by Andre Dubus
He rolled his napkin and pushed it into the ring, and when Mark started to, he told him to leave it, the guest napkin gets washed.
Near the bank of the lake he found a small flat rock and skimmed it hitting once on the sunlit surface and three times in the shadows before it sank. He paced up and down, looking for another rock, and Mark lay on the grass in the sun, and said: ’they’re pretty.’
He sat beside Mark and looked at the flowers of purple loosestrife and then at a crow rising from the trees.
‘Sometimes I wish I lived with my father.’
‘Can you?’
‘They never asked me to.’
He did not like the sound of his voice; in its softening he heard tears coming, and for a long time he had not cried about anything. He sat up and plucked a blade of grass and chewed it. Julie did not like the monthly visits to his father because she missed her boy friend, and Stephanie did not like them because she could not smoke there and she missed her boy friend, and neither one of them had forgiven his father. He would like to spend the school year with his father and Jenny and the summer here, and he knew now that for a long time he had made himself believe his father had never asked or even hinted because the apartment was too small.
‘Do they fuck?’ Mark said.
Who?
He pointed a thumb over his shoulder, and Walter turned and looked up the hill; sunlight splashed bronze on their hair.
‘How would / know?’ he said, and looked at his bare toes in the grass.’
‘Lots of ways, if you wanted to.’
‘I never thought about it.’
‘You’re weird.’
‘Sometimes I think about it. When they go out.’
He was awake when they came home, starting with Stephanie at eighteen minutes past midnight on his luminous digital clock and ending with his mother at three twenty-nine, and if he slept at all he did not know it, for even if he did, he still saw in his mind what he saw awake. Too much, Mark had said as Walter’s hand rose from Stephanie’s drawer with the third plastic case like a clam shell, and he snapped it open and it was empty too. Everybody’s fucking but you. I’ll have to jerk off tonight. But not him: he lay on the warm sheet in the cooling night air and listened for them, and then to them: the downstairs footsteps when the sound of the car was gone—a sound that chilled him with yearning hatred, as though he were bound to the bed by someone he could not hit—then steps climbing the stairs and into their bedrooms that he felt part of now (and was both ashamed and vengeful because Mark was part of them too) and, in there, slower and lighter steps so that for moments he did not hear them and then did again, at another part of the room. He tried to think but could not: tried to focus on each of them, force the other two from his mind, and reasonably say to himself: Dad has Jenny and she ought to have someone too or Julie’s eighteen and people when they’re eighteen but he could get no further and did not even try with Stephanie, for as soon as he focused on one, the other two were back in his room, among its shadows and furniture, and they all merged: naked, their legs embracing the cruelly plunging bodies of the two boys and one man he knew, and he saw their three open-mouthed wild-haired faces, and heard sounds he had not known he knew: fast, heavy breath and soft cries and grunts and, between their legs, sloshing thuds; heard these as he waited and as they climbed the stairs and turned on faucets and flushed toilets—Did it drip out of them and drop spreading and slowly sinking like thick sour milk, droplets left on that hair he had never seen, and did they—wipe it then with paper, the motion of arm and hand, the expressions on their faces as common as if nothing were there and in the water below their—again: naked—flesh but piss? Or did it stay in the diaphragm that Mark said was shaped like half an orange peel with the fruit gone? He tightened his legs and arms, shook his head on the pillow, shut his eyes to a darker dark; between his legs he felt nothing. When did they take it out? And how did their faces look when they took it out? He saw them frowning, nauseated, wickedly pleased. Once he had a large boil on his leg and the doctor froze it and lanced it, and for weeks he had to fight his memory when he ate. He could not imagine them now in clothes, nor in bathing suits, nor simply eating on the terrace or at the kitchen or dining room table; he tried to remember them in winter, fur-covered, leaving the house and walking with short, careful steps over the icy sidewalk, moving into the vapor of their breath as it wafted about their heads. But he could not, as though all he had known of them clothed was a mask that tonight he had pulled from their faces. When at last his mother’s steps ended, he imagined them all settled between sheets, their legs closed now, at rest, and he thought: They must stink.
