The Times Are Never So Bad

by Andre Dubus

  ‘Hon,’ he says behind me.

  ‘It’s three times.

  ‘Here. Let me do something for that eye.

  I hear him going to the ice chest, the ice moving in there to his big hands. I lay the bacon on the paper towel and open the door to pour out some of the grease; I look at the steps before I go out. The grease sizzles and pops on the wet grass, and there’s light at the tops of the hills.

  ‘Here,’ he says, and I shut the door. I’m holding the skillet with a pot holder, and I see he’s wearing his knife, and I think of all the weapons in a house: knives, cooking forks, ice picks, hammers, skillets, cleavers, wine bottles, and I wonder if I’ll be one of those women. I think of this without fear, like I’m reading in the paper about somebody else dead in her kitchen. He touches my eye with ice wrapped in a dish towel.

  ‘I have to do the eggs.’

  ’I break them into the skillet and he stands behind me, holding the ice on my eye. His arm is over mine, and I bump it as I work the spatula.

  ‘Not now,’ I say.

  I lower my face from the ice; for awhile he stands behind me, and I watch the eggs and listen to the grease and his breathing and the birds, then he goes to the chest and I hear the towel and ice drop in.

  ‘After, okay?’he says. ‘Maybe the swelling will go down. Jesus, Les. I wish I wasn’t going.’

  The coffee’s dripped.’

  He pours two cups, takes his to the table, and sits with a cigarette. I know his mouth and throat are dry, and probably he has a headache. I turn the eggs and count to four, then put them on a plate with bacon. I haven’t had a hangover since I was sixteen. He likes carbohydrates when he’s hung over; I walk past him, putting the plate on the table, seeing his leg and arm and shoulder, but not his face, and get a can of pork and beans from the cupboard. From there I look at the back of his head. He has a bald spot the size of a quarter. Then I go to the stove and heat the beans on a high flame, watching them, drinking coffee and smoking.

  ‘We’ll get something,’ he says between bites. ‘They’re out there.’

  Once, before I met him, he was in the water with a swordfish. He had harpooned it and they were bringing it alongside, it was thrashing around in the water, and he tripped on some line and fell in with it.

  ‘We’ll get the lights back on,’ he says. ‘Go out on the town, buy you something nice. A sweater, a blouse, okay? But I wish I wasn’t going today.’

  ‘I wish you didn’t hit me last night.’ The juice in the beans is bubbling. ‘And the two before that.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing, hon. I’ll never get that drunk again. It’s not even me anymore. I get drunk like that, and somebody crazy takes over.’

  I go to his plate and scoop all the beans on his egg yellow. The coffee makes me pee, and I leave the flashlight and walk through the living room that smells of beer and ashtrays and is grey now, so I can see a beer can on the arm of a chair. I sit in the bathroom where it is darkest, and the seat is cold. I hear a car coming up the road, shifting down and turning into the driveway, then the horn. I wash my hands without looking in the mirror; in the gas light of the kitchen, and the first light from the sky, he’s standing with his bag and harpoon.

  ‘Oh, hon,’ he says, and holds me tight. I put my arms around him, but just touching his back. ‘Say it’s okay.’

  I nod, my forehead touching his chest, coming up, touching, coming up.

  ‘That’s my girl.’

  He kisses me and puts his tongue in, then he’s out the door, and I stand on the top step and watch him to the car. He waves and grins and gets in. I hold my hand up at the car as they back into the road, then are gone downhill past the house. The sun is showing red over the hills, and there’s purple at their tops, and only a little green. They are always dry, but at night everything is wet.

  I go through the living room and think about cleaning it, and open the front door and look out through the screen. The house has a shadow now, on the grass and dew. There are other houses up here, but I can’t see any of them. The road goes winding up into the hills where the men hunted yesterday. I think of dressing and filling the canteen and walking, maybe all morning, I could make a sandwich and bring it in my jacket, and an orange. I open the screen and look up the road as far as I can see, before it curves around a hill in the sun. Blue is spreading across the sky. Soon the road will warm, and I think of rattlesnakes sleeping on it, and I shut the screen and look around the lawn where nothing moves.

