100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “You go messing into anybody’s life,” Elliot said, “that’s what you’ll find.”

  “If the child stays in that house,” she said, “he’s going to die.”

  “You did your best,” he told his wife. “Forget it.”

  She pushed the bottle away. She was holding a water glass that was almost a third full of whiskey.

  “That’s what the commissioner said.”

  Elliot was thinking of how she must have looked in court to the cherry-faced judge and the bikers and their lawyers. Like the schoolteachers who had tormented their childhoods, earnest and tight-assed, humorless and self-righteous. It was not surprising that things had gone against her.

  He walked over to the window and faced his reflection again. “Your optimism always surprises me.”

  “My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn’t optimism.”

  “No?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “I forget,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s your religious perspective. Your sense of the divine plan.”

  She sighed in exasperation. “Look, I don’t think I want to fight anymore. I’m sorry I threw the sugar at you. I’m not your keeper. Pick on someone your own size.”

  “Sometimes,” Elliot said, “I try to imagine what it’s like to believe that the sky is full of care and concern.”

  “You want to take everything from me, do you?” She stood leaning against the back of her chair. “That you can’t take. It’s the only part of my life you can’t mess up.”

  He was thinking that if it had not been for her he might not have survived. There could be no forgiveness for that. “Your life? You’ve got all this piety strung out between Monadnock and Central America. And look at yourself. Look at your life.”

  “Yes,” she said, “look at it.”

  “You should have been a nun. You don’t know how to live.”

  “I know that,” she said. “That’s why I stopped doing counseling. Because I’d rather talk the law than life.” She turned to him. “You got everything I had, Chas. What’s left I absolutely require.”

  “I swear I would rather be a drunk,” Elliot said, “than force myself to believe such trivial horseshit.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to do it without a straight man,” she said, “because this time I’m not going to be here for you. Believe it or not.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Elliot said. “Not my Grace.”

  “You’re really good at this,” she told him. “You make me feel ashamed of my own name.”

  “I love your name,” he said.

  The telephone rang. They let it ring three times, and then Elliot went over and answered it.

  “Hey, who’s that?” a good-humored voice on the phone demanded.

  Elliot recited their phone number.

  “Hey, I want to talk to your woman, man. Put her on.”

  “I’ll give her a message,” Elliot said.

  “You put your woman on, man. Run and get her.”

  Elliot looked at the receiver. He shook his head. “Mr. Vopotik?”

  “Never you fuckin’ mind, man. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to the skinny bitch.”

  Elliot hung up.

  “Is it him?” she asked.

  “I guess so.”

  They waited for the phone to ring again and it shortly did.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Grace said. But Elliot already had the phone.

  “Who are you, asshole?” the voice inquired. “What’s your fuckin’ name, man?”

  “Elliot,” Elliot said.

  “Hey, don’t hang up on me, Elliot. I won’t put up with that. I told you go get that skinny bitch, man. You go do it.”

  There were sounds of festivity in the background on the other end of the line—a stereo and drunken voices.

  “Hey,” the voice declared. “Hey, don’t keep me waiting, man.”

  “What do you want to say to her?” Elliot asked.

  “That’s none of your fucking business, fool. Do what I told you.”

  “My wife is resting,” Elliot said. “I’m taking her calls.”

  He was answered by a shout of rage. He put the phone aside for a moment and finished his glass of whiskey. When he picked it up again the man on the line was screaming at him. “That bitch tried to break up my family, man! She almost got away with it. You know what kind of pain my wife went through?”

  “What kind?” Elliot asked.

  For a few seconds he heard only the noise of the party. “Hey, you’re not drunk, are you, fella?”

  “Certainly not,” Elliot insisted.

  “You tell that skinny bitch she’s gonna pay for what she did to my family, man. You tell her she can run but she can’t hide. I don’t care where you go—California, anywhere—I’ll get to you.”

  “Now that I have you on the phone,” Elliot said, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Promise you won’t get mad?”

  “Stop it!” Grace said to him. She tried to wrench the phone from his grasp, but he clutched it to his chest.

