Maybe I'll Call Anna

by William Browning Spencer

  Anna could get a job working at one of the local shops. I would paint. In the evenings we would walk along the beach, and everything would be okay.

  “What would you say if I told you I was getting married?” Anna wrote. “I know you would be happy for me. It’s too early to tell you anything about it, and I shouldn’t even be writing this, but I had to tell someone, and you are my best friend, as I hope you know.”

  How out of touch could she be? I wondered. I read her wildly irritating, hurtful, oblivious letter. She prattled on about how happy she was, what a miracle had occurred in her life, and how surprised and shocked some people would be when the marriage was announced.

  I lay in my bed, listening to the din of stockade life, voices shouting, the dismal, chill sound of metal bars sliding, the hollow prison echoes, the blare of a distant television. I was amazed at how I hurt, as though I had been physically beaten.

  I was not surprised, of course. Anna was acting in character, and I knew that.

  A week after Anna’s good news, the army decided they were done with me; the paperwork was complete, and I was released. It was the twenty-second day of June.

  Two privates in a jeep drove me to the edge of Columbus and dropped me by the side of the road. “Don’t say we gotta hand deliver this motherfucker, now does it? Don’t say nothing about no bus station. This here is Columbus.” It was a bright, windy day, and I didn’t mind standing by the side of the road in my PX jeans and oversized shirt. The whine of the trucks racing down the highway struck me as the sound of freedom itself, filled me with joy. I wasn’t thinking of the troubled future; I was enjoying my freedom. The day soured, however. My first encounter with the civilian world was a knobby-faced man with yellow teeth who waved me into his big Buick and immediately asked me if I knew of any hot spots in Columbus and did I have a girlfriend and did I let her suck my cock, and as far as he was concerned, any kind of sex was good sex and … I asked him to let me out and discovered that I was only three blocks from the bus station.

  I got a ticket in Newburg and bought a bottle of wine and ate a cold turkey sandwich which sank like suicide in my stomach. On the bus I drank the wine and watched scruffy shacks race by. Gusts of wind shook the bus—which seemed more insubstantial than the buses I remembered—and I dozed off and woke in darkness and studied my face in the black mirror of the window. They had cut most of my hair off right before I left, and I had never become reconciled to this startled, naked-faced child with over-large ears and an unseemly youthfulness that resided in his too-full mouth. I looked too fragile to live, lost in my ill-fitting exile’s shirt.

  I was going back to Newburg to see Anna. My father had written, asking me to come home, but I wasn’t up to his solicitude. No telling what he might do in my best interests. I wasn’t strong enough for his protection, or the sullen righteousness of my big brother Johnny who would make it clear that my failures were the echo of bad genes—our mother’s much lamented delicacy.

  I had to see Anna, but I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t think about Anna without immediately walking into anxious country, peril on peril. I spent the last hours of the bus trip mentally avoiding dark alleys.

  It was four in the morning when I arrived in Newburg, and I was dirty and semi-drunk, exhausted, a stale, lurching wreck who reeked of cigarettes and wine. I drank a cup of coffee in an all-night diner and then got a cab to a motel where I staggered into bed and passed out … the hero home.

  I woke around noon, showered and shaved, and went out and forced myself to eat a breakfast of ham and eggs. I was going to need my strength for the confrontation with Anna.

  I took a bus across town and walked the half-dozen suburban blocks from Hanover Street to the Villa, which looked as it always looked, ravaged but friendly, good-humoredly hanging in as the windows buckled and the concrete steps split open. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming. No one knew I had been set free. Anna’s shiny Mustang was still parked at the curb. I might have only been gone a day. I had a hangover, and the sky was dirty, growling, working up a storm. I felt awkward, sick on freewill. I wanted to turn and walk away, but I had this great faith in the inevitability of the moment, so I went up to the door, almost knocked, didn’t. I pushed open the door, always unlocked, and entered.

  Diane, in the best theatrical manner, stopped dead still on the stairway, opened her mouth and actually put a hand to her heart.

