Back in the World

by Tobias Wolff

  Russell nodded.

  “Dave’s a good head,” Groves went on. “I admit he’s not that great with the general public, but he’s okay. Lots of smarts, too. I mean, I’m smart, but Dave is smart. Dave was centerfold material for a while there, but nowadays things just keep messing up on him. It’s like the well went dry. Happens to plenty of people. It could happen to you. I mean you might be coming up with sweet stuff today but there’s no law says it’s got to be there tomorrow, and just maybe it won’t be. You ought to think about that.”

  “I do,” Russell said.

  “Now his wife’s gone and left him. No concern of yours, but Lord, what a business.”

  “I tried to give the car back to him,” Russell said. “He didn’t give me a chance. He wouldn’t even let me talk.”

  Groves laughed.

  “It wasn’t funny,” Russell said. “He really scared me, Groves. That’s why I can’t give him the car back now. I’d always wonder if I did it just because I was afraid of him. I wouldn’t ever feel right about it.”

  Groves said, “Russell, I never saw no eighty-year-old man looked like you did before.”

  “What I’m going to do is give the Speedster to you,” Russell said. “Then you can give it to Dave. That’s something I can live with. But I’m going to keep the station wagon,” Russell added. “I won that fair and square.”

  “Well, now,” Groves said. He seemed about to go on, but finally he just shook his head and looked down at the counter.

  Russell had the papers in his pocket. He spread them out. “How do I write your name?” he asked.

  “Just like it sounds. Groves. Tom Groves.” As Russell took the cap from his pen, Groves said, in a quiet voice, “Make that Thomas B. Groves, Junior.”

  Russell never saw Groves again, but from time to time he felt a coldness on his back and looked around to find Dave watching him from another line in the market where he shopped, or through the window of the bank where he kept his money. Dave never said anything, never accused, but Russell began to think that he was being followed and that a showdown was soon to come. He tried to prepare himself for it. There were times at night and even at work when Russell made angry faces, and shook his head, and glared at things without seeing them as he rehearsed again and again the proofs of his own decency. This went on for almost a year.

  Then, in April, he saw Dave on El Camino. Russell had parked in the customer lot of a liquor store and was waiting for his date to come out with some wine for a party they were going to. He was sitting there, watching the cars go by, when he caught sight of Dave standing on the curb across the road. Russell felt sure that Dave had not seen him, because Dave was giving all his attention to the traffic. He swung his head back and forth as the cars rushed past him, looking, Russell supposed, for a chance to cross. Sometimes the line of cars heading north would thin out, and sometimes the line heading south, but never both together. There was no light nearby and no pedestrian crossing, because on El Camino there were no pedestrians. You never saw anyone on foot.

  Dave went on waiting for a break to come. Twice he stepped into the road as if to test his luck, but both times he changed his mind and turned back. Russell watched for Dave to bare his teeth and scream and shake his fists. Nothing like this happened. He stood there and waited for his chance, leaning into the road a little as he looked each way. His face was calm. He accepted this situation, saw nothing outrageous in it—nothing to make him go home and come back with a gun and shoot every driver on the road.

  Finally Dave spotted an opening and made a run for it. He moved heavily but for all he was worth, knees flying high, arms flailing the air, and Russell’s heart went out to the man. At that moment he would have given Dave everything he had—his money, his car, his job, everything—but what was the point? It didn’t make sense trying to help Dave, because Dave couldn’t be helped. Whatever Russell gave him he would lose. It just wasn’t in the cards for him to have anything.

  When Dave reached the curb he stopped and caught his breath. Then he started south in the direction of Mountain View. Russell watched him walk past the parking lot, watched him until he disappeared from sight. The low sun burned in the windows of a motel down the street. Above the motel rooftop, against the blue sky, hung a faint white haze like a haze of chalk dust on the blue suit Russell’s father wore to school. Blurred shapes of cars flashed back and forth. Russell felt a little lost, and thought, I’m on El Camino. He was on El Camino. Just a short drive down the road some people were having a party, and he was on his way there.

