Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Good God,” he said. “Isn’t this a little wild and hairy? Why don’t you swing down out of there and we’ll talk like human beings.”

  I shook my head. “Rules of the game.”

  “Whose rules? What game?”

  “Don’t know. Not yours this time, that’s all.”

  Kevin shook his head with exaggerated disgust.

  “All right,” he said. “Now what?”

  “Will you take delivery?”

  “What, do you want a receipt?”

  “Stand back a little, then.”

  Kevin backed up, closer to the edge of the walkway now, and I reached up and pulled loose the bow knot I’d tied in the nylon cord. The line whistled over the pulleys and then the load slammed into the walkway, perfect targeting, right in front of Kevin’s feet.

  “Bravo,” Kevin said, looking down and then smiling up at me. “Bravissimo.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I try.”

  But Kevin was no longer paying attention. He was working away at the wrapping, going in for a sample taste, bent over the bag, his full concentration on it. Without planning to I vaulted off my stanchion and landed in a crouch, saving my balance with one hand. Kevin glanced up.

  “Back to earth, eh?” he said, and went back to the package. I walked toward him slowly, not thinking, but with my hypothalamus screaming wordlessly. Do it now. There was nothing back of Kevin but the river. Then, with more speed than I would have given him credit for, he stood up, glancing behind him and to the side. I came on, a little slower. A click and a flash, and Kevin had a knife in his right hand.

  I stopped, bewildered; Kevin didn’t carry weapons, but I had a maddening certainty I’d seen that knife before. Then I knew it was not déjà vu at all but memory of that night at the Empire. The knife had been in my hand then and I had given it to Kevin. Of course, of course. A knife cuts friendship. Now both of us were free.

  Kevin, who might have been having a similar thought, was now moving in on me. I moved my feet for a fighting stance, though I still left my hands low. Kevin kept coming, stepping over the package, the knife extended before him like a fencing foil.

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “Maybe you can’t take me even with the knife.”

  “Maybe.”

  I raised my hands a little.

  “It’s enough. You like sure things, Kevin, both of us know that.”

  Kevin stopped, threw back his head and laughed. It comforts me a little now to remember him laughing then.

  “Ah, what the hell, Tracy, what the hell. It’s all been a little tense, hasn’t it.” And he spread his arms out wide. For just one second I had a mad impulse to run to him, accept the bear hug, take him somewhere and buy him a drink … Then I saw how it would happen, how when he closed his arms the knife would slide into my back. Maybe it would only be an accident, maybe he’d forget he still had it in his hand.

  “Sure,” I said, remaining where I was, unmoving, unblinking. Kevin shrugged and backed away, the knife still in front of him, stepping surely back over the package without needing to look down. He stooped and gathered the package under his left arm and backed off toward Manhattan now, still pointing the knife my way. I stood still. Kevin made about twenty or twenty-five yards and then he called to me.

  “It’s tough sometimes, you know how it is,” he said with another shrug, shifting his grip on the package. “Don’t follow me.” He must have thought the distance was safe enough because he turned then and went on.

  But I did follow him. Not very close and not very far, but once he’d passed through the bars at the end of the metal section of the walk, I went up to the junction point and waited. Though he seemed to look back over his shoulder a time or two, I doubt he saw me standing there. I watched him until he vanished into the stairwell and then I found myself counting under my breath, against my will. The time passed very slowly, slowly enough for me to think that every guess I’d made was wrong, long enough for a sort of relief to begin to settle in. Then I heard it: the opening rattle of the machine guns, first one and then the other, muffled and much softer than I’d expected, like voices answering each other in a conversation overheard from another room. It seemed not to concern me at all, that conversation; I felt no connection to it, believed fully then that it had all come about simply through choc en retour. So I felt no responsibility and certainly no fear, not even the least nervousness about continuing to stand there through the long silence that followed the end of the firing, that silence which was finally closed off by the first high lonesome wailing of the sirens.

  20

  WE’VE BEEN BACK AT the farm for a little over a month now, and so far I can say that things are going quite well. Better, perhaps, than I have any right to expect. In the beginning I was nervous and jumpy and had an irresistible urge to keep looking back over my shoulder. One of the first things I did was clean all the guns and spread them handily around the house, unloaded but with shells conveniently nearby. Lauren was sure to have noticed that but she said nothing to me about it. And nothing has come of it. Last week I collected the guns and put them all back in the rack upstairs. Grushko and Yonko must be either satisfied or else unable to find me. I believe now that they’ve been absorbed, one way or another, back into the urban miasma, them and their knapsack full of dope, and I don’t worry about them anymore.

  Everything here was much as I had left it, a little dustier in the house, a little more overgrown outdoors. A note left by my tenant detailed births and deaths among the sheep. There were a few calls on my machine but nothing of particular importance. The package from Heathrow had made it through, even though the address wasn’t totally accurate. It sat on the porch beside the front door, a little rain-splattered and with one corner torn, sagging inside its cord. The label directed it to my maternal great-grandfather, but he’s been dead for so many years I didn’t feel bad about opening it.

