Interference & Other Stories

by Richard Hoffman

  Roger stood at the bottom of the stairs, hugging the newel post. He shrugged. Then he asked them who was going to die.

  His parents, when they looked at each other, passed back and forth what each hoped the other would read as amusement and pride, but each had felt, and hidden, a chill.

  “Well, Big Guy, everybody has to die sometime,” the boy’s father said, kneeling close to the child. But this time when he looked at his wife, looked to her for some help, he saw that he’d annoyed her. “What’s with the look?” he wanted to say, “What am I supposed to tell him?”

  But it had been the tone of her husband’s remark, his manner more than the substance of his reply, that had irked the child’s mother. He had made a hard truth even harder somehow, as if with a cheery inflection and a wave of the hand even this mystery of mysteries was solved. She had heard this tone in his voice before, on the phone, responding to a customer’s difficult question. “Clients,” he called them. She felt alarmed in ways she didn’t fully understand yet. What was he selling the child then? Did he even know? Of course he was talking again, a little too rapidly, with the air of one expanding on his main point, though he wasn’t, really.

  ”…and your mother and I are both healthy and young. Is that what you’re worried about? You don’t need to worry about that, Mr. Big, not for a minute, you hear?”

  She kept her face turned from her husband so the child wouldn’t have to see her hesitate when his father looked to her for agreement. She looked straight at the child and could tell by the way he shifted his gaze that she’d been wise to do so. She tried to radiate a general reassurance and strength, to focus it like a ray and beam it at the child’s face.

  This was disturbing. It was all wrong what her husband seemed to be saying. She felt such a fundamental revulsion to his voice that, right there in front of the child, she wanted to scream at him to shut up. She felt that her child was being hustled and silenced, fooled and numbed. A response was required, but for now she could only acknowledge her anger and, for the child’s sake, hide it. Partly, she was simply too disturbed to speak, at a loss and grievously astonished. Without knowing precisely why, she understood that all that had seemed substantial now threatened to unravel.

  The boy looked back at his father who winked, patted him on the cheek, and stood up. He watched his father turn to his mother with no look on his face, none, nothing, and walk right past her and out the front door. The boy thought this was odd because they only ever used the front door when people rang the bell; otherwise, they used the back and went in and out through the kitchen.

  His mother knelt, on both knees, and hugged him. She didn’t speak. Sometimes she did this—squeezed him a little too hard. It was like the times his father clamped his thumb and finger on his chin to make him pay attention. Then he wanted to get away, go dig in the dirt or draw a picture. She released him and he ran upstairs.

  Earlier that morning, the garage had called to say that the Toyota was ready. They’d planned on driving there together so one of them could drive it back, but Russell was out of the driveway and headed there in the company car before he realized he had decided to pick it up himself. He wasn’t sure how, but he’d figure it out when he got there. There would be a thick rope or a chain or something he could borrow from the garage. It wasn’t far. He let out his anger in the solitude of the car, speaking to his wife as if she were there in the passenger seat, holding up his index finger to make a point or chopping the air with his right hand for emphasis.

  “You don’t just abandon the poor kid to his own devices with shit like, ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ You don’t give a good goddamn what the boy thinks, and he knows it. Besides, he asked because he’d reached the limit of his understanding. When else does a boy ask a question like that? Tell me. I don’t think you understand about boys. Maybe that stuff works with girls. I don’t pretend to know. I just don’t think you understand about boys.

  “Of course! Of course you have the right to say anything you want to him. Of course he’s your son, too.” He was hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “So say something to him is all I’m saying. Don’t duck with these child psychology tricks you learned in teacher’s ed. I respect him as a little man, that’s the difference. You don’t respect him.”

  He kept his eyes on the road and refrained from gesticulating as he approached an intersection where a panel truck was waiting for him to pass. In the rearview mirror he watched the truck turn and go in the other direction. He turned his attention back to the ghost of his wife, but felt too self-conscious now to continue. He hoped there would be a length of chain and maybe an old tire to put between the two bumpers. That would work. Leave a little slack in the chain so he could make the turns, and fasten an old tire to the rear bumper of the tow car to protect both cars on the way back. His anger dissipated as his plan took shape.

  He slowed and pulled into the service station. The Toyota was parked outside the repair bay, with one mechanic leaning under the hood, giving hand signals to another who sat behind the steering wheel with the door open and one foot on the ground, occasionally gunning the engine.

  Now what, he thought. I thought they said the car was ready.

  Beth sat in the bright dining room where the shadows of potted palm and ficus emphasized the morning sun, but she couldn’t think there, and she couldn’t sit still. She needed to walk to think, but with Roger upstairs in his room and Russell gone god knows where, she was trapped.

  She went in the kitchen and lit the burner under the kettle, but as soon as she lifted a tea bag from the canister she changed her mind, put the lid back on, whirled around, and turned off the stove. She couldn’t find a way to start to think about what had just happened. She had seen how profoundly different she and her husband were, and it frightened her.