  Sister

  There was a park at the bottom of the hill. Now that the leaves were down Marty could see the exercise stations and part of a tennis court from her kitchen window, through a web of black branches. She took another doughnut from the box on the table and ate it slowly, watching the people at the exercise stations: two men and a woman. The woman was doing leg-raises. The men were just standing there. Though the day was cold one of the men had taken his shirt off, and even from this distance Marty was struck by the deep brown color of his skin. You hardly ever saw great tans like that on people around here, not even in summer. He had come from somewhere else.

  She went into the bedroom and put on a running suit and an old pair of Adidas. The seams were giving out but her other pair was new and the whiteness made her feet look big. She took off her glasses and put her contacts in. Tears welled up under the lenses. For a few moments she lost her image in the mirror; then it returned and she saw the excitement in her face, the eagerness. Whoa, she thought. She sat there for a while, feeling the steady thump of the stereo in the apartment overhead. Then she rolled a joint and stuck it in the pocket of her sweatshirt.

  A dog barked at Marty as she walked down the hallway. It barked at her every time she passed its door and it always took her by surprise, leaving her fluttery and breathless. The dog was a big shepherd whose owners were gone all the time. She heard it barking all the way down the corridor until she reached the door and stepped outside.

  It was late afternoon and cold, so cold she could see her breath. As always on Sunday the street was dead quiet, except for the skittering of leaves on the sidewalk as the breeze swept through them and ruffled the cold-looking pools of water from last night’s rain. With the trees bare, the sky seemed vast. Two dark clouds drifted overhead, and in the far distance an angle of geese flew across the sky. Honkers, her brother called them. Right now he and his buddies would be banging away at them from one of the marshes outside town. By nightfall they’d all be drunk. She smiled, thinking of that.

  Marty did a couple of knee-bends and headed toward the park, forcing herself to walk against the urge she felt to run. She considered taking a couple of hits off the joint in her pocket but decided against it. She didn’t want to lose her edge.

  The woman she’d seen at the exercise station was gone, but the two men were still there. Marty held back for a while, did a few more knee-bends and watched some boys playing football on the field behind the tennis courts. They couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven but they moved like men, hunching up their shoulders and shaking their wrists as they jogged back to the huddle, grunting when they came off the line as if their bodies were big and weighty. You could tell that in their heads they had a whole stadium of people watching them. It tickled her. Marty watched them run several plays, then she walked over to the exercise stations.

  When she got there she had a shock. Marty recognized one of the men, and she was so afraid he would recognize her that she almost turned around and went home. He was a regular at the Kon-Tiki. A few weeks earlier he had taken notice of Marty and they’d matched daiquiris for a couple of hours and things were going good. Then she went out to the car to get this book she’d been describing to him, a book about Edgar Cayce and reincarnation, and when she got back he was sitting on the other side of the room with someone else. He hadn’t left anything for the drinks, so she got stuck with the bar bill. And her lighter was missing. The man’s n
ame was Jack. When she saw him leaning against the chin-up station she didn’t know what to do. She wanted to vanish right into the ground.

  But he seemed not to remember her. In fact, he was the one who said hello. “Hey there,” he said.

  She nodded. Then she looked at the tan one and said, “Hi.”

  He didn’t answer. His eyes moved over her for a moment, and he looked away. He’d put on a warm-up jacket with a hood but left the zipper open nearly to his waist. His chest was covered with little curls of glistening golden hair. The other one, Jack, had on faded army fatigues with dark patches where the insignia had been removed. He needed a shave. He was holding a quart bottle of beer.

  The two men had been talking when she walked up but now they were silent. Marty felt them watching her as she did her stretches. They had been talking about sex, she was sure of that. What they’d been saying was still in the air somehow, with the ripe smell of wet leaves and the rain-soaked earth. She took a deep breath.

  Then she said, “You didn’t get that tan around here.” She kept rocking back and forth on her knuckles but looked up at him.

