But today there were no buses. Vaguely he recalled, this was a Sunday. How he disliked Sundays, and Saturdays. He would not let his spirits ebb. He had been feeling good, optimistic. He would not let the damned woman ruin that feeling. There were conspicuously fewer vehicles on the highway into Ketchum, far fewer trucks. Cars bearing churchgoers, you had to surmise. In some of these cars there were child-passengers to observe him, smile and wave at him, but Papa was no longer in the mood. Papa was limping, muttering to himself. Papa was stroking the bulging leech-liver at the small of his back. Papa had drained the flask, not a drop of Four Roses remained. Papa was feeling very tired. Shards of broken glass, shrapnel lodged too deep inside his body to be surgically removed were working their way to the surface of his skin, why his skin so badly itched. His broken health was a joke to him, with a straight face the neurologist tells you inflammation of the brain yet “shrinkage” of the cerebral cortex. You could not believe any of it, the bastards told you things to scare you, to reduce you to their level.
God damn he could not bear it, he could not return to that life.
He was in the roadway, suddenly. Stepped into the path of an oncoming police cruiser. Papa’s weak eyes could yet pick out these gleaming white vehicles with green lettering camas county sheriff dept., like vultures cruising the stretch of Route 75 in the vicinity of Papa’s property. The cruiser skidded, braking to a stop to avoid hitting Papa. Quickly two young deputies climbed out. They recognized him: Papa saw. He was trying to explain to them what had happened at the house that morning. He’d become excited, he was stammering. He’d had a “gun accident.” He had “hurt” his wife. He’d been holding a shotgun, he said, and his wife had tried to take it from him and it had “discharged” in the struggle and the shot had struck her in the chest and “cut her in two.” Cautiously the deputies approached Papa. Traffic on Route 75 slowed, drivers were making wide berths around the deputies’ cruiser partly blocking the southbound lane. Papa saw, neither of the deputies had unholstered his weapon. Yet they were approaching him at an angle, alert and prepared. Asking if he was armed, and calling him sir. Asking if he would object to them searching him, and calling him sir. Papa was partly mollified by the young deputies’ respect for him. He was agitated but would not resist. One of the deputies searched him, briskly patted him down, discovered in his hip pocket the empty silver flask but did not appropriate it. Next Papa knew, he was being helped into the rear of the cruiser. He’d dropped his damned cane, one of the deputies would bring it. In the rear of the cruiser behind a protective metal grill Papa sat dazed and unsure of his surroundings. The pulsing in his ears was loud, distracting. The pulsing of his heart that beat hard and tremulously like a fist inside his rib cage. It was a short drive to the turnoff at Papa’s graveled driveway and with a small stab of gratification Papa thought They know where I live, they have been following me.
The driveway was a quarter-mile long. The pine woods on either side were thick. Papa had himself posted numerous signs warning NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT. As soon as the cruiser pulled up in the driveway below the house, the woman appeared outside on the first-floor deck. The woman was wearing a housecoat, her graying-blond hair blew in the wind. She was not a young woman, the deputies would see that at once. Her skin was very pale. Her face was doughy. Her waist was thick. She would be their mothers’ age. In short clipped sentences the woman spoke to the deputies. One of the deputies was helping Papa out of the back of the cruiser, as you might help an old man. Gripping his arm firmly, and calling him sir. Papa was grateful, the young men were respectful of him. That is really all you wish, to be treated with respect. He felt a tug of sympathy for the young men in their twenties, as he’d once been. There was an unspoken brotherhood of such men, Papa had been expelled from this brotherhood and keenly felt the loss. He had never comprehended the loss, all that had been taken from him. The woman had come down the steps from the deck, to take hold of his arm but he resisted her. Tears of alarm and exasperation shone in the woman’s eyes. Her face was lined, yet you could see the faded-girl beauty inside the other. Her lips had lost their fullness though, as if she’d been sucking at them. In a bright voice the woman thanked the deputies for bringing her husband home. Her husband was not well, she told them. Her husband had been hospitalized recently, he was recuperating. He would be fine now. She would take care of him now. The deputies were asking the woman about guns and the woman quickly assured them, all his guns are locked up. In disgust Papa turned away. The woman and the deputies continued to speak of Papa as if he were not there, he felt the insult, he would walk into the house unassisted. He did not need the damned cane. Not the steps, he would not risk the steps to the deck, he would enter the house by the ground floor. In her self-important way the woman continued to speak with the deputies. The woman would laugh sadly and explain another time that her husband was a very great man but a troubled man and he had medical problems that were being treated, the gist of it was that the woman would take care of him, she was grateful for the deputies’ kindness in bringing her husband home but they could leave now.
Ma’am, are you sure, the deputies asked.
Yes! The woman was sure.
Papa slammed the door behind him, he’d heard enough. A few minutes of peace he hoped for, before the woman followed him inside.
Notes
“Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House” has been suggested by the single-page manuscript titled “The Light-House,” which was found among the papers of Edgar Allan Poe after his death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore.
“EDickinsonRepliLuxe” draws generally upon the poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson and visually upon photographs by Jerome Leibling in The Dickinsons of Amherst (2001).
“Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906” is a work of fiction drawing, in part, on passages from The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan; Mark Twain’s Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens–Angelfish Correspondence 1905–1910, edited by John Cooley; and Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by His Thirteen-Year-Old Daughter Suzy. (At his death in April 1910, at the age of seventy-five, Samuel Clemens was survived by his daughter Clara, who eventually married and had a daughter, Clemens’ sole descendant, who committed suicide in 1964.)
“The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 1914–1916” is a work of fiction drawing, in part, upon passages from The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers; and Henry James: A Life, by Leon Edel.
“Papa at Ketchum, 1961” is a work of fiction suggested by passages in Hemingway by Kenneth S. Lynn and Hemingway’s “A Natural History of the Dead,” which is briefly quoted.
Acknowledgments
Titled “The Fabled Light-House at Viña de Mar,” “The Light-House” was published, in a slightly different version, in a special edition of McSweeney’s edited by Michael Chabon, 2004.
“EDICKINSONREPLILUXE” was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, fall 2006.
“Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906” appeared in McSweeney’s, 2006.
“The Master at St. Bartholomew’s” appeared in Conjunctions, spring 2007.
“Papa at Ketchum, 1961” appeared in Salmagundi, summer 2007.
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and since 1978 has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2003 she received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2007 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
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ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
STORY COLLECTIONS
By the North Gate (1963)
Upon Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (1966)
The Wheel of Love (1970)
Marriages and Infidelities (1972)
The Goddess and Other Women (1974)
The Poisoned Kiss (1975)
Crossing the Border (1976)
Night-Side (1977)
A Sentimental Education (1980)
Last Days (1984)
Raven’s Wing (1986)
The Assignation (1988)
Heat and Other Stories (1991)
Where Is Here? (1992)
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Selected Early Stories (1993)
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994)
Will You Always Love Me? (1996)
The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998)
Faithless: Tales of Transgression (2001)
High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966–2006 (2006)
Credits
Jacket Design by Allison Saltzman
Jacket Art © Gordon Parks, Blue Dawn, 1995
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WILD NIGHTS!. Copyright © 2008 by The Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition February 2008 ISBN 9780061757532
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