of gratitude. He knew that a certain idea had been thoroughly and vociferously discredited: the idea that the woman, in that exchange, did nothing but give.