The Times Are Never So Bad

by Andre Dubus

  She knew his steps in the hall and opened the door before he knocked. He was not in uniform, but he wore his cartridge belt and holstered .38. She hugged his deep, hard chest, and his arms were around her, one hand patting her back, and when he asked what Ray had done to her, she looked up at his wide sunburned face, his black hair and green eyes like her own, then rested her face on his chest and soft old chamois shirt, and said: ‘He had his knife. He touched me with it. My throat. My stomach. He cut the phone wire—’ His patting hand stopped. ‘The door was locked and I was asleep, he doesn’t even have a credit card, I don’t know what he used, I woke up with his hand on my mouth then he had that big knife, that Marine knife.’

  His mouth touched her hair, her scalp, and he said: ‘He raped you?’

  She nodded against his chest; he squeezed her, then his hands were holding her waist and he lifted her and his shoulders swung to the left and he put her down, as though moving her out of his path so he could walk to the bed, the wall, through it into the third-story night. But he did not move. He inhaled with a hiss and held it, then blew it out and did it again, and struck his left palm with his right fist, the open hand gripping the fist, and he stood breathing fast, the hand and fist pushing against each other. He was looking at the bed, and she wished she had made it.

  ‘You better come home.’

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘Then I’m going look for him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have anything to drink?’

  ‘Wine and beer.’

  When he turned the corner into the kitchen, she straightened the sheets; he came back while she was pulling the spread over the pillows.

  ‘I’ll call Mom,’ he said. He stood by the bed, his hands on the phone. ‘Then we’ll go to the hospital.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  He held the cord, looking at its severed end.

  ‘They take care of you, in case you’re pregnant.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  He swallowed from the bottle, his eyes still on the cord. Then he looked at her.

  ‘Just take something for tonight. We can come back tomorrow.’

  She packed an overnight bag and he took it from her; in the corridor he put his arm around her shoulders, held her going slowly down the stairs and outside to his pickup; with a hand on her elbow he helped her up to the seat. While he drove he opened a beer she had not seen him take from the apartment. She smoked and watched the town through the windshield and open window: Main Street descending past the city hall and courthouse, between the library and a park, to the river; she looked across the river at the street climbing again and, above the streetlights, trees and two church steeples. On the bridge she saw herself on her knees, her face on the pillow, Ray plunging, Ray lying naked and dead on her apartment floor, her father standing above him. She looked at the broad river, then they were off the bridge and climbing again, past Wendy’s and McDonald’s and Timmy’s, all closed. She wanted to speak, or be able to; she wanted to turn and look at her father, but she had to be cleansed first, a shower, six showers, twelve; and time; but it was not only that.

  It was her life itself; that was the sin she wanted hidden from her father and the houses and sleeping people they passed; and she wanted to forgive herself but could not because there was no single act or even pattern she could isolate and redeem. There was something about her heart, so that now glimpsing herself waiting on tables, sleeping, eating, walking in town on a spring afternoon, buying a summer blouse, she felt that her every action and simplest moments were soiled by an evil she could not name.

  Next day after lunch he brought her to a small studio; displayed behind its front window and on its walls were photographs, most in color, of families, brides and grooms, and what she assumed were pictures to commemorate graduation from high school: girls in dresses, boys in jackets and ties. The studio smelled of accumulated cigarette smoke and filled ashtrays, and the woman coughed while she seated Polly on a stool in the dim room at the rear. The woman seemed to be in her fifties; her skin had a yellow hue, and Polly did not want to touch anything, as if the walls and stool, like the handkerchief of a person with a cold, bore traces of the woman’s tenuous mortality. She looked at the camera and prepared her face by thinking about its beauty until she felt it. They were Polaroid pictures; as she stood beside her father at the front desk, glancing at portraits to find someone she knew, so she could defy with knowledge what she defied now with instinct, could say to herself: / know him, her, them; they’re not like that at all; are fucked up too, and, her breath recoiling from the odor of the woman’s lungs that permeated the walls and pictures, she looked down at the desk, at her face as it had been only minutes ago in the back room. With scissors, the woman trimmed it. She watched the blade cutting through her breasts. The black-and-white face was not angry or hating or fearful or guilty; she did not know what it was but very serious and not pretty.

  At City Hall they went to the detectives’ office at the rear of the police station. Two detectives sat at desks, one writing, one drinking coffee. They greeted her father, and she stood in the doorway while he went to the desk of the coffee-drinker, a short man wearing a silver revolver behind his hip. Then her father leaned over him, hiding all but his hand on the coffee cup, and she watched her father’s uniformed back, listened to his low voice without words. The other detective frowned as he wrote. Her father turned and beckoned: ‘Okay, Polly.’