  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it earlier, but now, vividly, I realized the possibilities of my unannounced presence. Sure, I had expected some kind of drama, some argument with Anna, who would fail to play her part, fail to recognize the spirit of reunion. We would fight, certainly, about her new infatuation, this mystery charisma man. But I hadn’t—characteristically—thought of Anna as other than alone, waiting to play out the drama. Now I realized that Anna might be upstairs with a man. Might? She almost certainly was. Diane’s expression said as much.

  Diane ran down the stairs and threw her arms around me. Anna was sleeping with someone. He was upstairs right now. I could run from the house. Diane was shaking in my arms, sobbing.

  “How awful for you,” she was saying. “God, how awful.”

  Yes. That bitch.

  Diane took me into the living room and sat me down on the sofa.

  “Is Anna here?” I asked.

  Diane, wet-faced, hair glued to her temples, stared at me. She shook her head, a physical rearranging of assumptions. “No,” she said, very slowly. “Anna isn’t here. You don’t know what’s happened, do you?”

  She looked at me, and I saw something coming to the surface of those solemn eyes, and I watched it coming, as a swimmer in the ocean might look down and behold a dark shadow growing rapidly larger, more ominous, and I knew that Diane was going to say something that would alter my life and I couldn’t stop her and then she said it.

  “Anna’s dead,” she said.

  Part 2

  Richard Parrish

  1

  Richard Parrish loved fine things, beautiful things. His mother, Grace, was beautiful, with blonde hair and a smoky, elegant voice. His father, Richard Senior, was bearded and powerful, a big man who fancied dark suits, a man too imposing and methodical to be considered simply fat. He towered over young Richard and spoke to the boy in the booming voice of an oracle.

  At eight, young Richard was already well aware that he was a privileged child. His parents never relented in telling him how fortunate he was.

  “I like beautiful things around me, honey,” Grace would tell him. “That’s why I brought you down from heaven. You are mommy’s little angel.”

  They lived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in a big white house with a maid and a cook.

  There were rooms in the house that Richard could not go in. Those rooms were too delicate and beautiful to withstand the presence of a small boy. But Richard would risk parental displeasure and enter those rooms to gaze at the rich, autumnal carpets, the luster of polished woods, the sparkling, cut-glass figures behind cabinet doors.

  Sometimes, on the weekends, they would get in the big dark car and drive out into the countryside. They would pack a picnic lunch and sit primly on the blanket and study the imperial sky. Richard Senior would speak in a deep, pontifical voice. He was a man of many opinions: about the war, about poverty, about God. Richard was too young to follow his father’s words, but the sense he got from them was that ugly people had brought their ugliness on themselves by their own laziness and dishonesty.

  Sometimes, on these trips, they would encounter ugliness: dirty farm shacks, roadside families in rags. Years later Richard remembered the girl with something wrong with her face, as though her mouth had been slashed with a knife, and the boy with the crooked arm. He remembered, mostly, the look on his mother’s face, a look of pain.

  “I can’t abide ugliness,” she had said in the car. “I don’t have the constitution for it.”

  Richard and his parents had been driving back from one of their o
utings when they had stopped at a roadside stand to buy apples. The boy had come right up to Richard and said, “That’s some car your folks got. You must be right rich.” Richard hadn’t said anything, of course, and meanwhile his mother was being escorted quickly back to the car by Richard Senior, having met the girl with the twisted face.

  “Buy some apples from the poor creatures,” Grace instructed. Richard Senior got back out of the car and bought a bushel. A mile down the road, Grace had him put the apples out. “I know it’s foolish,” she said. “But I don’t want them in the car.”

  Young Richard looked out the window and thought about the boy. He wondered if the ugliness had come on the boy suddenly, if the arm had twisted up into a useless claw as the result of some particularly foul deed, or if it had happened slowly, the accumulation of years of laziness and wrongdoing. What struck Richard as most astonishing was the boy’s attitude. He didn’t seem the least ashamed of his infirmity. What kind of parents must a boy like that have, to not feel any shame at all?

