The Night in Question: Stories

by Tobias Wolff

  By now I couldn’t see the trail. There was no point in trying. I stuck to him like white on rice and did what he did and somehow made it to the bottom without sailing off a cliff. We returned our skis and my father put chains on the Austin-Healey while I swayed from foot to foot, clapping my mittens and wishing I was home. I could see everything. The green tablecloth, the plates with the holly pattern, the red candles waiting to be lit.

  We passed a diner on our way out. “You want some soup?” my father asked. I shook my head. “Buck up,” he said. “I’ll get you there. Right, doctor?”

  I was supposed to say, “Right, doctor,” but I didn’t say anything.

  A state trooper waved us down outside the resort. A pair of sawhorses were blocking the road. The trooper came up to our car and bent down to my father’s window. His face was bleached by the cold. Snowflakes clung to his eyebrows and to the fur trim of his jacket and cap.

  “Don’t tell me,” my father said.

  The trooper told him. The road was closed. It might get cleared, it might not. Storm took everyone by surprise. So much, so fast. Hard to get people moving. Christmas Eve. What can you do.

  My father said, “Look. We’re talking about five, six inches. I’ve taken this car through worse than that.”

  The trooper straightened up. His face was out of sight but I could hear him. “The road is closed.”

  My father sat with both hands on the wheel, rubbing the wood with his thumbs. He looked at the barricade for a long time. He seemed to be trying to master the idea of it. Then he thanked the trooper, and with a weird, old-maidy show of caution turned the car around. “Your mother will never forgive me for this,” he said.

  “We should have left before,” I said. “Doctor.”

  He didn’t speak to me again until we were in a booth at the diner, waiting for our burgers. “She won’t forgive me,” he said. “Do you understand? Never.”

  “I guess,” I said, but no guesswork was required; she wouldn’t forgive him.

  “I can’t let that happen.” He bent toward me. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want us all to be together again. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He bumped my chin with his knuckles. “That’s all I needed to hear.”

  When we finished eating he went to the pay phone in the back of the diner, then joined me in the booth again. I figured he’d called my mother, but he didn’t give a report. He sipped at his coffee and stared out the window at the empty road. “Come on, come on,” he said, though not to me. A little while later he said it again. When the trooper’s car went past, lights flashing, he got up and dropped some money on the check. “Okay. Vamanos.”

  The wind had died. The snow was falling straight down, less of it now and lighter. We drove away from the resort, right up to the barricade. “Move it,” my father told me. When I looked at him he said, “What are you waiting for?” I got out and dragged one of the sawhorses aside, then put it back after he drove through. He pushed the door open for me. “Now you’re an accomplice,” he said. “We go down together.” He put the car into gear and gave me a look. “Joke, son.”

  Down the first long stretch I watched the road behind us, to see if the trooper was on our tail. The barricade vanished. Then there was nothing but snow: snow on the road, snow kicking up from the chains, snow on the trees, snow in the sky; and our trail in the snow. Then I faced forward and had a shock. The lay of the road behind us had been marked by our own tracks, but there were no tracks ahead of us. My father was breaking virgin snow between a line of tall trees. He was humming “Stars Fell on Alabama.” I felt snow brush along the floorboards under my feet. To keep my hands from shaking I clamped them between my knees.

  My father grunted in a thoughtful way and said, “Don’t ever try this yourself.”

  “I won’t.”

  “That’s what you say now, but someday you’ll get your license and then you’ll think you can do anything. Only you won’t be able to do this. You need, I don’t know—a certain instinct.”

  “Maybe I have it.”

  “You don’t. You have your strong points, but not this. I only mention it because I don’t want you to get the idea this is something just anybody can do. I’m a great driver. That’s not a virtue, okay? It’s just a fact, and one you should be aware of. Of course you have to give the old heap some credit, too. There aren’t many cars I’d try this with. Listen!”

  I did listen. I heard the slap of the chains, the stiff, jerky rasp of the wipers, the purr of the engine. It really did purr. The old heap was almost new. My father couldn’t afford it, and kept promising to sell it, but here it was.

  I said, “Where do you think that policeman went to?”

  “Are you warm enough?” He reached over and cranked up the blower. Then he turned off the wipers. We didn’t need them. The clouds had brightened. A few sparse, feathery flakes drifted into our slipstream and were swept away. We left the trees and entered a broad field of snow that ran level for a while and then tilted sharply downward. Orange stakes had been planted at intervals in two parallel lines and my father steered a course between them, though they were far enough apart to leave considerable doubt in my mind as to exactly where the road lay. He was humming again, doing little scat riffs around the melody.

  “Okay then. What are my strong points?”

  “Don’t get me started,” he said. “It’d take all day.”

  “Oh, right. Name one.”

  “Easy. You always think ahead.”

  True. I always thought ahead. I was a boy who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to insure proper rotation. I bothered my teachers for homework assignments far ahead of their due dates so I could draw up schedules. I thought ahead, and that was why I knew that there would be other troopers waiting for us at the end of our ride, if we even got there. What I did not know was that my father would wheedle and plead his way past them—he didn’t sing “O Tannenbaum,” but just about—and get me home for dinner, buying a little more time before my mother decided to make the split final. I knew we’d get caught; I was resigned to it. And maybe for this reason I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.

