by Alice Munro
The man shifted the beer and got that door open, and shouted for Harold. It was hard to tell what sort of room they were in now—there were kitchen cupboards with the doors off the hinges, some cans on the shelves, but there were also a couple of cots with bare mattresses and rumpled blankets. The windows were so successfully covered up with furniture or hanging quilts that you could not tell where they were, and the smell was that of a junk store, a plugged sink, or maybe a plugged toilet, cooking and grease and cigarettes and human sweat and dog mess and unremoved garbage.
Nobody answered the shouts. Eve turned around—there was room to turn around here, as there hadn’t been in the porch—and said, “I don’t think we should—” but Trixie got in her way and the man ducked round her to bang on another door.
“Here he is,” he said—still at the top of his voice, though the door had opened. “Here’s Harold in here.” At the same time Trixie rushed forward, and another man’s voice said, “Fuck. Get that dog out of here.”
“Lady here wants to see some pictures,” the little man said. Trixie whined in pain—somebody had kicked her. Eve had no choice but to go on into the room.
This was a dining room. There was the heavy old dining-room table and the substantial chairs. Three men were sitting down, playing cards. The fourth man had got up to kick the dog. The temperature in the room was about ninety degrees.
“Shut the door, there’s a draft,” said one of the men at the table.
The little man hauled Trixie out from under the table and threw her into the outer room, then closed the door behind Eve and the children.
“Christ. Fuck,” said the man who had got up. His chest and arms were so heavily tattooed that he seemed to have purple or bluish skin. He shook one foot as if it hurt. Perhaps he had also kicked a table leg when he kicked Trixie.
Sitting with his back to the door was a young man with sharp narrow shoulders and a delicate neck. At least Eve assumed he was young, because he wore his hair in dyed golden spikes and had gold rings in his ears. He didn’t turn around. The man across from him was as old as Eve herself, and had a shaved head, a tidy gray beard, and bloodshot blue eyes. He looked at Eve without any friendliness but with some intelligence or comprehension, and in this he was unlike the tattooed man, who had looked at her as if she was some kind of hallucination that he had decided to ignore.
At the end of the table, in the host’s or the father’s chair, sat the man who had given the order to close the door, but who hadn’t looked up or otherwise paid any attention to the interruption. He was a large-boned, fat, pale man with sweaty brown curls, and as far as Eve could tell he was entirely naked. The tattooed man and the blond man were wearing jeans, and the gray-bearded man was wearing jeans and a checked shirt buttoned up to the neck and a string tie. There were glasses and bottles on the table. The man in the host’s chair—he must be Harold—and the gray-bearded man were drinking whiskey. The other two were drinking beer.
“I told her maybe there was pictures in the front but she couldn’t go in there you got that shut up,” the little man said.
Harold said, “You shut up.”
Eve said, “I’m really sorry.” There seemed to be nothing to do but go into her spiel, enlarging it to include staying at the village hotel as a little girl, drives with her mother, the pictures in the wall, her memory of them today, the gateposts, her obvious mistake, her apologies. She spoke directly to the graybeard, since he seemed the only one willing to listen or capable of understanding her. Her arm and shoulder ached from the weight of Daisy and from the tension which had got hold of her entire body. Yet she was thinking how she would describe this—she’d say it was like finding yourself in the middle of a Pinter play. Or like all her nightmares of a stolid, silent, hostile audience.
The graybeard spoke when she could not think of any further charming or apologetic thing to say. He said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Harold. Hey. Hey Harold. Do you know anything about some pictures made out of broken glass?”
“Tell her when she was riding around looking at pictures I wasn’t even born yet,” said Harold, without looking up.
“You’re out of luck, lady,” said the graybeard.
The tattooed man whistled. “Hey you,” he said to Philip. “Hey kid. Can you play the piano?”