  All the way home, Richard was grateful that he had the parents he had and that he lived in a beautiful house.

  This gratitude was still in him when he killed Edgar, almost six months later. Edgar was a sleek and haughty Persian cat, so black that he seemed to draw light into him. He had large yellow eyes and a regal bearing. Grace loved Edgar, would carry him around the house with her or sit on the sofa petting him.

  Then Edgar got hit by a car and had to be taken to the vet. He returned to the Parrish household missing a portion of one leg and with a large bald spot on his hindquarters, a spot that refused to grow new hair. The car had smacked the dignity out of Edgar, and he hopped around, mewing hoarsely, following Grace around the house.

  Richard could see that look in his mother’s eyes. It was the same haunted and unhappy look that he had seen that day at the roadside stand.

  Edgar was lying in the sun on the porch, sleeping. The bright pink knob of his truncated leg jutted out oddly. His fur—no longer groomed by Grace—was a muddy tangle.

  Richard swung the axe with all his might, and with one blow he severed the cat’s head. Its body spasmed and a vast quantity of blood gushed forth. Richard had to hose off the porch after he had removed the body and buried it in a nearby vacant lot.

  His parents were gone for the afternoon, and he had cleaned up before they returned. He felt good. He had done the right thing.

  Grace confirmed that days later, when, at the dinner table, she confessed that she was glad Edgar had run away. The accident, she said, had ruined him.

  Richard found he loved the secret of it. He wrote the secret down on a piece of ruled paper. “I killed Edgar.” And he folded the piece of paper up and carried it with him in his shirt pocket where it exuded a sort of warmth, the heat of secrets.

  One morning when Richard was thirteen, he blinked his sleepy eyes at the bathroom mirror and raised his hand and touched a great, red knob of swollen flesh over his right eyebrow. It was the grandaddy of pimples, a ghastly ballooning of his forehead, and it sickened him, made him want to faint.

  Then, as he thought about it, fear invaded him. He couldn’t go downstairs where Grace was waiting at the breakfast table, waiting to take him in her arms and say, “How is Mommy’s morning glory?” That look would come into her eyes.

  He squeezed the pimple but it didn’t burst. Instead, it seemed to swell, to gain new ground on his pale forehead as he worried it. He heard his father’s voice downstairs. He began to feel desperate.

  He hurried out of the bathroom and found his penknife in a drawer and went back to the mirror. He ran hot water on the knife blade to kill whatever germs might lurk there (Richard Senior had some grim tales to tell about germs), and then, ignoring the cold, clenched fist of his stomach, he cut the swelling with his knife. It hurt. Blood oozed out, and yellow pus. A kind of anger overwhelmed him, and he worked the knife deeper, feeling an odd dislocation of self. His skin jumped under the burrowing knife.

  The pain was fierce, but the pain angered him too. He wasn’t going to back off because of the pain.

  He was going to slash the ugliness away; destroy the stupid bubble in his flesh. The eyebrow now seemed to conspire in the ugliness, and he gave his attention to that area as well.

  He didn’t even realize he was screaming until his father was standing at the door. Grace stood right behind Richard Senior, and the both of them had that look in their eyes.

  “Richard!” Grace screamed. “My God!”

  Richard Parrish had the words to explain, but they wouldn’t come out. He saw his reflection in the mirror, his forehead a scrawled mass of blood and tattered flesh. He swooned, his fingers sliding down the blood-splattered sink.

  They never did ask him to explain, and that was good, because the words were gone. His face healed okay. In six months there was just the smallest nick in his eyebrow. He was still beautiful, still welcomed in Grace’s arms.

  But Richard knew that the ugliness had simply retreated. It was waiting to boil up. In the morning, he would hurry to look in the mirror, and he would rejoice to find his face unblemished. But it was there, waiting, and he knew it, and the knowledge made him feel helpless and angry.

  2

  Richard’s father was a man of strong opinions. “The boy has been over-mothered,” he told Grace. “He’ll become odd, perhaps a sexual deviant, if you go on coddling him so.”

