Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  —Forgive me, he says.

  He’s offended.

  —I still must care for Mother, she tells him. And you.

  —I was trying to be magnanimous on that score.

  —Spare me.

  He’s silent for a time. Then he rises slowly, and goes to the window, parting the heavy drapes there to look out.

  —She isn’t long to be with us, I suppose you know.

  —Charley, please don’t talk of this. Not now.

  —I don’t know how long I’ll be here, either.

  —Are you speaking of dying?

  He turns from the window, and folds his hands behind his back. He has his father’s looks, but none of his father’s energy, none of his charm or brightness of mind. It seems to her now that she has always understood that whatever George Kingsley possessed in the way of strength and intelligence he had bequeathed not to his son but to his daughter. She feels only concern for Charley, poor worried Charley, his mind turning in the conventional little circles: Mary is single, and there are no suitors, and there are, given her unconventional ways, not likely to be any suitors. She watches him pace to the other side of the room, thinking, brooding over this problem. Outside, a blustery wind blows; the fire in the grate flickers from a downdraft. It is the coldest night of the year. She knows he feels the dark closing in, because she feels it. This will be a terrible winter; and the spring will come late. She tries to reassure her brother, that she’s quite happy to be where she is, as she is. The frivolity of courtship, of thinking about it and wasting hours hoping for someone to offer, or pay court, it all feels exactly the same to her as it felt in Paris, when she first realized her aversion to it. It leaves her with a cold sinking at heart, which she describes to Charley as an impatience, an unwillingness to lend herself to such games.

  —Father has left us with enough so that I needn’t worry about it, and I am relieved. You must believe me, I am relieved.

  —Mary, he says, I’m so terribly panicky right now.

  She answers in a whisper.

  —Yes.

  FOURTEEN

  1

  THE BABY’S MOVING NOW. It feels like the motion of the whole world—it is so immense to me, and yet secret. Poor Tyler’s almost the last one to have felt it. Sheri did, and then Millicent. He made a joke about it. And of course the baby won’t move when he’s near. There’s been a terrible earthquake in San Francisco. We were watching the World Series, and there was a sudden shimmer and the announcer said, “We’re having an earth…” and the signal was cut off. We all sat there stunned. And on the news, later we saw the city burning. A long camera view showed an awful glow in the sky. I sat on the sofa, back hurting, half sick, unable to take my eyes away. We saw a picture of a collapsed highway overpass, and Buddy said, “My God, there’s people in that mess.” I started crying, and Tyler came over and held my hand, and the baby kicked. It felt like something climbing my rib cage, inside. I didn’t say anything because this just wasn’t the time. But I had to shift myself so it was less uncomfortable, and Tyler said, “Is it moving?” I shook my head and tried to stop crying.

  You, who spent the first thirty years of your life in seclusion, saw so much of death. People want to say that it was different for people in your time, that because life was more precarious, one adjusted rather quickly to the idea of mortality, and therefore it was in some ways less horrible. I don’t believe it. People brought more courage to the world because the world required more courage—maybe that’s true. I admire your bravery because I sense how prodigious your fear was, as mine is. And I have so much less, in terms of daily threats to existence, than you did, to be afraid of. I’ve never had to drive a leopard away from the door.

  2

  IT SEEMED TO HER that people looked at her differently, and then there were occasions when no one seemed to notice at all. When she saw other pregnant women, she expected some exchange, some glance of commiseration or recognition, but they seemed particularly to be avoiding her gaze, as if the whole thing were an embarrassment they would rather not talk about. She had to stop working at The Loft, just as the stage sets were complete and rehearsals for The Merchant of Venice were starting. She went twice to watch these first rehearsals, and she was surprised by the quality of the acting. The whole thing depressed her now, because she could have no active part in it.