  She stood looking out the windows above the sink at the sugar maple in the side yard next to the driveway. Once before, when the world had seemed to spin madly out of orbit, threatening to fling her from sanity, to dislodge her by the centripetal force of grief, she had hugged that maple and held on. Now she filled a small plastic tumbler from the faucet and watered the African violets and geranium on the windowsill, staring out at the tree and remembering.

  It had been right around the time that she’d weaned Roger, hoping it wasn’t too early to do so, and feeling alternately guilty and resolute about it, just as she had while he was nursing: one moment he was so serene he’d fall asleep at the nipple, the next he was biting down so hard she almost slapped him, reflexively. “No!” she would exclaim then, through sudden tears, and detach herself, ashamed of how angry she felt, but damned if she was going to be “gnawed upon,” as she put it to her husband.

  On that day three years ago, when her husband came to tell her of her brother Jerry’s death, she had just returned from a walk, a habit she’d acquired while pregnant; “my walk,” she called it, marveling that although the route was always the same, the walk, her walk, was always different. The season, the weather, the light, her mood, her outlook, her expectations for later in the day—any number of variables combined to make her every circular walk trailblazing and unprecedented. Some days, where the road curved past the fenced meadow, just before she came upon the broad pond, cows would drift down the hill to the fence to greet her; other times she would round the curve to see the whole herd near the fence, and then they would walk away as if they’d all agreed, earlier, to shun her. Now her walks were tethered in her mind to her brother because of the happenstance of her hearing the news there, in the side yard, under the sugar maple, as she returned home.

  She had seen her husband coming toward her, and she smiled and walked a few steps farther before she stopped and touched her hand to the tree. He was walking toward her with a resolve that suggested he might walk right past her and keep on going to somewhere far away, as if he were hiking, reluctantly but resolutely. Very nearly marching, it had occurred to her, and by the time he drew near enough for her
to see his face, she already knew something was terribly wrong, and knew that it wasn’t the baby since there was no panic in his movement. Days later she would shoo away the thought, and more than once, that she had seen mostly impatience on his face, a man who had to clean up a mess and had better things to do.

  She couldn’t remember how he’d first touched her. Had he put his arms around her before or after he’d told her? Which one of them moved first? Had she sought comfort from him? Did he hold her head to his chest, a habit of his that she felt infantilized her, and was that why she turned away and leaned into the tree? He had stayed there with her until she was ready to go inside, not speaking, not touching her. What she remembered was that the way he had held her, and let her go, and stood by in silence, was not at all the way she would have imagined things should be, but that it had sufficed. She had turned to the tree, leaned her forehead into the trunk, and wept. When the anger took over, she grabbed the thick trunk and wailed, trying over and over to shake the tree but it wouldn’t budge. Soon she had her arms around it, like a fighter tying up an opponent to catch a breath, and then she slid to the ground and sat there hugging the tree with her arms and legs, convinced that if she let go she would hurtle from the earth into nothing but the purest pain.

  And then her menses had returned. At first she hadn’t been aware of it, subsumed in grief and melded to the tree, but soon it was wet and warm and undeniable, although she could, and did, choose to ignore it. She continued crying, scraping her cheeks and forehead on the bark, until she felt her equilibrium returning; she fought it, not ready yet to turn back to the world where brothers die, preferring her own disappearance into the roaring white water of grief. But no more tears would come.

  Instead, as she rose and turned to her husband, who had stood there, who had stood by her there, and with profound reluctance prepared to shoulder her identity again, the early October wind came up without warning and shook the yellowing tree so that it pitched and rocked and yellow leaves were blown from it and flew off sideways until they stuck to a fence or wall.

  Whether a tree can speak or not is not the issue, she tried to tell her husband later on. What she’d heard then, in the loud whisperings of the maple’s windblown crown, was the knowledge that each single moment is essential to every other, that if it were not, then no one, ever, would have to die. What she understood then, that the fact of dying proves the necessity of each and every moment to every other that has ever existed or ever will exist, filled her with such peace that her brother’s death, which hurt more than anything she had ever known, became acceptable to her. She tried, over the next several weeks, to make her husband understand until one evening he finally turned to her and said, “Enough. I’m thick. Okay? I just don’t get it. Save your breath.”

  In his room the boy was on his knees and drawing on a piece of posterboard with an orange crayon. When he pressed too hard and broke it, he said, “Good!” in a voice that was not yet his own. Peeling back the paper wrapper, exposing the jagged edge, he said it again, “Good!” And he bore down with the crayon—sharp dark lines now over the lighter pebbled orange. He thought this might be fire he was drawing. If he had to say—if someone, a grown-up, would ask him in the grown-up singing voice that always prompted him to answer—he would have said, “Fire,” wishing for them to go away and, as if he had paid them, satisfied them somehow, they would.

  The brown crayon. Then the yellow one. The black crayon was in pieces. He picked up one so rounded, paperless, and slick it might have been a jellybean. “Good!” he said. It should have black on it but not too much.

  As he worked on his picture, he was thinking. Just as he brought things to his room to know them, to interrogate them—horse chestnuts, certain rocks, an elbow of pipe, a spiky partly opened milkweed pod—he brought what happened, what he had observed. His four-year-old self had a pocket in it. Yellow and red will make a better orange than orange. Those are not flames. Those are ears. Green all around is important. He thought while the picture became. He became, wholly, the boy who was making this picture.