  The detective rose to meet her, and she shook his hand and did not hear his name. His voice was gentle, as if soothing her while dressing a wound; he led her across the room and explained what he was doing as he rolled her right forefinger on ink, then on the license. There was a sink and he told her to use the soap and water, the paper towels, then brought her to his desk where her father waited, and held a chair for her. It had a cushioned seat, but a straight wooden back and no arms, so she sat erect, feeling like a supplicant, as she checked answers on a form he gave her (she was not a convicted felon, a drunk, an addict) and answered questions he asked her as he typed on her license: one twenty-six, black (he looked at her eyes and said: ‘Pretty eyes, Polly’), green.He gave her the card and signed the front and looked at the back where he had typed Dark under Complexion, Waitress under Occupation, and, under Reason for Issuing License: Protection. He said the chief would sign the license, then it would go to Boston and return laminated in two weeks; he offered them coffee, they said no, and he walked them to the office door, his hand reaching up to rest on her father’s shoulder. The other detective was still writing. In the truck, she said: ‘He was nice.’

  The gun, her father said, looked like a scaled-down Colt .45: a .380 automatic which they bought because it was used and cost a hundred and fifteen dollars (though he would have paid three hundred, in cash and gladly, for the .38 snubnose she looked at and held first; they were in the store within twenty hours of his bringing her home, then driving to Newburyport, to Ray’s empty apartment, where he had kicked open the locked door and looked around enough to see in the floor dust the two bars of clean wood where the weight-lifting bench had been, and the clean circles of varying sizes left by the steel plates and power stands); and because of the way it felt in her hand, light enough so it seemed an extension of her wrist, a part of her palm, its steel and its wooden grips like her skinned bone, and heavy enough so she felt both safe and powerful, and the power seemed not the gun’s but her own; and because of its size, which she measured as one and a half Marlboro boxes long, and its shape, flat, so she could carry it concealed in the front pocket of her jeans, when she left home without a purse.

  They bought it in Kittery, Maine, less than an hour’s drive up New Hampshire’s short coast, at the Kittery Trading Post, where as a virgin, then not one but still young enough to keep that as secret as the cigarettes in her purse, she had gone with her father to buy surf rods and spinning rods, parkas, chamois and flannel shirts. It was also the store where Ray, while shopping for a pock-etknife, h
ad seen and bought (I had to, he told her) a replica of the World War II Marine knife, with the globe and anchor emblem on its sheath. It came in a box, on whose top was a reproduction of the knife’s original blueprint from 1942. When he came home, he held the box toward her, said Look what I found, his voice alerting her; in his face she saw the same nuance of shy tenderness, so until she looked down at the box she believed he had brought her a gift. I don’t need it, he said, as she drew it from the sheath, felt its edge, stroked its blood gutter. But, see, we gave all his stuff away. That was when she understood he had been talking about Kingsley, and she had again that experience peculiar to marriage, of entering a conversation that had been active for hours in her husband’s mind. Now she brought her father to the showcase of knives and showed him, and he said: ‘Unless he’s good with it at thirty feet, he might as well not have it at all. Not now, anyways.’

  Next day, in the sunlit evening of daylight savings time, at an old gravel pit grown with weeds and enclosed by woods on three sides, with a dirt road at one end and a bluff at the other, her father propped a silhouette of a man’s torso and head against the bluff, walked twenty paces from it, and gave her the pistol. He had bought it in his name, because she was waiting for the license, and he could not receive the gun in Maine, so a clerk from the Trading Post, who lived in Massachusetts where he was also a gun dealer, brought it home to Amesbury, and her father got it during his lunch hour.

  ‘It loads just like the .22,’ he said.

  A squirrel chattered in the trees on the bluff. She pushed seven bullets into the magazine, slid it into the handle, and, pointing the gun at the bluff, pulled the slide to the rear and let it snap forward; the hammer was cocked, and she pushed up the safety. Then he told her to take out the magazine and eject the chambered shell: it flipped to the ground, and he wiped it on his pants and gave it to her and told her to load it again; he kept her loading and unloading for ten minutes or so, saying he was damned if he’d get her shot making a mistake with a gun that was supposed to protect her.

  ‘Shoot it like you did the .22 and aim for his middle.’

  He had taught her to shoot his Colt .22, and she had shot with him on weekends in spring and summer and fall until her midteens, when her pleasures changed and she went with him just often enough to keep him from being hurt because she had outgrown shooting cans and being with him for two hours of a good afternoon; or often enough to keep her from believing he was hurt. She stood profiled to the target, aimed with one extended hand, thumbed the safety off, and, looking over the cocked hammer and barrel at the shape of a man, could not fire.

  ‘The Miller can,’ she said, and, shifting her feet, aimed at the can at the base of the bluff, held her breath, and squeezed to an explosion that shocked her ears and pushed her arm up and back as dust flew a yard short of the can.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Reminds me of what I forgot,’ he said and, standing behind her, he pulled back her hair and gently pushed cotton into her ears. ‘Better go for the target. They didn’t make that gun to hit something little.’

  ‘It’s the head. If we could fold it back.’

  He patted her shoulder.

  ‘Just aim for the middle, and shoot that piece of cardboard.’