  Another one of the first things I did was take that half-full bottle of bourbon, still waiting for me on the bread board there, and pour it down the sink. It was a wrench to do it, but I did. Lauren has not commented on this either, but I think she’s noticed and is pleased. Oh, someday, I’m sure, I’ll have another drink, but not today.

  It’s fall now; the leaves are turning and withering from the limbs. Though there’s nothing really here to harvest I manage to stay busy. I’ve mown the front pasture and the field on the hill. I keep the yard well raked and trimmed, and lately I’ve been trying to fix some of the fences, though that’s not something I know a lot about. There’s satisfaction in this work; beyond the fact that it fills my days, there’s the pleasure that I learn to take in the ordinary. More than anything I want to be ordinary now, to discover the savor of each particular: the smell of the wood, ringing of the nails, weight of the hammer in my hand. I have come to believe that this dailiness may save me.

  We don’t go out much now. Lauren doesn’t seem to crave company, which is just as well, since I know few people around here nowadays. Most nights I cook our supper and she praises it, a small flattery which pleases me inordinately. She sleeps a lot, and seems happy enough to read or putter around the house when she’s awake; she keeps the house in better order than it’s been in for a long time. There are a lot of books here; some, she tells me, that she’s always meant to read. Her pregnancy is beginning to show a little, not so much in her belly as in the rounding and softening of her face and arms.

  It is the calmest time we’ve known together, and it seems, deceptively, too easy. It must be harder, and one day soon enough I’m sure it will be. It seems to be my luck to see things structurally, and I picture our first greedy love as a sort of core, an inner ring, a spot where something fell and started ripples. At night as I am absorbed into sleep I sometimes picture it as if I were the Original stone itself, spiraling into darkness, while above I see not waves but expanding radiant bands of light.

  Wheels within wheels within wheels. I think we are trying to find our way out into the higher
concentricity of which Kierkegaard writes, which I still read about in the evenings. A dizzyingly distant prospect at times. I believe, because I have to, that love can become full trust and faith without being any the less love.

  All the same I don’t sleep well. Some node swells up behind my eyes and bursts into a flash of light; I wake up breathless and amazed that I am staring at the dark. It gets a little tiresome. I’ll lie there, for more than an hour sometimes, and cue and review the whole mental reel, all of the things that have happened. It must be that I am looking for some place it can be cut, but there is none, not even in imagination. In the end there’s little use in such reflection, myself upon myself upon myself. Nothing can be changed or rearranged.

  Make of it what you will.

  Last night, at around the time I’d usually pick to pour a drink, I went out into the yard. The sky was clear and the stars were bright, though they looked cold and distant from me. (It’s getting chilly at night now, cool enough for fires.) I had a strong sensation that someone was watching me, so that I turned around, but I found nothing there. I still wanted to check behind myself, to look and keep on looking, but I controlled the impulse.

  It was peculiar how the feeling stayed with me, that someone or something was watching. Someone who knew what I had done and didn’t like it. Something that disapproved. I dreamed I was climbing a high mountain in a fog. Strapped to my back was a baby, which I knew was my child and Lauren’s. And yet the baby was not a real infant at all but a tiny wise old man wrapped up in swaddling clothes. More knowledgeable by far than I, he directed me where to put my feet so that we should not fall.

  When I began to emerge from the dream it was still dark. I tried to picture the wise child again but the only face that came was Kevin’s, Kevin’s head spliced to an infant body in a last absurd chameleon change.

  “Why did you kill me?” his voice said, and then I was fully awake and staring at the dark spot on the ceiling where the image seemed to have been.

  It was true.

  I killed you, there’s no quibbling about it, it wasn’t poetic justice or anything else. I killed you, old friend, old enemy, but I never could have done it without your help.

  Today I got another dog. I drove down to Hickman County where I know a breeder and paid a princely sum for a black and tan Doberman puppy, his tail bobbed but his ears untrimmed, still floppy like a hound’s. Beside me on the car seat, he gnawed my fingers all the way back to the farm, and each needle-sharp twinge tightened his spell on me.

  I’d gone down there on impulse and hadn’t warned Lauren. She was surprised, a little annoyed, but finally charmed. I swore I’d be responsible for his training. With the financial success of my recent ventures it will be a while before I need to work again. I will have time and to spare to train a puppy. So Lauren resigned herself to the dog. So much so that in the end she wanted to take him to bed with her, and I had to draw the line at that. The puppy sleeps now in a box lined with newspaper here beside the stove.

  I am quite looking forward to the uncomplicated relationship I began with this dog today. There’s a lot that I will teach him, and as much I won’t and can’t. He’ll never learn to tell lies or withhold information. Sins of commission or omission will be meaningless to him. He will never know either guilt or doubt, which gives him tremendous advantages over me.