  The New Boy

  A SATURDAY NIGHT IN summer: his mother and two sisters had dates, and he did not want to greet the boys and the man, so he sat by the swimming pool, with his back to the house, and gazed at the lake and the woods beyond it. The house was on the crest of a ridge and, past the pool, the lawn was a long slope down to the lake. The sun was low over the trees, and their shadows spread toward him on the water. When he heard the last car, most of the lake was dark and the sun was nearly gone beyond the trees. The cars would return in the same order: Stephanie by twelve, Julie by two now that she was eighteen, then his mother; he would wake as each one turned into the driveway, and sleep after the front door closed and light footsteps had gone from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom. Stephanie was sixteen and stayed longest at the front door and in the kitchen; his mother was quickest at the door and did not stop at the kitchen unless a man came in for a drink; then Walter slept and woke again when the car started in the driveway, and he listened to his mother climbing the stairs and going to her room. Now she called him, and he looked over his shoulder at her standing behind the screen door.

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Have a good time.’

  When the car was gone, he rose and walked around the pool, then downhill to the lake, darker now than the sky. The sun showed through the woods as burning leaves. Then it was gone, leaving him in the black and grey solitude that touched him, and gave him the peaceful joy of sorrow that was his alone, that singled him out from all others. A sound intruded: above the frogs’ croaking and the flutter and soft plash of stirring geese, so familiar that they were, to him, audible silence, he heard now the rhythmic splashes and lapping of a swimmer. He looked to his right, near the shore, where purple loose-strife stood, deflowered by night, like charcoal strokes three feet tall. Beyond their tops he saw a head and arms and the small white roil of water at the feet. The swimmer angled toward him. Above and behind him, he felt the presence of his house: that place where, nearly always, he could go when he did not want something to happen. He stared at the head and arms coming to him. They rose: slender chest and waist of a boy walking through the dark water, then light bathing suit and legs, and the boy stepped onto the bank and shook his head, sprinkling Walter’s face, then he pushed his hair back from his forehead. He was neither taller nor broader than Walter, who glanced at the boy’s biceps and did not see in them, either, the source of his fear.

  ‘It’s against the law to swim in there,’ he said. ’that’s a reservoir.’

  ‘I pissed in it too. Let’s swim in your pool.’

  ‘How do you know I have one?’

  ‘You live here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everybody on this road’s got one. I can see all the backyards from the sun deck.’

  ‘Don’t you have one?’

  ‘It’s empty.’ He started walking up the slope. ‘Which house?’

  ‘Straight ahead.’

  Walter followed him up to the lighted house and stood at the shallow end while the boy went to the deep end and dived in and swam back, then stood.

  ‘I have to go put on my suit.’

  ‘Turn on the underwater lights.’