  “You bet your buns I didn’t,” he said. “The only thing you get around here is arthritis.” He pulled the zipper of his jacket up and down. “Hawaii. Waikiki Beach.”

  “Waikiki,” Jack said. “Bikini-watching capital of the world.”

  “Brother, you speak true,” the tan one said. “They’ve got this special breed over there that they raise just to walk back and forth in front of you. They ought to parachute about fifty of them into Russia. Those old farts in the Kremlin would go out of their skulls. We could just walk in and take the place over.”

  “They could drop a couple here while they’re at it,” Jack said.

  “Aloha,” Marty said. She rolled over on her back and raised her feet a few inches off the ground. She held them there for a moment, then lowered them. “That’s all the Hawaiian I know,” she said. “Aloha and Maui Zowie. They grow some killer weed over there.”

  “For sure,” the tan one said. “It’s God’s country, sister, and that’s a fact.”

  Jack walked up closer. “I know you from somewhere,” he said.

  Marty smiled at him. “Maybe,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  “Bill,” he said.

  Right, Marty wanted to say. You bet, Jack.

  Jack looked down at her. “What’s yours?”

  She raised her feet again. “Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth,” he repeated, slowly, so that it struck Marty how beautiful the name was.

  “I guess not,” he said.

  She lowered her feet and sat up. “A lot of people look like me.”

  He nodded.

  Just then something flew past Marty’s head. She jerked to one side and threw her hands up in front of her face. She gave a shudder and looked around. “Jesus,” she said.

  “Sorry!” someone shouted.

  “Goddam Frisbees,” Jack said.

  “It’s all right,” Marty told him, and waved at the man who’d thrown it. She turned and waved again at another man some distance behind her, who was wiping the Frisbee on his shirt. He waved back.

  “Frisbee freaks,” Jack said. “I’m sick of them.” He lifted the bottle and drank from it, then held it out to Marty. “Go on,” he told her.

  She took a swig. “There’s more than beer in here,” she said.

  Jack shrugged.

  “What’s in here?” she asked.

  “Secret formula,” he answered. “Go for two. You’re behind.”

  Marty looked at the bottle, then drank again and passed it to the other man. Even his fingers were brown. He wore a thick wedding band and a gold chain-link bracelet. She held on to the bottle for an extra moment, long enough for him to notice and give her a look; then she let go. The hood of his jacket fell back as he tilted his head to drink. Marty saw that he was nearly bald. He had parted his hair just above one ear and swept it sideways to cover the skin on top, which was even darker than the rest of him.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  Jack answered for him. “His name is Jack,” he said.

  The tan one laughed. “Brother,” he said, “you are too much.”

  “You aren’t from around here,” she said. “I would have seen you.”

  Jack said, “Don’t hog the fuel, Jack,” and made a drinking motion with his hand.

  The tan one nodded. He took a long pull and wiped his mouth and passed the bottle to Jack.

  Marty stood and brushed off her warm-ups. “Hawaii,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii. Just kick back for about three weeks. Check out the volcanoes. Do some mai tais.”

  “Get leis,” Jack said.

  All three of them laughed.

  “Well,” she said. She touched her toes a couple of times.

  Jack kept laughing.

  “Hawaii’s amazing,” said the other man. “Anything goes.”

  “Stop talking about Hawaii,” Jack told him. “It makes me cold.”

  “Me too,” Marty said. She rubbed her hands together. “I’m always cold. When I come back, I just hope I come back as a native of some place warm. California, maybe.”

  “Right,” Jack said. “Bitchin’ Cal,” but there was something in his voice that made her look over at him. He was studying her. She could tell that he was trying to place her again, trying to recall where he’d met her. She wished she hadn’t made that remark about coming back. That was what had set him off. She wasn’t even sure she actually believed in it—believed that she was going to return as a different entity later on, someone new and different. She had serious doubts, sometimes.

  “So,” she said, “do you guys know each other?”

  Jack stared at her a moment longer, then nodded. “All our lives,” he said.