  “Happens sometimes. Can’t tell until you go to start the bugger up again. Sometimes the ignition wires get brittle so when you hook them up again you find out they’re shot.” The mechanic lowered the hood, then dropped it. Bang. He walked toward Russell, wiping his hands on a rag. “Take about an hour. You can wait inside or come back. Up to you.”

  Having to wait was irritating and returned Russell to the argument with his wife. The grimy tubular steel chair in the office was uncomfortable. It occurred to him that this was almost a religious difference, if there could be such a thing between non-believers. He had married a fellow atheist and found himself in a mixed marriage. The irony didn’t wake his sense of humor, though; on the contrary, he felt a wave of panic pass through him, the perception of how complicated and beyond governing was this thing called marriage.

  He had no patience for what seemed to him to be her facile, hippie wisdom. He’d seen this delusion before, the first time during a rocket attack in the Central Highlands. Ordnance flying everywhere: screaming shells, screaming soldiers. And one of them, a kid named Scott, sitting on the tarmac on the edge of the compound babbling about transcending fear. Raving. Laughing at death. Making life thus inconsequential. Bullshit. It was a dodge, that’s what it was. Despair with a happy face stuck on it. He lived, the kid, rotated out. He should have been busted, the little prick.

  So if she needed to make believe she’d grasped something fucking ineffable, fine; but he had no intention of being drawn in or letting her warp the boy for that matter.

  He looked out the window across the station at the traffic going by. A lot of trucks this time of day. He remembered Roger in his arms just moments after he was born, and how he had hummed “Old Man River” to him in his deepest voice, surprising himself, not knowing he was going to do it, with his chin against the infant’s skull. Pouring into this act all his sorrow, joy, grief, anger: aggregates of that same ghost he had given up in drunken song, from the bottom of illness, in the moan of the love bed, so many times before, but now at last his own to give, this ghost that could only be known in transmission, that did not depend on the words of the song, but only on the love with which he shaped each vowel in his deepest belly-voice.

  The mechanic was there in the doorway. “She’s ready. What’s the trouble with the other one?” He nodded toward the Taurus Russell had arrived in.

  “That one? Nothing. Company car.”

  The mechanic frowned. “I thought you come to pick her up.”

  “I did. I did. I’m wondering if you have an old tire and a length of chain. Or a good strong rope would probably do the trick.”

  “You’re shittin’ me, right? You want to tow it home with a piece of rope?”

  “Why not? It’s not far.”

  “Not out of here you’re not.”

  Challenged, Russell felt a surge of anger. It was his car, after all. Even the company car was his, really, since he owned the company. He looked the mechanic up and down. Banty rooster on his own turf. “Give me one good reason.”

  “’Cause I won’t let you. You’ll bang up both these cars but good. And that’s if you don’t kill yourself and take somebody else down with you. What’s the matter with you? You got some kind of death wish?”

  He turned and opened the door to a storage closet next to the shelves of motor oil and antifreeze. In the time it took the mechanic to open the lid on a can of hand cleanser and scoop two fingers of it into his palm, Russell got a good look at a large photograph on the inside of the door. Above the picture of a large group of men in combat fatigues was a sign, in stenciled letter, reading:

  2nd Battalion, 4th Marines

  There were other regalia as well, but the mechanic closed the door before Russell got much of a look. The strong but pleasant scent of citrus cleaner filled the grimy office.

  “You’re a bastard,” Russell said.

  “I can be.”

  �
�A magnificent bastard—that’s what we called you guys.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Gimlet. Americal. 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry. Russell Harts-horne.” He put out his hand. “Nhi Ha.”

  “Ernie Gagnon.” He took Russell’s hand and held on. “So, shall I save your sorry ass or you still want to fight me?” Russell waited for the smile that would defuse this moment; when it came he gave Gagnons hand a quick pump and they both let go.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Russell.

  Beth took her old textbook from the low shelf on the upstairs landing and sat in a creaking white wicker chair by the window. Were all four-year-olds interested in death? Was this a developmental thing? Or was Roger speaking from a chill shadow his uncle’s death had cast over their family life? Beth sought the answer to the first question in the heavy maroon volume on her lap. She feared the answer to the second.

  Nothing in the index for death. Nothing for mortality. Nothing for mourning. Nothing for grief. Did the authors think none of these things were of any consequence in a child’s life? The listing for parent was extensive. There: bereaved parent, page 437. Dry as ashes, the text referred to “the maternal introject” and the danger to a child of “overwhelming affect” resulting from “acute maternal bereavement.”

  She refused the guilt that welled up in her and slammed shut the book. Tears came then, this time at the realization that there was nothing to be done, nothing that ought to be done, nothing that could be changed. She cried for Jerry, for his final moments; for Roger who seemed to have perceived her brother’s absence, even without really knowing him; for Russell, for whom death, anybody’s death, was a kind of failure, a collapse into incoherence; and for herself, facing mystery brotherless.

  She heard cars in the driveway and went to the window. A mechanic in coveralls was working a tow truck’s lift, lowering the front end of the Toyota to the ground.