  When hunting season began, the men all went north, to Tennessee, for deer. It was a fall day, with wind and a chilly mist, and when they returned with a deer strapped to the trunk of the car, they were like excited children, exhilarated and soaking wet. The deer was a large buck, “with an eight-point rack,” Nick said proudly. Buddy and Tyler hauled the carcass into the utility room, to the left of the back door. Nick had been drinking beer, and merely watched them, with yet another can of it in his hand, sipping it and looking at Lily.

  “You’re not gonna stay out here for this,” he said incredulously.

  “Stay out here for what?” Lily asked. She had been fascinated by the size and bulk of the animal, and the struggle of the two men to move it. There was a heavy, sodden look to the long belly, as if it were a bag of something gelatinous but solid, and Lily was morbidly curious; the inanimateness of the thing, its lovely shape gone slack—she couldn’t look away. The men chattered as they struggled, and there seemed something rather adolescent about it all—their loud voices, going on about the details of the afternoon, their breath on the frosty air. It was Buddy who had shot the deer.

  Nick went into the house, and the other two hung the carcass up by its hind legs, at the fetlocks. Lily saw the dark, facetless, unseeing eyes, and the tongue lolling out of the mouth. She felt weirdly detached; though when the head moved as the men hoisted the animal even higher, something turned over in her stomach, above where the baby was. Nick came out of the house with a box of plastic garbage bags and some newspapers. The three of them worked together to spread the newspapers beneath the carcass.

  Tyler looked at Lily and frowned. “Why don’t you go on inside, honey.”

  “I’m fine,” Lily told him, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “I don’t think you ought to see this in your condition,” Nick said. You could hear the beer he had drunk in his voice. “It might turn you into a vegetarian.”

  “If this is going to be a regular thing, I guess I ought to get used to it.”

  Buddy looked over at her and seemed to think a moment, as if he were doubting the wisdom of letting her stay—or reading her doubts, which she was beginning to feel. He grinned sweetly. “This ain’t pretty, darling, but it’s clear. There’s no mistaking what it is.”

  “You-all are so impressed with yourselves. It isn’t as if you’ve killed a lion.”

  “Tallyho,” Nick said. “The lady has a point.”

  “Okay,” Tyler said. “But nobody’s going to make fun or comment at all if you decide in a few seconds that you don’t want to stay out here. Isn’t that right, Nick?”

  “Not me,” Nick said.

  Buddy brought a knife out of a small leather holster on his belt, and with an air of casual practicality, as if this were no different from opening a letter, stuck the blade into the soft white belly of the deer, and carved downward, opening the cavity. He reached in and pulled out what looked like a wet sack of dark fruit, and the blood followed, flowing onto the newspapers, where the pile of innards had flopped with a surprisingly loud slapping sound. There was an immediate strong odor, something akin to that of dirt basements, that took her breath away. At first she thought this was the smell of death, but almost in the same instant she realized that it was the smell of these organs, their natural odor, and she felt the violation of the animal’s life all the more powerfully.

  She turned from them at their work and made her way into the house, where she found Millicent and Sheri sitting at the kitchen table, drinking wine. They had let the day wane without turning on any lights yet. What was going on outside was visible through the glass doors. The women could see i
t from where they were sitting. Lily took her coat off and sat with her back to it, and thought of Mary Kingsley walking through the bush, in Africa, past rows of dead from a yellow fever outbreak in 1895.

  Sheri said, “You’re white as these walls, honey.”

  “I’m okay,” Lily told her.

  They watched as the skin was pulled from the fetlocks downward, and there was the final hollowing out of the rib cage. All three men worked efficiently and they talked through it, making jokes and drinking beer. When it was done, Buddy began cutting the meat away from the bone, and making fillets. It took only a little more than an hour. Then Buddy cut the head off and worked over that for a time. He swathed what remained of it in a green plastic bag, and took it out to the car. When it was all finished, they spent another hour wrapping the meat and putting it in the freezer out in the garage. They came into the house stained with blood, and with the dirt from the places they had wandered, hunting the creature they had just made into steaks and chops. The strange exhilaration was still with them, and they drank more beer and talked about the whole trip—the one stag that Tyler had missed, the tumble downhill that Nick had taken, after his second beer, which he had secreted away in his knapsack (that was how they came to know that he had brought the beers along). Buddy was unhappy about it at first, they said, but then relented and had one himself. Nick had packed eight cans in the sack.