  The tan one shook his head and laughed. “Too much,” he said.

  “We’re inseparable,” Jack said. “Aren’t we, Jack?”

  The tan one laughed again.

  “Is that right?” Marty asked him. “Are you inseparable?”

  He pulled the zipper of his jacket up and down, hiding and then revealing the golden hairs on his chest, though not in a conscious way. His cheeks puffed out and his brow thickened just above his eyes, so that his face seemed heavier. He looked at her and said, “I guess we are. For the time being.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “That’s all right.” That was all right, she thought. She could call Jill, Jill was always up for a party, and if Jill was out or had company then she’d think of something else. It would work out.

  “Okay,” she said, but before she could say anything else someone yelled, “Heads up!” and they all looked around. The Frisbee was coming straight at them. Marty felt her body tighten. “Got it,” she said, and balanced herself for the catch. Suddenly the breeze gusted and the Frisbee seemed to stop cold, a quivering red line, and then it jerked upwards and flew over their heads and past them. She ran after it, one arm raised, gathering herself to jump, but it stayed just out of reach and finally she gave up.

  The Frisbee flew a short distance farther, then fell to the sidewalk and skidded halfway across the street. She stood there, wanting to laugh but completely out of breath. Too much weed, she thought. She put her hands on her knees and rocked back and forth. It was quiet. Then, from up the hill, she heard a low rumble that grew steadily louder, and a few seconds later a big white car came around the corner. Its tires squealed and then went silent as the car slid through a long sheet of water lying in the road. It was moving sideways in her direction. She watched it come. The car cleared the water and the tires began to squeal again but it kept sliding, and Marty saw the faces inside getting bigger and bigger. There was a girl staring at her from the front window. The girl’s mouth was open, her arms braced against the dashboard. Then the tires caught and the car shot forward, so close that Marty could have reached out and touched the girl’s cheek as they went past.

  The car f
ish-tailed down the street. It ran a stop sign at the corner and turned left back up the hill, coughing out bursts of black exhaust.

  Marty turned toward the park and saw the two men looking at her. They were looking at her as if they had seen her naked, and that was how she felt—naked. She had nearly been killed and now she was an embarrassment, like someone in need.

  Marty crossed the street and started up the hill toward her apartment building. She felt as if she were floating, as if there were nothing to her. She passed a grey cat curled up on the hood of a car. There was smoke on the breeze and the smell of decay. It seemed to Marty that she drifted with the smoke through the yellow light, over the dull grass and the brown clumps of leaves. In the park behind her a boy called football signals, his voice perfectly distinct in the thin cold air.

  She climbed the steps to the building but did not go inside. She knew that the dog would bark at her, and she didn’t want to face that right now.

  She sat on the steps. From somewhere nearby a bird cried out in a hoarse, ratcheting voice like chain being jerked through a pulley. Marty did some breathing exercises to get steady, to quiet the fluttering sensation in her shoulders and knees, but she could not calm herself. A few minutes ago she had nearly been killed and now there was nobody to talk to about it, to see how afraid she was and tell her not to worry, that it was over now. That everything was going to be all right. And Marty understood that there was never going to be anyone to tell her these things. She had no idea why this should be so; it was just something she knew.

  The sun was going down. Marty couldn’t see it from where she sat, but the windows of the house across the street had turned crimson, and the breeze was colder. A broken kite flapped in a tree. Marty fingered the joint in her pocket but left it there; she felt empty and clean, and did not want to lose the feeling.

  She watched the sky darken. Her brother and his friends would be coming off the marsh about now, flushed with cold and drink, their dogs running ahead through the reeds and the tall grass. When they reached the car they’d compare birds and pass a bottle around, and after the bottle was empty they’d head for the nearest bar. Do boilermakers. Stuff themselves with pickled eggs and jerky. Throw dice from a leather cup. And outside in the car the dogs would be waiting, ears pricked for the least sound, sometimes whimpering to themselves but mostly silent, tense, and still, watching the bright door the men had closed behind them.