There was a piano in the room behind Harold’s chair. There was no stool or bench—Harold himself taking up most of the room between the piano and the table—and inappropriate things, such as plates and overcoats, were piled on top of it, as they were on every surface in the house.
“No,” said Eve quickly. “No he can’t.”
“I’m asking him,” the tattooed man said. “Can you play a tune?”
The graybeard said, “Let him alone.”
“Just asking if he can play a tune, what’s the matter with that?”
“Let him alone.”
“You see I can’t move until somebody moves the truck,” Eve said.
She thought, There is a smell of semen in this room.
Philip was mute, pressed against her side.
“If you could just move—” she said, turning and expecting to find the little man behind her. She stopped when she saw he wasn’t there, he wasn’t in the room at all, he had got out without her knowing when. What if he had locked the door?
She put her hand on the knob and it turned, the door opened with a little difficulty and a scramble on the other side of it. The little man had been crouched right there, listening.
Eve went out without speaking to him, out through the kitchen, Philip trotting along beside her like the most tractable little boy in the world. Along the narrow pathway on the porch, through the junk, and when they reached the open air she sucked it in, not having taken a real breath for a long time.
“You ought to go along down the road ask down at Harold’s cousin’s place,” the little man’s voice came after her.” They got a nice place. They got a new house, she keeps it beautiful. They’ll show you pictures or anything you want, they’ll make you welcome. They’ll sit you down and feed you, they don’t let nobody go away empty.”
He couldn’t have been crouched against the door all the time, because he had moved the truck. Or somebody had. It had disappeared altogether, been driven away to some shed or parking spot out of sight.
Eve ignored him. She got Daisy buckled in. Philip was buckling himself in, without having to be reminded. Trixie appeared from somewhere and walked around the car in a disconsolate way, sniffing at the tires.
Eve got in and closed the door, put her sweating hand on the key. The car started, she pulled ahead onto the gravel—a space that was surrounded by thick bushes, berry bushes she supposed, and old lilacs, as well as weeds. In places these bushes had been flattened by piles of old tires and bottles and tin cans. It was hard to think that things had been thrown out of that house, considering all that was left in it, but apparently they had. And as Eve swung the car around she saw, revealed by this flattening, some fragment of a wall, to which bits of whitewash still clung.
She thought she could see pieces of glass embedded there, glinting.
She didn’t slow down to look. She hoped Philip hadn’t noticed—he might want to stop. She got the car pointed towards the lane and drove past the dirt steps to the house. The little man stood there with both arms waving and Trixie was wagging her tail, roused from her scared docility sufficiently to bark farewell and chase them partway down the lane. The chase was only a formality; she could have caught up with them if she wanted to. Eve had had to slow down at once when she hit the ruts.
She was driving so slowly that it was possible, it was easy, for a figure to rise up out of the tall weeds on the passenger side of the car and open the door—which Eve had not thought of locking—and jump in.
It was the blond man who had been sitting at the table, the one whose face she had never seen.
“Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared anybody. I just wondered if I could hitch a ride with y
ou guys, okay?”
It wasn’t a man or a boy; it was a girl. A girl now wearing a dirty sort of undershirt.
Eve-said, “Okay.” She had just managed to hold the car in the track.
“I couldn’t ask you back in the house,” the girl said. “I went in the bathroom and got out the window and run out here. They probably don’t even know I’m gone yet. They’re boiled.” She took hold of a handful of the undershirt which was much too large for her and sniffed at it. “Stinks,” she said. “I just grabbed this of Harold’s, was in the bathroom. Stinks.”
Eve left the ruts, the darkness of the lane, and turned onto the ordinary road. “Jesus I’m glad to get out of there,” the girl said. “I didn’t know nothing about what I was getting into. I didn’t know even how I got there, it was night. It wasn’t no place for me. You know what I mean?”
“They seemed pretty drunk all right,” said Eve.
“Yeah. Well. I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“That’s okay.”
“If I hadn’t’ve jumped in I thought you wouldn’t stop for me. Would you?”