  Cardboard, she told herself as she lined up the sights on the torso’s black middle and fired six times, but shoulder she thought when she saw the first hole, missed, stomach, chest, shoulder, stomach, and she felt clandestine and solemn, as though performing a strange ritual that would forever change her. She was suddenly tired. As she loaded the magazine, images of the past two nights and two days assaulted her, filled her memory so she could not recall doing anything during that time except kneeling between a knife and Ray’s cock, riding in her father’s truck—home, to the studio, to City Hall, to Kittery, home, to this woods—and being photographed and fingerprinted and questioned and pointing guns at the walls and ceiling of the store, and tomorrow night she had to wait tables, always wiping them, emptying ashtrays, bantering, smiling, soberly watching them get drunk, their voices louder than the jukebox playing music she would like in any other place. She fired, not trying to think cardboard, yielding to the target’s shape and going further, seeing it not as any man but Ray, so that now as holes appeared and her arm recoiled from the shots muted by cotton and she breathed the smell of gunpowder, and reloaded and fired seven more times and seven more, she saw him attacking her and falling, attacking her and falling, and she faced the target and aimed with both hands at head and throat and chest, and once heard, herself exhale: ‘Yes.’

  Two weeks later her father brought her license home, but he had told her not to wait for it, no judge would send her to jail, knowing she had applied, and knowing why. So from that afternoon’s shooting on, she carried it everywhere: in her purse, jeans, shorts, beach bag, in her skirt pocket at work and on the car seat beside her as, at two in the morning, she drove home, where she put it in the drawer of her bedside table and left her windows open to the summer air. At Timmy’s on that sunlit afternoon in July she rested her hand on it, rubbed its handle under the soft leather of her purse. She knew she was probably drunk by police or medical standards, but not by her own. Her skin seemed thickened, so she could feel more sharply the leather and the pistol handle beneath it than her fingers themselves when she rubbed them together. For a good while she had been unaware of having legs and feet; her cheeks and lips were numb; sometimes she felt an elbow on the table, or the base of her spine, or her thighs when they pressed on the chair’s edge, then she shifted her weight. But she was not drunk because she knew she was: she knew her reflexes were too slow for driving, and she would have to concentrate to walk without weaving to the ladies’ room. She also knew that the monologue coming to her was true; they always were. She listened to what her mind told her when it was free of the flesh: sometimes after making love, or waking in the morning, or lying on the beach for those minutes before the sun warmed her to sleep, or when she had drunk enough, either alone or with someone who would listen with her; but for a long time there had been no one like that.

  Only three men were at the bar now. She brought her glass and ashtray to it, told Al to fill one and empty the other, and took two cocktail napkins. She paid and tipped, then sat at the table and wiped it dry with the napkins, and waited for Steve. At ten to five he came in, wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt, his stomach not hanging but protruding over his jeans. Halfway to the bar he saw her watching him and smiled, his hand lifting. She waved him to her and looked at his narrow hips as he came.

  ‘Steve? Can I talk to you a minute?’

  He glanced over her at the bar, said he was early, and sat. Even now in July, his arms and face looked newly sunburned, his hair and beard, which grew below his open collar, more golden.

  ‘You’re one of those guys who look good everywhere,’ she said.

  ‘Doing sports outside, drinking in a bar—you know what I mean? Like some guys look right for a bar, but you see them on a boat or something, and they look like somebody on vacation.’

  ‘Some girls too.’

  She focused on his lips and teeth.

  ‘You’re always smiling, Steve. Don’t you ever get down? I’ve never seen you down.’

  ‘No time for it.’

  ‘No time for it. What did you do today, with all your time?’

  ‘Went out for cod this morning—’

  ‘Did you catch any?’

  ‘Six. Came back to the lake, charcoaled a couple of fillets, and crapped out in the hammock. What’s wrong—you down?’

  ‘Me? No, I’m buzzed. But let me tell you: I’ve been thinking. I’m going to ask you a favor, and if it’s any kind of hassle, you say no, all right? But I think it might be good for both of us. Okay? But if it’s not—’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘No, but wait. I’m sitting here, right? and looking out the window and thinking, and I’ve got to leave home. See’—she leaned forward, placed her hands on his
wrists, and lowered her voice—‘I’m living with my folks because I had a nice apartment and I liked being there, but last month, last month Ray broke in one night while I was sleeping and he held a knife on me and raped me.’ She did not know what she had expected from his face, but it surprised her: he looked hurt and sad, and he nodded, then slowly shook his head. ‘So I moved in with my folks. I was scared. I mean, it’s not as bad as some girls get it, from some stranger, like that poor fifteen-yearold last year hitchhiking and he had a knife and made her blow him; it was just Ray, you know, but still—I’ve got a gun too, a permit, the whole thing.’ He nodded. ‘It’s right here, in my purse.’

  ‘That’s the way it is now.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Whatever. Women need things; you’re built too small to be safe anymore.’

  ‘Steve, I got to move. But I’m still scared of having my own place. I was thinking, see, if I could move in with you, then I could do it gradually, you know? And when you leave in the fall I could sublet, I’d pay the whole rent for you till you get back, and by then—when do you come back?’

  ‘Around April.’

  ‘I’d be ready. Maybe I’d move to Amesbury or Newburyport. Maybe even Boston. I don’t know why I said Boston. Isn’t it funny it’s right there and nobody ever goes to live there?’

  ‘Not me. Spend your life walking on concrete? Sure: move in whenever you want.’