  Why not? This was one for the books. Like being in a speedboat, only better. You can’t go downhill in a boat. And it was all ours. And it kept coming, the laden trees, the unbroken surface of snow, the sudden white vistas. Here and there I saw hints of the road, ditches, fences, stakes, but not so many that I could have found my way. But then I didn’t have to. My father was driving. My father in his forty-eighth year, rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty. He was a great driver. All persuasion, no coercion. Such subtlety at the wheel, such tactful pedalwork. I actually trusted him. And the best was yet to come—switchbacks and hairpins impossible to describe. Except maybe to say this: if you haven’t driven fresh powder, you haven’t driven.

  The Life of the Body

  Wiley got lonely one night and drove to a bar in North Beach owned by a guy he used to teach with. He watched a basketball game and afterward fell into conversation with the woman sitting next to him. She was a veterinarian. Her name was Kathleen. When Wiley said her name he laid on a bit of the Irish and she smiled at him. She had freckles and very green eyes, “green as the fields of Erin,” he told her, and she laughed, holding her head back and deciding—he could tell, he could see it happen—to let things take their course. She was a little drunk. She touched him as she talked, his wrist, his hand, once even his thigh, to drive a point home. Wiley agreed, but he didn’t hear what she was saying. There was a rushing sound in his ears.

  The man Kathleen had come in with, a short, red-faced, bearded man in a safari jacket, held his glass with both hands and pondered it. He sometimes looked over at Kathleen, at her back. Then he looked at his glass again. Wiley wanted to keep everything friendly, so he leaned forward and stared at him until their eyes met, and then he lifted his glass in salute. The man gaped like a fish. He jabbed his finger at Wiley and y
elled something unintelligible. Kathleen turned and took his arm. Then the bartender joined them. He was wiping his hands with a towel. He leaned over the bar and spoke to Kathleen and the short man in a soft voice while Wiley looked on encouragingly.

  “That’s the ticket,” Wiley said. “Talk him down.”

  The short man jerked his arm away from Kathleen. Kathleen looked around at Wiley and said, “You keep your mouth shut.”

  The bartender nodded. “Please be quiet,” he said.

  “Now just a minute,” Wiley said.

  The bartender ignored him. He went on talking in that soft voice of his. Wiley couldn’t follow everything he said, but he did hear words to the effect that he, Wiley, had been drinking hard all night and that they shouldn’t take him too seriously.

  “Whoa!” Wiley said. “Just hold on a second. I’m having a quiet conversation with my neighbor here, and all of a sudden Napoleon declares war. Why is that my fault?”

  “Sir, I asked you to be quiet.”

  “You ought to cut him off,” the short man said.

  “I was about to.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Wiley said. “For your information, I happen to be a very old friend of Bob’s.”

  “Mr. Lundgren isn’t here tonight.”

  “I can see that. I have eyes. My point is, if Bob were here …” Wiley stopped. The three of them were looking at him as if he was a complete asshole, the little guy so superior he wasn’t even mad anymore. Wiley had to admit, he sounded like one—dropping the name of a publican, for Christ’s sake. A former algebra teacher. “I have many friends in high places,” he said, trying to make a joke of it, but they just kept looking at him. They actually thought he was serious. “Oh, relax,” he said.

  “I’m sure Mr. Lundgren will be happy to take care of your tab,” the bartender said. “If you want to make a complaint he’ll be in tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You can’t be serious. Are you throwing me out?”

  The bartender considered the question. Then he said, “Right now we’re at the request stage.”

  “But this is ridiculous.”

  “You’re free to leave under your own steam, sir, and I’d be much obliged if you did.”

  “This is absolutely incredible,” Wiley said, more to himself than the bartender, in whose studied courtesy he did not fail to hear the possibility of competent violence. But he was damned if he was going to be hurried. He finished his drink and set the glass down. He slid off his stool, inclined his head toward Kathleen, gravely thanked her for the pleasure of her company. He crossed the room with perfect dignity and stepped outside, taking care that the door should not slam behind him.

  A cold light rain was falling. Wiley stood under the awning and hopelessly waited for it to stop. From the place across the street he heard a woman laugh loudly; he thought of lipstick-stained teeth, a pink tongue licking off the creamy mustache left by a White Russian. He leaned in that direction, thrusting his head forward as he did when he caught certain smells in the breeze—curry, roasting coffee, baking bread. Wiley raised his jacket collar and pushed off up the hill, toward the garage where he’d left his car. When he reached the corner he stopped. He couldn’t go home now, not like this. He could not allow this absurd picture of himself to survive in Kathleen’s mind. It was important that she know the truth about him, and not go through life believing that he was some kind of mouthy lush who got tossed out of bars. Because he wasn’t. This had never happened to him before.

  He crossed the street and walked back downhill to the other bar. Two women were sitting in the corner with three men. The one Wiley had heard laughing was still at it. Whenever anybody said anything she cracked up. They were all in their fifties, tourists by the look of them, the only customers in the place. Wiley bought a whisky and carried it to a table by the window where he could keep an eye on the bar he’d just been asked to leave.