He woke to a bird’s shriek and sunlight, and went barefooted down the hall, looking at each door closed on the darkened blind-drawn cool of the room and bed and soft breathing of sleep, and out of the house and onto his bicycle. He rode toward the woods. He was hungry and thirsty and had not brushed his teeth, so the taste of night was still in his mouth, and he opened it to the breeze. Then he was there: the fragrance of pines sharper among the other smells of green life and earth and the old dappled leaves moist and soft under his feet as he walked his bicycle without trail or pattern between and under tall trees and around brush, the sweat from his ride drying now, cooling him in the shade as he moved farther into the woods that had waked while he slept: above him squirrels rustled leaves as they moved higher and birds fluttered from perches, and twice he heard the sudden flight of a rabbit. In a glade lit by the sun he stood up his bicycle and lay on his back with hands clasped behind his head and closed his eyes. The sun warmed his face, and beneath his eyelids he felt the heat and saw specks of red and orange in the darkness, and he tried to see them as he had known them, but he could not dress them, could not cover their nakedness, and could not keep them naked alone: behind his eyes they slowly revolved, coupling with the two boys and the man, and he tried to see nothing at all but the speckled dark, and then tried to see the food his stomach wanted, the juice for his dry throat, and then tried to concentrate his rage only on the two boys and the man whose faces had the glazed look of a dog’s above the bitch’s back, but he could not do that either, and the sounds from the six writhing bodies were louder than the woods.
He stood and moved out of the sunlight, into the shade of a maple, and unzipped and pissed, then stroked, shutting his eyes against the softness his hand encircled, seeing an infected and oozing orange peel, the softness even receding as though trying to withdraw from his abrasive fingers. He opened his eyes. Then he lay on his belly in the sunlight and pressed his cheek against the earth and held its grass with both hands.
We had to leave before you came home. We went shopping in Boston and will be back before dinner. Mark was looking for you and said he’d be back after lunch. Love, Mom, and a smiling line for a mouth drawn inside a circle with two eyes and a nose. He left the note on the table in front of him while he ate cereal and a peanut butter sandwich, then he took the small garbage basket from under the sink and went upstairs. He went to Stephanie’s room first. It was still darkened, and he opened the blinds and looked at the tossed-back top sheet and bedspread and stuffed brown bear and blue rabbit near a pillow; actors and singers watched him from the walls; he opened the drawer and took out the case and opened it with a click that tensed his arms. It’s more like a hollowed-out mushroom; then he realized he was holding his breath, and he let it out, and breathing fast and shallow he turned the case over and watched the diaphragm drop softly among banana peels and milk carton and tuna fish can. As he put the case under silk in the drawer, he knew why he had gone to her room first: the youngest, only a few years removed from the time when pranks on each other were as much part of their days as laughter.
The basket was wicker and lined with a plastic bag. He brought it to Julie’s room and opened her blinds and was crossing the floor when his name rose from outside, into the room; he stool still, gripping the basket, while Mark called again, then rang the back doorbell and called and then
was quiet, but Walter could feel him down there, and he stood looking at the soft yellow wall, listening to the slow breeze and a car coming and passing by, then crept to the window and looked down at the empty terrace. Quickly he took the case from the drawer and emptied it in the basket.
In his mother’s room he did not open the blinds; he walked softly as though she were sleeping there; he glanced at the sheets and pillows, and quietly slid open the drawer where last night Mark had found it, the first one they had found, while Walter was opening leather boxes of jewelry at her dresser and telling Mark to start in another room so they could work faster. He put the basket on the floor and held the open case in both hands. He lifted it closer to his eyes. He looked at it until his breathing slowed; and when he stopped hearing his breathing, he was suddenly tired, and as he lowered one hand and turned the other and watched the brief white descent, he wanted to sleep.