  “What will you do with the head?” Lily asked.

  “That’ll be stuffed and put on a wooden plaque for the wall,” said Nick. “We’ll take it out to the taxidermist’s right after we eat—or Buddy will. It’s his deer.”

  They all ate pasta for dinner, and Sheri joked about going out to the garage and getting some flesh to chew on. They began to talk about carnivorousness, and the fate of the eaten; it was odd. Sheri talked about a little boy who had climbed over a retaining wall at a zoo, and been attacked by a tiger; how the boy had called to his mother that it hurt while the tiger was eating his foot. Lily felt ill, and got up to leave the table. Tyler followed her to the head of the stairwell heading down.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, low, so the others couldn’t hear him.

  “Oh,” she told him. “I’m okay. That last thing got me a little.”

  “Sheri’s about as subtle as an ox sometimes.”

  Lily smiled at him. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Come to bed soon.”

  “I will.” He touched her arm, squeezed it, the faintest pressure, then let go.

  She started down the stairs with that feeling people sometimes have in the middle of a big change, the relieved, happy sense that whatever the change will bring is all quite blessedly beside the point, meaningless as a rainy day. She lay down on their bed and felt the baby move, and cried quietly for joy, even as, in her mind, she saw images of the knife tearing through the soft white fur of the killed deer.

  3

  SHE WAS CARRYING the baby low, and had gotten very big for being only six months gone. She had gained the weight too fast, and the gynecologist scolded her for it several times.

  Sheri and Millicent had strongly recommended this gynecologist—the sort of recommendation that carried a press of obligation; they were his patients, too, and they both made claims for his charm and his qualities: a family man, with a wife and seven children, and now two grandchildren. A great doctor, they said. Lily couldn’t do better.

  All over the walls in his waiting room were pictures of the hundreds of babies he had delivered, with names and dates and sometimes with photos of the young people they had grown to be, and with letters to him as if he had kept in touch with all of them, and perhaps he had. There was a meticulousness about him, and a kind of cerebral capaciousness. Along with the usual magazines in his waiting room there were dozens of books on wildly disparate subjects: literature, history, politics, art, horticulture, geology, viticulture, even cooking. You had the sense, looking through them, that they had been carefully selected to yield a picture of the man. Tall, handsome, blond (sculpted-looking, Sheri had said), the doctor spoke with a German accent that always made Lily feel tense. He was stylish, tidy, resourceful, thorough, obviously intelligent, articulate—and tyrannical. His name was Rudy Volker Brauner, and it was wearying to have to keep appointments with him. To Lily, he seemed only faintly more concerned with medicine than with the shine of his shoes, or the strands of his impeccably combed hair. Yet his frowning attention to the details of her pregnancy seemed all-consuming, a part of his enormous grasp of everything.

  “If I was casting a play,” she told Tyler on the way to one appointment, “he’d be the head of the gestapo. I know that’s unoriginal, but that’s how I’d cast him. Even if there wasn’t a part for someone in the gestapo.”

  They were scheduled to attend a preliminary Lamaze meeting afterward. A friend of Millicent taught the classes. Tyler drove. The day was not terribly hot, but the humidity had been climbing since first light, and the traffic was bad. It was the second week of November, and the few chilly days had given way to Indian summer. Nothing seemed to have changed; the summery weather held. They were in his demo, and they had the windows down because the air-conditioning, along with the new-car smell, made her woozy. Tyler suffered visibly, hair mussed, one arm on the sill of the window and the other draped over the top of the steering wheel. A single bead of sweat ran down the side of his face.

  “Let’s put the air on,” she said.