  Nothing like this had ever happened to him. He was an English teacher in a private high school. He lived alone. He didn’t go to bars much and almost never drank whisky. He liked good wine, knew something about it, but was wary of knowing too much. At night, after he’d prepared his classes, he drank wine and read nineteenth-century novels. He didn’t like modern fiction, its narcissism, its moral timidity, its silence in the face of great wrongs. Wiley had started teaching to support himself while he wrote his doctoral thesis, and then lost interest in scholarship as he began to sense the power of his position. His students were still young enough not to be captive to the lies the world told about itself; he could make a difference in the way they saw things.

  Wiley read thick books late into the night and often got only a few hours’ sleep, but in nine years he had never missed a day of work; come morning he pushed himself out of bed just in time and drove to school still fumbling with his buttons, stomach empty, coffee sloshing in the cup between his knees.

  Wiley didn’t like living alone. He wanted to get married, and had always assumed he would be married by now, but he’d had bad luck with women. The last one brushed him off after four months. Her name was Monique. She was a French teacher on exchange, a tall jaunty Parisian who humiliated the boys in her class by mimicking their oafish accents, and the girls by rendering them invisible to the boys. She wore dark glasses even when she went to movies. Her full red lips were habitually pursed. Wiley learned they were held thus in readiness not for passion but scorn, at least where he was concerned. After Monique read Catcher in the Rye her dissatisfaction found a home in the word phony. He never understood why she’d settled on him in the first place. Sometimes he thought it was for his language; he liked to talk, and talked well, and Monique was in the states to polish her English. But her reasons were a mystery. She dropped him cold without ever making them clear.

  Wiley had finished two whiskies and just bought a third when Kathleen and the little guy came out of the bar. They stopped in the doorway and watched the rain, which was falling harder now. They stood well apart, not speaking, and watched the rain drip off the awning. She looked into her purse, said something to him. He patted his jacket pockets. She rummaged in her purse again and then the two of them ducked their heads and started up the hill. Wiley stood suddenly, knocking his chair over. He picked it up and left the bar.

  He had to walk fast. It was an effort. His feet kept taking him from side to side. He bent forward, compelling them to follow. He reached the corner and shouted, “Kathleen!”

  She was on the opposite corner. The man was a few steps ahead of her, leaning into the rain. They both stopped and looked over at Wiley. Wiley walked into the street and came toward them. He said, “I love you, Kathleen.” He was surprised to hear himself say this, and then to say, as he stepped up on the curb, “Come home with me.” She didn’t look the way he remembered her. In fact he barely recognized her. She put her hand to her mouth. Wiley couldn’t tell whether she was shocked or afraid or what. Maybe she was laughing. He smiled foolishly, confused by his own presence here and by what he’d said, not sure what to say next. Then the little guy came past her and Wiley felt a blow on his cheek and his head snapped back, and right after that the wind went out of him in a whoosh and he folded up, clutching his stomach, unable to breathe or speak. There was another blow at the back of his knees and he fell forward against the curb. He saw a shoe coming at his face and tried to jerk his head away but it caught him just above the eye. He heard Kathleen screaming and the shoe hit him on the mouth. He rolled away and covered his face with his hands. Kathleen kept screaming, No Mike No Mike No Mike No! Wiley could feel himself being kicked on his shoulders and back. A dull, faraway pain that went on for a while, and then ceased.

  He lay where he was, not trusting the silence, afraid that by moving he would make it all start again. Finally he raised himself to his hands and knees. There was broken glass in the street, glittering on the wet asphalt, and to see it at just this angle, so close, so familiar, so perfectly a part of everything that had happened to him, was to feel
utterly reduced; and he knew that he would never forget this, being on his knees with broken glass all around. The rain fell softly. He heard himself weeping, and stopped; it was a stagey, dishonest sound. His lower lip throbbed. He licked it. It was swollen, and tasted of salt and leather.

  Wiley stood up, steadying himself against the wall of a building. Two men came toward him, talking excitedly. He was afraid that they would stop to help him, ask him questions. What if they called the police? He had no excuse for his condition, no explanation. Wiley turned his face. The men walked past him as if he wasn’t there, or as if he belonged there, in exactly that pose, as part of what they expected a street to look like.

  Home. He had to get home. Wiley pushed away from the wall and started walking. He was surprised at how well he walked. His head was clear, his feet steady. He felt exuberant, even exultant, as if he’d gotten away with something. Light and easy. The feeling lasted through most of the drive home, and then it broke; by the time Wiley reached his apartment he was weak and cold, seized by feverish trembling.

  He went straight to the bathroom and turned on the light. His lower lip was cut and bleeding, purplish in color, puffed up like a sausage. He had another cut over his left eyebrow, the skin above it scraped raw all the way to his hairline. His chin was bloody and flecked with dirt. He could see a bruise beginning on his cheekbone. My God, he thought, looking at himself. He felt great tenderness for the person behind this lurid mask, as if it were not his face at all, but the face of a beaten child. He touched the hurt places. The raw skin clung to his fingertips.