  There remain things that Lauren and I have not said to one another and probably never will. It is a sort of unspoken pact between us which neither of us can refer to. She will not ask me any questions about Kevin, though I have no doubt she knows that I could answer some. And I will not ask her which one of us is the father of our child.

  How stable such complicity can be I can’t predict. Though for now we’re happy in each other, I can’t be certain how long that will last. Lauren may lose the peace she’s found these weeks, may find the urge to wander overcoming her again. Or it may be me who somehow breaks our circle.

  The future can’t be guaranteed.

  All the same, when in a few more minutes I shut off the lights and follow her to bed, I will believe that what we’ve started is enough. I will believe that this immediacy can become a permanence. By force of my desire and will I’ll make this time a fortress for the future. We’ll curl together against the cold and hold each other safe till morning.

  What child will be born of this union, I do not know.

  A Biography of Madison Smartt Bell

  Madison Smartt Bell is a critically acclaimed writer of more than a dozen novels and story collections, as well as numerous essays and reviews for publications such as Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Book Review. His books have been finalists for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award among other honors. Bell has also taught at distinguished creative writing programs including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Johns Hopkins University, and Goucher College. His work is notable for its sweeping historical and philosophical scope matched with a remarkable sensitivity to the individual voices of characters on the margins of society.

  Bell was born on August 1, 1957, near Nashville, Tennessee. His parents were intellectuals who mingled with poets and artists. Not long after being taught to read, Bell decided to become a professional writer, as he viewed authors as the most powerful and important people in the world. His excellent academic record earned Bell a scholarship to attend Princeton University. There he studied fiction in one of the first creative writing programs for undergraduates in the country, graduating summa cum laude and earning numerous writing awards from the school.

  After Princeton, Bell moved to New York City and took on various jobs including security guard and sound engineer. Many of his urban experiences and observations became subject matter for his first published works. At twenty-two, Bell moved to Virginia to pursue an MA at Hollins University, where he wrote his first novel and many of his early collected stories. The Washington Square Ensemble (1984) depicts New York at its grittiest and most dangerous in the late seventies, and showcases Bell’s astonishing eye for detail, ear for dialogue, and compassion for people on the margins of society. Waiting for the End of the World (1985) is a more ambitious and complex novel that also explores the teeming city.

  After moving back to New York for a short time, Bell settled in Baltimore, Maryland, to teach at Johns Hopkins and Goucher College. At Goucher, he met and married poet and teacher Elizabeth Spires. During a particularly prolific period, Bell produced a hard-boiled crime novel, Straight Cut (1986), his first collection of stories, Zero db (1987), and a novel made of interconnected perspectives of New York residents, The Year of Silence (1987).

  Bell’s subsequent books began exploring broader territories, geographically and historically. Soldier’s Joy (1989) examines race, the South, and the impact of the Vietnam War on veterans’ lives. The story collection Barking Man (1990) follows characters around the globe, and Save Me, Joe Louis (1993) brings a pair of Bell’s Manhattan reprobates to rural Tennessee. Next, Bell turned to historical epics, such as his fictionalization of Haiti’s slave rebellion and early years, All Souls’ Rising (1995), a work that earned him National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award nominations, and the two subsequent novels that completed his trilogy of Haitian history, Master of the Crossroads (2000) and The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004). In the last decade he has also produced fiction and nonfiction books including a biography of Toussaint Louverture and a walking guide to Baltimore, Charm City (2007). In 2008 Bell was awarded the prestigious Strauss Living Award, which grants distinguished authors five years of funding to focus on their writing.

  Bell continues to write and teach in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

  Bell with his mother and Wotan the Doberman in 1957.

  Bell at age three, the age his mother taught him to read. He credits this early start for his development as a writer later in life.

  Bell with the family’s first sheep, Backson. Bell himself named the sheep based on a dream he had about “Backson th
e buffalo, with trailing blue wings.”

  Bell as a young writer, age eleven.

  The Bell family on their Tennessee farm in 1970.

  Bell, pictured at age thirteen with a brood sow, was responsible for the care of the animals.

  Author photos taken in New York in the early 1980s for the publication of Bell’s first novel, The Washington Square Ensemble. Selections from this shoot were eventually used for Bell’s second novel, Waiting for the End of the World. (Photo courtesy of Peter Taub.)

  Bell on a visit to Haiti in 1999. He occasionally stayed at this particular lakou (a communal compound where several families live and share a common space) and here is learning how to plant and weed with a machete.

  Bell in 1999, teaching his daughter to shoot. Here they are practicing on mistletoe.

  Bell teaching a class at Ensworth School, his former elementary school in Nashville.

  Bell in a rowboat on a pond in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, in 2005. He and his wife, Elizabeth, had just moved to Paris a few months prior.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.