  “Nonsense,” Grace said. “He’ll grow up just like you, breaking hearts and maidenheads with his good looks.”

  While Richard Senior had done no such thing, he was flattered, and so, for the moment, silenced. But the notion had taken hold of him: some firm, manly guidance was required for his son. Not content with lectures, Parrish Senior felt compelled to instruct his son by example.

  “Self-control is everything,” Parrish Senior said. This particular conversation was held at the dinner table while Grace maintained a rapt silence, playing the part of a second pupil, but brighter and more attentive than her son. Parrish Senior was wearing a tie and a white shirt, and smiling, leaning back in his chair. “You can’t let others know what you think, what you feel. People are on the lookout for weakness; that’s a heritage we have from the jungle. Some have called me cynical, but I’m not. I’m just aware of the way things are.”

  “Yes Father,” Richard said.

  “We’re going for a walk,” his father had said, and he had lit a cigar and pushed the screen door open. Father and son walked out into a fading summer twilight. “You think your old man doesn’t know what he is talking about, Richard. You think I’m just an old fool, I suppose.” Richard thought no such thing. He thought that his father was dangerous and brilliant. He didn’t say this, of course. He didn’t say anything, for he knew that these lectures were, essentially, monologues and he could be in real trouble if he said anything. “The old man knows what he is talking about,” Parrish Senior said. He wasn’t old, not much over forty, and Richard’s mother was thirty-eight then (this was when Richard was fourteen) but Parrish Senior liked to think of himself as wise and weary.

  They walked down a street of maples and the smell of cut grass was in the air and his father put an arm on Richard’s shoulder. “What say we walk on over to the warehouse?”

  The night was fine, and people were sitting on their porches or walking along the sidewalks. Parrish Senior nodded to those he knew, adding a smile to the nod when the person was of sufficient importance, a doctor, a banker, a successful businessman.

  Richard wished he were back in the house with Grace.

  A thin, grey light leaked through the dusty windows of the warehouse, and Richard’s father hummed tunelessly and fiddled with a set of keys, finally pushing the door open. “Don’t get down here often enough,” he said. “If you are running a business, you can’t afford to ignore a part of it, or the whole thing will tumble down.” The door creaked open on this sentiment and father and son walked into a gloomy, glue-smelling world of shadowy barrels and spiderw
ork machinery. “Be right back,” Parrish said, and he hurried up a rickety flight of stairs and closed the door to the loft office. Richard waited in the semi-darkness, and a strange, frenzied scratching made him turn and stare into the gloom. A large Doberman emerged from the darkness. The dog, somewhat smaller than a pony, was slipping on the concrete floor in its haste to reach Richard. It wasn’t barking, but a deep, evil vibration, a lunatic-wielding-a-chain-saw sound, came from its throat. The dog was black with small, glittering eyes. Richard’s heart flopped and he turned and ran for the door. He had to turn again before he reached the door; the beast was coming too fast. Richard turned and backed up as the Doberman stopped in front of him and barked wildly.

  “Hiller,” Richard said. “Good Hiller.” Fear had released this pocket of information. His father had referred to the dog before. “Just let some nigger try to break in,” his father had said. “Old Hiller is death on niggers.”

  “Good Hiller,” Richard repeated, but the dog was ducking its small head, growling again. Richard backed up slowly and something metallic rolled under his foot and he stooped slowly, saying, “HillerHillergoodHiller,” and picked up a length of metal pipe and continued to back up. The dog started jumping up and down, as though it recognized this declaration of war, and Richard reached the door. He turned the handle. The door was locked. He remembered now. He remembered his father fumbling with the keys—locking the door. “Good Hiller,” he muttered, and the fear was coming out of him like steam, hissing in his ears. He heard his father’s voice and looked up. His father was leaning against the railing and speaking quietly, a lecture, of course. “Self-control, Richard. Dog or man, it’s the same. You can’t show fear. Dog or man don’t respect you if you show fear. They’ll both go for you if they suspect weakness.”