Their voices woke him, and when they started up the stairs, he turned quietly onto his side, his back to the door, and heard the girls with soft-crackling shopping bags going into their rooms and his mother coming to his; she stopped at the doorway and he breathed as though asleep until she turned and went to her room. He opened his eyes to the lake and trees and the low sun. He waited until he heard showers in all three bathrooms. Then he ran on tiptoes down the hall and stairs, and at the terrace he sprinted: past the pool and down toward the widening lake, and fell forward and struck with knees and palms, and rolled and stood and ran again, weight on his heels now, leaping when his balance shifted forward: running and leaping to the bottom of the hill where he could not stop: with short flat-footed steps he went across the narrow mud bank and into the water deep as his knees and then was sitting in it. He stood and looked up at the house, and higher and beyond it at the sky. Then he eased backward into the water and floated. Behind him the geese stirred and he listened to their wings as they rose and settled again. He backstroked toward the middle, then floated. Now the trees were on his left and he looked at their green crowns and the sky and waited for his mother’s voice calling from the terrace.
The Captain
For Gunnery Sergeant Jim Beer
HIS SON WORE a moustache. Over and between tan faces and the backs of heads with hair cut high and short, and green-uniformed shoulders and chests and backs, Harry saw him standing with two other second lieutenants at the bar. His black moustache was thick. Only one woman was at happy hour, a blond captain: she had a watchful, attractive face that was pretty when she laughed. Harry stepped forward one pace, then another, and stood with his back to the door, breathing the fragrance of liquor and cigarette smoke, as pleasing to him as the smell of cooking is to some, and feeling through his body the loud talk and laughter and shouts, as though he watched a parade whose music coursed through him. In his own uniform wth captain’s bars and ribbons, he wanted to stand here and have one Scotch. He did not feel that he stood to the side of the gathered men, but at their head, looking down the axis of their gaiety. A tall man, he did look down at most of them, and he wanted to watch his son from this distance. But there were no waitresses, so he went to the bar and spoke over Phil’s shoulder: ‘There’s one nice thing about a moustache.’
The eyes in the turning face were dark and happy. Thèn Harry was hugging him, and Phil’s arms were around his waist, tighter and tighter, and Phil leaned back and lifted him from the floor, the metal buttons of their blouses clicking together, then scraping as Phil lowered him, and introduced him to the two lieutenants as my father, Captain LeDuc, retired. Harry shook hands, not hearing their names, focusing intsead on their faces and tightly tailored blouses and the silver shooting badges on their breasts: both wore the crossed rifles and crossed pistols of experts, and above those, like Phil, they wore only the one red and gold ribbon that showed they were in the service during a war they had not seen. He saw them scanning his four rows of ribbons, pretended he had not, and turned to Phil, letting his friends look comfortably at the colored rectangles of two wars and a wound and one act that had earned him a Silver Star. Beside Phil’s crossed rifles was the Maltese cross of a sharpshooter. The bartender emptied the ashtray, and Phil ordered another round and a Scotch and water, and Harry said: ‘What happened with the .45?’
‘I choked up. What bothers me is knowing I’m better and having to wear this till next year. Then I’ll—’ He smiled and his eyes lowered and rose. ‘Jesus.’
‘Good,’ Harry said. ‘If we couldn’t forget, we’d never enjoy anything after the age of ten. Or five.’
Phil turned to his friends standing at his left and said he had just told his father he didn’t like having to wear the sharpshooter badge until he qualified again next year, and the three of them laughed and joked about rice paddies and Monday and jungle and Charlie, and Harry saw the bartender coming with their drinks and paid him, thinking of how often memory lies, of how so often the lies are good ones. When he was twenty-four years old, he had learned on Guadalcanal that the body could endure nearly anything, and after that he had acted as though he believed it could endure everything: could work without sleep or rest or enough food and water, heedless of cold and heat and illness; could survive penetration and dismemberment, so that death in combat was a matter of bad luck, a man with five bullets in him surviving another pierced by only one. He was so awed by the body’s strength and vulnerability that he did nothing at all about prolonging its life. This refusal was rooted neither in confidence nor an acceptance of fate. His belief in mystery and chance was too strong to allow faith in exercising and in controlling what he ate and drank and when he smoked. Phil had forgotten who he was and where he was going; was that how the mind survived? The body pushed beyond pain, and the mind sidestepped. How else could he stand here, comfortable, proud of his son, when his own mind held images this room of cheerful peace could not contain? He raised a knee and drew his pack of cigarettes from his sock, and Phil gave him a light with a Zippo bearing a Marine emblem, and said: ‘What’s the one nice thing about a moustache?’