“I don’t know,” said Eve. “I guess I would have if it got through to me you were a girl. I didn’t really get a look at you before.”
“Yeah. I don’t look like much now. I look like shit now. I’m not saying I don’t like to party. I like to party. But there’s party and there’s party, you know what I mean?”
She turned in the seat and looked at Eve so steadily that Eve had to take her eyes from the road for a moment and look back. And what she saw was that this girl was much more drunk than she sounded. Her dark-brown eyes were glazed but held wide open, rounded with effort, and they had the imploring yet distant expression that drunks’ eyes get, a kind of last-ditch insistence on fooling you. Her skin was blotched in some places and ashy in others, her whole face crumpled with the effects of a mighty bingeing. She was a natural brunette—the gold spikes were intentionally and provocatively dark at the roots—and pretty enough, if you disregarded her present dinginess, to make you wonder how she had ever got mixed up with Harold and Harold’s crew. Her way of living and the style of the times must have taken fifteen or twenty natural pounds off her—but she wasn’t tall and she really wasn’t boyish. Her true inclination was to be a cuddly chunky girl, a darling dumpling.
“Herb was crazy bringing you in there like that,” she said. “He’s got a screw loose, Herb.”
Eve said, “I gathered that.”
“I don’t know what he does around there, I guess he works for Harold. I don’t think Harold uses him too good, neither.”
Eve had never believed herself to be attracted to women in a sexual way. And this girl in her soiled and crumpled state seemed unlikely to appeal to anybody. But perhaps the girl did not believe this possible—she must be so used to appealing to people. At any rate she slid her hand along Eve’s bare thigh, just getting a little way beyond the hem of her shorts. It was a practiced move, drunk as she was. To spread the fingers, to grasp flesh on the first try, would have been too much. A practiced, automatically hopeful move, yet so lacking in any true, strong, squirmy, comradely lust that Eve felt that the hand might easily have fallen short and caressed the car upholstery.
“I’m okay,” the girl said, and her voice, like the hand, struggled to put herself and Eve on a new level of intimacy. “You know what I mean? You understand me. Okay?”
“Of course,” said Eve briskly, and the hand trailed away, its tired whore’s courtesy done with. But it had not failed—not altogether. Blatant and halfhearted as it was, it had been enough to set some old wires twitching.
And the fact that it could be effective in any way at all filled Eve with misgiving, flung a shadow backwards from this moment over all the rowdy and impulsive as well as all the hopeful and serious, the more or less unrepented-of, couplings of her life. Not a real flare-up of shame, a sense of sin—just a dirty shadow. What a joke on her, if she started to hanker now after a purer past and a cleaner slate.
But it could be just that still, and always, she hankered after love.
She said, “Where is it you want to go?”
The girl jerked backwards, faced the road. She said, “Where you going? You live around here?” The blurred tone of seductiveness had changed, as no doubt it would change after sex, into a mean-sounding swagger.
“There’s a bus goes through the village,” Eve said. “It stops at the gas station. I’ve seen the sign.”
“Yeah but just one thing,” the girl said. “I got no money. See, I got away from there in such a hurry I never got to collect my money. So what use would it be me getting on a bus without no money?”
The thing to do was not to recognize a threat. Tell her that she could hitchhike, if she had no money. It wasn’t likely that she had a gun in her jeans. She just wanted to sound as if she might have one.
But a knife?
The girl turned for the first time to look into the backseat.
“You kids okay back there?” she said.
No answer.
“They’re cute,” she said. “They shy with strangers?”
How stupid of Eve to think about sex, when the reality, the danger, were elsewhere.