  He turned them on with the switch near the door and went upstairs; his room looked over the pool, and in the dark he stood at the window and undressed, watching the boy splashing silver as he moved fast through the water that was greener now in the light from the bottom of the pool. Naked, he looked beyond at the slope and lake and, on its far side
, the trees like a tufted black wall. He put on his damp trunks and went down the carpeted hall and stairs and out through the kitchen, then ran across flagstones to the side of the pool, glimpsing the boy to his left, in the deep end, and dived, opening his eyes to bubbles and the pale bottom coming up at him. He touched it with his fingers. Under the night sky the water felt heavy, deeper. He arched his back and started to rise; the boy was up there, breaststroking, then bending into a dive, coming down at Walter, under his lifted arms: a shoulder struck his chest, an arm went around it, then the boy was behind him, the arm moved and was around his neck, tightening and pulling, and he went backward toward the bottom, and with both hands jerked at the wrist and forearm, cool and slick under his prying fingers. His jaws were clamped tight on the pressure rising from his chest. He released some, and bubbles rose toward the dark air. He rolled toward the bottom, touched it for balance with a hand, swung his feet down to it, and thrust upward with straightening legs; he had exhaled again; he released the boy’s arm and stroked upward and kicked and kept his mouth closed against the throbbing emptiness in his chest, then breathed water and rose to the air choking, inhaling, coughing. The boy’s arm had left his throat. He did not look behind him. Slowly he swam away, head out of the water, coughing; he climbed out of the pool and, bent over, coughed and spat on the flagstones. He heard the feet behind him.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said, then straightened and turned and looked at the boy’s eyes. He had seen them before, on school playgrounds: amused, playful, and with a shimmer of affection, they had looked at him as knowingly as his family and his closest friends did. Boys with those eyes never fought in fury; they rarely fought at all. They threw your books in the mud, pushed you against walls, pulled your hair, punched your arm or stomach, shamed and goaded you, while watching boys and girls urged you to fight. Two years ago, when he was twelve, he had leaped into those voices, onto the bully, and they rolled grappling in the dust, then he was on his back, shoulders pinned by knees, fists striking his face before someone pulled the boy away. For the rest of the school year he was free; and for the rest of his boyhood, for he knew that the months of peace were worth the fear and pain of the first quick fight, so he was ready for that, and so was left alone. This boy’s eyes were brown; Walter swung his right fist at them and struck the nose. The boy raised a hand to it, and looked at blood on the fingers. He wiped them on his trunks; blood had reached his lip now.

  ‘I didn’t know you were scared,’ the boy said.

  ‘Scared my ass’

  ‘I mean underwater.’

  ‘I couldn’t breathe.’

  The boy folded his arms.

  ‘I could.’

  ‘Let’s go inside and fix your nose.’

  ‘Let’s go inside and ear.’

  The boy turned and dived. Swimming underwater, he pinched and rubbed his nose, and blood wafted from his fingers, became the green-tinted pale blue of the pool. He swam to the other side; Walter walked around the pool and they went into the kitchen. The boy stood at the bar. Looking into the refrigerator, Walter said: ‘Peaches, grapes, liverwurst, cheese—four kinds of cheese—’ He turned and looked at the boy; his eyes had not changed.

  In the still heat of Sunday morning he slept long and woke, clammy, to the voices of his sisters and mother rising from the terrace. Every day in summer his sisters slept late, and his mother did on weekends, and he loved those mornings, going downstairs, quiet and alone, to eat cereal and read the baseball news, feeling in the kitchen silence their sleeping behind the three closed doors above him. They woke loudly, talking in the hall and from one bathroom door to another, and through bedroom doors as they altered their hair and faces; their voices came down the stairs and into the kitchen, then they entered, red-lipped and tan and scented; talking, they turned on the radio and made coffee and lit cigarettes. It seemed that always at least one of them was smoking, at least one was talking, and all three of them were now, on the terrace beneath his window; he had not waked when they came home in the night, so his own night of sleep seemed long; and, having no place to go, he still felt that he was late. He looked down at them sitting at the glass table; their hair, chestnut in three seasons, was lighter; they wore two-piece bathing suits, and his mother and Julie drank Bloody Marys; Stephanie had a glass of wine. His mother let her drink wine at dinner and at Sunday brunch, and only Walter knew that when she drank at brunch she got drunk, for they stayed at the table longer than at any dinner except Thanksgiving and Christmas, and neither Julie nor his mother was sober enough to notice her rose cheeks and shining eyes. He put on his trunks and made his bed and moved past their rooms, glancing at their beds that would not be made until old Nora from Ireland came to work Monday afternoon, down the stairs into the undulant sound of their voices. He stepped into the sunlight and Stephanie said: ‘Well finally.’

  They smiled at him; they wished him a good morning and he returned it; Julie said why couldn’t she meet someone as good-looking as her brother; his mother puckered her lips for a kiss and he gave her one. Their hair and bathing suits were dry. He stood above them in the warmth of the sun and their love, and his for them; their eyes flushed his cheeks, and he left: went to the deep end and dived in and swam fast laps of the pool until he was winded, then returned to them. Someone had poured him a glass of orange juice. His mother blew smoke and said: ’spinach crepes, kid. Can you handle it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Stephanie looked down at herself and said: ‘I shouldn’t handle anything.’