‘If I have to tell you, you’re fucking up on more than the .45.’
‘They don’t give out badges for that.’
‘One girl?’
‘No.’
‘Good. It’s too rough on them.’
‘They’ll all miss me, Pop.’
‘I’d rather be in the middle of it. I didn’t have a girl, when I was in the Pacific. But, Jesus, I was never warm in the Reservoir, not for one minute, there was always something cold—’
‘Frozen Chosin,’ one of the lieutenants said, and drank and eyed Harry’s ribbons over the glass.
‘—Right: I was frozen. Everybody: we’d come on dead Chinese frozen. And tell you the truth, I didn’t think we’d get out, more fucking Chinese than snow, but I’d rather have been freezing my ass off and trying to keep it from getting between a Chinaman’s bullet and thin air than back home like your mother. How do you keep waking up every day and doing what there is to do when you know your man is getting shot at? Ha.’ He looked from Phil to the two lieutenants watching him, respectfully embarrassed, then back at Phil, whose dark saddened eyes had never looked at him this way before, almost as a father gazing at a son, and in a rush of age he saw himself as father of a man grown enough to give him pity. ‘I guess I’m fucking well about to find out.’
‘Fucking-A,’ Phil said, and clapped his shoulder and turned to his drink.
At three in the morning, a half-hour before the alarm, his heart woke him, its anticipatory beat freeing him as normally caffeine did from that depth of sleep whose paradox he could not forgive: needing each night that respite so badly that finally nothing could prevent his having it, then each morning having to rise from it with coffee and tobacco so that he could resume with hope those volitive hours that would end with his grateful return to the oblivion of dreams. He coughed and swallowed, and coughed again and swallowed that too. Phil was in a sleeping bag on an air mattress in the middle of the small room. Last night after dinner at the offic
ers’ club, where they had talked of hunting and today’s terrain, they had spread out on Phil’s desk a map he got from the sportsmen’s club when he drew their hunting area from a campaign hat three nights earlier, and Harry looked, nodded, and listened while Phil, using a pencil as a pointer, told him about the squares of contoured earth on the map that Harry could not only read more quickly, and more accurately, but also felt he knew anyway because, having spent most of his peacetime career at Camp Pendleton, he felt all its reaches were his ground. But he remained amused, and nearly agreed when Phil showed him two long ridges flanking a valley, and said this was the place to get a deer and spend the whole Saturday without seeing one of the other eight hunters who had drawn the same boundaries.
‘It’ll take us too long to walk in,’ Harry said.
‘I got the CO’s jeep. I told him you were coming to hunt.’
At three-fifteen by the luminous dial of his Marine-issued wrist-watch that he felt he had not stolen but retired with him, he quietly left the bed and stood looking down at Phil. He lay on his back, a pillow under his head, all but his throat and face hidden and shapeless in the bulk of the sleeping bag. His face was paled by sleep and the dark, eyeless save for brows and curves, and his delicate breathing whispered into the faint hum, the constant tone of night’s quiet. Harry had not watched him sleeping since he was a boy, and now he was pierced as with a remembrance of fatherhood, but of something else too, as old as the earth’s dust: in the darkened bedrooms of Phil and the two daughters he had felt this tender dread; and also looking at the face of a woman asleep, even some he did not love when he woke in the night: his children and the women devoid of anger and passion and humor and pain, so that he yearned during their fragile rest to protect them from and for whatever shaped their faces in daylight.