  “Do you keep a journal?” Elliot asked the man on the phone. “What’s your hat size?”

  “Maybe you think I can’t get to you,” the man said. “But I can get to you, man. I don’t care who you are, I’ll get to you. The brothers will get to you.”

  “Well, there’s no need to go to California. You know where we live.”

  “For God’s sake,” Grace said.

  “Fuckin’ right,” the man on the telephone said. “Fuckin’ right I know.”

  “Come on over,” Elliot said.

  “How’s that?” the man on the phone asked.

  “I said come on over. We’ll talk about space travel. Comets and stuff. We’ll talk astral projection. The moons of Jupiter.”

  “You’re making a mistake, fucker.”

  “Come on over,” Elliot insisted. “Bring your fat wife and your beat-up kid. Don’t be embarrassed if your head’s a little small.”

  The telephone was full of music and shouting. Elliot held it away from his ear.

  “Good work,” Grace said to him when he had replaced the receiver.

  “I hope he comes,” Elliot said. “I’ll pop him.”

  He went carefully down the cellar stairs, switched on the overhead light, and began searching among the spiderwebbed shadows and fouled fishing line for his shotgun. It took him fifteen minutes to find it and his cleaning case. While he was still downstairs, he heard the telephone ring again and his wife answer it. He came upstairs and spread his shooting gear across the kitchen table. “Was that him?”

  She nodded wearily. “He called back to play us the chain saw.”

  “I’ve heard that melody before,” Elliot said.

  He assembled his cleaning rod and swabbed out the shotgun barrel. Grace watched him, a hand to her forehead. “God,” she said. “What have I done? I’m so drunk.”

  “Most of the time,” Elliot said, sighting down the barrel, “I’m helpless in the face of human misery. Tonight I’m ready to reach out.”

  “I’m finished,” Grace said. “I’m through, Chas. I mean it.”

  Elliot rammed three red shells into the shotgun and pumped one forward into the breech with a satisfying report. “Me, I’m ready for some radical problem solving. I’m going to spray that no-neck Slovak all over the yard.”

  “He isn’t a Slovak,” Grace said. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her eyes closed. Her face was chalk white.

  “What do you mean?” Elliot demanded. “Certainly he’s a Slovak.”

  “No he’s not,” Grace said.

  “Fuck him anyway. I don’t care what he is. I’ll grease his ass.”

  He took a handful of deer shells from the box and stuffed them in his jacket pockets.

  “I’m not going to stay with you. Chas. Do you understand me?”

  Elliot walked to the window and peered out a
t his driveway. “He won’t be alone. They travel in packs.”

  “For God’s sake!” Grace cried, and in the next instant bolted for the downstairs bathroom. Elliot went out, turned off the porch light and switched on a spotlight over the barn door. Back inside, he could hear Grace in the toilet being sick. He turned off the light in the kitchen.

  He was still standing by the window when she came up behind him. It seemed strange and fateful to be standing in the dark near her, holding the shotgun. He felt ready for anything.

  “I can’t leave you alone down here drunk with a loaded shotgun,” she said. “How can I?”

  “Go upstairs,” he said.

  “If I went upstairs it would mean I didn’t care what happened. Do you understand? If I go it means I don’t care anymore. Understand?”

  “Stop asking me if I understand,” Elliot said. “I understand fine.”

  “I can’t think,” she said in a sick voice. “Maybe I don’t care. I don’t know. I’m going upstairs.”

  “Good,” Elliot said.

  When she was upstairs, Elliot took his shotgun and the whiskey into the dark living room and sat down in an armchair beside one of the lace-curtained windows. The powerful barn light illuminated the length of his driveway and the whole of the back yard. From the window at which he sat, he commanded a view of several miles in the direction of East Ilford. The two-lane blacktop road that ran there was the only one along which an enemy could pass.

  He drank and watched the snow, toying with the safety of his 12-gauge Remington. He felt neither anxious nor angry now but only impatient to be done with whatever the night would bring. Drunkenness and the silent rhythm of the falling snow combined to make him feel outside of time and syntax.