  “Are you uncomfortable?” he asked.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Earlier that morning, Dominic had telephoned from Knoxville, Tennessee, to say that he and Manny had stopped there, after driving all night. They would sleep for two hours and then head out again, and they would be in Oxford by evening. Dominic had said all this to Tyler, who joked with him about driving too fast and falling asleep at the wheel. “Just be careful,” he said. Then he handed the phone to Lily, who nearly wept with happiness to hear his voice.

  “How are you,” she said to him. “Tell me how you are.”

  “I’m happy,” he told her, “because I’m gonna get to see you and Tyler.”

  “We can’t wait.”

  “Neither can we.”

  A moment later, he laughed. “Have we already run out of things to say?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m so excited.”

  “What if it’s a girl?” Dominic said. “What’s the female equivalent of Dominic? You are naming this baby after me, right? Manny and I are going to live in New Orleans awhile.”

  “Oh, that’s such good news.”

  “His great-aunt—well, they’re not really related. I told you all this in my letter.”

  “Just hurry,” she said to him. “We’re all anxious to see you.”

  Now, she looked over at Tyler, so depleted-looking in the heat. Her own body, with its distended, rounded belly, appeared foreign to her. He had pulled into the parking garage, and they were slowly making their way to the top. No spaces. The tires squealed slightly with each turn. At last he found a place and pulled in—but he had pulled too close to the car on her side. She opened her door and realized in an instant that there was no way she would be able to get out. He had already left her there and was standing a few feet away, having paused to pull his shirttail up to wipe his face. She closed her door and waited, hearing him come slowly back to the driver’s window. He looked in, his face gleaming. “Oh, hell.”

  He walked around to the back of the car, and then returned and got in, pulling his door shut with a slam. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What an idiot.” He started the car, and looked back. She touched his arm where he had put it on the seat back, and he stopped and looked at her.

  “If I wasn’t so fat, I could get out of a car.”

  After a little shake of his head, he continued backing out. “I should’ve looked at it, though.”

  The only other open space was out on the roof, in the blazing
sun. The temperature here was at least fifteen degrees higher than it was down on the street or inside the garage. This was blacktop, and it soaked up the heat, sent it back at them in wavering lines that looked like the very coinage of delusion. They got out and crossed to an elevator, shielding their eyes from the brightness. Below them was the square, with its statue and its drooping trees and shops. It looked deserted. On the elevator he stared at his own reflection, a dull shape in the metal. Then he seemed to remember himself, and put his hand on her elbow. They went out and down the corridor, and she stepped close, winding her arm around his.

  When they reached the brown door with its fake wood-grain surface, he patted her shoulder, and pushed the door open for her.

  The office was crowded with women, several with small children. Two of them were extremely pregnant. No one looked at anyone else. Lily took a seat, and Tyler went to the magazine rack and bookcase and began rifling through what was there. The door to the inner offices opened, and a young nurse Lily didn’t recognize said, “Lily Harrison?”

  She stood and Tyler stepped up to enter with her.

  “Just Mrs. Harrison right now,” said the nurse. “We’ll call you.”

  Tyler backed away and the door closed on him. The nurse, a wiry, small woman with dark freckles on her face and neck, and dark skin that had the leathery look of many hours outdoors, preceded Lily along the corridor, with its photos of babies and its degrees in frames. She led her to the scale and Lily got on it. The nurse adjusted the weights, whistling softly through crooked teeth, then wrote it down on her chart. As she took Lily’s blood pressure, she said, “Still gaining more weight than we should. Are we drinking our water?”

  “Yes,” Lily said. “We are.” She handed over her urine-sample bottle.

  The nurse took it and showed her to one of the small cubicle examination rooms. In the room, Lily saw the aluminum sink, and the small swivel chair, the charts on the wall illustrating the stages of pregnancy. And here was the examination table, the sight of which always gave her an obscure feeling of dread, as though it were a device for some sort of institutionalized torture. She began to undress. “Sonogram today, right?”