  ‘You’re not fat,’ he said.

  ‘I need to lose seven pounds.’

  ‘Bull’

  ‘She does,’ his mother said. ’But not today.’

  ‘Do it gradually,’ Julie said. ‘Give yourself three weeks.’

  ‘That’s August. I’d like to get into my bathing suit before August.’

  He looked through the glass table at her black pants like a wide belt around her hips.

  ‘You’re in it,’ he said.

  ‘And look what shows,’ and she pinched flesh above the pants.

  ‘You have to be really skinny to wear those things,’ he said, then grinned, looking through glass at his mother’s and Julie’s flat skin above the maroon and blue swaths, and Julie said: ‘Okay, everybody stare at Walter’s pelvis.’

  He stood and, profiled to them, he drew in his stomach muscles, expanded his chest, flexed his left arm, and looked down at them over the rising and falling curve of his bicep as he rotated his wrist.

  ‘Our macho man,’ Julie said, and his father was there: not a memory of the broad, hairy chest, and hair curling over the gold watchband as he read the Sunday paper before swimming his laps, but his father in Philadelphia, in that apartment of leaves: plants growing downward from suspended pots and upward from pots on tables and floor, his father like a man reading in a jungle clearing; he sat and drank juice and his mother said: ‘Were you up late last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He picked up a green cigarette pack, let it fall, pushed it toward Stephanie. He looked beyond Julie at Canadian geese on the lake; his mother and the girls were talking again, and he leaned back in the canvas deck chair and looked up at the blue sky, then closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun, and breathed deeply into the chill of his lie until it was gone, and his mother went to the kitchen, and he opened his eyes and watched the girls talking. They rarely said anything he wanted to know, but he liked hearing their voices and watching their faces and hands: they spoke of clothes, and he looked with tender amusement at their passionate eyes, their lips closing on cigarettes with sensuous pouts he knew they had practiced; hair fell onto their cheeks, and their hands rose to it and lightly swept it back, as if stroking a spider web. From the house behind him, his mother came with a broad tray: a bottle of white wine in an ice bucket, a bowl of fruit, four plates with crepes, a glass of milk, and ringed napkins. He believed Julie—but ma
ybe Stephanie—had asked one Sunday: What did you do with Dad’s napkin ring? But since he could not remember the answer, he was not sure anyone had ever asked; perhaps he had dreamed it, or had imagined someone asking, and had waited for that; he slipped linen from silver, and his mother asked him to pour the wine. For over a year of Sundays and dinners he had poured the wine, but always he waited for his mother to ask him: he disliked doing what his father had done, felt artificial and very young and disloyal too, as if he were helping to close the space his father had left behind; and he disliked her never saying that she wanted him to pour because his father was gone. While his sisters nibbled and moaned and sipped, he ate fast, head down, waiting for his mother to strike back, knowing she was watching yet would not tell him the truth: that she wanted him to eat with slow appreciation of her work. She would tell him that eating fast was bad for—Then he heard the squeak-skid of brakes and tires and turned to see him at the edge of the terrace, straddling his bicycle, bare-chested, wearing cut-off jeans and sneakers without socks. Walter nodded to him, ate the last of the crepe, and stood, looking at his mother as he swallowed and wiped his mouth.

  ‘I’m going bike riding.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Mark Evans.’ Walking away, he looked back over his shoulder and said: ’they moved in yesterday.’

  In the woods near the road he and Mark lay face down in the shadow of trees and looked through branches and brown needles of a larger fallen branch of pine; Mark had dragged it from deeper in the woods, where their bicycles were chained to a tree. Moist dead leaves were cool against Walter’s flesh. Out in the sunlight the white handkerchief hung: folded over a length of fishing line tied to trees on either side of the narrow road, it was suspended three feet above the blacktop, motionless in the still air.