  Sitting in the dark room, he found himself confronting Blankenship’s dream. He saw the bunkers and wire of some long-lost perimeter. The rank smell of night came back to him, the dread evening and quick dusk, the mysteries of outer darkness: fear, combat, and death. Enervated by liquor, he began to cry. Elliot was sympathetic with other people’s tears but ashamed of his own. He thought of his own tears as childish and excremental. He stifled whatever it was that had started them.

  Now his whiskey tasted thin as water. Beyond the lightly frosted glass, illuminated snowflakes spun and settled sleepily on weighted pine boughs. He had found a life beyond the war after all, but in it he was still sitting in darkness, armed, enraged, waiting.

  His eyes grew heavy as the snow came down. He felt as though he could be drawn up into the storm and he began to imagine that. He imagined his life with all its artifacts and appetites easing up the spout into white oblivion, everything obviated and foreclosed. He thought maybe he could go for that.

  When he awakened, his left hand had gone numb against the trigger guard of his shotgun. The living room was full of pale, delicate light. He looked outside and saw that the storm was done with and the sky radiant and cloudless. The sun was still below the horizon.

  Slowly Elliot got to his feet. The throbbing poison in his limbs served to remind him of the state of things. He finished the glass of whiskey on the windowsill beside his easy chair. Then he went to the hall closet to get a ski jacket, shouldered his shotgun, and went outside.

  There were two cleared acres behind his house; beyond them a trail descended into a hollow of pine forest and frozen swamp. Across the hollow, white pastures stretched to the ridge line, lambent under the lightening sky. A line of skeletal elms weighted with snow marked the course of frozen Shawmut Brook.

  He found a pair of ski goggles in a jacket pocket and put them on and set out toward the tree line, gripping the shotgun, step by careful step in the knee-deep snow. Two raucous crows wheeled high overhead, their cries exploding the morning’s silence. When the sun came over the ridge, he stood where he was and took in a deep breath. The risen sun warmed his face and he closed his eyes. It was windless and very cold.

  Only after he had stood there for a while did he realize how tired he had become. The weight of the gun taxed him. It seemed infinitely wearying to contemplate another single step in the snow. He opened his eyes and closed them again. With sunup the world had gone blazing blue and white, and even with his tinted goggles its whiteness dazzled him and made his head ache. Behind his eyes, the hypnagogic patterns formed a monsoon-heavy tropical sky. He yawned. More than anything, he wanted to lie down in the soft, pure snow. If he could do that, he was certain he could go to sleep at once.

  He stood in the middle of the field and listened to the crows. Fear, anger, and sleep were the three primary conditions of life. He had learned that over there. Once he had thought fear the worst, but he had learned that the worst was anger. Nothing could fix it; neither alcohol nor medicine. It was a worm. It left him no peace. Sleep was the best.

  He opened his eyes and pushed on until he came to the brow that overlooked the swamp. Just below, gliding along among the frozen cattails and bare scrub maple, was a man on skis. Elliot stopped to watch the man approach.

  The skier’s face was concealed by a red-and-blue ski mask. He wore snow goggles, a blue jumpsuit, and a red woolen Norwegian hat. As he came, he leaned into the turns of the trail, moving silently and gracefully along. At the foot of the slope on which Elliot stood, the man looked up, saw him, and slid to a halt. The man stood staring at him for a moment and then began to herringbone up the slope. In no time at all the skier stood no more than ten feet away, removing his goggles, and inside the woolen mask Elliot recognized the clear blue eyes of his neighbor, Professor Loyall Anderson. The shotgun Elliot was carrying seemed to grow heavier. He yawned and shook his head, trying unsuccessfully to clear it. The sight of Anderson’s eyes gave him a little thrill of revulsion.

  “What are you after?” the young professor asked him, nodding toward the shotgun Elliot was cradling.

  “Whatever there is,” Elliot said.