Eve’s purse was on the floor of the car in front of the girl’s feet. She didn’t know how much money was in it. Sixty, seventy dollars. Hardly more. If she offered money for a ticket the girl would name an expensive destination. Montreal. Or at least Toronto. If she said, “Just take what’s there,” the girl would see capitulation. She would sense Eve’s fear and might try to push further. What was the best she could do? Steal the car? If she left Eve and the children beside the road, the police would be after her in a hurry. If she left them dead in some thicket, she might get farther. Or if she took them along while she needed them, a knife against Eve’s side or a child’s throat.
Such things happen. But not as regularly as on television or in the movies. Such things don’t often happen.
Eve turned onto the county road, which was fairly busy. Why did that make her feel better? Safety there was an illusion. She could be driving along the highway in the midst of the day’s traffic taking herself and the children to their deaths.
The girl said, “Where’s this road go?”
“It goes out to the main highway.”
“Let’s drive out there.”
“That’s where I am driving,” Eve said.
“Which way’s the highway go?”
“It goes north to Owen Sound or up to Tobermory where you get the boat. Or south to—I don’t know. But it joins another highway, you can get to Sarnia. Or London. Or Detroit or Toronto if you keep going.”
Nothing more was said until they reached the highway. Eve turned onto it and said, “This is it.”
“Which way you heading now?”
“I’m heading north,” Eve said.
“That the way you live then?”
“I’m going to the village. I’m going to stop for gas.”
“You got gas,” the girl said. “You got over half a tank.”
That was stupid. Eve should have said groceries.
Beside her the girl let out a long groan of decision, maybe of relinquishment.
“You know,” she said, “you know. I might as well get out here if I’m going to hitch a ride. I could get a ride here as easy as anyplace.”
Eve pulled over onto the gravel. Relief was turning into something like shame. It was probably true that the girl had run away without collecting any money, that she had nothing. What was it like to be drunk, wasted, with no money, at the side of the road?
“Which way you said we’re going?”
“North,” Eve told her again.
“Which way you said to Sarnia?”
“South. Just cross the road, the cars’ll be headed south. Watch out for the traffic.”
“Sure,” the girl said. Her voice was already distant; she was calculating new chances. She was half out of the car as she said, “See you.�
� And into the backseat, “See you guys. Be good.”
“Wait,” said Eve. She leaned over and felt in her purse for her wallet, got out a twenty-dollar bill. She got out of the car and came round to where the girl was waiting. “Here,” she said. “This’ll help you.”
“Yeah. Thanks,” the girl said, stuffing the bill in her pocket, her eyes on the road.
“Listen,” said Eve. “If you’re stranded I’ll tell you where my house is. It’s about two miles north of the village and the village is about half a mile north of here. North. This way. My family’s there now, but they should be gone by evening, if that bothers you. It’s got the name Ford on the mailbox. That’s not my name, I don’t know why it’s there. It’s all by itself in the middle of a field. It’s got one ordinary window on one side of the front door and a funny-looking little window on the other. That’s where they put in the bathroom.”
“Yeah,” the girl said.
“It’s just that I thought, if you don’t get a ride—”
“Okay,” the girl said. “Sure.”
When they had started driving again, Philip said, “Yuck. She smelled like vomit.”
A little farther on he said, “She didn’t even know you should look at the sun to tell directions. She was stupid. Wasn’t she?”
“I guess so,” Eve said.
“Yuck. I never ever saw anybody so stupid.”
As they went through the village he asked if they could stop for ice-cream cones. Eve said no.
“There’s so many people stopping for ice cream it’s hard to find a place to park,” she said. “We’ve got enough ice cream at home.”
“You shouldn’t say ‘home,’” said Philip. “It’s just where we’re staying. You should say ‘the house.’”
The big hay rolls in a field to the east of the highway were facing ends-on into the sun, so tightly packed they looked like shields or gongs or faces of Aztec metal. Past that was a field of pale soft gold tails or feathers.
“That’s called barley, that gold stuff with the tails on it,” she said to Philip.
He said, “I know.”
“The tails are called beards sometimes.” She began to recite, “‘But the reapers, reaping early, in among the bearded barley—’”