  Anderson took a quick look at the distant pasture behind him and then turned back to Elliot. The mouth hole of the professor’s mask filled with teeth. Elliot thought that Anderson’s teeth were quite as he had imagined them earlier. “Well, Polonski’s cows are locked up,” the professor said. “So they at least are safe.”

  Elliot realized that the professor had made a joke and was smiling. “Yes,” he agreed.

  Professor Anderson and his wife had been the moving force behind an initiative to outlaw the discharge of firearms within the boundaries of East Ilford Township. The initiative had been defeated, because East Ilford was not that kind of town.

  “I think I’ll go over by the river,” Elliot said. He said it only to have something to say, to fill the silence before Anderson spoke again. He was afraid of what Anderson might say to him and of what might happen.

  “You know,” Anderson said, “that’s all bird sanctuary over there now.”

  “Sure,” Elliot agreed.

  Outfitted as he was, the professor attracted Elliot’s anger in an elemental manner. The mask made him appear a kind of doll, a kachina figure or a marionette. His eyes and mouth, all on their own, were disagreeable.

  Elliott began to wonder if Anderson could smell the whiskey on his breath. He pushed the little red bull’s-eye safety button on his gun to Off.

  “Seriously,” Anderson said, “I’m always having to run hunters out of there. Some people don’t understand the word ‘posted.’”

  “I would never do that,” Elliot said, “I would be afraid.”

  Anderson nodded his head. He seemed to be laughing. “Would you?” he asked Elliot merrily.

  In imagination, Elliot rested the tip of his shotgun barrel against Anderson’s smiling teeth. If he fired a load of deer shot into them, he thought, they might make a noise like broken china. “Yes,” Elliot said. “I wouldn’t know who they were or where they’d been. They might resent my being alive. Telling them where they could shoot and where not.”

  Anderson’s teeth remained in place. “That’s pretty strange,” he said. “I mean, to talk about resent
ing someone for being alive.”

  “It’s all relative,” Elliot said. “They might think, ‘Why should he be alive when some brother of mine isn’t?’ Or they might think, ‘Why should he be alive when I’m not?’”

  “Oh,” Anderson said.

  “You see?” Elliot said. Facing Anderson, he took a long step backward. “All relative.”

  “Yes,” Anderson said.

  “That’s so often true, isn’t it?” Elliot asked. “Values are often relative.”

  “Yes,” Anderson said. Elliot was relieved to see that he had stopped smiling.

  “I’ve hardly slept, you know,” Elliot told Professor Anderson. “Hardly at all. All night. I’ve been drinking.”

  “Oh,” Anderson said. He licked his lips in the mouth of the mask. “You should get some rest.”

  “You’re right,” Elliot said.

  “Well,” Anderson said, “got to go now.”

  Elliot thought he sounded a little thick in the tongue. A little slow in the jaw.

  “It’s a nice day,” Elliot said, wanting now to be agreeable.

  “It’s great,” Anderson said, shuffling on his skis.

  “Have a nice day,” Elliot said.

  “Yes,” Anderson said, and pushed off.

  Elliot rested the shotgun across his shoulders and watched Anderson withdraw through the frozen swamp. It was in fact a nice day, but Elliot took no comfort in the weather. He missed night and the falling snow.

  As he walked back toward his house, he realized that now there would be whole days to get through, running before the antic energy of whiskey. The whiskey would drive him until he dropped. He shook his head in regret. “It’s a revolution,” he said aloud. He imagined himself talking to his wife.

  Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution—a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty moral blackmail and cheap remorse. He had said dreadful things to his wife. He had bullied Anderson with his violence and unhappiness, and Anderson would not forgive him. There would be damn little justice and no mercy.

  Nearly to the house, he was startled by the desperate feathered drumming of a pheasant’s rush. He froze, and out of instinct brought the gun up in the direction of the sound. When he saw the bird break from its cover and take wing, he tracked it, took a breath, and fired once. The bird was a little flash of opulent color against the bright-blue sky. Elliot felt himself flying for a moment. The shot missed.